They tried to downplay Linux as a competitor in the beginning saying its open source, no one is commercially responsible, blah blah.
Then over a period of time they accepted and acknowledged that Linux is a threat to MS.
Since the open source movement picked up quite well and became very successful, they tried to downplay it with their hastily drawn "Software Choice" movement which stopped making sense beyond the first sentence. Actually this particular thing shows the tremendous pressure the various departments of MS is under and their desparation to come up with such a ridiculous idea.
Given all this, it is not surprising that MS should now start embracing Linux. Look at it from MS point of view. They dont care if they sell windows or Linux, as long as they sell to make enough money. Okay, assuming that that argument is true to a certain extent, consider their choices in that path.
They would definitely try to utilise the name of Linux as much as possible. They would on the other hand also try to come up with innovative ways of creating a monopoly, and creating a layer of closed source on top of Linux.
Even though it looks contradictory, its not difficult to come up with closed source both at application and system level. Modules can be closed source with an open source shim, and applications can be closed source if you jump around linking with libraries. If they find a way to deploy closed-source software on top of linux they would definitely try to create propietery interfaces and propreitery file formats as much as possible.
Even though this sounds ominous, its in a way easier for us open source folks, since it would be much much easier to hack applications running on Linux, than those running over windows. So one aspect we should concentrate on is to make sure that the licensing of Linux makes it impossible to stop anyone from reverse engineering anything that runs on it.
I am not sure if this is currently true, but I would love to hear comments about this. Basically, any propreitary software box I open which runs on Linux should not be able to say "reverse engineering this product is illegal". Atleast it should be impossible to enforce it, if we reverse engineer using only standard linux tools and kernel interfaces.
All that being said, there are definitely some (possibly short-term) positive side to this. If MS wants to sell Linux software (or even Linux itself) they are definitely going to make sure that hardware drivers are extensively supported on Linux (even if they are closed source drivers) which is a good thing. They might also have to then do something about websites that dont work well with Linux browsers (which is again a good thing, unless they decide to port IE to Linux. Actually that may be a good way for win-users to migrate to Linux).
Well lot of wishful thinking, but this may signal the end of bitter commercial antogonism towards open source in general.
I am not sure why he is whining so much because in the end he made one sensible comment:
"... And that will only start to change when the first really big artists jumps from old media to new, trading 15 percent of $30 times 100,000 copies for 100 percent of $0.50 times 1 million copies... "
This is exactly what is waiting to happen. Who loses ? The people who are _NOT_ the artists who are making 85% of $30 times 10000 just because of their existing monopoly.
And we all know... monopoly is bad... right ?
PS: Is quoting his article here a piracy too ? Wooo... I am stealing... I am ashhhhamed...
Some basic flaws
on
Cringely on P2P
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think this guy's whole article makes sense only if you accept his fundamental unwritten premise: that the concept of P2P networking is a zero-revenue generator, and that copying is stealing.
But the whole argument in this issue is whether copying per-se is stealing or not? So the rest of the discussion is just a hyperbole of what happens to the poor movie businesses if they are stolen, and what happens if everyone in NY is a thief, etc.
The issue I have with this approach is that, on the one hand you say its impossible to stop copying, and on the other hand you say copying is stealing. Why not atleast _try_ to see if there is an intermediate standpoint where you _try_ to see if under some business model copying can indeed generate revenue but maynot be as much as the movie and music moguls are making right now.
I dont want to start questions about such a model as such, and I am not even advocating that such a model is definitely practical, but like all other things in this world, it needs to be thought about, given a chance to prove itself in all its manifestations and then be discarded.
It makes sense for the sheiks in Sahara desert to sell water to the passer-bys at atrocious price, but does it make sense to sell water to the dwellers next to a river ?
of screw-ups.
1. Konqueror with popup support could not access their website
2. They seem to have forgotten the poor old "text" surfers. Hey
Lynx users, did you know you have been "stealing" from the internet ???
Be ashamed of yourselves and go stand in a corner!
When I type in an URL like www.comics.com I am essentially "guessing" that this URL exists and contains what I want. If it doesnt I move on. Essentially any URL I type in is similiar to this. Now, www.comics.com cannot put their most confidential stuff at this page and then sue me for not following links. (links from where?)
There is no rule that accessing pages that are available to my web-browser are violation of privacy because the web server is present exactly for that reason: sharing what you dont want to be private.
The bottom line in this case is very simple. Its _my_ freedom of action to type in _any_ goddamn URL I want, in _my_ browser. If some moron in their company doesnt know the difference between their web-share drive and the company private drive, they need to fire him/her.
The company site quotes: "The incident has severely damaged confidence in us as individuals and in Intentia as a company" and I am amused by this. YES thats perfectly true. Any company that handles up such a vital information in such a careless manner DOES NOT deserve much confidence or credibility and they are just proving themselves that they are morons. But instead of accepting their shortcomings they are raving like an infant.
I think the key to their charge is the allegation: "The investigation has shown that there was an unauthorized entry via an IP-address belonging to Reuters." Which pretty much sums it up. Is it illegal to type in any url I want in my browser and view the contents ? I just hope that the verdict is a slap in their face and doesnt set any idiotic precedents.
Anonymous coward, you surely are a paypal guy.
Why dont you atleast mention it ?
People sue companies which have dubious and questionable
contract exactly to make them run a sound business.
This may or maynot be loophole in their software, or
even in their policies, but the very fact that they
try to slip away from any responsibility raises doubts.
Free market doesnt mean freedom to run fraudulent businesses
blaming the customers for being stupid. Free market means
being able to run legitimate businesses freely.
Continuing my earlier post I checked citibank again and looks like some monkey has made major changes to the site and now it behaves erratically with konqueror. Basically I have to create a new account everytime I want to login !
I almost never send out anything by mail except for b'day gifts. I use online banking heavily and my env. is Linux/KDE/Konqueror
Here is my experience: Citibank - Very good for a long time. Recently they started throwing up
on konqueror. But I am confident it was a temp. problem. American Express - Very good Crestar Bank - Horrible Sinners. I moved to citibank basically due to this factor. DCU (Digital Credit Union) - Cool, few months ago they boldly said they dont
support alt. browsers. But seems like Konq works fine now
So overall, 3 out of 4 of my banks.. pretty good eh ?
Reminds me the good old days back in 93-94 when tried to explain what this Linux-thingy is to our profs and struggled with the Slackware and installed successfully after smoking half a dozen lab machines:)
This time when I visited India I was amazed to see that not only was Linux very much a part of their engineering curriculum but the students were encouraged to do most of their projects on Linux. It fetches them extra marks, and students try to learn Linux on their own just so they can get an edge!
It was also amazing to see that local Linux-gurus are charging anywhere between 1000 Rs to 5000Rs ($20 - $100) for installing and trouble-shooting Linux.
Basically the P2P file-sharing that appeals to you is a application layer protocol which needs some sort of networking layer protocol underneath it. Usually IPv4 is that networking layer protocol and this is not something very transparent and hence all the ugly config stuff that you hate.
But since underneath all that, there is a networking layer where you have broadcast media that everyone can talk over theoratically its possible to have the pplication layer P2P right on top of this. You can see something like this if you used the QNET under QNX OS (its a filesharing protocol like NFS, but can run directly on top of ethernet without IP)
The reason why this is not mainstream (there are some sort of equivalents with MS windows and other OSes) is just that it has limited applictions and people havent really thought about it. It should be very easy to implement, say, under linux. Just ask for it:)
I pay $80 every month for cable. I watch only about 30% of the channels and far little content (after all there are 100+ channels 24 hours a day and I watch max 4 hours a day).
If they charged me the same amount for the little subset of content that I watch I would gladly agree to that arrangement.
If they cannot make their content and make it cost less than about $80 per month per viewer then there is some problem with this demand supply curve.
And no, I dont watch the commercials, even though I dont have replay TV or TiVo. Its a simple common sense concept. You can make it as difficult as you want for me to avoid commercials. But still you cant make me watch (and much less buy) what I dont want to watch.
Drill this into the heads : If someone doesnt want to do something, no matter
how much legislation, how much force and how much ranting is used, that person would still not enjoy doing it.
How is this for an idea: Why dont we make a legislation which mandates each person to spend a minimum amount every month on consumer goods instead?
Cynicism and mindless flaiming apart, some thought needs to be given to why there is a basic problem here? Why is it so hard to make programs and make it at a cost that can be profitable by what people are willing to pay for it?
Is it because people have such diverse interests that catering to everyone just shoots up the cost?
Is it because the content makers are placed far away from the consumers ?
Are the costs for items related to producing TV content artificially high because of the flawed models being used till now (a.k.a are these people just plain spolt?) ?
Is it because the investors are just not willing to forgo the model they have always known and used ?
Just think about this: We have the ad model where the ads support the cost for making the shows. And these ads payoff by the profits they make from what I end up buying after watching the ads.
If I am willing to pay up this amount expressly for the cost of making the show then what is the need for the ads ?
I can give you a concrete example. I created a webpage and I also created a gif image. I filled the background of the gif image with some RGB color code. In the webpage I set the background to be the same color code and included the image in the page.
All this looked perfect in konqueror, both colors matched seamlessly. Even netscape on windows was fine, but IE displayed them with different shades. Now, even if I had started off with IE, I would have noticed this problem.
Another example was when I included some image and text in a table with % cols. Shrinking the windows behaved fine on konqueror (and this time IE too) but netscape screwed up the text positioning when the browser was shrunk too small.
No matter how you put it, code rewrite from scratch just means that they ended up with a messy code which got out of control, and had no choice but to spend 18 months rewriting from scratch.
Cynicism apart, I have used Opera (much earlier version), Netscape, the new Mozilla, IE, and even lynx, but being a very picky person when it comes to browsers, I was amazed to see that I didnt have much to complain about Konqueror 3.0.0 Of course if you have used earlier konqueror, you wouldnt even consider it a browser but its amazing how far they have come so fast. I bet they didnt rewrite their core.
Its fast to load (I like to close unused windows), renders well, quite fast in rendering, supports most websites and many times more accurate that IE in rendering! Very neat bookmarks, nice DCOP interface, breeze for writing plugins, neatly handles pesky popups, and on top of everything else, very cute too !
There are many missing wanna-haves like being able to launch your own satellites but otherwise the best browser on earth;)
Firstly, when I talk about presentation, its being simplyfied. As an example
consider the case where P2 is the information to decode the DVD encryption -
an information that was banned by the govt.
Secondly, you are perfectly right about encoding. In a way thats how I came to think
about it. Assume that I published the DVD encryption by swapping all the letters.
Would it still be illegal ? If it is then going further what encoding schemes are
illegal.
And then it hit me that if I can come up with the same encoding scheme to derive
my copyrighted material from some commercial page then the arguements involving
encoding schemes become meaningless.
So if you use the arguement that however little my copy correlates with the original,
I can use the exact same arguement to prove that their other page correlates to my
copyrighted page by exactly the same amount.
Hehe.. I am glad someone caught this. I have thought of this
(and other assumptions too). Well, here is my arguement. Taking alternate
letters is just one way of doing this. Instead of J1, lets take some
independant piece of information. It could be some pre-existing webpage
or whatever. Now come up with a encoding which can transform from P1 to J1.
Notice that J1 was created originally and the encoding scheme came later.
Now use _that_ encoding scheme for deriving from P2 to J2. I agree that
coming up with such a scheme is difficult, but theoratically possible.
And its all for the theory, wondering if, inherently, there is something
like a Godel's theorum.
Let us say that there is a publicly accessible webpage P1 which contains information that is copyrighted by a company C.
Let us also assume that there is another webpage P2 that has information copyrighted by the same company C. This information is confidential and the company prohibits the display of this information on any public pages.
We are trying to explore if Joe, who is an average internet user can display the information on webpage P2 on another webpage JP2 without prior permission from company C.
From the first impressions it might seem like its obvious that Joe is infringing the copyright privileges of company C by displaying the page P2 on his own personal webpage. But if we use some simple logic and simple mathematics, it can be proved that if we consider Joe to be infringing upon company C's copyrights using any set of rules, then the same set of rules can be applied to prove that company C has infringed upon Joe's copyrights. Here is how we proceed.
Step 1: Let us take the webpage P1 and create another page J1 which consists of all the alternate characters from P1.
Let us denote this operation as f(P1) = J1.
The page J1 would be gibberish and would most probably make no sense at all. Also we assume (A1) that this gibberish on this page is not owned by anybody. We will also assume (A2) that Joe can legally copyright this page J1 since it is his creation.
Step 2: Now Joe creates a web page J2 by adding a random letter after each letter in P2.
Let us denote this operation as f1(P2) = J2 We also notice that f(J2) = P2. f1() and f() are mutually inverse operations.
This page would be drastically different from J2 and would most probably we gibberish too. We assume (A3) that Joe can copyright this page J2 since it is his creation.
Now we have f(P1) = J1 and f(J2) = P2
P1, P2 belong to company C and J1 and J2 belong to Joe.
None of the pages put up by Joe show copyrighted material except for his own copyrights.
Joe also puts up a webpage called F which accepts a URL and displays a different page based on the URL. The way this does this is to apply the function f() on the contents of URL and display the output.
As we can notice, if any person goes to F and enters the URL for J2, they see the information P2. If they enter the URL for P1 they see the information J1.
At this point, effectively any user who wants to access the confidential information P2, just need to go to the site F and enter the URL for J2. And whola! They see the confidential information P2.
Now if we apply any set of legal rules to deem this as copyright infringement on the part of Joe, it should be noted that by entering the URL for P1, one is taken to the copyrighted material J1. Hence the same logic can be applied to prove that P1 is infringing on copyrights of Joe.
I have some very good spam filtering based on the content (which is almost
a give away!) The only way this would keep working was if the spammers
did not know what I was filtering on. Please lets keep it this way.
If smart people like Paul start divulging his good techniques, the spammers
will start changing their content too...
The only way we can win was if everyone came up with their own
filters, kept really quiet about it, and the spammers continued to spam
thinking everything was okay. And of course the SPAM-lovers could
still continue to receive all the spam they like without realising
that anything is different in their little world.
Something to think about.
Say an employee is working for a big corporation which makes its profits from exploiting employee ideas for their own use.
Assume that this employee indeed signed the standard inventions disclosure agreement with the company.
Now say that this employee developed a very cool software based on GPLed source code. So obviously this new software is GPLed. Assume that this employee used company time and resources to develop this software, but without negligence of his(her) primary duties. What can the company do to own the rights for this cool software ? They cannot revoke GPL since its based on GPLed source code. What happens then ?
Slashdot Mirror
Dream on ...
Consider all the facts:
They tried to downplay Linux as a competitor in the beginning
saying its open source, no one is commercially responsible, blah blah.
Then over a period of time they accepted and acknowledged that
Linux is a threat to MS.
Since the open source movement picked up quite well and became
very successful, they tried to downplay it with their hastily
drawn "Software Choice" movement which stopped making sense
beyond the first sentence. Actually this particular thing shows
the tremendous pressure the various departments of MS
is under and their desparation to come up with such a ridiculous
idea.
Given all this, it is not surprising that MS should now start
embracing Linux. Look at it from MS point of view. They dont
care if they sell windows or Linux, as long as they sell
to make enough money. Okay, assuming that that argument is
true to a certain extent, consider their choices in that path.
They would definitely try to utilise the name of Linux as much
as possible. They would on the other hand also try to come
up with innovative ways of creating a monopoly, and creating
a layer of closed source on top of Linux.
Even though it looks contradictory, its not difficult to
come up with closed source both at application and system level.
Modules can be closed source with an open source shim, and
applications can be closed source if you jump around linking with
libraries. If they find a way to deploy closed-source software
on top of linux they would definitely try to create
propietery interfaces and propreitery file formats as much as
possible.
Even though this sounds ominous, its in a way easier for us
open source folks, since it would be much much easier to hack
applications running on Linux, than those running over windows.
So one aspect we should concentrate on is to make sure that
the licensing of Linux makes it impossible to stop anyone
from reverse engineering anything that runs on it.
I am not sure if this is currently true, but I would love to
hear comments about this. Basically, any propreitary software
box I open which runs on Linux should not be able to say
"reverse engineering this product is illegal". Atleast it should
be impossible to enforce it, if we reverse engineer using
only standard linux tools and kernel interfaces.
All that being said, there are definitely some (possibly short-term)
positive side to this. If MS wants to sell Linux software
(or even Linux itself) they are definitely going to make sure
that hardware drivers are extensively supported on Linux (even
if they are closed source drivers) which is a good thing.
They might also have to then do something about websites
that dont work well with Linux browsers (which is again a
good thing, unless they decide to port IE to Linux. Actually
that may be a good way for win-users to migrate to Linux).
Well lot of wishful thinking, but this may signal the end of
bitter commercial antogonism towards open source in general.
I am not sure why he is whining so much because in the
... And that will only start to change when the first really ... "
... monopoly is bad ... right ?
... I am ... I am ashhhhamed ...
end he made one sensible comment:
"
big artists jumps from old media to new, trading 15 percent
of $30 times 100,000 copies for 100 percent of $0.50 times
1 million copies
This is exactly what is waiting to happen. Who loses ? The people
who are _NOT_ the artists who are making 85% of $30 times 10000
just because of their existing monopoly.
And we all know
PS: Is quoting his article here a piracy too ? Wooo
stealing
I think this guy's whole article makes sense only if you accept
his fundamental unwritten premise: that the concept of P2P networking
is a zero-revenue generator, and that copying is stealing.
But the whole argument in this issue is whether copying per-se is stealing
or not? So the rest of the discussion is just a hyperbole of what happens
to the poor movie businesses if they are stolen, and what happens if everyone
in NY is a thief, etc.
The issue I have with this approach is that, on the one hand you say
its impossible to stop copying, and on the other hand you say copying is stealing.
Why not atleast _try_ to see if there is an intermediate standpoint
where you _try_ to see if under some business model copying can indeed
generate revenue but maynot be as much as the movie and music moguls are
making right now.
I dont want to start questions about such a model as such, and I am not even
advocating that such a model is definitely practical, but like all other
things in this world, it needs to be thought about, given a chance to
prove itself in all its manifestations and then be discarded.
It makes sense for the sheiks in Sahara desert to sell water to the passer-bys
at atrocious price, but does it make sense to sell water to the dwellers
next to a river ?
Visit this URL: pants-down
After that you can surf all their site with no popups hehe. I am sure this is just a demo but what good is a demo that doesnt work ?
Anyway, I tried it on Konqueror. Feel free to populate this thread with success failure cases :)
Proud-to-be-a-"leech"
Internet "Thief"
of screw-ups. 1. Konqueror with popup support could not access their website 2. They seem to have forgotten the poor old "text" surfers. Hey Lynx users, did you know you have been "stealing" from the internet ??? Be ashamed of yourselves and go stand in a corner!
When I type in an URL like www.comics.com I am essentially
"guessing" that this URL exists and contains what I want. If
it doesnt I move on. Essentially any URL I type in is similiar
to this. Now, www.comics.com cannot put their most confidential
stuff at this page and then sue me for not following links.
(links from where?)
There is no rule that accessing pages that are available to my
web-browser are violation of privacy because the web server is
present exactly for that reason: sharing what you dont want to be private.
The bottom line in this case is very simple. Its _my_ freedom of action
to type in _any_ goddamn URL I want, in _my_ browser.
If some moron in their company doesnt know the difference between
their web-share drive and the company private drive, they need to fire him/her.
The company site quotes: "The incident has severely damaged confidence in us as individuals and in Intentia as a company" and I am amused by this. YES thats perfectly true.
Any company that handles up such a vital information in such a careless manner
DOES NOT deserve much confidence or credibility and they are just proving
themselves that they are morons. But instead of accepting their shortcomings
they are raving like an infant.
I think the key to their charge is the allegation: "The investigation has shown that there was an unauthorized entry via an IP-address belonging to Reuters."
Which pretty much sums it up. Is it illegal to type in any url I want in my browser and
view the contents ? I just hope that the verdict is a slap in their face
and doesnt set any idiotic precedents.
Anonymous coward, you surely are a paypal guy. Why dont you atleast mention it ? People sue companies which have dubious and questionable contract exactly to make them run a sound business. This may or maynot be loophole in their software, or even in their policies, but the very fact that they try to slip away from any responsibility raises doubts. Free market doesnt mean freedom to run fraudulent businesses blaming the customers for being stupid. Free market means being able to run legitimate businesses freely.
Continuing my earlier post I checked citibank again
and looks like some monkey has made major changes to
the site and now it behaves erratically with konqueror.
Basically I have to create a new account everytime I want
to login !
I almost never send out anything by mail except for b'day gifts.
.. pretty good eh ?
I use online banking heavily and my env. is Linux/KDE/Konqueror
Here is my experience:
Citibank - Very good for a long time. Recently they started throwing up
on konqueror. But I am confident it was a temp. problem.
American Express - Very good
Crestar Bank - Horrible Sinners. I moved to citibank basically due to this factor.
DCU (Digital Credit Union) - Cool, few months ago they boldly said they dont
support alt. browsers. But seems like Konq works fine now
So overall, 3 out of 4 of my banks
Reminds me the good old days back in 93-94 when tried :)
to explain what this Linux-thingy is to our profs and
struggled with the Slackware and installed successfully
after smoking half a dozen lab machines
This time when I visited India I was amazed to see that
not only was Linux very much a part of their engineering curriculum
but the students were encouraged to do most of their projects on
Linux. It fetches them extra marks, and students try to learn Linux
on their own just so they can get an edge!
It was also amazing to see that local Linux-gurus are charging anywhere
between 1000 Rs to 5000Rs ($20 - $100) for installing and trouble-shooting
Linux.
Do I smell a business oppurtunity here ?
Basically the P2P file-sharing that appeals to you
:)
is a application layer protocol which needs some sort
of networking layer protocol underneath it. Usually
IPv4 is that networking layer protocol and this is not
something very transparent and hence all the ugly
config stuff that you hate.
But since underneath all that, there is a networking layer
where you have broadcast media that everyone can talk over
theoratically its possible to have the pplication layer P2P
right on top of this. You can see something like this
if you used the QNET under QNX OS (its a filesharing protocol
like NFS, but can run directly on top of ethernet without IP)
The reason why this is not mainstream (there are some sort of
equivalents with MS windows and other OSes) is just that it has
limited applictions and people havent really thought about it.
It should be very easy to implement, say, under linux.
Just ask for it
I pay $80 every month for cable. I watch only about 30%
of the channels and far little content (after all there are 100+ channels
24 hours a day and I watch max 4 hours a day).
If they charged me the same amount for the little subset of content
that I watch I would gladly agree to that arrangement.
If they cannot make their content and make it cost less than about $80 per month
per viewer then there is some problem with this demand supply curve.
And no, I dont watch the commercials, even though I dont have replay TV or TiVo.
Its a simple common sense concept. You can make it as difficult as you want
for me to avoid commercials. But still you cant make me watch (and much less buy)
what I dont want to watch.
Drill this into the heads : If someone doesnt want to do something, no matter
how much legislation, how much force and how much ranting is used,
that person would still not enjoy doing it.
How is this for an idea: Why dont we make a legislation which mandates
each person to spend a minimum amount every month on consumer goods instead?
Cynicism and mindless flaiming apart, some thought needs to be given to
why there is a basic problem here? Why is it so hard to make programs
and make it at a cost that can be profitable by what people are willing to pay for it?
Is it because people have such diverse interests that catering to everyone just
shoots up the cost?
Is it because the content makers are placed far away from the consumers ?
Are the costs for items related to producing TV content artificially high because
of the flawed models being used till now (a.k.a are these people just plain spolt?) ?
Is it because the investors are just not willing to forgo the model they have always
known and used ?
Just think about this:
We have the ad model where the ads support the cost for making the shows. And these ads
payoff by the profits they make from what I end up buying after watching the ads.
If I am willing to pay up this amount expressly for the cost of making the show then
what is the need for the ads ?
I can give you a concrete example. I created a webpage and I also created
a gif image. I filled the background of the gif image with some RGB color code.
In the webpage I set the background to be the same color code and included the
image in the page.
All this looked perfect in konqueror, both colors matched seamlessly. Even netscape
on windows was fine, but IE displayed them with different shades. Now, even
if I had started off with IE, I would have noticed this problem.
Another example was when I included some image and text in a table with % cols.
Shrinking the windows behaved fine on konqueror (and this time IE too)
but netscape screwed up the text positioning when the browser was shrunk too small.
Hope this explains.
No matter how you put it, code rewrite from scratch just means that they
;)
ended up with a messy code which got out of control, and had no choice but
to spend 18 months rewriting from scratch.
Cynicism apart, I have used Opera (much earlier version), Netscape, the new Mozilla,
IE, and even lynx, but being a very picky person when it comes to browsers,
I was amazed to see that I didnt have much to complain about Konqueror 3.0.0
Of course if you have used earlier konqueror, you wouldnt even consider it
a browser but its amazing how far they have come so fast. I bet they didnt
rewrite their core.
Its fast to load (I like to close unused windows), renders well, quite fast in
rendering, supports most websites and many times more accurate that IE in rendering!
Very neat bookmarks, nice DCOP interface, breeze for writing plugins, neatly
handles pesky popups, and on top of everything else, very cute too !
There are many missing wanna-haves like being able to launch your own satellites
but otherwise the best browser on earth
Firstly, when I talk about presentation, its being simplyfied. As an example consider the case where P2 is the information to decode the DVD encryption - an information that was banned by the govt. Secondly, you are perfectly right about encoding. In a way thats how I came to think about it. Assume that I published the DVD encryption by swapping all the letters. Would it still be illegal ? If it is then going further what encoding schemes are illegal. And then it hit me that if I can come up with the same encoding scheme to derive my copyrighted material from some commercial page then the arguements involving encoding schemes become meaningless. So if you use the arguement that however little my copy correlates with the original, I can use the exact same arguement to prove that their other page correlates to my copyrighted page by exactly the same amount.
Hehe .. I am glad someone caught this. I have thought of this
(and other assumptions too). Well, here is my arguement. Taking alternate
letters is just one way of doing this. Instead of J1, lets take some
independant piece of information. It could be some pre-existing webpage
or whatever. Now come up with a encoding which can transform from P1 to J1.
Notice that J1 was created originally and the encoding scheme came later.
Now use _that_ encoding scheme for deriving from P2 to J2. I agree that
coming up with such a scheme is difficult, but theoratically possible.
And its all for the theory, wondering if, inherently, there is something
like a Godel's theorum.
(sigh) ... and they wondered what went wrong ...
.. its simple! its pure common sense .. just read it !
aw c'mon
Let us say that there is a
publicly accessible webpage P1 which contains information that is
copyrighted by a company C.
Let us also assume that there is another webpage P2 that has
information copyrighted by the same company C. This information is
confidential and the company prohibits the display of this information
on any public pages.
We are trying to explore if Joe, who is an average internet user can
display the information on webpage P2 on another webpage JP2 without
prior permission from company C.
From the first impressions it might seem like its obvious that Joe is
infringing the copyright privileges of company C by displaying the page
P2 on his own personal webpage. But if we use some simple logic and
simple mathematics, it can be proved that if we consider Joe to be
infringing upon company C's copyrights using any set of rules, then the
same set of rules can be applied to prove that company C has infringed upon
Joe's copyrights. Here is how we proceed.
Step 1:
Let us take the webpage P1 and create another page J1 which consists of all
the alternate characters from P1.
Let us denote this operation as f(P1) = J1.
The page J1 would be gibberish and would most probably make no sense
at all. Also we assume (A1) that this gibberish on this page is not
owned by anybody. We will also assume (A2) that Joe can legally
copyright this page J1 since it is his creation.
Step 2:
Now Joe creates a web page J2 by adding a random letter after each letter
in P2.
Let us denote this operation as f1(P2) = J2
We also notice that f(J2) = P2.
f1() and f() are mutually inverse operations.
This page would be drastically different from J2 and would most
probably we gibberish too. We assume (A3) that Joe can copyright this page
J2 since it is his creation.
Now we have f(P1) = J1
and f(J2) = P2
P1, P2 belong to company C and J1 and J2 belong to Joe.
None of the pages put up by Joe show copyrighted material except for his own
copyrights.
Joe also puts up a webpage called F which accepts a URL and displays a
different page based on the URL. The way this does this is to apply
the function f() on the contents of URL and display the output.
As we can notice, if any person goes to F and enters the URL for J2,
they see the information P2. If they enter the URL for P1 they see the
information J1.
At this point, effectively any user who wants to access the
confidential information P2, just need to go to the site F and enter the
URL for J2. And whola! They see the confidential information P2.
Now if we apply any set of legal rules to deem this as copyright infringement
on the part of Joe, it should be noted that by entering the URL for P1, one
is taken to the copyrighted material J1. Hence the same logic can be
applied to prove that P1 is infringing on copyrights of Joe.
Q.E.D
(chuckle) True! Not very well :P
--
Dont believe the SIG below. Its fake!
I have some very good spam filtering based on the content (which is almost a give away!) The only way this would keep working was if the spammers did not know what I was filtering on. Please lets keep it this way. If smart people like Paul start divulging his good techniques, the spammers will start changing their content too ...
The only way we can win was if everyone came up with their own
filters, kept really quiet about it, and the spammers continued to spam
thinking everything was okay. And of course the SPAM-lovers could
still continue to receive all the spam they like without realising
that anything is different in their little world.
Something to think about.
Say an employee is working for a big corporation which makes its profits
from exploiting employee ideas for their own use.
Assume that this employee indeed signed the standard inventions disclosure
agreement with the company.
Now say that this employee developed a very cool software based on GPLed
source code. So obviously this new software is GPLed. Assume that this
employee used company time and resources to develop this software, but
without negligence of his(her) primary duties.
What can the company do to own the rights for this cool software ?
They cannot revoke GPL since its based on GPLed source code. What happens
then ?
Just take a look at all the other patents cited in this patent. Makes me want to jump in the ocean (sigh)
This is an excellant example why we are facing so many problems
in the emerging world as we are.
We have to open our eyes and we have a long way to go.
Best of luck to us.
And as for them, I am sure their engineers will successfully
land on moon. No doubt.