I once wrote a library for implementing
MIME message creation, and placed it in
the public domain. A colleague promptly
upbraided me for not using the Gnu licence
for it.
Why not? Because I wanted MIME adopted widely,
and did not mind if a proprietary program
used it for communication to the rest of
the world, including to open source programs.
In general, if you want proprietary programs to
use standard services, you don't want to make
the licence on the standard code onerous.
We've had our problems with Scientology too:
if memory serves: they were convicted
of launching covert operations against
the Toronto police, and
had to pay ~4 million for attacking the
prosecutor in that case.
Linux consistantly runs quicker on older
SPARCs than the same-age versions of Solaris.
Just like people run Linux on 486s, they also
run it on SPARC 10s and 20s.
I think the community needs a problem they
want to solve, but need a multiprocessor for
for... such as beating a certain Microsoft benchmark that used a 4-processor Intel to
run a web server? (;-))
Please understand, the content provider is being
paid for their content: this is either directly from the distributor (broadcaster) if the distributor
is huge, or from a copyright collective if they're
small.
I create a movie and sell it to a distributor,
and get paid royalties each time they show it.
If someone else buys it from them, they pay
royalties to me for each time they show it.
That's the law in both the U.S. and Canada.
I'll disagree: the CRTC exists to manage the national component of a long-standing, internet-like,
international agreements on broadcasting, something which crosses borders by definition.
Cooperative adjacent countries make bilateral agreements about the overlaps: Canada and the U.S. are
two such, and they have rules in place which specifically protect the advertisers, the folks who pay for
the content on TV.
Uncooperative countries broadcast across borders, and the only choice the recipient has is to jam the
signals: the Voice of America and Radio Moscow are two examples.
I don't think JumpTV's business model is close enough to TV's to work, but the existing business model
(buy a feed, sell advertising) will work on the 'net as well as on cable and broadcast, without change.
Instead of being regionalized, as you fear, I suspect it will be a big lever to use against those who wish to
use their nominal ownership as a claim in a regime where "if you broadcast it, you've given it away".
Remember, in that model, they sell the performance rights to distributors (networks) who pay for them
with advertising. Selling preferentially, dumping and other shady business practices are prohibited by
the anti-trust laws in the countries where the sale takes place.
In other words, by admitting the CRTC has jurisdiction, the content providers end up being constrained
by an existing body of law, applied to the internet as if it were a big broadcasting tower.
Dear Dr. Anthony:
I noted the treatment of one of your "geekier" students, as
reported by Jon Katz, and was reminded of my own experience
in the Chatham (Ontario) school system.
I was nearly expelled for defending myself against one
of the school bullies, and only the involvement of one
of the trustees kept this from happening.
I strongly recommend you investigate the abuse reportedly
suffered by Mr. Sheeley, and intervene if it warrants it.
Sincerely,
David Collier-Brown
Forbes is a magazine: write a letter to the editor
on
Calling Out TiVo
·
· Score: 1
Mr. Dvorak was hired to make contentious statements: the appropriate reaction to his
making false statements is to write to his boss.
Magazines have a rich tradition of letter-writing: many of their people are called "correspondents" because they used to write (invited) letters to the editors.
My letter says:
Subject: Wild overstatement, courtesy of Mr. Dvorak...
Mr. Dvorak, in his column, "Commercial-Free Conundrum",
describes a new, easier to program VCR as a "a way to
steal programming".
He appears to be suggesting that being able to skip over
commercials makes my existing vcr a way of stealing
programming, and that the new ones are worse because
they make it easier to do so.
Firstly, this is a solved problem for the advertisers: they've
long since learned to make their commercials sufficiently
interesting that I'm tempted to watch them, often to see
what's so funny. And yes, I do remember the vendors from
my favorite commercials (Molson Canadian's "The Rant").
Secondly, it isn't theft: ignoring bad commercials isn't
a criminal offense in Canada. As far as I know, it's not
in the U.S., either.
Finally, I do know that the U.S. courts have specifically
stated that recording devices like my VCR or the new
improved ones are legal, and criticized those who had sued Sony
for their "unprecedented attempt to impose copyright liability
upon the distributors of copying equipment".
Yes, one of my former employers went under
many moons ago, and the escrow kicked in.
From memory, if the company passed out
of existance, the customers got the source
if no-one bought it and offered the
program for sale.
A new company purchased the title, and
renewed the escrow contract with the lawyer
who was doing the work. Therefor the company
didn't pass out of existance, at least until the
softwate was pretty obsolete, so no-one
had to use that "feature".
It's very close to the printing press.
[timewarp on] In fact,
it's also very much like a new invention, the
"newspaper", which are small unbound books
printed by our two leading political parties,
the Whigs and Tories. [warp forward somewhat] It's also similar to
radio, and somewhat later, television.[timewarp off]
We've seen this problem before, and seen
the solution set: I note that the initial
reastion is regulation, then public participation,
then broad availability. In the case of the
'net, we're got to the third quite quickly (;-))
Some years back I saw a family friend's configuration in his
suburb, as wired by NB Tell: it was 10 Mbit/S
ethernet over ordinary coax, as mentioned
in the article. Performance was comparable to
thin-net at my then employer.
Anyone from NB with information about this
initiative?
Under performance, you can see significant differences between the three "tiers" of database offering:
The flat-file psuedo-databases you get
bundled with products like Access are good for about 3-5 concurrent users, then they start
to fail. For very small numbers of users, the
price-preformance is pretty good.
Free sql databases handle larger neumbers of
users, and get bottlenecked by things like not enough disk bandwidth, (which aren't their fault),
poor distribution of queries across disks (which are) and poor ACID implementations (ditto). price-preformance is purely a factor of the hardware they live on, so they're not bad.
Expensive sql databases handle ridiculous numbers of concurrent users at a good price-preformance ratio, so long as the number
of users is big enough.
My conclusion: always prototype with a
small sql database: if you use a database at all,
you don't want to limit yourself to three users (:-)). Be prepared to move to a big one
if the rollout is large enough to warrent it.
I'm one of the authors of Using Samba, which is
selling quite well, which has been translated into German, French and Polish, and which has
a pocket guide coming out soon.
It's available under an open content license, which says it can "be freely reproduced and distributed in any form, in any medium physical or electronic, in whole or in
part..."
I and my colleagues are receiving a decent income
from this book despite its free availability:
O'Reilly adds so much value by editing, publishing and distributing it on paper that people spend real money buying physical copies.
The free, online copies are a non-threatening form
of advertising for us.
Actually third-party ram works fine in Suns:
it's only a few of the bleeding-edge models
which had or have oddball ram requirements.
Youy'll get random reboots if and only if
you buy your ram from somebody in a black
trenchcoat (;-))
(David J. Brown is the originator of the Solaris
Application Binary Interface programme: I worked for him for two years on the project,
back in my pre-samba days --dave)
Once upon a time, the U.S. government write
a set of specifications for multi-level secure
computers, called the
orange book. This
worked pretty well for mainframes: Multics
was rated B2, and was on the 'net as dockmaster.mil.
It was a bit clunky, but had been
continuously updated
over time, so I still have a machine running
Trusted Solaris 7 in my basement.
It's arguably the same task to do this sort of
thing with a virtual machine monitor as it
is with a security monitor: both create trusted
computing bases, which enforce the security rules.
It would look almost exactly like an unmodified system, with optional colored
bars on the windows indicating the security level
and subject matter that was displayed there.
The rules the TCB would enforce are things
like "thou shalt not copy from higher security down to lower security",
so the TCB gets asked if it should allow a top-secret
cut buffer to be pasted into an merely restricted
document.
The Trusted Computing Base (the VMM)
gets to say no, and so refuses to
allow mapping of that page. The X server
gets a -1 return code and errno=NOWAYJOSE,
so it then pops up a "sorry, that was a security
breach" message... which is exactly what my TS system does when I klutz and try to copy
stuff from my confidential files into my unclassified email!
Update on the case of a Cornwall, Ontario teen
jailed for writing a short story about a bullied
teen blowing up his school...
Principal decries portrayal of case against jailed teen
By Estanislao Oziewicz
The principal of a rural Eastern Ontario school says that she is amazed at published
portrayals of the case against a 16-year-old boy charged with making death threats to
staff and fellow students.
Some media have turned the case into one about freedom of expression rather than the
safety of the students, she said.
"It's really sad," said the woman, who has been principal at the school of 500
students for three years.
(The Young Offenders Act prohibits publication of information that would lead to the
identification of a young person charged with a crime.)
The boy was charged on Dec. 8 with threatening to blow up the school after writing a
story and presenting it to his drama class, and with making specific threats to kill
three schoolmates.
He was held in detention until Thursday, when he was released on bail in the care of
his parents.
After the boy's release, Toronto lawyer Clayton Ruby agreed to take the case.
In an interview yesterday, he said that it is unconscionable that the boy was
detained for a month.
"We too often forget that young people have constitutional rights, too, and we tend
to treat them as if we could just lock up them based in part on what they wrote,
whereas we wouldn't do that for an adult," he said.
"I really think that if you really believe in the free-expression guarantee, and you
tell a child in school to write fiction, you should not be using that in evidence
against him. And to lock him up for a month is really quite peculiar."
PEN Canada, which sees the charges as an attack on freedom of expression, has sided
with the boy. The Ottawa International Writers Festival is holding a fundraiser for
the boy's defence and to discuss associated civil-liberties issues.
Consider the propogation velocity of a PC
virus that did nothing that the user would
recognize as damage... until long after it had spawned its next generation.
A virus that smashed the key block, for example.
Once upon a time I did proof outlines for
a secure single-level workstation, with an
encrypted disk drive. One of the nasty problems was backup: either
I left the directory structure unencrypted or
I couldn't do file-by file backups.
I suspect the magic
key block corresponds to the directories in this
case: unless you can back it up and restore
it to the new drive, you can't recover from
media failure. Alas, leaving the directories unprotected
broke the effort to demonstrate the system was
secure: it allowed me to prove it was
insecure instead!
If we assume the vendor wants you to fail to restore the data, then it opens questions about
suitability for the purpose sold...
Slashdot Mirror
I once wrote a library for implementing MIME message creation, and placed it in the public domain. A colleague promptly upbraided me for not using the Gnu licence for it. Why not? Because I wanted MIME adopted widely, and did not mind if a proprietary program used it for communication to the rest of the world, including to open source programs. In general, if you want proprietary programs to use standard services, you don't want to make the licence on the standard code onerous.
We've had our problems with Scientology too: if memory serves: they were convicted of launching covert operations against the Toronto police, and had to pay ~4 million for attacking the prosecutor in that case.
Linux consistantly runs quicker on older SPARCs than the same-age versions of Solaris. Just like people run Linux on 486s, they also run it on SPARC 10s and 20s.
--dave (who works for sun, though) c-b
I create a movie and sell it to a distributor, and get paid royalties each time they show it. If someone else buys it from them, they pay royalties to me for each time they show it. That's the law in both the U.S. and Canada.
And the How-To on doing that is here.
Cooperative adjacent countries make bilateral agreements about the overlaps: Canada and the U.S. are two such, and they have rules in place which specifically protect the advertisers, the folks who pay for the content on TV.
Uncooperative countries broadcast across borders, and the only choice the recipient has is to jam the signals: the Voice of America and Radio Moscow are two examples.
I don't think JumpTV's business model is close enough to TV's to work, but the existing business model (buy a feed, sell advertising) will work on the 'net as well as on cable and broadcast, without change.
Instead of being regionalized, as you fear, I suspect it will be a big lever to use against those who wish to use their nominal ownership as a claim in a regime where "if you broadcast it, you've given it away".
Remember, in that model, they sell the performance rights to distributors (networks) who pay for them with advertising. Selling preferentially, dumping and other shady business practices are prohibited by the anti-trust laws in the countries where the sale takes place.
In other words, by admitting the CRTC has jurisdiction, the content providers end up being constrained by an existing body of law, applied to the internet as if it were a big broadcasting tower.
I noted the treatment of one of your "geekier" students, as
reported by Jon Katz, and was reminded of my own experience
in the Chatham (Ontario) school system.
I was nearly expelled for defending myself against one
of the school bullies, and only the involvement of one
of the trustees kept this from happening.
I strongly recommend you investigate the abuse reportedly
suffered by Mr. Sheeley, and intervene if it warrants it.
Sincerely,
David Collier-Brown
Subject: Wild overstatement, courtesy of Mr. Dvorak...
Mr. Dvorak, in his column, "Commercial-Free Conundrum",
He appears to be suggesting that being able to skip overdescribes a new, easier to program VCR as a "a way to
steal programming".
commercials makes my existing vcr a way of stealing
programming, and that the new ones are worse because
they make it easier to do so.
Firstly, this is a solved problem for the advertisers: they've
long since learned to make their commercials sufficiently
interesting that I'm tempted to watch them, often to see
what's so funny. And yes, I do remember the vendors from
my favorite commercials (Molson Canadian's "The Rant").
Secondly, it isn't theft: ignoring bad commercials isn't
Finally, I do know that the U.S. courts have specificallya criminal offense in Canada. As far as I know, it's not
in the U.S., either.
stated that recording devices like my VCR or the new
improved ones are legal, and criticized those who had sued Sony
for their "unprecedented attempt to impose copyright liability
upon the distributors of copying equipment".
The same point might be made to Mr. Dvorak.
--dave
A new company purchased the title, and renewed the escrow contract with the lawyer who was doing the work. Therefor the company didn't pass out of existance, at least until the softwate was pretty obsolete, so no-one had to use that "feature".
This was a normal (not a time-limited) program.
It's very close to the printing press. [timewarp on] In fact, it's also very much like a new invention, the "newspaper", which are small unbound books printed by our two leading political parties, the Whigs and Tories. [warp forward somewhat] It's also similar to radio, and somewhat later, television.[timewarp off] We've seen this problem before, and seen the solution set: I note that the initial reastion is regulation, then public participation, then broad availability. In the case of the 'net, we're got to the third quite quickly (;-))
Numerous people have independantly noticed this: I saw it first in Risks Digest.
At the expense of getting into blatant self-aggrandizement, one answer to the question lies in Retiring Accidental Windows Servers with Virtual Samba
Some years back I saw a family friend's configuration in his suburb, as wired by NB Tell: it was 10 Mbit/S ethernet over ordinary coax, as mentioned in the article. Performance was comparable to thin-net at my then employer. Anyone from NB with information about this initiative?
A broader article on privacy, and the business of making money by providing it, is in this month's Atlantic, here. And I love the cartoon!
Have a peek at the Detroit Free Press for Doron Levin's article Music industry won a battle, not the war.
My conclusion: always prototype with a small sql database: if you use a database at all, you don't want to limit yourself to three users (:-)). Be prepared to move to a big one if the rollout is large enough to warrent it.
I'm one of the authors of Using Samba, which is selling quite well, which has been translated into German, French and Polish, and which has a pocket guide coming out soon. It's available under an open content license, which says it can "be freely reproduced and distributed in any form, in any medium physical or electronic, in whole or in part..." I and my colleagues are receiving a decent income from this book despite its free availability: O'Reilly adds so much value by editing, publishing and distributing it on paper that people spend real money buying physical copies. The free, online copies are a non-threatening form of advertising for us.
I disagree: Sun's a lot more concerned about Windows on PC hardware. And I expect Linux will run on the 100 just as nicely as it does on my Ultra 1.
Actually third-party ram works fine in Suns: it's only a few of the bleeding-edge models which had or have oddball ram requirements. Youy'll get random reboots if and only if you buy your ram from somebody in a black trenchcoat (;-))
For prople primatily interested in Linux, and glibc2, there's a paper for the community, written by David J. Brown and Karl Runge on Library Interface Versioning in Solaris and Linux.
(David J. Brown is the originator of the Solaris Application Binary Interface programme: I worked for him for two years on the project, back in my pre-samba days --dave)Once upon a time, the U.S. government write a set of specifications for multi-level secure computers, called the orange book. This worked pretty well for mainframes: Multics was rated B2, and was on the 'net as dockmaster.mil.
It was a bit clunky, but had been continuously updated over time, so I still have a machine running Trusted Solaris 7 in my basement.
It's arguably the same task to do this sort of thing with a virtual machine monitor as it is with a security monitor: both create trusted computing bases, which enforce the security rules.
It would look almost exactly like an unmodified system, with optional colored bars on the windows indicating the security level and subject matter that was displayed there.
The rules the TCB would enforce are things like "thou shalt not copy from higher security down to lower security", so the TCB gets asked if it should allow a top-secret cut buffer to be pasted into an merely restricted document.
The Trusted Computing Base (the VMM) gets to say no, and so refuses to allow mapping of that page. The X server gets a -1 return code and errno=NOWAYJOSE, so it then pops up a "sorry, that was a security breach" message... which is exactly what my TS system does when I klutz and try to copy stuff from my confidential files into my unclassified email!
Principal decries portrayal of case against jailed teen
By Estanislao Oziewicz
The principal of a rural Eastern Ontario school says that she is amazed at published portrayals of the case against a 16-year-old boy charged with making death threats to staff and fellow students.
Some media have turned the case into one about freedom of expression rather than the safety of the students, she said.
"It's really sad," said the woman, who has been principal at the school of 500 students for three years.
(The Young Offenders Act prohibits publication of information that would lead to the identification of a young person charged with a crime.)
The boy was charged on Dec. 8 with threatening to blow up the school after writing a story and presenting it to his drama class, and with making specific threats to kill three schoolmates.
He was held in detention until Thursday, when he was released on bail in the care of his parents.
After the boy's release, Toronto lawyer Clayton Ruby agreed to take the case.
In an interview yesterday, he said that it is unconscionable that the boy was detained for a month.
"We too often forget that young people have constitutional rights, too, and we tend to treat them as if we could just lock up them based in part on what they wrote, whereas we wouldn't do that for an adult," he said.
"I really think that if you really believe in the free-expression guarantee, and you tell a child in school to write fiction, you should not be using that in evidence against him. And to lock him up for a month is really quite peculiar."
PEN Canada, which sees the charges as an attack on freedom of expression, has sided with the boy. The Ottawa International Writers Festival is holding a fundraiser for the boy's defence and to discuss associated civil-liberties issues.
[Email courtesy the globeandmail.com Web Centre.
Clayton Ruby is one of the top defense lawyers in Canada, who occcasionally does pro-bono work in cases with a significant "political" component.
Consider the propogation velocity of a PC virus that did nothing that the user would recognize as damage... until long after it had spawned its next generation. A virus that smashed the key block, for example.
I suspect the magic key block corresponds to the directories in this case: unless you can back it up and restore it to the new drive, you can't recover from media failure. Alas, leaving the directories unprotected broke the effort to demonstrate the system was secure: it allowed me to prove it was insecure instead!
If we assume the vendor wants you to fail to restore the data, then it opens questions about suitability for the purpose sold...