If you're ripping to MP3 and your CD read speed is very fast at all (20x is probably more than fast enough), you're going to be slowed down by your processor and not the drives. However it might be more efficient to have more than one drive so you don't lose time swapping CDs or you can take off while all three complete.
Exactly... This is the first time I heard about a linux distributor promissing to take out the offending code. Now when SCO claims the only possible remedy is that end users should pay a huge licensing fee, RedHat can point to this and say they have another way to deal with the problem.
The distributors or the ones that claimed copyright on SCO code are the ones that should be getting sued or charged licensing fees, not the end users. If you buy a book which has part of it illegally copied from another book, you would never have to pay the original author of that part. The people that copied the offending sections and the people or companies that published the book would be the ones that should could be sued. Patents might be a different matter, but Copyrights are all about COPYing and publishing, not use.
You pay to watch TV too, in the cost of the TV and electricity. If you have cable or a satellite dish you pay a monthly fee as well. The websites you view on your computer don't get any of the money you pay to your ISP (except for the ISP's own site). Unless they are a pay site, they have to make their money by advertising as well. If you don't want to deal with it, you can always change the channel. I don't think it's as bad as broadcast TV. If I had to sit at my computer for 20 minutes every hour I'm surfing just to watch the commercials I'd be pissed.
In US courts, SCO could never prove copyright infringement unless they specifically showed the code. Then we would be able remove the offending code from Linux and move forward. I know a lot of people have said this and it makes sense, but they rarely quote the legal reasons for it.
The legal reason is simple, we have the First Ammendment. This ammendment to the Constitution is one of our most cherished and freedom of speech is a right granted by the First Ammendment that can has has been used in case law since we became a country. You want to burn a flag, well the First Ammendments grants you that right to "speech" against the government. You want to spout nazi propoganda to a crowd, well the First Ammendment protects that as well. We cannot of course copy other people's work because of the copyright clause in Article 1. Through copyright case law however, a balance has been established between the copyright clause and the first ammendment. You can't copy and distribute the work of others without their permission because it is "their" speech, not yours.
The reason that SCO cannot legally say "you can't distribute ANY of Linux without a license from us" is because of the First Ammendment rights of all the other contributors to Linux. There is no way that the courts will consider SCO's copyright protection as more important that the First Ammendment rights of all the other contributors. It could be argued that the people that have worked on Linux have made a much greater contribution to science and the useful arts (the reason for the copyright clause) that SCO (or AT&T by creating Unix) ever had, especially since the source code is open for anyone and everyone to use and contribute to.
Actually the settlement reached between AT&T and the University of Berkley is like a valid contract. I don't believe SCO would be able to throw that contract out as it was made in good faith and has held up for 10 years with both sides appearing satisfied. Of course it seems like SCO is wanting to re-write a lot of contracts, but there's just not support in the law for doing that.
Well, the MPlayer site has some pretty good proof that their code has been used in KISS's product. KISS says that no MPlayer code was used and that it's all their properietary code (and even that it may have been leaked to the OSS community and included in MPlayer illegally). That doesn't really stand up when you look at what the MPlayer team is comparing, they show that not only was their code copyrighed and committed back in 2001 and KISS"s was in 2003, but that the KISS binary has the subtitle type "MPSub" the same as MPlayer's (i.e. "MP(layer)Sub(title)") and many other strings are the same and in the same order. Their evidence doesn't look like an open-and shut case, but pretty good. Maybe some programmers at KISS decided to copy a bunch of MPlayer code and take a few weeks off, or maybe they just copied the whole code base and made their own changes.
I think that what he was trying to say is that KISS could contact the copyright holders and try to work out a closed-source licesnse to use the code. That is totally acceptable. Just because someone releases code under the GPL does not mean that they cannot use it in closed-source projects or sell it to other people. Releasing the code under the GPL does not "give away" the copyright, the originally author still retains the copyright and can use the code however he or she wishes. However, by releasing the code under the GPL, the GPL will always be in effect for that code, so that anyone that has a copy of the code under that license can still use it and make changes according to the GPL. The author however can use the code in any other way they see fit as well, but not modifications made by someone else which are owned by the person doing the changes.
So is it the standard GPL or a derivative? In the download it looks like the COPYING file is standard GPL. Doesn't that mean that I could use it on a commercial system freely as long as I don't link to the code? They seem to say that if anything in your appliation is commercial that you should buy a commercial license. What if your company is a service bureau, you would install mysql and setup the database, then have a proprietary system that accesses the database for filling orders, managing inventory, etc.?
I know this isn't the right place to bring this up, but Caldera has given away the source code for most of the headers specified in the December 18th letters as infringing ABI code under their own license. Even if they do own that code in Linux (which is seriously in doubt), couldn't Linux still be distributed for free if it followed the licese for those files? In the letter they even state those files are part of the BSD settlement, so couldn't the code be used just by following the BSD license?
I thought that a lot of the 486SXs were 486DXs with a defect in the FPU so that part was disabled. Manufacturers throw away a lot of chips because of defects, so it made sense to keep and sell those chips where the defect was in the FPU which could be turned off...
Yep, same exact software, but with a couple different settings. The difference is in the licensing, which is why a lot of servers are priced on per-user, per-seat, etc. You're not paying for different code, you're paying for different capabilities. If you're not willing to spend the extra money, you're not supposed to get the extra features. MS has developed all the code for Windows XP home and Windows 2003 Server that they will except for updates. The CDs cost the same to make, but yet the products sell for different prices. Weird, isn't it?
I agree... The dumbest thing to do is pre-order from an online retailer. Sure they'll ship your game on the day it's released, but you won't get it for days later. Best Buy and CompUSA usually have decent deals on newer games either when they come out of a couple of weeks later. Most brick and mortar stores give you something extra when you pre-order though, such as the DVD that came with "Enter: The Matrix" or a poster.
Well, PS2s have 32mb ram (plus 4mb dedicated graphics and 2mb dedicated sound), but that isn't that much. What I'm saying is that when they port it to the PC with probably 256mb+ ram and a much faster (1.8ghz vs. 300mhz) processor, they could do a little more... It totally takes you out of the game when cars and people just disappear when you look away for a second...
I totally agree, this is the one thing I would like most and that would probably be easiest to do in the sequel. I can understand why they might need all the spare memory and CPU they can get on a console, but why should gamers with decked-out PCs have to pay the price too? They could probably make this a setting you can change, if the performance starts to degrade, turn down the distance or something.
I can't tell you how annoying it is to pass that hard-to-find car you need for a garage mission only to look in the rear-view mirror to see that it poofed! From looking at the game memory, they don't even store the car's momentum or direction, or even have an in-game character controlling it until you hit it or steal it. Try editing the "handling.cfg" to make a certain car really slow or really fast. It always drives the same speed on the road unless something hits it or you steal it.
BTW, check out my ViceCheat program to do some cool things, make whatever car you're driving damage-proof, repair the tires, warp around the world, etc.
If I learned one thing from reading yahoo stock forums, it's that the people that post there knew very little about what actually was going on. There'd be a lot of posts by people on whatever position they had and why, but looking back with hindsight, the great majority of posters were utterly clueless.
Wasn't Q4 of 2003 going to be his 4th straight profitiable quarter, but they missed it because of their lawyer fees? Actually saying that the reason they missed it was the lawyer fees isn't accurate. It would be better to say the reason they almost made a profit was because of the two one-time license payments by Sun and MS. SCO's losing money on the rest of it's business and still going to be paying lawyer fees until 2005 at least. I didn't think they were going to expect many more payments from MS and Sun, and I don't see any other companies chomping at the bit to pay SCO.
Thinking like a true day-trader:)... The people that make money on the way up will be smiling, but someone will be left holding the bag with stock they bought for $20 that they thought would go up to $50 when this all falls apart, and there will be a class-action lawsuit.
I was a day-trader for about a year. I went from a $2,000 investment, to a portfolio worth $27,000 (for about two hours on one day), to under $1,000, and back up to $6,000 before I pulled it out. Out of the fifteen stocks I owned during that time I received two letters in the mail inviting me to join a class action lawsuit against those companies for artificially inflating their stock prices.
I was just comparing the contract sections quoted in the SCO Letter with the same sections in the only actual license document I could find, the AT&T/IBM one. What got me looking was the "emphasis added" to paragraph 2.04 which really appears to be completely different from the contract, but I found this ommitted in the SCO letter from the end of paragraph 7.06a in the IBM agreement:
If information relating to a SOFTWARE PRODUCT subject to this Agreement at any time becomes available without restriction to the general public by acts not attributable to LICENSEE or its employees, LICENSEE'S obligations under this section shall not apply to such information after such time.
If this clause is really in most agreements and just ommitted by SCO in the letter, it looks to me like if some code was put into Linux by someone other than the company the letter was sent to that the licensee has no further obligations under that section towards that code. Let's say that code was put into Linux by IBM. Wouldn't that actually indemnify all other licensees against redistributing that code since a third party made it available to the public?
The contract basically says the company has been given the right to use the software product (Unix code) for internal business purposes on certain CPUs (most licenses listed the CPUs that the software could be run on with a price per CPU).
Also the contract states that the company must provide to SCO at most once a year a statement:
Certified by an authorized representative of the company
The locaion, type, and serial number of the CPUs the software is running on
Stating that the use of the Software Products has been reviewed and that the Software Product is being used only on designated or temporary backup CPUs
That's a lot different from what they are asking for. If you look at the paragraph numbers, the one requiring the annual statement is immediately after the ones saying that the Software Product can only be used internally on the designated CPUs and that it cannot be used by others. They go on later to show paragraphs about export, not disclosing the Software Product to others, etc. What they are asking for is:
evidence - Evidence that each employee and contractor has been notified and taken steps to assure the disclosure of the Software Products (Unix source) has been in confidence - They are asking for evidence here. Clearly all the contract requires is a statment. SCO is asking for individual non-disclosure agreements for pete's sake, along with employee manuals, etc. This is complete hogwash, all that is required by the contract is a statement.
A statement that the company isn't running binary linux code - This is completely outside the scope of the agreement. They might as well ask for a statement that the company is't using Microsoft Windows NT. All the company has to do is provide a statement that they have kept the Unix source they licensed in confidence and not disclosed it. Products they have gotten from third parties including Linux are outside the scope of the contract.
There's a clause in the contract that specifically allows SCO to send letters like this, but it specifically states what must be furnished to SCO. SCO is asking for quite a bit more, but there is nothing in the contract to support their requests. If I was one of these companies, I would supply them with exactly what is required by the contract and ignore the other requests, like this:
Dear UNIX Licensor:
As an authorized representative of [Company xyz], I declare that we are running the Software Product on the following CPUs, all in our home office at 123 Main Street, Milwaukee, WI:
4 PPC 4000 processors, serial number 10003940, 10003941, 10003942, and 10307783
2 PPC 8000 processors, serial numbers 40000120, 40000121
We have done a review and these are the only CPUs currently running the Software Product we have licensed from you.
Yours truly,
[Company xyz]
If they send a letter back asking about the unanswered requirements in the letter, just say "We have fully complied with Para. 2.04 2.05 of our licensing agreement by issuing our previous letter. Have a nice day."
SCO can ask for all the information they want, including the social security numbers and current phone numbers and addresses of every employee, that doesn't mean you have to give it to them. Stick to how the contract is worded...
That's fine, if you don't mind spending $175 for a 2gb CF "microdrive" card (cheapest price on pricewatch.com). You can get a 512mb card for only $95 though...
I think you're assuming it will look and act like the current iPod, and I don't think your prices are even close to what a manufacturer would spend. You can get a portable CD/MP3 player for $35 now with a small LCD display. That's the components you say would be $100 with for $35 with a free CD mechanism thrown in (MSRP $60 but of course you can get it cheaper). Tack on $70 to the $35 for the hard drive and take just $5 off for removing the CD component and that comes out to $100.
Maybe it'll use AA batteries. You can buy a charger and 4 AA batteries for about $15-$20, or get about 30 batteries for that price. I prefer them to a built-in battery anyway because I can take backups and I use them for remotes and a PDA I have too. Not to mention all the negative attention the iPod has gotten because the batteries had to be replaced...
I wouldn't think Apple would go too far from the iPod design, but if this player is supposed to be "mini", it'll have to have a smaller LCD and probably button controls too instead of the nice spinner the current iPods have. Also I for one like the idea of using standard AA or AAA batteries instead of the lithium-ion, but that's just me.
Well, 1,209 / 760,000 is 0.00159, or about 0.16%, not 0.00827%. Your calculation is off by a factor of 20 for some reason...
That's just counting people that have signed that online petition at "Black Cider". Just checked and it's 1286 now. Still, 99.8% isn't a bad rate, but I don't know how you can assume that everyone that didn't find this online petition and sign it is happy with their purchase...
I started out with a 300 baud modem on my C-64. I had forgotten how much I loved ZModem until other people pointed it out here. There were precious few BBSs in local dialing area around Knoxville, IA. My brother and I would save up money and call late at night or on the weekend to the great BBSs in the big cities to download shareware. I remember back then a lot of BBSs weren't open all day, they'd just start after some guy (or his parents) went to bed:) There was one game that was a lot of fun for me back then where you'd create a fighter and enter the arena to win money and buy better equipment. I never got into Tradewars much, it was a little hard for me to get the hang of... I even created my own simple BBS in Basic, but nobody came...
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If you're ripping to MP3 and your CD read speed is very fast at all (20x is probably more than fast enough), you're going to be slowed down by your processor and not the drives. However it might be more efficient to have more than one drive so you don't lose time swapping CDs or you can take off while all three complete.
The distributors or the ones that claimed copyright on SCO code are the ones that should be getting sued or charged licensing fees, not the end users. If you buy a book which has part of it illegally copied from another book, you would never have to pay the original author of that part. The people that copied the offending sections and the people or companies that published the book would be the ones that should could be sued. Patents might be a different matter, but Copyrights are all about COPYing and publishing, not use.
You pay to watch TV too, in the cost of the TV and electricity. If you have cable or a satellite dish you pay a monthly fee as well. The websites you view on your computer don't get any of the money you pay to your ISP (except for the ISP's own site). Unless they are a pay site, they have to make their money by advertising as well. If you don't want to deal with it, you can always change the channel. I don't think it's as bad as broadcast TV. If I had to sit at my computer for 20 minutes every hour I'm surfing just to watch the commercials I'd be pissed.
The legal reason is simple, we have the First Ammendment. This ammendment to the Constitution is one of our most cherished and freedom of speech is a right granted by the First Ammendment that can has has been used in case law since we became a country. You want to burn a flag, well the First Ammendments grants you that right to "speech" against the government. You want to spout nazi propoganda to a crowd, well the First Ammendment protects that as well. We cannot of course copy other people's work because of the copyright clause in Article 1. Through copyright case law however, a balance has been established between the copyright clause and the first ammendment. You can't copy and distribute the work of others without their permission because it is "their" speech, not yours.
The reason that SCO cannot legally say "you can't distribute ANY of Linux without a license from us" is because of the First Ammendment rights of all the other contributors to Linux. There is no way that the courts will consider SCO's copyright protection as more important that the First Ammendment rights of all the other contributors. It could be argued that the people that have worked on Linux have made a much greater contribution to science and the useful arts (the reason for the copyright clause) that SCO (or AT&T by creating Unix) ever had, especially since the source code is open for anyone and everyone to use and contribute to.
Actually the settlement reached between AT&T and the University of Berkley is like a valid contract. I don't believe SCO would be able to throw that contract out as it was made in good faith and has held up for 10 years with both sides appearing satisfied. Of course it seems like SCO is wanting to re-write a lot of contracts, but there's just not support in the law for doing that.
Well, the MPlayer site has some pretty good proof that their code has been used in KISS's product. KISS says that no MPlayer code was used and that it's all their properietary code (and even that it may have been leaked to the OSS community and included in MPlayer illegally). That doesn't really stand up when you look at what the MPlayer team is comparing, they show that not only was their code copyrighed and committed back in 2001 and KISS"s was in 2003, but that the KISS binary has the subtitle type "MPSub" the same as MPlayer's (i.e. "MP(layer)Sub(title)") and many other strings are the same and in the same order. Their evidence doesn't look like an open-and shut case, but pretty good. Maybe some programmers at KISS decided to copy a bunch of MPlayer code and take a few weeks off, or maybe they just copied the whole code base and made their own changes.
I think that what he was trying to say is that KISS could contact the copyright holders and try to work out a closed-source licesnse to use the code. That is totally acceptable. Just because someone releases code under the GPL does not mean that they cannot use it in closed-source projects or sell it to other people. Releasing the code under the GPL does not "give away" the copyright, the originally author still retains the copyright and can use the code however he or she wishes. However, by releasing the code under the GPL, the GPL will always be in effect for that code, so that anyone that has a copy of the code under that license can still use it and make changes according to the GPL. The author however can use the code in any other way they see fit as well, but not modifications made by someone else which are owned by the person doing the changes.
So is it the standard GPL or a derivative? In the download it looks like the COPYING file is standard GPL. Doesn't that mean that I could use it on a commercial system freely as long as I don't link to the code? They seem to say that if anything in your appliation is commercial that you should buy a commercial license. What if your company is a service bureau, you would install mysql and setup the database, then have a proprietary system that accesses the database for filling orders, managing inventory, etc.?
I know this isn't the right place to bring this up, but Caldera has given away the source code for most of the headers specified in the December 18th letters as infringing ABI code under their own license. Even if they do own that code in Linux (which is seriously in doubt), couldn't Linux still be distributed for free if it followed the licese for those files? In the letter they even state those files are part of the BSD settlement, so couldn't the code be used just by following the BSD license?
I thought that a lot of the 486SXs were 486DXs with a defect in the FPU so that part was disabled. Manufacturers throw away a lot of chips because of defects, so it made sense to keep and sell those chips where the defect was in the FPU which could be turned off...
Yep, same exact software, but with a couple different settings. The difference is in the licensing, which is why a lot of servers are priced on per-user, per-seat, etc. You're not paying for different code, you're paying for different capabilities. If you're not willing to spend the extra money, you're not supposed to get the extra features. MS has developed all the code for Windows XP home and Windows 2003 Server that they will except for updates. The CDs cost the same to make, but yet the products sell for different prices. Weird, isn't it?
I agree... The dumbest thing to do is pre-order from an online retailer. Sure they'll ship your game on the day it's released, but you won't get it for days later. Best Buy and CompUSA usually have decent deals on newer games either when they come out of a couple of weeks later. Most brick and mortar stores give you something extra when you pre-order though, such as the DVD that came with "Enter: The Matrix" or a poster.
Well, PS2s have 32mb ram (plus 4mb dedicated graphics and 2mb dedicated sound), but that isn't that much. What I'm saying is that when they port it to the PC with probably 256mb+ ram and a much faster (1.8ghz vs. 300mhz) processor, they could do a little more... It totally takes you out of the game when cars and people just disappear when you look away for a second...
Good, I was thinking they'd have to be pretty tiny "galaxies" to fit so many in only 300 light-years :)
I can't tell you how annoying it is to pass that hard-to-find car you need for a garage mission only to look in the rear-view mirror to see that it poofed! From looking at the game memory, they don't even store the car's momentum or direction, or even have an in-game character controlling it until you hit it or steal it. Try editing the "handling.cfg" to make a certain car really slow or really fast. It always drives the same speed on the road unless something hits it or you steal it.
BTW, check out my ViceCheat program to do some cool things, make whatever car you're driving damage-proof, repair the tires, warp around the world, etc.
Wasn't Q4 of 2003 going to be his 4th straight profitiable quarter, but they missed it because of their lawyer fees? Actually saying that the reason they missed it was the lawyer fees isn't accurate. It would be better to say the reason they almost made a profit was because of the two one-time license payments by Sun and MS. SCO's losing money on the rest of it's business and still going to be paying lawyer fees until 2005 at least. I didn't think they were going to expect many more payments from MS and Sun, and I don't see any other companies chomping at the bit to pay SCO.
I was a day-trader for about a year. I went from a $2,000 investment, to a portfolio worth $27,000 (for about two hours on one day), to under $1,000, and back up to $6,000 before I pulled it out. Out of the fifteen stocks I owned during that time I received two letters in the mail inviting me to join a class action lawsuit against those companies for artificially inflating their stock prices.
If information relating to a SOFTWARE PRODUCT subject to this Agreement at any time becomes available without restriction to the general public by acts not attributable to LICENSEE or its employees, LICENSEE'S obligations under this section shall not apply to such information after such time.
If this clause is really in most agreements and just ommitted by SCO in the letter, it looks to me like if some code was put into Linux by someone other than the company the letter was sent to that the licensee has no further obligations under that section towards that code. Let's say that code was put into Linux by IBM. Wouldn't that actually indemnify all other licensees against redistributing that code since a third party made it available to the public?
Also the contract states that the company must provide to SCO at most once a year a statement:
That's a lot different from what they are asking for. If you look at the paragraph numbers, the one requiring the annual statement is immediately after the ones saying that the Software Product can only be used internally on the designated CPUs and that it cannot be used by others. They go on later to show paragraphs about export, not disclosing the Software Product to others, etc. What they are asking for is:
There's a clause in the contract that specifically allows SCO to send letters like this, but it specifically states what must be furnished to SCO. SCO is asking for quite a bit more, but there is nothing in the contract to support their requests. If I was one of these companies, I would supply them with exactly what is required by the contract and ignore the other requests, like this:
Dear UNIX Licensor:
As an authorized representative of [Company xyz], I declare that we are running the Software Product on the following CPUs, all in our home office at 123 Main Street, Milwaukee, WI:
- 4 PPC 4000 processors, serial number 10003940, 10003941, 10003942, and 10307783
- 2 PPC 8000 processors, serial numbers 40000120, 40000121
We have done a review and these are the only CPUs currently running the Software Product we have licensed from you.Yours truly,
[Company xyz]
If they send a letter back asking about the unanswered requirements in the letter, just say "We have fully complied with Para. 2.04 2.05 of our licensing agreement by issuing our previous letter. Have a nice day."
SCO can ask for all the information they want, including the social security numbers and current phone numbers and addresses of every employee, that doesn't mean you have to give it to them. Stick to how the contract is worded...
And they for got how much to upgrade their server os each year... Costs to patch/fix problems with worms and viruses...
That's fine, if you don't mind spending $175 for a 2gb CF "microdrive" card (cheapest price on pricewatch.com). You can get a 512mb card for only $95 though...
Maybe it'll use AA batteries. You can buy a charger and 4 AA batteries for about $15-$20, or get about 30 batteries for that price. I prefer them to a built-in battery anyway because I can take backups and I use them for remotes and a PDA I have too. Not to mention all the negative attention the iPod has gotten because the batteries had to be replaced...
I wouldn't think Apple would go too far from the iPod design, but if this player is supposed to be "mini", it'll have to have a smaller LCD and probably button controls too instead of the nice spinner the current iPods have. Also I for one like the idea of using standard AA or AAA batteries instead of the lithium-ion, but that's just me.
Don't know how many people backup their computers more than once a day...
That's just counting people that have signed that online petition at "Black Cider". Just checked and it's 1286 now. Still, 99.8% isn't a bad rate, but I don't know how you can assume that everyone that didn't find this online petition and sign it is happy with their purchase...
I started out with a 300 baud modem on my C-64. I had forgotten how much I loved ZModem until other people pointed it out here. There were precious few BBSs in local dialing area around Knoxville, IA. My brother and I would save up money and call late at night or on the weekend to the great BBSs in the big cities to download shareware. I remember back then a lot of BBSs weren't open all day, they'd just start after some guy (or his parents) went to bed :) There was one game that was a lot of fun for me back then where you'd create a fighter and enter the arena to win money and buy better equipment. I never got into Tradewars much, it was a little hard for me to get the hang of... I even created my own simple BBS in Basic, but nobody came...