the U.S. is the number one wired country in the world, followed by Canada.
No, I believe Finland is, and Norway and Sweden and New Zealand are above the US. In per capita terms, that is; of course the US has the most internet users.
It's one thing to compete with private, low quality, free ISPs. But another to compete with your government.
True. The "correct" way for a government to do this without killing the market is to act as a consumer. I.e., not provide internet access themselves, but offer to pay $20/month to to anyone who buys internet access. That way there's still competition between ISPs and inefficient ones'll die out.
'Generous' people take your money and spend a little bit of it on you.
And on people who have no money, and on their families. $1000 probably makes little or no difference to you, but to kids in a single parent family it can be the difference between misery and a reasonable life. A lot of people on slashdot seem to forget that such families exist.
it is still yet to be shown that OpenSource is just as profitable as ClosedSource
I don't believe the most successful open source company will be proportionally as rich as MS, simply because most of their income comes from a monopoly which could not be obtained by an open source company. That doesn't mean that closed source is better. No democratic head of state will ever have the power that Stalin had.
OTOH the overall IT market may be more productive, efficient and competitive if open source continues to make an impact.
some V.I. people here [...] have very spoiled ideas - they just gotta make money on everything interesting, exciting and new. If they decide to rip off people with Linux, kiss Linux popularity good bye.
I'm not so sure that follows. A few months ago I saw W.H.Smith selling software for £30 which will "test for and fix the millenium bug in your computer". This was bollocks of course, it just checked your BIOS, and almost no home users had a bios so shagged that it wouldn't have booted ok on 1/1/2000. However, people must've been buying it and I've not heard of any backlash.
You only get a backlash if people *realise* they've been ripped off. I wonder how many people buying Red Hat for £50 know they can get it for £5? But anyway, if they do find out, that shouldn't put them of Linux as a whole, just make them more reluctant to shell out in the shops.
Tapes are inferior to CDs, therefore, would you consider this "theft"?
I think this is legally untested in most juristictions, so it probably partly depends on where you've moved to. Personally I think it *should* be acceptable to get a higher-quality copy, since the argument for copy protection is that "you're not buying the tape, you're buying a license to use the song" and it is obvious, at least for older music, that there was never any intention of reserving the right to use a higher-quality version.
[BTW, just to nitpick, it is not "theft" even if it is "unauthorised copying" - the latter is a much less serious offence]
The singer's manager, Caresse Norman, said: "The music was stolen and was not intended for release for several months
Does that mean ``stolen'' as in ``somebody walked in and swiped the demo tape'', or ``stolen'' as in ``somebody copied the demo tape''? If it's the former then the manager's comments are fair enough. However if it's the latter then the manager has committed slander and they are therefore wide open for a countersuit if they try and litigate, in which case I do hope defendents take advantage of this because I'd like to see the flagrant misuse of the word ``stolen'' being stamped out.
preventing MS from selling in the US, would be an insane tactic.
Yep. But they could just impose an arbitrarily large fine. If MS didn't pay, then part of a contempt-of-court punishment could, say, remove the copyright from Windows in the US.
Which part deals with them bundling Internet Explorer with their operating system
Banning differentiated pricing helps. Forcing all their APIs to be open would make it useless to them to waste vast amounts of money trying to snuff out Netscape's layer of middleware [i.e. browser].
Also, the trial wasn't just about them bundling IE. It was also (amongst other things) about them punishing vendors for preinstalling Netscape. So banning differentiated pricing does help.
Does anyone know if having a computer DVD player means you have to pay the TV license (in the UK)? I know they say you have to if you've got a card which can pick up broadcast signals, but does it apply to DVD?
Any lawyers here care to give the answer? I notice the Apogee guy says they'd not allow their trademarks to be used by a porn site. If they were parodying one of Apogee's games, then could that count as fair use?
[n.b. I'm not thinking of running a Duke Nukem porn site, I was just wondering what the law is.]
The Transmeta design abstracts the hardware from legacy software, which means chips can be redesigned as the future brings new hardware demands. This is good - better than x86 which might have been designed well for 1978 but is a dead weight now. However, Transmeta have patents on this technique so if this chip becomes dominant, Transmeta will have a chip monopoly. I realise that there aren't that many chip companies at the moment because there is a large natural barrier to entry (the cost of a fabrication plant); however, at this moment there is competition between AMD, Intel and to a lesser extent things like ARM and Alpha.
Another way of abstracting the hardware from software is the way the free unixes do it - have a portable kernel and libc and use source compatibility. This only works for open-source software but has the advantage of not needing to rely on another monopoly. If GNOME and K Office get popular, this may provide serious competition with Transmeta's chip. Anyone reckon Linus has a conflict of interest? [Depends what his job at TM actually involves]
The third way is the Java way, with bytecode. The trouble is that the Java language is under Sun's control so this again carries some danger of creating dependence upon a monopoly.
How difficult would it be to have some sort of "portable C bytecode", which could be compiled later into a native executable for a given architecture? I realise this wouldn't work for C programs which assume sizeofint, endianness etc., but lots of the best quality free source code doesn't make such assumptions. If there was such a bytecode format, then good coding practice would be sufficient to create a portable app, and this would include non-free software distributed in the bytecode format. A way of allowing consumers choice of architecture for non free software?
I don't know if standard KDE has this, or it's a Corel add-on
It's a matter of the superuser [or package maintainer] configuring X to allow this. If you've got the permissions, you can change resolution from a perl script.
My Complaint comes in when people bitch about open source drivers [...] but don't seem to give a damn about open source games
If you make a hierarchy of which closed-source software has the most potential to restrict freedom, [single-user] games come fairly low. The reason that the software market is such a mess is that, to get anything useful done, several pieces of software have to interact - this is even more true if you want to communicate with somebody else's computer. So the "lock-in" potential of software can be high - you might be forced to use one piece of software just so that you can use another. Compare this to, say, novels, where you only need to buy the books you want to read, and you'll see the problem.
Now to my mind, [single user] games are more like novels than like software, in that no other program depends upon a game. A game might tie you to a particular OS, but if (say) Wine can make it run on an open OS then this problem is alleviated.
OTOH closed-source drivers have a bit more lock-in potential because a piece of hardware *is* dependent on them. If the hardware specs are also secret (winmodems, hp printers etc) this could be quite serious. If the specs are available and freely implementable then an open driver can be written if a sufficient number of people want it.
So, to summarise, I think that it's more important that drivers are open-source than it is that [single user] games are.
Sort of, yes. They've written it around the current facilities/limitations of Wine (and built on Wine) because they wanted something out of the door Now. Since they've been working on both code bodies (Office and Wine) I imagine there's a good chance they know what they're doing and have only used stable stuff.
Hmm the top half of my original message got munched. I was saying that Wine 1.0 will be a version with a core of functionality and a stable API which will be supportable in future versions of Wine. Obviously this matters for Winelib (compiling X apps that use the windows API) rather than for Wine (executing Windows binaries). The idea's not to get perfect Windows emulation for 1.0, it's to have a frozen API in a state which can be supported through future versions. (Also getting documentation into a good state is a priority)
BTW I think ygotta hand it to the Wine developers. They're catching Microsoft up. You can now get Office 97 to run, though it wobbles a lot. They've managed to close in on the moving target which is the Windows API. IBM (OS/2), Sun (WABI) and others have tried and failed. Within the forseeable future it will be possible to execute the average Win95 program under X on x86 Unix. That's really a remarkable achievement, more so as it's free.
Well, not if it was a typical 386SX or better. The time it took to do the decompression was typically less than the time it saved by not having to read as much from the disk. This was true for hard disks, but particularly true for floppies. I only stopped using the floppy "stacker anywhere" compression when I switched to Linux.
BTW I have known of memory compression being used to get round physical limits. E.g. ymight want to keep more than 2G of data in memory w/o swapping, on a system that supports only 2G physical memory.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I believe Finland is, and Norway and Sweden and New Zealand are above the US. In per capita terms, that is; of course the US has the most internet users.
True. The "correct" way for a government to do this without killing the market is to act as a consumer. I.e., not provide internet access themselves, but offer to pay $20/month to to anyone who buys internet access. That way there's still competition between ISPs and inefficient ones'll die out.
And on people who have no money, and on their families. $1000 probably makes little or no difference to you, but to kids in a single parent family it can be the difference between misery and a reasonable life. A lot of people on slashdot seem to forget that such families exist.
Yep, but CERN is funded largely [entirely?] by European governments.
I don't believe the most successful open source company will be proportionally as rich as MS, simply because most of their income comes from a monopoly which could not be obtained by an open source company. That doesn't mean that closed source is better. No democratic head of state will ever have the power that Stalin had.
OTOH the overall IT market may be more productive, efficient and competitive if open source continues to make an impact.
I'm not so sure that follows. A few months ago I saw W.H.Smith selling software for £30 which will "test for and fix the millenium bug in your computer". This was bollocks of course, it just checked your BIOS, and almost no home users had a bios so shagged that it wouldn't have booted ok on 1/1/2000. However, people must've been buying it and I've not heard of any backlash.
You only get a backlash if people *realise* they've been ripped off. I wonder how many people buying Red Hat for £50 know they can get it for £5? But anyway, if they do find out, that shouldn't put them of Linux as a whole, just make them more reluctant to shell out in the shops.
No it *isn't*. Unauthorised copying is *not* theft.
Quite [the] contrary.
I think this is legally untested in most juristictions, so it probably partly depends on where you've moved to. Personally I think it *should* be acceptable to get a higher-quality copy, since the argument for copy protection is that "you're not buying the tape, you're buying a license to use the song" and it is obvious, at least for older music, that there was never any intention of reserving the right to use a higher-quality version.
[BTW, just to nitpick, it is not "theft" even if it is "unauthorised copying" - the latter is a much less serious offence]
From the bbc article:
Does that mean ``stolen'' as in ``somebody walked in and swiped the demo tape'', or ``stolen'' as in ``somebody copied the demo tape''? If it's the former then the manager's comments are fair enough. However if it's the latter then the manager has committed slander and they are therefore wide open for a countersuit if they try and litigate, in which case I do hope defendents take advantage of this because I'd like to see the flagrant misuse of the word ``stolen'' being stamped out.
Yep. But they could just impose an arbitrarily large fine. If MS didn't pay, then part of a contempt-of-court punishment could, say, remove the copyright from Windows in the US.
Banning differentiated pricing helps. Forcing all their APIs to be open would make it useless to them to waste vast amounts of money trying to snuff out Netscape's layer of middleware [i.e. browser].
Also, the trial wasn't just about them bundling IE. It was also (amongst other things) about them punishing vendors for preinstalling Netscape. So banning differentiated pricing does help.
Does anyone know if having a computer DVD player means you have to pay the TV license (in the UK)? I know they say you have to if you've got a card which can pick up broadcast signals, but does it apply to DVD?
Any lawyers here care to give the answer? I notice the Apogee guy says they'd not allow their trademarks to be used by a porn site. If they were parodying one of Apogee's games, then could that count as fair use?
[n.b. I'm not thinking of running a Duke Nukem porn site, I was just wondering what the law is.]
Anybody fancy "finding" a copy of this and putting it up next time Seagram are using this program?
The Transmeta design abstracts the hardware from legacy software, which means chips can be redesigned as the future brings new hardware demands. This is good - better than x86 which might have been designed well for 1978 but is a dead weight now. However, Transmeta have patents on this technique so if this chip becomes dominant, Transmeta will have a chip monopoly. I realise that there aren't that many chip companies at the moment because there is a large natural barrier to entry (the cost of a fabrication plant); however, at this moment there is competition between AMD, Intel and to a lesser extent things like ARM and Alpha.
Another way of abstracting the hardware from software is the way the free unixes do it - have a portable kernel and libc and use source compatibility. This only works for open-source software but has the advantage of not needing to rely on another monopoly. If GNOME and K Office get popular, this may provide serious competition with Transmeta's chip. Anyone reckon Linus has a conflict of interest? [Depends what his job at TM actually involves]
The third way is the Java way, with bytecode. The trouble is that the Java language is under Sun's control so this again carries some danger of creating dependence upon a monopoly.
How difficult would it be to have some sort of "portable C bytecode", which could be compiled later into a native executable for a given architecture? I realise this wouldn't work for C programs which assume sizeofint, endianness etc., but lots of the best quality free source code doesn't make such assumptions. If there was such a bytecode format, then good coding practice would be sufficient to create a portable app, and this would include non-free software distributed in the bytecode format. A way of allowing consumers choice of architecture for non free software?
Ah, I see what you mean. AFAIK there's no way of doing it in XFree 3.3.6, though XFree 4.0 might well have.
It's a matter of the superuser [or package maintainer] configuring X to allow this. If you've got the permissions, you can change resolution from a perl script.
Even if Gould, Watson, Crick and Hofstadter haven't actually collaborated on GNOME, the Open Source development model has *allowed* them to.
Too bad.
If you make a hierarchy of which closed-source software has the most potential to restrict freedom, [single-user] games come fairly low. The reason that the software market is such a mess is that, to get anything useful done, several pieces of software have to interact - this is even more true if you want to communicate with somebody else's computer. So the "lock-in" potential of software can be high - you might be forced to use one piece of software just so that you can use another. Compare this to, say, novels, where you only need to buy the books you want to read, and you'll see the problem.
Now to my mind, [single user] games are more like novels than like software, in that no other program depends upon a game. A game might tie you to a particular OS, but if (say) Wine can make it run on an open OS then this problem is alleviated.
OTOH closed-source drivers have a bit more lock-in potential because a piece of hardware *is* dependent on them. If the hardware specs are also secret (winmodems, hp printers etc) this could be quite serious. If the specs are available and freely implementable then an open driver can be written if a sufficient number of people want it.
So, to summarise, I think that it's more important that drivers are open-source than it is that [single user] games are.
Sort of, yes. They've written it around the current facilities/limitations of Wine (and built on Wine) because they wanted something out of the door Now. Since they've been working on both code bodies (Office and Wine) I imagine there's a good chance they know what they're doing and have only used stable stuff.
Hmm the top half of my original message got munched. I was saying that Wine 1.0 will be a version with a core of functionality and a stable API which will be supportable in future versions of Wine. Obviously this matters for Winelib (compiling X apps that use the windows API) rather than for Wine (executing Windows binaries). The idea's not to get perfect Windows emulation for 1.0, it's to have a frozen API in a state which can be supported through future versions. (Also getting documentation into a good state is a priority)
BTW I think ygotta hand it to the Wine developers. They're catching Microsoft up. You can now get Office 97 to run, though it wobbles a lot. They've managed to close in on the moving target which is the Windows API. IBM (OS/2), Sun (WABI) and others have tried and failed. Within the forseeable future it will be possible to execute the average Win95 program under X on x86 Unix. That's really a remarkable achievement, more so as it's free.
Well, not if it was a typical 386SX or better. The time it took to do the decompression was typically less than the time it saved by not having to read as much from the disk. This was true for hard disks, but particularly true for floppies. I only stopped using the floppy "stacker anywhere" compression when I switched to Linux.
BTW I have known of memory compression being used to get round physical limits. E.g. ymight want to keep more than 2G of data in memory w/o swapping, on a system that supports only 2G physical memory.