I real interesting case concerning copyright and the courts is Coca-Cola v Bob Kolody. This is a long article and delves into some of the problems that individuals face in going up against large corporations. It is a very interesting story that contains many aspects of the way the law works (or fails to) in reality. Not the way some of us idealistic slashdotters who have read the Constitution think that the law works.
This is NOT true! Once it is introduced in court it becomes public but it still retains its copyright and, if it contains trademarked images, then it is protected by trademark. Further, if it has a patented invention (leaving aside the probability that the US patent office failed to properly research the application) you cannot build that invention without licensing the patent. Once something is introduced in court you have the right to see it provided that the judge has not ordered it sealed (to protect a minor defendant, corporate trade secret, or for reasons of National Security) and fair use rights will grant you the right to publish it (or parts of it) in a news report but the original author will always retain the copyright. That assumes that the US congress continues to lengthen copyright terms everytime Mickey Mouse is poised to fall into the public domain.
For example: Let's say that I write a short story about Mickey Mouse and attempt to sell it. Mr. Eisner, through his lawyers, will attempt to stop my distributing/selling it. In reality, being a broke programmer that lacks the funds to take on a multinational corporation in a court of law, I would be forced to concede before I ever entered a court room. But lets assume that I did have the funds and the tenacity to attempt to take on such a battle. First, the complainant, Disney, would file their complaint, or lawsuit, and attach exibits, namely my story, and submit it to the court. At that point they have not violated copyright law by reprinting my story for their complaint as it is needed for them to make their case. Second, although my story will now become part of the court record -- and therefore open to public review -- I would still own the copyright on that story; that means that even if Disney prevailed in court and loved the story that I wrote they still would not have the right to publish it without making a deal with me; and for that matter no one else can publish it without making a deal with me and Disney (since it is a work derivied from their character).
Where it will really become interesting is if it is considered a database that could be protected under the proposed HR 3261. A timeline is a collection of facts that could conceivably be protected by the proposed law; that is the reason for releasing it under the Creative Commons license. Fortunately, collections of fact are only protected if they are organized by some unique means. Courts have ruled that phone books, because that are sorted alphabetically, are not protected at the moment; that is why corporations that collect data are trying to change the law. I would guess that numeric and chronologic ordering of data would not be considered a unique method of organizing the data and thus would not be protectable under the current law.
The X server is implied. Your average developer is capable of dealing with all of the above so they aren't the real problem. Problems arise when people that don't know about computers (windows or linux) start downloading software or clicking on email attachments. Besides employees can be told that they are not allowed to install any new software. I know this because my girlfriend uses my computer (Linux) and still after two years clicks to install plugins from Mozilla. Even ones that come from Microsoft and obviously won't work on Linux. she has smoked her desktop at least twice by doing this. My desktop, we both stay logged in all of the time, has never even hiccupped from her actions.
Granted, my last windows deployment of any size was NT 4.0 for services and workstations with workstations/98SE. I have also played with XP on a friend's computer. I have a friend that has told me these things as well as he is a windows expert. And I'll conceed those points to you in a large environment where you have windows experts everywhere.
Where you are missing the points though is in small to medium offices without any experts on scene. If you look at the default installations windows looses on every one of those points. It's default security settings are similair to those of 70's and 80's UNIX deployments that have default guest accounts! You might say that you would need a Linux expert to do these things but I say that you only need the expert once to set up the system. I've heard of many Linux deployments that just work for years on end. Windows needs to be babysat on a regular basis. I have never heard from my friends of a Windows deployment, with the exception of one machine = one service, that Windows is stable for any length of time. This is a topic that we argue about passionately. Of the few people that I actually respect their abilities in windows, it usually boils down to this. Windows, when behind a good firewall, and patched continuiously, and pet/maintained regularly, and properly configured by someone who really knows what they are doing is pretty stable. Linux, on the other hand, need merely be behind a firewall and it will work for years! Even if that Linux box is running many different services on it.
PLEASE... before posting such utter crap next time, stop, think, then don't. This is only crap from the point of view of a well trained M$ junkie. M$ has trained you to apply patches almost daily. They have trained you in how to back out patches that don't work as promised. They have trained you to wait months for a patch, even when an exploit is in the wild. And best of all, they have trained you to open the door with your wallet in hand when the M$ rep shows up and asks (just like in the commericials) "So, how much software do you want to buy today?"
The thing to keep in mind here is that they are most likely shooting for a corporate desktop where the secretaries will have a very limited portfolio of applications. They just need things like email, web, word processing, and a spreadsheet. Linux is an ideal client for that!
1. It doesn't catch all of the M$ viruses out there.
2. If it does catch a virus it will only blow away the user's account and not the whole computer.
3. User email accounts can be time limited to only send x messages per minute. This will further retard the proliferation of nasty email attached worms. (IP_TABLES LIMIT)
4. Software that is installed in a user's account runs with limited priviledges and is not going to muck up anything outside of the user's account. (It is also out of the reach of other users)
5. The installation and applications can be custom tailored to an organization so that there is no super-corporation dictating that ALL computers will have Winblows Media Slayer installed.
6. Trivial little things, like having the default search page be an internal corporate server, can be setup in a CD image so that everything is the way the corporation doing the deploying wants it and not the way some license agreement with Redmond mandates.
7. Documents will automatically be protected from other users by being protected in seperate home directories.
8. Usage of company computers would be limited to those people that have accounts on the computers.
I have written the following email to Kiss, their supplier, samsung and their US distributer: sales@mtsbs.com.
To: sale@kiss-technology.com bo.lustrup@kiss-technology.com sales@mtsbs.com dcewebmaster@samsungusa.com
Kiss-Tech,
You have stolen the property of the Open Source Software Community! Your actions will not be forgotten. I am one of millions of people that have recently become upset with your actions. Do you really think that irritating the OSS community is the best thing to do when your company relies on their support? You will loose your license rights under the GPL to distribute any and all OSS code, including the GNU/Linux OS that is at the core of your product. The GPL is not merely a guidline - it is the way that we live. As for its legal teeth: I hope that you are the first company that gets to test it out in court. The reason that it has never been challenged in court is because it is extremely clear cut. Do you treat the DVD-CSS' and the movie studios' copyrights as you do the FSF/OSS/GPL copyrights? The community will not stand for this!
If your products ever make it to the shores of America, since I work selling consumer electronics, I will work my very best to talk everybody out of purchasing your pirated products. I take the Open Source community that I am a part of very seriously and I consider you to be an enemy of it. You should move back to Microsoft and quit getting a free ride from us.
The only way that you can relieve this situation is a complete release of your source code. Since your president stated that the release of code is never going to happen I can state that I will never purchase one of your products and will bad mouth your company, using the same kind of lies that your president used in his interview with the Danish National Radio, to persuade every customer in the store that I work that your product is almost always returned by very angry customers because it is considered JUNK!
Your behavior is despicable! It's more like Kiss-my-ass-technology!
Tres
PS The reference site:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design6/news.html
Slashdotters: Also note that SCOX stock was off $1.00 or 5.85% probably due to the Novell indemnification.
This is the comment that I wish that I had mod points for!
It reminds me of the person that got detained for passing through airport security with a copy of "Hayduke Lives"; a continuation of Edward Abbey's "The Monkey Wrench Gang" and one of the best books I've ever read. It is also one of the first books that talks about environmental extremeists and the cover contains a picture of someone's hand holding a bundle of dynamite. Even though the book is a comedy and was written years ago the airport officials known for their exceptionally high IQ's saw fit to detain him.
While poking through the links in this article -- Mother still runs 98se on her K6-2 350MHz AMD and since its Winblows it is in desperate need of a reinstallation (meaning: I need some security patches before they revert back to their vaporware state) -- I noticed something a little bit distressing; I've been a Linux user since about '94 and I thought that our numbers were growing but I may have been mistaken. The earliest date that the archives have is Jan 2001 but for some reason xpdf doesn't like it. The earliest HTML on record is June 2001 and it shows a usage for Linux operating systems accessing Google to be 1%. All the months that I checked, including the last month in 2002 (December 2001 doesn't mention OS's), Linux still seems to be stuck at 1%! Even the most recent month archived: September 2003 still has Linux at 1%. What is going on here?
The usage for web browsers is also shown and Mozilla, as mixed in with Netscape 5+, is slowly gaining but everything is getting trownsed by Micro$haft's Internet Exploder. Perhaps Mac's new broswer, based on KHTML, will start to show up soon and help Mozilla and some other things so that Small&Limp^H^H^H^H Microsoft doesn't continue to dictate our future.
Just how many Linux on the Desktop users of us are out there? Perhaps that is a good Ask Slashdot question.
Business
1. What best describes your Linux knowledge level?
2. What best describes your involvment with Linux?
3. What region are you from?
4. How many systems does your organization have?
5. What is the typical hardware used in your Linux systems?
6. What is the primary Linux distribution you use?
7. How complete of a replacement for Windows do you feel Linux is?
This question refers you to the top of the page (an error maybe in Mozilla ID:2002122222) It also contains the words "DO_NOT_COPY_THIS_LINK"
8. What organizations would you recommend use Linux?
9. Rank the importance of support resources you use for Linux.
10. Rank the importance of server operating attributes to your organization.
(1 indicates a preference for low product cost and more administive and end-user time. 5 indicates a high up-front product cost but less user effort)
11. Rank the importance of easy initial configuration and setup of a server operating system against easier administration.
(1 is easy initial setup and lousy administration and 5 is difficult initial setup and great administration)
12. Rank the reasons you like Linux as a server compared to Windows Server 2003.
There are about twenty sub questions here. Look at this comment
13. What do you use Linux servers for in your organization?
14. If you are running a Linux cluster, how many nodes are there?
15. What does your organization use Linux clients for?
16. Do you run Windows emulators or virtual machines?
17. List the top one or two possible improvements that you would like to see made to Windows Server.
18. List the top one or two improvements that you would like to see made to Linux.
19. Please list your e-mail address if you don't mind answering follow-up questions. Your e-mail address will only be used for follow-up on this survey.
Many of the questions that are actually buttons are broken (at least on my browser) so I couldn't get past this page.
Home
Refused to load. Probably due to the Slashdot effect.
There is not really any way out of selling a contract except the expiration date.
To be clear this should probably say: There is really no way of getting out of a contract that you previously sold except the expiration date. Since you sold it earlier the correct way out would be to buy it back. It is too much trouble to contact the original buyer and buy it back so you need to buy another contract that makes money while the first one loses money. This is starting to get into the area of spreads straddles and other options investment strategies -- This is offtopic considering the original topic of: SCO's attempt to screw over the Linux community
Thanks for the correction. I realized that I should have said exercised and not bought/sold but only after I submitted. The other is a typo, one of three in the origianl post.
There is a lot to learn about this topic, such as covered options, spreads, straddles, etc.. But since the original topic was SCO blah blah blah. I thought just covering the basics was enough. I think I did ok at that but I did make that one significant mistake about exercising options.
Shorting is borrowing someone else's stock so that you can sell it now. Eventually you will have to replace that stock but there is no timeframe involved. Betting on movement in a prticular timeframe is where options come into play. If you buy puts then you are buying the right to sell the stock within a certain time frame at a price that is determined at the time the options contract is bought/sold. If you are buying calls then you are buying the right to buy stock within a certain time frame at a price determined at the time the options contract is bought. Likewise you can sell the contracts thereby selling someone else the opportunity to exercise the options contract within a certain time frame.
Bottom Line: buying options contracts has a predetermined downside: the cost of the contract. On the good side there is no limit to the upside; the more the price of a stck moves in the direction that you guessed the more money that you make. On the other side of the story is that of selling contracts. There is a limited upside: the cost of the contract. There is an unlimited downside though; the more the price of a stock moves against you the more you loose. There is not really any way out of selling a contract except the expiration date. That said you can buy an options contract that is in the opposite direction from the one that you previously sold and stop the bloodletting there by essentially making money on one instrument while loosing it on another at the same time. The general rule of thumb, the reason that there are about as many people selling contracts, either puts or calls, as there are people that want to buy them is that 90% of the contracts will expire worthless.
There is a major differences in options contracts in Europe and the US: when they can be exercised. In the US options can be bought and sold at any time during the contract. In Europe contracts can only be sold on the date that they mature. Either way they are priced by a method known as The Blask Scholes method. These two economists won a Noble Prize for developing these equations and the markets have never been the same since. The price that they come up with is based on many different things: the current price, the volume of stock, the amount of stock in play, and how fast the price is moving, among others.
Back to selling stock short. The borrowing of stock is arranged by brokerage houses so you need not worry about that detail but if the price goes up the brokerage house can and will demand that you have enough cash in your account to cover the margin between the current price and that which you bought it at. If you don't have enough margin the brokerage house will do whatever it thinks is necessary to cover their ass as anything that you cannot cover is their loss. That often includes liquidating everything that you own. Just make sure that you have the required margin!!!
This could actually be the program that gets me to dig out the hundred plus albums and my old turn-table from storage and start to work. Now I either need a really long patch cord or I'll have to find one of those old Radio-Shack pre-amps that allows you to hook up a turn-table to a standard Line-In plug. The impendance is not the same on a decent turn-table as it is on other things that you plug into stereos (like CD players, tape decks, etc.) and if I remember correctly you can barely hear the music without one. Hell, I'm not even sure that my current pre-amp (my system has seperate components: pre-amp, tuner, and three power amps for the front, center, and rear speakers) in the other room (yes I'm too lazy to get up and check right now) has a Phono connection. I know finding one of the old pre-amps from Radio Shack is probably out of the question - does anyone else remember the little black boxes with RCA in and RCA out jacks, a screw terminal for the ground wire that also comes out of turn-tables and a power cord? They didn't even have any knobs or switches!!! If I can't find my old one and my current system doesn't have a Phono in then I'll have to find an old stereo at Goodwill to plug the turn-table into. If my component pre-amp does then how much sound quality will I lose with a 30 foot patch cord? I've never plugged my computer and stereo together. How many other Slashdotters are going to have to figure out some creative wiring to make this work? For that matter how many other Slashdotters still have vinyl? I wonder if this trip down memory lane will induce any flashbacks!;-)
If SCO didn't buy the patents and copyrights associated with UNIX then what exactly did they buy?
If they did buy the patents and copyrights and Novell is refusing to transfer them then why isn't SCO suing Novell for breach of contract? That would seem to be a necessary first step before suing IBM and threatening world+dog.
Do we need to start a Linus Torvalds Legal Defense Fund? (as this slashdot article suggests)
Can't Linus claim that by sending him a patch on the very public LKML that it is no longer secret. The suit alleges trade secret misappropriation not patent or copyright infringement.
Is there any chance that we, the Linux community, can file a class action suit against SCO for all of this crap that they are putting us through? If we sue for damages we could tally all of the time that the community has spent investigating this situation.
If we, the community, all started to sell SCO short (and buy some puts and sell some calls) wouldn't that give Darl something to think about as the market capitalization of SCO went shooting through the floor? I wonder if his salary/bonus is related to the performance of SCO's stock.
How many simultaneous legal battles could SCO fight before going bankrupt? It would seem that every Linux vendor, support service provider, user of Linux, and especially the 1500 large companies that received a threatening letter from SCO now have a claim against SCO. And if everyone of those claimants filed in their own jurisdiction SCO would have to deploy more lawyers worldwide than Mico$haft!
Shouldn't John 'KGB' Ashcroft be weighing in on the issue considering the massive deployment of GNU/Linux throughout the US government? The DOD, NSA, NASA, and many other parts of the government are heavily invested in Linux.
If SCO were to go bankrupt then what would happen to whatever (see question #1) they did buy from Novell?
Assuming they were to be sold through a bankruptcy court, would it be advantagous for the FSF, Linux International, or another Liberated software advocate to buy them?
How adversely would SCO's bottom line be affected if all of its customers (mostly the fast food chains) were to receive a letter indicating the likelihood of SCO staying in business for another year if some of the counter claims that I have mentioned come to fruition? We shouldn't forget to include a blurb about the ease of moving over to Linux and the amount of money that they could save. Basically some of our own FUD!
Using the same legal theories that the RIAA is using against Bertlesman for supporting Napster, is it possible to go after M$ for their obvious legal action by proxy?
Since the SCO lawsuit is alleging breach of contract with IBM, is there any possibility that IBM could post the contract that it had with SCO for the development of the now defunct True64 version of UNIX?
On that same note, is there any possibility that Novell would post their contract selling UNIX to Caldera (now SCO)?
The media seems to suggest that SCO is trying to put pressure on IBM or some other company to acquire it. Who in their right mind would want to buy into this nightmare?
If SCO didn't buy the patents and copyrights associated with UNIX then what exactly did they buy?
If they did buy the patents and copyrights and Novell is refusing to transfer them then why isn't SCO suing Novell for breach of contract? That would seem to be a necessary first step before suing IBM and threatening world+dog.
Do we need to start a Linus Torvalds Legal Defense Fund? (as this slashdot article suggests)
Can't Linus claim that by sending him a patch on the very public LKML that it is no longer secret. The suit alleges trade secret misappropriation not patent or copyright infringement.
Is there any chance that we, the Linux community, can file a class action suit against SCO for all of this crap that they are putting us through? If we sue for damages we could tally all of the time that the community has spent investigating this situation.
If we, the community, all started to sell SCO short (and buy some puts and sell some calls) wouldn't that give Darl something to think about as the market capitalization of SCO went shooting through the floor? I wonder if his salary/bonus is related to the performance of SCO's stock.
How many simultaneous legal battles could SCO fight before going bankrupt? It would seem that every Linux vendor, support service provider, user of Linux, and especially the 1500 large companies that received a threatening letter from SCO now have a claim against SCO. And if everyone of those claimants filed in their own jurisdiction SCO would have to deploy more lawyers worldwide than Mico$haft!
Shouldn't John 'KGB' Ashcroft be weighing in on the issue considering the massive deployment of GNU/Linux throughout the US government? The DOD, NSA, NASA, and many other parts of the government are heavily invested in Linux.
If SCO were to go bankrupt then what would happen to whatever (see question #1) they did buy from Novell?
Assuming they were to be sold through a bankruptcy court, would it be advantagous for the FSF, Linux International, or another Liberated software advocate to buy them?
How adversely would SCO's bottom line be affected if all of its customers (mostly the fast food chains) were to receive a letter indicating the likelihood of SCO staying in business for another year if some of the counter claims that I have mentioned come to fruition? We shouldn't forget to include a blurb about the ease of moving over to Linux and the amount of money that they could save. Basically some of our own FUD!
Using the same legal theories that the RIAA is using against Bertlesman for supporting Napster, is it possible to go after M$ for their obvious legal action by proxy?
Since the SCO lawsuit is alleging breach of contract with IBM, is there any possibility that IBM could post the contract that it had with SCO for the development of the now defunct True64 version of UNIX?
On that same note, is there any possibility that Novell would post their contract selling UNIX to Caldera (now SCO)?
The media seems to suggest that SCO is trying to put pressure on IBM or some other company to acquire it. Who in their right mind would want to buy into this nightmare?
If there are any lawyers trolling slashdot then please post some possible answers to these questions. I promise not to hold you to those comments as legal advice as I'm not a party to this action in any way (other than being an avid gnu/Linux user).
Proud to be an opinionated, elitist asshole... I mean a member of the Slashdot community.
This is on topic but it might take me a minute to get there.
I think that we in the Free/Liberated software world (and to a lesser extent the Open Source world) should come up with a way of running cryptographically signed code on our preferred operating systems. I know that most of you equate signed code with Digital Rights Management (DRM) but that is only one use and not necessarily a bad one. There are many other times when making sure the code that you are running is the code that you want to be running and not some Trojanized version.
From a DRM perspective, would it be such a bad thing to have code that is signed run on a Linux machine? For the people that want to pirate movies and music this is obviously NOT a good thing; but for the rest of us it could be. The reason that we cannot watch a DVD legally on our Linux boxes is because the DVD-CCA won't allow anyone to write a player and distribute the source code. If there was a way to verify that a program was running in an unaltered state then I see no reason that the DVD-CCA would not allow us to produce a Free Software player for Linux. They could be assured that the player would only play the movie and not make an un-encrypted copy of it because the program would refuse to run if it had been modified.
Another use for such a system would be online games. Cheats have almost destroyed some of the online gaming communities by giving programmers and script kiddies an overwhelmingly unfair advantage over those that play fair.
Getting back to the topic at hand, if it were possible to run cryptograpphically signed code on Linux then it would be possible to construct an electronic voting system where ALL of the code is available. This would eliminate the possibility of an obscure bug in either Micro$aft's operating system or database server either tainting the results, or worse, being exploited to influence the results of the election. I believe what we need is an electronic voting system where:
The source code can be audited.
The voter is given a piece of paper confirming his/her vote.
The paper trail is cryptographically signed so we can tell if the paper was altered.
The paper could be fed back into a machine that could recover the votes cast thereby ensuring the voter that his/her voate was recorded correctly.
This would also have the advantage of saving the taxpayers a lot of money. Not only could we run the program on commodity hardware but we could port the program to all of the languages of the world that are used in either a Democracy or a Republic. This would enable voting to take place in many third world countries that cannot afford to produce a program for electronic voting. Further the system could be used by the illiterate as they could be presented with pictures of the candidate and simply touch their favorite.
I don't know if this is even possible from a technical perspective. If I can go into the kernel code (or the device driver code) then I could probably find some way around the protections. But I still think the goal of being able to run cryptographically signed code, that is released under the GPL w/ source, would be beneficial to all of the members of the Free/Liberated software community.
This is not a Score:5 Funny! It is a serious issue. I agree with your suggested actions but the real point is that this is not a sideshow. It is playing Center-Stage! And yes I vote and help out the EFF. The problem is that America is NOT a democracy; it is a Republic. When was the last time you got to vote on an issue? You only get to vote for a representative for your views. By the time a candidate has spent enough money for you to have heard of their name they are so indebted to the people and corporations that paid for the advertising that got his/her name infront of you that their decisions are already bought and paid for. It is unfortunate that those same deep pockets finance the court battles over the DMCA as well.
Now that I'm on to politics I'm going to shut up so a single post doesn't take my karma from good to Satan's hellspawn w/ a keyboard.
Probably not. It was most probably a work for hire commissioned by the DVD-CSS. They then own the copyright for that work and it is most definitely in their interest that it not be sold but licensed and only to a select few.
If you are talking about an individual that wrote a program that copies DVDs then, according to the DMCA (a law that I despise), he is a criminal. That's like saying that Xerox has a right to sell a product that is designed to remove the binding from a book and copy it 'en masse. I think the 321 studios would have a better leg to stand on if they created a product that let the user excerpt a portion of a DVD for a movie review; that is where their legal arguments seem to be focused anyway. The real difference here is that Xerox can sell a regular copy machine because it has substantial non-infringing uses where as in the digital world, thanks to the DMCA, the use doesn't matter; it is the capabilities of that device (the ability to circumvent copy control technology) that matter.
A point that has not been argued that I think would be interesting to see debated is the definition of effective in the following passage: No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
Isn't the fact that it was circumvented proof that it is no longer effective.
Regardless of how you look at it the DMCA is in direct conflict with a number of the other laws (some being case law - as defined by the courts) that allow Fair use
Offtopic: So much for moderating in one of my favorite topics of discussion.
This is what Micro$oft is trying to do with the hardware encryption in the X-box and just as soon in Palladium as Bill can get the chip manufacturers to produce the needed hardware components. If the chip vendors are cool about it we could end up with a system that's open enough for GNU/Linux to use to secure the data it contains. Obviously they won't be able to read each others data or work the same way but if the standard is open and published I'm sure some ingenious kernel hacker will come up with a driver that allows for Ultra Secure GNU/Linux Server platforms. And lest we not forget the varios flavors of BSD, OpenVMS, etc..
Having just installed Debian last week on my girlfriends computer I can tell you that the default kernel is 2.2.20. I then upgraded to sid and it didn't change the kernel during the upgrade. Follow that with:
apt-get install kernel-source-2.4.20
and NOW it is running 2.4.20. Since her machine is an old Pentium 100MHz I'll probably leave it there since I don't have the patience to wait for it. It took hours to rebuild the kernel -- then I made a mistake in selecting the drivers -- I picked the SYM53C8XX instead of the NCR53C8XX for the origianl 810 chipset (not even the 810a). Another night of waiting for the machine!!! Yea! She's definitely going to have to stay where she is!:-)
The first suggestion that I have is NOT to let an electrician install the wiriing unless you KNOW that they are capable of doing it right. I had to set up a business (an ISP) with a network that was really elaborate. It even had a central UPS with outlets in every room that were connected to the central UPS so those outlets wouldn't loose power when the city's power grid failed. During the installation I walked in and was appalled at what I saw: the cat5 wire was laying on the ground with crap piled on top of it, it had nicks in it from being pulled through aluminum 2x4s, and was generally screwed. We had to redo it all the network stuff! From an electricians point of view if it carries a current then it works. This could not be farther from the truth. If a cat5 wire is bent with a radius of less than one inch or if it is pulled with a force that exceeds 25 lbs it is no longer cat5. It will carry current but the twists in the wire will be f*cked up and it won't be able to transmit data at its rated speed. I strongly suggest that you either pull the cable yourself or get someone that KNOWS what they are doing. Catagory 5 wiring cannot be within four feet of a flourscent light, it can't drop more than two flooors without a stress relieving loop, etc.. There is a LOT to know.
What I would do, since wire is cheap relatively speaking, is pull everything that you think that you might need. I would pull a coaxial, two cat5e, and a phone line (cat2) into all of the places in question and then leave what you are not going to use in the walls for later. Perhaps even a piece of fiber (single mode) There are some companies that have wire bundles where all of the above mentioned wire is in a single bundle so that you only need to pull one wire (albeit a large one). I would also pull a few pieces of heavy nylon cord for use later. These help when you need an additional run. Simply tape the new wire (fiber?) to the nylon and pull the nylon cord out, thereby pulling the new wire into place. You may want to pull a replacement piece of nylon cord with it for the next time.
Remember that you must be as gentle as possible with the wire so as not to pull the twists out of copper wire or shatter the glass in a piece of fiber as you run it through the walls. The last thing that I would strongly suggest doing is testing the cable after you have pulled it. I'm not talking about one of those $45 boxes with lights that your nearest Fried Electronics (Fry's Electronics - I used to work there and most of the sales people don't know shit about this stuff) will try to sell you. I'm talking about a $5-8k tester from Fluke, Wavelan, etc. that can tell you what the wire is actually transmitting. You should be able to find someplace to rent one for the day or perhaps your lucky enough to have a friend in the business. Or you could pull one of the tricks that Fry's customers do all of the time: buy yourself the tester and then return it within the 30 day return policy that they offer.
Once you have run all of the wires that you may need for the next 10-20 years then you will be free to hook whatever you want to the ends of it. There was a slashdot discussion on the merits of a Linux multi-media server that you may want to search for as well. First get the infrastructure (wires) installed and then your options are wide open.
Slashdot Mirror
I real interesting case concerning copyright and the courts is Coca-Cola v Bob Kolody. This is a long article and delves into some of the problems that individuals face in going up against large corporations. It is a very interesting story that contains many aspects of the way the law works (or fails to) in reality. Not the way some of us idealistic slashdotters who have read the Constitution think that the law works.
For example: Let's say that I write a short story about Mickey Mouse and attempt to sell it. Mr. Eisner, through his lawyers, will attempt to stop my distributing/selling it. In reality, being a broke programmer that lacks the funds to take on a multinational corporation in a court of law, I would be forced to concede before I ever entered a court room. But lets assume that I did have the funds and the tenacity to attempt to take on such a battle. First, the complainant, Disney, would file their complaint, or lawsuit, and attach exibits, namely my story, and submit it to the court. At that point they have not violated copyright law by reprinting my story for their complaint as it is needed for them to make their case. Second, although my story will now become part of the court record -- and therefore open to public review -- I would still own the copyright on that story; that means that even if Disney prevailed in court and loved the story that I wrote they still would not have the right to publish it without making a deal with me; and for that matter no one else can publish it without making a deal with me and Disney (since it is a work derivied from their character).
Where it will really become interesting is if it is considered a database that could be protected under the proposed HR 3261. A timeline is a collection of facts that could conceivably be protected by the proposed law; that is the reason for releasing it under the Creative Commons license. Fortunately, collections of fact are only protected if they are organized by some unique means. Courts have ruled that phone books, because that are sorted alphabetically, are not protected at the moment; that is why corporations that collect data are trying to change the law. I would guess that numeric and chronologic ordering of data would not be considered a unique method of organizing the data and thus would not be protectable under the current law.
The X server is implied. Your average developer is capable of dealing with all of the above so they aren't the real problem. Problems arise when people that don't know about computers (windows or linux) start downloading software or clicking on email attachments. Besides employees can be told that they are not allowed to install any new software. I know this because my girlfriend uses my computer (Linux) and still after two years clicks to install plugins from Mozilla. Even ones that come from Microsoft and obviously won't work on Linux. she has smoked her desktop at least twice by doing this. My desktop, we both stay logged in all of the time, has never even hiccupped from her actions.
Where you are missing the points though is in small to medium offices without any experts on scene. If you look at the default installations windows looses on every one of those points. It's default security settings are similair to those of 70's and 80's UNIX deployments that have default guest accounts! You might say that you would need a Linux expert to do these things but I say that you only need the expert once to set up the system. I've heard of many Linux deployments that just work for years on end. Windows needs to be babysat on a regular basis. I have never heard from my friends of a Windows deployment, with the exception of one machine = one service, that Windows is stable for any length of time. This is a topic that we argue about passionately. Of the few people that I actually respect their abilities in windows, it usually boils down to this. Windows, when behind a good firewall, and patched continuiously, and pet/maintained regularly, and properly configured by someone who really knows what they are doing is pretty stable. Linux, on the other hand, need merely be behind a firewall and it will work for years! Even if that Linux box is running many different services on it.
PLEASE... before posting such utter crap next time, stop, think, then don't. This is only crap from the point of view of a well trained M$ junkie. M$ has trained you to apply patches almost daily. They have trained you in how to back out patches that don't work as promised. They have trained you to wait months for a patch, even when an exploit is in the wild. And best of all, they have trained you to open the door with your wallet in hand when the M$ rep shows up and asks (just like in the commericials) "So, how much software do you want to buy today?"
1. It doesn't catch all of the M$ viruses out there.
2. If it does catch a virus it will only blow away the user's account and not the whole computer.
3. User email accounts can be time limited to only send x messages per minute. This will further retard the proliferation of nasty email attached worms. (IP_TABLES LIMIT)
4. Software that is installed in a user's account runs with limited priviledges and is not going to muck up anything outside of the user's account. (It is also out of the reach of other users)
5. The installation and applications can be custom tailored to an organization so that there is no super-corporation dictating that ALL computers will have Winblows Media Slayer installed.
6. Trivial little things, like having the default search page be an internal corporate server, can be setup in a CD image so that everything is the way the corporation doing the deploying wants it and not the way some license agreement with Redmond mandates.
7. Documents will automatically be protected from other users by being protected in seperate home directories.
8. Usage of company computers would be limited to those people that have accounts on the computers.
9. ... etc. etc. etc.
To: sale@kiss-technology.com bo.lustrup@kiss-technology.com sales@mtsbs.com dcewebmaster@samsungusa.com
Kiss-Tech,
You have stolen the property of the Open Source Software Community! Your actions will not be forgotten. I am one of millions of people that have recently become upset with your actions. Do you really think that irritating the OSS community is the best thing to do when your company relies on their support? You will loose your license rights under the GPL to distribute any and all OSS code, including the GNU/Linux OS that is at the core of your product. The GPL is not merely a guidline - it is the way that we live. As for its legal teeth: I hope that you are the first company that gets to test it out in court. The reason that it has never been challenged in court is because it is extremely clear cut. Do you treat the DVD-CSS' and the movie studios' copyrights as you do the FSF/OSS/GPL copyrights? The community will not stand for this!
If your products ever make it to the shores of America, since I work selling consumer electronics, I will work my very best to talk everybody out of purchasing your pirated products. I take the Open Source community that I am a part of very seriously and I consider you to be an enemy of it. You should move back to Microsoft and quit getting a free ride from us.
The only way that you can relieve this situation is a complete release of your source code. Since your president stated that the release of code is never going to happen I can state that I will never purchase one of your products and will bad mouth your company, using the same kind of lies that your president used in his interview with the Danish National Radio, to persuade every customer in the store that I work that your product is almost always returned by very angry customers because it is considered JUNK!
Your behavior is despicable! It's more like Kiss-my-ass-technology!
Tres
PS The reference site: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design6/news.html
Slashdotters: Also note that SCOX stock was off $1.00 or 5.85% probably due to the Novell indemnification.
It reminds me of the person that got detained for passing through airport security with a copy of "Hayduke Lives"; a continuation of Edward Abbey's "The Monkey Wrench Gang" and one of the best books I've ever read. It is also one of the first books that talks about environmental extremeists and the cover contains a picture of someone's hand holding a bundle of dynamite. Even though the book is a comedy and was written years ago the airport officials known for their exceptionally high IQ's saw fit to detain him.
The 2003 year end doesn't have an OS percentage. nor does 2002 year end or 2001 year end.
The usage for web browsers is also shown and Mozilla, as mixed in with Netscape 5+, is slowly gaining but everything is getting trownsed by Micro$haft's Internet Exploder. Perhaps Mac's new broswer, based on KHTML, will start to show up soon and help Mozilla and some other things so that Small&Limp^H^H^H^H Microsoft doesn't continue to dictate our future.
Just how many Linux on the Desktop users of us are out there? Perhaps that is a good Ask Slashdot question.
The index for the archives is here.
1. What best describes your Linux knowledge level?
2. What best describes your involvment with Linux?
3. What region are you from?
4. How many systems does your organization have?
5. What is the typical hardware used in your Linux systems?
6. What is the primary Linux distribution you use?
7. How complete of a replacement for Windows do you feel Linux is?
This question refers you to the top of the page (an error maybe in Mozilla ID:2002122222) It also contains the words "DO_NOT_COPY_THIS_LINK" 8. What organizations would you recommend use Linux?
9. Rank the importance of support resources you use for Linux.
10. Rank the importance of server operating attributes to your organization. (1 indicates a preference for low product cost and more administive and end-user time. 5 indicates a high up-front product cost but less user effort)
11. Rank the importance of easy initial configuration and setup of a server operating system against easier administration. (1 is easy initial setup and lousy administration and 5 is difficult initial setup and great administration)
12. Rank the reasons you like Linux as a server compared to Windows Server 2003.
There are about twenty sub questions here.
Look at this comment 13. What do you use Linux servers for in your organization?
14. If you are running a Linux cluster, how many nodes are there?
15. What does your organization use Linux clients for?
16. Do you run Windows emulators or virtual machines?
17. List the top one or two possible improvements that you would like to see made to Windows Server.
18. List the top one or two improvements that you would like to see made to Linux.
19. Please list your e-mail address if you don't mind answering follow-up questions. Your e-mail address will only be used for follow-up on this survey.
Many of the questions that are actually buttons are broken (at least on my browser) so I couldn't get past this page.
Home
Refused to load. Probably due to the Slashdot effect.
Well there they are.
To be clear this should probably say: There is really no way of getting out of a contract that you previously sold except the expiration date. Since you sold it earlier the correct way out would be to buy it back. It is too much trouble to contact the original buyer and buy it back so you need to buy another contract that makes money while the first one loses money. This is starting to get into the area of spreads straddles and other options investment strategies -- This is offtopic considering the original topic of: SCO's attempt to screw over the Linux community
There is a lot to learn about this topic, such as covered options, spreads, straddles, etc.. But since the original topic was SCO blah blah blah. I thought just covering the basics was enough. I think I did ok at that but I did make that one significant mistake about exercising options.
Bottom Line: buying options contracts has a predetermined downside: the cost of the contract. On the good side there is no limit to the upside; the more the price of a stck moves in the direction that you guessed the more money that you make. On the other side of the story is that of selling contracts. There is a limited upside: the cost of the contract. There is an unlimited downside though; the more the price of a stock moves against you the more you loose. There is not really any way out of selling a contract except the expiration date. That said you can buy an options contract that is in the opposite direction from the one that you previously sold and stop the bloodletting there by essentially making money on one instrument while loosing it on another at the same time. The general rule of thumb, the reason that there are about as many people selling contracts, either puts or calls, as there are people that want to buy them is that 90% of the contracts will expire worthless.
There is a major differences in options contracts in Europe and the US: when they can be exercised. In the US options can be bought and sold at any time during the contract. In Europe contracts can only be sold on the date that they mature. Either way they are priced by a method known as The Blask Scholes method. These two economists won a Noble Prize for developing these equations and the markets have never been the same since. The price that they come up with is based on many different things: the current price, the volume of stock, the amount of stock in play, and how fast the price is moving, among others.
Back to selling stock short. The borrowing of stock is arranged by brokerage houses so you need not worry about that detail but if the price goes up the brokerage house can and will demand that you have enough cash in your account to cover the margin between the current price and that which you bought it at. If you don't have enough margin the brokerage house will do whatever it thinks is necessary to cover their ass as anything that you cannot cover is their loss. That often includes liquidating everything that you own. Just make sure that you have the required margin!!!
This could actually be the program that gets me to dig out the hundred plus albums and my old turn-table from storage and start to work. Now I either need a really long patch cord or I'll have to find one of those old Radio-Shack pre-amps that allows you to hook up a turn-table to a standard Line-In plug. The impendance is not the same on a decent turn-table as it is on other things that you plug into stereos (like CD players, tape decks, etc.) and if I remember correctly you can barely hear the music without one. Hell, I'm not even sure that my current pre-amp (my system has seperate components: pre-amp, tuner, and three power amps for the front, center, and rear speakers) in the other room (yes I'm too lazy to get up and check right now) has a Phono connection. I know finding one of the old pre-amps from Radio Shack is probably out of the question - does anyone else remember the little black boxes with RCA in and RCA out jacks, a screw terminal for the ground wire that also comes out of turn-tables and a power cord? They didn't even have any knobs or switches!!! If I can't find my old one and my current system doesn't have a Phono in then I'll have to find an old stereo at Goodwill to plug the turn-table into. If my component pre-amp does then how much sound quality will I lose with a 30 foot patch cord? I've never plugged my computer and stereo together. How many other Slashdotters are going to have to figure out some creative wiring to make this work? For that matter how many other Slashdotters still have vinyl? I wonder if this trip down memory lane will induce any flashbacks! ;-)
Can you name one college student who enjoys lacking funds!
- If SCO didn't buy the patents and copyrights associated with UNIX then what exactly did they buy?
- If they did buy the patents and copyrights and Novell is refusing to transfer them then why isn't SCO suing Novell for breach of contract? That would seem to be a necessary first step before suing IBM and threatening world+dog.
- Do we need to start a Linus Torvalds Legal Defense Fund? (as this slashdot article suggests)
- Can't Linus claim that by sending him a patch on the very public LKML that it is no longer secret. The suit alleges trade secret misappropriation not patent or copyright infringement.
- Is there any chance that we, the Linux community, can file a class action suit against SCO for all of this crap that they are putting us through? If we sue for damages we could tally all of the time that the community has spent investigating this situation.
- If we, the community, all started to sell SCO short (and buy some puts and sell some calls) wouldn't that give Darl something to think about as the market capitalization of SCO went shooting through the floor? I wonder if his salary/bonus is related to the performance of SCO's stock.
- How many simultaneous legal battles could SCO fight before going bankrupt? It would seem that every Linux vendor, support service provider, user of Linux, and especially the 1500 large companies that received a threatening letter from SCO now have a claim against SCO. And if everyone of those claimants filed in their own jurisdiction SCO would have to deploy more lawyers worldwide than Mico$haft!
- Shouldn't John 'KGB' Ashcroft be weighing in on the issue considering the massive deployment of GNU/Linux throughout the US government? The DOD, NSA, NASA, and many other parts of the government are heavily invested in Linux.
- If SCO were to go bankrupt then what would happen to whatever (see question #1) they did buy from Novell?
- Assuming they were to be sold through a bankruptcy court, would it be advantagous for the FSF, Linux International, or another Liberated software advocate to buy them?
- How adversely would SCO's bottom line be affected if all of its customers (mostly the fast food chains) were to receive a letter indicating the likelihood of SCO staying in business for another year if some of the counter claims that I have mentioned come to fruition? We shouldn't forget to include a blurb about the ease of moving over to Linux and the amount of money that they could save. Basically some of our own FUD!
- Using the same legal theories that the RIAA is using against Bertlesman for supporting Napster, is it possible to go after M$ for their obvious legal action by proxy?
- Since the SCO lawsuit is alleging breach of contract with IBM, is there any possibility that IBM could post the contract that it had with SCO for the development of the now defunct True64 version of UNIX?
- On that same note, is there any possibility that Novell would post their contract selling UNIX to Caldera (now SCO)?
- The media seems to suggest that SCO is trying to put pressure on IBM or some other company to acquire it. Who in their right mind would want to buy into this nightmare?
Any thoughts?When it comes to legal matters the only dictionary that counts is Black's Law Dictionary. Just a little FYI.
- If SCO didn't buy the patents and copyrights associated with UNIX then what exactly did they buy?
- If they did buy the patents and copyrights and Novell is refusing to transfer them then why isn't SCO suing Novell for breach of contract? That would seem to be a necessary first step before suing IBM and threatening world+dog.
- Do we need to start a Linus Torvalds Legal Defense Fund? (as this slashdot article suggests)
- Can't Linus claim that by sending him a patch on the very public LKML that it is no longer secret. The suit alleges trade secret misappropriation not patent or copyright infringement.
- Is there any chance that we, the Linux community, can file a class action suit against SCO for all of this crap that they are putting us through? If we sue for damages we could tally all of the time that the community has spent investigating this situation.
- If we, the community, all started to sell SCO short (and buy some puts and sell some calls) wouldn't that give Darl something to think about as the market capitalization of SCO went shooting through the floor? I wonder if his salary/bonus is related to the performance of SCO's stock.
- How many simultaneous legal battles could SCO fight before going bankrupt? It would seem that every Linux vendor, support service provider, user of Linux, and especially the 1500 large companies that received a threatening letter from SCO now have a claim against SCO. And if everyone of those claimants filed in their own jurisdiction SCO would have to deploy more lawyers worldwide than Mico$haft!
- Shouldn't John 'KGB' Ashcroft be weighing in on the issue considering the massive deployment of GNU/Linux throughout the US government? The DOD, NSA, NASA, and many other parts of the government are heavily invested in Linux.
- If SCO were to go bankrupt then what would happen to whatever (see question #1) they did buy from Novell?
- Assuming they were to be sold through a bankruptcy court, would it be advantagous for the FSF, Linux International, or another Liberated software advocate to buy them?
- How adversely would SCO's bottom line be affected if all of its customers (mostly the fast food chains) were to receive a letter indicating the likelihood of SCO staying in business for another year if some of the counter claims that I have mentioned come to fruition? We shouldn't forget to include a blurb about the ease of moving over to Linux and the amount of money that they could save. Basically some of our own FUD!
- Using the same legal theories that the RIAA is using against Bertlesman for supporting Napster, is it possible to go after M$ for their obvious legal action by proxy?
- Since the SCO lawsuit is alleging breach of contract with IBM, is there any possibility that IBM could post the contract that it had with SCO for the development of the now defunct True64 version of UNIX?
- On that same note, is there any possibility that Novell would post their contract selling UNIX to Caldera (now SCO)?
- The media seems to suggest that SCO is trying to put pressure on IBM or some other company to acquire it. Who in their right mind would want to buy into this nightmare?
If there are any lawyers trolling slashdot then please post some possible answers to these questions. I promise not to hold you to those comments as legal advice as I'm not a party to this action in any way (other than being an avid gnu/Linux user).Proud to be an opinionated, elitist asshole ... I mean a member of the Slashdot community.
I think that we in the Free/Liberated software world (and to a lesser extent the Open Source world) should come up with a way of running cryptographically signed code on our preferred operating systems. I know that most of you equate signed code with Digital Rights Management (DRM) but that is only one use and not necessarily a bad one. There are many other times when making sure the code that you are running is the code that you want to be running and not some Trojanized version.
From a DRM perspective, would it be such a bad thing to have code that is signed run on a Linux machine? For the people that want to pirate movies and music this is obviously NOT a good thing; but for the rest of us it could be. The reason that we cannot watch a DVD legally on our Linux boxes is because the DVD-CCA won't allow anyone to write a player and distribute the source code. If there was a way to verify that a program was running in an unaltered state then I see no reason that the DVD-CCA would not allow us to produce a Free Software player for Linux. They could be assured that the player would only play the movie and not make an un-encrypted copy of it because the program would refuse to run if it had been modified.
Another use for such a system would be online games. Cheats have almost destroyed some of the online gaming communities by giving programmers and script kiddies an overwhelmingly unfair advantage over those that play fair.
Getting back to the topic at hand, if it were possible to run cryptograpphically signed code on Linux then it would be possible to construct an electronic voting system where ALL of the code is available. This would eliminate the possibility of an obscure bug in either Micro$aft's operating system or database server either tainting the results, or worse, being exploited to influence the results of the election. I believe what we need is an electronic voting system where:
- The source code can be audited.
- The voter is given a piece of paper confirming his/her vote.
- The paper trail is cryptographically signed so we can tell if the paper was altered.
- The paper could be fed back into a machine that could recover the votes cast thereby ensuring the voter that his/her voate was recorded correctly.
This would also have the advantage of saving the taxpayers a lot of money. Not only could we run the program on commodity hardware but we could port the program to all of the languages of the world that are used in either a Democracy or a Republic. This would enable voting to take place in many third world countries that cannot afford to produce a program for electronic voting. Further the system could be used by the illiterate as they could be presented with pictures of the candidate and simply touch their favorite.I don't know if this is even possible from a technical perspective. If I can go into the kernel code (or the device driver code) then I could probably find some way around the protections. But I still think the goal of being able to run cryptographically signed code, that is released under the GPL w/ source, would be beneficial to all of the members of the Free/Liberated software community.
What exactly is an ANTIcircumvention device?
An armour condom. No wait, that would be an anti-circumcision device. Nevermind.
Now that I'm on to politics I'm going to shut up so a single post doesn't take my karma from good to Satan's hellspawn w/ a keyboard.
If you are talking about an individual that wrote a program that copies DVDs then, according to the DMCA (a law that I despise), he is a criminal. That's like saying that Xerox has a right to sell a product that is designed to remove the binding from a book and copy it 'en masse. I think the 321 studios would have a better leg to stand on if they created a product that let the user excerpt a portion of a DVD for a movie review; that is where their legal arguments seem to be focused anyway. The real difference here is that Xerox can sell a regular copy machine because it has substantial non-infringing uses where as in the digital world, thanks to the DMCA, the use doesn't matter; it is the capabilities of that device (the ability to circumvent copy control technology) that matter.
A point that has not been argued that I think would be interesting to see debated is the definition of effective in the following passage:
No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
Isn't the fact that it was circumvented proof that it is no longer effective.
Regardless of how you look at it the DMCA is in direct conflict with a number of the other laws (some being case law - as defined by the courts) that allow Fair use
Offtopic: So much for moderating in one of my favorite topics of discussion.
This is what Micro$oft is trying to do with the hardware encryption in the X-box and just as soon in Palladium as Bill can get the chip manufacturers to produce the needed hardware components. If the chip vendors are cool about it we could end up with a system that's open enough for GNU/Linux to use to secure the data it contains. Obviously they won't be able to read each others data or work the same way but if the standard is open and published I'm sure some ingenious kernel hacker will come up with a driver that allows for Ultra Secure GNU/Linux Server platforms. And lest we not forget the varios flavors of BSD, OpenVMS, etc..
Having just installed Debian last week on my girlfriends computer I can tell you that the default kernel is 2.2.20. I then upgraded to sid and it didn't change the kernel during the upgrade. Follow that with: :-)
apt-get install kernel-source-2.4.20
and NOW it is running 2.4.20. Since her machine is an old Pentium 100MHz I'll probably leave it there since I don't have the patience to wait for it. It took hours to rebuild the kernel -- then I made a mistake in selecting the drivers -- I picked the SYM53C8XX instead of the NCR53C8XX for the origianl 810 chipset (not even the 810a). Another night of waiting for the machine!!! Yea! She's definitely going to have to stay where she is!
So you WANT your neighbors to know what kinda pervert you are??
What I would do, since wire is cheap relatively speaking, is pull everything that you think that you might need. I would pull a coaxial, two cat5e, and a phone line (cat2) into all of the places in question and then leave what you are not going to use in the walls for later. Perhaps even a piece of fiber (single mode) There are some companies that have wire bundles where all of the above mentioned wire is in a single bundle so that you only need to pull one wire (albeit a large one). I would also pull a few pieces of heavy nylon cord for use later. These help when you need an additional run. Simply tape the new wire (fiber?) to the nylon and pull the nylon cord out, thereby pulling the new wire into place. You may want to pull a replacement piece of nylon cord with it for the next time.
Remember that you must be as gentle as possible with the wire so as not to pull the twists out of copper wire or shatter the glass in a piece of fiber as you run it through the walls. The last thing that I would strongly suggest doing is testing the cable after you have pulled it. I'm not talking about one of those $45 boxes with lights that your nearest Fried Electronics (Fry's Electronics - I used to work there and most of the sales people don't know shit about this stuff) will try to sell you. I'm talking about a $5-8k tester from Fluke, Wavelan, etc. that can tell you what the wire is actually transmitting. You should be able to find someplace to rent one for the day or perhaps your lucky enough to have a friend in the business. Or you could pull one of the tricks that Fry's customers do all of the time: buy yourself the tester and then return it within the 30 day return policy that they offer.
Once you have run all of the wires that you may need for the next 10-20 years then you will be free to hook whatever you want to the ends of it. There was a slashdot discussion on the merits of a Linux multi-media server that you may want to search for as well. First get the infrastructure (wires) installed and then your options are wide open.
Good luck. Tres