Well, that makes sense. Copyright is to do with the right to copy. When you download a protected work, it is the owner of the server who is making the copy, not you; you are merely recieving the copy.
In the context of KaZaa, a client is also a server unless you specifically disable that function. Once you disable that function, you are no longer distributing copies, merely recieving them.
Is it not the case that the RIAA is subpoenaing those who are sharing the works to which they own the copyright? This does seem to align with common sense, as well as the practical issue of monitoring who is recieving such illegal copies.
The Windows.Forms bit will be tricky to handle even with the help of Wine, since there are a lot of assumptions in there very specific to Windows.
I suspect what is more likely is that developers will make the guts of their software in some kind of library using the more general parts of the class library and language features and then bolt on a different UI for different systems. This has the advantage that the UI will better follow the "local" UI style, plus it means that the functionality of the program is a library which can be called from other apps.
It shouldn't be too hard to port, for example, the socket-related parts of the class library, as the socket libraries on Windows are essentially identical to elsewhere in terms of capabilities and "paradigm".
The problem is not getting geeks to use it, the problem is getting non-geeks to use it. Sure, non-geeks who have a geeky friend might be okay, but right now there's very little point in using Jabber because the vast majority of people are using the centralised IM services and have no reason to switch.
In order to get people to switch, it must be simple, easy and essentially "just work". Relying on your geeky friend rather than relying on Microsoft just isn't going to fly for most people, and also most non-geeks do not have any friends who are geeks to provide this service for them anyway.
I don't know about you, but when I increase my resolution it's because I've got a bigger monitor. The stuff on the screen stays the same size, there's just more room for it.
Those 16x16 icons still look the same size today as they did on my Windows 95 box with a 12" monitor running at 640x480... I can just fit more of them on the screen now.
Making the stuff on the screen bigger seems counterproductive to me. That gives me screen realestate comparable to that I had on my 12" monitor, only now I have to have a 21" monitor to get it. Why is this desirable?
Apple's QuickTime Player for Windows is evil, also. They followed their own UI guidelines (for OS X), but that doesn't really make sense when they are producing an application for Windows.
I guess this means that device drivers must now ship with a picture of the device. I can't really see this working in reality. Device vendors will either ship drivers with a picture of a different model (since the driver supports several) or no picture at all, at which point who knows what that pretty UI will do.
Maybe they use Residual Self-image to project a true image of the device onto the screen!
I don't doubt that there are defects in Linux and the various BSDs, but then those aren't sold for hundreds of dollars. In addition, open source software allows you to perform whatever level of review you might want to perform on software before you use it, whereas with Windows the only option is to trust Microsoft.
As a final benefit, albeit not a very useful one in the scenario of a company's IT department, it's possible to make rudimentary temporary patches to the system if an official one is not forthcoming. I realise your average IT department doesn't have the time and possibly the expertise to do this, however.
The problem with MSN, AIM, Y!IM and so forth is that they are centralised. One entity both controls and pays for the hub of the service without which the service will not function. Obviously they must somehow recoup costs, which they usually do via advertising in the official client.
What we need is a decentralised IM system. We techically already have one in the form of Jabber, but noone uses it for reasons I can't be sure of. I suspect the major problem is the high barrier of entry: you must either use the jabber.com/jabber.org servers (centralisation, again) or install your own Jabber server, which is where things get tricky.
In order to run your own Jabber server, you must have a box somewhere preferably with an always-on connection and static IP. This box must be Internet-accessible, at least on the ports Jabber uses.
Had Jabber been invented around the same time as email and news, ISPs would no doubt run Jabber servers on behalf of their customers as they do with USENET news servers and SMTP servers. Unfortunately, it's now far too late in the game for this to happen. Convincing one ISP to do this would be nearly impossible, so convincing the majority to do it will never happen.
As with most new things on the Internet today, it seems like peer-to-peer is the only answer. The clients must also be the servers, and it should be no harder than simply running the program. Designing an efficient peer-to-peer system for instant messaging which works behind NAT gateways sounds tricky, but not impossible. Is anyone working on this already?
Ahh yes. They've been trialling this with London Transport staff for a good few months now. I've seen it work to great effect at my local Underground station. A LU train operator that I know demonstrated how he can simply wave his hip at the sensor with his wallet (and thus card) still in his pocket and the gate will open immediately.
I'm sure the more paranoid people on slashdot will already be thinking about it being used to track movements around the Underground system and whatnot, but remember they could do this before anyway. What would be more sinister would be for businesses surrounding stations reading the IDs on the cards and thus being able to identify a returning customer at least until his ticket expires. I can't really see this being an issue, however, as only frequent users of the system will have these cards.
The problems you had deleting Outlook Express are no doubt caused by Windows File Protection. In order to beat it, simply delete the copies of the files you wish to delete from the directory C:\Windows\System32\dllcache (or similar, depending on where you installed Windows).
Once the relevant files (such as msimn.exe) are not present in dllcache, you can delete the versions of them in the main program directory. Windows will, at this point, moan that it failed to restore the files and ask for the CD to restore them, but you have the opportunity to decline, and Windows will never bother you about those files again.
I don't advise that you delete the entire contents of dllcache, though, no matter how elite you think you are. Windows File Protection is good for protecting against apps which overwrite the installed libraries in the Windows directory which can render your Windows 2000 installation unbootable in some cases.
I hope your mother made a lot of noise as she was leaving. Let anyone who cares know what they are losing. If noone makes obvious what is being lost, the majority will not notice until it is too late.
All of the relationships I had with other children in my early life was a result of the public school system. What were your experiences with regards to meeting and forming relationships with other children your age while you were being home-schooled? Did you find it harder or easier to maintain relationships with your peers in the home-school environment versus the school environment?
I'm not surprised to hear that Microsoft can't produce a sensibly-localised product for China, considering that after all these years their British releases of Windows say "Favorites" instead of "Favourites".
They do have Britain-specific releases of Windows, but the only change seems to be that the installer defaults to the British locale and keymap.
Thanks for the informative reply. I'm just going to pick on one bit:
Now that he is 18 and a full legal adult (in the US at least), he would be prosecuted as an adult for the heinous crime of possessing child pornography.
I suppose it could be argued that the guy "forced" the girl to be in the photographs and thus it is a form of sexual assault. I wonder if testimony from the now 18-year-old woman would be sufficient to convince the court that she voluntarily had the pictures taken and thus the misdeed was actually just a 16-year-old lad enjoying times with his same-age girlfriend with mutual consent. There was no abuse here, so all of the reasons for the child porn possession laws are not relevant.
Does the "Yes" button which appears when a website attempts to run an unsigned ActiveX control within IE qualify as a magic button?
I'm sure lots of people just hit Yes because they don't really understand the issues and want to see whatever site they were trying to see. That site could be something dodgy, but it could simply have been a typo in the URL which the user doesn't notice until it's too late.
I guess you were referring to "skwirrel", which is the popular British pronounciation, vs. "skwirl", which (so I've observed) is the popular American pronounciation.
I've certainly never heard anyone call them "skwittles".
I believe an old beta of media player could play standard MP4, but when they made the release the deliberately broke the codec so that it would only work for decoding the contents of a Windows Media stream.
I saw a site once which had the old, uncripped codec available for download, but I guess MS have probably put a stop to that particular site by now.
Still, having to install a beta codec is hardly "out of the box", I suppose.
The first thing that needs to be done is to get micropayments sorted out once and for all. Noone wants to pay a monthly subscription, they want to pay for what they actually use, and they'll probably not know their usage ahead of time. Of course, there's nothing to stop sites still offering cheaper subscription services for those who like that sort of thing.
However, what will really make this work is to find some way to centralize this so that a person only has to pay a single organisation and will get some kind of bill, just like with the telephone system.
The ultimate solution would be to somehow tie it into ISPs, so that the ISP is charged for the micropayments and then passes this cost onto the customer as part of their service. ISPs could bundle a certain amount of "free" service charges with their monthly fee and charge users for anything they use in excess of that, of course giving the customer some way to monitor their expenditure.
People are paying their ISPs already, so they'll probably be less unhappy to pay them a little extra especially if they get some free credit to try before they buy. The problem is setting up the infra-structure for this. It would involve some kind of organisation which runs the system and then have sites which want to make use of it tie into them to charge the micropayments to the ISP or the user directly depending on how the user is subscribed. The user could then get a monthly statement and be able to query anything they don't agree with just like they can with a credit card statement.
This is likely to never happen, since it requires too much cooperation. If it was to happen in any form we'd end up with lots of different micropayment providers all of which are supported by different sites, so everyone would have to have an account with all of them. I can dream, though! :)
You'd probably want a system based on a CompactFlash card to be more like a thin client dependant on a noisy machine in another room, since if you try to use one in a regular machine you'll kill the card in a matter of weeks due to your OS swapping to it, or you updating a single file multiple times.
CompactFlash cards have an essentially infinite read life, but their write life is much shorter. When I get around to making truly silent PCs, mine will keep the card read-only and just use it to get the system up as an alternative to a complete netboot. The real work will be done by a beefy, noisy PC in the closet.
Well, it appears that all of the UK mobile telcos are trying to phase out prepay these days. My theory is that they came up with the prepay idea because it's the only way they could get all of the teens into it at the time, but now those teens have grown up so they can be tempted with a contract in exchange for cheaper calls, which are actually artificially cheaper because they actually increased the prepay tarrifs.
Add to that the fact that it's not just teenagers madly buying up mobile phones these days and the prepay model doesn't seem so attractive anymore. I've still got my first prepay SIM although I just recently changed phones. The only real reason I'm still with Orange is that I don't want to change my number. Fortunately I use my phone so infrequently that their recent tarrif increase hasn't hit me very hard.
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Without a privately operated server, Trillian supporting Jabber solves nothing because most users will just use the jabber.com server.
Well, that makes sense. Copyright is to do with the right to copy. When you download a protected work, it is the owner of the server who is making the copy, not you; you are merely recieving the copy.
In the context of KaZaa, a client is also a server unless you specifically disable that function. Once you disable that function, you are no longer distributing copies, merely recieving them.
Is it not the case that the RIAA is subpoenaing those who are sharing the works to which they own the copyright? This does seem to align with common sense, as well as the practical issue of monitoring who is recieving such illegal copies.
The Windows.Forms bit will be tricky to handle even with the help of Wine, since there are a lot of assumptions in there very specific to Windows.
I suspect what is more likely is that developers will make the guts of their software in some kind of library using the more general parts of the class library and language features and then bolt on a different UI for different systems. This has the advantage that the UI will better follow the "local" UI style, plus it means that the functionality of the program is a library which can be called from other apps.
It shouldn't be too hard to port, for example, the socket-related parts of the class library, as the socket libraries on Windows are essentially identical to elsewhere in terms of capabilities and "paradigm".
The problem is not getting geeks to use it, the problem is getting non-geeks to use it. Sure, non-geeks who have a geeky friend might be okay, but right now there's very little point in using Jabber because the vast majority of people are using the centralised IM services and have no reason to switch.
In order to get people to switch, it must be simple, easy and essentially "just work". Relying on your geeky friend rather than relying on Microsoft just isn't going to fly for most people, and also most non-geeks do not have any friends who are geeks to provide this service for them anyway.
I don't know about you, but when I increase my resolution it's because I've got a bigger monitor. The stuff on the screen stays the same size, there's just more room for it.
Those 16x16 icons still look the same size today as they did on my Windows 95 box with a 12" monitor running at 640x480 ... I can just fit more of them on the screen now.
Making the stuff on the screen bigger seems counterproductive to me. That gives me screen realestate comparable to that I had on my 12" monitor, only now I have to have a 21" monitor to get it. Why is this desirable?
Apple's QuickTime Player for Windows is evil, also. They followed their own UI guidelines (for OS X), but that doesn't really make sense when they are producing an application for Windows.
I guess this means that device drivers must now ship with a picture of the device. I can't really see this working in reality. Device vendors will either ship drivers with a picture of a different model (since the driver supports several) or no picture at all, at which point who knows what that pretty UI will do.
Maybe they use Residual Self-image to project a true image of the device onto the screen!
I don't doubt that there are defects in Linux and the various BSDs, but then those aren't sold for hundreds of dollars. In addition, open source software allows you to perform whatever level of review you might want to perform on software before you use it, whereas with Windows the only option is to trust Microsoft.
As a final benefit, albeit not a very useful one in the scenario of a company's IT department, it's possible to make rudimentary temporary patches to the system if an official one is not forthcoming. I realise your average IT department doesn't have the time and possibly the expertise to do this, however.
The problem with MSN, AIM, Y!IM and so forth is that they are centralised. One entity both controls and pays for the hub of the service without which the service will not function. Obviously they must somehow recoup costs, which they usually do via advertising in the official client.
What we need is a decentralised IM system. We techically already have one in the form of Jabber, but noone uses it for reasons I can't be sure of. I suspect the major problem is the high barrier of entry: you must either use the jabber.com/jabber.org servers (centralisation, again) or install your own Jabber server, which is where things get tricky.
In order to run your own Jabber server, you must have a box somewhere preferably with an always-on connection and static IP. This box must be Internet-accessible, at least on the ports Jabber uses.
Had Jabber been invented around the same time as email and news, ISPs would no doubt run Jabber servers on behalf of their customers as they do with USENET news servers and SMTP servers. Unfortunately, it's now far too late in the game for this to happen. Convincing one ISP to do this would be nearly impossible, so convincing the majority to do it will never happen.
As with most new things on the Internet today, it seems like peer-to-peer is the only answer. The clients must also be the servers, and it should be no harder than simply running the program. Designing an efficient peer-to-peer system for instant messaging which works behind NAT gateways sounds tricky, but not impossible. Is anyone working on this already?
Ahh yes. They've been trialling this with London Transport staff for a good few months now. I've seen it work to great effect at my local Underground station. A LU train operator that I know demonstrated how he can simply wave his hip at the sensor with his wallet (and thus card) still in his pocket and the gate will open immediately.
I'm sure the more paranoid people on slashdot will already be thinking about it being used to track movements around the Underground system and whatnot, but remember they could do this before anyway. What would be more sinister would be for businesses surrounding stations reading the IDs on the cards and thus being able to identify a returning customer at least until his ticket expires. I can't really see this being an issue, however, as only frequent users of the system will have these cards.
It contains essentially every executable and library which comes with Windows. Sadly, this includes the pinball game, Solitaire, Paint etc.
If you decline to install the games during the install process it will not put them there in the first place, though.
The problems you had deleting Outlook Express are no doubt caused by Windows File Protection. In order to beat it, simply delete the copies of the files you wish to delete from the directory C:\Windows\System32\dllcache (or similar, depending on where you installed Windows).
Once the relevant files (such as msimn.exe) are not present in dllcache, you can delete the versions of them in the main program directory. Windows will, at this point, moan that it failed to restore the files and ask for the CD to restore them, but you have the opportunity to decline, and Windows will never bother you about those files again.
I don't advise that you delete the entire contents of dllcache, though, no matter how elite you think you are. Windows File Protection is good for protecting against apps which overwrite the installed libraries in the Windows directory which can render your Windows 2000 installation unbootable in some cases.
I hope your mother made a lot of noise as she was leaving. Let anyone who cares know what they are losing. If noone makes obvious what is being lost, the majority will not notice until it is too late.
All of the relationships I had with other children in my early life was a result of the public school system. What were your experiences with regards to meeting and forming relationships with other children your age while you were being home-schooled? Did you find it harder or easier to maintain relationships with your peers in the home-school environment versus the school environment?
If they use Virtual PC, do they not then need to buy not only a copy of OS 9 for every Mac they have, but also some kind of Windows licence?
That'll cost quite a lot, and that's before they've even got any applications to run on either.
I'm not surprised to hear that Microsoft can't produce a sensibly-localised product for China, considering that after all these years their British releases of Windows say "Favorites" instead of "Favourites".
They do have Britain-specific releases of Windows, but the only change seems to be that the installer defaults to the British locale and keymap.
Thanks for the informative reply. I'm just going to pick on one bit:
I suppose it could be argued that the guy "forced" the girl to be in the photographs and thus it is a form of sexual assault. I wonder if testimony from the now 18-year-old woman would be sufficient to convince the court that she voluntarily had the pictures taken and thus the misdeed was actually just a 16-year-old lad enjoying times with his same-age girlfriend with mutual consent. There was no abuse here, so all of the reasons for the child porn possession laws are not relevant.
Does the "Yes" button which appears when a website attempts to run an unsigned ActiveX control within IE qualify as a magic button?
I'm sure lots of people just hit Yes because they don't really understand the issues and want to see whatever site they were trying to see. That site could be something dodgy, but it could simply have been a typo in the URL which the user doesn't notice until it's too late.
Is it illegal for a minor to download sexual pictures of people his or her own age?
I'm just curious. I bet there are at least a few horny 13-year-olds who would rather look at people their own age.
What do Americans call washing-up liquid?
I guess you were referring to "skwirrel", which is the popular British pronounciation, vs. "skwirl", which (so I've observed) is the popular American pronounciation.
I've certainly never heard anyone call them "skwittles".
I believe an old beta of media player could play standard MP4, but when they made the release the deliberately broke the codec so that it would only work for decoding the contents of a Windows Media stream.
I saw a site once which had the old, uncripped codec available for download, but I guess MS have probably put a stop to that particular site by now.
Still, having to install a beta codec is hardly "out of the box", I suppose.
The first thing that needs to be done is to get micropayments sorted out once and for all. Noone wants to pay a monthly subscription, they want to pay for what they actually use, and they'll probably not know their usage ahead of time. Of course, there's nothing to stop sites still offering cheaper subscription services for those who like that sort of thing.
However, what will really make this work is to find some way to centralize this so that a person only has to pay a single organisation and will get some kind of bill, just like with the telephone system.
The ultimate solution would be to somehow tie it into ISPs, so that the ISP is charged for the micropayments and then passes this cost onto the customer as part of their service. ISPs could bundle a certain amount of "free" service charges with their monthly fee and charge users for anything they use in excess of that, of course giving the customer some way to monitor their expenditure.
People are paying their ISPs already, so they'll probably be less unhappy to pay them a little extra especially if they get some free credit to try before they buy. The problem is setting up the infra-structure for this. It would involve some kind of organisation which runs the system and then have sites which want to make use of it tie into them to charge the micropayments to the ISP or the user directly depending on how the user is subscribed. The user could then get a monthly statement and be able to query anything they don't agree with just like they can with a credit card statement.
This is likely to never happen, since it requires too much cooperation. If it was to happen in any form we'd end up with lots of different micropayment providers all of which are supported by different sites, so everyone would have to have an account with all of them. I can dream, though! :)
You'd probably want a system based on a CompactFlash card to be more like a thin client dependant on a noisy machine in another room, since if you try to use one in a regular machine you'll kill the card in a matter of weeks due to your OS swapping to it, or you updating a single file multiple times.
CompactFlash cards have an essentially infinite read life, but their write life is much shorter. When I get around to making truly silent PCs, mine will keep the card read-only and just use it to get the system up as an alternative to a complete netboot. The real work will be done by a beefy, noisy PC in the closet.
Well, it appears that all of the UK mobile telcos are trying to phase out prepay these days. My theory is that they came up with the prepay idea because it's the only way they could get all of the teens into it at the time, but now those teens have grown up so they can be tempted with a contract in exchange for cheaper calls, which are actually artificially cheaper because they actually increased the prepay tarrifs.
Add to that the fact that it's not just teenagers madly buying up mobile phones these days and the prepay model doesn't seem so attractive anymore. I've still got my first prepay SIM although I just recently changed phones. The only real reason I'm still with Orange is that I don't want to change my number. Fortunately I use my phone so infrequently that their recent tarrif increase hasn't hit me very hard.