A T-1 served being hit by about 20-25 users at the same time would produce that effect. It doesn't matter how fast your connection is, it's the slowest point between you and "them" that regulates the speed.
When you have a modem, it's likely that you're the slowest link, but the faster you get, the more likely it becomes that the choke point is closer to the site you're trying to download from than your line.
Unlimited-time dial-up doesn't exist in the UK, so this is their user's first experience with the Internet where they didn't feel rushed to interact. Users certainly will behave differently when they are on a pay-per-minute Internet connection than when they are not.
It's not legal theft, but to the content owner, blocking software is a threat to the way they do business.
This company is trying its best to provide technology to get around the ad-blocking technology... a fair game of cat-and-mouse if you ask me. Although, it looks like the mouse is getting away...
Lindows is the first Linux distro company with executives who know how to make noise.
It takes a brash set of executives to pick a name that's sure to bait the MS laywers, then have the lawyers to win the resulting stare-down. They're willing to play MS at its own game.
When a white hat discovers a glitch first, the public is first told about it when a patch is available. When a black hat discovers a glitch first, the public is first told about it when an exploit is in the wild. Opening the source makes it easier for the white hats to do their thing, it also does the same for the black hats.
Right now, we're in an asymetric situation where there are more white hats looking at Linux because they can look at Linux but not at Windows, but there are more black hats trying to break Windows because those hacks are more vaulable because there are more Windows systems to use them against.
If Linux and Windows were to switch situations, Windows would get the secure reputation because less people would be trying to knock down the gate and therefore almost nobody would get through, and more people would be trying to knock down Linux's gate.
Only in the same way that Tom Clancey's competitors can take advantage of reading his books. The code is still under the full protection of copyright law, and since competitors would be required to disclose source as well, violations would easily be detected. Just like in the world of books.
If somebody lifts the plot of a Clancey book, and then rewrites it with different character names and different names for the setting, that's plagiarism. Now for the hard part: Prove it.
That's one problem the software industry would rather not have.
The problem is, if you were required to provide the source free with purchase of the binaires, the cost of the package will go up. Knowledge is worth money, so when you're forced to show people how you did everything you did, eventually some people who weren't able to competete with you before will learn how to do the same thing. You'd have to charge a higher price to get the same profit, because you'll get less sales.
So, people who have no need or use for the source will end up having to pay more to get something they don't want. There's a turkey of an idea.
As much as I hate DRM as a user-limiting technology, when it comes to programming code, you at least need something.
If your source was Open-yet-Copyrighted, the law of the land is on your side to protect you, but the laws of physics are not.
What if somebody was to take the critical for loop from your program, change the variable names, and then release it as their own. That's a definite copyright violation if you can prove that it happened that way, but if the other guy's claiming otherwise, it's gonna be one hell of a lawsuit.
As anybody who knows the PBS guidelines knows, that description could air on PBS without being called an ad because it didn't contain a price or mention of a competitor. Which reminds me, how much more expensive is this compared to a blank Maxtor drive?
Glad to see you've never been burned by a client. What if a client were say, to not give you a chance on service, and just take your code from the get go?
The way copyright was meant to work was that creators got a short period in which they had monopoly rights on their creation in order to make a profit on it, because you need a profit for most people to do anything useful, but after that time was up the book, poem, or drawing would go into the public domain.
However, this system has been corrupted by stretching the time out every 20 years so that Mickey Mouse era works never fall into the public domain, and also had no foresight for works such as computer binaires where the human readable part, the source code, that generates it can be divorced from what is distributed.
"Free Software" is a step forward in repairing the system, however it does not provide compensation to the author that only he can claim. Yeah, I can support my program and charge money for that... but you can read my code, eventually learn it as well as I know it, then undercut me in the support service. If all programming code has to be "Open Source", then the cost of getting a program that does what you want is either going to be free because it already exists, or incredibly expensive because the code that is going to be written for you is going to be code that everybody else in the same situation can use. Having closed-source code allows the programmer to sell you a copy, but allows him to charge everybody else who wants a copy as well so that he can multiply the price times the number of people willing to pay it. If he only gets to paid for the first copy, the programmer's going to have to get all of his money out of the first buyer.
I think the better way to structure it is that they agree to buy support for your code. However, if they modify any part of the production system, then you are no longer responsible for support on that section, yet they must still pay the agreed upon price. That is, you still get the money, but they waived the service.
The tie back to this question is that closed-source code is usually sold with the implication that there will be further sales made in the process of supporting the code in the form of updates, revisions, etc. Some closed source programs are sold at a loss or given away free (as in beer) because they're only usuful when combined with a very profitable subscription service.
Free-code-for-hire is more expensive because it's a one-shot deal. Your people do a day's work, they get a day's pay but they get no leverage to force that the revision come from them. They have to collect more money upfront because they don't get the promise of money in the future.
If this company wants the code, but is paying the going rates for binaries instead... you don't want the job.
No, but/. is the place for him to get ideas as to what to tell the lawyer to put into the license.
A lawyer is like a complier. You write code in English, he compilies it into airtight Legalese. However, if you give him a bug in the unput, his contract can still crash.
No, but a smartly written contract has a section for the penalties agreed upon for breaches. That is, it has langauge stating that if they do one of the prohibited actions they agree to pay an outragous sum of money. In that case, the court will require payment of the agreed-upon sum instead of any actual damages.
Lawyers are better at telling you if what you're trying to do is going to work than telling you what to do. That's where we come in...
Asking Slashdot will likely generate a lot of dumb ideas that won't fly legally, but it also at times generates the occasional 5-Insightful that contains the idea that neither you nor your lawyer would have thought of. Get the idea from Slashdot, run it past the lawyer, and you might just get an idea that would not have been used otherwise.
This client is coming off to me as untrustworthy. That is, their reason to refuse escrow as an option seems bogus to me. It's seems like they want the code so that they can fold, spindle, and multilate it. The upfront money is all you'll ever see, as they'll have their own cheaper people modify and service the code if it ever needs changing.
Unless the client is willing to agree to an extreme penalty (on the scale of millions, something that'd potentially bankrupt the client) in the contract for violations, you may just want to abandon the project and let somebody else take the sucker punch.
Most businesses have more bandwidth than they need at any given moment, so the bandwidth is practically free to them since they were going to pay for it anyway. That is, until ISPs get wise to this idea and start with TOSes that prevent this use without paying extra for it.
For some businesses, like shopping malls, they might write off the cost of WiFi bandwidth as a promotion to try to get geeks to stay in the mall, and therefore not pulling their girlfriends away from their shopping.
WiFi is inherently peer-to-peer. When you have two or more devices within range of each other, you have a network. There wouldn't need to be anything that's not user provided unless they were providing a point that reaches the Internet.
I'd love to see a wide-open WiFi access system installed at my local park, but I'm concerned that the network might be abused for use in spamming, DOSing, or other hacking.
What logical restrictions should be put on a public WiFi center so that the majority of good people can enjoy the system while the small number of people who would do the Internet harm are foiled?
You did not give something unless you A: Had it and B: Don't have it any more. Authors who choose to release code under the GPL are giving up their right to insist that everybody who ever uses their code pay them.
I think it's the reverse. That the judge understands that the correct definition of open source is legal, quoting the phrase implys "he calls this open source, but I don't." The fact is, Open Source is not a legal sheild that protects you from the evils of copyright law, in fact, it's a waiving of some of your copyrights you're granted by law in exchange for a promise everybody who modifies your work will waive their copyright too.
Bottom line: Don't go into court expecting "but it was for an Open Source project!" to get you off the hook for anything.
Slashdot Mirror
But what are you downloading from?
A T-1 served being hit by about 20-25 users at the same time would produce that effect. It doesn't matter how fast your connection is, it's the slowest point between you and "them" that regulates the speed.
When you have a modem, it's likely that you're the slowest link, but the faster you get, the more likely it becomes that the choke point is closer to the site you're trying to download from than your line.
You're exactly the user the tiered cable modem is aimed at. And, you're the majority of the world, and only in the minority on Slashdot.
Unlimited-time dial-up doesn't exist in the UK, so this is their user's first experience with the Internet where they didn't feel rushed to interact. Users certainly will behave differently when they are on a pay-per-minute Internet connection than when they are not.
It's not legal theft, but to the content owner, blocking software is a threat to the way they do business.
This company is trying its best to provide technology to get around the ad-blocking technology... a fair game of cat-and-mouse if you ask me. Although, it looks like the mouse is getting away...
Lindows is the first Linux distro company with executives who know how to make noise.
It takes a brash set of executives to pick a name that's sure to bait the MS laywers, then have the lawyers to win the resulting stare-down. They're willing to play MS at its own game.
When a white hat discovers a glitch first, the public is first told about it when a patch is available. When a black hat discovers a glitch first, the public is first told about it when an exploit is in the wild. Opening the source makes it easier for the white hats to do their thing, it also does the same for the black hats.
Right now, we're in an asymetric situation where there are more white hats looking at Linux because they can look at Linux but not at Windows, but there are more black hats trying to break Windows because those hacks are more vaulable because there are more Windows systems to use them against.
If Linux and Windows were to switch situations, Windows would get the secure reputation because less people would be trying to knock down the gate and therefore almost nobody would get through, and more people would be trying to knock down Linux's gate.
Only in the same way that Tom Clancey's competitors can take advantage of reading his books. The code is still under the full protection of copyright law, and since competitors would be required to disclose source as well, violations would easily be detected. Just like in the world of books.
If somebody lifts the plot of a Clancey book, and then rewrites it with different character names and different names for the setting, that's plagiarism. Now for the hard part: Prove it.
That's one problem the software industry would rather not have.
The problem is, if you were required to provide the source free with purchase of the binaires, the cost of the package will go up. Knowledge is worth money, so when you're forced to show people how you did everything you did, eventually some people who weren't able to competete with you before will learn how to do the same thing. You'd have to charge a higher price to get the same profit, because you'll get less sales.
So, people who have no need or use for the source will end up having to pay more to get something they don't want. There's a turkey of an idea.
As much as I hate DRM as a user-limiting technology, when it comes to programming code, you at least need something.
If your source was Open-yet-Copyrighted, the law of the land is on your side to protect you, but the laws of physics are not.
What if somebody was to take the critical for loop from your program, change the variable names, and then release it as their own. That's a definite copyright violation if you can prove that it happened that way, but if the other guy's claiming otherwise, it's gonna be one hell of a lawsuit.
Anybody get the feeling like /. is trying to encurage us to be with our families by posting the stories from the bottom of the barrel today?
As anybody who knows the PBS guidelines knows, that description could air on PBS without being called an ad because it didn't contain a price or mention of a competitor. Which reminds me, how much more expensive is this compared to a blank Maxtor drive?
Glad to see you've never been burned by a client. What if a client were say, to not give you a chance on service, and just take your code from the get go?
I didn't say all 5-Insightfuls contianed useful info, just an occasional one...
The way copyright was meant to work was that creators got a short period in which they had monopoly rights on their creation in order to make a profit on it, because you need a profit for most people to do anything useful, but after that time was up the book, poem, or drawing would go into the public domain.
However, this system has been corrupted by stretching the time out every 20 years so that Mickey Mouse era works never fall into the public domain, and also had no foresight for works such as computer binaires where the human readable part, the source code, that generates it can be divorced from what is distributed.
"Free Software" is a step forward in repairing the system, however it does not provide compensation to the author that only he can claim. Yeah, I can support my program and charge money for that... but you can read my code, eventually learn it as well as I know it, then undercut me in the support service. If all programming code has to be "Open Source", then the cost of getting a program that does what you want is either going to be free because it already exists, or incredibly expensive because the code that is going to be written for you is going to be code that everybody else in the same situation can use. Having closed-source code allows the programmer to sell you a copy, but allows him to charge everybody else who wants a copy as well so that he can multiply the price times the number of people willing to pay it. If he only gets to paid for the first copy, the programmer's going to have to get all of his money out of the first buyer.
I think the better way to structure it is that they agree to buy support for your code. However, if they modify any part of the production system, then you are no longer responsible for support on that section, yet they must still pay the agreed upon price. That is, you still get the money, but they waived the service.
The tie back to this question is that closed-source code is usually sold with the implication that there will be further sales made in the process of supporting the code in the form of updates, revisions, etc. Some closed source programs are sold at a loss or given away free (as in beer) because they're only usuful when combined with a very profitable subscription service. Free-code-for-hire is more expensive because it's a one-shot deal. Your people do a day's work, they get a day's pay but they get no leverage to force that the revision come from them. They have to collect more money upfront because they don't get the promise of money in the future. If this company wants the code, but is paying the going rates for binaries instead... you don't want the job.
No, but /. is the place for him to get ideas as to what to tell the lawyer to put into the license.
A lawyer is like a complier. You write code in English, he compilies it into airtight Legalese. However, if you give him a bug in the unput, his contract can still crash.
No, but a smartly written contract has a section for the penalties agreed upon for breaches. That is, it has langauge stating that if they do one of the prohibited actions they agree to pay an outragous sum of money. In that case, the court will require payment of the agreed-upon sum instead of any actual damages.
Lawyers are better at telling you if what you're trying to do is going to work than telling you what to do. That's where we come in...
Asking Slashdot will likely generate a lot of dumb ideas that won't fly legally, but it also at times generates the occasional 5-Insightful that contains the idea that neither you nor your lawyer would have thought of. Get the idea from Slashdot, run it past the lawyer, and you might just get an idea that would not have been used otherwise.
Now, for something completely different.
This client is coming off to me as untrustworthy. That is, their reason to refuse escrow as an option seems bogus to me. It's seems like they want the code so that they can fold, spindle, and multilate it. The upfront money is all you'll ever see, as they'll have their own cheaper people modify and service the code if it ever needs changing.
Unless the client is willing to agree to an extreme penalty (on the scale of millions, something that'd potentially bankrupt the client) in the contract for violations, you may just want to abandon the project and let somebody else take the sucker punch.
Most businesses have more bandwidth than they need at any given moment, so the bandwidth is practically free to them since they were going to pay for it anyway. That is, until ISPs get wise to this idea and start with TOSes that prevent this use without paying extra for it. For some businesses, like shopping malls, they might write off the cost of WiFi bandwidth as a promotion to try to get geeks to stay in the mall, and therefore not pulling their girlfriends away from their shopping.
WiFi is inherently peer-to-peer. When you have two or more devices within range of each other, you have a network. There wouldn't need to be anything that's not user provided unless they were providing a point that reaches the Internet.
I'd love to see a wide-open WiFi access system installed at my local park, but I'm concerned that the network might be abused for use in spamming, DOSing, or other hacking. What logical restrictions should be put on a public WiFi center so that the majority of good people can enjoy the system while the small number of people who would do the Internet harm are foiled?
You did not give something unless you A: Had it and B: Don't have it any more. Authors who choose to release code under the GPL are giving up their right to insist that everybody who ever uses their code pay them.
I think it's the reverse. That the judge understands that the correct definition of open source is legal, quoting the phrase implys "he calls this open source, but I don't." The fact is, Open Source is not a legal sheild that protects you from the evils of copyright law, in fact, it's a waiving of some of your copyrights you're granted by law in exchange for a promise everybody who modifies your work will waive their copyright too.
Bottom line: Don't go into court expecting "but it was for an Open Source project!" to get you off the hook for anything.