Whether cash, kickbacks, favours, or even a long, long chain of six or seven companies to hide the relationship.
There is no other rational explanation for the wrist slap instead of a breakup, nor for the sudden spate of nonsense patents being assigned to Microsoft. Of course no actual evidence will be found.
Even when you have evidence and a conviction, they'll just stall until they can get a government elected that can be bought. Simple American Corporate politics, at least as they seem to play the game now.
You might also want to look again how many bullshit patents have been granted to Microsoft during the Bush term. My guess is you'll find most of the bullshit patents filed or approved during that period, adding to their wrist-slap penalty as evidence that Microsoft blatantly paid off the government to avoid breakup and to gain a patent portfolio large enough to crush competition.
Not by winning, but by simply dragging the court cases on long enough to bankrupt anyone who won't knuckle under.
Bloody thieves and frauds. They can't compete on quality or innovation, so they resort to barratry and payoffs like any other thug.
The patent holder can license their implementation however they choose. It is perfectly legal to expressly say that your code may be used by GPL applications as a shared library, the same way that LGPL code can be used by commercial source.
Otherwise you'd best get rid of the NVidia drivers, the commercial databases, and every other non-GPL product that runs on Linux. That's not the intent of the GPL, never was, and it's nothing but Microsoft FUD bolstered by uncertain IP laws which suggests otherwise.
The GPL is about ensuring that if you use GPL code for your work then it must be licensed under the GPL, not that the GPL can't use any libaries which aren't expressly GPL'd. Contrary to any fantasies the full-bore GPL zealot might have, there is no legal way you could do that, and it would be against the very spirit of freedom that led to the creation of the GPL.
Also note they are not talking about refusing to license the IP for specific projects, but to the distributor of the source. In other words, they've decided to play their patent portfolio as a market-blocking threat the same way they yanked all the incentives from hardware manufacturers who dared ship something other than Windows.
As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft has just expressly stated their intent to maintain monopoly profits and control through IP barratry and by locking out any company which dares support or distribute GPL software.
If that's not a RICO violation, I don't know what is, and it's well past the time we stopped putting up with this crap as an industry. I greatly look forward to Sun, IBM, and every other IP holder banding together and teaching Bill that he does not rule the world, no matter how much he'd like to.
The problem is that every time you get someone trying to say something like "Ok, 20 friends, that's it, after that it's a public performance", you get someone who comes from a family of 13 kids.
By the time any reasonable number of them and their kids get together, there are 50-60 people involved. Yet their all family, much less friends.
The RIAA and MPAA have a fundamental business model problem and until they address that issue they'll never "win" their battle. You cannot sell people "product" but then expect them to treat it as a lease or a service (i.e. it's yours, but you can only use it the way we say.)
Look at the whole music download thing. They could have worked with RSA SecurID or equivalent to create playlist cards that authorize you to listen to music anywhere you want. Instead of taking your CD's with you, you just plug in, and slide your card as proof of "license" ownership.
The main database is online or at your house and has your original certs, the card is just a portable, secure copy.
But no, they're futzing with DRM and crap to try to do the impossible: stop people from copying data. You can't stop data from being copied. Period. Someone, somehow, somewhere will always find a way to copy the data.
What you can do is make it easier and cheaper to go the legal route instead of piracy, but instead of seeing the obvious the studios tried to shut down the new model.
The problem with new business models is that if companies won't adopt them and provide them, but the need (market) is still there, someone else will always step in. Thus the MP3 sites and other sources.
Now that someone else (the black market) already owns those customers, the RIAA et. al. have to win back the market. As they don't have enough functioning brain cells left to be able to figure out how to penetrate new markets, they're trying good old fashioned bullying, barratry, and virtual terrorism to protect their undeserved revenue stream.
Undeserved because they can't defend it in the face of competition. If your business model can't compete, change the model, or die. It's that simple.
Yes, and insurance companies do it too in order to try to force a low-ball settlement.
It is illegal, and it's called "barratry", but when the offenders have bought off the government through "donations" and lobbyists, there isn't much anyone can do about it.
Bottom line is it's our governments that are not doing their job in protecting us from abusive corps, and it's our own damn fault for continually re-electing them even after we know about the scams and scandals they're involved in.
Well now, that is just about the worst phrasing I have ever come up with. Serves me right for not re-reading before I hit "Submit".
US Congress, Canadian and British Parliament, etc. are supposed to be the check and balance that notice and stop corporate abuse. But as the people tolerate the continual fraud and sellout, the politicians no longer are held accountable for their actions.
There is also the significant issue of the USPTO's blatant incompetence and lack of domain-specific knowledge. If they can't make a proper assessment, the case should be rejected until the applicant can explain the patent in language plain enough for anyone to understand, not just a lawyer.
Or am I the only one who has noticed that instead of the 3-4 page patents with full schematics of the 1920's-30's, we now seem to have entire textbooks of legalese instead of a 3-4 line description. Does any of that verbiage help define the product being patented?
No.
But it does obfuscate the patent so that the USPTO can be baffled into approving the patent by it's sheer weight.
Bottom line it's the US patent office and the corrupt American politicians who sell out the people to allow the corporations such unlimited power. That is part of what government is for, and why there are RICO acts and all the rest of it.
But when the corrupt politician sells his vote and still gets re-elected instead of turfed, I can't help but blame the irresponsible citizens who leave the losers in office instead of getting out there to vote for someone else.
They're supposed to be there to represent the people. They were supposed to be the check and balance that leashed corporations, not the lapdogs.
While I may be a typical technoweenie with a small group of friends, I also know people whose "small" parties are only 30-40 friends getting together.
Sorry, but the MPAA does not get to dictate how many friends I have, how large my home is, or what is legally, morally, or socially considered "home".
That could be a communal or shared accomodations, it could be a private mansion, it could be a shack on the shore of a lake. It is home because it's where I live.
Quite frankly, the whole "home use" label is probably illegal, because there is no legal definition of "home" that anyone would consider acceptable for all situations.
Lets take it to a (hopefully) ridiculous variant -- what of a bunch of homeless people who get together in their alley to watch a movie? It is, after all, their home.
Bottom line is the MPAA and the RIAA can kiss my ass when it comes to their perpetual greed. They call their shipments "product", it has a "purchase price", therefore it is mine after payment, and I'll damned well watch or listen to it with as many friends as I want wherever the hell I choose to call "home" at the time.
It is illegal to drink beer on public streets in most jurisdictions. But it is perfectly legal to drink it at home, in your yard, etc.
If you happen to be in an apartment complex with a communal yard, the law recognizes the communal yard as your own.
At no point has anyone here mentioned a truly "public" venue. Obviously to watch a DVD you're going to be in a relatively quiet, dark area -- not a main street or a mall.
Bergman's key point seems to be "...where anybody who wants to can come and watch..."
Anybody who wants to is welcome to press their nose against my living room window to watch along with me. I'll probably freak out and have them arrested as potential burglers casing the joint, but I can't stop them.
I'm not actually kidding on that point -- legal responsibility is for the things you can control or reasonably prevent. The actions of complete strangers is not your responsibility.
If I watch a DVD at home in the living room alone, it's legal.
If I watch that same DVD at home with friends, it's legal.
If I have a private party, set up a huge freakin' projection system, and watch the DVD with my friends in the yard, it's still legal.
Now if we all get together and drive out to a field, a parking lot, a park, or wherever else to watch that same DVD, why would it suddenly be "illegal"?
The only think "illegal" is if you a) charge to see the movie or b) set it up for a bunch of strangers to watch instead of friends (i.e., it's just you and your projector, there never were the group of friends, so no one but you and a group of strangers are watching.)
That depends on your fundamental architecture. For smaller applications environments your app servers and RDBMS are often on the same box. Not great for security, but it often brings the price down to a point where the project can go ahead.
With all of your "traffic" in-server many of the vendors stacks will let you use IPC messaging instead of IP messaging, which can boost performance rather significantly.
The other thing to consider is that for environments like the full IBM stack, you're expected to have a cluster of DB/2 UDB servers with a hefty, hefty backbone in the data center.
Like I said, the vendors have different approaches. Oracles is monolithic -- get it all into one big server. DB/2 is pure database, and expects to have other architectural components in use when building an application. Sybase tries to walk a line that can live in either variant, with interesting ideas of it's own. Postgres has some really slick custom data type support.
The point is that within the overall application cluster, you can get the same kind of performance out of any vendors RDBMS is you're using the appropriate application stack in a properly configured cluster. You just don't architect the solutions for the different products in quite the same way is all.
Well, you certainly know how to pitch the Oracle monolithic viewpoint on database architectures. It works, I did about 7 years on Oracle 5-7.2 before I ended up working with other RDBMS for a while. I'm not knocking your opinion, just saying that it's specific to Oracle.
DB/2 UDB used to have relatively poor stored proc performance, because they ran out-of-process. I think that's changed with the latest releases, but I'm not sure. Yet you could still get blazing performance for certain apps by using precompiler binding stubs instead of stored procs -- the stub is effectively a special case, one-statement stored proc. It doesn't save on network data transfer, but it makes a huge difference for individual statements. Plus it's an interesting approach to database security.
Sybase takes a bit of a hybrid approach. They have the high performance stored procs, but they also support statement caching and precompiling. All in all I'd say it's the most flexible database if you need to build a few different styles of data access into the same repository.
As someone mentioned earlier, none of the approaches is inherently good or bad. There are different ways of slicing your performance, and the decision of what to do and when to do it depends on knowing your specific tools, not just general theory or "rules".
It's surprising how many DBA's and architects keep trying to shove every application into the same design framework they're familiar with, instead of taking the time to learn and try different approaches. There really is only one real "rule" I know of:
I really don't care about your workload, your excuses, or the rest of your bile.
If you really do "work" at the patent office, you aren't doing your job and I'm getting more than a little tired of the industry having to pay millions in court and legal fees for your perpetual fuckups.
The USPTO is populated by people who don't grasp the fundamental concept that IT systems and programming are about abstract concepts applied to specific requirements. Object oriented programming, GUI event frameworks, network interfaces, RMI, RPC, XML, it's all about abstraction.
The application of those abstract techniques and utilities to solving a particular business problem is not a patentable idea. It is a fundamental concept of the industry.
We now have the USPTO not merely patenting business concepts, but architectural concepts and theoretical interfaces like the association of time with an image. It's absolutely insane -- they are allowing Microsoft to patent a naturally observable attribute of a real-world object. Everyone knows a picture has a time associated with it -- even portraits that were painted over the course of weeks are still associated with a fuzzy time value. How the hell can you possibly patent the idea of associating time with a picture, no matter what the media, formats, or protocols involved?
Patent law itself states that you cannot patent a natural process, and the application of a general tool to a specific function is a natural process of computing.
From this fundamental misunderstanding, we end up dealing with a patent system that allows a company like Amazon to patent the use of abstract behavior templates in regards to a real-world object, the shopping cart.
That's just insane. You cannot patent something which any IT resource with a knack for abstraction can observe, and there are hundreds of thousands of such people. You cannot patent the idea that a car has a color, nor could you patent the idea of a picture of a car changing color each time you click on it. Yet some USPTO employee without a wit of sense or understanding of fundamental computing techniques and philosophies thinks that it's reasonable to think an abstract action like a mouse click associated with a catalog object is a patentable concept.
It's nuts. It's just insane. The USPTO needs to distinguish between use of abstract concepts that are a natural part of computing, and genuine art in implementing general-purpose abstractions.
No matter how disagreeable it might have been, the specifics of how a GIF image file is constructed and compressed is a patentable expression of an abstract image. So is any other image file format.
But the idea that it is an image file, that it has attribute values such as author or creation date embedded in it, or that it has an associated set of attributes like creation date, storage size, etc. are not patentable concepts. They are just natural attributes of an abstract image.
*sigh* We are truly doomed, not because of OSS or Microsoft or because the corps pay off the government so they can use the legal system and patent office as a business model. We are doomed because the people responsible for protecting the people from being fleeced by the con-artists don't have a freakin' clue how to recognize aggressive abuse of the legal and patent systems.
Even when it is recognized, we have governments who are paid off by the corps who benefit from the abuse of the very social systems that are supposed to protect us from such abuse. Or do you think it was an accident that Microsoft's penalty for blatant illegal action was reduced to monitoring and a wrist slap, while IBM and AT&T had been broken up for far lesser offenses? Change of government, change of legislators who've been paid off, and the penalties go away.
Thanks to a legal system that allows corps to drag things out long enough to buy themselves a change of law or government before a ruling or settlement are issued, and you have a system that is ripe for abuse, and the largest of predator corps are abusing it for every dollar they can hope to garner. Nor am I singling out Microsoft -- SCO, Enron, and dozens
Sorry -- typo. It was around 92 that I was working on that box. You're right about the first 386 boxes -- I think the IBM PS/2 Model 80 I used in '88 would have been the first one I got my hands on (the Model 60 was the 286 IIRC -- could be wrong, been a lot of years.)
In a sick twist of fate, that first 386 I used ran SCO Xenix, and I ended up assisting their engineers with debugging the QIC tape drivers (ugly mess, horrible race conditions, only worked if the machine was idle while writing to tape.)
Back then SCO was an actual OS company, not just a name bought up by some IP vulture corp.
I just don't understand how any one with the vaguest concept of OS history would think that an architectural device driver feature like RCU was part of the OS. That's like claiming the FIFO command queues of a SCSI driver mean that FIFO queuing is "owned" by the OS.
Ludicrous.
Yet the US government does nothing to prevent the legal system from being used as a destructive tool by so-called "businesses" hoping to win an IP lottery. No business plan, no marketing plan, no product -- just the greedy hope that someone will say they "deserve" to profit from the work everyone else did, no matter who actually created or developed any of the technology involved.
SCO and it's legal team are truly the lowest of IP vulture corps I've heard of to date. Lowest of IQ. Lowest of integrity. Lowest of honesty. Lowest of responsibility. Lowest of social conscience (or any conscience for that matter.)
Much as I despise Bill Gates, I respect the man for at least being good at his job. But Darl & co. don't do a job. They don't do anything but try to use legal thuggery in hopes they'll be bought off, the same as any other blackmailer.
Yet because they use the courts to beat their victims, they're not held accountable like a common mugger or thief would be. In the end, they'll have wasted millions of investor dollars, acquired nothing, cost IBM, Redhat, and a dozen other companies millions of dollars, and the legal vultures will be allowed to keep their Porsches and mansions.
I was working with CBIS (Cincinnati Bell Information Systems) in the early '80s when Sequent S81 was running Dynix/ptx with SVR and BSD interface flavours.
The technical sales reps were very hot on RCU and how it worked with NUMA to scale the system. 32 way SMP of 386's might not seem much now, but it was significant back then.
Their plans were to have multiple OS flavours under Dynix, relying on RCU to provide scalability to AIX, SunOS/Solaris, and other operating systems that would sit on top of the monolithic ptx core.
From day one, RCU and NUMA were marketted by Sequent as seperate products targetted at many operating systems and vendors, not as just a part of Dynix.
I'm tired of watching SCO's insanity. The industry did not develop in a vaccuum -- there are hundreds if not thousands of us who are witness to how the systems were really developed, despite some IP vulture corp's claims otherwise.
It's a disgrace that SCO's legal team and IP trolls haven't been arrested for fraud and locked up by now. They have no legal case, they never did, and they never will. It's time for them to be spanked and sent to sit in a jail-cell corner for 20 years each.
PBS is supposed to be the public broadcast station, not the "government censor approved" station.
The rest of the excuses for censoring public broadcast, cable, or other mediums are the same tired excuses.
I don't care if you are right-wing Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, or Buddhist. Whatever your religion and personal morality, you have no right to dictate what is "acceptable" to the public, only to stop listening or watching if you disagree.
The similarities of how censorship, suppression of women's rights, and a general restrictions of personal freedoms are used by Muslim and Christian fundamentalists are disgustingly similar. I find it terribly amusing that while the US gripes about the abuses of various "Muslim" extremists and lunatic terrorists, they are willing to allow the same brand of fanatic control of the US government, just because they're local "Christian" groups.
The quotes in both cases are because neither group of fanatics are truly representative of the ideals of their respective religions. They're just a bunch of naval-gazing twists who think they're on some sort mission to dictate morality to the world.
Well, I don't care what religion backs or drives censorship: shut it off, change the channel, and stop trying to shove your ideologies down my throat. The fundamentalist "flock" is aptly named; I'll keep my right to think and decide for myself, thank you very much.
I agree, the only justification for the blatant censorship is to ensure that only approved propaganda and entertainment is available. Let people do their own censorship by changing channels or hitting the power button.
Thanks to multi-language tracks, there is even the existing technology to deliver different censorship levels for language. So if you want the Sopranos to sound like the Cleavers, just select the "English - 5 minute" sound track instead.
I am truly amazed that the American citizens are willing to put up with Shrub and his neo-Nazi policies. Even Hitler waited for a genuine emergency before suspending elections!
A quiet lawsuit does not make a bullshit patent a "good" thing, nor does it excuse the blatant incompetence of the US patent office.
As long as the US allows nonsense like SCO to continue, you deserve the mess you're creating for yourselves. Just stop trying to foist the crap on everyone else.
Fortunately it seems a few European nations have noticed the current US system is only good for patent lawyers and draining resources to fight off vulture corps. Even Microsoft's recent BS patents being awarded had to have helped wake up the EC to the insanity which is destroying the American ability to innovate and compete.
Maybe a few of them also noticed that such legislation was only a first step. Next would have been a "unified" patent database "offered" by the US which would have started with a portfolio of bogus patents owned by US interests. Essentially signing over a world-wide "software tax" to US corporate interests.
Not only would the US businesses continue to be gutted by IP vultures, the EC businesses would have been caught up in the same nightmare. The US is quite welcome to continue destroying the American economy, but thank God the rest of the world has finally noticed the insanity of their patent "system" as a viable model.
More importantly, that simplistic formula ignores the most common reason for installing pirated software: it's needed for work.
Not for running the business, not for your personal pleasure, but because you were given a CD by your job (unofficially) to install the tools you need to work from home.
Most large companies have enterprise licenses which include the right for a single active copy per user, not per machine. But when the employee or contractor moves on, most such companies don't verify that the software or media were returned. I keep a seperate boot partition for such client software and wipe it when I'm done a contract, but it's surprising how many so-called professionals never thought about the fact that once the contract is over, so is the license to use that handy package.
Disgustingly enough, a very few small PC maintenance shops are also thievingly unprofessional and keep the data (including applications) copied while recovering a hard drive. It's not common, but I've run into two smaller shops over the years that were caught doing so.
Point is that the downloaders are usually the working poor, students, or collectors who would never pay for the product. They are thieves, but they aren't "lost revenue".
Yes, worked over ten years, off and on in Florida, Texas, Delaware, and Maryland.
I've gotten lost and wound up in the inner city core of Washington, where I was warned to "get in your car, and get the hell out of here while you can" by an armed security guard in a McDonalds.
I've lived blocks from some of the worst crack-infested districts in the Orlando area, because it was close to the job and I didn't know better when I rented.
Those issues were years ago -- it's gotten a lot worse, and I see nothing happening to indicate it'll get any better. I don't see another revolution/rebellion against oppressive government and rich corps as being an issue of "if", but of when.
Label me troll if you like, but I'm seriously worried for my American friends and the worldwide repercussions of the inevitable flare-up. As long as the US politicians continue to sell out community interests in favour of padding their own pockets, and utterly fail to punish abusive monopolists as Verizon, Microsoft, and a few insurance companies, they continue to widen the gap between rich and poor.
Eventually the power will be clustered in a small enough number of people that they'll just be lynched by mobs or shot be "crazed lunatics" pushed over the edge by living hand to mouth for too many years.
Apparently the problem stems from voters in Florida and elsewhere who cannot write an "X" legibly in a half-inch square.
Just watch how many people claim the button for the candidate they wanted to vote for was broken.
But electronic voting has one important feature: it makes it easy to tamper with the results. That could well be the only thing to get Shrub "re-elected", and many will view the original Florida results as proof the election was rigged.
I don't look forward to the next few years. I see our brethren to the south starting a rather nasty and violent revolution to get rid of the corporate and government trough-feeders. The poor always outnumber the rich, but in the US they not only dramatically outnumber the rich, most of them have guns. It's going to be a lot messier than the last American Revolution was...
I know many think the idea of another revolution is a crackpot idea, but I really don't see it as avoidable. Too many of the people in power are so thoroughly clueless about how the majority of citizens live, and it's going to end up affecting everyone.
How many OSS implementations of the JVM do you need?
You don't need Sun's implementation of a JVM to have access to the spec, nor to see different (sometimes radically so) implementations of the bytecode runtimes.
For that matter, I expect the source code of the JVM itself is probably available under the same licence. I just haven't had to look that far into a debug issue yet (I avoid JNI like the plague -- it's responsible for more Java "portability" issues than anything else, at least on the server side.)
"And what about the Java source code? Is that any better? I don't know, and I don't think you do, cause it's closed source."
You can download the source for the Java class libraries the same as any other developer. You'll not only find it is clean, documented, and commented, you'll find those API manuals you reference online are all embedded in the source.
Downloading the source is incredibly useful for debugging thorny issues. The code is available for that purpose to anyone, which means you can also peruse it just to see an example of documented, structured code. The fact that you can't change it to suit your whim isn't "closed" source, it's community managed source.
By claiming Java is "closed" source, you spout the same inaccuracies as Microsoft claiming that "shared" source is the same as "open". Both are a dishonest attempt to mislead and redefine terms to suit your political agenda.
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The evidence speaks for itself.
Whether cash, kickbacks, favours, or even a long, long chain of six or seven companies to hide the relationship.
There is no other rational explanation for the wrist slap instead of a breakup, nor for the sudden spate of nonsense patents being assigned to Microsoft. Of course no actual evidence will be found.
Even when you have evidence and a conviction, they'll just stall until they can get a government elected that can be bought. Simple American Corporate politics, at least as they seem to play the game now.
You might also want to look again how many bullshit patents have been granted to Microsoft during the Bush term. My guess is you'll find most of the bullshit patents filed or approved during that period, adding to their wrist-slap penalty as evidence that Microsoft blatantly paid off the government to avoid breakup and to gain a patent portfolio large enough to crush competition.
Not by winning, but by simply dragging the court cases on long enough to bankrupt anyone who won't knuckle under.
Bloody thieves and frauds. They can't compete on quality or innovation, so they resort to barratry and payoffs like any other thug.
The patent holder can license their implementation however they choose. It is perfectly legal to expressly say that your code may be used by GPL applications as a shared library, the same way that LGPL code can be used by commercial source.
Otherwise you'd best get rid of the NVidia drivers, the commercial databases, and every other non-GPL product that runs on Linux. That's not the intent of the GPL, never was, and it's nothing but Microsoft FUD bolstered by uncertain IP laws which suggests otherwise.
The GPL is about ensuring that if you use GPL code for your work then it must be licensed under the GPL, not that the GPL can't use any libaries which aren't expressly GPL'd. Contrary to any fantasies the full-bore GPL zealot might have, there is no legal way you could do that, and it would be against the very spirit of freedom that led to the creation of the GPL.
Also note they are not talking about refusing to license the IP for specific projects, but to the distributor of the source. In other words, they've decided to play their patent portfolio as a market-blocking threat the same way they yanked all the incentives from hardware manufacturers who dared ship something other than Windows.
As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft has just expressly stated their intent to maintain monopoly profits and control through IP barratry and by locking out any company which dares support or distribute GPL software.
If that's not a RICO violation, I don't know what is, and it's well past the time we stopped putting up with this crap as an industry. I greatly look forward to Sun, IBM, and every other IP holder banding together and teaching Bill that he does not rule the world, no matter how much he'd like to.
The problem is that every time you get someone trying to say something like "Ok, 20 friends, that's it, after that it's a public performance", you get someone who comes from a family of 13 kids.
By the time any reasonable number of them and their kids get together, there are 50-60 people involved. Yet their all family, much less friends.
The RIAA and MPAA have a fundamental business model problem and until they address that issue they'll never "win" their battle. You cannot sell people "product" but then expect them to treat it as a lease or a service (i.e. it's yours, but you can only use it the way we say.)
Look at the whole music download thing. They could have worked with RSA SecurID or equivalent to create playlist cards that authorize you to listen to music anywhere you want. Instead of taking your CD's with you, you just plug in, and slide your card as proof of "license" ownership.
The main database is online or at your house and has your original certs, the card is just a portable, secure copy.
But no, they're futzing with DRM and crap to try to do the impossible: stop people from copying data. You can't stop data from being copied. Period. Someone, somehow, somewhere will always find a way to copy the data.
What you can do is make it easier and cheaper to go the legal route instead of piracy, but instead of seeing the obvious the studios tried to shut down the new model.
The problem with new business models is that if companies won't adopt them and provide them, but the need (market) is still there, someone else will always step in. Thus the MP3 sites and other sources.
Now that someone else (the black market) already owns those customers, the RIAA et. al. have to win back the market. As they don't have enough functioning brain cells left to be able to figure out how to penetrate new markets, they're trying good old fashioned bullying, barratry, and virtual terrorism to protect their undeserved revenue stream.
Undeserved because they can't defend it in the face of competition. If your business model can't compete, change the model, or die. It's that simple.
Yes, and insurance companies do it too in order to try to force a low-ball settlement.
It is illegal, and it's called "barratry", but when the offenders have bought off the government through "donations" and lobbyists, there isn't much anyone can do about it.
Bottom line is it's our governments that are not doing their job in protecting us from abusive corps, and it's our own damn fault for continually re-electing them even after we know about the scams and scandals they're involved in.
Well now, that is just about the worst phrasing I have ever come up with. Serves me right for not re-reading before I hit "Submit".
US Congress, Canadian and British Parliament, etc. are supposed to be the check and balance that notice and stop corporate abuse. But as the people tolerate the continual fraud and sellout, the politicians no longer are held accountable for their actions.
There is also the significant issue of the USPTO's blatant incompetence and lack of domain-specific knowledge. If they can't make a proper assessment, the case should be rejected until the applicant can explain the patent in language plain enough for anyone to understand, not just a lawyer.
Or am I the only one who has noticed that instead of the 3-4 page patents with full schematics of the 1920's-30's, we now seem to have entire textbooks of legalese instead of a 3-4 line description. Does any of that verbiage help define the product being patented?
No.
But it does obfuscate the patent so that the USPTO can be baffled into approving the patent by it's sheer weight.
Bottom line it's the US patent office and the corrupt American politicians who sell out the people to allow the corporations such unlimited power. That is part of what government is for, and why there are RICO acts and all the rest of it.
But when the corrupt politician sells his vote and still gets re-elected instead of turfed, I can't help but blame the irresponsible citizens who leave the losers in office instead of getting out there to vote for someone else.
They're supposed to be there to represent the people. They were supposed to be the check and balance that leashed corporations, not the lapdogs.
It is my home.
While I may be a typical technoweenie with a small group of friends, I also know people whose "small" parties are only 30-40 friends getting together.
Sorry, but the MPAA does not get to dictate how many friends I have, how large my home is, or what is legally, morally, or socially considered "home".
That could be a communal or shared accomodations, it could be a private mansion, it could be a shack on the shore of a lake. It is home because it's where I live.
Quite frankly, the whole "home use" label is probably illegal, because there is no legal definition of "home" that anyone would consider acceptable for all situations.
Lets take it to a (hopefully) ridiculous variant -- what of a bunch of homeless people who get together in their alley to watch a movie? It is, after all, their home.
Bottom line is the MPAA and the RIAA can kiss my ass when it comes to their perpetual greed. They call their shipments "product", it has a "purchase price", therefore it is mine after payment, and I'll damned well watch or listen to it with as many friends as I want wherever the hell I choose to call "home" at the time.
Err, no. That is only his opinion.
It is illegal to drink beer on public streets in most jurisdictions. But it is perfectly legal to drink it at home, in your yard, etc.
If you happen to be in an apartment complex with a communal yard, the law recognizes the communal yard as your own.
At no point has anyone here mentioned a truly "public" venue. Obviously to watch a DVD you're going to be in a relatively quiet, dark area -- not a main street or a mall.
Bergman's key point seems to be "...where anybody who wants to can come and watch..."
Anybody who wants to is welcome to press their nose against my living room window to watch along with me. I'll probably freak out and have them arrested as potential burglers casing the joint, but I can't stop them.
I'm not actually kidding on that point -- legal responsibility is for the things you can control or reasonably prevent. The actions of complete strangers is not your responsibility.
Define "public".
If I watch a DVD at home in the living room alone, it's legal.
If I watch that same DVD at home with friends, it's legal.
If I have a private party, set up a huge freakin' projection system, and watch the DVD with my friends in the yard, it's still legal.
Now if we all get together and drive out to a field, a parking lot, a park, or wherever else to watch that same DVD, why would it suddenly be "illegal"?
The only think "illegal" is if you a) charge to see the movie or b) set it up for a bunch of strangers to watch instead of friends (i.e., it's just you and your projector, there never were the group of friends, so no one but you and a group of strangers are watching.)
That depends on your fundamental architecture. For smaller applications environments your app servers and RDBMS are often on the same box. Not great for security, but it often brings the price down to a point where the project can go ahead.
With all of your "traffic" in-server many of the vendors stacks will let you use IPC messaging instead of IP messaging, which can boost performance rather significantly.
The other thing to consider is that for environments like the full IBM stack, you're expected to have a cluster of DB/2 UDB servers with a hefty, hefty backbone in the data center.
Like I said, the vendors have different approaches. Oracles is monolithic -- get it all into one big server. DB/2 is pure database, and expects to have other architectural components in use when building an application. Sybase tries to walk a line that can live in either variant, with interesting ideas of it's own. Postgres has some really slick custom data type support.
The point is that within the overall application cluster, you can get the same kind of performance out of any vendors RDBMS is you're using the appropriate application stack in a properly configured cluster. You just don't architect the solutions for the different products in quite the same way is all.
Well, you certainly know how to pitch the Oracle monolithic viewpoint on database architectures. It works, I did about 7 years on Oracle 5-7.2 before I ended up working with other RDBMS for a while. I'm not knocking your opinion, just saying that it's specific to Oracle.
DB/2 UDB used to have relatively poor stored proc performance, because they ran out-of-process. I think that's changed with the latest releases, but I'm not sure. Yet you could still get blazing performance for certain apps by using precompiler binding stubs instead of stored procs -- the stub is effectively a special case, one-statement stored proc. It doesn't save on network data transfer, but it makes a huge difference for individual statements. Plus it's an interesting approach to database security.
Sybase takes a bit of a hybrid approach. They have the high performance stored procs, but they also support statement caching and precompiling. All in all I'd say it's the most flexible database if you need to build a few different styles of data access into the same repository.
As someone mentioned earlier, none of the approaches is inherently good or bad. There are different ways of slicing your performance, and the decision of what to do and when to do it depends on knowing your specific tools, not just general theory or "rules".
It's surprising how many DBA's and architects keep trying to shove every application into the same design framework they're familiar with, instead of taking the time to learn and try different approaches. There really is only one real "rule" I know of:
I really don't care about your workload, your excuses, or the rest of your bile.
If you really do "work" at the patent office, you aren't doing your job and I'm getting more than a little tired of the industry having to pay millions in court and legal fees for your perpetual fuckups.
The USPTO is populated by people who don't grasp the fundamental concept that IT systems and programming are about abstract concepts applied to specific requirements. Object oriented programming, GUI event frameworks, network interfaces, RMI, RPC, XML, it's all about abstraction.
The application of those abstract techniques and utilities to solving a particular business problem is not a patentable idea. It is a fundamental concept of the industry.
We now have the USPTO not merely patenting business concepts, but architectural concepts and theoretical interfaces like the association of time with an image. It's absolutely insane -- they are allowing Microsoft to patent a naturally observable attribute of a real-world object. Everyone knows a picture has a time associated with it -- even portraits that were painted over the course of weeks are still associated with a fuzzy time value. How the hell can you possibly patent the idea of associating time with a picture, no matter what the media, formats, or protocols involved?
Patent law itself states that you cannot patent a natural process, and the application of a general tool to a specific function is a natural process of computing.
From this fundamental misunderstanding, we end up dealing with a patent system that allows a company like Amazon to patent the use of abstract behavior templates in regards to a real-world object, the shopping cart.
That's just insane. You cannot patent something which any IT resource with a knack for abstraction can observe, and there are hundreds of thousands of such people. You cannot patent the idea that a car has a color, nor could you patent the idea of a picture of a car changing color each time you click on it. Yet some USPTO employee without a wit of sense or understanding of fundamental computing techniques and philosophies thinks that it's reasonable to think an abstract action like a mouse click associated with a catalog object is a patentable concept.
It's nuts. It's just insane. The USPTO needs to distinguish between use of abstract concepts that are a natural part of computing, and genuine art in implementing general-purpose abstractions.
No matter how disagreeable it might have been, the specifics of how a GIF image file is constructed and compressed is a patentable expression of an abstract image. So is any other image file format.
But the idea that it is an image file, that it has attribute values such as author or creation date embedded in it, or that it has an associated set of attributes like creation date, storage size, etc. are not patentable concepts. They are just natural attributes of an abstract image.
*sigh* We are truly doomed, not because of OSS or Microsoft or because the corps pay off the government so they can use the legal system and patent office as a business model. We are doomed because the people responsible for protecting the people from being fleeced by the con-artists don't have a freakin' clue how to recognize aggressive abuse of the legal and patent systems.
Even when it is recognized, we have governments who are paid off by the corps who benefit from the abuse of the very social systems that are supposed to protect us from such abuse. Or do you think it was an accident that Microsoft's penalty for blatant illegal action was reduced to monitoring and a wrist slap, while IBM and AT&T had been broken up for far lesser offenses? Change of government, change of legislators who've been paid off, and the penalties go away.
Thanks to a legal system that allows corps to drag things out long enough to buy themselves a change of law or government before a ruling or settlement are issued, and you have a system that is ripe for abuse, and the largest of predator corps are abusing it for every dollar they can hope to garner. Nor am I singling out Microsoft -- SCO, Enron, and dozens
Sorry -- typo. It was around 92 that I was working on that box. You're right about the first 386 boxes -- I think the IBM PS/2 Model 80 I used in '88 would have been the first one I got my hands on (the Model 60 was the 286 IIRC -- could be wrong, been a lot of years.)
In a sick twist of fate, that first 386 I used ran SCO Xenix, and I ended up assisting their engineers with debugging the QIC tape drivers (ugly mess, horrible race conditions, only worked if the machine was idle while writing to tape.)
Back then SCO was an actual OS company, not just a name bought up by some IP vulture corp.
I just don't understand how any one with the vaguest concept of OS history would think that an architectural device driver feature like RCU was part of the OS. That's like claiming the FIFO command queues of a SCSI driver mean that FIFO queuing is "owned" by the OS.
Ludicrous.
Yet the US government does nothing to prevent the legal system from being used as a destructive tool by so-called "businesses" hoping to win an IP lottery. No business plan, no marketing plan, no product -- just the greedy hope that someone will say they "deserve" to profit from the work everyone else did, no matter who actually created or developed any of the technology involved.
SCO and it's legal team are truly the lowest of IP vulture corps I've heard of to date. Lowest of IQ. Lowest of integrity. Lowest of honesty. Lowest of responsibility. Lowest of social conscience (or any conscience for that matter.)
Much as I despise Bill Gates, I respect the man for at least being good at his job. But Darl & co. don't do a job. They don't do anything but try to use legal thuggery in hopes they'll be bought off, the same as any other blackmailer.
Yet because they use the courts to beat their victims, they're not held accountable like a common mugger or thief would be. In the end, they'll have wasted millions of investor dollars, acquired nothing, cost IBM, Redhat, and a dozen other companies millions of dollars, and the legal vultures will be allowed to keep their Porsches and mansions.
I was working with CBIS (Cincinnati Bell Information Systems) in the early '80s when Sequent S81 was running Dynix/ptx with SVR and BSD interface flavours.
The technical sales reps were very hot on RCU and how it worked with NUMA to scale the system. 32 way SMP of 386's might not seem much now, but it was significant back then.
Their plans were to have multiple OS flavours under Dynix, relying on RCU to provide scalability to AIX, SunOS/Solaris, and other operating systems that would sit on top of the monolithic ptx core.
From day one, RCU and NUMA were marketted by Sequent as seperate products targetted at many operating systems and vendors, not as just a part of Dynix.
I'm tired of watching SCO's insanity. The industry did not develop in a vaccuum -- there are hundreds if not thousands of us who are witness to how the systems were really developed, despite some IP vulture corp's claims otherwise.
It's a disgrace that SCO's legal team and IP trolls haven't been arrested for fraud and locked up by now. They have no legal case, they never did, and they never will. It's time for them to be spanked and sent to sit in a jail-cell corner for 20 years each.
PBS is supposed to be the public broadcast station, not the "government censor approved" station.
The rest of the excuses for censoring public broadcast, cable, or other mediums are the same tired excuses.
I don't care if you are right-wing Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, or Buddhist. Whatever your religion and personal morality, you have no right to dictate what is "acceptable" to the public, only to stop listening or watching if you disagree.
The similarities of how censorship, suppression of women's rights, and a general restrictions of personal freedoms are used by Muslim and Christian fundamentalists are disgustingly similar. I find it terribly amusing that while the US gripes about the abuses of various "Muslim" extremists and lunatic terrorists, they are willing to allow the same brand of fanatic control of the US government, just because they're local "Christian" groups.
The quotes in both cases are because neither group of fanatics are truly representative of the ideals of their respective religions. They're just a bunch of naval-gazing twists who think they're on some sort mission to dictate morality to the world.
Well, I don't care what religion backs or drives censorship: shut it off, change the channel, and stop trying to shove your ideologies down my throat. The fundamentalist "flock" is aptly named; I'll keep my right to think and decide for myself, thank you very much.
I agree, the only justification for the blatant censorship is to ensure that only approved propaganda and entertainment is available. Let people do their own censorship by changing channels or hitting the power button.
Thanks to multi-language tracks, there is even the existing technology to deliver different censorship levels for language. So if you want the Sopranos to sound like the Cleavers, just select the "English - 5 minute" sound track instead.
I am truly amazed that the American citizens are willing to put up with Shrub and his neo-Nazi policies. Even Hitler waited for a genuine emergency before suspending elections!
A quiet lawsuit does not make a bullshit patent a "good" thing, nor does it excuse the blatant incompetence of the US patent office.
As long as the US allows nonsense like SCO to continue, you deserve the mess you're creating for yourselves. Just stop trying to foist the crap on everyone else.
Fortunately it seems a few European nations have noticed the current US system is only good for patent lawyers and draining resources to fight off vulture corps. Even Microsoft's recent BS patents being awarded had to have helped wake up the EC to the insanity which is destroying the American ability to innovate and compete.
Maybe a few of them also noticed that such legislation was only a first step. Next would have been a "unified" patent database "offered" by the US which would have started with a portfolio of bogus patents owned by US interests. Essentially signing over a world-wide "software tax" to US corporate interests.
Not only would the US businesses continue to be gutted by IP vultures, the EC businesses would have been caught up in the same nightmare. The US is quite welcome to continue destroying the American economy, but thank God the rest of the world has finally noticed the insanity of their patent "system" as a viable model.
More importantly, that simplistic formula ignores the most common reason for installing pirated software: it's needed for work.
Not for running the business, not for your personal pleasure, but because you were given a CD by your job (unofficially) to install the tools you need to work from home.
Most large companies have enterprise licenses which include the right for a single active copy per user, not per machine. But when the employee or contractor moves on, most such companies don't verify that the software or media were returned. I keep a seperate boot partition for such client software and wipe it when I'm done a contract, but it's surprising how many so-called professionals never thought about the fact that once the contract is over, so is the license to use that handy package.
Disgustingly enough, a very few small PC maintenance shops are also thievingly unprofessional and keep the data (including applications) copied while recovering a hard drive. It's not common, but I've run into two smaller shops over the years that were caught doing so.
Point is that the downloaders are usually the working poor, students, or collectors who would never pay for the product. They are thieves, but they aren't "lost revenue".
Yes, worked over ten years, off and on in Florida, Texas, Delaware, and Maryland.
I've gotten lost and wound up in the inner city core of Washington, where I was warned to "get in your car, and get the hell out of here while you can" by an armed security guard in a McDonalds.
I've lived blocks from some of the worst crack-infested districts in the Orlando area, because it was close to the job and I didn't know better when I rented.
Those issues were years ago -- it's gotten a lot worse, and I see nothing happening to indicate it'll get any better. I don't see another revolution/rebellion against oppressive government and rich corps as being an issue of "if", but of when.
Label me troll if you like, but I'm seriously worried for my American friends and the worldwide repercussions of the inevitable flare-up. As long as the US politicians continue to sell out community interests in favour of padding their own pockets, and utterly fail to punish abusive monopolists as Verizon, Microsoft, and a few insurance companies, they continue to widen the gap between rich and poor.
Eventually the power will be clustered in a small enough number of people that they'll just be lynched by mobs or shot be "crazed lunatics" pushed over the edge by living hand to mouth for too many years.
Apparently the problem stems from voters in Florida and elsewhere who cannot write an "X" legibly in a half-inch square.
Just watch how many people claim the button for the candidate they wanted to vote for was broken.
But electronic voting has one important feature: it makes it easy to tamper with the results. That could well be the only thing to get Shrub "re-elected", and many will view the original Florida results as proof the election was rigged.
I don't look forward to the next few years. I see our brethren to the south starting a rather nasty and violent revolution to get rid of the corporate and government trough-feeders. The poor always outnumber the rich, but in the US they not only dramatically outnumber the rich, most of them have guns. It's going to be a lot messier than the last American Revolution was...
I know many think the idea of another revolution is a crackpot idea, but I really don't see it as avoidable. Too many of the people in power are so thoroughly clueless about how the majority of citizens live, and it's going to end up affecting everyone.
How many OSS implementations of the JVM do you need?
You don't need Sun's implementation of a JVM to have access to the spec, nor to see different (sometimes radically so) implementations of the bytecode runtimes.
For that matter, I expect the source code of the JVM itself is probably available under the same licence. I just haven't had to look that far into a debug issue yet (I avoid JNI like the plague -- it's responsible for more Java "portability" issues than anything else, at least on the server side.)
"And what about the Java source code? Is that any better? I don't know, and I don't think you do, cause it's closed source."
You can download the source for the Java class libraries the same as any other developer. You'll not only find it is clean, documented, and commented, you'll find those API manuals you reference online are all embedded in the source.
Downloading the source is incredibly useful for debugging thorny issues. The code is available for that purpose to anyone, which means you can also peruse it just to see an example of documented, structured code. The fact that you can't change it to suit your whim isn't "closed" source, it's community managed source.
By claiming Java is "closed" source, you spout the same inaccuracies as Microsoft claiming that "shared" source is the same as "open". Both are a dishonest attempt to mislead and redefine terms to suit your political agenda.