It is possible to extract knowledge from the code without breaching copyright, but...Getting a copy of the code at all is a breach of copyright.
Sorry for sounding like an idiot but could you clarify that for me. On one hand you say it is safe to read copyrighted code, on the other hand it isn't.
It sounds like you are saying that there are some instances where you can read copyrighted source code and still write your own code for a similar project and be legally safe. But in this instance simply having a copy of microsoft's code without signing their NDA first is a breach of copyright and would put a person at risk. Is this correct?
I must admit that I am curious to see the Windows source, and since I write network apps in java & delphi, not operating systems in C my software is not likely to be tainted by it.
What ever you do, don't let the code influence your projects
You beat me to the punch. This code leak could be a very good thing for Microsoft, and a trap for the open source community. I doubt that Microsoft intentionally planted this snare but if any future open source project even vaguely resembles this leaked code I have no doubt that Microsoft will open their full arsenal of lawyers.
I used OSX at work for a year. It was time for an upgrade on my workstation and we replaced my pentium 233 with a Mac G4 500 - I expected a bit of a learning curve like having to relearn how to configure network cards, printers, and mount network drives etc but in truth there was very little to learn.
The three programs that I use the most JBuilder, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop worked flawlessly on OSX. (They also work in Windows, and sort of work with WINE)
Unfortunately hardware support for OSX was terrible. Much of the hardware that we had in the office for other OS9 macs did not work at all. Things like scsi scanners, cd caddies, became useless. We bought a new $900CAD Epson 1280 printer that had an OSX driver but it worked poorly when it worked at all.
I had further troubles finding software for OSX. As a programmer I use many small but time saving utilities. Most of these programs have windows, and/or Linux X windows versions but nothing for the Mac.
After a year of using the Mac and making a genuine effort to be rid of Microsoft forever I was still not as productive as I was when I had a Windows workstation, and a Linux test server. So I switched back.
(I'll probably get flamed for saying this, or modded into oblivion. But I had to say it anyway.)
Try asking a random selection of 1000 people the following question: "Am I a thief if I make a tape of a friend's (copyrighted) CD?" (this is a form of copyright violation most people, even not computer literate, can understand and relate to). If you can honestly say that more than a small percentage will agree that you're a thief, then I think you're deluded.
Let me tell you what I believe. Firstly: I believe that the majority is not always right. They are living in a dreamworld so to speak. So you can not prove whether copyright violation is theft simply by asking people if it is.
Therefore let me present another example of copyright violation, and you can tell me whether or not it is theft.
Imagine that you own an engineering firm that designs heavy haul trucks. One of your engineers has resigned and taken a job elsewhere. Before he leaves he uploads your AutoCad drawings (like source code to the manufacturing business) to his server at home.
If I understand your point of view correctly he has not taken any physical item of worth from your company. He has only copied your designs. Therefore no theft has occurred.
I believe that copying, a copyrighted work is theft and it applies to all sorts of intellectual property such as proprietary software, AutoCad schematics, music, and art.
1GB of transfer is about 5 to 10 cents, raw, for high-bandwidth ISPs
Did you just pull it out of the air, did you hear it from a friend, or is it based on some sort of fact? I would love to know where you get this number.
I operate a small company that does graphic design, custom software and web hosting. We host ~15 web sites, use 55-65 gig's per month and our wholesale cost is $6 CAD per Gig. I have heard of some colo providers in the states that can go as low as $2 USD per gig but I like to configure new servers, and upgrade hardware myself so a local colocate provider is the only option.
Last year a friend gave me a pentium 200 mmx that he coundn't get working. Since my parents were in need of a firewall I figured I would drop a couple nics into this box and build one for them.
The first thing I did was plug in a keyboard, monitor, and turn the box's power on to see if it would reach the POST.
Smoke started coming from the box, and soon open flame. For a brief moment I just stood there looking at it thinking, "That's interesting. First time I've seen a computer catch fire." Then I pulled the plug from the wall and the flames soon stopped.
I looked into the case to see what went wrong. It seems that the power supply connector for a floppy drive is roughly the same size as a speaker connector on the sound card. My friend had plugged the power supply into the sound card which seems to have caused the fire when the power was turned on. I suppose I should have checked for something like this instead of just plugging in the machine.
Just as a dark room helps us sleep. . . light helps us wake up. How about getting a bedroom light that plugs into the wall and use a simple timer from RadioShack as a supplement to your alarm.
The surprising fact is that many girls seem genuinely interested to hear about life in the tech world. I used to try to avoid all talk of software programming because I thought that girls would find in a turn off. But I've found that when a person is interested in you she will want to know everything about you and that includes what you do at work. The problems you face, and how you solve them.
In the last couple years I have dated a teacher, nurse, legal assistant, and a graphic designer, and the only one who didn't really enjoy talking tech was the graphic designer and I think thats because she, too, worked with computers all day.
18-55 (35-70mm equiv) f/3.5-f5.6 zoom. That has got to be the worst possible lens to learn photography on. ..The tiny aperature (compared to a f/1.8) severly restricts how you learn about light.
For the non-photographers out there let me expand on this point.
Look at a few samples of professional photography. Wedding photos, glossy fashion shots in a magazine, or even you local newspaper. You will notice that many pros use selective focus - photos where the subject is in sharp focus and everything else is blurred. To achieve this effect the camera needs a longish lense and a wide aperture. The minimum combination would be about a 50mm and f2.8 . The lens that comes with the digital rebel (and virtually every autofocus camera on the planet) is long enough but the aperture is not wide enough to achieve this effect.
An Engineering Student, a Physics Student, and a Mathematics student were each given $150 dollars and were told to use that money to find out exactly how tall a particular hotel was.
All three ran off, extremely keen on how to do this. The Physics student went out, purchased some stopwatches, a number of ball bearings, a calculator, and some friends. He had them all time the drop of ball bearings from the roof, and he then figured out the height from the time it took for the bearings to accelerate from rest until they impacted with the sidewalk.
The Math student waited until the sun was going down, then she took out her protractor, plumb line, measuring tape,and scratch pad, measured the length of the shadow, found the angle the buildings roof made from the ground, and used trignometry to figure out the height of the building.
These two students bumped into the Engineering student the next day, who was nursing a really bad hangover. When asked what he did to find the height of the building he replied:
"Well, I walked up to the bell hop, gave him 10 bucks, asked him how tall the hotel was, and hit the bar inside for happy hour!"
Canadian students must pay tax on income earned. Many students don't make as much money as they spend in tuition and since they can write off tuition, and the cost of books they owe nothing at the end of the year. But in your example the student should be paying tax on approx $4000. $19,000 total income for 2002 - 8,000 basic exemption (all Canadians get it) - 5,000 tuition - 2,000 books = 4,000 taxable income
Sure. Everything gets hacked but there was a really-long-lag-time between when CDs became popular and when cd burners became affordable. I bought my first cd some time in the late eighties but cd burners didn't become affordable until the year 2000. More than 10 years is a long time to wait for a hack.
Of course it was always possible to copy a friend's cd to tape, but I rarely did this because cds were much cooler than tape.
to the average user, the bells and whistles of Flash are a GOOD thing, not a bad thing
There are times when flash is acceptable and times when it isn't. I, personally, love the entertainment value that a well designed flash entertainments site. And web applications designed with flash interfaces are typically much smoother than what is possible with html. BUT (and this is a big but) many flash programmers are too quick to adopt features that have been introduced versions 5+ and this causes a significant problem with corporate users.
Many corporate users do not have permission to install the latest and greatest flash plugin.
This is a problem that our company is facing right now. We have designed flash front ends for web applications and are finding that users running on corporate networks typically have the default flash plugin for their system (Usually flash 4) so we get phone calls from P.O'd customers that they can't see the web site. We ask them to download the plugin and find out they can't because their system admin has not given them permission to install stuff.
Now what we are doing is building both html, and flash front ends for everything that is targeted to corporate users.
Now I am no expert on hacking or security but I once read a book that changed the way that I write software. Hacking Exposed taught me a number of different methods that can be used to find weaknesses in software. Once I learned some of the attacks that people could use against my applications fortifying against those attacks became much easier.
If this system becomes acceptable and legal it will soon become a standard at every bar in the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD).
There are two reasons that I believe it will spread like wildfire.
According to the article the system only costs about $3000 dollars (dirt cheap).
Insurance, and Legal costs for bars in the GVRD are very high.
A friend used to own a night club. He took great steps to create a safe environment because he knew that women go where they can have fun and be safe, and the men go where the women are. Never the less this is a drinking establishment and there is only so much you can do. With each alcoholic berverage served the probabiltiy of a fight breaking out reaches closer to 1.
And each fight that starts on your property brings a potential lawsuit. And defending lawsuits is expensive. For each law suit he would have to spend at least $5000 (assuming he doesn't even have to show up in court) and sometimes as much as $30,000 just to prove he was not at fault.
If the proposed id tracking system saves him just one lawsuit per year then it more than covers the cost of implimentation and probably covers the cost of lost business. Soon insurance companies will require the system or they will jack up the cost of premiums for club owners. When that happens the system will be everywhere and when that happens Vancouver club goers might have little choice.
Vancouverites should fight to nip this one in the bud.
The article does not suggest that companies be prevented from doing product placement.
Advertising must not be deceptive. It's an old principle and one that the government has enforced in the past. For example magazine ads that look like an unbiased article are required to state something to the effect of "Paid Advertisement" so that the reader is not misled. The situation is similar with infomercials on TV. From the article
The Commission has brought many deceptive advertising cases against producers
of infomercials, charging that these productions were deceptive in that they "purported to be independent programming rather than paid ads.
Good idea. But chances are the glow of the monitor will provide enough light to see the keyboard.
My dad taught himself how to touch type using our atari computer, some typing software and a cardboard box. Find a box big enough to fit over your keyboard, and your hands. Cut out the front and bottom of the box. Sit it over they keyboard so you can't see the keys.
about hyrdrogen fuel cells that often gets missed when discussing hydrogen power is that these fuel cells are an interesting alternative for storing power but not for generating it.
For some reason people often talk about hydrogen as an alternative to coal, nuclear, or hydro power. It isn't. Hydrogen Fuel Cells are alternatives to batteries, but they usually need some other method to initially generate the hydrogen eg solar panels, windmills etc.
The article touches on this:
In the case of natural gas, a catalytic convertor strips out the hydrogen from the natural gas, via a steam-reforming process, and stores it for later use in a fuel cell. Alternatively, an electrolyser can be attached to the electricity line and electricity can be used to separate hydrogen from water.
Brahmastra. Thanks that was a good job comparing the resolution of a 35mm to Digital. My experience with a Nikon 5000 is that it's 5 megapixels is good enough to create great looking 8x10 images. But there is more to good quality photography than the resolution of the film, or of the digital chip.
IMHO the quality of the lens is a the single largest determinant in a camera's ability for producing creative photos, and is an area where many digitals fall way too short.
The first thing I do when shooting a photograph is decide what the subject is. The next thing I do is frame the photo in such a way that anything that is not relevant to the subject is excluded from the photo. A good lens on a 35mm slr gives you the ability to use selective focus so that your subject is sharp, and everything else is a blur. For this technique to work you need a longish lens, and a wide aperture. Most point and shoots and digitals fall short in both categories. (My $1500 CAD Nikon included) So the thing that interested me most about this Sony was it's Carl Zeiss lens 28 - 200 mm equiv. F2.0 - F2.8 aperture.
Zeiss is famous for quality, and 105 mm lens, at f 2.8 is a beautiful combination for selective focus portraits.
Slashdot Mirror
It is possible to extract knowledge from the code without breaching copyright, but...Getting a copy of the code at all is a breach of copyright.
Sorry for sounding like an idiot but could you clarify that for me. On one hand you say it is safe to read copyrighted code, on the other hand it isn't.
It sounds like you are saying that there are some instances where you can read copyrighted source code and still write your own code for a similar project and be legally safe. But in this instance simply having a copy of microsoft's code without signing their NDA first is a breach of copyright and would put a person at risk. Is this correct?
I must admit that I am curious to see the Windows source, and since I write network apps in java & delphi, not operating systems in C my software is not likely to be tainted by it.
What ever you do, don't let the code influence your projects
You beat me to the punch. This code leak could be a very good thing for Microsoft, and a trap for the open source community. I doubt that Microsoft intentionally planted this snare but if any future open source project even vaguely resembles this leaked code I have no doubt that Microsoft will open their full arsenal of lawyers.
I used OSX at work for a year. It was time for an upgrade on my workstation and we replaced my pentium 233 with a Mac G4 500 - I expected a bit of a learning curve like having to relearn how to configure network cards, printers, and mount network drives etc but in truth there was very little to learn.
The three programs that I use the most JBuilder, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop worked flawlessly on OSX. (They also work in Windows, and sort of work with WINE)
Unfortunately hardware support for OSX was terrible. Much of the hardware that we had in the office for other OS9 macs did not work at all. Things like scsi scanners, cd caddies, became useless. We bought a new $900CAD Epson 1280 printer that had an OSX driver but it worked poorly when it worked at all.
I had further troubles finding software for OSX. As a programmer I use many small but time saving utilities. Most of these programs have windows, and/or Linux X windows versions but nothing for the Mac.
After a year of using the Mac and making a genuine effort to be rid of Microsoft forever I was still not as productive as I was when I had a Windows workstation, and a Linux test server. So I switched back.
(I'll probably get flamed for saying this, or modded into oblivion. But I had to say it anyway.)
Try asking a random selection of 1000 people the following question: "Am I a thief if I make a tape of a friend's (copyrighted) CD?" (this is a form of copyright violation most people, even not computer literate, can understand and relate to). If you can honestly say that more than a small percentage will agree that you're a thief, then I think you're deluded.
Let me tell you what I believe. Firstly: I believe that the majority is not always right. They are living in a dreamworld so to speak. So you can not prove whether copyright violation is theft simply by asking people if it is.
Therefore let me present another example of copyright violation, and you can tell me whether or not it is theft.
Imagine that you own an engineering firm that designs heavy haul trucks. One of your engineers has resigned and taken a job elsewhere. Before he leaves he uploads your AutoCad drawings (like source code to the manufacturing business) to his server at home.
If I understand your point of view correctly he has not taken any physical item of worth from your company. He has only copied your designs. Therefore no theft has occurred.
I believe that copying, a copyrighted work is theft and it applies to all sorts of intellectual property such as proprietary software, AutoCad schematics, music, and art.
I've never received an unfair metamod for modding down an anti-MS troll
How does one find out if the comments he moderated were later rated fair or unfair in meta-mod?
re: <a href="http://www.sco.com" title="The SCO Group - litigious bastards">litigious bastards</a>
How does a title property inside the anchor tag affect the google search result?
1GB of transfer is about 5 to 10 cents, raw, for high-bandwidth ISPs
Did you just pull it out of the air, did you hear it from a friend, or is it based on some sort of fact? I would love to know where you get this number.
I operate a small company that does graphic design, custom software and web hosting. We host ~15 web sites, use 55-65 gig's per month and our wholesale cost is $6 CAD per Gig. I have heard of some colo providers in the states that can go as low as $2 USD per gig but I like to configure new servers, and upgrade hardware myself so a local colocate provider is the only option.
Last year a friend gave me a pentium 200 mmx that he coundn't get working. Since my parents were in need of a firewall I figured I would drop a couple nics into this box and build one for them.
The first thing I did was plug in a keyboard, monitor, and turn the box's power on to see if it would reach the POST.
Smoke started coming from the box, and soon open flame. For a brief moment I just stood there looking at it thinking, "That's interesting. First time I've seen a computer catch fire." Then I pulled the plug from the wall and the flames soon stopped.
I looked into the case to see what went wrong. It seems that the power supply connector for a floppy drive is roughly the same size as a speaker connector on the sound card. My friend had plugged the power supply into the sound card which seems to have caused the fire when the power was turned on. I suppose I should have checked for something like this instead of just plugging in the machine.
"The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." - attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes
Just as a dark room helps us sleep. . . light helps us wake up. How about getting a bedroom light that plugs into the wall and use a simple timer from RadioShack as a supplement to your alarm.
Your right about people getting a better grip on English
Did you mean, "You're right?"
If "afterall" is a word then it isn't in my dictionary, nor on dictionary.com. How about two words: after all.
The surprising fact is that many girls seem genuinely interested to hear about life in the tech world. I used to try to avoid all talk of software programming because I thought that girls would find in a turn off. But I've found that when a person is interested in you she will want to know everything about you and that includes what you do at work. The problems you face, and how you solve them.
In the last couple years I have dated a teacher, nurse, legal assistant, and a graphic designer, and the only one who didn't really enjoy talking tech was the graphic designer and I think thats because she, too, worked with computers all day.
18-55 (35-70mm equiv) f/3.5-f5.6 zoom. That has got to be the worst possible lens to learn photography on. . .The tiny aperature (compared to a f/1.8) severly restricts how you learn about light.
For the non-photographers out there let me expand on this point.
Look at a few samples of professional photography. Wedding photos, glossy fashion shots in a magazine, or even you local newspaper. You will notice that many pros use selective focus - photos where the subject is in sharp focus and everything else is blurred. To achieve this effect the camera needs a longish lense and a wide aperture. The minimum combination would be about a 50mm and f2.8 . The lens that comes with the digital rebel (and virtually every autofocus camera on the planet) is long enough but the aperture is not wide enough to achieve this effect.
I think you're bullshitting.
As far as I recall the story, C++ was named because of the ++ (postfix?) operator in C. So, C++ is C + 1
Yup. Check out Bjarne Stroustrup's FAQ page Why is the language called C++
more science jokes
An Engineering Student, a Physics Student, and a Mathematics student were
each given $150 dollars and were told to use that money to find out exactly
how tall a particular hotel was.
All three ran off, extremely keen on how to do this. The Physics
student went out, purchased some stopwatches, a number of ball bearings,
a calculator, and some friends. He had them all time the drop of ball
bearings from the roof, and he then figured out the height from the time
it took for the bearings to accelerate from rest until they impacted with
the sidewalk.
The Math student waited until the sun was going down, then she
took out her protractor, plumb line, measuring tape,and scratch pad,
measured the length of the shadow, found the angle the buildings roof
made from the ground, and used trignometry to figure out the height of
the building.
These two students bumped into the Engineering student the next
day, who was nursing a really bad hangover. When asked what he did to
find the height of the building he replied:
"Well, I walked up to the bell hop, gave him 10 bucks, asked him
how tall the hotel was, and hit the bar inside for happy hour!"
Who said you don't pay income tax?
Canadian students must pay tax on income earned. Many students don't make as much money as they spend in tuition and since they can write off tuition, and the cost of books they owe nothing at the end of the year. But in your example the student should be paying tax on approx $4000.
$19,000 total income for 2002
- 8,000 basic exemption (all Canadians get it)
- 5,000 tuition
- 2,000 books
= 4,000 taxable income
Sure. Everything gets hacked but there was a really-long-lag-time between when CDs became popular and when cd burners became affordable. I bought my first cd some time in the late eighties but cd burners didn't become affordable until the year 2000. More than 10 years is a long time to wait for a hack.
Of course it was always possible to copy a friend's cd to tape, but I rarely did this because cds were much cooler than tape.
to the average user, the bells and whistles of Flash are a GOOD thing, not a bad thing
There are times when flash is acceptable and times when it isn't. I, personally, love the entertainment value that a well designed flash entertainments site. And web applications designed with flash interfaces are typically much smoother than what is possible with html. BUT (and this is a big but) many flash programmers are too quick to adopt features that have been introduced versions 5+ and this causes a significant problem with corporate users.
Many corporate users do not have permission to install the latest and greatest flash plugin.
This is a problem that our company is facing right now. We have designed flash front ends for web applications and are finding that users running on corporate networks typically have the default flash plugin for their system (Usually flash 4) so we get phone calls from P.O'd customers that they can't see the web site. We ask them to download the plugin and find out they can't because their system admin has not given them permission to install stuff.
Now what we are doing is building both html, and flash front ends for everything that is targeted to corporate users.
Now I am no expert on hacking or security but I once read a book that changed the way that I write software. Hacking Exposed taught me a number of different methods that can be used to find weaknesses in software. Once I learned some of the attacks that people could use against my applications fortifying against those attacks became much easier.
Java Cryptography was another informative read.
There are two reasons that I believe it will spread like wildfire.
A friend used to own a night club. He took great steps to create a safe environment because he knew that women go where they can have fun and be safe, and the men go where the women are. Never the less this is a drinking establishment and there is only so much you can do. With each alcoholic berverage served the probabiltiy of a fight breaking out reaches closer to 1.
And each fight that starts on your property brings a potential lawsuit. And defending lawsuits is expensive. For each law suit he would have to spend at least $5000 (assuming he doesn't even have to show up in court) and sometimes as much as $30,000 just to prove he was not at fault.
If the proposed id tracking system saves him just one lawsuit per year then it more than covers the cost of implimentation and probably covers the cost of lost business. Soon insurance companies will require the system or they will jack up the cost of premiums for club owners. When that happens the system will be everywhere and when that happens Vancouver club goers might have little choice.
Vancouverites should fight to nip this one in the bud.
Advertising must not be deceptive. It's an old principle and one that the government has enforced in the past. For example magazine ads that look like an unbiased article are required to state something to the effect of "Paid Advertisement" so that the reader is not misled. The situation is similar with infomercials on TV. From the article
Good idea. But chances are the glow of the monitor will provide enough light to see the keyboard.
My dad taught himself how to touch type using our atari computer, some typing software and a cardboard box. Find a box big enough to fit over your keyboard, and your hands. Cut out the front and bottom of the box. Sit it over they keyboard so you can't see the keys.
It worked well for him.
Why are so many companies who are doing Linux business (SuSE, for example) complaining, but not unleashing their lawyers.
Like the old saying:
Never argue with an idiot. He'll drag you down to his level, then beat you with experience.
For some reason people often talk about hydrogen as an alternative to coal, nuclear, or hydro power. It isn't. Hydrogen Fuel Cells are alternatives to batteries, but they usually need some other method to initially generate the hydrogen eg solar panels, windmills etc.
The article touches on this:
Brahmastra. Thanks that was a good job comparing the resolution of a 35mm to Digital. My experience with a Nikon 5000 is that it's 5 megapixels is good enough to create great looking 8x10 images. But there is more to good quality photography than the resolution of the film, or of the digital chip.
IMHO the quality of the lens is a the single largest determinant in a camera's ability for producing creative photos, and is an area where many digitals fall way too short.
The first thing I do when shooting a photograph is decide what the subject is. The next thing I do is frame the photo in such a way that anything that is not relevant to the subject is excluded from the photo. A good lens on a 35mm slr gives you the ability to use selective focus so that your subject is sharp, and everything else is a blur. For this technique to work you need a longish lens, and a wide aperture. Most point and shoots and digitals fall short in both categories. (My $1500 CAD Nikon included) So the thing that interested me most about this Sony was it's Carl Zeiss lens 28 - 200 mm equiv. F2.0 - F2.8 aperture.
Zeiss is famous for quality, and 105 mm lens, at f 2.8 is a beautiful combination for selective focus portraits.