I'm no Microsoft apologist, but this does make sense for them. The point is that law enforcement in any country can be pretty clueless on whether a CD is copied or not. This way, when they find a warehouse full of suspicious CD's, they have an easy way to tell if they are actually legit or counterfeit. This sort of thing is *not* designed for customers (who don't know about it) or illegal dupers (who don't care about it).
As an explanation to our non-US observers: It may seem odd to have to list your party affiliation. The main reason for this is to determine who can vote in which "primary" election, where Republicans chose the Republican candidate (Bush), and Democrats chose the Democratic candidate (Kerry), earlier this year.
You can also state an "independent" affiliation, in which case you may not vote in the primary election but can vote in (today's) general election. No matter what affiliation you state, you can vote for any candidate (or no candidate) in the general election.
>> someone will lose the password within days. It's happened to me, and I finally had to put a global password in every machine
Ummmm.... have you ever heard of a configuration reset button? You definitely didn't "have to" put in a back door. Please let me know the name of your product(s) so I can avoid them.
Here's an article from a UK source today, called Microsoft millions back SCO case. It also highlights Boies' et. al. backing of SCO. Just so there's no confusion about who it is that's scared of Linux.
So SCO is using our (open source community) hard work, while at the same time threatening and extorting us with the legal system. So what can we do about it, other than just complain to each other?
Yes, we can complain to the proper authorities, and we should. Yes, we can support IBM, RedHat, and others who are fighting this scourge. But we as developers and sysadmins can do more.
We need to stick with our principles and what's legal, which rules out any malicious attacks, or subverting our own GPL in any way.
So what can we do? We can stop helping SCO.
We help SCO when support SCO products like SCO Unix and SCO mail. We support those product by creating and distributing Open Source software that works with them. We support those products when we relay mail traffic from or to them. We support those products when we accept web connections from them. So let's just stop doing that! SCO is attacking Linux end-users, so why should we be helping theirs? I propose that we shun SCO and SCO products.
What do you think? How easy would it be to add code to *your* open source software that would prevent it running on SCO Unix? How could you block SCO Mail traffic through your servers? Could you identify SCO Unix clients to your file servers and web servers?
All of this blocking should be accompanied by an explanation: "We decline to process your request because you are running an SCO product. SCO is threatening to sue Linux end-users and has refused to respect the GPL open source license. We recommend you switch to non-SCO free open source software and notify SCO of the reason for your switch."
Just to clarify a couple points that most commenters seem to misunderstand.
First, the Audible Magic technology doesn't just look at a set of bits, like a Snort signature. It "fingerprints" the audio itself, based on characteristcs most relevant to the human ear. That means that the same fingerprint will identify an audio track digitized from a radio broadcast as the same one ripped from a CD.
Second, the point of the technology is to help groups that are trying to prevent illegal use of their own property. It's not going to stop people who are trying to break the law. A University is not a common carrier.
The key is government enforcement (i.e. stiff fines) for spammers. I think the "do not call" list is unnecessary and error prone. I think we just need big penalties for spammers who don't a) abide by current laws to have non-fraudulent "remove me" instructions, or b) use truthful headers. I think those would cut way down on spam without forcing people to sign up for something that *everyone* wants anyway.
And if you want to be on a do-not-call for via Gra, you might still want to get emails about network software tools!
The best science museum I've ever visited is the History of Science museum in Florence, Italy. They have an incredible exhibit of Galileo's telescopes, inclined plane experiments, clocks, and (I kid you not!) his (middle) finger.
As someone who's just downloading the XML Mind editor and about to write an.xsd for my data -- this is great timing! Thanks, Dare.
I also want to gripe a bit about the complexity of XML Schema. DTD has all the restrictions I'd typically want to use (the main thing I want to do is just specify element names, contents, and attributes). The *only* problem with DTD's is that they are totally namespace-challenged!
You can't use combine two DTD's for different namespaces into a combo document. You can't even allow arbitrary other elements in a DTD element declaration -- every element must be declared and local. Even worse, you have to pick and stick with a namespace prefix in your DTD -- defeating the whole point of globally unique namespaces.
What I *really* want is just DTD with a smidge of namespace smarts and the ability to combine DTD's for one document. Anyone want to give it a shot?
Thanks for the review! Which do you think takes more time -- moving the Roomba, replacing its batteries, emptying its dirt collector, etc... -- or vacuuming the regular way?
I wonder how Eric would like it if someone "modded" his article to change the conclusion and then posted it on their website? I actually agree with his point that encouraging a customizing fan club can be a good thing. However, we have to allow IP creators to be able to control what people are allowed to do with their IP, and definitely whether others are allowed to pirate it.
If you don't like a game or gaming platform's mod policy, then vote with your dollars -- don't buy it!
I appreciate the attempt to inform, but it seems to me this falls into the category of "a little bit of knowledge is dangerous". The pages bill themselves as "3 years of law school in a nutshell", as if you'd get a quick overview of relevant law for geeks. However, it is an analysis of one particular court filing, and based on my 15+ years dealing with legal docs and lawyers (as a techie, IASNAL), I didn't find a scrap of it relevant to software licensing, employment contracts, stock option agreements, or confidentiality agreements. You may find it entertaining, but it's not going to help you deal with the legal issues that you come across in the real world.
Supposedly consumers will be allowed to circumvent copy protection for fair use. Great! But what about the programmers? Does each consumer have to write their own software cracker? Will creating a decoder or unlocker designed for fair use still get you thrown in jail?
And they still need more help... The "Security Contract" is still open for bidding. It includes video surveillance equipment and a 400 Gig DVR. Anyone interested?
Conflicts between developer and management objectives
My take is that for any easy problem, the software is written once, standardized, and doesn't need to be changed. You only need to write new software to deal with the problems or environments you didn't anticipate before, which is inherently unpredictable.
Wow, working at that rate, a 128-bit key could be broken in only 4 billion years. That is, if you had 300 trillion people working on it. Aren't exponential algorithms fun?
Now you can see why the scientific community insists on reproducible experiments. If you can't reproduce it, you can't trust the data. That's how Cold Fusion was debunked. Now only some of the garbage that gets reported as "news" in our mainstream media was half as well checked out.
You're right, that this doesn't show that Linux is faster than Windoz. What's important, however, is that some huge barriers to the adoption of Linux are coming down. There are many situations you can't sell into without a TPC benchmark. And getting one can cost over a million bucks and take several months. What's important is that HP is investing serious time, dollars, and management attention into Linux. We got a good number, and this will make it harder for IT not to take Linux seriously. (Rah, Rah!)
"Anti-Piracy" database/recognizers are being marketed by more than one vendor. Here's Replicheck. I understand this technology will be applied to P2P networks too.
You have to get a grass-roots word-of-mouth going, by starting with influential developers. Give away copies at tradeshows. Go to a user's group meeting, show your product, and give away a lot of copies (check out Software Development Forum if you're in the bay area). Try to get some prominent or way cool developers/products to use your tools.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm no Microsoft apologist, but this does make sense for them. The point is that law enforcement in any country can be pretty clueless on whether a CD is copied or not. This way, when they find a warehouse full of suspicious CD's, they have an easy way to tell if they are actually legit or counterfeit. This sort of thing is *not* designed for customers (who don't know about it) or illegal dupers (who don't care about it).
As an explanation to our non-US observers: It may seem odd to have to list your party affiliation. The main reason for this is to determine who can vote in which "primary" election, where Republicans chose the Republican candidate (Bush), and Democrats chose the Democratic candidate (Kerry), earlier this year. You can also state an "independent" affiliation, in which case you may not vote in the primary election but can vote in (today's) general election. No matter what affiliation you state, you can vote for any candidate (or no candidate) in the general election.
>> someone will lose the password within days. It's happened to me, and I finally had to put a global password in every machine Ummmm.... have you ever heard of a configuration reset button? You definitely didn't "have to" put in a back door. Please let me know the name of your product(s) so I can avoid them.
Here's an article from a UK source today, called Microsoft millions back SCO case. It also highlights Boies' et. al. backing of SCO. Just so there's no confusion about who it is that's scared of Linux.
So SCO is using our (open source community) hard work, while at the same time threatening and extorting us with the legal system. So what can we do about it, other than just complain to each other?
Yes, we can complain to the proper authorities, and we should. Yes, we can support IBM, RedHat, and others who are fighting this scourge. But we as developers and sysadmins can do more.
We need to stick with our principles and what's legal, which rules out any malicious attacks, or subverting our own GPL in any way.
So what can we do? We can stop helping SCO.
We help SCO when support SCO products like SCO Unix and SCO mail. We support those product by creating and distributing Open Source software that works with them. We support those products when we relay mail traffic from or to them. We support those products when we accept web connections from them. So let's just stop doing that! SCO is attacking Linux end-users, so why should we be helping theirs? I propose that we shun SCO and SCO products.
What do you think? How easy would it be to add code to *your* open source software that would prevent it running on SCO Unix? How could you block SCO Mail traffic through your servers? Could you identify SCO Unix clients to your file servers and web servers?
All of this blocking should be accompanied by an explanation: "We decline to process your request because you are running an SCO product. SCO is threatening to sue Linux end-users and has refused to respect the GPL open source license. We recommend you switch to non-SCO free open source software and notify SCO of the reason for your switch."
What do you think? Can we carry off a boycott?
Just to clarify a couple points that most commenters seem to misunderstand.
First, the Audible Magic technology doesn't just look at a set of bits, like a Snort signature. It "fingerprints" the audio itself, based on characteristcs most relevant to the human ear. That means that the same fingerprint will identify an audio track digitized from a radio broadcast as the same one ripped from a CD.
Second, the point of the technology is to help groups that are trying to prevent illegal use of their own property. It's not going to stop people who are trying to break the law. A University is not a common carrier.
-- My 2 bits.
The key is government enforcement (i.e. stiff fines) for spammers. I think the "do not call" list is unnecessary and error prone. I think we just need big penalties for spammers who don't a) abide by current laws to have non-fraudulent "remove me" instructions, or b) use truthful headers. I think those would cut way down on spam without forcing people to sign up for something that *everyone* wants anyway.
And if you want to be on a do-not-call for via Gra, you might still want to get emails about network software tools!
The best science museum I've ever visited is the History of Science museum in Florence, Italy. They have an incredible exhibit of Galileo's telescopes, inclined plane experiments, clocks, and (I kid you not!) his (middle) finger.
As someone who's just downloading the XML Mind editor and about to write an .xsd for my data -- this is great timing! Thanks, Dare.
I also want to gripe a bit about the complexity of XML Schema. DTD has all the restrictions I'd typically want to use (the main thing I want to do is just specify element names, contents, and attributes). The *only* problem with DTD's is that they are totally namespace-challenged!
You can't use combine two DTD's for different namespaces into a combo document. You can't even allow arbitrary other elements in a DTD element declaration -- every element must be declared and local. Even worse, you have to pick and stick with a namespace prefix in your DTD -- defeating the whole point of globally unique namespaces.
What I *really* want is just DTD with a smidge of namespace smarts and the ability to combine DTD's for one document. Anyone want to give it a shot?
The scary thing is how soon everyone *will* have 360 TB of space lying around. Using Moore's law:
Cheapest new Dell hardrive (2002):
80 GB
ln2(360) + ln2(1024) - ln2(80) =
8.5 + 10 - 6.3 = 12.2 doublings.
Moore's law: doubling every 18 months
(for transistors, but we applied to storage)
12.2 * 1.5 = 18.3 years
Therefore, the "record full-frame of every moment of your life on your home PC" is available in 2020, just about in time for Christmas.
Happy shopping!
Thanks for the review! Which do you think takes more time -- moving the Roomba, replacing its batteries, emptying its dirt collector, etc... -- or vacuuming the regular way?
I won't be happy until my 24 fps video t-shirt can go through wash and tumble dry with all the colors as bright as the day it was new. Hurry up guys!
I wonder how Eric would like it if someone "modded" his article to change the conclusion and then posted it on their website?
I actually agree with his point that encouraging a customizing fan club can be a good thing. However, we have to allow IP creators to be able to control what people are allowed to do with their IP, and definitely whether others are allowed to pirate it.
If you don't like a game or gaming platform's mod policy, then vote with your dollars -- don't buy it!
I appreciate the attempt to inform, but it seems to me this falls into the category of "a little bit of knowledge is dangerous". The pages bill themselves as "3 years of law school in a nutshell", as if you'd get a quick overview of relevant law for geeks. However, it is an analysis of one particular court filing, and based on my 15+ years dealing with legal docs and lawyers (as a techie, IASNAL), I didn't find a scrap of it relevant to software licensing, employment contracts, stock option agreements, or confidentiality agreements. You may find it entertaining, but it's not going to help you deal with the legal issues that you come across in the real world.
Supposedly consumers will be allowed to circumvent copy protection for fair use. Great! But what about the programmers? Does each consumer have to write their own software cracker? Will creating a decoder or unlocker designed for fair use still get you thrown in jail?
And they still need more help... The "Security Contract" is still open for bidding. It includes video surveillance equipment and a 400 Gig DVR. Anyone interested?
- Distributed systems are fundamentally hard
- Design is fundamentally hard
- Difficulty organizing large teams
- Use of bad or ad-hoc development processes
- Conflicts between developer and management objectives
My take is that for any easy problem, the software is written once, standardized, and doesn't need to be changed. You only need to write new software to deal with the problems or environments you didn't anticipate before, which is inherently unpredictable.Wow, working at that rate, a 128-bit key could be broken in only 4 billion years. That is, if you had 300 trillion people working on it. Aren't exponential algorithms fun?
Now you can see why the scientific community insists on reproducible experiments. If you can't reproduce it, you can't trust the data. That's how Cold Fusion was debunked. Now only some of the garbage that gets reported as "news" in our mainstream media was half as well checked out.
1) Always get as much memory as you can afford.
2) A year or two from now, it won't seem like enough.
3) Ummmm.... I forgot. See my point?
You're right, that this doesn't show that Linux is faster than Windoz. What's important, however, is that some huge barriers to the adoption of Linux are coming down. There are many situations you can't sell into without a TPC benchmark. And getting one can cost over a million bucks and take several months. What's important is that HP is investing serious time, dollars, and management attention into Linux. We got a good number, and this will make it harder for IT not to take Linux seriously. (Rah, Rah!)
"Anti-Piracy" database/recognizers are being marketed by more than one vendor. Here's Replicheck. I understand this technology will be applied to P2P networks too.
You have to get a grass-roots word-of-mouth going, by starting with influential developers. Give away copies at tradeshows. Go to a user's group meeting, show your product, and give away a lot of copies (check out Software Development Forum if you're in the bay area). Try to get some prominent or way cool developers/products to use your tools.