Arguably, the finger and sendmail problems were coding errors, not designed in per se. The problems with Outlook et al. are the result of poorly thought out and designed features. I think the latter deserves more culpability than the former.
No, they were design errors pure and simple. However, the authors of finger and sendmail ought to be cut a good deal more slack than MS, because security issues had never before been a high priority for software development, and they couldn't really be expected to foresee the types of problems a global network would expose their code to. Remember, finger and sendmail were both written to be used on internal networks of trusted clients, not on the wilds of the Internet.
In the case of Outlook, we'd had years of experience with network security for the designers to draw upon. Unfortunately, they seem to have taken the same trusting mindset which characterized the pre-worm versions of finger, sendmail, et al--which is truly inexcusable.
On the other hand, there's nothing about this worm that couldn't be replicated by a script designed for any other email program. Yes, even Pine. Someone using Pine would have to type ^S to save the attachment, and then run it from the command line, but this isn't functionally any different from clicking on the "attachments" paper clip and clicking on YOU-MUST-BE-AN-IDIOT.vbs. Everything this trojan does could be accomplished in user-space in a Unix. The only real difference is that most Pine users are smart enough not to run a suspicious script they got in their inbox.
There are firsthand accounts of it happening posted here.
Where? There are no firsthand reports of this trojan running in the preview pane, and indeed there can't be, since the preview pane Outlook Express vulernability has different permissions than this worm. Specifically, a preview pane OE virus can "only" run Java Script code and/or insert arbitrary code into your StartUp directory to be run upon reboot. In any case, the source for this worm is widely available, and anyone who understands the issues involved can see that it does not run without being specifically clicked on by the user.
Finally, the preview pane vulnerability has been closed via a patch for months. Most users probably haven't applied it, but there's really nothing more MS could have done (besides not designing ActiveX so poorly in the first place).
Just one correction here, ISP working friend of mine tells me that you don't actually have to run this particular one... the preview pane in outlook is enough to run it, apperently.
This is false.
A proof-of-concept virus which runs when rendered in the preview pane of Outlook Express, and in the full view pane of Outlook, exists, (called Bubbleboy IIRC) but this worm has nothing to do with it. Furthermore, "all" that vulnerability allows is for arbitrary code to be saved (in plain view) into your StartUp directory to run upon reboot. In any case, MS issued a patch for this months ago.
"It crashed all the computers," said Daphne Ghesquiere, a Dow Jones spokeswoman in Hong Kong. "You get the message and the topic says ILOVEYOU, and I was among the stupid ones to open it. I got about five at one time and I was suspicious, but one was from Dow Jones Newswires, so I opened it."
Once the message was opened, Ghesquiere said, it began sending the virus to other e-mail addresses within the Dow Jones computers, blocking people's ability to send and receive e-mail. Victims sometimes received dozens of e-mails, all contaminated.
"I have no idea how it got through the firewall," Ghesquiere said. "It's supposed to be protected." (emphasis mine)
The acticle even has a screen shot of the oh-so-unsuspicious attachment: "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs".
Now, I'm generally all for grandmothers sending email and not-everyone-should-have-to-be-able-to-configure-X 11-to-use-the-Internet and all of that, but shouldn't there be a law against letting people this ignorant operate important computers in financial institutions??
Yes, Napster said that they would take action against users whom they were notified were copyright infringers. However, you should be aware that they took this position not because they think it's right to censor the Internet, but because they are required to do so by law.
Which law? That's right, our very favorite law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Napster "asked" for a list of names just like your ISP is required by the DMCA to "ask" for the names of everyone hosting deCSS on their servers. They are exactly the same application of exactly the same law.
If you'd be thrilled with the MPAA asking the ISPs of everyone listed on 2600's catalog of deCSS mirrors to take down their sites and revoke their Internet access, then you have every right to revel in Metallica's plucky invasion of Napster users' privacy. If instead you'd think that it was a misguided and overzealous application of an unconstitutional law which is not in the public interest, then you should think the same think regardless of whether the illegal content is deCSS.c or enter_sandman.mp3.
I'm pretty sure Dean Lewis had something to do with it, as he's made several public statements in favor of giving students unrestricted access to the Internet like any true educational institution would. Indeed, he's even gone so far as to say that, if Napster (or anything else) sucks up too much bandwidth, Harvard should buy fatter pipes. Of course, Harvard has nearly as much money as God (literally--Harvard is the 2nd largest non-profit organization in the world, losing only to the Catholic Church/Vatican), so what is an option for them may not be possible for other schools.
I can't prove it, but I'd suggest that Dean Lewis' cluefulness on the issue stems from the fact that he's also a Computer Science professor. After all, as you point out, he tends to be pig-headed about everything else.
Linux has got along fine so far with only word-of-mouth advertising (for both customers and programmers) so why should things change?
Read the debate this story linked to. Read the articles that provoked the debate. (Lessig's in particular.) And learn your history.
Linux got where it is by copying the implementation of Unix. Unix got where it was through heavy government involvement, funding, and forced standardization. Unix then became a quagmire of incompatible proprietary forks when the government stopped promoting Unix and enforcing open Unix standards, and instead left Unix development to the wonders of the free market.
Linux (and, more to the point, all the Open Source software that actually runs things, like Apache, BIND, and Sendmail) got where it is by harnessing the open nature of the Internet. The Internet is open because the government developed TCP/IP to be content-agnostic, and forced open access laws on the telecommunications network which currently "is" the Internet. As the Internet evolves to cable/wireless networds which currently don't operate under the same open access laws, the environment which fostered the growth of OSS like Linux will instead be owned by corporations like AOL/TW to do with as they please. This is not because of an absence of government regulation, but rather because the type of government regulation that currently applies to cable networks is different from the type that applies to phone networks. All networks in this country are and will continue to be regulated by the government. The only question is how.
That's the point Lessig makes, and ESR so conveniently avoids, instead arguing that "open-source developers...share a gut-level sense, born of experience, that handing governments more power is more likely in the long term to injure the Internet (and all its potentials for human freedom and property) than to help it grow." What's his evidence for this? Laws like CDA, UCITA, and DMCA--laws passed by politicians who are ignorant of the open-source heritage of the Internet and instead fed propaganda by corporate lobbyists.
Ok, fine. So what's the solution, Eric? Fight to put open access and OSS back on the government agenda? Hire our own lobbyists to teach lawmakers the truth? Use the government's power to redress the harm they've caused by abondoning the development of computing standards to proprietary closed-source corporations like MS?
No, silly. The solution is to ignore the problem, since it will go away. After all, the government doesn't have anything to do with technology or the operations of the "free" market anyways.
Now, I'm rabidly clueless about the requirements for something to qualify as Prior Art, so this idea could be entirely unworkable. But it's my general understanding that to invalidate a patent on grounds of prior art, you just need proof that someone thought of the idea before the person seeking the patent, not that they implemented it or even carried out the design to the degree of detail necessary to secure a patent.
Thus, my idea is this: why don't we have a website (priorart.org?) where you can go whenever you have a cool idea that you don't have the time, money, inclination or expertise to implement, and post that idea to the public domain? That way it ought to be trivial (or as trivial as the law gets) to invalidate a patent using one of the ideas posted there: just show that the idea is the same, and that the timestamp at the website was before the date of the patent submission. By submitting your idea to the site, you'd be placing it in the public domain, but you'd have the advantage of all the other people who read the site responding to it and possibly improving on it to the point where it's actually feasible to implement. On the whole, it sounds like a way to fight the patent system that's a whole lot more broad, less time consuming and less expensive than trying to maintain a GPLed patent portfolio (although I think that's a good idea too).
Of course (and this just demonstrates my point! Sort of.) I think there's prior art on the priorart idea. Or, at least, there are 16 websites with "priorart" in their names. priorart.org is taken, but I timed out when I tried to go there; I didn't take the time to check out all the other ones, so I dunno if they're using my idea or not.
But it's a good idea, though, isn't it? Isn't it?? What do you guys think??
I can't believe you people! When did music piracy go from something done late at night on IRC and ICQ or by passing CD-Rs around at an underground party, to a god-given constitutional right?!??
...The sooner Napster dies, the better; all napster does is make theft accessable to the terminally lame... (emphasis mine)
Translation: "I can't believe you people! When did freely sharing digital information go from something which took above-average computer skills and was thus Ok, to something which non-nerds could do?!??
"...The sooner Napster dies, the better; all napster does is make the power of the digital revolution available to everyone."
How pathetic.
Look, I'm not going to rehash the reasons why duplicating something is not a theft but a gift, and why the music distribution industry is so obviously antiquated by the existence of the Internet as to make propping them not just futile but actually against the interests of society.
Instead I'm going to relate a little anecdote. After I saw this ridiculous story posted to news.com early this morning, I went to www.metallica.com, which I correctly guessed was the official Metallica website, to see what the reaction there was--whether Metallica fans would be swayed more by their allegiance to the band or by their allegiance to common sense. (Well, mostly to see whether there were actually still Metallica fans...)
Unfortunately, when I got there I found that www.metallica.com's message boards are only available to "members". Ok, registration required, fair enough. Only one problem: to become a member, you need to pay them $25!!! Just to post in their message boards!!!!
And I thought to myself, wow--how could they possibly not get it any more??
See, Cid, ask yourself this: do you think that $25 message board is worth it? Of course not; indeed, it's almost guaranteed to be one of the worst message boards on the face of the Internet, because it will only consist of people who just paid $25 to post in a message board.
The point is this: elitism doesn't work anymore. On the Internet, everyone is equal, but everyone's power is additive. That's why Napster is so powerful--not because it does anything that hasn't been done before; like you said, it's pretty much just IRC and ftp tied together, automated, and made easy. But by virtue of being so easy, it gains critical mass, and it gains its own power; when the history of the end of the commodification of ideas is written, Napster will have no small part.
Meanwhile, you and Metallica and everyone else stuck with your outdated elitist worldview will sit on the side of the road and watch the world pass you by.
Celery 2 has 256k of Cache, but 128k is permanently disabled because Intel wants to make sure that the Celeron perfoms worse than the P!!!. It is cheaper for them to do it this way too, rather than have two lines.
Nearly right. The real reason that it's much cheaper for them to do it this way is because often times they'll make a PIII and there'll be a fab problem somewhere on the 256k L2 cache. Used to be, that PIII was either destined for a lower speed bin (maybe the flaw won't cause failure at lower speeds), or for the trash. Now, they can just turn that half of the L2 off and sell it as a Celeron 2!
Thus, the cost savings isn't just from only having "one assembly line", but rather because they can salvage chips that would otherwise be tossed in the trash. Of course, they almost certainly have to purposely disable half the L2 of some perfectly good chips so that they have exactly as many Celeron 2's as marketing says they need on the market...but you get the idea.
I really don't like this ruling
on
Microsoft Loses
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· Score: 2
I admit I've just read the opening few paragraphs--what might be called the abstract were this a scientific paper--but I really have to say that I think this ruling has it precisely backwards. From the opening summary of the judgement, the judge ruled that:
1) MS violated the Sherman Act by employing "anticompetitive means" in an "albeit unsuccessful" attempt "to monopolize the Web browser market";
2) MS violated the Sherman Act by "unlawfully tying its Web browser to its operating system";
3) "the effect of Microsoft's marketing arrangements with other companies" did NOT constitute "unlawful exclusive dealing under criteria established by leading decisions".
I really have to disagree. Now, I haven't read all of the Conclusions of Law, but I did read nearly two-thirds of the Findings of Fact, so I have heard much of Judge Jackson's reasoning on this case, in excrutiating detail. I think his finding in point 1) above is more or less right, except I disagree with the end he projects for MS's illegal practices: that is, I feel like he still, after all this time, doesn't understand the internet well enough to realize that "monopolizing the Web browser market" is not an end in itself, but rather a means to a further end. That is, I get the feeling that Judge Jackson thinks that once Netscape was out of the way, MS was going to start charging for IE, or stop porting it to the Mac, or some other such ridiculous thing. Instead, of course, MS wanted IE to have large market share partially so that they could influence web standards and have a platform to launch proprietary web protocols that they could tie into IIS and Win2000 Server, and partially so that they had a strong platform from which to attack Java's cross-platform compatability. Perhaps he addressed these things later in the ruling, so maybe he got this one right. On the other hand, his assertion that IE represents an unsuccessful attempt to monopolize the browser market is ridiculous. IE has been successful beyond what even the most arrogant MS exec could have predicted--after all, how could anyone have expected the quality of Netscape Navigator to become so awful so quickly? And more to the point, who on earth would have guessed that MS would produce a quick, relatively standards compliant, stable program???
Ruling 2), on the other hand, is dead wrong, and I have a very difficult time believing any of you disagree. The simple fact is, every desktop OS/environment today has an integrated web browser. Some (MacOS, BeOS) are less integrated than others (KDE 2.0, Win98), but the less integrated OS's are *worse off for it*, and they will all be more integrated in the future. There is absolutely no way anyone can convince me that an integrated web browser won't be as essential a feature of a desktop OS in five years as, say, a clipboard is today. This is one of the few legitimate innovations MS has made in the last few years, and it's ludicrous that they're being punished for it.
As for 3), I'd say that it is precisely MS's marketing arrangements that have made them an anticompetitive monopoly. I admit that IANAL and thus Judge Jackson knows the "criteria established by leading decisions" much much better than I do. However, if in fact MS does not meet those criteria, than I think a new precedent must be advanced, as MS has clearly effected the competitive landscape in the software industry for the worse.
In the end, though, I have to say that I'd probably almost rather this case were dropped. I believe MS probably has violated antitrust laws, and caused some pretty serious harm. On the other hand, I think that there have been some positive effects on the consumer experience of the computer industry from having MS's monopoly around, and that it's damned difficult to know just how much better things would have been had MS never existed, or had MS and IBM not split ways back when they were developing OS/2 together.
Frankly, I think MS's market power, and consumer choice in general, has been severely impacted by the internet, and just might be just as severely impacted by OSS. And I'd much rather see Microsoft's dynasty of mediocre software fall to the forces of better products within the industry than to legal regulation from outside.
It's not the Darwin layer that's the problem. The problem is that Quicktime is an application heavily dependent on graphics and sound APIs. Quicktime relies pretty heavily on the QuickDraw and Quartz APIs AFAIK. Porting from those to X is NOT a trivial task. I remember reading somewhere that you could sort of port Mac apps to Windows taking advantage of all the Mac OS calls they basically reimplemented on top of Windows to get Quicktime to get Quicktime to work on Windows
That's all fine and good, except Linux doesn't need a port of Quicktime--it already has xanim, which works just fine for all the old Quicktime codecs. What this topic is really about is getting Apple to stop preventing Sorenson from releasing their codec to alternate platforms. If Apple only let them, Sorenson could release a binary-only version of their codec which could plug into xanim and finally let Linux viewers watch high quality streaming video.
As for your contention that Quicktime 4 for Windows is a bloated API port rather than an ap port, that sounds right to me. After all, the only programs I can think of that are buggier, or bigger memory hogs than Win32 Quicktime are...well, Word 6 for Mac and IE for Solaris. (And Netscape 4.x for all platforms, of course.)
This sounds like an extension of contract law, where contracts can't simply be one-sided -- each party has to give the other party something.
Wait a sec. IAcertainlyNAL, but when you are the liscensee of a GPL'ed program you most certainly do give the liscensor something: you agree not to use their code in any proprietary programs. That can be quite a large restriction--certainly worth more than giving a dollar as you suggest--without taking away your rights to use the software as you wish for your own personal use--which the forced bug-reporting plan someone else suggested would do.
The BSD liscense might be on shakier grounds here; all it does is revoke any implied warranties. But I think the GPL is legally ok.
(I'm sure I don't have to point out that this is a stupid clause in contract law anyways, whether it happens to impact the particular free liscenses we have around today or not. The idea of course is just to make sure that we're not making unfair deals to hide one person's taking advantage of another and calling them "contracts". Well, considering that you can completely circumvent the spirit of the clause by paying $1, and yet it just might apply to some free software liscenses, in which all parties actually *do* understand what's going on, and no one's taking advantage of anyone or hiding anything...yet another case where we find contract/IP law is completely out of sync with actual human interactions.)
There's a Napster plug-in for Winamp. Still has some functions that aren't supported, and in some ways it ruins the point--since you only log on when you're looking for something, there's no reason to share your files. Still, it's a good sight more convenient than firing up Napster every time you want to find a song.
Whether this technology will make it into, say, IE, off-hand I'd be extremely surprised, just because big companies like MS are far too much in bed with the IP fascists. As for the Netscape branded Mozilla, I think we know the answer there, seeing as how their parent company *is* the IP fascists. The real Mozilla? I bet (I hope!) there's a module within a couple weeks.
One thing that confounds me is why they are trying to stop DeCSS on the grounds that it "is produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work." If, by this definition, DeCSS is illegal, then the DVD players you get from department stores are just as illegal! DeCSS decrypts the information stored on the DVD. A DVD player decrypts the information stored on the DVD.
Nope. A DVD player converts a DVD into an analog video signal; at no point to you get access to the unencrypted program material. What you get is good enough for pirating movies, though.
Nope. A DVD player converts its signal into a video signal, but it certainly doesn't have to be analog. Witness DVD players with digital output, or any DVD-ROM. Indeed, such digital output can be recorded (digitally); there have been DVD rippers around for years which operate this way. So no, it's technically not a copy of the unencrypted program material; it's only as good as what actually shows up on the screen. =)
I was having some thoughts about the inevitable conclusions of this whole mess (and the related mp3/SDMI mess), and realized that the MPAA and the RIAA truly have their work cut out for them in the future. What no one has really mentioned yet is that technology is constantly improving in all ways, not just in ways that require things to be hooked up to other things with little wires. What I'm trying to get at is this: what happens when a (digital) camcorder comes out which is good enough to record without any picture degredation (visable to the human eye)?? How can the MPAA stop me from renting the new HDTV-DVD of The Matrix: Part 6, playing it on my new HDTV, recording it with my new kickass digital camera, editing the result on my PC to remove everything in the picture outside of my TV screen, remove ambient noise, *downsample* to HDTV resolution, compress it down to 15 gigs or so, and pop that sucker off to the rest of the world via Napster v2.0 BETA 38??
Now, of course, there are a couple ways to attack the process I just outlined, but they're all pretty damn scary to think about:
First, they could use some sort of Macrovision thing--Macrovision is this funky strobe-light type thingy stuck on all current DVDs that screws up the picture if you try to videotape your screen with a camcorder, because the ugliness pulses are synced up in such a way that you don't notice them when watching on TV, but they create interference with the frame rate of your camcorder. Sort of like how computer monitors have that awful refresh interference when you see them on your local news. Of course, they look just fine when they show up on your national news, because there's a way around that problem--you just have a video camera which operates at the same refresh rate as the computer monitor; in other words, your camera has an adjustible frame rate. So, the MPAA could "mandate" that this feature not find its way into future camcorders. Of course, that would mean that you wouldn't be able to make a video with your computer in it without getting funky lines. Plus it would mean that the camcorders of tomorrow would have a different frame rate than the TV's of tomorrow, which also seems like a pretty bad outcome and thus doubtful.
Next, there's the bit about uploading the result to my TV and editing it. They could try to get in the way of digital video editing on the consumer level. (It would be impossible on the professional level, so they wouldn't even try; unfortunately for them, that means the equipment to do this sort of thing will necessarily be available, just perhaps more expensive.) Of course, now that Apple has invented desktop video editing a couple months back with the release of those new iMacs (note: sarcasm), this is probably too mainstream a technology for them to put back in the bottle without several people noticing.
Then there's the bit about all the edits we made to improve the quality--removing ambient noise, especially. The best the MPAA could hope to do is to make these tools available only on a professional level; still, with the inevitable advance of computers, and with the probable advance of open-source software, it seems quite doubtful that the average person 10 or 15 years from now won't have considerably more video editing capability on their desktop than the average movie-editing studio does now.
On a related note, there's the bit about downsampling to HDTV resolutions. The MPAA could try to limit (consumer-targeted) digital camcorders to HDTV resolution. However, doing so would mean a loss of quality for any video which was recorded and then digitally edited in any non-trivial way. Plus, it would mean an arbitrary limiting of available technology; cheap digital cameras already beat HDTV resolution (just 1024 x 768 IIRC), and it's certainly not too hard to just "do that" 60 (or whatever) times per second. (Yeah, storage concerns, but this is the future. Let the thing have a high speed wireless connection to the internet and use your home server for storage.) The bottom line is, if the MPAA tried to stop piracy here, lots of people would notice and would be very justifiably angry.
Finally, there's the bit about posting it to something sorta like Napster. Now, I'm not going to buy any arguments that 15 gigs is too much; we all know that in 10 years or so 15 gigs of hard drvie space will be about equivalent to the 5 MB an mp3 takes up now; even if it's not quite there, you have to remember that a movie is 2 hours of entertainment whereas a song is just 5 minutes. You might have a slightly better argument when it comes to bandwidth, but there will be a whole whole lot of people, including the MPAA, working very hard to ensure that HDTV quality video can be streamed into consumers' homes over the internet.
So the only avenue of easy attack is Napster. Of course, Napster is just a protocol; at this point I don't think anyone much cares about whether the RIAA wins their suit against Napster (except Shawn Fanning), because it's far far too late for that. Like it or not (and a lot of the old fogeys around here seem not to), Napster and Napster-like protocols are inevitably part of the internet now, just as much as ftp or irc. There may be some wrangling over the next couple years before we see which protocol will actually win out, but rest assured that one will. Now the question becomes, what can the entertainment cartel do about it? Obviously there's no way they can keep it off the computers of any geeks. Of course, geeks could trade pirated stuff years ago, because they knew how to use irc and ftp, and BBS's before that. What about the average consumer? Well, assuming that open-source software succeeds in making its way into the consumer's consciousness--which it appears that it will--then suing everyone in sight won't accomplish much. So it looks as though the only chance they have of success is some sort of large scale regulation of the internet. We all know it can't be done without completely changing the character of the internet, drastically for the worse. Whether it can't be done at all is still too hard to tell.
So, while I seriously doubt anyone has actually read this far, I'd like to ask those of you who have: what do you think the MPAA is trying to accomplish here? Do they have any plan to block universal sharing of movies in the not-so-distant-at-all future? Have they even thought about it yet??
CSS has to decode the video signal in the DVD-ROM, and then send that signal, unencrypted, to the framebuffer for display on the monitor. In other words, a hack sitting at the driver level could rip the DVD content and save it as an MPEG (or whatever), and there's absolutely nothing CSS can do about it. Indeed, such programs have been around since 1997. There are quite a large number of them, and they're much more advanced and easier to use than deCSS in its current form.
Now, having said that, the copy they make, while fully digital, is technically slightly inferior to what could be made by the direct bit-for-bit copying that deCSS helps facilitate, but only because the signal has been degraded by the pass through your computer's electrically noisy innards. In other words, the copy is no worse than the best output you could get watching a DVD on your computer anyways!
Furthermore, it's always been easy to copy a DVD--again fully digitally--from a normal home DVD player; you can just route the digital output into a video capture card. You may have to deal with that Macrovision thing, which is this funky strobe-light effect that's somehow sent into the DVD out signal in such a way that it doesn't show up when you're just watching a DVD on your TV (as long as you have a new TV...), but does when you plug your DVD output into your VCR and press record. Luckily, though, Macrovision is as easy to disable as region encoding: most DVD players have a "hidden" setup mode--accessible through a combination of buttons on the remote or on the player itself (directions widely available on internet)--which lets you turn Macrovision and region encoding off. Just like the "hack" to turn region encoding off on the PS2 a few days ago.
Anyways, the point is, the only thing deCSS brings to the table as far as ripping DVD's goes is *publicity*. That is, most anyone could have ripped a DVD years ago with tools that have been readily available, and are indeed easier to use, but with all the publicity surrounding deCSS, it's a bit easier to find on the internet than those other tools. On the other hand, by the time you actually find the other programs required in addition to deCSS to successfully rip a DVD--i.e. a program which converts from VOB to MPEG--then you'll probably run across these other rippers as well. Yes, deCSS theoretically allows for rips which are closer to bit-perfect, but considering no one is going to be able to distribute the bit-perfect rip in a reasonably efficient manner (4.7 gig files over the internet?), it really makes no difference.
And Crusoe has four times the battery life of any of them.
You do not understand. The point of this chip is NOT HIGH PERFORMANCE. Nor is it low cost. It is ACCEPTABLE performance, with ACCEPTABLE battery life--which in my and most people's opinions, no mobile devices have reached yet.
Even at their most "efficient" setting, the SpeedStep PIII chips use as much power as a 400MHz PIII; only when they're plugged into a wall are they any faster. By contrast, Crusoe should be able to switch between a much much wider range of power-usage modes (perhaps even continuous range), and will be considerably more efficient at all of them. Furthermore, its response-time will be faster than most notebooks, which quickly power-down and back up in order to save battery life already.
So. Once again. It's not for desktops. It's not for Quake3 and it's *certainly* not for Ultima 9. It's for non-3d-game Win32 compatability--mainly web browsing--on ultralight laptops with several times the battery life of today's x86 ultralightweights, and for wireless x86-compatible internet webpads with 20 hour battery life. Your comments are completely irrelevent to the market Crusoe is targeted at.
Actually, it was Thomas Freidman, the Foreign Affairs columnist for the NY Times, who came up with the McDonald's Theory of Conflict Prevention. And yes, it did fail in the case of the US bombings of Serbia, although Freidman rather convincingly argues that it was "McDonald's" that stopped that war, rather than any traditional military concerns.
That is to say (since obviously McDonald's didn't literally stop the war, just like it doesn't literally prevent other ones) that the reasons the Serbs gave in and withdrew from Kosovo had nothing to do with any military losses we inflicted on them. Indeed, we barely touched their tanks/artilary in Kosovo, which were dug in well in advance and shielded by the mountainous terrain. Our bombing campaign against their military targets was a pretty big flop.
Instead, they surrendered because we bombed their economic infrastructure--namely all the bridges and power plants in Belgrade. Thus, Milosovic didn't withdraw because he no longer had the military ability to continue occupying Kosovo and killing/kicking out Kosovars at will, but rather because Serbia wants to be part of the global economy--hence the McDonald's--and the economic/political costs were too great. Indeed, he would have had a revolt on his hands, precisely (so says Freidman) because the citizens of Serbia care more about being able to "eat at McDonald's" (i.e. partake in the global economy) than they care about oppressing a bunch of Kosovars. (Or Kosovians, if you're George W. Bush.)
Hence the McDonald's Theory of Conflict Prevention is strengthened, despite being conclusively refuted by example. Or so says Freidman. (If you can't tell, I'm taking a course that he's co-teaching this semester. But you can read all of this in his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree.)
Okay, at least on Win32, Mozilla is finally running about as stable and lo-mem as IE5. It crashes much less and is actually somewhat fast.
I have to respectfully disagree there, unless the nightly builds have somehow made tremendous stability progress since M14. I bit the bullet and downloaded at M14, since I'd heard so many good things about Mozilla on/., and I just have to say that y'all must really really be suffering with the atrocious state of web browsing under Linux to think that Mozilla is as good as many of you make it out to be. (Not to mention the fact that no one disputs that the Win32 version is the most stable! I can't imagine Mozilla on Linux. Well, ok, maybe I can--it's probably something like Netscape in Unix...)
M14 is an impressive achievement, and contains many thoughtful, well implemented ideas that will really improve the browsing experience if they're contained in a stable framework. In my experience (albeit limited and on only one, slightly idiosyncratic, machine), M14 was nowhere near as stable as IE5. Indeed, I wouldn't even consider comparing the stability of the two programs.
In about an hour of playing around with M14, I managed to crash it no less than 6 times, not including multiplicities when I was testing to see if my crashes were reproducible. (One, involving both an incorrect rendering and a hard crash on the slashdot home page, was reproducible under several different circumstances. Yes, I reported it, and although it's an awesome system, it must be said that bugzilla is very intimidating for first-time users.) I managed on two occasions to magically lose my back arrow, and despite the much-touted new rendering engine, I ran into several rendering errors. (No, they were not caused by incompatible pages; Mozilla would incorrectly render the pages inconsistently.)
Furthermore, the little autofeedback-on-crash tool that's supposed to pop up with every crash never worked; it froze (recoverable through ctrl-alt-delete) every time. Dude, when even your crash-reporting tool always crashes, you've got problems.
That is to say, you're not at the beta level yet.
Now, maybe I'm just spoiled because the only other public beta I've really participated in has been the very high-quality Q3:Arena tests. On the other hand, no, I'm not. Maybe those of you who've had to make do with Netscape for Unix don't realize this, but browsers--in sharp contrast to, say, Q3:Arena--are designed (or ought to be) to run full-time, in multiple instances, with complete stability and low overhead. IE5 is very certainly not perfect in these respects (low overhead especially), but it does an immeasurably better job of this than Mozilla appears capable of. It loads up very quickly (yeah, that's just because it loads up with the OS...but with the way I use my computer (and indeed, with the way most people with persistant net connections--an increasing percentage of the populace--use their computers), that's a much better way of doing things, and I'd say Mozilla has close to no chance of capturing my desktop if it requires the long wait and splash screen to start-up. I mean, of course I could just stick a copy of Mozilla in my StartUp directory, but...eh, whatever.)
Back to IE: it's amazingly modularized, and works quite well in that capacity. Case in point, GuruNet (or Flyswat), two little programs that sit in your taskbar and will find definitions, synonyms, and other information for any word in any program that you Alt-click on. Both use a componentized version of IE, and both run transparently without affecting stability or sucking up too terribly much memory (although that could stand to be improved). Examples like this abound.
And finally, it's quite stable. Yes, IE5 crashes from time to time, sometimes taking down the whole OS. In Win98. However, IE5 is still running full-time in Win2000, which has remarkable stability. (From what I've heard, it's at least on par with KDE or Gnome on Linux, much more so if you run Linux Netscape. Now, sure, a Win2000 reboot is worse than just restarting KDE or Gnome, if your computer is acting as a server or something...but then you shouldn't be using it as a desktop anyways.) In Win2000, you can spawn 5 copies of IE, have a couple IE-based components running in the background, and browse to your heart's content without much risk of crashing. Mozilla is very very far from that, to say the least.
Finally, IE5 is faster. Yeah, there's still debugging code in Mozilla, and optimizations need to be made, but IE5 is much much faster. Don't believe me, then take your web connection out of the equation: check how much faster IE5 renders pages out of the cache. Easily an order of magnitude.
And finally, the back button in Mozilla still doesn't work. How on earth Netscape users manage to browse/., when they're always returned back the top of an article everytime they click a link in the comments or read responses below their threshold, is a mystery to me. This is beyond inexcusible. I'm not even sure if it isn't beyond laughable. Perhaps pathetic is word I'm looking for. I know that this is a bug they've identified and plan on fixing, but I really hope for their sake that it's a showstopper before they declare Mozilla beta.
Uch, so I've ranted for quite some time now, but the point is, Mozilla is going to be most people's first taste of open-source. (Well, except for all the things they use every day they surf the internet but don't realize, like Apache, Sendmail, Perl, BSD/Linux, etc. Their first taste of open-source on their own machines, say.) If it's declared beta in anywhere near its current state (much less *released* in anything resembling its current state), it will probably be their last for some time. Netscape/AOL/Mozilla/whoever really shouldn't rush this, and the open source community developing Mozilla really ought to realize just how much better the competition really is.
And remember, Nvidia said the NV25 was X-Box ONLY.
Not exactly. Actually, the NV25 is the codename for their next-next-next-generation PC graphics chip--the geForce was the NV10; the NV15 should be out in May or June; the NV20 by Christmas of this year, and the NV25 in mid-2001. The GPU in the X-Box (release date: Christmas 2001) will be an NV25, in the sense that it will have essentially the same core as the NV25 video cards for the PC; however, it will have to be custom-made to use the X-Box's 64 MB unified memory, and the X-Box's custom bus, and various other things.
In any case, you're absolutely right that this sounds like "me too" vaporware, and a rather transparent case of it at that. There will not be "NV25 Hardware Acceleration or better" available by this Christmas, except on SGI workstations and possibly some arcade machines.
Also, I think a little less bias in the selection of the stories themselves could be useful. Who on earth made the decision that the release of FreeBSD 4.0 wasn't even worthy of a mention as a "quickie," yet the book review on assosciate programs was worthy of a whole article?
Erm...however decided it wasn't worthy of a mention of a quickie probably made that decision based on the fact that it already had its own article. FreeBSD 4.0 Released.
I have to say that I agree with the main thrust of your comment; the editorializing in the article topics and some of the article selection does get a bit ridiculous sometimes. However, you might want to do the slightest modicum of research (i.e. scan the Older Stuff slashbox) before you spout off ignorantly.
They never released the source. Despite the "gnu" in the name, the beta version was Win32 binary-only. (They were planning on porting to Mac/Linux/etc. and GPLing once they got to 1.0)
Of course, there are numerous open-source napster clones already out there, so it isn't such a huge loss.
I think that a patent period of 6 to 9 months is too short for some SW patents (e.g. a revolutionary new algorithm for multimedia compression).
Really? Then you're happy that you're not able to watch Sorenson encoded video on Linux? Even though it's rapidly becoming the encoding alrgorithm of choice for high-quality video on the internet? And that, except for a potential (maybe, maybe not) port of Apple's closed-source, horrendously buggy, resource-hogging, pop-up-ad-spewing Interface Hall of Shame member Quicktime 4, you never will??
Yeah, let's hear it for long software patents. After all, Linux users won't mind having to wait 17 years to watch the new Mission Impossible 2 trailer. (Caution!! 17.9 MB download!! And no Linux users allowed until the year 2015!!!)
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Arguably, the finger and sendmail problems were coding errors, not designed in per se. The problems with Outlook et al. are the result of poorly thought out and designed features. I
think the latter deserves more culpability than the former.
No, they were design errors pure and simple. However, the authors of finger and sendmail ought to be cut a good deal more slack than MS, because security issues had never before been a high priority for software development, and they couldn't really be expected to foresee the types of problems a global network would expose their code to. Remember, finger and sendmail were both written to be used on internal networks of trusted clients, not on the wilds of the Internet.
In the case of Outlook, we'd had years of experience with network security for the designers to draw upon. Unfortunately, they seem to have taken the same trusting mindset which characterized the pre-worm versions of finger, sendmail, et al--which is truly inexcusable.
On the other hand, there's nothing about this worm that couldn't be replicated by a script designed for any other email program. Yes, even Pine. Someone using Pine would have to type ^S to save the attachment, and then run it from the command line, but this isn't functionally any different from clicking on the "attachments" paper clip and clicking on YOU-MUST-BE-AN-IDIOT.vbs. Everything this trojan does could be accomplished in user-space in a Unix. The only real difference is that most Pine users are smart enough not to run a suspicious script they got in their inbox.
There are firsthand accounts of it happening posted here.
Where? There are no firsthand reports of this trojan running in the preview pane, and indeed there can't be, since the preview pane Outlook Express vulernability has different permissions than this worm. Specifically, a preview pane OE virus can "only" run Java Script code and/or insert arbitrary code into your StartUp directory to be run upon reboot. In any case, the source for this worm is widely available, and anyone who understands the issues involved can see that it does not run without being specifically clicked on by the user.
Finally, the preview pane vulnerability has been closed via a patch for months. Most users probably haven't applied it, but there's really nothing more MS could have done (besides not designing ActiveX so poorly in the first place).
Just one correction here, ISP working friend of mine tells me that you don't actually have to run this particular one... the preview pane in outlook is enough to run it, apperently.
This is false.
A proof-of-concept virus which runs when rendered in the preview pane of Outlook Express, and in the full view pane of Outlook, exists, (called Bubbleboy IIRC) but this worm has nothing to do with it. Furthermore, "all" that vulnerability allows is for arbitrary code to be saved (in plain view) into your StartUp directory to run upon reboot. In any case, MS issued a patch for this months ago.
From the MSNBC article:
X 11-to-use-the-Internet and all of that, but shouldn't there be a law against letting people this ignorant operate important computers in financial institutions??
"It crashed all the computers," said Daphne Ghesquiere, a Dow Jones spokeswoman in Hong Kong. "You get the message and the topic says ILOVEYOU, and I was among the stupid ones to open it. I got about five at one time and I was suspicious, but one was from Dow Jones Newswires, so I opened it."
Once the message was opened, Ghesquiere said, it began sending the virus to other e-mail addresses within the Dow Jones computers, blocking people's ability to send and receive e-mail. Victims sometimes received dozens of e-mails, all contaminated.
"I have no idea how it got through the firewall," Ghesquiere said. "It's supposed to be protected." (emphasis mine)
The acticle even has a screen shot of the oh-so-unsuspicious attachment: "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs".
Now, I'm generally all for grandmothers sending email and not-everyone-should-have-to-be-able-to-configure-
I mean, I'm joking of course.
Or at least I think I'm joking...
Yes, Napster said that they would take action against users whom they were notified were copyright infringers. However, you should be aware that they took this position not because they think it's right to censor the Internet, but because they are required to do so by law.
Which law? That's right, our very favorite law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Napster "asked" for a list of names just like your ISP is required by the DMCA to "ask" for the names of everyone hosting deCSS on their servers. They are exactly the same application of exactly the same law.
If you'd be thrilled with the MPAA asking the ISPs of everyone listed on 2600's catalog of deCSS mirrors to take down their sites and revoke their Internet access, then you have every right to revel in Metallica's plucky invasion of Napster users' privacy. If instead you'd think that it was a misguided and overzealous application of an unconstitutional law which is not in the public interest, then you should think the same think regardless of whether the illegal content is deCSS.c or enter_sandman.mp3.
I'm pretty sure Dean Lewis had something to do with it, as he's made several public statements in favor of giving students unrestricted access to the Internet like any true educational institution would. Indeed, he's even gone so far as to say that, if Napster (or anything else) sucks up too much bandwidth, Harvard should buy fatter pipes. Of course, Harvard has nearly as much money as God (literally--Harvard is the 2nd largest non-profit organization in the world, losing only to the Catholic Church/Vatican), so what is an option for them may not be possible for other schools.
I can't prove it, but I'd suggest that Dean Lewis' cluefulness on the issue stems from the fact that he's also a Computer Science professor. After all, as you point out, he tends to be pig-headed about everything else.
Linux has got along fine so far with only word-of-mouth advertising (for both customers and programmers) so why should things change?
Read the debate this story linked to. Read the articles that provoked the debate. (Lessig's in particular.) And learn your history.
Linux got where it is by copying the implementation of Unix. Unix got where it was through heavy government involvement, funding, and forced standardization. Unix then became a quagmire of incompatible proprietary forks when the government stopped promoting Unix and enforcing open Unix standards, and instead left Unix development to the wonders of the free market.
Linux (and, more to the point, all the Open Source software that actually runs things, like Apache, BIND, and Sendmail) got where it is by harnessing the open nature of the Internet. The Internet is open because the government developed TCP/IP to be content-agnostic, and forced open access laws on the telecommunications network which currently "is" the Internet. As the Internet evolves to cable/wireless networds which currently don't operate under the same open access laws, the environment which fostered the growth of OSS like Linux will instead be owned by corporations like AOL/TW to do with as they please. This is not because of an absence of government regulation, but rather because the type of government regulation that currently applies to cable networks is different from the type that applies to phone networks. All networks in this country are and will continue to be regulated by the government. The only question is how.
That's the point Lessig makes, and ESR so conveniently avoids, instead arguing that "open-source developers...share a gut-level sense, born of experience, that handing governments more power is more likely in the long term to injure the Internet (and all its potentials for human freedom and property) than to help it grow." What's his evidence for this? Laws like CDA, UCITA, and DMCA--laws passed by politicians who are ignorant of the open-source heritage of the Internet and instead fed propaganda by corporate lobbyists.
Ok, fine. So what's the solution, Eric? Fight to put open access and OSS back on the government agenda? Hire our own lobbyists to teach lawmakers the truth? Use the government's power to redress the harm they've caused by abondoning the development of computing standards to proprietary closed-source corporations like MS?
No, silly. The solution is to ignore the problem, since it will go away. After all, the government doesn't have anything to do with technology or the operations of the "free" market anyways.
Now, I'm rabidly clueless about the requirements for something to qualify as Prior Art, so this idea could be entirely unworkable. But it's my general understanding that to invalidate a patent on grounds of prior art, you just need proof that someone thought of the idea before the person seeking the patent, not that they implemented it or even carried out the design to the degree of detail necessary to secure a patent.
Thus, my idea is this: why don't we have a website (priorart.org?) where you can go whenever you have a cool idea that you don't have the time, money, inclination or expertise to implement, and post that idea to the public domain? That way it ought to be trivial (or as trivial as the law gets) to invalidate a patent using one of the ideas posted there: just show that the idea is the same, and that the timestamp at the website was before the date of the patent submission. By submitting your idea to the site, you'd be placing it in the public domain, but you'd have the advantage of all the other people who read the site responding to it and possibly improving on it to the point where it's actually feasible to implement. On the whole, it sounds like a way to fight the patent system that's a whole lot more broad, less time consuming and less expensive than trying to maintain a GPLed patent portfolio (although I think that's a good idea too).
Of course (and this just demonstrates my point! Sort of.) I think there's prior art on the priorart idea. Or, at least, there are 16 websites with "priorart" in their names. priorart.org is taken, but I timed out when I tried to go there; I didn't take the time to check out all the other ones, so I dunno if they're using my idea or not.
But it's a good idea, though, isn't it? Isn't it?? What do you guys think??
It's not IBM's patent. IBM just hosts a searchable database which lists all US patents, including that one.
I can't believe you people! When did music piracy go from something done late at night on IRC and ICQ or by passing CD-Rs around at an underground party, to a god-given constitutional right?!??
...The sooner Napster dies, the better; all napster does is make theft accessable to the terminally lame... (emphasis mine)
Translation: "I can't believe you people! When did freely sharing digital information go from something which took above-average computer skills and was thus Ok, to something which non-nerds could do?!??
"...The sooner Napster dies, the better; all napster does is make the power of the digital revolution available to everyone."
How pathetic.
Look, I'm not going to rehash the reasons why duplicating something is not a theft but a gift, and why the music distribution industry is so obviously antiquated by the existence of the Internet as to make propping them not just futile but actually against the interests of society.
Instead I'm going to relate a little anecdote. After I saw this ridiculous story posted to news.com early this morning, I went to www.metallica.com, which I correctly guessed was the official Metallica website, to see what the reaction there was--whether Metallica fans would be swayed more by their allegiance to the band or by their allegiance to common sense. (Well, mostly to see whether there were actually still Metallica fans...)
Unfortunately, when I got there I found that www.metallica.com's message boards are only available to "members". Ok, registration required, fair enough. Only one problem: to become a member, you need to pay them $25!!! Just to post in their message boards!!!!
And I thought to myself, wow--how could they possibly not get it any more??
See, Cid, ask yourself this: do you think that $25 message board is worth it? Of course not; indeed, it's almost guaranteed to be one of the worst message boards on the face of the Internet, because it will only consist of people who just paid $25 to post in a message board.
The point is this: elitism doesn't work anymore. On the Internet, everyone is equal, but everyone's power is additive. That's why Napster is so powerful--not because it does anything that hasn't been done before; like you said, it's pretty much just IRC and ftp tied together, automated, and made easy. But by virtue of being so easy, it gains critical mass, and it gains its own power; when the history of the end of the commodification of ideas is written, Napster will have no small part.
Meanwhile, you and Metallica and everyone else stuck with your outdated elitist worldview will sit on the side of the road and watch the world pass you by.
Celery 2 has 256k of Cache, but 128k is permanently disabled because Intel wants to make sure that the Celeron perfoms worse than the P!!!. It is cheaper for them to do it this way too, rather than have two lines.
Nearly right. The real reason that it's much cheaper for them to do it this way is because often times they'll make a PIII and there'll be a fab problem somewhere on the 256k L2 cache. Used to be, that PIII was either destined for a lower speed bin (maybe the flaw won't cause failure at lower speeds), or for the trash. Now, they can just turn that half of the L2 off and sell it as a Celeron 2!
Thus, the cost savings isn't just from only having "one assembly line", but rather because they can salvage chips that would otherwise be tossed in the trash. Of course, they almost certainly have to purposely disable half the L2 of some perfectly good chips so that they have exactly as many Celeron 2's as marketing says they need on the market...but you get the idea.
I admit I've just read the opening few paragraphs--what might be called the abstract were this a scientific paper--but I really have to say that I think this ruling has it precisely backwards. From the opening summary of the judgement, the judge ruled that:
1) MS violated the Sherman Act by employing "anticompetitive means" in an "albeit unsuccessful" attempt "to monopolize the Web browser market";
2) MS violated the Sherman Act by "unlawfully tying its Web browser to its operating system";
3) "the effect of Microsoft's marketing arrangements with other companies" did NOT constitute "unlawful exclusive dealing under criteria established by leading decisions".
I really have to disagree. Now, I haven't read all of the Conclusions of Law, but I did read nearly two-thirds of the Findings of Fact, so I have heard much of Judge Jackson's reasoning on this case, in excrutiating detail. I think his finding in point 1) above is more or less right, except I disagree with the end he projects for MS's illegal practices: that is, I feel like he still, after all this time, doesn't understand the internet well enough to realize that "monopolizing the Web browser market" is not an end in itself, but rather a means to a further end. That is, I get the feeling that Judge Jackson thinks that once Netscape was out of the way, MS was going to start charging for IE, or stop porting it to the Mac, or some other such ridiculous thing. Instead, of course, MS wanted IE to have large market share partially so that they could influence web standards and have a platform to launch proprietary web protocols that they could tie into IIS and Win2000 Server, and partially so that they had a strong platform from which to attack Java's cross-platform compatability. Perhaps he addressed these things later in the ruling, so maybe he got this one right. On the other hand, his assertion that IE represents an unsuccessful attempt to monopolize the browser market is ridiculous. IE has been successful beyond what even the most arrogant MS exec could have predicted--after all, how could anyone have expected the quality of Netscape Navigator to become so awful so quickly? And more to the point, who on earth would have guessed that MS would produce a quick, relatively standards compliant, stable program???
Ruling 2), on the other hand, is dead wrong, and I have a very difficult time believing any of you disagree. The simple fact is, every desktop OS/environment today has an integrated web browser. Some (MacOS, BeOS) are less integrated than others (KDE 2.0, Win98), but the less integrated OS's are *worse off for it*, and they will all be more integrated in the future. There is absolutely no way anyone can convince me that an integrated web browser won't be as essential a feature of a desktop OS in five years as, say, a clipboard is today. This is one of the few legitimate innovations MS has made in the last few years, and it's ludicrous that they're being punished for it.
As for 3), I'd say that it is precisely MS's marketing arrangements that have made them an anticompetitive monopoly. I admit that IANAL and thus Judge Jackson knows the "criteria established by leading decisions" much much better than I do. However, if in fact MS does not meet those criteria, than I think a new precedent must be advanced, as MS has clearly effected the competitive landscape in the software industry for the worse.
In the end, though, I have to say that I'd probably almost rather this case were dropped. I believe MS probably has violated antitrust laws, and caused some pretty serious harm. On the other hand, I think that there have been some positive effects on the consumer experience of the computer industry from having MS's monopoly around, and that it's damned difficult to know just how much better things would have been had MS never existed, or had MS and IBM not split ways back when they were developing OS/2 together.
Frankly, I think MS's market power, and consumer choice in general, has been severely impacted by the internet, and just might be just as severely impacted by OSS. And I'd much rather see Microsoft's dynasty of mediocre software fall to the forces of better products within the industry than to legal regulation from outside.
It's not the Darwin layer that's the problem. The problem is that Quicktime is an application heavily dependent on graphics and sound APIs. Quicktime relies pretty heavily on the QuickDraw and Quartz APIs AFAIK. Porting from those to X is NOT a trivial task. I remember reading somewhere that you could sort of port Mac apps to Windows taking advantage of all the Mac OS calls they basically reimplemented on top of Windows to get Quicktime to get Quicktime to work on Windows
That's all fine and good, except Linux doesn't need a port of Quicktime--it already has xanim, which works just fine for all the old Quicktime codecs. What this topic is really about is getting Apple to stop preventing Sorenson from releasing their codec to alternate platforms. If Apple only let them, Sorenson could release a binary-only version of their codec which could plug into xanim and finally let Linux viewers watch high quality streaming video.
As for your contention that Quicktime 4 for Windows is a bloated API port rather than an ap port, that sounds right to me. After all, the only programs I can think of that are buggier, or bigger memory hogs than Win32 Quicktime are...well, Word 6 for Mac and IE for Solaris. (And Netscape 4.x for all platforms, of course.)
This sounds like an extension of contract law, where contracts can't simply be one-sided -- each party has to give the other party something.
Wait a sec. IAcertainlyNAL, but when you are the liscensee of a GPL'ed program you most certainly do give the liscensor something: you agree not to use their code in any proprietary programs. That can be quite a large restriction--certainly worth more than giving a dollar as you suggest--without taking away your rights to use the software as you wish for your own personal use--which the forced bug-reporting plan someone else suggested would do.
The BSD liscense might be on shakier grounds here; all it does is revoke any implied warranties. But I think the GPL is legally ok.
(I'm sure I don't have to point out that this is a stupid clause in contract law anyways, whether it happens to impact the particular free liscenses we have around today or not. The idea of course is just to make sure that we're not making unfair deals to hide one person's taking advantage of another and calling them "contracts". Well, considering that you can completely circumvent the spirit of the clause by paying $1, and yet it just might apply to some free software liscenses, in which all parties actually *do* understand what's going on, and no one's taking advantage of anyone or hiding anything...yet another case where we find contract/IP law is completely out of sync with actual human interactions.)
There's a Napster plug-in for Winamp. Still has some functions that aren't supported, and in some ways it ruins the point--since you only log on when you're looking for something, there's no reason to share your files. Still, it's a good sight more convenient than firing up Napster every time you want to find a song.
Whether this technology will make it into, say, IE, off-hand I'd be extremely surprised, just because big companies like MS are far too much in bed with the IP fascists. As for the Netscape branded Mozilla, I think we know the answer there, seeing as how their parent company *is* the IP fascists. The real Mozilla? I bet (I hope!) there's a module within a couple weeks.
Nope. A DVD player converts a DVD into an analog video signal; at no point to you get access to the unencrypted program material. What you get is good enough for pirating movies, though.
Nope. A DVD player converts its signal into a video signal, but it certainly doesn't have to be analog. Witness DVD players with digital output, or any DVD-ROM. Indeed, such digital output can be recorded (digitally); there have been DVD rippers around for years which operate this way. So no, it's technically not a copy of the unencrypted program material; it's only as good as what actually shows up on the screen. =)
I was having some thoughts about the inevitable conclusions of this whole mess (and the related mp3/SDMI mess), and realized that the MPAA and the RIAA truly have their work cut out for them in the future. What no one has really mentioned yet is that technology is constantly improving in all ways, not just in ways that require things to be hooked up to other things with little wires. What I'm trying to get at is this: what happens when a (digital) camcorder comes out which is good enough to record without any picture degredation (visable to the human eye)?? How can the MPAA stop me from renting the new HDTV-DVD of The Matrix: Part 6, playing it on my new HDTV, recording it with my new kickass digital camera, editing the result on my PC to remove everything in the picture outside of my TV screen, remove ambient noise, *downsample* to HDTV resolution, compress it down to 15 gigs or so, and pop that sucker off to the rest of the world via Napster v2.0 BETA 38??
Now, of course, there are a couple ways to attack the process I just outlined, but they're all pretty damn scary to think about:
First, they could use some sort of Macrovision thing--Macrovision is this funky strobe-light type thingy stuck on all current DVDs that screws up the picture if you try to videotape your screen with a camcorder, because the ugliness pulses are synced up in such a way that you don't notice them when watching on TV, but they create interference with the frame rate of your camcorder. Sort of like how computer monitors have that awful refresh interference when you see them on your local news. Of course, they look just fine when they show up on your national news, because there's a way around that problem--you just have a video camera which operates at the same refresh rate as the computer monitor; in other words, your camera has an adjustible frame rate. So, the MPAA could "mandate" that this feature not find its way into future camcorders. Of course, that would mean that you wouldn't be able to make a video with your computer in it without getting funky lines. Plus it would mean that the camcorders of tomorrow would have a different frame rate than the TV's of tomorrow, which also seems like a pretty bad outcome and thus doubtful.
Next, there's the bit about uploading the result to my TV and editing it. They could try to get in the way of digital video editing on the consumer level. (It would be impossible on the professional level, so they wouldn't even try; unfortunately for them, that means the equipment to do this sort of thing will necessarily be available, just perhaps more expensive.) Of course, now that Apple has invented desktop video editing a couple months back with the release of those new iMacs (note: sarcasm), this is probably too mainstream a technology for them to put back in the bottle without several people noticing.
Then there's the bit about all the edits we made to improve the quality--removing ambient noise, especially. The best the MPAA could hope to do is to make these tools available only on a professional level; still, with the inevitable advance of computers, and with the probable advance of open-source software, it seems quite doubtful that the average person 10 or 15 years from now won't have considerably more video editing capability on their desktop than the average movie-editing studio does now.
On a related note, there's the bit about downsampling to HDTV resolutions. The MPAA could try to limit (consumer-targeted) digital camcorders to HDTV resolution. However, doing so would mean a loss of quality for any video which was recorded and then digitally edited in any non-trivial way. Plus, it would mean an arbitrary limiting of available technology; cheap digital cameras already beat HDTV resolution (just 1024 x 768 IIRC), and it's certainly not too hard to just "do that" 60 (or whatever) times per second. (Yeah, storage concerns, but this is the future. Let the thing have a high speed wireless connection to the internet and use your home server for storage.) The bottom line is, if the MPAA tried to stop piracy here, lots of people would notice and would be very justifiably angry.
Finally, there's the bit about posting it to something sorta like Napster. Now, I'm not going to buy any arguments that 15 gigs is too much; we all know that in 10 years or so 15 gigs of hard drvie space will be about equivalent to the 5 MB an mp3 takes up now; even if it's not quite there, you have to remember that a movie is 2 hours of entertainment whereas a song is just 5 minutes. You might have a slightly better argument when it comes to bandwidth, but there will be a whole whole lot of people, including the MPAA, working very hard to ensure that HDTV quality video can be streamed into consumers' homes over the internet.
So the only avenue of easy attack is Napster. Of course, Napster is just a protocol; at this point I don't think anyone much cares about whether the RIAA wins their suit against Napster (except Shawn Fanning), because it's far far too late for that. Like it or not (and a lot of the old fogeys around here seem not to), Napster and Napster-like protocols are inevitably part of the internet now, just as much as ftp or irc. There may be some wrangling over the next couple years before we see which protocol will actually win out, but rest assured that one will. Now the question becomes, what can the entertainment cartel do about it? Obviously there's no way they can keep it off the computers of any geeks. Of course, geeks could trade pirated stuff years ago, because they knew how to use irc and ftp, and BBS's before that. What about the average consumer? Well, assuming that open-source software succeeds in making its way into the consumer's consciousness--which it appears that it will--then suing everyone in sight won't accomplish much. So it looks as though the only chance they have of success is some sort of large scale regulation of the internet. We all know it can't be done without completely changing the character of the internet, drastically for the worse. Whether it can't be done at all is still too hard to tell.
So, while I seriously doubt anyone has actually read this far, I'd like to ask those of you who have: what do you think the MPAA is trying to accomplish here? Do they have any plan to block universal sharing of movies in the not-so-distant-at-all future? Have they even thought about it yet??
CSS has to decode the video signal in the DVD-ROM, and then send that signal, unencrypted, to the framebuffer for display on the monitor. In other words, a hack sitting at the driver level could rip the DVD content and save it as an MPEG (or whatever), and there's absolutely nothing CSS can do about it. Indeed, such programs have been around since 1997. There are quite a large number of them, and they're much more advanced and easier to use than deCSS in its current form.
Now, having said that, the copy they make, while fully digital, is technically slightly inferior to what could be made by the direct bit-for-bit copying that deCSS helps facilitate, but only because the signal has been degraded by the pass through your computer's electrically noisy innards. In other words, the copy is no worse than the best output you could get watching a DVD on your computer anyways!
Furthermore, it's always been easy to copy a DVD--again fully digitally--from a normal home DVD player; you can just route the digital output into a video capture card. You may have to deal with that Macrovision thing, which is this funky strobe-light effect that's somehow sent into the DVD out signal in such a way that it doesn't show up when you're just watching a DVD on your TV (as long as you have a new TV...), but does when you plug your DVD output into your VCR and press record. Luckily, though, Macrovision is as easy to disable as region encoding: most DVD players have a "hidden" setup mode--accessible through a combination of buttons on the remote or on the player itself (directions widely available on internet)--which lets you turn Macrovision and region encoding off. Just like the "hack" to turn region encoding off on the PS2 a few days ago.
Anyways, the point is, the only thing deCSS brings to the table as far as ripping DVD's goes is *publicity*. That is, most anyone could have ripped a DVD years ago with tools that have been readily available, and are indeed easier to use, but with all the publicity surrounding deCSS, it's a bit easier to find on the internet than those other tools. On the other hand, by the time you actually find the other programs required in addition to deCSS to successfully rip a DVD--i.e. a program which converts from VOB to MPEG--then you'll probably run across these other rippers as well. Yes, deCSS theoretically allows for rips which are closer to bit-perfect, but considering no one is going to be able to distribute the bit-perfect rip in a reasonably efficient manner (4.7 gig files over the internet?), it really makes no difference.
And Crusoe has four times the battery life of any of them.
You do not understand. The point of this chip is NOT HIGH PERFORMANCE. Nor is it low cost. It is ACCEPTABLE performance, with ACCEPTABLE battery life--which in my and most people's opinions, no mobile devices have reached yet.
Even at their most "efficient" setting, the SpeedStep PIII chips use as much power as a 400MHz PIII; only when they're plugged into a wall are they any faster. By contrast, Crusoe should be able to switch between a much much wider range of power-usage modes (perhaps even continuous range), and will be considerably more efficient at all of them. Furthermore, its response-time will be faster than most notebooks, which quickly power-down and back up in order to save battery life already.
So. Once again. It's not for desktops. It's not for Quake3 and it's *certainly* not for Ultima 9. It's for non-3d-game Win32 compatability--mainly web browsing--on ultralight laptops with several times the battery life of today's x86 ultralightweights, and for wireless x86-compatible internet webpads with 20 hour battery life. Your comments are completely irrelevent to the market Crusoe is targeted at.
Actually, it was Thomas Freidman, the Foreign Affairs columnist for the NY Times, who came up with the McDonald's Theory of Conflict Prevention. And yes, it did fail in the case of the US bombings of Serbia, although Freidman rather convincingly argues that it was "McDonald's" that stopped that war, rather than any traditional military concerns.
.)
That is to say (since obviously McDonald's didn't literally stop the war, just like it doesn't literally prevent other ones) that the reasons the Serbs gave in and withdrew from Kosovo had nothing to do with any military losses we inflicted on them. Indeed, we barely touched their tanks/artilary in Kosovo, which were dug in well in advance and shielded by the mountainous terrain. Our bombing campaign against their military targets was a pretty big flop.
Instead, they surrendered because we bombed their economic infrastructure--namely all the bridges and power plants in Belgrade. Thus, Milosovic didn't withdraw because he no longer had the military ability to continue occupying Kosovo and killing/kicking out Kosovars at will, but rather because Serbia wants to be part of the global economy--hence the McDonald's--and the economic/political costs were too great. Indeed, he would have had a revolt on his hands, precisely (so says Freidman) because the citizens of Serbia care more about being able to "eat at McDonald's" (i.e. partake in the global economy) than they care about oppressing a bunch of Kosovars. (Or Kosovians, if you're George W. Bush.)
Hence the McDonald's Theory of Conflict Prevention is strengthened, despite being conclusively refuted by example. Or so says Freidman. (If you can't tell, I'm taking a course that he's co-teaching this semester. But you can read all of this in his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree
Okay, at least on Win32, Mozilla is finally running about as stable and lo-mem as IE5. It crashes much less and is actually somewhat fast.
/., and I just have to say that y'all must really really be suffering with the atrocious state of web browsing under Linux to think that Mozilla is as good as many of you make it out to be. (Not to mention the fact that no one disputs that the Win32 version is the most stable! I can't imagine Mozilla on Linux. Well, ok, maybe I can--it's probably something like Netscape in Unix...)
/., when they're always returned back the top of an article everytime they click a link in the comments or read responses below their threshold, is a mystery to me. This is beyond inexcusible. I'm not even sure if it isn't beyond laughable. Perhaps pathetic is word I'm looking for. I know that this is a bug they've identified and plan on fixing, but I really hope for their sake that it's a showstopper before they declare Mozilla beta.
I have to respectfully disagree there, unless the nightly builds have somehow made tremendous stability progress since M14. I bit the bullet and downloaded at M14, since I'd heard so many good things about Mozilla on
M14 is an impressive achievement, and contains many thoughtful, well implemented ideas that will really improve the browsing experience if they're contained in a stable framework. In my experience (albeit limited and on only one, slightly idiosyncratic, machine), M14 was nowhere near as stable as IE5. Indeed, I wouldn't even consider comparing the stability of the two programs.
In about an hour of playing around with M14, I managed to crash it no less than 6 times, not including multiplicities when I was testing to see if my crashes were reproducible. (One, involving both an incorrect rendering and a hard crash on the slashdot home page, was reproducible under several different circumstances. Yes, I reported it, and although it's an awesome system, it must be said that bugzilla is very intimidating for first-time users.) I managed on two occasions to magically lose my back arrow, and despite the much-touted new rendering engine, I ran into several rendering errors. (No, they were not caused by incompatible pages; Mozilla would incorrectly render the pages inconsistently.)
Furthermore, the little autofeedback-on-crash tool that's supposed to pop up with every crash never worked; it froze (recoverable through ctrl-alt-delete) every time. Dude, when even your crash-reporting tool always crashes, you've got problems.
That is to say, you're not at the beta level yet.
Now, maybe I'm just spoiled because the only other public beta I've really participated in has been the very high-quality Q3:Arena tests. On the other hand, no, I'm not. Maybe those of you who've had to make do with Netscape for Unix don't realize this, but browsers--in sharp contrast to, say, Q3:Arena--are designed (or ought to be) to run full-time, in multiple instances, with complete stability and low overhead. IE5 is very certainly not perfect in these respects (low overhead especially), but it does an immeasurably better job of this than Mozilla appears capable of. It loads up very quickly (yeah, that's just because it loads up with the OS...but with the way I use my computer (and indeed, with the way most people with persistant net connections--an increasing percentage of the populace--use their computers), that's a much better way of doing things, and I'd say Mozilla has close to no chance of capturing my desktop if it requires the long wait and splash screen to start-up. I mean, of course I could just stick a copy of Mozilla in my StartUp directory, but...eh, whatever.)
Back to IE: it's amazingly modularized, and works quite well in that capacity. Case in point, GuruNet (or Flyswat), two little programs that sit in your taskbar and will find definitions, synonyms, and other information for any word in any program that you Alt-click on. Both use a componentized version of IE, and both run transparently without affecting stability or sucking up too terribly much memory (although that could stand to be improved). Examples like this abound.
And finally, it's quite stable. Yes, IE5 crashes from time to time, sometimes taking down the whole OS. In Win98. However, IE5 is still running full-time in Win2000, which has remarkable stability. (From what I've heard, it's at least on par with KDE or Gnome on Linux, much more so if you run Linux Netscape. Now, sure, a Win2000 reboot is worse than just restarting KDE or Gnome, if your computer is acting as a server or something...but then you shouldn't be using it as a desktop anyways.) In Win2000, you can spawn 5 copies of IE, have a couple IE-based components running in the background, and browse to your heart's content without much risk of crashing. Mozilla is very very far from that, to say the least.
Finally, IE5 is faster. Yeah, there's still debugging code in Mozilla, and optimizations need to be made, but IE5 is much much faster. Don't believe me, then take your web connection out of the equation: check how much faster IE5 renders pages out of the cache. Easily an order of magnitude.
And finally, the back button in Mozilla still doesn't work. How on earth Netscape users manage to browse
Uch, so I've ranted for quite some time now, but the point is, Mozilla is going to be most people's first taste of open-source. (Well, except for all the things they use every day they surf the internet but don't realize, like Apache, Sendmail, Perl, BSD/Linux, etc. Their first taste of open-source on their own machines, say.) If it's declared beta in anywhere near its current state (much less *released* in anything resembling its current state), it will probably be their last for some time. Netscape/AOL/Mozilla/whoever really shouldn't rush this, and the open source community developing Mozilla really ought to realize just how much better the competition really is.
And remember, Nvidia said the NV25 was X-Box ONLY.
Not exactly. Actually, the NV25 is the codename for their next-next-next-generation PC graphics chip--the geForce was the NV10; the NV15 should be out in May or June; the NV20 by Christmas of this year, and the NV25 in mid-2001. The GPU in the X-Box (release date: Christmas 2001) will be an NV25, in the sense that it will have essentially the same core as the NV25 video cards for the PC; however, it will have to be custom-made to use the X-Box's 64 MB unified memory, and the X-Box's custom bus, and various other things.
In any case, you're absolutely right that this sounds like "me too" vaporware, and a rather transparent case of it at that. There will not be "NV25 Hardware Acceleration or better" available by this Christmas, except on SGI workstations and possibly some arcade machines.
Also, I think a little less bias in the selection of the stories themselves could be useful. Who on earth made the decision that the release of FreeBSD 4.0 wasn't even worthy of a mention as a "quickie," yet the book review on assosciate programs was worthy of a whole article?
Erm...however decided it wasn't worthy of a mention of a quickie probably made that decision based on the fact that it already had its own article. FreeBSD 4.0 Released.
I have to say that I agree with the main thrust of your comment; the editorializing in the article topics and some of the article selection does get a bit ridiculous sometimes. However, you might want to do the slightest modicum of research (i.e. scan the Older Stuff slashbox) before you spout off ignorantly.
They never released the source. Despite the "gnu" in the name, the beta version was Win32 binary-only. (They were planning on porting to Mac/Linux/etc. and GPLing once they got to 1.0)
Of course, there are numerous open-source napster clones already out there, so it isn't such a huge loss.
I think that a patent period of 6 to 9 months is too short for some SW patents (e.g. a revolutionary new algorithm for multimedia compression).
Really? Then you're happy that you're not able to watch Sorenson encoded video on Linux? Even though it's rapidly becoming the encoding alrgorithm of choice for high-quality video on the internet? And that, except for a potential (maybe, maybe not) port of Apple's closed-source, horrendously buggy, resource-hogging, pop-up-ad-spewing Interface Hall of Shame member Quicktime 4, you never will??
Yeah, let's hear it for long software patents. After all, Linux users won't mind having to wait 17 years to watch the new Mission Impossible 2 trailer. (Caution!! 17.9 MB download!! And no Linux users allowed until the year 2015!!!)