"...if I shot you in a public place you cant do crap about it...", you are correct on this point. In a case that involved cameras at traffic lights, a person who ran a red light sued because they thought their expectation of privacy was violated when the traffic camera snapped their photo. The courts ruled that a person in a car on a public street has no expectation of privacy.
When the OP wrote, "You can sue the crap out of someone for using your image/likeness...for a commercial purpose.", what they meant is that you cannot take a photo of a person in a public place and then use that person's likeness/image to sell products such as coffee, t-shirts, toilet paper, cosmetic surgery, boxes of cereal, calendars, food products, etc.
...I consider ridiculous the argument that the GPL somehow restricts freedom...
For embedded hardware developers (i.e. cellphones, PDA's, cable boxes, satellite boxes, routers, entertainment consoles, copiers) it is a huge issue. If you have to write a hack to the GPL'd Linux kernel to get it to work with your hardware, all your competitors have to do is demand you comply with the GPL and give them the source code, which will include the hacks your company made and paid for. Your competitors can then clone your hardware device without having to invest in the time and very expensive R&D that your company did.
Why isn't half (at least) of the current administration in jail?...
In case you missed it, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' aide, Monica Gooding, instituted a screening policy where only ideologically compatible people were hired at the Dept. of Justice. According to DOJ hiring rules, this is a violation of their rules. Other Gonzales aides also fingered and fired those of whom were ideologically independent (i.e. not loyal Bushies). With that in mind, there really is no one left at the DOJ to ensure the current administration abides by the letter and spirit of the law.
...largest collection of hacking and spamming sites will now have protection against people finding out who even owns the domains...
I do believe that is the goal. It's the Russian embrace of western capitalism. The Russians are looking to attract (and protect) the type of web site entrepreneurs who would be in violation of the stricter U.S. laws. Periodically you will see news items where U.S. authorities crack down on web site operators whose servers are hosted in Russia but the persons behind the operations reside in the United States.
"...See, we'd give them 2 chances - they got reported for spamming we'd give them a call and tell them what going on and ask them nicely to please fix it. if its a suspected botnet, get a pc tech..."
You're better than Pacific Bell (now AT&T) in California. One of their residential customers in Los Angeles had their computer hijacked by a botnet. I called PacBell's DSL customer service and tried to give them the IP address of the infected machine. Their response? PacBell: "Nothing we can do about it. Try blocking them on your end."
Since their residential customer is on DHCP, I have to periodically reblock the offending hijacked computer when people complain about the level of spam getting through. This single hijacked computer accounts for about 1/3 to 1/2 of the spam we receive.
"...Google does not lose the safe harbor by making money off of YouTube; if they did, the DMCA safe harbor would be vitiated. The benefit has to be _directly_ attributable to the infringing activity; an indirect benefit like "more people come to the site, and thus see the ads, thus raising revenue" does not qualify..."
Based upon your logic, I can copy a bunch of DVDs I rent from Netflix or get from a television broadcast. Put them on my website. Insert a bunch of advertising. Since I am not selling the material that I copied, I am not in violation of the DMCA because I am making money off of advertising and not the pirated material itself. Using your same logic, radio stations should stop paying royalties to musicians because radio stations make money by selling advertising on their station. The same rule would apply to television, cable and satellite stations as well.
The bottom line is Youtube is acting as a broadcaster and distributor of material.
Since when is the "Recording Industry Association of America" a company? Last time I checked, it was a trade group, and the record companies themselves are members of this group.
Most of the dorks and geeks that hate the RIAA are to stupid to understand this subtle point. The dweebs that voted the RIAA worst company are also the same group of people who would vote BSA (Business Software Alliance), IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and ISO (International Organization for Standardization) as terrible "companies" as well.
"...There's certainly no plans to open-source the IDE or the VFP engine..."
Microsoft released their free VFP OLEDB driver last year. It pretty much allows all the.NET, VB, Delphi, VC++, etc. developers to write apps that talk to legacy FP/VFP systems without being tied to the VFP IDE or having to have VFP installed. The VFP OLEDB driver seems to be a huge improvement over the older VFP ODBC driver and (for a Microsoft product) has a rather small footprint.
Fair enough, from your link "The System p5 570 servers running AIX feature IBM's POWER5 processors, which deliver 64-bit computing power...The system is designed to scale with both UNIX and Linux enterprise applications on demand. Dow Jones Electronic Publishing and an extensive IBM team worked closely to enhance Dow Jones application performance. "
Since IBM is one of the biggest boosters of Java and Java application servers, might we not infer that this is a hiccup in IBM's Java application servers (aka IBM WebSphere)?
"If there's one thing the Windows OS team is good at, it's backwards compatibility. I recently heard that a Win32 app I wrote 10 years ago for NT 3.51 still works on Vista. The SQL Server team must have fucked up something big for their code to fail on Vista..."
If you use all the standard documented Win, Win32, ODBC, MDAC, multimedia, etc. API calls, your app should run forever.
In the, literally, thousands of DLL's that Microsoft provides for its many API's, there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of officially undocumented function calls which are only known internally at Microsoft (for competitive advantage reasons). Odds are is that the SQL Server Express team used some of these undocumented API function calls that had been deprecated (or slightly modified) by the Operating System team in Vista since Vista was allegedly rewritten from scratch. SP2 of SQL Server Express will reintroduce the deprecated or altered function call(s). This would be a variation of Window's DLL hell versioning.
As the old saying goes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Junking Cobol at financial institutions would be akin to nuclear facilities junking Fortran. The thought of a nuclear power plant junking Fortran for VB/C# in.NET running on a Microsoft platform should cause nearby property values to plunge like a rock.
"Its $44.3 billion in annual sales are puttering along at an 11% growth pace"
This just goes to show you why tech writers are tech writers and not businessmen. I am sure Warren Buffett would be more than satisfied if all of his investments via Berkshire Hathaway could grow at 11% per annum. Clearly the author of the original article hasn't noticed but the interest rates on savings, money market and certificates of deposit have been in the 1% to 4% range for about five years now. 11% growth would be very nice for 99.999% of the people out there.
Microsoft will be coming up with a brand new language for IIS and web developers, it will be called PHP# Dot Net. PHP# Dot Net will be bundled in the next Visual Studio upgrade. It's part of Microsoft's strategy to innovate.
...And I always thought that 90% of the web was made up of porn and spam......And spyware, adware, pop-up advertising, embedded flash advertising but porn is clearly the people's choice for the #1 spot.:)
"...Lyons bashes Stallman, GPL, Linux, free software, open source etc. every chance he gets...He came to the article with an axe to grind...."
Interestingly enough, I've never read anything where Daniel Lyons bashes the BSD's or the BSD license. From what I have seen, it would seem that Stallman and GPLv3 are the ones with axes to grind.
Home User: No real downside since most home users surf the internet, send e-mail, do a little word processing, play some MP3's. Pretty basic stuff, easily covered by a Mac.
Gamer: Lots of cons, no real pros. Are there any games for a Mac that do not suck?
Business User: Many of the industry specific vertical apps are written for a baseline of Win2K. Some of these vertical apps *MAY* run on Win98 but many of them use very specific features that are tied very closely to the WinNT/2K kernels. Almost none of them, unless they are browser based and standards compliant, work with a Mac. Then again, the server side of many of these vertical apps require that you run them on a Win2k/XP/2k3 system running IIS.
Ultimately, AJAX is nothing more than spagetti Javascript and HTML.
As much as I truly despise Macromedia Flash, the more Flash develops the more Flash makes sense for the web, and especially media rich Web 2.0. AJAX is like putting a tiny bandage on a gaping wound the size of a grapefruit. I think Flash is an abomination but the typical end user (and most MacInfags) sure loves the stuff. By the time Macromedia Flash v10.0 rolls out, AJAX will be relegated to the dustbin of technological history, much like Java applets, while Flash will be alive and kicking, and making my 2ghz CPU feel like a P2 running at 200mhz while sucking up all my network bandwidth.
"To be honest the purchase has baffeled me as well. $1,65bn just doesnt seem worth it..."
A key point to remember is that the $1.6 billion buyout is in Google stocks only. There is no cash being exchanged. If Google feels that their stocks are badly overvalued, hypothetically by 300%, and that their stock prices are peaking then this makes sense. If, by the end of 2007, Google's share prices tumble to a more reasonable $140/share, then the Youtube purchase is a more reasonable $550 million purchase (about the same as what Viacom paid for Myspace).
Ultimately, Google is paying for web traffic (i.e. advertising eyeballs), since a number of other video sites do have similar or better technology than Youtube. Then again, Google recently paid Viacom $900 million for the rights to place ads on Myspace.com for 3 years.
"Not to mention his mathematics are suspect: 3.99 is 133 times 0.03, not 100..."
Absolutely correct. When the guy thinks MySpace, which is a money LOSER, is worth $20B, you know that they guy knows nothing about math, nor business. That guy reminds me alot of the Web I days when many execs thought that eyeballs (i.e. web traffic) was the only thing that mattered and generating revenue was irrelevant.
"I've had several 120 and 160 GB drives without a problem."
The most reliable IDE drives I've got are the 80GB and 120GB drives that spin at slower speeds. I've got a bunch of dead 7200rpm 80GB IDEs but all the 5400rpm (80GB, 120GB, 160GB) drives are alive and kicking.
"...Seeing as they use off the shelf wireless chipsets, ethernet controllers, and such, there's absolutely nothing to stop a competitor from using the source code they would have to release under the GPL to manufacture a cheaper alternative that is functionally identical..."
If I was a maker of ATM machines, PDAs, embedded devices, etc, this is what my concern with GPL would be. I certainly would not want to sink millions of dollars into R&D on a product only to have a competitor cobble together a clone by benefitting from my company's R&D dollars.
Now, if GPL had some sort of time delay on requiring the release of code for use in a commercial product, hypothetically 30 months, then a manufacturer would have almost three years before a competitor can release a clone your product. Until GPL incorporates some sort of time delay for compliance, I suspect the BSD license and the MIT license are more comforting alternatives.
"if the GPL is valid and a company has released a product contaminated with GPL code, shouldn't they have to release the source rather than simply refraining from the practise?"
This is the viral nature of GPL. I suspect from now on, D-Link will move over to one of the BSD's, probably FreeBSD. The viral aspect of GPL is what I suspect keeps many companies from going full Linux. At least when you make a deal with the Devil, i.e. Microsoft, and MS allows you to modify one of their Windoze kernels for a hardware device, you have the comfort of knowing that your competitors will not use the GPL to try and get their grubby little fingers on the code that you paid huge sums of money to your developers for free.
YouTube's been continuing to grow at a steady rate all year, so it's probably approaching $1.5M/month.
Then factor in the technical staff, storage costs, hardware, servers, etc., and Youtube could easily be burning through $5 million cash per month. Factor in possible litigation for copyright violations and the number skyrockets. Yahoo, Google and (just a few days ago) Microsoft have their own variations on the video sharing service. I wouldn't be surprised if Flickr and Webshots are not working on a similar service. Then again, it seems that MySpace just did.
The $1.5 billion asking price is a search for a sucker, uhhh, I mean "investor" to bail Youtube out since Youtube is hemmoraging money at an incredible rate and hasn't figured out how to make money off of their service.
"No, in most minds the life of a computer is "until it breaks". WHy should someone who's current computer does what they need replace a working one?..."
Very true. Most of my office (real estate management) runs on Win98, only one 2k machine and only one XP machine (both of which replaced machines which had motherboards that failed).
I suspect the 4% Win98/ME usage figure is based on polling Fortune 500 companies and not the small and medium sized companies which are the heart of the economy.
"spammers typically have someone else's valid addresses in the "From:" field, and then you end up spamming that someone else with the bounce message."
Let us not forget the "Return-Path:" either. We've gotten a bunch of bounceback/undeliverable return messages and when I've looked at the headers, it's a spammer putting something like: "Return-Path: info@our-domain" or "Return-Path: admin@our-domain" in conjunction with someone's pilfered e-mail address from a zombied machine.
Slashdot Mirror
"...if I shot you in a public place you cant do crap about it..." , you are correct on this point. In a case that involved cameras at traffic lights, a person who ran a red light sued because they thought their expectation of privacy was violated when the traffic camera snapped their photo. The courts ruled that a person in a car on a public street has no expectation of privacy.
When the OP wrote, "You can sue the crap out of someone for using your image/likeness...for a commercial purpose." , what they meant is that you cannot take a photo of a person in a public place and then use that person's likeness/image to sell products such as coffee, t-shirts, toilet paper, cosmetic surgery, boxes of cereal, calendars, food products, etc.
For embedded hardware developers (i.e. cellphones, PDA's, cable boxes, satellite boxes, routers, entertainment consoles, copiers) it is a huge issue. If you have to write a hack to the GPL'd Linux kernel to get it to work with your hardware, all your competitors have to do is demand you comply with the GPL and give them the source code, which will include the hacks your company made and paid for. Your competitors can then clone your hardware device without having to invest in the time and very expensive R&D that your company did.
Why isn't half (at least) of the current administration in jail?...
In case you missed it, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' aide, Monica Gooding, instituted a screening policy where only ideologically compatible people were hired at the Dept. of Justice. According to DOJ hiring rules, this is a violation of their rules. Other Gonzales aides also fingered and fired those of whom were ideologically independent (i.e. not loyal Bushies). With that in mind, there really is no one left at the DOJ to ensure the current administration abides by the letter and spirit of the law.
I do believe that is the goal. It's the Russian embrace of western capitalism. The Russians are looking to attract (and protect) the type of web site entrepreneurs who would be in violation of the stricter U.S. laws. Periodically you will see news items where U.S. authorities crack down on web site operators whose servers are hosted in Russia but the persons behind the operations reside in the United States.
"...See, we'd give them 2 chances - they got reported for spamming we'd give them a call and tell them
what going on and ask them nicely to please fix it. if its a suspected botnet, get a pc tech..."
You're better than Pacific Bell (now AT&T) in California. One of their residential customers in Los Angeles had their computer hijacked by a botnet. I called PacBell's DSL customer service and tried to give them the IP address of the infected machine. Their response? PacBell: "Nothing we can do about it. Try blocking them on your end."
Since their residential customer is on DHCP, I have to periodically reblock the offending hijacked computer when people complain about the level of spam getting through. This single hijacked computer accounts for about 1/3 to 1/2 of the spam we receive.
"...Google does not lose the safe harbor by making money off of YouTube; if they did, the DMCA safe harbor would be vitiated. The benefit has to be _directly_ attributable to the infringing activity; an indirect benefit like "more people come to the site, and thus see the ads, thus raising revenue" does not qualify..."
Based upon your logic, I can copy a bunch of DVDs I rent from Netflix or get from a television broadcast. Put them on my website. Insert a bunch of advertising. Since I am not selling the material that I copied, I am not in violation of the DMCA because I am making money off of advertising and not the pirated material itself. Using your same logic, radio stations should stop paying royalties to musicians because radio stations make money by selling advertising on their station. The same rule would apply to television, cable and satellite stations as well.
The bottom line is Youtube is acting as a broadcaster and distributor of material.
Since when is the "Recording Industry Association of America" a company?
Last time I checked, it was a trade group, and the record companies themselves are members of this group.
Most of the dorks and geeks that hate the RIAA are to stupid to understand this subtle point. The dweebs that voted the RIAA worst company are also the same group of people who would vote BSA (Business Software Alliance), IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and ISO (International Organization for Standardization) as terrible "companies" as well.
"...There's certainly no plans to open-source the IDE or the VFP engine..."
.NET, VB, Delphi, VC++, etc. developers to write apps that talk to legacy FP/VFP systems without being tied to the VFP IDE or having to have VFP installed. The VFP OLEDB driver seems to be a huge improvement over the older VFP ODBC driver and (for a Microsoft product) has a rather small footprint.
Microsoft released their free VFP OLEDB driver last year. It pretty much allows all the
Fair enough, from your link "The System p5 570 servers running AIX feature IBM's POWER5 processors, which deliver 64-bit computing power...The system is designed to scale with both UNIX and Linux enterprise applications on demand. Dow Jones Electronic Publishing and an extensive IBM team worked closely to enhance Dow Jones application performance. "
Since IBM is one of the biggest boosters of Java and Java application servers, might we not infer that this is a hiccup in IBM's Java application servers (aka IBM WebSphere)?
"If there's one thing the Windows OS team is good at, it's backwards compatibility. I recently heard that a Win32 app I wrote 10 years ago for NT 3.51 still works on Vista. The SQL Server team must have fucked up something big for their code to fail on Vista..."
If you use all the standard documented Win, Win32, ODBC, MDAC, multimedia, etc. API calls, your app should run forever.
In the, literally, thousands of DLL's that Microsoft provides for its many API's, there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of officially undocumented function calls which are only known internally at Microsoft (for competitive advantage reasons). Odds are is that the SQL Server Express team used some of these undocumented API function calls that had been deprecated (or slightly modified) by the Operating System team in Vista since Vista was allegedly rewritten from scratch. SP2 of SQL Server Express will reintroduce the deprecated or altered function call(s). This would be a variation of Window's DLL hell versioning.
"...maintain their legacy stuff or migrate it."
.NET running on a Microsoft platform should cause nearby property values to plunge like a rock.
As the old saying goes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Junking Cobol at financial institutions would be akin to nuclear facilities junking Fortran. The thought of a nuclear power plant junking Fortran for VB/C# in
"Its $44.3 billion in annual sales are puttering along at an 11% growth pace"
This just goes to show you why tech writers are tech writers and not businessmen. I am sure Warren Buffett would be more than satisfied if all of his investments via Berkshire Hathaway could grow at 11% per annum. Clearly the author of the original article hasn't noticed but the interest rates on savings, money market and certificates of deposit have been in the 1% to 4% range for about five years now. 11% growth would be very nice for 99.999% of the people out there.
Microsoft will be coming up with a brand new language for IIS and web developers, it will be called PHP# Dot Net. PHP# Dot Net will be bundled in the next Visual Studio upgrade. It's part of Microsoft's strategy to innovate.
"...Lyons bashes Stallman, GPL, Linux, free software, open source etc. every chance he gets...He came to the article with an axe to grind...."
Interestingly enough, I've never read anything where Daniel Lyons bashes the BSD's or the BSD license. From what I have seen, it would seem that Stallman and GPLv3 are the ones with axes to grind.
Home User: No real downside since most home users surf the internet, send e-mail, do a little word processing, play some MP3's. Pretty basic stuff, easily covered by a Mac.
Gamer: Lots of cons, no real pros. Are there any games for a Mac that do not suck?
Business User: Many of the industry specific vertical apps are written for a baseline of Win2K. Some of these vertical apps *MAY* run on Win98 but many of them use very specific features that are tied very closely to the WinNT/2K kernels. Almost none of them, unless they are browser based and standards compliant, work with a Mac. Then again, the server side of many of these vertical apps require that you run them on a Win2k/XP/2k3 system running IIS.
Ultimately, AJAX is nothing more than spagetti Javascript and HTML.
As much as I truly despise Macromedia Flash, the more Flash develops the more Flash makes sense for the web, and especially media rich Web 2.0. AJAX is like putting a tiny bandage on a gaping wound the size of a grapefruit. I think Flash is an abomination but the typical end user (and most MacInfags) sure loves the stuff. By the time Macromedia Flash v10.0 rolls out, AJAX will be relegated to the dustbin of technological history, much like Java applets, while Flash will be alive and kicking, and making my 2ghz CPU feel like a P2 running at 200mhz while sucking up all my network bandwidth.
"To be honest the purchase has baffeled me as well. $1,65bn just doesnt seem worth it..."
A key point to remember is that the $1.6 billion buyout is in Google stocks only. There is no cash being exchanged. If Google feels that their stocks are badly overvalued, hypothetically by 300%, and that their stock prices are peaking then this makes sense. If, by the end of 2007, Google's share prices tumble to a more reasonable $140/share, then the Youtube purchase is a more reasonable $550 million purchase (about the same as what Viacom paid for Myspace).
Ultimately, Google is paying for web traffic (i.e. advertising eyeballs), since a number of other video sites do have similar or better technology than Youtube. Then again, Google recently paid Viacom $900 million for the rights to place ads on Myspace.com for 3 years.
"Not to mention his mathematics are suspect: 3.99 is 133 times 0.03, not 100..."
Absolutely correct. When the guy thinks MySpace, which is a money LOSER, is worth $20B, you know that they guy knows nothing about math, nor business. That guy reminds me alot of the Web I days when many execs thought that eyeballs (i.e. web traffic) was the only thing that mattered and generating revenue was irrelevant.
"I've had several 120 and 160 GB drives without a problem."
The most reliable IDE drives I've got are the 80GB and 120GB drives that spin at slower speeds. I've got a bunch of dead 7200rpm 80GB IDEs but all the 5400rpm (80GB, 120GB, 160GB) drives are alive and kicking.
"...Seeing as they use off the shelf wireless chipsets, ethernet controllers, and such, there's absolutely nothing to stop a competitor from using the source code they would have to release under the GPL to manufacture a cheaper alternative that is functionally identical..."
If I was a maker of ATM machines, PDAs, embedded devices, etc, this is what my concern with GPL would be. I certainly would not want to sink millions of dollars into R&D on a product only to have a competitor cobble together a clone by benefitting from my company's R&D dollars.
Now, if GPL had some sort of time delay on requiring the release of code for use in a commercial product, hypothetically 30 months, then a manufacturer would have almost three years before a competitor can release a clone your product. Until GPL incorporates some sort of time delay for compliance, I suspect the BSD license and the MIT license are more comforting alternatives.
"if the GPL is valid and a company has released a product contaminated with GPL code, shouldn't they have to release the source rather than simply refraining from the practise?"
This is the viral nature of GPL. I suspect from now on, D-Link will move over to one of the BSD's, probably FreeBSD. The viral aspect of GPL is what I suspect keeps many companies from going full Linux. At least when you make a deal with the Devil, i.e. Microsoft, and MS allows you to modify one of their Windoze kernels for a hardware device, you have the comfort of knowing that your competitors will not use the GPL to try and get their grubby little fingers on the code that you paid huge sums of money to your developers for free.
YouTube's been continuing to grow at a steady rate all year, so it's probably approaching $1.5M/month.
Then factor in the technical staff, storage costs, hardware, servers, etc., and Youtube could easily be burning through $5 million cash per month. Factor in possible litigation for copyright violations and the number skyrockets. Yahoo, Google and (just a few days ago) Microsoft have their own variations on the video sharing service. I wouldn't be surprised if Flickr and Webshots are not working on a similar service. Then again, it seems that MySpace just did.
The $1.5 billion asking price is a search for a sucker, uhhh, I mean "investor" to bail Youtube out since Youtube is hemmoraging money at an incredible rate and hasn't figured out how to make money off of their service.
"No, in most minds the life of a computer is "until it breaks". WHy should someone who's current computer does what they need replace a working one?..."
Very true. Most of my office (real estate management) runs on Win98, only one 2k machine and only one XP machine (both of which replaced machines which had motherboards that failed).
I suspect the 4% Win98/ME usage figure is based on polling Fortune 500 companies and not the small and medium sized companies which are the heart of the economy.
"spammers typically have someone else's valid addresses in the "From:" field, and then you end up spamming that someone else with the bounce message."
Let us not forget the "Return-Path:" either. We've gotten a bunch of bounceback/undeliverable return messages and when I've looked at the headers, it's a spammer putting something like: "Return-Path: info@our-domain" or "Return-Path: admin@our-domain" in conjunction with someone's pilfered e-mail address from a zombied machine.