I mean, come on - it's not rocket science for a corporation (a city is a corporation) to keep records of purchases. If they had had records of giving Microsoft the money for the licenses, Microsoft wouldn't be giving them a hard time about it. I think it's fairly likely that the city just didn't have licenses, and Microsoft caught them.
(Surprise software audits aren't very common - a disgruntled ex- (or current) employee probably tipped Microsoft off to trigger it).
Unfortuantely, you're saying that any business model that involves "giving away the razors and making money off the blades" is doomed. I wish this wasn't the case (and so do these guys). I don't know enough about legalities to know if there is a way to protect companies from having the products they supply subverted and used for something other than their intended purpose.
If a E*Trade wanted to give me a free device that would let me trade stocks from anywhere, with the agreement that I only use it with their service, they should be able to. And their doing so should be protected from abuse.
Without the legal protection, companies will stop doing it. Video games, cell phones, Internet access devices, and others are subsidized by the money you're expected to spend later. Consider an example: If the PlayStation 2 comes out, and a Linux distro for it appears the day after and as time goes on, Sony sees more PS2's being sold as workstations than as gaming machines, what will it mean?
I don't know, exactly, but either it means lawsuits (the route these guys are taking), or it will mean the PS2's price will have to be adjusted to reflect the fact that Sony may not make a cent off of those customers.
To hit market penetration with something like a PS2, there's a price point you have to hit. Not many people would buy an $800 PS2. If you need to sell the hardware below cost to hit your $199 price point, knowing you'll make the money back later, then you can't afford to lose sales to people who just want to take advantage of you.
So what do you think? If there isn't legal protection for this kind of endeavor now, should there be?
I think so (and I think there already is, but as I said, IANAL, and most people here seem to disagree with me).
You own stuff you pay for. If you pay for your house, you own it - until then, the bank does. If you buy a car, you own it. If you lease a car, you don't. If someone gives you a barcode scanner...
Their business model is one I support, and one that I could see growing quite quickly - the one where you give people some physical thing that ties them to the service that pays for it. I don't think that it's a bad business model - but it needs legal protection because it would be very easy to destroy it.
It's like their renting you the device, not giving it to you - the price of the rental is that you pay them for it's use.
I think it would be cool if my Mom got a "free" device that would let her read Email and do basic Web stuff, even if it had a great big ad across the bottom (FreePC style). I for one don't want to see the business model that would permit that to happen, be destroyed.
IMHO if their license says don't reverse engineer the device, then pretend it didn't exist. I don't think it's your right to destroy their business.
Oh, and trying to say that this device isn't their business (that their business is the website and their services) is drawing attention away from the fact that, say, if someone were to write a handy Open Source app that let you take the ISBNs off your books and create a cool catalog of your home library or CD collection, suddenly they could have a million people wanting their "free" device. Oops.. now they can't give it away. Sure, the device isn't their business, but it's a vital (and vulnerable) part.
As for the Adaptec's and DVD-ROM drives of the world, well, that's a wholly different argument because they CHARGE for the hardware. They made their money up-front.
- Steve
Re:Java-bastardizing-then-dumping bastards....
on
Microsoft PDC Journal
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps Microsoft is a little bitter about Sun suing them over basically nothing (fighting over two different ways of running native code? It's native code! It's not portable anyway, by definition, so does it really matter whose native code spec you use?) and decided to follow a path that wouldn't lead to more random lawsuits designed to garner free publicity from the anti-Microsoft crowd.
If so, does that change things any? IIS is a system service, so it's going to have a lot more overhead than a webserver running in the kernel - but it's going to have a lot more protection around it as well. Benchmarking Tux vs Apache might be interesting.
Sure, an Athlon system will cost more than a Celeron - but what about a K6 based system? Then you're looking at similar performance and a lower price (mainly because of the cheaper mobos).
Me too. I've got an Athlon 500 at home, which, with the TNT2 Ultra I've got, feels so incredibly fast at every game I've tried...
And I'm buying two more. Doing my part to support them.
I don't understand why people would be buyin Intel chips - okay, Athlon motherboards are a bit more expensive and as far as I can tell, none of them support AGP 4X, but AGP 4X hasn't proved to be a big win anyway (and not many Intel boards support it). And after you pay for the Intel chip, the cheaper board doesn't win you anything.
I've got an Asus K7M, btw, which is a great board. Overclocking options right in the bios - woohoo!
(Oh, and check out this article, which basically says that you can add about 5% to all the benchmarks you've seen if you buy a newer motherboard or are lucky enough to have the newer version of the chipset that supports Super Bypass).
A Slashdot report on a security hole in WebTV, whose only value is to make Slashdot readers go "gee another microsoft hole".
Where's the report on this hole which actually affects most of the readers of this site? Are Microsoft bugs more important to Slashdot readers than bugs in Linux?
Nothing prevents you from retransmitting the encrypted data. But encryption prevents you from taking the source image, recompressing it using a better compression algorithm or at a smaller size or doing something else to reduce quality in an acceptable manner, and distributing that.
In other words, if Audio CD's (CDDA) were encrypted in a way that worked, we wouldn't be ripping them and distributing mp3s with Napster. That's what they're trying to prevent with DVD encryption, and ESR seemed to miss that.
Eric's argument is that encryption won't prevent piracy because you can still make a bit by bit copy of the disc.
However, DeCSS makes it easy to grab the digital data off the disc and transmit it over the Internet. This is a kind of piracy that wasn't possible without DeCSS, and while it may sound unreasonable today, music piracy of the sort common today seemed impossible a few years ago as well.
I think it's already not selected in the "typical" download of IE. If not the "typical" setting, then the "small" setting has it off by default - I know one of them was, and I'm surprised that there's been no mention of it.
I read an article somewhere on the SOAP technology (which is basically RPC using XML) and how there was a bit of a battle within Microsoft as to whether or not to use it... because it really does open things up. And in the end, they ended up supporting it.
Kinda surprising, but a good thing. Means you'll be able to use DCOM objects from Linux and vice versa fairly easily.
One problem with this is that the Visual J++ package is probably 10% Java-related stuff and 90% extras that are common to the Developer Studio family.
The IDE is the DevStudio IDE. Does Rational get that? Do they get updates to it? Or is Visual J++ going to simply stay where it is now with some extra Rational hooks for Rose integration Rose while the IDE get moldy...
(I know IDEs are a religious issue and most people reading Slashdot probably prefer Emacs or vi, but as for me, I like the DevStudio IDE).
I've used a couple of different Java development environments; as long as you're careful to tell Visual J++ not to do anything Microsoft-specific, it generates good, compatible Java code, and it does it quickly. The debugger is nice, too.
It'd be a shame to see it die; fortunately Rational is a good company and I think they have a lot at stake when it comes to Java and EJB and making things interoperate at the component level, so I have some hope.
Usually Canada follows what the States does in situations like this; it's nice to see us doing this. I didn't hear anything about it...
Maybe that's how it happened. Does RIAA have any influence in Canada? I wouldn't be surprised if some industry group showed up here and tried to mess things up.
No no, you're wrong. The proper response is to say "It's too big and development is out of control. Look how they can't release on time!". At least, that's what people say when Microsoft has to change a release date..
"In his findings of fact, Jackson said there are no current products that pose a competitive threat to Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows operating system, and that no such products are on the horizon.".
>Surely those extra Half-Life frames aren't going >to make that much of a difference?
Well if 5 years ago you'd said about 100mhz processors "Surely those extra Wolfenstein 3D frames aren't going to make that much of a difference?" we wouldn't HAVE half-life.
Games will easily be able to consume way more CPU than we're giving them today. Better physics, better modeling, better lighting, etc.
If you added a channel where processes could attach themselves to the Doom creature that represents them (kinda like the agents switching bodies in The Matrix), you could link an UnrealTournament style bot into Netscape and have it try to stay alive...
Of course Netscape's bot would walk just kinda lumber around, but I'd be worried about taking on, say, Apache...
I'm using a Storm Platinum, from the Gamer's Pack by Xitel, and it's got an S/PDIF output that plugs right into my Sony minidisc recorder.
This works great! The Xitel is an awesome soundcard (it's got the 3D accelerated audio stuff.. I don't know if there are Linux drivers for that but it works well with EverQuest on Windows) and the optical output is perfect for downloading MP3s and burning them onto minidiscs so I can listen to them in the car without having to go analog anywhere through the process.
That's exactly how the game vs Kasparov going on now works. You don't vote on a move - you pick your own move, and the move that gets picked the most is the one that is used.
The world may score a draw with Kasparov. This is no easy achievement - that's better than almost every computer (every computer?) has been able to do, and it's completely against what was predicted of this game (by the people here on Slashdot at least).
"A consensus of chess intermediates will suck compared to a single chess expert", a quote from the earlier Slashdot thread on this.
I've been hoping from the start that this would work out - and maybe someone should look into whether the combined efforts of so many people contributed to a larger strategy that none of us could have created alone. Isn't that how the mind works? Isn't this what so many Sci-Fi books have pontificated on?
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, come on - it's not rocket science for a corporation (a city is a corporation) to keep records of purchases. If they had had records of giving Microsoft the money for the licenses, Microsoft wouldn't be giving them a hard time about it. I think it's fairly likely that the city just didn't have licenses, and Microsoft caught them.
(Surprise software audits aren't very common - a disgruntled ex- (or current) employee probably tipped Microsoft off to trigger it).
- SteveX
I think that guy that cracked Slashdot is still posting articles.
Unfortuantely, you're saying that any business model that involves "giving away the razors and making money off the blades" is doomed. I wish this wasn't the case (and so do these guys). I don't know enough about legalities to know if there is a way to protect companies from having the products they supply subverted and used for something other than their intended purpose.
If a E*Trade wanted to give me a free device that would let me trade stocks from anywhere, with the agreement that I only use it with their service, they should be able to. And their doing so should be protected from abuse.
Without the legal protection, companies will stop doing it. Video games, cell phones, Internet access devices, and others are subsidized by the money you're expected to spend later. Consider an example: If the PlayStation 2 comes out, and a Linux distro for it appears the day after and as time goes on, Sony sees more PS2's being sold as workstations than as gaming machines, what will it mean?
I don't know, exactly, but either it means lawsuits (the route these guys are taking), or it will mean the PS2's price will have to be adjusted to reflect the fact that Sony may not make a cent off of those customers.
To hit market penetration with something like a PS2, there's a price point you have to hit. Not many people would buy an $800 PS2. If you need to sell the hardware below cost to hit your $199 price point, knowing you'll make the money back later, then you can't afford to lose sales to people who just want to take advantage of you.
So what do you think? If there isn't legal protection for this kind of endeavor now, should there be?
I think so (and I think there already is, but as I said, IANAL, and most people here seem to disagree with me).
- Steve
You own stuff you pay for. If you pay for your house, you own it - until then, the bank does. If you buy a car, you own it. If you lease a car, you don't. If someone gives you a barcode scanner...
Their business model is one I support, and one that I could see growing quite quickly - the one where you give people some physical thing that ties them to the service that pays for it. I don't think that it's a bad business model - but it needs legal protection because it would be very easy to destroy it.
It's like their renting you the device, not giving it to you - the price of the rental is that you pay them for it's use.
I think it would be cool if my Mom got a "free" device that would let her read Email and do basic Web stuff, even if it had a great big ad across the bottom (FreePC style). I for one don't want to see the business model that would permit that to happen, be destroyed.
IMHO if their license says don't reverse engineer the device, then pretend it didn't exist. I don't think it's your right to destroy their business.
Oh, and trying to say that this device isn't their business (that their business is the website and their services) is drawing attention away from the fact that, say, if someone were to write a handy Open Source app that let you take the ISBNs off your books and create a cool catalog of your home library or CD collection, suddenly they could have a million people wanting their "free" device. Oops.. now they can't give it away. Sure, the device isn't their business, but it's a vital (and vulnerable) part.
As for the Adaptec's and DVD-ROM drives of the world, well, that's a wholly different argument because they CHARGE for the hardware. They made their money up-front.
- Steve
Perhaps Microsoft is a little bitter about Sun suing them over basically nothing (fighting over two different ways of running native code? It's native code! It's not portable anyway, by definition, so does it really matter whose native code spec you use?) and decided to follow a path that wouldn't lead to more random lawsuits designed to garner free publicity from the anti-Microsoft crowd.
Is that what Tux is?
If so, does that change things any? IIS is a system service, so it's going to have a lot more overhead than a webserver running in the kernel - but it's going to have a lot more protection around it as well. Benchmarking Tux vs Apache might be interesting.
- Steve
Sure, an Athlon system will cost more than a Celeron - but what about a K6 based system? Then you're looking at similar performance and a lower price (mainly because of the cheaper mobos).
Me too. I've got an Athlon 500 at home, which, with the TNT2 Ultra I've got, feels so incredibly fast at every game I've tried...
And I'm buying two more. Doing my part to support them.
I don't understand why people would be buyin Intel chips - okay, Athlon motherboards are a bit more expensive and as far as I can tell, none of them support AGP 4X, but AGP 4X hasn't proved to be a big win anyway (and not many Intel boards support it). And after you pay for the Intel chip, the cheaper board doesn't win you anything.
I've got an Asus K7M, btw, which is a great board. Overclocking options right in the bios - woohoo!
(Oh, and check out this article, which basically says that you can add about 5% to all the benchmarks you've seen if you buy a newer motherboard or are lucky enough to have the newer version of the chipset that supports Super Bypass).
A Slashdot report on a security hole in WebTV, whose only value is to make Slashdot readers go "gee another microsoft hole".
Where's the report on this hole which actually affects most of the readers of this site? Are Microsoft bugs more important to Slashdot readers than bugs in Linux?
Nothing prevents you from retransmitting the encrypted data. But encryption prevents you from taking the source image, recompressing it using a better compression algorithm or at a smaller size or doing something else to reduce quality in an acceptable manner, and distributing that.
In other words, if Audio CD's (CDDA) were encrypted in a way that worked, we wouldn't be ripping them and distributing mp3s with Napster. That's what they're trying to prevent with DVD encryption, and ESR seemed to miss that.
However, DeCSS makes it easy to grab the digital data off the disc and transmit it over the Internet. This is a kind of piracy that wasn't possible without DeCSS, and while it may sound unreasonable today, music piracy of the sort common today seemed impossible a few years ago as well.
I think it's already not selected in the "typical" download of IE. If not the "typical" setting, then the "small" setting has it off by default - I know one of them was, and I'm surprised that there's been no mention of it.
I read an article somewhere on the SOAP technology (which is basically RPC using XML) and how there was a bit of a battle within Microsoft as to whether or not to use it... because it really does open things up. And in the end, they ended up supporting it.
Kinda surprising, but a good thing. Means you'll be able to use DCOM objects from Linux and vice versa fairly easily.
One problem with this is that the Visual J++ package is probably 10% Java-related stuff and 90% extras that are common to the Developer Studio family.
The IDE is the DevStudio IDE. Does Rational get that? Do they get updates to it? Or is Visual J++ going to simply stay where it is now with some extra Rational hooks for Rose integration Rose while the IDE get moldy...
(I know IDEs are a religious issue and most people reading Slashdot probably prefer Emacs or vi, but as for me, I like the DevStudio IDE).
- Steve
Have you actually used it?
I've used a couple of different Java development environments; as long as you're careful to tell Visual J++ not to do anything Microsoft-specific, it generates good, compatible Java code, and it does it quickly. The debugger is nice, too.
It'd be a shame to see it die; fortunately Rational is a good company and I think they have a lot at stake when it comes to Java and EJB and making things interoperate at the component level, so I have some hope.
- Steve
Usually Canada follows what the States does in situations like this; it's nice to see us doing this. I didn't hear anything about it...
Maybe that's how it happened. Does RIAA have any influence in Canada? I wouldn't be surprised if some industry group showed up here and tried to mess things up.
- Steve
No no, you're wrong. The proper response is to say "It's too big and development is out of control. Look how they can't release on time!". At least, that's what people say when Microsoft has to change a release date..
"In his findings of fact, Jackson said there are no current products that pose a competitive threat to Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows operating system, and that no such products are on the horizon.".
:)
Would anyone here care to correct him?
>Surely those extra Half-Life frames aren't going
>to make that much of a difference?
Well if 5 years ago you'd said about 100mhz processors "Surely those extra Wolfenstein 3D frames aren't going to make that much of a difference?" we wouldn't HAVE half-life.
Games will easily be able to consume way more CPU than we're giving them today. Better physics, better modeling, better lighting, etc.
- SteveX
If you added a channel where processes could attach themselves to the Doom creature that represents them (kinda like the agents switching bodies in The Matrix), you could link an UnrealTournament style bot into Netscape and have it try to stay alive...
Of course Netscape's bot would walk just kinda lumber around, but I'd be worried about taking on, say, Apache...
Should we regulate what you can see out your window, too? Or from a tall building?
What if someone sees me going into this corner store? Nobody should be able to see that! We need more regulation!
- Steve
(What if someone saw me post this?)
I'm using a Storm Platinum, from the Gamer's Pack by Xitel, and it's got an S/PDIF output that plugs right into my Sony minidisc recorder.
This works great! The Xitel is an awesome soundcard (it's got the 3D accelerated audio stuff.. I don't know if there are Linux drivers for that but it works well with EverQuest on Windows) and the optical output is perfect for downloading MP3s and burning them onto minidiscs so I can listen to them in the car without having to go analog anywhere through the process.
TINAR, YMMV, etc
- Steve
That's exactly how the game vs Kasparov going on now works. You don't vote on a move - you pick your own move, and the move that gets picked the most is the one that is used.
- Steve
How can you say this?
The world may score a draw with Kasparov. This is no easy achievement - that's better than almost every computer (every computer?) has been able to do, and it's completely against what was predicted of this game (by the people here on Slashdot at least).
"A consensus of chess intermediates will suck compared to a single chess expert", a quote from the earlier Slashdot thread on this.
I've been hoping from the start that this would work out - and maybe someone should look into whether the combined efforts of so many people contributed to a larger strategy that none of us could have created alone. Isn't that how the mind works? Isn't this what so many Sci-Fi books have pontificated on?
- Steve