How likely is it that this audit will turn up something it shouldn't? I mean, what are the chances of there not being a single infringement of licence conditions coming to light in an audit on this scale?
I can't see how there can't be at least a few minor violations to be discovered in this study. Furthermore, after the audit is finished, Newham will be irredeemably marked down as a hotbed of piracy and copyright infringement. So, something will have to be done to ensure there is no possibility of a repeat performance. There are two ways to do so. Either you implement draconian procedures, and dedicate staff and resources to ensuring that licence conditions are complied with {and that means that if your system goes T.U., it could be out of action for a full day if the few people who are authorised to fix it are all somewhere else; but after all, it is better to miss a deadline, even if it could place lives and jobs in jeopardy, than to risk a licence infringement}. Or, you take it the other way around. Let's explore the "known facts" again.
Licence infringement must be prevented.
Copying software constitutes a licence infringement.
Preventing the copying of software costs time and money.
We are forced to conclude that preventing licence infringement costs time and money..... or are we?
If we did not care about licence infringements, it would not matter. But that was what got us into this mess. We have to accept premise [1] as inviolable. If there was a quick and cheap method to prevent the copying of software, then premise [3] - and by extension, the conclusion - would be invalidated. Unfortunately, copy prevention is impossible without much human intervention.
But what about premise [2]? Is there a way for copying software not to constitute a licence infringement?
You bet your butt there is. Again you have to make a draconian policy decision; this time, that no software that cannot be freely copied and distributed without anyone having cause for complaint shall be brought onto site. This time, though, the technology is on your side. By banishing Windows altogether and using only Linux on the desktop, you quietly yet firmly ensure that Windows software cannot be used on site. And, as most of the non-Free software is for Windows, you have actively prevented a huge chunk of the problem. Someone with a CD burner on their desktop could be knocking off copies of software using your equipment; but that's clearly got a lot less to do with you, as you can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the software being copied isn't yours - sort of like squatters you didn't know about dealing drugs from a property you own. Ignorance of the fact is a valid defence. Under Linux, it's trivial to restrict the use of the CD-RW drive to a few trustworthy people, so containing the problem.
As for whole the "retraining of staff" bit, it's a freaking myth. What do they use computers for? Word processing and spreadsheets, mostly. See how all the typing keys are all in different places on a Linux computer? Oh, wait, they aren't, are they? Damn. Seriously, in all seriousness, why do you persist in the belief that typing a simple memo in KWord is any harder that typing a simple memo in MSWord?
Outside of fascist dictatorships, your employer is not allowed to fire you on account of something you did outside of company time - it would constitute unfair dismissal. Even if you took a piss through the boss's letter box, or sparked up a big fat doobie and blew smoke in his face, or wandered around town in a T-shirt saying "XXX CORP SUCKS", as long as you weren't on company premises and/or on company time there is nothing your boss can do about it.
This isn't about stealing, troll. It's about the right to use goods you bought, paid for and own, in such a manner as you think fit.
I really thought I had stumbled onto a piece of horror sci-fi when I saw the full extent what the DMCA was about to criminalise. If I own a DVD, IMHO I have paid for the right to watch the content on that DVD. All means to the same end are equally valid - nobody {except the irreversible laws of Nature; and she's reckoned to be a deity precisely because it doesn't do mortals any good arguing with her} can dictate to me how I may watch that DVD. Only in a fascist police state would it be considered "theft" to use software received as a gift with the blessing of the author, to watch a paid-for DVD, on equipment you already own. The only thing you haven't done is paid money to some DVD player manufacturer, but as you haven't made any use of their goods or services, you don't owe them anything. That would be like a consortium of bra manufacturers calling Charlie Dimmock a thief!
And, of course, it's totally unenforceable - unless you actually spend more money on enforcing a stupid law than you would have lost through it getting broken in the first place. But you do get to blame it on "criminals", even although it was only your law that made them criminals in the first place.
And then, of course, you have to remember that it could be the thin end of the wedge. How long till the Bakery Products Association of America start busting bread machine users?
Just think of a future where music can't be sold because no one wants to pay for it
If it means fewer Backstreet Boys and Beyonces and more Jameses and Ocean Colour Scenes {I could have mentioned Alan Woolley, Lester Norton, or the Feredays, but it's probable that nobody else here would have a clue who they are - though feel free to reply if you do}, I'm sold on the idea.
Artists that make music just to make money will fall by the wayside. Artists that make music because they genuinely love doing so will thrive. And that second group is bigger than you think. Instruments are cheap now. The place where a bit of money is to be made right now is in renting out PAs so skint-but-talented bands can do a gig in a local. Someone who's right on the ball could even get it together to be knocking out CDs of the performance while-u-wait. Stick half a dozen 40-speed writers in a SCSI tower case and you can bang out one every 20 seconds on average.
And on that sort of scale, the "middlemen" with the amps and kit are either going to be musicians themselves, or intimate friends of the musicians who just happen to feel their talents lie in other directions than playing an instrument. When artists begin to get that level of control over their destinies, record labels as we know them today will shrivel up and die.
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, almost everything has been becoming less and less expensive. That is the whole point of mass production. You make thingies, you sell plenty of them, you make more, thingies become cheaper, eventually everybody has a thingy. The trick is to get out of the thingy market and into wossnames before this point. Once the patent on a thingy runs out, some chancer is certain to try starting making their own thingy clones while you concentrate on producing wossnames.
What you mustn't do is bitch over it when you can't sell as many thingies as you used to. By creating a supply, you are eroding the demand you set out to meet - you have sown the seed of your own undoing. Failing to adapt to the consequences of your own actions is always fatal.
There are some goods, of course, for which there will always be a steady demand - food, toilet paper, electricity, recreational drugs, for example. The day to day essentials - things that by nature can only be used once.
These things are now becoming obvious, but that will not prevent an attempted but futile backlash, with a few players trying to cling onto the old ways for dear life. One attempt against the inevitable is to try to make durable goods less durable. That is why we are seeing cheap and plasticky printers, for example. People won't be fooled by crap forever - as soon as someone steps in with a well-built printer, customers will snap them up. That's not to say it won't take another technological leap first; in fact, then would be the most sensible time to introduce a quality-built, long-lasting product. "Intellectual Property" and litigation as a source of income will end up passing as a fad. The lie behind closed-source software will be exposed. Nobody will stand for laws that attempt to prohibit the growing of plants.
If that sounds like doom and gloom, remember it's only that for some. The key to survival is, and always has been, adaptability. Today we are better fed, better educated and better cared for than we have ever been - but we have a new set of challenges to face. Success will be richly rewarded - but failure will be punished with the brutality only Nature can mete out.
And the point of testing a ship designed for travelling through an essentially frictionless vacuum, in high-speed air currents, is..... what, exactly?
The Enterprise stays in space. It never has to enter the atmosphere of a planet - everyone gets beamed on and off. You might draw some analogies between sound and light waves, but they all break down at some point, usually because sound is a longitudinal wave, whilst light is a transverse wave. Even if you actually could travel faster than light, you would not be setting up a shockwave, because shockwaves travel through matter and there isn't any matter in space.
But then again, Star Trek is science fiction, so maybe I'm being a git.
Assume that the metadata is insignificant compared to the audio, then the filesize will be roughly proportional with the bitrate. So you can assume that 192K MP3 files occupy 192/128 times the space of 128K MP3 files. 192 / 128 = 1.5, so I'd say you'd get about 3266 songs on it.
On the other hand, a portable device is most probably going to be used with fair-to-middling quality headphones as opposed to proper studio monitoring cans; and there's not much point making with the extra bits if the improvement they make is beyond the ken of the 'phones through which you will be listening. Since you obviously have the original discs for this to stand a chance of being even remotely legal, you might as well re-encode at the lower bitrate just to get the benefit of the larger storage capacity. It's at least worth an experiment, if you can enlist someone to help you with a blind trial.
I don't use Dreamweaver. I just have to make small edits to pages on the server - using vi or pico - after they have already been uploaded by someone else who just happened to use Dreamweaver to create them.
So maybe it's the fault of the person using DW, and they are just using it wrongly. However, lousy HTML is still lousy HTML. Why write "<font color=#ff0000><font size=5><font face=verdana></font></font></font>" when you could write "<font color=#ff0000 size=5 face=verdana></font>" ?! In fact, I've seen Dreamweaver produce pairs of tags like <foo></foo> with no content between them! Obviously where something was deleted, but the tags persist.
Maybe there is a procedure for combining / eliminating redundant tags or something..... like a final prettification thingy, and someone's just not using it?
My favourite editor for creating web pages from scratch on a machine that isn't running a public webserver that gets several squillion hits a nanosecond has to be Kate. But only because Kate is my favourite editor for doing most things..... I'm only too aware what an emotive subject favourite editors are, though.....
Just because it's a standard doesn't make it by definition not lame. The original SGML spec - and remember, HTML is a special case of SGML - actually called for upper and lower case to be treated the same. So my guess is that browsers will have to continue to support capitalised tags for a long while to come - and failing that, someone will come up with an Apache module to get the server to lowercase tags on-the-fly. Beside which, there simply is no reason why <li> and <LI> should be treated differently. The tags are first and foremost a mnemonic for humans {otherwise they would be like \x1b[1m and \x1b[m}, who have a rather different kind of case-sensitivity than machines..... we can spot a capital letter amongst lower case letters very quickly, not by its ASCII code but by its size.
XML is primarily a standard for document interchange formats, and would normally be written by machines. Case sensitivity was just something that happened incidentally and wasn't felt to be worth fixing. HTML was meant to be written by humans. I can't think of a single good reason for breaking the spec the way they are trying to do.
There are a lot of pages (for example banks) that only work on IE.
What is the earthly point of a bank having a web site? There are only two reasons I ever set foot anywhere near a bank.
To pay in a cheque through the hole-in-the-wall.
To draw out some cash from the hole-in-the-wall.
Unless someone has come up with a new killer application that lets me scan a cheque at home and pay it into my account, or print pound notes on my own printer {actually, I have done the very next best thing, but that's another story}, I have absolutely no use for internet banking.
Good HTML means separating content from presentation as far as possible. So you write the text first, then decide what it should look like. Then you create a style sheet, and base BODY and P on what the majority of the document should look like - leaving you to define.classes for exceptional SPANs and DIVs. If you're really smart, you'll name them after what they represent {<SPAN CLASS="PASTDATE"> and <SPAN CLASS="FUTUREDATE"> are more meaningful than <SPAN CLASS="BLUE"> and <SPAN CLASS="ORANGE"> and will survive a "refit" better - you will still have dates in the future and dates in the past, but they may well not be blue and orange anymore.} Of course, this involves thinking, which humans can do {with varying degrees of effort} but machines can only pretend to do, and in a fashion that looks more limited the longer you study it.
Anyone can use a stencil, but that does not make them calligraphers. The whole idea of Dreamweaver is fundamentally flawed - attempting to impose a type of user interface onto a task which is, by its nature, unsuited to that user interface. You can't use a point-and-drool system to place precise insertions into text and have it work reliably. It reminds me of a gadget that clips onto the neck of a guitar and allows you to fret and strum the strings using piano-like keys. You can never hope for that to sound better than a guitar played the traditional way, except maybe for a rather limited range of music, and it certainly won't make you into Steve Cradock.
On the web, there really is no such thing as What You See Is What You Get, because What You See Is Not Necessarily What Everyone Else Gets. Also, Dreamweaver uses <font> tags all the time - how long have we had cascading style sheets now, for chuff's sake? - and I find its "trendy" lowercase tags too hard to spot in a non-context-sensitive editor like vi or pico. {Sometimes it's nice to have a few eye-stabbing caps..... it's not as if any known browser gives a damn nor is ever likely to..... if <p> and <P> started meaning different things one day, pretty much the whole Internet would break. Beside which, whatever conceivable use would that ever be? Except making money for monopolistic corporations..... um.....}
Many EULAs attempt to abridge inalienable rights. There are some rights which, outside of a fascist dictatorship, you cannot have taken away; and any contract which tries to abridge these rights is void - depending on the wording, this could mean just the clauses that try to take away those rights, or it could mean the whole lot is void. It follows that there are some things that you can apparently agree to on paper, but that can never be enforced. For example, if you sign a contract offering someone a large sum of money if they take a baseball bat to you, you can still have them up in court on an assault charge because you cannot legally consent to assault. Likewise, a marriage agreement is not written consent to sexual intercourse, because a man can still be arrested for raping his wife. This, BTW, is why you see the catch-all phrase in any guarantee agreement: "This does not affect your statutory rights".
The GPL is explicit permission for copying above and beyond fair use, subject to certain conditions. Anyone who understands English can see that. It is cast-iron and cannot fail to stand up in court. There is nothing to fear from it being tested like this.
An EULA which tries to take away an inalienable right, on the other hand, might well be considered null and void - at least in part, depending on whether or not the courts rule that its terms are severable. Anyone who drafts a restrictive EULA is treading on some very shaky ground, and they know it - an EULA relies more on fear than legal enforceability.
But if, by some freak mischance, the GPL was declared invalid, then every restrictive EULA - including SCO's own - would almost certainly be declared equally invalid in the same breath.
You can actually boil water in a paper bag, using a butane/propane blowtorch. The water inside the bag keeps the temperature on the inside surface below 100 degrees. As long as the paper is thin enough, the outer surface temperature will still be low enough for the paper not to go on fire. But practice this {and do it out of doors, naturally} before showing it off to your mates, because a paper bag full of water is a fragile thing and the first few times you try this stunt, you probably will burst the bag and balls it up. This is more likely to happen than setting the bag on fire {which will happen if the flame is turned up too high; then the temperature above the waterline will become too high, and bhwhoomph!}. Also, don't underestimate how painful a little steam can be; it won't do you much in the way of long-term damage, but it canes and leaves you with an "exclusion zone" which is painful to even breath on, let alone touch, for several hours. Fold over the top of the bag at an angle, leaving a corner open like a kettle spout, to channel steam away from your hand. You should be able to actually get some steam to appear {well, we all know steam itself is invisible; but the water droplets that appear where it condenses in cold air are a good indication of where it has been} before it becomes too painful to hold.
To take the trick up a notch or two, practice holding the bag at such an angle so as you can dry out a small spot in a corner; set fire to that corner with the blowtorch and tilt the bag so as to empty into a waiting mug with a teabag or some instant coffee in it. Your audience will be so amazed, they probably will forget to clap.
Why in the name of all that is sane and decent, would anyone, anywhere, ever choose to pay out a heap of money equivalent to a living wage for an inferior product - and, as a side effect, be beholden to some proprietary software company, who can demand more money off you at any time on pain of bringing your company's email system to its knees - when almost the whole of the rest of the world is using a free, standards-compliant product with no chance that anyone, anywhere could ever hold you to ransom over it?
For crying out loud, get a chuffing clue! If they won't show you the source code, why the chuff not? Because they have something to hide. Something they don't want you to know. Some dirty little secret that they want to hide from the people that pay their wages. Do you really want to give your money - and trust the security of your company - to people like that? For chuff's sake! Bosses, you spy on your workers who are physically incapable of harming your organisation; yet some convicted-felon corporation to whom you pay more money than you do one of your lowliest minions gets to play around with your internal private email under such a cloak of secrecy that they won't even tell you exactly what they are doing?
Let me put that another way. If you are using Exchange Server, Microsoft have the power to read every email you send within your organisation, even encrypted ones. Microsoft have the power to read every email that comes into or out of your company, including some encrypted ones. Microsoft have the power to delete or alter your emails before they get read. Microsoft have the power to demand more money from you at any time, otherwise they will cut off your email. And you are paying Microsoft all this money because, essentially, you trust a convicted felon with a slick corporate brochure more than you do some ordinary person who lays all their cards face-up on the table, and proves to you beyond all reasonable doubt that they have none of those powers. We know for certain because we can read the source code with our own eyes.
For a small to medium sized office intranet, exim is fine, otherwise go with sendmail. You will need to set up SMTP auth, but it really isn't that hard. You'll also need a POP3 server, but they're all pretty similar anyway - just the fact that you get different defaults with different distros is evidence of that. The same machine that is running your mail server can also be used for an apache server, and once you couple that with MySQL / PostgreSQL and Perl / PHP / Python, there's your contact and calendar management taken care of. {Remember that although LAMP is GPL, your in-house-written gizmos are only GPL if they leave the building. If you're anti-social enough to want to keep the code to yourself, then you can. But if you want to share it with your capitalist buddies, then you have to share it with everyone else too. Which bit of that do you think is unfair exactly?}
Done. Always a pleasure to get back at spammers and scammers! Anyone seen the NatWest Bank one? I don't even have an account with the NatWest, for crying out loud!
I have a desktop at work, where I'm sitting at a desk and not moving too far {except to traipse across the room to hoik the power lead out of a crashed Windows box}. I have a laptop which I can use in most other places. No Wireless network at home, but I do have the twenty-metre CAT5 lead that came with my broadband starter pack, and that's plenty long enough for my two-up-two-down terrace.
I also have a brand new Palm Tungsten E, so new I haven't learned half its features yet but I'm generally impressed so far. The handwriting recognition is nice for entering a little text, and the ability to draw on the screen is great. Also nice is the way it keeps all its applications "always open" - I don't have to remember to save an unfinished drawing before I play a game of chess or switch off. It's a bit like KDE's session restore, but more so.
However, I can't imagine using handwriting, nor the on-screen keyboard, to enter a whole lot of text. I still like a proper keyboard. Sure, it's not perfect, but I've got so used to it now, I wouldn't want anything else. Decent key travel gives proper negative feedback. And I can't see any use for voice input either. In a large office it would be next to unworkable. Highly-directional headset mics would solve half the problem - other people's voices getting into my mic - but not keep my voice out of other people's ears!
So it's really a case of horses for courses. And an expensive, keyboardless laptop with a processor that isn't quite upto the job of running a burdensome OS is only ever going to be useful to a few people.....
So put KDE on it with an XP-looking theme, then! Seriously, there's very little difference from a user's point of view. Linux gets the job done, end of story. The "differences" are really overstated. Most of word processing is just knowing where the keys are, and they don't change places when you switch OSes! {Well, sometimes the speech mark ", at sign @, pound sign and comment mark # change to the right keys, if you're using a UK keyboard, and doubtless other countries' keyboard layouts have their own peculiarities too. But that's just a simple matter of misconfiguration and not the fault of the OS. The logistical difficulties inherent in making sure each country gets copies of Windows where the default keymap suits that country would be too enormous even for Microsoft to handle.} Same with spreadsheets; the number keys, mathematical symbols, arrow keys, Scroll Lock and TAB are all in the same place and work the same way. And of course, when the machine is being used without a keyboard, it's academic anyway. I see the big use for these things being in applications where they get used more for displaying data than for entering it. The form facor and usage pattern differences certainly outweigh the differences between using GNU/Linux applications and using Windows applications.
As soon as the next KOffice comes out with.sxw /.sxc interchange filters, a huge difference will be nullified. KOffice, which only exists on KDE systems, will be transparently interoperable with OpenOffice.org, which exists on KDE, GNOME, other non-KDE and Windows systems and will replace MS office quicker than you think. There are a lot of unpaid copies of MS office out there. My guess is that when the Licencing Stasi try to bully firms into buying licences for all of them, what will happen is that firms will see the cost, cry "sod that!" and switch to OpenOffice.org instead. {I should point out here that it would be grossly irresponsible to leave a job at such a liberty-taking company, start up a new consultancy and training business helping people switch to OO.org, grass up your former employer and profit!!!.} So far, PHBs have been reluctant to switch as long as Microsoft give them the false sense of security {MS = someone to sue if it goes T.U., OSS = nobody to sue}. But how long can it be before an attempted lawsuit gives it the lie? Frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't happened already.
Also needed is some way of unifying hardware drivers. Maybe a char device that spits out handwriting-recognised or virtal-keyboard tapped characters just as though they'd been typed on an actual keyboard, and one that spits out the same things as a mouse as you drag / tap on the screen. {It's possible that exists already.}
I think it's a reference to a music scene phenomenon that begain in the late 1980s / early 1990s, when a whole lot of bands got "discovered" almost at once; and ended just after the "rock and pop" section in record stores became "rock, pop and indie". All of a sudden, people stopped liking bands just because they'd been on Top of the Pops, and it was back to business as usual.
Not liking something just because other people like it is hardly any different than liking something because other people like it. You're still a fashion victim.
And anyway, the system fights against those it considers rebels by assimilating them, albeit in a rather watered-down, sanitised fashion. Late 1960s - rebellious men start growing their hair long. Early 1970s - respectable men start growing their hair long. Result: long hair now not rebellious!
It doesn't work with real money, because money gets diminished by the act of sharing. If I have to share $100 with another person, we only end up with $50 each. On the other hand, if I have a lit candle, and someone else lights another candle from it, that does not make my room any darker, yet we both have lit candles: the light is not diminished by the act of sharing.
I respectfully suggest you keep reading until you understand.
Exactly. With Open Source, everybody benefits when anybody contributes. The dividends are shared, yet not diminished by the act of sharing.
Consider a bank paying interest at 5% and run along traditional lines, but with just three investors: Anna, Bob and Charlie. Anna invests $1000. Bob invests $200. Charlie invests $3000. A year later, they get their interest payments.
Anna receives 5% of $1000 = $50.
Bob receives 5% of $200 = $10.
Charlie receives 5% of $3000 = $150.
With a bank that worked the way Open Source works, Interest Calculations would be done more like this:
Anna has $1000. Bob has $200. Charlie has $3000.
Anna receives 5% of $4200 = $210.
Bob receives 5% of $4200 = $210.
Charlie receives 5% of $4200 = $210.
This is one massive case study, and it should be inspirational reading to anybody who has ever wondered if there was an alternative to Microsoft.
As the migration progresses in Germany, so it will be copied in many other places - and mostly without the mistakes Germany will inevitably make {though, arguably, none of them will ever come close in magnitude to actually ever letting closed-source software anywhere near their machines in the first place}. Once somebody with some real clout has made a hard commitment to GNU/Linux on the desktop, then we will see real change.
I wish every success to all who choose to wrest back the control of their destiny from the hands of the evil corporations. Theirs will not be an easy journey. I, too, have a little experience of what they must be facing; and yet, my humble effort - to do without Windows at any price, even if that prevented me from using a computer at all - just seems so insignificant compared to Germany's task.
I'm also more than a little humbled at realising I don't know how to say "Good luck!" in German.
There should be a law to provide that in the event of a company becoming bankrupt, the entire source code for any closed-source software it controls automatically enters the public domain - software IP should not be a strippable asset. Software is a tool of someone's trade, and there is an ancient law that the tools of a person's trade can never be seized in repayment of a debt. This was intended to ensure that a craftsman should never be denied the opportunity to work his way legitimately out of a bad situation. If you take away the tools of a person's trade then they may have no option but to steal - and such crimes would be on the heads of the creditors.
While this wrangle is going on, and the software is useless, the IP is worthless anyway.
This may well devalue a few investment portfolios overnight, but IMHO closed-source software is no more ethical an investment than sweatshop manufacturing or weapons of war. These people should have known what they were investing in, and if they chose to sink money into such an antisocial business then they deserve the consequences.
You don't actually need to transesterify it if your engine is an old style one with a mechanical fuel pump. Just pour a litre or two of Crisp 'n' Dry into your tank and drive off. As for the farming, it certainly wouldn't use more energy than you were growing {most of the energy stored in C-C bonds in plants comes from sunlight} and, in fact, farm machinery usually has exactly the right kind of engine to use crude vegetable oil. The non-oily parts of the plant can be pyrolysed, or compressed and burned as a solid fuel for steam engines, space heating &c. Remember, you can burn as much plant matter as you can grow and you still won't be adding CO2 to the atmosphere. {I hope I don't need to tell anyone why not}.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't see how there can't be at least a few minor violations to be discovered in this study. Furthermore, after the audit is finished, Newham will be irredeemably marked down as a hotbed of piracy and copyright infringement. So, something will have to be done to ensure there is no possibility of a repeat performance. There are two ways to do so. Either you implement draconian procedures, and dedicate staff and resources to ensuring that licence conditions are complied with {and that means that if your system goes T.U., it could be out of action for a full day if the few people who are authorised to fix it are all somewhere else; but after all, it is better to miss a deadline, even if it could place lives and jobs in jeopardy, than to risk a licence infringement}. Or, you take it the other way around. Let's explore the "known facts" again.
- Licence infringement must be prevented.
- Copying software constitutes a licence infringement.
- Preventing the copying of software costs time and money.
We are forced to conclude that preventing licence infringement costs time and moneyIf we did not care about licence infringements, it would not matter. But that was what got us into this mess. We have to accept premise [1] as inviolable. If there was a quick and cheap method to prevent the copying of software, then premise [3] - and by extension, the conclusion - would be invalidated. Unfortunately, copy prevention is impossible without much human intervention.
But what about premise [2]? Is there a way for copying software not to constitute a licence infringement?
You bet your butt there is. Again you have to make a draconian policy decision; this time, that no software that cannot be freely copied and distributed without anyone having cause for complaint shall be brought onto site. This time, though, the technology is on your side. By banishing Windows altogether and using only Linux on the desktop, you quietly yet firmly ensure that Windows software cannot be used on site. And, as most of the non-Free software is for Windows, you have actively prevented a huge chunk of the problem. Someone with a CD burner on their desktop could be knocking off copies of software using your equipment; but that's clearly got a lot less to do with you, as you can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the software being copied isn't yours - sort of like squatters you didn't know about dealing drugs from a property you own. Ignorance of the fact is a valid defence. Under Linux, it's trivial to restrict the use of the CD-RW drive to a few trustworthy people, so containing the problem.
As for whole the "retraining of staff" bit, it's a freaking myth. What do they use computers for? Word processing and spreadsheets, mostly. See how all the typing keys are all in different places on a Linux computer? Oh, wait, they aren't, are they? Damn. Seriously, in all seriousness, why do you persist in the belief that typing a simple memo in KWord is any harder that typing a simple memo in MSWord?
Outside of fascist dictatorships, your employer is not allowed to fire you on account of something you did outside of company time - it would constitute unfair dismissal. Even if you took a piss through the boss's letter box, or sparked up a big fat doobie and blew smoke in his face, or wandered around town in a T-shirt saying "XXX CORP SUCKS", as long as you weren't on company premises and/or on company time there is nothing your boss can do about it.
This isn't about stealing, troll. It's about the right to use goods you bought, paid for and own, in such a manner as you think fit.
I really thought I had stumbled onto a piece of horror sci-fi when I saw the full extent what the DMCA was about to criminalise. If I own a DVD, IMHO I have paid for the right to watch the content on that DVD. All means to the same end are equally valid - nobody {except the irreversible laws of Nature; and she's reckoned to be a deity precisely because it doesn't do mortals any good arguing with her} can dictate to me how I may watch that DVD. Only in a fascist police state would it be considered "theft" to use software received as a gift with the blessing of the author, to watch a paid-for DVD, on equipment you already own. The only thing you haven't done is paid money to some DVD player manufacturer, but as you haven't made any use of their goods or services, you don't owe them anything. That would be like a consortium of bra manufacturers calling Charlie Dimmock a thief!
And, of course, it's totally unenforceable - unless you actually spend more money on enforcing a stupid law than you would have lost through it getting broken in the first place. But you do get to blame it on "criminals", even although it was only your law that made them criminals in the first place.
And then, of course, you have to remember that it could be the thin end of the wedge. How long till the Bakery Products Association of America start busting bread machine users?
Artists that make music just to make money will fall by the wayside. Artists that make music because they genuinely love doing so will thrive. And that second group is bigger than you think. Instruments are cheap now. The place where a bit of money is to be made right now is in renting out PAs so skint-but-talented bands can do a gig in a local. Someone who's right on the ball could even get it together to be knocking out CDs of the performance while-u-wait. Stick half a dozen 40-speed writers in a SCSI tower case and you can bang out one every 20 seconds on average.
And on that sort of scale, the "middlemen" with the amps and kit are either going to be musicians themselves, or intimate friends of the musicians who just happen to feel their talents lie in other directions than playing an instrument. When artists begin to get that level of control over their destinies, record labels as we know them today will shrivel up and die.
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, almost everything has been becoming less and less expensive. That is the whole point of mass production. You make thingies, you sell plenty of them, you make more, thingies become cheaper, eventually everybody has a thingy. The trick is to get out of the thingy market and into wossnames before this point. Once the patent on a thingy runs out, some chancer is certain to try starting making their own thingy clones while you concentrate on producing wossnames.
What you mustn't do is bitch over it when you can't sell as many thingies as you used to. By creating a supply, you are eroding the demand you set out to meet - you have sown the seed of your own undoing. Failing to adapt to the consequences of your own actions is always fatal.
There are some goods, of course, for which there will always be a steady demand - food, toilet paper, electricity, recreational drugs, for example. The day to day essentials - things that by nature can only be used once.
These things are now becoming obvious, but that will not prevent an attempted but futile backlash, with a few players trying to cling onto the old ways for dear life. One attempt against the inevitable is to try to make durable goods less durable. That is why we are seeing cheap and plasticky printers, for example. People won't be fooled by crap forever - as soon as someone steps in with a well-built printer, customers will snap them up. That's not to say it won't take another technological leap first; in fact, then would be the most sensible time to introduce a quality-built, long-lasting product. "Intellectual Property" and litigation as a source of income will end up passing as a fad. The lie behind closed-source software will be exposed. Nobody will stand for laws that attempt to prohibit the growing of plants.
If that sounds like doom and gloom, remember it's only that for some. The key to survival is, and always has been, adaptability. Today we are better fed, better educated and better cared for than we have ever been - but we have a new set of challenges to face. Success will be richly rewarded - but failure will be punished with the brutality only Nature can mete out.
And the point of testing a ship designed for travelling through an essentially frictionless vacuum, in high-speed air currents, is ..... what, exactly?
The Enterprise stays in space. It never has to enter the atmosphere of a planet - everyone gets beamed on and off. You might draw some analogies between sound and light waves, but they all break down at some point, usually because sound is a longitudinal wave, whilst light is a transverse wave. Even if you actually could travel faster than light, you would not be setting up a shockwave, because shockwaves travel through matter and there isn't any matter in space.
But then again, Star Trek is science fiction, so maybe I'm being a git.
Assume that the metadata is insignificant compared to the audio, then the filesize will be roughly proportional with the bitrate. So you can assume that 192K MP3 files occupy 192/128 times the space of 128K MP3 files. 192 / 128 = 1.5, so I'd say you'd get about 3266 songs on it.
On the other hand, a portable device is most probably going to be used with fair-to-middling quality headphones as opposed to proper studio monitoring cans; and there's not much point making with the extra bits if the improvement they make is beyond the ken of the 'phones through which you will be listening. Since you obviously have the original discs for this to stand a chance of being even remotely legal, you might as well re-encode at the lower bitrate just to get the benefit of the larger storage capacity. It's at least worth an experiment, if you can enlist someone to help you with a blind trial.
Right, thanks for the tip. I'll write that on the end of a piece of 100*50 constructional timber and show it to our web designer.
I don't use Dreamweaver. I just have to make small edits to pages on the server - using vi or pico - after they have already been uploaded by someone else who just happened to use Dreamweaver to create them.
..... like a final prettification thingy, and someone's just not using it?
..... I'm only too aware what an emotive subject favourite editors are, though .....
So maybe it's the fault of the person using DW, and they are just using it wrongly. However, lousy HTML is still lousy HTML. Why write "<font color=#ff0000><font size=5><font face=verdana></font></font></font>" when you could write "<font color=#ff0000 size=5 face=verdana></font>" ?! In fact, I've seen Dreamweaver produce pairs of tags like <foo></foo> with no content between them! Obviously where something was deleted, but the tags persist. Maybe there is a procedure for combining / eliminating redundant tags or something
My favourite editor for creating web pages from scratch on a machine that isn't running a public webserver that gets several squillion hits a nanosecond has to be Kate. But only because Kate is my favourite editor for doing most things
Just because it's a standard doesn't make it by definition not lame. The original SGML spec - and remember, HTML is a special case of SGML - actually called for upper and lower case to be treated the same. So my guess is that browsers will have to continue to support capitalised tags for a long while to come - and failing that, someone will come up with an Apache module to get the server to lowercase tags on-the-fly. Beside which, there simply is no reason why <li> and <LI> should be treated differently. The tags are first and foremost a mnemonic for humans {otherwise they would be like \x1b[1m and \x1b[m}, who have a rather different kind of case-sensitivity than machines ..... we can spot a capital letter amongst lower case letters very quickly, not by its ASCII code but by its size.
XML is primarily a standard for document interchange formats, and would normally be written by machines. Case sensitivity was just something that happened incidentally and wasn't felt to be worth fixing. HTML was meant to be written by humans. I can't think of a single good reason for breaking the spec the way they are trying to do.
- To pay in a cheque through the hole-in-the-wall.
- To draw out some cash from the hole-in-the-wall.
Unless someone has come up with a new killer application that lets me scan a cheque at home and pay it into my account, or print pound notes on my own printer {actually, I have done the very next best thing, but that's another story}, I have absolutely no use for internet banking.Good HTML means separating content from presentation as far as possible. So you write the text first, then decide what it should look like. Then you create a style sheet, and base BODY and P on what the majority of the document should look like - leaving you to define .classes for exceptional SPANs and DIVs. If you're really smart, you'll name them after what they represent {<SPAN CLASS="PASTDATE"> and <SPAN CLASS="FUTUREDATE"> are more meaningful than <SPAN CLASS="BLUE"> and <SPAN CLASS="ORANGE"> and will survive a "refit" better - you will still have dates in the future and dates in the past, but they may well not be blue and orange anymore.} Of course, this involves thinking, which humans can do {with varying degrees of effort} but machines can only pretend to do, and in a fashion that looks more limited the longer you study it.
..... it's not as if any known browser gives a damn nor is ever likely to ..... if <p> and <P> started meaning different things one day, pretty much the whole Internet would break. Beside which, whatever conceivable use would that ever be? Except making money for monopolistic corporations ..... um .....}
Anyone can use a stencil, but that does not make them calligraphers. The whole idea of Dreamweaver is fundamentally flawed - attempting to impose a type of user interface onto a task which is, by its nature, unsuited to that user interface. You can't use a point-and-drool system to place precise insertions into text and have it work reliably. It reminds me of a gadget that clips onto the neck of a guitar and allows you to fret and strum the strings using piano-like keys. You can never hope for that to sound better than a guitar played the traditional way, except maybe for a rather limited range of music, and it certainly won't make you into Steve Cradock.
On the web, there really is no such thing as What You See Is What You Get, because What You See Is Not Necessarily What Everyone Else Gets. Also, Dreamweaver uses <font> tags all the time - how long have we had cascading style sheets now, for chuff's sake? - and I find its "trendy" lowercase tags too hard to spot in a non-context-sensitive editor like vi or pico. {Sometimes it's nice to have a few eye-stabbing caps
Exactly.
Many EULAs attempt to abridge inalienable rights. There are some rights which, outside of a fascist dictatorship, you cannot have taken away; and any contract which tries to abridge these rights is void - depending on the wording, this could mean just the clauses that try to take away those rights, or it could mean the whole lot is void. It follows that there are some things that you can apparently agree to on paper, but that can never be enforced. For example, if you sign a contract offering someone a large sum of money if they take a baseball bat to you, you can still have them up in court on an assault charge because you cannot legally consent to assault. Likewise, a marriage agreement is not written consent to sexual intercourse, because a man can still be arrested for raping his wife. This, BTW, is why you see the catch-all phrase in any guarantee agreement: "This does not affect your statutory rights".
The GPL is explicit permission for copying above and beyond fair use, subject to certain conditions. Anyone who understands English can see that. It is cast-iron and cannot fail to stand up in court. There is nothing to fear from it being tested like this.
An EULA which tries to take away an inalienable right, on the other hand, might well be considered null and void - at least in part, depending on whether or not the courts rule that its terms are severable. Anyone who drafts a restrictive EULA is treading on some very shaky ground, and they know it - an EULA relies more on fear than legal enforceability.
But if, by some freak mischance, the GPL was declared invalid, then every restrictive EULA - including SCO's own - would almost certainly be declared equally invalid in the same breath.
You can actually boil water in a paper bag, using a butane/propane blowtorch. The water inside the bag keeps the temperature on the inside surface below 100 degrees. As long as the paper is thin enough, the outer surface temperature will still be low enough for the paper not to go on fire. But practice this {and do it out of doors, naturally} before showing it off to your mates, because a paper bag full of water is a fragile thing and the first few times you try this stunt, you probably will burst the bag and balls it up. This is more likely to happen than setting the bag on fire {which will happen if the flame is turned up too high; then the temperature above the waterline will become too high, and bhwhoomph!}. Also, don't underestimate how painful a little steam can be; it won't do you much in the way of long-term damage, but it canes and leaves you with an "exclusion zone" which is painful to even breath on, let alone touch, for several hours. Fold over the top of the bag at an angle, leaving a corner open like a kettle spout, to channel steam away from your hand. You should be able to actually get some steam to appear {well, we all know steam itself is invisible; but the water droplets that appear where it condenses in cold air are a good indication of where it has been} before it becomes too painful to hold.
To take the trick up a notch or two, practice holding the bag at such an angle so as you can dry out a small spot in a corner; set fire to that corner with the blowtorch and tilt the bag so as to empty into a waiting mug with a teabag or some instant coffee in it. Your audience will be so amazed, they probably will forget to clap.
Why in the name of all that is sane and decent, would anyone, anywhere, ever choose to pay out a heap of money equivalent to a living wage for an inferior product - and, as a side effect, be beholden to some proprietary software company, who can demand more money off you at any time on pain of bringing your company's email system to its knees - when almost the whole of the rest of the world is using a free, standards-compliant product with no chance that anyone, anywhere could ever hold you to ransom over it?
For crying out loud, get a chuffing clue! If they won't show you the source code, why the chuff not? Because they have something to hide. Something they don't want you to know. Some dirty little secret that they want to hide from the people that pay their wages. Do you really want to give your money - and trust the security of your company - to people like that? For chuff's sake! Bosses, you spy on your workers who are physically incapable of harming your organisation; yet some convicted-felon corporation to whom you pay more money than you do one of your lowliest minions gets to play around with your internal private email under such a cloak of secrecy that they won't even tell you exactly what they are doing?
Let me put that another way. If you are using Exchange Server, Microsoft have the power to read every email you send within your organisation, even encrypted ones. Microsoft have the power to read every email that comes into or out of your company, including some encrypted ones. Microsoft have the power to delete or alter your emails before they get read. Microsoft have the power to demand more money from you at any time, otherwise they will cut off your email. And you are paying Microsoft all this money because, essentially, you trust a convicted felon with a slick corporate brochure more than you do some ordinary person who lays all their cards face-up on the table, and proves to you beyond all reasonable doubt that they have none of those powers. We know for certain because we can read the source code with our own eyes.
For a small to medium sized office intranet, exim is fine, otherwise go with sendmail. You will need to set up SMTP auth, but it really isn't that hard. You'll also need a POP3 server, but they're all pretty similar anyway - just the fact that you get different defaults with different distros is evidence of that. The same machine that is running your mail server can also be used for an apache server, and once you couple that with MySQL / PostgreSQL and Perl / PHP / Python, there's your contact and calendar management taken care of. {Remember that although LAMP is GPL, your in-house-written gizmos are only GPL if they leave the building. If you're anti-social enough to want to keep the code to yourself, then you can. But if you want to share it with your capitalist buddies, then you have to share it with everyone else too. Which bit of that do you think is unfair exactly?}
Done. Always a pleasure to get back at spammers and scammers! Anyone seen the NatWest Bank one? I don't even have an account with the NatWest, for crying out loud!
I have a desktop at work, where I'm sitting at a desk and not moving too far {except to traipse across the room to hoik the power lead out of a crashed Windows box}. I have a laptop which I can use in most other places. No Wireless network at home, but I do have the twenty-metre CAT5 lead that came with my broadband starter pack, and that's plenty long enough for my two-up-two-down terrace.
.....
I also have a brand new Palm Tungsten E, so new I haven't learned half its features yet but I'm generally impressed so far. The handwriting recognition is nice for entering a little text, and the ability to draw on the screen is great. Also nice is the way it keeps all its applications "always open" - I don't have to remember to save an unfinished drawing before I play a game of chess or switch off. It's a bit like KDE's session restore, but more so.
However, I can't imagine using handwriting, nor the on-screen keyboard, to enter a whole lot of text. I still like a proper keyboard. Sure, it's not perfect, but I've got so used to it now, I wouldn't want anything else. Decent key travel gives proper negative feedback. And I can't see any use for voice input either. In a large office it would be next to unworkable. Highly-directional headset mics would solve half the problem - other people's voices getting into my mic - but not keep my voice out of other people's ears!
So it's really a case of horses for courses. And an expensive, keyboardless laptop with a processor that isn't quite upto the job of running a burdensome OS is only ever going to be useful to a few people
So put KDE on it with an XP-looking theme, then! Seriously, there's very little difference from a user's point of view. Linux gets the job done, end of story. The "differences" are really overstated. Most of word processing is just knowing where the keys are, and they don't change places when you switch OSes! {Well, sometimes the speech mark ", at sign @, pound sign and comment mark # change to the right keys, if you're using a UK keyboard, and doubtless other countries' keyboard layouts have their own peculiarities too. But that's just a simple matter of misconfiguration and not the fault of the OS. The logistical difficulties inherent in making sure each country gets copies of Windows where the default keymap suits that country would be too enormous even for Microsoft to handle.} Same with spreadsheets; the number keys, mathematical symbols, arrow keys, Scroll Lock and TAB are all in the same place and work the same way. And of course, when the machine is being used without a keyboard, it's academic anyway. I see the big use for these things being in applications where they get used more for displaying data than for entering it. The form facor and usage pattern differences certainly outweigh the differences between using GNU/Linux applications and using Windows applications.
.sxw / .sxc interchange filters, a huge difference will be nullified. KOffice, which only exists on KDE systems, will be transparently interoperable with OpenOffice.org, which exists on KDE, GNOME, other non-KDE and Windows systems and will replace MS office quicker than you think. There are a lot of unpaid copies of MS office out there. My guess is that when the Licencing Stasi try to bully firms into buying licences for all of them, what will happen is that firms will see the cost, cry "sod that!" and switch to OpenOffice.org instead. {I should point out here that it would be grossly irresponsible to leave a job at such a liberty-taking company, start up a new consultancy and training business helping people switch to OO.org, grass up your former employer and profit!!!.} So far, PHBs have been reluctant to switch as long as Microsoft give them the false sense of security {MS = someone to sue if it goes T.U., OSS = nobody to sue}. But how long can it be before an attempted lawsuit gives it the lie? Frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't happened already.
As soon as the next KOffice comes out with
Also needed is some way of unifying hardware drivers. Maybe a char device that spits out handwriting-recognised or virtal-keyboard tapped characters just as though they'd been typed on an actual keyboard, and one that spits out the same things as a mouse as you drag / tap on the screen. {It's possible that exists already.}
I think it's a reference to a music scene phenomenon that begain in the late 1980s / early 1990s, when a whole lot of bands got "discovered" almost at once; and ended just after the "rock and pop" section in record stores became "rock, pop and indie". All of a sudden, people stopped liking bands just because they'd been on Top of the Pops, and it was back to business as usual.
Not liking something just because other people like it is hardly any different than liking something because other people like it. You're still a fashion victim.
And anyway, the system fights against those it considers rebels by assimilating them, albeit in a rather watered-down, sanitised fashion. Late 1960s - rebellious men start growing their hair long. Early 1970s - respectable men start growing their hair long. Result: long hair now not rebellious!
It doesn't work with real money, because money gets diminished by the act of sharing. If I have to share $100 with another person, we only end up with $50 each. On the other hand, if I have a lit candle, and someone else lights another candle from it, that does not make my room any darker, yet we both have lit candles: the light is not diminished by the act of sharing.
I respectfully suggest you keep reading until you understand.
Exactly. With Open Source, everybody benefits when anybody contributes. The dividends are shared, yet not diminished by the act of sharing.
Consider a bank paying interest at 5% and run along traditional lines, but with just three investors: Anna, Bob and Charlie. Anna invests $1000. Bob invests $200. Charlie invests $3000. A year later, they get their interest payments.
Anna receives 5% of $1000 = $50.
Bob receives 5% of $200 = $10.
Charlie receives 5% of $3000 = $150.
With a bank that worked the way Open Source works, Interest Calculations would be done more like this:
Anna has $1000. Bob has $200. Charlie has $3000.
Anna receives 5% of $4200 = $210.
Bob receives 5% of $4200 = $210.
Charlie receives 5% of $4200 = $210.
This is one massive case study, and it should be inspirational reading to anybody who has ever wondered if there was an alternative to Microsoft.
As the migration progresses in Germany, so it will be copied in many other places - and mostly without the mistakes Germany will inevitably make {though, arguably, none of them will ever come close in magnitude to actually ever letting closed-source software anywhere near their machines in the first place}. Once somebody with some real clout has made a hard commitment to GNU/Linux on the desktop, then we will see real change.
I wish every success to all who choose to wrest back the control of their destiny from the hands of the evil corporations. Theirs will not be an easy journey. I, too, have a little experience of what they must be facing; and yet, my humble effort - to do without Windows at any price, even if that prevented me from using a computer at all - just seems so insignificant compared to Germany's task.
I'm also more than a little humbled at realising I don't know how to say "Good luck!" in German.
In Britain, that would be considered a marked improvement.
There should be a law to provide that in the event of a company becoming bankrupt, the entire source code for any closed-source software it controls automatically enters the public domain - software IP should not be a strippable asset. Software is a tool of someone's trade, and there is an ancient law that the tools of a person's trade can never be seized in repayment of a debt. This was intended to ensure that a craftsman should never be denied the opportunity to work his way legitimately out of a bad situation. If you take away the tools of a person's trade then they may have no option but to steal - and such crimes would be on the heads of the creditors.
While this wrangle is going on, and the software is useless, the IP is worthless anyway.
This may well devalue a few investment portfolios overnight, but IMHO closed-source software is no more ethical an investment than sweatshop manufacturing or weapons of war. These people should have known what they were investing in, and if they chose to sink money into such an antisocial business then they deserve the consequences.
You don't actually need to transesterify it if your engine is an old style one with a mechanical fuel pump. Just pour a litre or two of Crisp 'n' Dry into your tank and drive off. As for the farming, it certainly wouldn't use more energy than you were growing {most of the energy stored in C-C bonds in plants comes from sunlight} and, in fact, farm machinery usually has exactly the right kind of engine to use crude vegetable oil. The non-oily parts of the plant can be pyrolysed, or compressed and burned as a solid fuel for steam engines, space heating &c. Remember, you can burn as much plant matter as you can grow and you still won't be adding CO2 to the atmosphere. {I hope I don't need to tell anyone why not}.