The license for Solaris 8 was really nice, free for machines that could hold 8 or fewer processors. BTW, that license is still in effect for people with media in hand (although it applies just for their organization).
Could you point me at any information on this?
My understand was that you had to register all your Solaris 8 machines on the Sun website for them to be licenced. Now when I try to register another machine, the page that comes up says that free licenses are only available for machines which only support 1 CPU.
Looking at the web site, it appears that the 1 CPU limit now applies to new Solaris 8 installs, too.
And since CPUs are counted by the number of CPUs supported by the platform, rather than the number of CPUs installed in the machine, all those old SPARCstation 10 and SPARCstation 20 machines will now count as 4 processor machines and cost you $199 for a desktop licence or $999 for a server licence.
It was designed to break copy protection, which is a no-no according to the DMCA, whether you really have a right to copy lit or not.
Indeed it is. It was illegal, no question, under that bad piece of legislation, the DMCA. But piracy (to the best of my knowledge) is not a legal term. And copying something within fair use rights would not be described as piracy by most reasonably people, whether or not it involved defeating a technological protection device, and whether or not it was therefore legal.
So, I stand by my statement. The parent post was FUD, because the way I read it, it implied that the only purpose of Sklyarov's e-book reader was to infringe copyright. It was not.
I agree with this guy. I know Reuters says they tried it, but that's not good enough, I want proof. I agree that it's possible it may work since it's the DATA not audio tracks that are the issue, but like this guy said, it sounds a lot like the "green ink makes your CD's sound better" crap.
It sounds pretty plausible.
Almost certainly, the CD is a multisession disc. The first session is audio, and the second session is corrupt.
Audio CD players only look at the first session; however a PC will look for CD-ROM content in the last session, and get confused by the corrupt session.[1]
All you need to do is to render the second session unreadable, by obscuring it in some way; then the PC will just see a normal single-session audio disc.
This sounds like it is really just a variant of the CD Extra format. CD Extra is sometimes used to place additional CD-ROM content on an audio disc. By placing the CD-ROM content in the second session, they avoid confusing audio players with it.
I mean, how can one argue that any device is designed specifically for copyright violation, if it can do anything else which is useful?
Well, you could ask the designer. Most technological inventions are designed to solve a specific set of problems. So it is often a matter of fact as to what something was designed for.
Of course, it may still be difficult to establish the design intent if the designers are not available or are not considered credible witnesses.
A good OS design would make it impossible for anything in user space to violate any security or stability rules -- any action on the app's part that would do so is rejected and an exception is raised.
Indeed. Any real OS should be expected to do this. By this definition, Windows NT/2000/XP, UNIX/Linux/BSD and Mac OS X are real operating systems. (Bear in mind I'm talking about OS design here. The design of all these OS's is such such that (in general) it will prevent a rogue app from crashing the machine. Of course, no design is ever perfectly implemented -- all OS's have bugs -- so in reality it is sometimes possible for an app to crash a machine.)
Contrast with DOS, Windows 3.x/95/98/ME and Mac OS up to (and including) OS 9 -- the design of which does not make any serious attempt at preventing apps from being able to crash the machine (Windows 95/98/ME makes a half-hearted attempt, but it doesn't go very far...)
No, you have it backwards. A well designed OS would not barf all over itself and dy because of a bad driver. The driver/device might fail, but the OS would chug right along.
Well, that rules out most operating systems then. Most OS's run drivers at the same privilidge level as the kernel, and hence a broken driver can crash your system.
In fact, many hardware architectures only support two privildge levels, so it's impossible to fix this in general (though x86 supports 4, which would allow the OS to protect itself somewhat from a rogue driver).
What pisses me off is that I haven't even done anything wrong. I'm guilty by default.
But surely, under the DMCA by using a multiregional DVD player you're defeating a technological protection measure. Please turn yourself in at the nearest police station...:)
I'm not saying your wrong, and I certainly agree that subjective judgements of sound quality are often flawed, but the history of audio reproduction shows that sometimes, when the audiophiles claim that they can hear differences that aren't born out by the measurements, it's because you're measuring the wrong things.
Take the early transistor designs. Lots of people claimed that valves sounded better, but none of the measurements backed it up. Of course, that was because back then people were too caught up in measuring frequency response and total harmonic distortion to realize that their was more to audio reproduction than that. They didn't think to measure transient intermodulation distortion, because they didn't even know what it was (hey, neither do I). Hey, on paper the transistor designs were better (lower thd). But it turned out to be important, and is something that all modern designs worry about. This footnote in history, incidentally, is probably the main reason why audiophiles are still so enamoured with valves.
Can two different CD decks sound different if both are tested connected to the same outboard DAC (assuming both are reading good data off the CD, and there are no uncorrected errors)? Conventional wisdom said this clearly made no sense, though the people who trusted their ears insisted there was a difference. Of course, we now know that clock jitter is a big issue in digital audio, so the quality of the audio coming out of the outboard DAC is actually very dependent on the amount of clock jitter in the digital output of the CD deck.
So, can two CDs (a pressed one and a burned one, say) sound different when played back in a CD player, despite the fact that they're bit-for-bit identical, and read back without error? Well, actually it appears that maybe they can. The quality of the signal on the disc (eg how sharp the transitions are) will certainly affect the amount of jitter in the recovered clock. But, you say, the data is reclocked anyway before being sent to the DAC, so this is irrelevent. But there's a suggestion that in reality the clocks aren't anywhere near as well decoupled as we'd like to believe, due to parasitic effects that are very hard to completely eliminate. So the level of jitter (and hence audio quality) of the sound coming out of your CD player is potentially influenced by how well-defined the pits are on the medium.
Is there a point to all this? I think so. Yes, 90% of what you read in audiophile magazines is misguided. But the object of audio engineering is to produce something that sounds right. Measurements are incredibly useful in achieving this, but we should never lose sight of the fact that the objective is to produce something that sounds good. And history tell us that sometimes, just because you can't (yet) measure the difference that some people claim to be able to hear, it doesn't mean it's not there.
This allows any ISP to claim a violation under there "Acceptible use policy".
There's nothing new here. If you sign a contract that states you will abide by the ISPs AUP, and then you don't, you are in breech of contract. If the contract states that they can terminate the contract for material breech, then that means they can cut you off for breeching the AUP.
All this case does is confirm the bloody obvious, namely that a signed contract carries legal force.
Then again, I don't get spam because I am careful to not give my main account addresses to untrusted people. That is just common sense.
Possibly, but I don't want to have to keep my e-mail address a closely guarded secret.
That's like saying that you don't get mugged because you never leave your house after dark. It may be sensible, but I don't want want to have to live under a self-imposed curfew. I want something done about the muggers.
I prety much saw this and went through this in my teenage years (way back when).
I started out being interested in electronics -- and saw basic microcomputer projects occaisionally appear in the elecronics magazine as these incredibly complex designs that I (at the time) couldn't understand what they were about.
As I gravitated towards computers (which is where I ended up making my career, after a brief flirtation with Physics), I saw the increase in shelf space in the newsagents of the early computer hobbyist magazines, coupled with the reduction in shelf space for electronics.
I think the/. headline is right -- the loss to the electonics constuctor community is the gain to the computer hacker (in the true sense of the word) community, and open source is the obvious beneficiary.
This is exactly what I dislike about the Linux community: the constant whining when something doesn't go "the way it should". When Lindows doesn't want to release the source until they ship the definite version, let them
I don't understand your point.
If someone got hold of Microsoft's source code, and used it in their product without Microsoft's permission, I'm sure Microsoft would 'whine' (as you put it) -- beta or no beta. Why should the open source community not be able to expect the same protection for their intellectual property rights?
I think we all agree that using it on my company's computers only is not distributing it.
I think you're right. Because your company is a separate legal entity. The fact that your employees may have access to your code in the course of their duties does not mean that your company is distributing the code to them. (If you allow them to take personal copies, of course, then the situation is different).
I don't agree. Nor does the FSF
Care to give us a quote from the FSF on this issue?
" Does the GPL allow me to develop a modified version under a nondisclosure agreement? [gnu.org]"
Yes. For instance, you can accept a contract develop changes and agree not to release your changes until the client says ok. This is permitted because in this case no GPL-covered code is being distributed under an NDA.
I think you misunderstand. In this example, a company tells a third party contractor to take the original, public copy of some GPL'd code, and have them develop a modified version.
This is OK; if the company distributes anything to the contractor, it's the original, unmodified public source, which of course everyone already has access to.
The contractor produces his modified version, and then gives his modified version back to the company that's paying him. This is distribution, but it is fine as long as he gives the company source (which is of course what they're paying him for).
So this example is irrelevent and has no bearing on Lindows.
As far as I had thought, as long as the software was distributed in house and not to the public, they don't have to release the source code
IANAL, but I think you're right. The point is that if you're acting in your capactity (say) as an employee of an organization, then it's the organization that's producing the derived work, doing the internal distribution, etc, not the employee -- so when you read the licence, you have to read you as refering to your organization.
If the organization now distributes the binary code internally (for business use, rather than for use by employees in a personal capacity) then the organization is giving itself copies of the code, and is therefore obliged to give itself copies of it's source, which by definition it already has. No problem.
You probably have to be slightly more careful if you distribute it to subsidiaries, parent companies, group members, etc.
I can't see that any of this applies to Lindows. In no way can the Lindows beta-testers be regarded as acting as agents of the company here, so it seems clear that this isn't just internal distribution (ie it isn't just Lindows, Inc giving a copy to Lindows, Inc which wouldn't really be distribution at all. It's Lindows, Inc giving a copy to a third party. NDA or no NDA they need to give the source, too.
Question for GPL-experts. Isn't the NDA (which, as I understant it, prevents the beta-testers from redistributing the binaries) a further breach of the GPL?
I should add, that doing what I'm proposing would be seriously hard work.
If this has been though of before (and it very probably has), I can quite understand why it hasn't been implemented. But doing it right would also be seriously cool.
So don't copy it, cache it, according to the HTTP 1.1 caching semantics.
If the site is properly designed, it'll reduce the load on their servers, and they'll still be able to display their ads and count their page impressions.
Of course, this won't help the 95% of sites that don't know how to make a page properly cacheable, but maybe it'll act as an incentive...
Whilst you have a valid point, there are similar problems to the ones you cite to greater or lesser degrees with Windows, too.
The really big advantage that Windows users have is a larger userbase, which just makes it so much easier to find a Foo for Dummies page for pretty much any foo.
Granted, you can find instuctions on foo for Linux, too, but it's often harder to find, and much more likely to be a Foo for Techies document.
If Linux were to seriously start to gain acceptance on the non-techie desktop, it would be the beginning of a virtuous circle; the increased userbase would favour further adoption...
The unfortunate thing, is 9/10 reviews ignore the stability of boards, which is the primary reason I wrote this.
I agree, this is one of my main complaints about all hardware reviews.
It's inevitable really. Unless a product is seriously unreliable, you're not going to be able to usefully measure reliability and stability without testing at least a dozen samples over several months.
Sadly, but unsurprisingly, reviewers don't have the resources to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
The license for Solaris 8 was really nice, free for machines that could hold 8 or fewer processors. BTW, that license is still in effect for people with media in hand (although it applies just for their organization).
Could you point me at any information on this?
My understand was that you had to register all your Solaris 8 machines on the Sun website for them to be licenced. Now when I try to register another machine, the page that comes up says that free licenses are only available for machines which only support 1 CPU.
Looking at the web site, it appears that the 1 CPU limit now applies to new Solaris 8 installs, too.
And since CPUs are counted by the number of CPUs supported by the platform, rather than the number of CPUs installed in the machine, all those old SPARCstation 10 and SPARCstation 20 machines will now count as 4 processor machines and cost you $199 for a desktop licence or $999 for a server licence.
Please someone tell me I'm mistaken...
Indeed it is. It was illegal, no question, under that bad piece of legislation, the DMCA. But piracy (to the best of my knowledge) is not a legal term. And copying something within fair use rights would not be described as piracy by most reasonably people, whether or not it involved defeating a technological protection device, and whether or not it was therefore legal.
So, I stand by my statement. The parent post was FUD, because the way I read it, it implied that the only purpose of Sklyarov's e-book reader was to infringe copyright. It was not.
It sounds pretty plausible.
Almost certainly, the CD is a multisession disc. The first session is audio, and the second session is corrupt.
Audio CD players only look at the first session; however a PC will look for CD-ROM content in the last session, and get confused by the corrupt session.[1]
All you need to do is to render the second session unreadable, by obscuring it in some way; then the PC will just see a normal single-session audio disc.
This sounds like it is really just a variant of the CD Extra format. CD Extra is sometimes used to place additional CD-ROM content on an audio disc. By placing the CD-ROM content in the second session, they avoid confusing audio players with it.
Well, you could ask the designer. Most technological inventions are designed to solve a specific set of problems. So it is often a matter of fact as to what something was designed for.
Of course, it may still be difficult to establish the design intent if the designers are not available or are not considered credible witnesses.
Well, that rules out most operating systems then. Most OS's run drivers at the same privilidge level as the kernel, and hence a broken driver can crash your system.
In fact, many hardware architectures only support two privildge levels, so it's impossible to fix this in general (though x86 supports 4, which would allow the OS to protect itself somewhat from a rogue driver).
But surely, under the DMCA by using a multiregional DVD player you're defeating a technological protection measure. Please turn yourself in at the nearest police station...
What, having a sense of humour gives open source a bad name?
I'm not saying your wrong, and I certainly agree that subjective judgements of sound quality are often flawed, but the history of audio reproduction shows that sometimes, when the audiophiles claim that they can hear differences that aren't born out by the measurements, it's because you're measuring the wrong things.
Take the early transistor designs. Lots of people claimed that valves sounded better, but none of the measurements backed it up. Of course, that was because back then people were too caught up in measuring frequency response and total harmonic distortion to realize that their was more to audio reproduction than that. They didn't think to measure transient intermodulation distortion, because they didn't even know what it was (hey, neither do I). Hey, on paper the transistor designs were better (lower thd). But it turned out to be important, and is something that all modern designs worry about. This footnote in history, incidentally, is probably the main reason why audiophiles are still so enamoured with valves.
Can two different CD decks sound different if both are tested connected to the same outboard DAC (assuming both are reading good data off the CD, and there are no uncorrected errors)? Conventional wisdom said this clearly made no sense, though the people who trusted their ears insisted there was a difference. Of course, we now know that clock jitter is a big issue in digital audio, so the quality of the audio coming out of the outboard DAC is actually very dependent on the amount of clock jitter in the digital output of the CD deck.
So, can two CDs (a pressed one and a burned one, say) sound different when played back in a CD player, despite the fact that they're bit-for-bit identical, and read back without error? Well, actually it appears that maybe they can. The quality of the signal on the disc (eg how sharp the transitions are) will certainly affect the amount of jitter in the recovered clock. But, you say, the data is reclocked anyway before being sent to the DAC, so this is irrelevent. But there's a suggestion that in reality the clocks aren't anywhere near as well decoupled as we'd like to believe, due to parasitic effects that are very hard to completely eliminate. So the level of jitter (and hence audio quality) of the sound coming out of your CD player is potentially influenced by how well-defined the pits are on the medium.
Is there a point to all this? I think so. Yes, 90% of what you read in audiophile magazines is misguided. But the object of audio engineering is to produce something that sounds right. Measurements are incredibly useful in achieving this, but we should never lose sight of the fact that the objective is to produce something that sounds good. And history tell us that sometimes, just because you can't (yet) measure the difference that some people claim to be able to hear, it doesn't mean it's not there.
All this case does is confirm the bloody obvious, namely that a signed contract carries legal force.
So is posting to USENET from a fake address now so acceptable that even members of abuse departments engage in it?
And apologies in advance if the address is valid, but the MX doesn't resolve as I type this...
That's like saying that you don't get mugged because you never leave your house after dark. It may be sensible, but I don't want want to have to live under a self-imposed curfew. I want something done about the muggers.
Yes. Not that recently, actually.
This is old news
/. headline is right -- the loss to the electonics constuctor community is the gain to the computer hacker (in the true sense of the word) community, and open source is the obvious beneficiary.
I prety much saw this and went through this in my teenage years (way back when).
I started out being interested in electronics -- and saw basic microcomputer projects occaisionally appear in the elecronics magazine as these incredibly complex designs that I (at the time) couldn't understand what they were about.
As I gravitated towards computers (which is where I ended up making my career, after a brief flirtation with Physics), I saw the increase in shelf space in the newsagents of the early computer hobbyist magazines, coupled with the reduction in shelf space for electronics.
I think the
I don't understand your point.
If someone got hold of Microsoft's source code, and used it in their product without Microsoft's permission, I'm sure Microsoft would 'whine' (as you put it) -- beta or no beta. Why should the open source community not be able to expect the same protection for their intellectual property rights?
I think you're right. Because your company is a separate legal entity. The fact that your employees may have access to your code in the course of their duties does not mean that your company is distributing the code to them. (If you allow them to take personal copies, of course, then the situation is different).
Care to give us a quote from the FSF on this issue?
I think you misunderstand. In this example, a company tells a third party contractor to take the original, public copy of some GPL'd code, and have them develop a modified version.
This is OK; if the company distributes anything to the contractor, it's the original, unmodified public source, which of course everyone already has access to.
The contractor produces his modified version, and then gives his modified version back to the company that's paying him. This is distribution, but it is fine as long as he gives the company source (which is of course what they're paying him for).
So this example is irrelevent and has no bearing on Lindows.
IANAL, but I think you're right. The point is that if you're acting in your capactity (say) as an employee of an organization, then it's the organization that's producing the derived work, doing the internal distribution, etc, not the employee -- so when you read the licence, you have to read you as refering to your organization.
If the organization now distributes the binary code internally (for business use, rather than for use by employees in a personal capacity) then the organization is giving itself copies of the code, and is therefore obliged to give itself copies of it's source, which by definition it already has. No problem.
You probably have to be slightly more careful if you distribute it to subsidiaries, parent companies, group members, etc.
I can't see that any of this applies to Lindows. In no way can the Lindows beta-testers be regarded as acting as agents of the company here, so it seems clear that this isn't just internal distribution (ie it isn't just Lindows, Inc giving a copy to Lindows, Inc which wouldn't really be distribution at all. It's Lindows, Inc giving a copy to a third party. NDA or no NDA they need to give the source, too.
Question for GPL-experts. Isn't the NDA (which, as I understant it, prevents the beta-testers from redistributing the binaries) a further breach of the GPL?
[Replying to my own post]
I should add, that doing what I'm proposing would be seriously hard work.
If this has been though of before (and it very probably has), I can quite understand why it hasn't been implemented. But doing it right would also be seriously cool.
So don't copy it, cache it, according to the HTTP 1.1 caching semantics.
If the site is properly designed, it'll reduce the load on their servers, and they'll still be able to display their ads and count their page impressions.
Of course, this won't help the 95% of sites that don't know how to make a page properly cacheable, but maybe it'll act as an incentive...
Whilst you have a valid point, there are similar problems to the ones you cite to greater or lesser degrees with Windows, too.
The really big advantage that Windows users have is a larger userbase, which just makes it so much easier to find a Foo for Dummies page for pretty much any foo.
Granted, you can find instuctions on foo for Linux, too, but it's often harder to find, and much more likely to be a Foo for Techies document.
If Linux were to seriously start to gain acceptance on the non-techie desktop, it would be the beginning of a virtuous circle; the increased userbase would favour further adoption...
It's inevitable really. Unless a product is seriously unreliable, you're not going to be able to usefully measure reliability and stability without testing at least a dozen samples over several months.
Sadly, but unsurprisingly, reviewers don't have the resources to do this.
Where do you want to go today?