When they get these down to say 30-40k, and maybe beef up the processing power of the chips another generation or two (all entirely within the realm of possibility), I could see some of the big animation studios slapping them in deskside and clearing out the big renderfarm racks.
"You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
Obviously the buyer qualifies as a third party.
Yes, but I didn't say I was selling a license to use grep. I was just selling the compiled binary, the "physical product" as it were. It's my "grep" distribution and it is multi-fantastic-incredible.
No, if you are using GPL'd code and selling it for profit, it is against the GPL.
Dang, someone better tell RedHat, SuSE, Lindows, etc., etc., on and on and on!!!!!
I can sell compiled binaries of grep for a billion dollars each if I can find someone willing to pay that for them. The GPL allows it. AFAIK, I just can't relabel it as FrepSearchIncredible, withhold the source code, and pretend it's my own unique product.
Is the situation getting worse or is community just getting better at finding the violators?
I don't think it's the community getting better, at least not in this case. If you have a crook who is known to steal televisions and then put them in his front yard, disguised as birdbaths, you're going to get suspicious every time a new birdbath appears in his yard.
Maui X-Stream is that crook and this video project is their latest birdbath.
In a recent scientific study of spam, it was found to mindlessly reproduce, leave a scummy surface on anything they touched, and mutate rapidly in response to efforts to stop its spread.
"Its just a router, its really not that complicated."
If you want to hook it up between your standard cable/DSL modem which assigns an IP address by DHCP and your PC, it's easy. I've got DSL with multiple unique IP addresses (through SpeakEasy - their "Slashdot" special they ran last year - 6.0/768 with up to 8 unique IPs) and I didn't want this router sitting between my PC and the internet.
Hooking it up when you have a unique IP is more complex than hooking it up normally. Then, I'd get it hooked up, get a dial tone, and within 5 minutes it would stop working.
Recently some clients of mine were talking about signing up with Vonage or another VOIP provider to get cheaper calls between their main office and a satellite office. I immediately told them "Skype". Why pay $30 a month per seat for Vonage business lines, and have to hook up complicated hardware (I never got Vonage to work until I got their software based service, which is a $10 a month *add-on*) when you can pay a 1-time fee for headsets/handsets, and use Skype for free. They don't want incoming phone numbers or to make general outgoing calls. They just want to cut their phone costs for the 50 times a day they're calling the satellite office or the satellite office is calling them.
For businesses wanting to cut costs between satellite offices, families wanting to cut long distance charges when calling between family members, etc., Skype is the natural solution.
Look at the page. If you exceed 100 gigabits in transfer (combo of upstream and downstream) a month, you'll be charged 40 cents a gigabit in overages.
Once you factor in overhead for various transmission protocols, that 100 gigabits is about 10.5-11.5 gigabytes of actual data. Every e-mail you send out is deducted from that. Every e-mail you receive is deducted from that. Every graphic on every web page. Every advertisement including a streaming video...
Now, the average household that doesn't do file trading will be okay. But if you have such a line and your teenager leaves a peer-to-peer app on day after day, not throttling the outgoing bandwidth, you'll wake up to a $300 bandwidth bill one month.
You can buy "fatpacks" which allows you to pre-buy additional bandwidth for as little as $0.20 a gigabit. But there are still going to be some people who get a big surprise in future bills.
What I think would be smart on the part of the telco is to try to infect you with spyware that sends out a constant stream of data. If you don't catch it, you end up with a $1,500 bandwidth bill at the end of the month and they tell you that you are responsible for keeping clean of spyware.
I'm not going to say patents or copyrights are bad. If you create a truly useful invention (be it artistic or technological), you should have the right to control it for a specified period of time and benefit from it. As other posters have noted, the GPL and other open source licenses are not anti-copyright, but are actually dependent on the concept of copyright for enforcement.
But this isn't about the GPL.
IANAL, but AFAIK about patents, copyrights, and tradmarks, you have to actively defend your rights or you lose them. That's why when these companies discover a patent in the back of some filing cabinet they bought at a bankruptcy auction, they immediately sue 500 infringers. It's not just for the money, but to establish that they are actively defending it.
What ticks me off is that someone who owns a patent, copyright, or tradmark can let it be trod upon, made part of universal standards, and essentially give up all rights to it. Then they go bankrupt, retire, get bought out, and a new party acquires their portfolio. That new party then runs out and sues everyone using this IP.
In cases like this, where the IP has been widely used, has become a standard, and no one has enforced the copyright/trademark/patent for over a decade, the patent should be declared null and void. A new owner shouldn't be able to crawl out from under a rock and start suing people.
But that would require common sense on the part of our politicians. And as we all know, few of them have any sense and the only time the word "common" is applied to them is when someone's calling them "common crooks."
I stopped watching Comedy Central for a month after writing them a letter protesting their Crank Yankers commercials with puppets projectile vomiting and squirting streams of pseudo-snot. Hey, I'm all about freedom of speech, but if you're going to show me puppet snot right after I eat dinner, I'm changing the channel.
The gross-out commercials disappeared from the dinner hour. So I probably wasn't alone.
So far most donation systems or "tip jars" haven't proved a viable business model, and setting up a subscription-based system isn't easy for a small site with a webmaster who only knows HTML. And there are a number of large, hugely popular and hugely *useful* sites that have cash channels (extra services people pay for), but would still die without ad revenue. If I had to pay a monthly fee for each and every site I visit regularly, I'd probably stop using the net altogether and sign up for AOL or some other big content aggregator service.
If you don't like the way I pay my bills, don't use my stuff. But if you use it, pay for it. The simplest way for this transaction to occur is for me to show you an ad. Come up with a better way that is easy to implement, and maybe I'll change my model. But a number of sites do not have the resources to innovate the transaction AND create compelling, useful content, even some of the big boys.
I have no problem with having a blocker on by default to protect you from really pernicious crap on a site you just found by clicking on a link. If I'm lured to some site, particularly by spamdexing or trying to game a search engine, I'm not going to tolerate 5 pop-ups and an attempt to install Gator just for hitting their homepage.
But if I find the site valuable and give it extended use, then the site's owner/creator is doing me a service. One good turn deserves another, and I'll trade a few blinks of an annoying ad for the value I'm deriving from the content. If the ads get too annoying, I'll stop using the site.
If there is a site I visit regularly, I either allow their ads, or if the ads are that annoying, I stop visiting the site and find a competitor. Period. If the site is going to die, let it die of loneliness, not the costs of serving up content to freeloaders.
I'm not sure about the particular GPL'ed projects in question, but I know that a number of GPL'ed projects offer a GPL license and a Commercial license.
If you don't mind releasing source and contributing changes/improvements back to the community, you can use the code for free. But, if you want to create a closed-source/proprietary project, you can buy a license that allows it. MySQL does this.
The GPL does not create an anti-business environment in and of itself. It merely a licensing option that can be part of a portfolio of licensing options developers make available to those who want to use their code.
People may not know how to "use" Windows. They just know how to turn on their PC, boot Word, IE, Outlook, and that's it. But they consider that knowing how to use Windows.
Let's remember that at one point millions of people didn't know that AOL was not the Internet (I can't remember how many times I've explained that AOL was a private network with a gateway to the Internet as one of its many features, not the Internet itself).
Let's note that Netscape advertises its free "web accelerator" on TV as if it's a great thing, but it actually causes serious degradation to many graphics on the web. People buy the whole "surf up to 5 times faster" and then complain to webmasters that their sites look lousy because they don't know that the acceleration is achieved by the ISP running a highly lossy compression on all graphics at the proxy server.
As my mom once said: "those manuals would be easier to understand if they used words like thingy and whoozit like we do."
non-news? They still won something which means it moves to the next level. They haven't won yet but they haven't lost either. They are making news because its now become a bigger deal. Don't pretend like nothing just happened...
Until the injunction has been appealed and held valid or Microsoft is prevented from shipping a product which is otherwise ready to go, the injunction *is* a non-event. It's preliminary, issued by a judge who is in a class that is regularly found in error by higher courts. The Scalable Networking Pack, if it gets delayed, will make this have an impact. But Longhorn... Microsoft doesn't need any outside help in delaying that beast.
Based on the press release, it seems more like Alacritech is trying to boost its own profile and try the case in the media.
First, if it requires a much higher standard of proof to get a preliminary injunction than it does to win at trial, as they claim, how come there are trials where preliminary injunctions are granted and then the plaintiffs lose? They're trying to play up this minor victory in the opening salvo of legal maneuverings as if they've already won the trial. Their lawyers know that's not the case and so do Microsoft's lawyers and execs. So who are they tring to convince?
And would Microsoft think a single networking technology would provide that much leverage? Seeing as the phrase comes from an Alacritech lawyer, it seems like just so much more hyperbole. If Microsoft "rules the world", it does so more because it owns the consumer/business desktop than because of huge wins in the server market. Microsoft has much more competition in the server OS world than it does in the desktop OS world.
All, in all, I consider this non-news. Let's see if the injunction withstands an appeal or two, or if the case withstands some of Microsoft's early motions. Until then, IMO, this is all just a lot of preening by peacocks in suits.
I didn't see the lower-end consumer model mentioned. They did say that the Spyder 1 wasn't that good, while the Spyder 2 was better, but I'm not aware that the ColorPlus is a re-branded Spyder 1.
Do you have a reference that states that explicitly? A quick googling around hinted it might be, but I didn't find anything conclusive.
Regarding color accuracy, I recently purchased a Pantone "Color Plus". It's a cool little device which hangs (on LCD/Laptop) or sticks (via suction cups on a CRT) over your screen and plugs into the USB port. Using their software, you can test the color accuracy of your screen and generate an.icm color profile to help your monitor be more color accurate.
These types of things can cost major buckage, but this is their consumer version and can be picked up for sub-$100.
I just started a little home-based start-up and I'm doing a lot of graphics for print (not a graphic designer, just being my own in-house ad department) and though subtle, I found the difference invaluable in getting my collateral to come out looking like it did on the screen.
Because of the gag order, it seems he can't say what the people whose IP addresses the FBI is demanding did.
I've said it before in a previous post and I'll say it again. "freedom of Speech" is not absolute. Just check your local noise ordinances or "disturbing the peace laws". Let's not forget the following forms of illegal speech...
Inciting to riot
Deceptive or false advertising
Terrorist threats
Slander/Libel (more a civil matter, but still...)
Obscenity
It's sad that this guy is the one who has to pony up info to the FBI, in violation of his principles, but the safe harbor laws only extend so far. Just because he is granted certain protections from legal liability over what happens in his public forum, that does not mean he is exempt from subpoena to turn over information about them if they should do something illegal in his public forum.
Now, if the gag order comes off, and the matter seems totally spurious, then it seems more like harrassment by the FBI. But if what these users did was pretty f'ed up, then such is life. Responsibility goes hand in hand with rights and privileges.
And the answer is... "All of the above". Acura is Honda's luxury brand.
- Greg
Re:Yes, Jeff, you do get police services
on
Book 'Em, Dano
·
· Score: 1
The police help maintain law and order. That way, it's easier for me to go out into the world and earn a living without having the double duty of helping to protect my town. That's how I was able to afford that $500 vacuum cleaner from your website, dumbass.
Actually, he was stating he didn't get police services in North Carolina, so why should he do the work of collecting North Carolina's taxes for them. Jeff and Amazon are in Washington and they collect WA state sales tax from all WA residents. They get police and fire services, their employees use public transit, the school system, etc. They collect sales taxes for WA and pay business taxes to WA.
OTOH, it's often cheaper for WA residents to shop at other e-tailers with locations outside the state, or go to a local "bricks and mortar" retailer who may have a similar price, as they'll pay sales tax anyway and they get instant gratification with no shipping costs or shipping wait.
This is not the first challenge the Opera folks have issued to M$ and most likely not the last. It seems that the heads of Opera have a bit of a quixotic relationship with the windmill of Microsoft.
And let's not be smug about everyone but Microsoft following standards. The company I used to work for had a file-upload javascript that worked with Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, and IE, but it didn't work with Safari and we had to specially recode the script just to accomodate that Safari quirk.
It would be nice if every page rendered the same way on every browser, but let's be real. There will still be millions and millions of people who are slow to upgrade. Even if the latest versions of Opera, Firefox, Safari, and IE join hands in a circle and sing Kumbaya, you're still going to have to test your sites on Netscape 4.7, IE 5, etc. or you're going to have issues with the 30-40% of the market who hasn't upgraded yet.
Pay cable channels care more about subscribers than viewers. Since Showtime and Paramount (which owns the Trek franchise) are both owned by Viacom, they might convince Viacom to move "Enterprise" over to the pay cable service if fans could generate a successful subscription drive.
It's doubtful that UPN wants to keep a low-performing show on the air, even with fan subsidies. But pay cable is by definition about fan subsidies. They come up with great programming not to get people to watch a specific time slot, but to subscribe.
The Stargate SG-1 franchise originated on Showtime and they're much more likely to do original sci-fi/horror than HBO seems to be. It's a perfect match. Viacom would be stupid not to at least explore transferring Enterprise to pay cable to see if it would drive Showtime revenues sufficiently.
This seems good, but what exactly can I do with a cell processor other than play games with better graphics? It seems like the vast majority of people don't use even half of the power their computers have today, and if there are bottlenecks in todays computers it is because of RAM and the OS and not because of the CPU. Other then games, when will I be able to do other than maybe look for aliens faster.
"If you build it, he will come."
If you create a machine so powerful that there's nothing that fully utilizes its capacities, that merely spurs all sorts of geeks to dream about how they can push that machine to its limits, then overclock it, then put it all in a case made of Legos.
Slashdot Mirror
- Greg
His name is Eddie and I believe he'll be appearing in the Christmas episode of "Reno 911" ;-)
- Greg
[In his best Dr. Evil voice] "One biilllion dollars! Muahaha!"
- Greg
Obviously the buyer qualifies as a third party.
Yes, but I didn't say I was selling a license to use grep. I was just selling the compiled binary, the "physical product" as it were. It's my "grep" distribution and it is multi-fantastic-incredible.
- Greg
Dang, someone better tell RedHat, SuSE, Lindows, etc., etc., on and on and on!!!!!
I can sell compiled binaries of grep for a billion dollars each if I can find someone willing to pay that for them. The GPL allows it. AFAIK, I just can't relabel it as FrepSearchIncredible, withhold the source code, and pretend it's my own unique product.
I don't think it's the community getting better, at least not in this case. If you have a crook who is known to steal televisions and then put them in his front yard, disguised as birdbaths, you're going to get suspicious every time a new birdbath appears in his yard.
Maui X-Stream is that crook and this video project is their latest birdbath.
- Greg
- G
If you want to hook it up between your standard cable/DSL modem which assigns an IP address by DHCP and your PC, it's easy. I've got DSL with multiple unique IP addresses (through SpeakEasy - their "Slashdot" special they ran last year - 6.0/768 with up to 8 unique IPs) and I didn't want this router sitting between my PC and the internet.
Hooking it up when you have a unique IP is more complex than hooking it up normally. Then, I'd get it hooked up, get a dial tone, and within 5 minutes it would stop working.
- Greg
For businesses wanting to cut costs between satellite offices, families wanting to cut long distance charges when calling between family members, etc., Skype is the natural solution.
- Greg
Once you factor in overhead for various transmission protocols, that 100 gigabits is about 10.5-11.5 gigabytes of actual data. Every e-mail you send out is deducted from that. Every e-mail you receive is deducted from that. Every graphic on every web page. Every advertisement including a streaming video...
Now, the average household that doesn't do file trading will be okay. But if you have such a line and your teenager leaves a peer-to-peer app on day after day, not throttling the outgoing bandwidth, you'll wake up to a $300 bandwidth bill one month.
You can buy "fatpacks" which allows you to pre-buy additional bandwidth for as little as $0.20 a gigabit. But there are still going to be some people who get a big surprise in future bills.
What I think would be smart on the part of the telco is to try to infect you with spyware that sends out a constant stream of data. If you don't catch it, you end up with a $1,500 bandwidth bill at the end of the month and they tell you that you are responsible for keeping clean of spyware.
- Greg
But this isn't about the GPL.
IANAL, but AFAIK about patents, copyrights, and tradmarks, you have to actively defend your rights or you lose them. That's why when these companies discover a patent in the back of some filing cabinet they bought at a bankruptcy auction, they immediately sue 500 infringers. It's not just for the money, but to establish that they are actively defending it.
What ticks me off is that someone who owns a patent, copyright, or tradmark can let it be trod upon, made part of universal standards, and essentially give up all rights to it. Then they go bankrupt, retire, get bought out, and a new party acquires their portfolio. That new party then runs out and sues everyone using this IP.
In cases like this, where the IP has been widely used, has become a standard, and no one has enforced the copyright/trademark/patent for over a decade, the patent should be declared null and void. A new owner shouldn't be able to crawl out from under a rock and start suing people.
But that would require common sense on the part of our politicians. And as we all know, few of them have any sense and the only time the word "common" is applied to them is when someone's calling them "common crooks."
- Greg
The gross-out commercials disappeared from the dinner hour. So I probably wasn't alone.
So far most donation systems or "tip jars" haven't proved a viable business model, and setting up a subscription-based system isn't easy for a small site with a webmaster who only knows HTML. And there are a number of large, hugely popular and hugely *useful* sites that have cash channels (extra services people pay for), but would still die without ad revenue. If I had to pay a monthly fee for each and every site I visit regularly, I'd probably stop using the net altogether and sign up for AOL or some other big content aggregator service.
If you don't like the way I pay my bills, don't use my stuff. But if you use it, pay for it. The simplest way for this transaction to occur is for me to show you an ad. Come up with a better way that is easy to implement, and maybe I'll change my model. But a number of sites do not have the resources to innovate the transaction AND create compelling, useful content, even some of the big boys.
I have no problem with having a blocker on by default to protect you from really pernicious crap on a site you just found by clicking on a link. If I'm lured to some site, particularly by spamdexing or trying to game a search engine, I'm not going to tolerate 5 pop-ups and an attempt to install Gator just for hitting their homepage.
But if I find the site valuable and give it extended use, then the site's owner/creator is doing me a service. One good turn deserves another, and I'll trade a few blinks of an annoying ad for the value I'm deriving from the content. If the ads get too annoying, I'll stop using the site.
If there is a site I visit regularly, I either allow their ads, or if the ads are that annoying, I stop visiting the site and find a competitor. Period. If the site is going to die, let it die of loneliness, not the costs of serving up content to freeloaders.
- Greg
If you don't mind releasing source and contributing changes/improvements back to the community, you can use the code for free. But, if you want to create a closed-source/proprietary project, you can buy a license that allows it. MySQL does this.
The GPL does not create an anti-business environment in and of itself. It merely a licensing option that can be part of a portfolio of licensing options developers make available to those who want to use their code.
- Greg
Let's remember that at one point millions of people didn't know that AOL was not the Internet (I can't remember how many times I've explained that AOL was a private network with a gateway to the Internet as one of its many features, not the Internet itself).
Let's note that Netscape advertises its free "web accelerator" on TV as if it's a great thing, but it actually causes serious degradation to many graphics on the web. People buy the whole "surf up to 5 times faster" and then complain to webmasters that their sites look lousy because they don't know that the acceleration is achieved by the ISP running a highly lossy compression on all graphics at the proxy server.
As my mom once said: "those manuals would be easier to understand if they used words like thingy and whoozit like we do."
Until the injunction has been appealed and held valid or Microsoft is prevented from shipping a product which is otherwise ready to go, the injunction *is* a non-event. It's preliminary, issued by a judge who is in a class that is regularly found in error by higher courts. The Scalable Networking Pack, if it gets delayed, will make this have an impact. But Longhorn... Microsoft doesn't need any outside help in delaying that beast.
- Greg
First, if it requires a much higher standard of proof to get a preliminary injunction than it does to win at trial, as they claim, how come there are trials where preliminary injunctions are granted and then the plaintiffs lose? They're trying to play up this minor victory in the opening salvo of legal maneuverings as if they've already won the trial. Their lawyers know that's not the case and so do Microsoft's lawyers and execs. So who are they tring to convince?
And would Microsoft think a single networking technology would provide that much leverage? Seeing as the phrase comes from an Alacritech lawyer, it seems like just so much more hyperbole. If Microsoft "rules the world", it does so more because it owns the consumer/business desktop than because of huge wins in the server market. Microsoft has much more competition in the server OS world than it does in the desktop OS world.
All, in all, I consider this non-news. Let's see if the injunction withstands an appeal or two, or if the case withstands some of Microsoft's early motions. Until then, IMO, this is all just a lot of preening by peacocks in suits.
- Greg
Do you have a reference that states that explicitly? A quick googling around hinted it might be, but I didn't find anything conclusive.
- G
These types of things can cost major buckage, but this is their consumer version and can be picked up for sub-$100.
I just started a little home-based start-up and I'm doing a lot of graphics for print (not a graphic designer, just being my own in-house ad department) and though subtle, I found the difference invaluable in getting my collateral to come out looking like it did on the screen.
- G
Because of the gag order, it seems he can't say what the people whose IP addresses the FBI is demanding did.
I've said it before in a previous post and I'll say it again. "freedom of Speech" is not absolute. Just check your local noise ordinances or "disturbing the peace laws". Let's not forget the following forms of illegal speech...
It's sad that this guy is the one who has to pony up info to the FBI, in violation of his principles, but the safe harbor laws only extend so far. Just because he is granted certain protections from legal liability over what happens in his public forum, that does not mean he is exempt from subpoena to turn over information about them if they should do something illegal in his public forum.
Now, if the gag order comes off, and the matter seems totally spurious, then it seems more like harrassment by the FBI. But if what these users did was pretty f'ed up, then such is life. Responsibility goes hand in hand with rights and privileges.
- Greg
And the answer is... "All of the above". Acura is Honda's luxury brand.
- Greg
Actually, he was stating he didn't get police services in North Carolina, so why should he do the work of collecting North Carolina's taxes for them. Jeff and Amazon are in Washington and they collect WA state sales tax from all WA residents. They get police and fire services, their employees use public transit, the school system, etc. They collect sales taxes for WA and pay business taxes to WA.
OTOH, it's often cheaper for WA residents to shop at other e-tailers with locations outside the state, or go to a local "bricks and mortar" retailer who may have a similar price, as they'll pay sales tax anyway and they get instant gratification with no shipping costs or shipping wait.
- Greg
And let's not be smug about everyone but Microsoft following standards. The company I used to work for had a file-upload javascript that worked with Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, and IE, but it didn't work with Safari and we had to specially recode the script just to accomodate that Safari quirk.
It would be nice if every page rendered the same way on every browser, but let's be real. There will still be millions and millions of people who are slow to upgrade. Even if the latest versions of Opera, Firefox, Safari, and IE join hands in a circle and sing Kumbaya, you're still going to have to test your sites on Netscape 4.7, IE 5, etc. or you're going to have issues with the 30-40% of the market who hasn't upgraded yet.
- Greg
It's doubtful that UPN wants to keep a low-performing show on the air, even with fan subsidies. But pay cable is by definition about fan subsidies. They come up with great programming not to get people to watch a specific time slot, but to subscribe.
The Stargate SG-1 franchise originated on Showtime and they're much more likely to do original sci-fi/horror than HBO seems to be. It's a perfect match. Viacom would be stupid not to at least explore transferring Enterprise to pay cable to see if it would drive Showtime revenues sufficiently.
Greg
"If you build it, he will come."
If you create a machine so powerful that there's nothing that fully utilizes its capacities, that merely spurs all sorts of geeks to dream about how they can push that machine to its limits, then overclock it, then put it all in a case made of Legos.
- Greg