I wonder if a clause like this in the EULA would be considered a waiving of thier DMCA rights. If you repackaged your backup software so that it only worked on titles with such a license, that might be an effective loophole.
After all, if you can give up your legal rights by reading and clicking the button, can't they give up legal rights by offering the license?
Re:Command and source/test review.
on
Java Faster Than C++?
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· Score: 4, Informative
The method call is a really egregious case of bad methodolgy. The C++ test he's using was designed to test method call overhead, which is why it returns by value instead of refrence. The massive performance improvement from the JVM (server only, note) is the JVM aggresively inlining the call (and it's a single method call in a tight loop, an obvious inline candidate), so what he's measuring is just loop performance, not method call overhead. If he hadn't disabled loop unrolling and function inlining in GCC (via O2), C++ would have performed much better.
It's worth pointing out that inlining is a case where a VM can really shine for optimizing because it has alot more options available (partial inlining, etc) and can make better decisions about tradeoffs. But this particular benchmark is comparing apples to oranges.
This has got to be one of the whiniest, worst written apologies I have ever read. You aren't allowed to dislike the new spatial paradigm! If you don't like it, it's only because you're messy! SUBMIT!
Some people aren't interested in the Gnome developers personal interperation of the desktop metaphor. Some people think that making poor decisions based on pushing on a metaphor to the breaking point is stupid.
Some people think that using a tool to apply struture to files is an excellent use of a computer, rather than yelling at users that they're too messy and they need to conform to thier tools rather than the other way around.
Jesus. What egocentric crap! There's nothing wrong with a "spatial metaphor" if thats what works for you, but your underwear twisted in a knot when other people don't willingly submit to your attempt to push it on them is just egocentric and irritating.
My employer is in the process of moving an old mainframe system to Peoplesoft, and I have to agree with everything you're saying there. I'm involved only on the edges, but everytime something incredibly stupid comes up it seems to be Peoplesoft's fault.
What makes this even worse is that we had about 80% of the Peoplesoft functionality we needed re-implemented in Oracle anyway, and we're now scrapping all that and re-writing everything so it can interface with Peoplesoft. In our homebrewed system if we screwed everything up and needed to drop all our tables and reload everything from the mainframe source, it took about an hour. The first load had some problems, after that it could be run unattended during overnight batch. When Peoplesoft screwed up, it took _48 hours_ for the system to be available again.
It's actually not. The reason you can't show a DVD to 20 people is because it's a public perfromance, which is a copyright. If you bought 20 people thier own copy of a DVD and let each one watch it on his own TV they couldn't say boo. If this whole licensing thing relies on the strength of a personal use only clause in the EULA, then I hope the guy goes to court and wins.
You don't need a special license to profit from someone elses work. This is a really common misconception people have, and it's wrong. Copyright does not cover "every way someone can make money", it grants certain specific rights. You can profit off of someone elses work all you want as long as you don't violate any of those rights. For example, you don't need a special license to sell used books. In fact, you don't need a special license to sell books at all. All you have to do is buy books.
This is an important difference between percieved performance and "real" performance. Your MT cpu-bound task (calculating a private key, say) will run slower (sometimes _much_ slower), but the user will percieve it as being performing better, because the application stays responsive (and they an see a progress bar, hit the cancel button, etc). A user will wait for a progress dialog that takes 30 seconds alot more willingly than they'll accept an application just freezing for 5.
I question whether it's even legal to try to enforce that sort of licensing. It seems ridiculous. I don't need any special license to loan books from a library. There's no copying or distribution here. He's got legitimate (I assume, for the sake of argument) copies of half-life that're installed on machines. Every person playing has a legit copy that's not used by anyone else at the same time. Are they trying to claim it's public exhibition, because they aren't playing in private or something?
I can't speak to DotGNU, but the CompactFramework is _not_ optimized for speed, at least when it comes to graphics. The bitmap object is especially bad - on a 400mhz strongarm, a simple transform (to rotate a bitmap to landscape) took roughly 10 seconds to render. Per pixel bitmap access is _slow_ in the compact framework. You can wrap up the GAPI (which basically just gives you an addressable framebuffer) in.NET calls, but all the work is done by C then.
Also, the Compact Framework is NOT heavily licensed. It ships with VS 2003, and while thats espensive (a couple grand, I think) there's no special licensing besides the money.
Re:This writer of the article is a journalistic ko
on
Testing ISP Censorship
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· Score: 1
Anyone with control over the publishing of material can censor something. This includes self-censorship, private censorship, corporate censorship, community censorship, and government censorship.
Christ, did you even read your own source? Despite being an incredibly poor dictionary (there's no sourcing of it's definitions, or entymology or indeed anything to compare it to real dictionaries...), it also totally fails to require goverment influence as part of the definition. I quote:
2.censorship - deleting parts of publications or correspondence or theatrical performances
I have no idea why the first definition (normally the most commonly used) is the military definition, or, indeed, why it's considered seperate from the secondary definition. Further investigation reveals that this is the WordNet's definition. Note that WordNet is not a dictionary, it's a lexical database (used for tying words with related meanings together). I wouldn't consider it even as much of an authoritive source on usage and definitions as the American Heritage dictionary, much less Mirriam-Webster.
You'll note, from a careful reading of your source, that censorship is often used in the context of government, but is not defined by that context. If you're going to mouth off with poorly-spelled, ill-formated rants, at least make sure that your own sources don't prove you wrong.
This actually is not true, much to my sadness. The only "penalty of perjury" claim is that you represent a copyright owner. You must say that you have good faith cause to believe that the copyrights of whoever you represent are violated, but thats not a "penalty of perjury" clause. This is why spurious DMCA claims are so easy.
Re:Maybe we shouldn't be so quick to judge the ISP
on
Testing ISP Censorship
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· Score: 1
Technically, only government-sponsored killing and abuse violates the constition. That's right, if I come to your house and shoot you, I haven't violated a single one of your constitutional rights. Or, say, if I lock you up without reading you your rights. In fact, I am not capable of doing anything to you that violates the Constitution, because it doesn't limit me. That doesn't mean that anything I choose to do to you is okay.
If you'd actually read it, he's not blaming ISPs for doing that. He's blaming legislation (specifically the NTD) for creating an environment that induces ISPs to do this. It doesn't provide any guidelines about what contitutes "knowledge" that would make an ISP liable, doesn't set any conditions of accountability or openness, etc, etc. Of course ISPs respond this way. If you were a conspiracy buff you'd probably draw the conclusion that the legislation was this vague on purpose, to get exactly this same effect. For all it's flaws, the DMCA gets alot of this stuff right.
If we're going to work on the legal assumption of wrongdoing (which is what both EU and US law do, in this case), then at the very least there should be strict guidelines. The DMCA provides for a specfic format and requires legal proof of ownership, which (as he points out) are a sorely lacking in the NTD.
Re:This writer of the article is a journalistic ko
on
Testing ISP Censorship
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· Score: 1
You should probably read the correct definition of censorship before you post any more rants. Of course a private company can censor content. Thats why the people responsible for making sure you don't say "shit" on live tv are called censors. In summary: you don't know what the hell you're talking about, and it's not relevent to this discussion anyway, which you would have known had you read the article.
Look on the bright side. Your hosting provider spent less on it's licenses than it spend on free coffee for it's janitors, much less it's caffeine addicted sysadmins.
Exactly correct. Static CG art can be amazingly human as well (see some of the shots linked earlier in this article), or stills from the Final Fantasy movie. When they start moving the difficulty goes up by an order of magnitude.
I played Thief 3 on an Athlon 1800+, with a GF 3 and 256 megs of ram. Turning resolution to 800x600 and turning down most of the detals made the game run perfectly playably, with a stable framerate. People with 3 times the hardware I've got complaining about it being "slow" or "ugly" need to either re-evaluate thier assumptions or fix whatever else they have wrong with thier machines.
It's worth pointing out that the United Way actually does stuff with thier donated money. An "organization" that did nothing more than than move money from one spot to another in a 99.9% automated manner would have very low (almost 0) administrative costs. Transaction fees they'd have to pay to banks would be about it.
Sneaking around all the guards in Thief 2 is a lot harder than killing them all:P. Try ghosting a mission (no kills, no alerts - no hint you were there except that all the loot is gone) and you'll see what I mean.
Re:They should stick with C
on
The GNOME Roadmap
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Because it's very easy to expose a C api to practically any language in existence but very difficult to expose a C++ one to anything except C++, and in fact it's generally done by flattening the API to a C one. I prefer C++ myself but for a library that is meant to be widely used and called having the base layer be in C makes oodles of sense.
Thats a good point and you're probably right. On the other hand, reprinting or even re-mailing a letter that was sent to you is not a violation of copyright, so I'm not sure where the line is.
Creation of a market is a means to an end. It could just as easily have been government stipends for artists or something (far less workable, I know). It's a reasonable means to a very desirable end. But it's important to remember what the end goal is, which is the increase of artistic works available to society, rather than getting stuck on the means, which is what the major players who use copyright as a buisness model do. Note that copyright law, as well as me personally, see a difference between someone making a mix tape for a friend and someone sharing with 10,000 anonymous people. The point here is that record labels (and the MPAA, and software companies, and even alot of book publishers) don' see that difference. They want a piece of the pie every time someone views or reads or whatever anything they hold copyright for and that is one of the problems with copyrights today and thats when the means starts conflicting with the end.
In the absense of copyright law, everything is "fair use". Thomas Jefferson had some very intelligent things to say about this - knowledge is naturally transferred, it takes nothing from the creator, and there is no natural way for the creator to prevent this, other than never telling anyone what he knows. Copyright law is a sob to human possesiveness to get people to open up, by artficially limiting the spread of information. It should be obvious that there is a delicate balance that wants to be struck there.
It's another common misconception that copyright law grants you total and complete control over a work, excepted only by fair use. This is untrue - copyright grants specific rights, in specific areas, and then exempts those rights. For example, copyright law does not grant you the right to require that your work be viewed in a certain way. There's lots of directors out there who'd like to require that I only watch thier movie in certain lighting, or while I drink a certain type of wine, or whatever, but copyright law doesn't let them require that. Most of fair use has been embodied in copyright law from the beginning. Some has been a response to technology. Some has been a response to abuse by copyright holders (for example, right of first sale is in response to book publishers attempting to shut down used book sales).
You seem to insist on misrepresenting my position here. I am not saying that there should be no copyright law. I am not saying that it should be fair use to distribute something to anyone who wants it over the internet. I'm not advocating illustrators being ripped off by publishers. I am saying that the trend of lawmakers toward restricting the use of copyrighted material, and not by changing copyright law but by "end-running" around it via legislation like UCITA and the DMCA, is troublesom e and at odds with the (Constitutionally mandated!) goals of copyright. Technological restrictions likewise - they're attempting to enforce rights they don't have. The amount of works that have already been lost to the public domain because of these sort of restrictive policies is already huge, and is only going to get worse. I would be surpised if more than a tiny fraction of the software (and the knowledge of computer science it represents) survives long enough to make it into the public domain. Movies from the turn of the century are being destroyed because the copyright holders won't permit them to be backed up on more durable media. Content companies who are used to total vertical control of markets are attempting to use copyright to leverage subscription based markets instead of product based ones. Thats not what copyright is for, and it should be nipped in the bud.
Also, artists who draw things should still get paid when publishers use those drawings. I hope you can see how these views are not incompatible.
If you don't think that your current mail provider "reads" your email you're sadly mistaken. Unless you've got no spam or AV filtering. Good spam filtering analyzes messages at least as much as gmail does. Your privacy isn't at risk - at least no more than it already was, considering that you're using an unsecured medium (HTTP) for access to unencrypted communications (email) over an unsecure protocol (SMTP), with all the communication happening on servers you don't control and in fact probably don't even know about. Every email provider on the planet has at least as much access to your email as gmail will - it's a matter of who you trust and what you're comfortable with.
If you don't trust Google thats fine, but don't fool yourself into thinking that they're doing anything out of line as far as email goes - it's nothing more or less than any other provider already does.
Slashdot Mirror
After all, if you can give up your legal rights by reading and clicking the button, can't they give up legal rights by offering the license?
It's worth pointing out that inlining is a case where a VM can really shine for optimizing because it has alot more options available (partial inlining, etc) and can make better decisions about tradeoffs. But this particular benchmark is comparing apples to oranges.
Some people aren't interested in the Gnome developers personal interperation of the desktop metaphor. Some people think that making poor decisions based on pushing on a metaphor to the breaking point is stupid.
Some people think that using a tool to apply struture to files is an excellent use of a computer, rather than yelling at users that they're too messy and they need to conform to thier tools rather than the other way around.
Jesus. What egocentric crap! There's nothing wrong with a "spatial metaphor" if thats what works for you, but your underwear twisted in a knot when other people don't willingly submit to your attempt to push it on them is just egocentric and irritating.
What makes this even worse is that we had about 80% of the Peoplesoft functionality we needed re-implemented in Oracle anyway, and we're now scrapping all that and re-writing everything so it can interface with Peoplesoft. In our homebrewed system if we screwed everything up and needed to drop all our tables and reload everything from the mainframe source, it took about an hour. The first load had some problems, after that it could be run unattended during overnight batch. When Peoplesoft screwed up, it took _48 hours_ for the system to be available again.
You don't need a special license to profit from someone elses work. This is a really common misconception people have, and it's wrong. Copyright does not cover "every way someone can make money", it grants certain specific rights. You can profit off of someone elses work all you want as long as you don't violate any of those rights. For example, you don't need a special license to sell used books. In fact, you don't need a special license to sell books at all. All you have to do is buy books.
This is an important difference between percieved performance and "real" performance. Your MT cpu-bound task (calculating a private key, say) will run slower (sometimes _much_ slower), but the user will percieve it as being performing better, because the application stays responsive (and they an see a progress bar, hit the cancel button, etc). A user will wait for a progress dialog that takes 30 seconds alot more willingly than they'll accept an application just freezing for 5.
I question whether it's even legal to try to enforce that sort of licensing. It seems ridiculous. I don't need any special license to loan books from a library. There's no copying or distribution here. He's got legitimate (I assume, for the sake of argument) copies of half-life that're installed on machines. Every person playing has a legit copy that's not used by anyone else at the same time. Are they trying to claim it's public exhibition, because they aren't playing in private or something?
Also, the Compact Framework is NOT heavily licensed. It ships with VS 2003, and while thats espensive (a couple grand, I think) there's no special licensing besides the money.
Christ, did you even read your own source? Despite being an incredibly poor dictionary (there's no sourcing of it's definitions, or entymology or indeed anything to compare it to real dictionaries...), it also totally fails to require goverment influence as part of the definition. I quote:
I have no idea why the first definition (normally the most commonly used) is the military definition, or, indeed, why it's considered seperate from the secondary definition. Further investigation reveals that this is the WordNet's definition. Note that WordNet is not a dictionary, it's a lexical database (used for tying words with related meanings together). I wouldn't consider it even as much of an authoritive source on usage and definitions as the American Heritage dictionary, much less Mirriam-Webster.You'll note, from a careful reading of your source, that censorship is often used in the context of government, but is not defined by that context. If you're going to mouth off with poorly-spelled, ill-formated rants, at least make sure that your own sources don't prove you wrong.
Holy crap, Ken Brown, is that you?
This actually is not true, much to my sadness. The only "penalty of perjury" claim is that you represent a copyright owner. You must say that you have good faith cause to believe that the copyrights of whoever you represent are violated, but thats not a "penalty of perjury" clause. This is why spurious DMCA claims are so easy.
Technically, only government-sponsored killing and abuse violates the constition. That's right, if I come to your house and shoot you, I haven't violated a single one of your constitutional rights. Or, say, if I lock you up without reading you your rights. In fact, I am not capable of doing anything to you that violates the Constitution, because it doesn't limit me. That doesn't mean that anything I choose to do to you is okay.
The US ISP was Lycos, he did a pretty crappy job of censoring (ha!) that. Even a find & replace would have worked better :P
If we're going to work on the legal assumption of wrongdoing (which is what both EU and US law do, in this case), then at the very least there should be strict guidelines. The DMCA provides for a specfic format and requires legal proof of ownership, which (as he points out) are a sorely lacking in the NTD.
You should probably read the correct definition of censorship before you post any more rants. Of course a private company can censor content. Thats why the people responsible for making sure you don't say "shit" on live tv are called censors. In summary: you don't know what the hell you're talking about, and it's not relevent to this discussion anyway, which you would have known had you read the article.
Look on the bright side. Your hosting provider spent less on it's licenses than it spend on free coffee for it's janitors, much less it's caffeine addicted sysadmins.
Exactly correct. Static CG art can be amazingly human as well (see some of the shots linked earlier in this article), or stills from the Final Fantasy movie. When they start moving the difficulty goes up by an order of magnitude.
I played Thief 3 on an Athlon 1800+, with a GF 3 and 256 megs of ram. Turning resolution to 800x600 and turning down most of the detals made the game run perfectly playably, with a stable framerate. People with 3 times the hardware I've got complaining about it being "slow" or "ugly" need to either re-evaluate thier assumptions or fix whatever else they have wrong with thier machines.
Only Microsofts most recent products have this (VS 2003 and up) and it's not as good or as reliable as the implementation in Borlands.
It's worth pointing out that the United Way actually does stuff with thier donated money. An "organization" that did nothing more than than move money from one spot to another in a 99.9% automated manner would have very low (almost 0) administrative costs. Transaction fees they'd have to pay to banks would be about it.
Sneaking around all the guards in Thief 2 is a lot harder than killing them all :P. Try ghosting a mission (no kills, no alerts - no hint you were there except that all the loot is gone) and you'll see what I mean.
Because it's very easy to expose a C api to practically any language in existence but very difficult to expose a C++ one to anything except C++, and in fact it's generally done by flattening the API to a C one. I prefer C++ myself but for a library that is meant to be widely used and called having the base layer be in C makes oodles of sense.
Amazingly, it was also true. That was an SGI file browser running on Irix. See http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html
Thats a good point and you're probably right. On the other hand, reprinting or even re-mailing a letter that was sent to you is not a violation of copyright, so I'm not sure where the line is.
In the absense of copyright law, everything is "fair use". Thomas Jefferson had some very intelligent things to say about this - knowledge is naturally transferred, it takes nothing from the creator, and there is no natural way for the creator to prevent this, other than never telling anyone what he knows. Copyright law is a sob to human possesiveness to get people to open up, by artficially limiting the spread of information. It should be obvious that there is a delicate balance that wants to be struck there.
It's another common misconception that copyright law grants you total and complete control over a work, excepted only by fair use. This is untrue - copyright grants specific rights, in specific areas, and then exempts those rights. For example, copyright law does not grant you the right to require that your work be viewed in a certain way. There's lots of directors out there who'd like to require that I only watch thier movie in certain lighting, or while I drink a certain type of wine, or whatever, but copyright law doesn't let them require that. Most of fair use has been embodied in copyright law from the beginning. Some has been a response to technology. Some has been a response to abuse by copyright holders (for example, right of first sale is in response to book publishers attempting to shut down used book sales).
You seem to insist on misrepresenting my position here. I am not saying that there should be no copyright law. I am not saying that it should be fair use to distribute something to anyone who wants it over the internet. I'm not advocating illustrators being ripped off by publishers. I am saying that the trend of lawmakers toward restricting the use of copyrighted material, and not by changing copyright law but by "end-running" around it via legislation like UCITA and the DMCA, is troublesom e and at odds with the (Constitutionally mandated!) goals of copyright. Technological restrictions likewise - they're attempting to enforce rights they don't have. The amount of works that have already been lost to the public domain because of these sort of restrictive policies is already huge, and is only going to get worse. I would be surpised if more than a tiny fraction of the software (and the knowledge of computer science it represents) survives long enough to make it into the public domain. Movies from the turn of the century are being destroyed because the copyright holders won't permit them to be backed up on more durable media. Content companies who are used to total vertical control of markets are attempting to use copyright to leverage subscription based markets instead of product based ones. Thats not what copyright is for, and it should be nipped in the bud.
Also, artists who draw things should still get paid when publishers use those drawings. I hope you can see how these views are not incompatible.
If you don't trust Google thats fine, but don't fool yourself into thinking that they're doing anything out of line as far as email goes - it's nothing more or less than any other provider already does.