``It wont work anywhere but the US, I would buy from it, but it seems their attitude towards the rest of the world seems to consist of "no, fuck off".
Lame, and they need to fix it, but anyhow.''
Why fix it if it ain't broken? I live in the Rest of the World, and I can get MP3s or better cheaply or even for free, all legal. I have no need of this new service. I know the same is true for many other restoftheworlders, in the Netherlands and elsewhere.
``with the right settings (mainly the defaults) in LameMP3 128abr/vbr works wonders.''
Problem is, when I get the MP3s from somewhere else, I don't control how they are made. Many MP3s that I find in the wild are junk, for one reason or another.
``The other problem with other formats like vorbis is many portable players don't support the format.''
Mine does, though. Obviously, or I wouldn't have bought it.
Nice but...I don't want any more MP3s. I don't think my hearing is especially great, but MP3s have an annoying something I call jingling in the region where (among other things) some part of percussion is. Ever since I first noticed this, MP3s have started to make me grimace. Not all of them, but enough of them that I am not paying for more MP3s. My Vorbis files don't suffer from the same problem, so I'm happy most of my music is in that format.
If I can buy major-label music in Vorbis format again, I might.
My dust (since I'm not betting any money on this) is on open standards.
Let the EU mandate open standards for use in their own communications (both internally and to citizens). Since no one vendor will control the standard, vendor lock-in is avoided* and freedom of choice provided.
In my opinion, that is all we should aim for. Let people be free to choose the product they want. If that is a home-built PC with a custom-built Linux installation, fine. If it is a Sun workstation that comes bundled with Solaris, fine too. Dell PC with bundled Windows? Great!
As long as we're free to choose.
Slowly, we're actually moving in this direction. Just look at the whole ODF vs. OOXML circus. Or look at.NET. We're seeing Microsoft submit their inventions to standards bodies. There is innovation and there is standardization. We're not there yet, but we're getting closer.
* This won't happen when standardizing on win32, because Microsoft will be the one controlling the standard, with others playing catch-up.
The question is what sandboxing really solves. Supposedly, we already have processes in isolated address spaces. They interact with the rest of the system through interfaces exposed by the operating system. You can sandbox all you want, but, eventually, you are still going to have some interaction between the sandboxed process and the rest of the system.
I see much more value in writing software in languages where the now common types of exploits can't occur. If we can stop programs from wrongly referencing memory, i.e. going outside the bounds of allocated data structures, that will be a great step, eliminating many current vulnerabilities. And we can do that...we just have to not use the unsafe constructs from C (and not replace them by other unsafe constructs, obviously).
Now there is an interesting concept...wouldn't the communist thing to do to _not_ restrict the rights to only one individual, but rather to let the whole community use the work as they see fit? I think "communist" countries even used to do that.
The summary makes me think it is some kind of stack smashing attack; probably an integer overflow. These can occur in the PDF parsing code, before you even have to look at features like scripting. On the other hand, if PDF is anything like PostScript here, and I believe it is, it is a programming language itself, which might lead to exploitable situations.
Also, an integer overflow was recently found and fixed in xpdf. This could be the same bug.
``To be sure, copying for private use is still permitted - which is, after all, the reason for the flat-rate levy payable on certain devices. However, if special anti-copying technology has been employed to protect the medium, e.g. a music CD, such protection may not be circumvented by any means. The Ministry of Justice has given clear expression to this prohibition: "There is no 'right of private copying' at the expense of rights holders". This also means that consumers who download a file from the Internet must first check whether the offer is legal. How users are supposed to do so remains unclear, says the National Federation of Consumer Organisations.''
Comparing this to the Dutch (from the Netherlands, a small country that borders Germany in the west) equivalent of copyright law, I get the following.
1. Copying for personal use is permitted by basic copyright law, which, in the Netherlands, has been in place for a pretty long time. I imagine the same to be true in Germany. 2. Not allowing the circumvention of "technical measures" is from the EUCD, the EU equivalent of the DMCA. Both Germany and the Netherlands have this. 3. In the Netherlands at least, downloading a file from the Internet constitutes making a copy for personal use, which is expressly permitted as per 1. (That is, for anything that is on media, except software. Books don't apply as thy aren't on media, music does, and software doesn't, because it is explicitly mentioned as an exception.)
I would be mildly surprised if 3 were different in Germany, i.e. you were not allowed to download music files under all circumstances. What is illegal, in the Netherlands, is circumventing the DRM. Anything that involves that (making a copy of th contents of the DVD, playing the DVD) therefore cannot be done legally. Downloading a file from the Internet does not involve curcimventing DRM, so isn't made ilelgal by tha.t
``Because we tried that, and it didn't work. When ARPANet was starting, the namespace was flat. Every host had a name, there wasn't any hierarchical organization. When the network was less than 0.01% the size it is today, it was already too hard to handle name conflicts in that flat namespace. The hierarchical namespace with dot seperators that we use in DNS today was introduced to solve the problem, segregating the namespace so you only had to worry about conflicts between names in a single domain and not with names in everyone else's domain. And once you have a hierarchy, you have to have a top level to it. If you remove the current top level, then what used to be the second level becomes the top level. And you have to resolve all the conflicts when two different organizations own the same second-level name.''
I don't buy it. Thanks for your explanations, but they just don't convince me. I bet there are many more.com domains now than there were hostnames "when the network was 0.01% the size it is today". The same mechanisms we use now to deal with name conflicts in the.com namespace could be used to deal with conflicts in a TLD-less namespace. As you correctly point out, a TLD-less system would be similar to putting what is now under.com on the top-level. So it's exactly the same as we now have under.com, except without the.com at the end. If there is any problem without TLDs, the same problem exists in the.com namespace.
Note that I am not proposing to assign everybody who currently holds a second level domain to get assigned one of my newfangled TLD-less domains. As you point out, that would raise problems where two entities own the same SLD under two different TLDs.
Why don't we just get rid of TLDs altogether? They don't do much besides confusing users and force site operators to register more domains, anyway. We have.orgs that aren't non-profit organizations, country TLDs for sites that have little to do with that country, and on and on. The only valid case I see is that TLDs _sometimes_ can differentiate between different versions of a site tailored for different locations, but even there...you can do that differentiation through other means. Really, if it were up to me, I'd get rid of TLDs.
``KDE and Gnome both have... issues... in particular the fact that there are two desktops in the first place fragmenting application development and massively duplicating effort.''
Just to nitpick, the issue here isn't that there are two desktops (competition is good), but that they fragment application development and lead to duplication of effort. Fortunately, work is being done to limit that (e.g. at freedesktop.org).
``If you prevent people from bypassing technical limitations which protect copyright, you should have a corresponding mandate preventing copyright holders from using the technical limitation to claim other rights that they wouldn't normally have.''
I don't know the exact text of the DMCA, but the EUCD does the exact opposite. At least, the Dutch implementation of it explicitly states that bypassing the technical measures, _by itself_ is a criminal offense. It also states that members of the public have certain rights, _unless_ the technical measures are in the way of those. In that case, the technical measures take precedence, because it is a criminal offense to circumvent them.
Now, I have always argued that there is no need whatsoever to make circumventing "technical measures to protect copyright" illegal. It is already illegal to infringe on copyright. So if you circumvent the measures and do things that you normally aren't allowed to do, you're breaking the law. If you circumvent the measures to do things you are normally allowed to do, that shouldn't be illegal. In fact, it should rather be illegal for the technical measures to get in the way of you doing what you are normally allowed to do.
The only conclusion I can draw from this is that the EUCD (and, I guess, the DMCA) was never intended to protect copyright. What it does is grant companies a way to further extend their power at the expense of customers, that is, the public. Simply slap some DRM on your product and you can limit your users' rights and extend your own power indefinitely. And the great thing is, since circumventing the DRM is a _criminal_ offense, the government has to do the enforcing for you. Meaning that the public gets to foot the bill of enforcing a law that restricts the freedom of the very same public. A greater victory for corporate government there never was!
Last year I setup a dual box zimbra system to replace some rather high traffic imap servers that served ~1200 users with 550+ concurrent during periods of heavy load, with a *lot* of incoming and outgoing mail peppered full of attachments. I was pretty skeptical at first about how the system would hold up, but not only was it solid, in many ways it was much faster than the previous system, especially with the mailboxes that were huge in size.
The only thing that surprises me is that this continues to surprise people. In generaly, I have found that open source software tends to beat the proprietary incumbents on performance, and often scalability. It may get other things wrong, but generally not those.
The exceptions are, of course, programs that attempt to be imitations of their proprietary counterparts. I find these are sometimes significantly more sluggish than the product they imitate.
I'm surprised nobody seems to have brought this up yet, but I will.
Think about the language he is using.
Is he encouraging people to go into record stores, grabbing copies of his albums, and running?
Or is he encouraging people to make copies of his music and distributing it?
The former is stealing. The latter is copyright infringement. There is a difference. When someone steals from you, you lose something that you had. When someone makes a copy of something you have the copyright to, you don't lose anything. It can be argued that you lose the potential to make some money, but that's a sticky issue - in at least some cases, copyright infringement has been shown to actually boost profits. Anyway, that's not important here.
What is important is that we keep the terminology straight. Copyright infringement is not stealing. People who share music are not thieves. We shouldn't encourage them to be thieves, either. And we shouldn't let the RIAA set the rules of the game, by copying their slanted language.
``Years ago, LISP hackers used to talk about how great it was that LISP programs could modify themselves while they were running. Few useful programs ever actually did so.''
Well, yes and no, but that wasn't the point I was going to make here. I did want to add that Lisp designers and implementers have gone to great lengths to make everything possible, and the cases that can be efficient efficient. So if you have a good Lisp implementation, you can do all the wonderful dynamic stuff...but you can also write your program in a fashion that makes it more amenable to optimization, and expect it to run fast.
The new dynamic languages have shown people the power of the first part. Now, they are struggling to get the last part right.
``Espeically about Dynamic typing being too much of a good thing since it screwes with optimization.''
That actually isn't the real problem with dynamic typing. The real problem is that type checking can help catch many errors. Static typing catches these errors before your program is run. Dynamic typing does so at run time. So, where static typing will force you to delay shipping your program until the bugs (that type checking can catch, and there are many of those) are fixed, dynamic typing will let you ship your buggy program and wait for your customer to call you after it ate 3 months of their work.
The other day, someone asked me what I think of Myspace. Now, I really have something against the site, but I couldn't really explain it to her. It just feels...wrong. I noticed this sentiment is common among geeks, even geeks like me who are actually sociable people. I have been too tired to really try putting my finger on what exactly it is that is wrong with Myspace (and its ilk), but maybe others have had better luck. If you recognize my sentiment and have maneged to put it into words, could you please post?
Social networking sites are a great idea (whose time has finally come, it seems), but the implementation could use some improvement. What we need is standards, so that profiles from one site can be linked from another. I have been dragged into one social networking site kicking and screaming, and I am on a few other sites that happen to do social networking (though I joined for different reasons), but I'd rather avoid them altogether as long as there isn't a widely implemented standard so that I can ACTUALLY LINK TO PROFILES, instead of having to ask my friends to please create a profile on that other site as well, because that's what I happen to use.
``We'll need some screwed up revolution again after sitting through hundreds of frivolous suits, since greed on both sides (consumers and the industry) overshadows their reasoning.''
The nice thing is that you can take action here yourself. License your own works under a license that protects users' rights (copyleft), and favor works under permissive licenses for your own usage.
One step at a time, we will move towards a freeer world. It's working for software. I believe media is next.
While on the subject, I invite everyone to reply with their favorite suppliers of permissive-licensed music.
I was thinking along those lines, too. Probably, Microsoft's and Novell's mutual interest in this is that whatever software will be dominant in a few years, you can always easily run _their_ software alongside it. Virtualization fits that picture; just look at what Parallels is doing on Macintel: you can run Windows and its apps alongside OS X and its apps, all on the same desktop. It would be good for Microsoft and Novell if people ended up running SuSE, Windows and MS Office that way, after all, that would mean people needing licenses for all three.
``The first priority for the lab team will be to ensure interoperability between Microsoft and Novell virtualization technologies.''
That is definitely not the place I would start. First of all, I hardly think interoperability in virtualization is the most important, and secondly, as far as I know, we already _have_ interoperable virtualization.
Instead of virtualization, I would start with file formats and move to protocols from there.
Of course, neither of these would be issues if there were standards and both parties adhered to them.
Slashdot Mirror
``It wont work anywhere but the US, I would buy from it, but it seems their attitude towards the rest of the world seems to consist of "no, fuck off".
Lame, and they need to fix it, but anyhow.''
Why fix it if it ain't broken? I live in the Rest of the World, and I can get MP3s or better cheaply or even for free, all legal. I have no need of this new service. I know the same is true for many other restoftheworlders, in the Netherlands and elsewhere.
Thanks for the insightful post.
``with the right settings (mainly the defaults) in LameMP3 128abr/vbr works wonders.''
Problem is, when I get the MP3s from somewhere else, I don't control how they are made. Many MP3s that I find in the wild are junk, for one reason or another.
``The other problem with other formats like vorbis is many portable players don't support the format.''
Mine does, though. Obviously, or I wouldn't have bought it.
Nice but...I don't want any more MP3s. I don't think my hearing is especially great, but MP3s have an annoying something I call jingling in the region where (among other things) some part of percussion is. Ever since I first noticed this, MP3s have started to make me grimace. Not all of them, but enough of them that I am not paying for more MP3s. My Vorbis files don't suffer from the same problem, so I'm happy most of my music is in that format.
If I can buy major-label music in Vorbis format again, I might.
My dust (since I'm not betting any money on this) is on open standards.
.NET. We're seeing Microsoft submit their inventions to standards bodies. There is innovation and there is standardization. We're not there yet, but we're getting closer.
Let the EU mandate open standards for use in their own communications (both internally and to citizens). Since no one vendor will control the standard, vendor lock-in is avoided* and freedom of choice provided.
In my opinion, that is all we should aim for. Let people be free to choose the product they want. If that is a home-built PC with a custom-built Linux installation, fine. If it is a Sun workstation that comes bundled with Solaris, fine too. Dell PC with bundled Windows? Great!
As long as we're free to choose.
Slowly, we're actually moving in this direction. Just look at the whole ODF vs. OOXML circus. Or look at
* This won't happen when standardizing on win32, because Microsoft will be the one controlling the standard, with others playing catch-up.
The question is what sandboxing really solves. Supposedly, we already have processes in isolated address spaces. They interact with the rest of the system through interfaces exposed by the operating system. You can sandbox all you want, but, eventually, you are still going to have some interaction between the sandboxed process and the rest of the system.
I see much more value in writing software in languages where the now common types of exploits can't occur. If we can stop programs from wrongly referencing memory, i.e. going outside the bounds of allocated data structures, that will be a great step, eliminating many current vulnerabilities. And we can do that...we just have to not use the unsafe constructs from C (and not replace them by other unsafe constructs, obviously).
``...Communistic copyright laws...''
Now there is an interesting concept...wouldn't the communist thing to do to _not_ restrict the rights to only one individual, but rather to let the whole community use the work as they see fit? I think "communist" countries even used to do that.
Ah, so you seem to actually know what zero-day means. Would you explain it here for the public benefit?
The summary makes me think it is some kind of stack smashing attack; probably an integer overflow. These can occur in the PDF parsing code, before you even have to look at features like scripting. On the other hand, if PDF is anything like PostScript here, and I believe it is, it is a programming language itself, which might lead to exploitable situations.
Also, an integer overflow was recently found and fixed in xpdf. This could be the same bug.
``To be sure, copying for private use is still permitted - which is, after all, the reason for the flat-rate levy payable on certain devices. However, if special anti-copying technology has been employed to protect the medium, e.g. a music CD, such protection may not be circumvented by any means. The Ministry of Justice has given clear expression to this prohibition: "There is no 'right of private copying' at the expense of rights holders". This also means that consumers who download a file from the Internet must first check whether the offer is legal. How users are supposed to do so remains unclear, says the National Federation of Consumer Organisations.''
Comparing this to the Dutch (from the Netherlands, a small country that borders Germany in the west) equivalent of copyright law, I get the following.
1. Copying for personal use is permitted by basic copyright law, which, in the Netherlands, has been in place for a pretty long time. I imagine the same to be true in Germany.
2. Not allowing the circumvention of "technical measures" is from the EUCD, the EU equivalent of the DMCA. Both Germany and the Netherlands have this.
3. In the Netherlands at least, downloading a file from the Internet constitutes making a copy for personal use, which is expressly permitted as per 1. (That is, for anything that is on media, except software. Books don't apply as thy aren't on media, music does, and software doesn't, because it is explicitly mentioned as an exception.)
I would be mildly surprised if 3 were different in Germany, i.e. you were not allowed to download music files under all circumstances. What is illegal, in the Netherlands, is circumventing the DRM. Anything that involves that (making a copy of th contents of the DVD, playing the DVD) therefore cannot be done legally. Downloading a file from the Internet does not involve curcimventing DRM, so isn't made ilelgal by tha.t
``Because we tried that, and it didn't work. When ARPANet was starting, the namespace was flat. Every host had a name, there wasn't any hierarchical organization. When the network was less than 0.01% the size it is today, it was already too hard to handle name conflicts in that flat namespace. The hierarchical namespace with dot seperators that we use in DNS today was introduced to solve the problem, segregating the namespace so you only had to worry about conflicts between names in a single domain and not with names in everyone else's domain. And once you have a hierarchy, you have to have a top level to it. If you remove the current top level, then what used to be the second level becomes the top level. And you have to resolve all the conflicts when two different organizations own the same second-level name.''
.com domains now than there were hostnames "when the network was 0.01% the size it is today". The same mechanisms we use now to deal with name conflicts in the .com namespace could be used to deal with conflicts in a TLD-less namespace. As you correctly point out, a TLD-less system would be similar to putting what is now under .com on the top-level. So it's exactly the same as we now have under .com, except without the .com at the end. If there is any problem without TLDs, the same problem exists in the .com namespace.
I don't buy it. Thanks for your explanations, but they just don't convince me. I bet there are many more
Note that I am not proposing to assign everybody who currently holds a second level domain to get assigned one of my newfangled TLD-less domains. As you point out, that would raise problems where two entities own the same SLD under two different TLDs.
Oh yeah. And since I am too tired now to make a complete, coherent, well-formulated argument, such is left as an exercise to the reader.
Why don't we just get rid of TLDs altogether? They don't do much besides confusing users and force site operators to register more domains, anyway. We have .orgs that aren't non-profit organizations, country TLDs for sites that have little to do with that country, and on and on. The only valid case I see is that TLDs _sometimes_ can differentiate between different versions of a site tailored for different locations, but even there...you can do that differentiation through other means. Really, if it were up to me, I'd get rid of TLDs.
``KDE and Gnome both have ... issues ... in particular the fact that there are two desktops in the first place fragmenting application development and massively duplicating effort.''
Just to nitpick, the issue here isn't that there are two desktops (competition is good), but that they fragment application development and lead to duplication of effort. Fortunately, work is being done to limit that (e.g. at freedesktop.org).
``If you prevent people from bypassing technical limitations which protect copyright, you should have a corresponding mandate preventing copyright holders from using the technical limitation to claim other rights that they wouldn't normally have.''
I don't know the exact text of the DMCA, but the EUCD does the exact opposite. At least, the Dutch implementation of it explicitly states that bypassing the technical measures, _by itself_ is a criminal offense. It also states that members of the public have certain rights, _unless_ the technical measures are in the way of those. In that case, the technical measures take precedence, because it is a criminal offense to circumvent them.
Now, I have always argued that there is no need whatsoever to make circumventing "technical measures to protect copyright" illegal. It is already illegal to infringe on copyright. So if you circumvent the measures and do things that you normally aren't allowed to do, you're breaking the law. If you circumvent the measures to do things you are normally allowed to do, that shouldn't be illegal. In fact, it should rather be illegal for the technical measures to get in the way of you doing what you are normally allowed to do.
The only conclusion I can draw from this is that the EUCD (and, I guess, the DMCA) was never intended to protect copyright. What it does is grant companies a way to further extend their power at the expense of customers, that is, the public. Simply slap some DRM on your product and you can limit your users' rights and extend your own power indefinitely. And the great thing is, since circumventing the DRM is a _criminal_ offense, the government has to do the enforcing for you. Meaning that the public gets to foot the bill of enforcing a law that restricts the freedom of the very same public. A greater victory for corporate government there never was!
So, will this office suite, which is being sent to Lotus users, be backward compatible with what the recipients are currently using?
:-)
Will it be based on OpenOffice.org?
Will it run faster than OpenOffice.org?
Will it have a less clunky interface than common office suites?
Just some questions from a curious observer.
The only thing that surprises me is that this continues to surprise people. In generaly, I have found that open source software tends to beat the proprietary incumbents on performance, and often scalability. It may get other things wrong, but generally not those.
The exceptions are, of course, programs that attempt to be imitations of their proprietary counterparts. I find these are sometimes significantly more sluggish than the product they imitate.
I'm surprised nobody seems to have brought this up yet, but I will.
Think about the language he is using.
Is he encouraging people to go into record stores, grabbing copies of his albums, and running?
Or is he encouraging people to make copies of his music and distributing it?
The former is stealing. The latter is copyright infringement. There is a difference. When someone steals from you, you lose something that you had. When someone makes a copy of something you have the copyright to, you don't lose anything. It can be argued that you lose the potential to make some money, but that's a sticky issue - in at least some cases, copyright infringement has been shown to actually boost profits. Anyway, that's not important here.
What is important is that we keep the terminology straight. Copyright infringement is not stealing. People who share music are not thieves. We shouldn't encourage them to be thieves, either. And we shouldn't let the RIAA set the rules of the game, by copying their slanted language.
``Years ago, LISP hackers used to talk about how great it was that LISP programs could modify themselves while they were running. Few useful programs ever actually did so.''
Well, yes and no, but that wasn't the point I was going to make here. I did want to add that Lisp designers and implementers have gone to great lengths to make everything possible, and the cases that can be efficient efficient. So if you have a good Lisp implementation, you can do all the wonderful dynamic stuff...but you can also write your program in a fashion that makes it more amenable to optimization, and expect it to run fast.
The new dynamic languages have shown people the power of the first part. Now, they are struggling to get the last part right.
``Espeically about Dynamic typing being too much of a good thing since it screwes with optimization.''
That actually isn't the real problem with dynamic typing. The real problem is that type checking can help catch many errors. Static typing catches these errors before your program is run. Dynamic typing does so at run time. So, where static typing will force you to delay shipping your program until the bugs (that type checking can catch, and there are many of those) are fixed, dynamic typing will let you ship your buggy program and wait for your customer to call you after it ate 3 months of their work.
The other day, someone asked me what I think of Myspace. Now, I really have something against the site, but I couldn't really explain it to her. It just feels...wrong. I noticed this sentiment is common among geeks, even geeks like me who are actually sociable people. I have been too tired to really try putting my finger on what exactly it is that is wrong with Myspace (and its ilk), but maybe others have had better luck. If you recognize my sentiment and have maneged to put it into words, could you please post?
Social networking sites are a great idea (whose time has finally come, it seems), but the implementation could use some improvement. What we need is standards, so that profiles from one site can be linked from another. I have been dragged into one social networking site kicking and screaming, and I am on a few other sites that happen to do social networking (though I joined for different reasons), but I'd rather avoid them altogether as long as there isn't a widely implemented standard so that I can ACTUALLY LINK TO PROFILES, instead of having to ask my friends to please create a profile on that other site as well, because that's what I happen to use.
``We'll need some screwed up revolution again after sitting through hundreds of frivolous suits, since greed on both sides (consumers and the industry) overshadows their reasoning.''
The nice thing is that you can take action here yourself. License your own works under a license that protects users' rights (copyleft), and favor works under permissive licenses for your own usage.
One step at a time, we will move towards a freeer world. It's working for software. I believe media is next.
While on the subject, I invite everyone to reply with their favorite suppliers of permissive-licensed music.
``...to make Linux desktops work with Windows servers.''
Worst of both worlds!
I was thinking along those lines, too. Probably, Microsoft's and Novell's mutual interest in this is that whatever software will be dominant in a few years, you can always easily run _their_ software alongside it. Virtualization fits that picture; just look at what Parallels is doing on Macintel: you can run Windows and its apps alongside OS X and its apps, all on the same desktop. It would be good for Microsoft and Novell if people ended up running SuSE, Windows and MS Office that way, after all, that would mean people needing licenses for all three.
``The first priority for the lab team will be to ensure interoperability between Microsoft and Novell virtualization technologies.''
That is definitely not the place I would start. First of all, I hardly think interoperability in virtualization is the most important, and secondly, as far as I know, we already _have_ interoperable virtualization.
Instead of virtualization, I would start with file formats and move to protocols from there.
Of course, neither of these would be issues if there were standards and both parties adhered to them.