If the infringement is willful, which the XVID case almost certainly is, the infringer can be liable for up to $100,000 in statutory damages per infringement even if there are no actual damages. That actually happened to Keith Henson, who got stuck with $75K of statutory damages for posting a couple of pages of Scientology crap on a newsgroup. This XVID thing on the other hand is what statutory damages were intended and make sense for.
So suing Sigma Designs is not necessarily a futile effort, though of course it will take some resources and I don't know if it will happen.
As for me, when I use the GPL on something interesting, I generally assign it to the FSF, so the FSF can then take action if necessary against infringers.
That's the PROBLEM. Starbucks and the free guys are using the same frequency. You can't stomp out one without stomping out the other. If they were using separate frequencies so you could stomp out just Starbucks, there wouldn't be a problem.
So again, my question: what is so fundamentally different between DVD's and CD's that I can space-shift one legally, but not the other?
The difference is you can copy CD's because of the Home Audio Recording Act of 1990(iirc), which permits copying recorded audio for personal use. The personal use exemption in the HRAA was a deal that the RIAA agreed to in exchange for getting a tax passed on the sale of blank DAT tape, and nowadays "music capable" CD-R media. But the exemption is just for audio, not video. Without the HRAA, you have only whatever fair use protection the courts might give you for using copyrighted material, and Congress, prodded by lobbyists, are trying to take away as much of that as they can.
NY only bans handheld cellphones--you're still allowed to use a handsfree one. And that misses the point. Handsfree helps only part of the issue. The other part is driver distraction due to pseudo-big-shot executives holding complex business meetings on the cell phone while driving in traffic. They don't need a handsfree phone. They need a brainfree car, like a real big shot uses.
That's right, wanna-be's. If you think you're such a big shot as to need to do business in your car, fine, do what a real big shot does. Hire a fscking driver to drive the car while you sit in the back and make all the phone calls you want. The megacorp where I formerly worked actually provided chauffeured company limosines for all managers starting at the executive director level (ED was one level below VP, so ED's were generally in charge of a few hundred people). They were wise to do that.
At the time I thought it was a ridiculous perk to make the mucky-mucks feel important. Looking back, I understand it a lot better. The ED types really did have to take 7am conference calls while en route to work, entertain visitors on the way to and from the airport, etc. The limos really let the company get more work out of the ED's and probably saved a bunch of road accidents. When the company saw that its execs needed to take meetings in the car, they did it the right way and there was nothing pretentious about it. It's the pseudo-execs who insist on endangering traffic because they're not important enough to rate getting a car with a driver who are pretentious. If your time isn't so valuable that it's worth your company's while to supply you with a driver, then you can afford to pull over or stay in the office when you make your phone calls.
Note, I don't advocate a total ban on using the phone while driving, since a short call to let someone know where you are doesn't suck your mind away from the road. I'd get rid of the handsfree/non-handsfree distinction and instead make it a violation for a driver to be on the phone more than 2 minutes continuously while the car is moving. An accident where cell tower records show the driver was on the phone more than 2 minutes should be treated similarly to DWI, since accident statistics show cell phone use and drinking are comparably dangerous.
I'm a music pirate in China with no computer and no internet connection, but I do have a telephone and an answering machine.
I put a Metallica song on my outgoing message tape, so anyone who calls my number hears the song.
I publish my phone number all over the world.
The RIAA for some reason can't locate me through the Chinese phone company, so they sue to make US phone carriers block calls to my number.
At no point in any of this are computers or the internet involved.
Would they (the RIAA) get anywhere with that lawsuit? I really don't know. But if there's a reasonable answer, I'd hope the answer for the current Internet situation is the same answer.
They should be suing the John Doe site owner and subpoena'ing the advertisers, if they're really trying to find the site owners. Really though, what they're up to is finding a roundabout way to seize control of human to human communication by saying they decide what traffic telecoms and ISP's can transfer.
Surprisingly it's not slashdotted--there must be big pipes behind it. I didn't try loading any mp3's.
Just viewing the site launched endless popup ad windows some of which resized themselves to fill the whole screen, popped more windows when you closed the old ones, etc.
Interestingly, the actual mp3's come from an entirely different set of domains, that don't appear related to the gateway site and probably aren't hosted in China. The site being sued over is more like a portal (link farm) than an actual mp3 host. It has tons of "legitimate" advertising including audio devices, Visa cards, etc. But I couldn't stand looking at it long, because of all the damn popups.
Anyway, this isn't some warez kiddie's server, it's a highly commercial site, and it astounds me if RIAA is really having trouble finding its owners (asking its advertisers where they send their checks is an obvious approach).
It's kind of late to add this but I remember in the 80's there was an amplifier called Ampzilla (connoting its high power) made by the Great American Sound Company. IIRC, it had a dinosaur-like logo sort of like the Mozilla logo. It would surprise me if Ampzilla wasn't registered as a trademark.
No matter what OS Dell ships with a machine, at least some buyers are going to install it and try to use it and call Dell support if they have a problem. So Dell is going to have to include some OS support costs in the price of machines they ship with FreeDOS or Linux or anything else. They can't refuse to support the OS. That may work for a white-box vendor but not for a slick label like Dell. If people buy a Dell product they expect support for whatever it comes with.
That's why it's a win for Dell to be able to ship machines with no OS at all. They can't be expected to handle software support calls for machines that didn't come with any software whatsoever. So they can charge less for a no-OS machine than they can for a FreeDOS machine.
I may blow some/. karma by saying this, but that Atlantic article is one of the best pieces I've seen linked from/. in quite a while. It has nothing to do with tech or software and can't really be called news for nerds, but it's an eye-opener about how businesses manipulate public perception out there in the real world. If you skipped the article and went straight to the comments like I did, it's worth going back to read the article.
If they have no resale value, they you could buy a used diamond very cheaply and get a jeweler to put it in a new setting for you, and that would kill the market for new diamonds. They don't wear out, of course. "Diamonds are forever" and all that.
I agree with most of your other points about the disgusting practices used to produce diamonds and market them.
A lot of the anti-IT backlash this thread is about is the idea that the promised productivity gains of all those computer upgrades aren't real. If someone has a 3 year old computer, giving them a new one won't necessarily make them more productive. In some situations it will, of course, but for the typical office worker or even programmer, the 3 year old box is fine.
I'm a programmer with a 3 year old computer. I'm not planning to upgrade soon. I am thinking of buying a new chair (probably not an Aeron). I think a better chair is likely to improve my programming more than a new computer would (I'm typing this with horrible posture due to my crappy chair).
I'm not saying you're full of it about the productivity gains since you didn't give enough specifics to find anything right or wrong with. I'd like it a lot if you posted more details. The exact nature of the upgrades and productivity gains are squarely on topic for this thread.
It seemed to me that NeWS was a good design--it added the obvious stuff to PostScript to use in a window system. It didn't take off because its implentation stunk and it wasn't free. But using Potsscript as the format seemed just fine. Any prob?
I know that at least part of the design goal of GhostScript was to be a basis for replacing NeWS or Display PostScript, though people settled on X instead. Why reinvent the wheel now though? If you want a PostScript-like X extension, why not use GhostScript?
I'd be more precise about that. Apps in GNOME or KDE have reasonable integration interfaces that attempt the same kinds of things that Automation does. They just don't use COM and don't interoperate with MS programs at that level. Maybe it would be good for the Windows industry if competing Windows vendors like Word Perfect supported the same COM interfaces as MS Word. So yeah, I can see it as a missing feature of
MS Office competitors that gets ignored more than it should.
Of course as a free software user I don't care much about the Windows industry. I see some value in being able to deal with.doc files that people send me, but not much to being able to actually connect to a running instance of Word. So from my point of view, if I can connect to Gnumeric with CORBA and do the same stuff I can do with Excel through COM, then the OSS world has done an equally good job of letting me integrate the apps.
And even if they haven't done as good a job, they're working at it, and I don't think they consider it a low priority. (There is this sad situation where KDE's DCOP and Gnome's CORBA don't interoperate, that represents a fork in the OSS world that wouldn't have happened with Microsoft, but maybe it will be resolved someday).
In fact there are quite a few companies, like Covalent, who write useful patches for Apache, BSD, etc. and hold them back (except for their paying customers) because of the non-GPL license. Under the GPL they couldn't do that and at least some of the time we'd get more free software (lots of GCC ports were done by companies that would have liked to make them proprietary, but released them for free completely because of the GPL). BSD was around earlier than Linux but Linux overtook it in popularity, IMO at least partly because of the GPL.
As for me,
I've made a few small bugfixes to Apache and sent them in, since I'd done them already anyway. I wrote a larger extension for Apache because someone hired me to do it, but I wouldn't have done it for free. If Apache was GPL'd, I might have done it for free.
That's sort of a plausible security-convenience tradeoff, deciding not to validate the certs means you just want confidentiality and aren't worried about active MITM attacks. The convenience is you can browse sites with selfsigned certs without getting obnoxious cert dialogs. The SSL just gives you confidentiality, not authentication. It's maybe a little bit foolhardy, but at least you can imagine somebody deciding to do it that way even if you don't agree with it.
Going to the trouble of validating the certs but then not checking the CA attribute bits, like MSIE does, is just stupid.
According to the article, Free Radical paid for the code and then GPL'd it. It doesn't say how much they paid so I don't know whether it was a pittance. The GPL'ing does not appear to have been done as an act of charity. Rather, it looks like they want the Internet to be their unpaid porting, QA, and feature-addition department. The program will be dual licensed which means there will probably be proprietary versions, possibly including contributions from those same unpaid programmers. I'm not terribly thrilled with that kind of arrangement.
Mozilla is licensed sort of similarly (the MPL gives Netscape special rights to the code) and it's not attracting so many volunteers either. I'm not real surprised. While the letter of the GPL doesn't prevent dual licensing, it's not really in the GPL spirit, which is that the original author of a piece of code doesn't have special rights that others don't have.
If I add features to an FSF GPL'd program, I'm doing volunteer work for the free software community and it makes me happy. If I add features to a BSD-licensed program, I become an unpaid employee of anyone who feels like forking the code--I don't find that so attractive. If I add features to Gobe Office, I possibly become an unpaid employee of just one company, Free Radical. Once again, life's too short for that.
I'm not a total free software zealot and I am willing to work on proprietary code. But when I do that, I expect to get paid, just as the vendor expects to get paid. So I'm not terribly impressed by these commercial dual licensed semi-GPL projects.
(Man, topic drift inside a single post! Forgive me.)
Automation only makes sense if you're trying to do a total clone of Word. (Note to confused readers, of which there appear to be a few: "Automation" refers to the OLE/COM interface supplied by Word and other MS programs, that let you script the application from other applications, embed live Excel spreadsheets in your Word documents, etc. It has nothing to do with "office automation").
Some of the free word processing programs including Kword have their own Automation-like interface, but not using COM. Those allow scripting under Linux using CORBA or DCOP or whatever, but probably doesn't help your vertical app under Windows.
Based on my own goals of using a computer with 100% free software, I don't see much point in precisely emulating Word's Automation interface, since I don't want to run Windows or anyone's proprietary COM-dependent app. However, if the app simply launches Word and handles a few simple operations, it might be possible to put some COM wrapper around KWord that turns the COM calls into appropriate DCOP calls. If you really want something like that, I know people who might be able to do it for you, though not for free. However, if you only need a minimal interface to support your vertical app, it might be pretty simple to implement. It would certainly cost more than a single copy of Word, but might be worth it if you want to run it on 10's or 100's of machines.
including the Adagio and Rondo for Glass Harmonica, Flute, Oboe, Viola & Cello in C minor, K. 617,
and the Adagio for Glass Harmonica/Keyboard in C major, K. 356.
Both these pieces are on this disc. I think there might be one or two others as well.
I don't remember any Beethoven compositions for glass harmonica but am not at all sure there weren't any. Glass Harmonica was very popular for a while. More recently composers including possibly Stravinsky and Hindemith (from vague memory, don't hold me to that) have composed for it as well.
Dijkstra's passing is of course a great loss, like the closing of an era in CS. But even with the deepest respect for his memory, I can't resist posting this old classic (from Cornell University in the early 80's):
"You are old, Father Edsger," the young man said,
"All your papers these days look the same;
Those EWD's would be better unread --
Do these facts never fill you with shame?"
"In my youth," Father Edsger replied to his son,
"I wrote wonderful papers galore;
But the great reputation I found that I'd won,
Made it pointless to think any more."
"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And make errors few people could bear;
You complain about everyone's English but yours --
Do you really think this is quite fair?"
"I make lots of mistakes," Father Edsger declared,
"But my stature these days is so great
That no critic can hurt me -- I've got them all scared,
And to stop me it's now far too late."
"You are old," said the youth, "and your programs don't run,
And there isn't one language you like;
Yet of useful suggestions for help you have none --
Have you thought about taking a hike?"
"Since I never write programs," his father replied,
"Every language looks equally bad;
Yet the people keep paying to read all my books
And don't realize that they've been had."
"You are old," said the youth, "and I'm told by my peers
That your lectures bore people to death.
Yet you talk at one hundred conventions per year --
Don't you think that you should save your breath?"
"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father. "Don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!"
Just swap cards with your friends once in a while. That happens at cypherpunk meetings. Everyone throws their card in a hat, then the cards get stirred around in the hat, then everyone takes out a card.
Cool, we just need to add encryption
on
VoIP at $15 a Pop
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
And yeah, I've used soundblaster-type VOIP programs and worked on one. They suck because of the hardware--talking into a microphone and listening through a speaker (or even a headset) feels like you're sitting in a tree house with a CB radio. The handset thing is a lot more newbie-friendly.
So I'm eager to get one of these things and add some encryption to it. Since it's USB, it should even work with a laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
So suing Sigma Designs is not necessarily a futile effort, though of course it will take some resources and I don't know if it will happen. As for me, when I use the GPL on something interesting, I generally assign it to the FSF, so the FSF can then take action if necessary against infringers.
That's the PROBLEM. Starbucks and the free guys are using the same frequency. You can't stomp out one without stomping out the other. If they were using separate frequencies so you could stomp out just Starbucks, there wouldn't be a problem.
The difference is you can copy CD's because of the Home Audio Recording Act of 1990(iirc), which permits copying recorded audio for personal use. The personal use exemption in the HRAA was a deal that the RIAA agreed to in exchange for getting a tax passed on the sale of blank DAT tape, and nowadays "music capable" CD-R media. But the exemption is just for audio, not video. Without the HRAA, you have only whatever fair use protection the courts might give you for using copyrighted material, and Congress, prodded by lobbyists, are trying to take away as much of that as they can.
That's right, wanna-be's. If you think you're such a big shot as to need to do business in your car, fine, do what a real big shot does. Hire a fscking driver to drive the car while you sit in the back and make all the phone calls you want. The megacorp where I formerly worked actually provided chauffeured company limosines for all managers starting at the executive director level (ED was one level below VP, so ED's were generally in charge of a few hundred people). They were wise to do that.
At the time I thought it was a ridiculous perk to make the mucky-mucks feel important. Looking back, I understand it a lot better. The ED types really did have to take 7am conference calls while en route to work, entertain visitors on the way to and from the airport, etc. The limos really let the company get more work out of the ED's and probably saved a bunch of road accidents. When the company saw that its execs needed to take meetings in the car, they did it the right way and there was nothing pretentious about it. It's the pseudo-execs who insist on endangering traffic because they're not important enough to rate getting a car with a driver who are pretentious. If your time isn't so valuable that it's worth your company's while to supply you with a driver, then you can afford to pull over or stay in the office when you make your phone calls.
Note, I don't advocate a total ban on using the phone while driving, since a short call to let someone know where you are doesn't suck your mind away from the road. I'd get rid of the handsfree/non-handsfree distinction and instead make it a violation for a driver to be on the phone more than 2 minutes continuously while the car is moving. An accident where cell tower records show the driver was on the phone more than 2 minutes should be treated similarly to DWI, since accident statistics show cell phone use and drinking are comparably dangerous.
- I'm a music pirate in China with no computer and no internet connection, but I do have a telephone and an answering machine.
- I put a Metallica song on my outgoing message tape, so anyone who calls my number hears the song.
- I publish my phone number all over the world.
- The RIAA for some reason can't locate me through the Chinese phone company, so they sue to make US phone carriers block calls to my number.
- At no point in any of this are computers or the internet involved.
Would they (the RIAA) get anywhere with that lawsuit? I really don't know. But if there's a reasonable answer, I'd hope the answer for the current Internet situation is the same answer.They should be suing the John Doe site owner and subpoena'ing the advertisers, if they're really trying to find the site owners. Really though, what they're up to is finding a roundabout way to seize control of human to human communication by saying they decide what traffic telecoms and ISP's can transfer.
Just viewing the site launched endless popup ad windows some of which resized themselves to fill the whole screen, popped more windows when you closed the old ones, etc.
Interestingly, the actual mp3's come from an entirely different set of domains, that don't appear related to the gateway site and probably aren't hosted in China. The site being sued over is more like a portal (link farm) than an actual mp3 host. It has tons of "legitimate" advertising including audio devices, Visa cards, etc. But I couldn't stand looking at it long, because of all the damn popups.
Anyway, this isn't some warez kiddie's server, it's a highly commercial site, and it astounds me if RIAA is really having trouble finding its owners (asking its advertisers where they send their checks is an obvious approach).
It's kind of late to add this but I remember in the 80's there was an amplifier called Ampzilla (connoting its high power) made by the Great American Sound Company. IIRC, it had a dinosaur-like logo sort of like the Mozilla logo. It would surprise me if Ampzilla wasn't registered as a trademark.
That's why it's a win for Dell to be able to ship machines with no OS at all. They can't be expected to handle software support calls for machines that didn't come with any software whatsoever. So they can charge less for a no-OS machine than they can for a FreeDOS machine.
The Microsoft tax strikes again.
I may blow some /. karma by saying this, but that Atlantic article is one of the best pieces I've seen linked from /. in quite a while. It has nothing to do with tech or software and can't really be called news for nerds, but it's an eye-opener about how businesses manipulate public perception out there in the real world. If you skipped the article and went straight to the comments like I did, it's worth going back to read the article.
I agree with most of your other points about the disgusting practices used to produce diamonds and market them.
I'm a programmer with a 3 year old computer. I'm not planning to upgrade soon. I am thinking of buying a new chair (probably not an Aeron). I think a better chair is likely to improve my programming more than a new computer would (I'm typing this with horrible posture due to my crappy chair).
I'm not saying you're full of it about the productivity gains since you didn't give enough specifics to find anything right or wrong with. I'd like it a lot if you posted more details. The exact nature of the upgrades and productivity gains are squarely on topic for this thread.
It seemed to me that NeWS was a good design--it added the obvious stuff to PostScript to use in a window system. It didn't take off because its implentation stunk and it wasn't free. But using Potsscript as the format seemed just fine. Any prob?
I know that at least part of the design goal of GhostScript was to be a basis for replacing NeWS or Display PostScript, though people settled on X instead. Why reinvent the wheel now though? If you want a PostScript-like X extension, why not use GhostScript?
Of course as a free software user I don't care much about the Windows industry. I see some value in being able to deal with .doc files that people send me, but not much to being able to actually connect to a running instance of Word. So from my point of view, if I can connect to Gnumeric with CORBA and do the same stuff I can do with Excel through COM, then the OSS world has done an equally good job of letting me integrate the apps.
And even if they haven't done as good a job, they're working at it, and I don't think they consider it a low priority. (There is this sad situation where KDE's DCOP and Gnome's CORBA don't interoperate, that represents a fork in the OSS world that wouldn't have happened with Microsoft, but maybe it will be resolved someday).
As for me, I've made a few small bugfixes to Apache and sent them in, since I'd done them already anyway. I wrote a larger extension for Apache because someone hired me to do it, but I wouldn't have done it for free. If Apache was GPL'd, I might have done it for free.
Going to the trouble of validating the certs but then not checking the CA attribute bits, like MSIE does, is just stupid.
Mozilla is licensed sort of similarly (the MPL gives Netscape special rights to the code) and it's not attracting so many volunteers either. I'm not real surprised. While the letter of the GPL doesn't prevent dual licensing, it's not really in the GPL spirit, which is that the original author of a piece of code doesn't have special rights that others don't have.
If I add features to an FSF GPL'd program, I'm doing volunteer work for the free software community and it makes me happy. If I add features to a BSD-licensed program, I become an unpaid employee of anyone who feels like forking the code--I don't find that so attractive. If I add features to Gobe Office, I possibly become an unpaid employee of just one company, Free Radical. Once again, life's too short for that.
I'm not a total free software zealot and I am willing to work on proprietary code. But when I do that, I expect to get paid, just as the vendor expects to get paid. So I'm not terribly impressed by these commercial dual licensed semi-GPL projects.
(Man, topic drift inside a single post! Forgive me.)
Some of the free word processing programs including Kword have their own Automation-like interface, but not using COM. Those allow scripting under Linux using CORBA or DCOP or whatever, but probably doesn't help your vertical app under Windows.
Based on my own goals of using a computer with 100% free software, I don't see much point in precisely emulating Word's Automation interface, since I don't want to run Windows or anyone's proprietary COM-dependent app. However, if the app simply launches Word and handles a few simple operations, it might be possible to put some COM wrapper around KWord that turns the COM calls into appropriate DCOP calls. If you really want something like that, I know people who might be able to do it for you, though not for free. However, if you only need a minimal interface to support your vertical app, it might be pretty simple to implement. It would certainly cost more than a single copy of Word, but might be worth it if you want to run it on 10's or 100's of machines.
I don't remember any Beethoven compositions for glass harmonica but am not at all sure there weren't any. Glass Harmonica was very popular for a while. More recently composers including possibly Stravinsky and Hindemith (from vague memory, don't hold me to that) have composed for it as well.
"You are old, Father Edsger," the young man said,
"All your papers these days look the same;
Those EWD's would be better unread --
Do these facts never fill you with shame?"
"In my youth," Father Edsger replied to his son,
"I wrote wonderful papers galore;
But the great reputation I found that I'd won,
Made it pointless to think any more."
"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And make errors few people could bear;
You complain about everyone's English but yours --
Do you really think this is quite fair?"
"I make lots of mistakes," Father Edsger declared,
"But my stature these days is so great
That no critic can hurt me -- I've got them all scared,
And to stop me it's now far too late."
"You are old," said the youth, "and your programs don't run,
And there isn't one language you like;
Yet of useful suggestions for help you have none --
Have you thought about taking a hike?"
"Since I never write programs," his father replied,
"Every language looks equally bad;
Yet the people keep paying to read all my books
And don't realize that they've been had."
"You are old," said the youth, "and I'm told by my peers
That your lectures bore people to death.
Yet you talk at one hundred conventions per year --
Don't you think that you should save your breath?"
"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father. "Don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!"
Just swap cards with your friends once in a while. That happens at cypherpunk meetings. Everyone throws their card in a hat, then the cards get stirred around in the hat, then everyone takes out a card.
At the UTexas EWD archive.
So I'm eager to get one of these things and add some encryption to it. Since it's USB, it should even work with a laptop.
See the archive.