"I dont agree. It's not your local ISPs fault that there aren't multiple providers in your area (assuming we are talking about you) or multiple service options. If there was enough money to be made in an area, there would most likely be more providers."
I'm not sure what world you're living in. It IS MOST ASSUREDLY my local ISP's fault that there are not multiple provider's in my area.
Verizon ran every dirty trick in the book to stop me from getting access through DSLi (out of Florida, who had an EXCELLENT TOS) instead of buying Verizon's restricted, overpriced DSL in North Carolina. I fought with them for over 14 months. I called the friggin' Utilities Commission on them. Unfortunately, by the time that bore fruit, every intelligently run provider had read the writing on the wall -- there's no way to make a profit when every single customer has to fight through the SUC for over a year, for God's sake.
The reason I am stuck with crappy TOS is because of Verizon, straight and simple. Verizon covers something like 20% of the country. Most of the Baby Bells aren't any better.
I'm not saying everyone who has a NAT fought with a Baby Bell for a year. But most of them have been cheated out of a decent, affordable TOS by one.
Since virtually none exist because of illegal behavior, you shouldn't be so surprised or indignant that many folks choose to get around them.
"Has anyone yet found an app that runs on 98 that doesn't at all on XP? I'm Seriously curious, because other than stuff dependant on.VXDs I haven't been able to find any."
Diablo II was completely hosed on my XP laptop. Not sure how common a problem that was for others (I imagine I would have heard about it if it was a lot of folks that couldn't run D2). Don't really remember what vxd's did specifically, but I imagine anything using DirectX wouldn't need anything else for video.
"And besides if we let the private sector take charge then we are still left with a choice. We will be able to choose not to purchase Palidium enabled hardware/software.
What is going to happen the first time a motherboard manufacturer has a non-palidium board outsell a Palidium enabled board?"
There's a problem with your line of reasoning-- and you'll see it if you ever try to buy a laptop without also buying Windows.
My money is on your NOT being able to get a non-Palladium board after industry hashes all this out.
Industry loves to conspire to deprive users of choice. Why compete to make money when you can collude and save yourself a lot of effort?
While I think this devlopment is better than Hollings-- hell, like some other poster said, the fact that it pisses off Valenti is good in and of itself.
"Lowering and removing licensing barriers is not only great for the consumer electronics and software industries, but also offers consumers the benefits of better quality video at smaller file sizes," said Michael Aldridge, lead product manager for Windows Digital Media division at Microsoft.
I don't think I have anything to add to this except a smiley.;-)
"Every producer has a monopoly over their products, be it Office, Solaris, Paradox, or Access. Just like in Highlander, there can be only one (who gets the right to maintain the product, licensing aside.)"
Methinks you misunderstand what a monopoly is, at least legally. Making a unique product that no one else has or can sell is NOT a monopoly. It is legitimate competition. But any entity controlling a specific market segment to the point where that segment cannot reasonably be called competitive IS a monopoly.
Microsoft has been found, despite using every delay tactic and technicality money could buy, to have a monopoly in the desktop OS market. You may disagree with this conclusion, but it is a legal FACT.
Monopolies are not illegal-- but EXTENDING them, as the previous poster pointed out, by using the monopoly to freeze competition in market segments which are not yet monopolized, IS illegal.
This is why MS's giving away and embedding IE in its OS was illegal.
It is also why Sun giving away its office suite is not.
"So don't tell me that you need more license seats because you have more storage available. I call bullshit."
It's easy to call bullshit on something that was never said. He just mentioned user license seats as an expense of running a large DB.
As other people have pointed out, this whole storage space discussion is a Straw Man / Red Herring. If you read the article, it mentions that there's a DB size over which they'll pay a premium according to contract. Maybe you don't believe the guy, but repeating that storage is cheap is completely irrelevent.
(X is) so low level, that it almost doesn't make sense to criticize it. And I think many of the critics don't really understand fully what X is.
For example, if you don't like the performance, then that is a complaint against the specific Xserver you are running, not against X itself.
Perhaps you could tell me what I'm not getting here. It seems obvious that
drawing something,
abstracting it for networking,
pushing it down the tcp/ip stack,
immediately pulling it BACK UP through the tcp/ip stack,
de-abstracting it,
writing it to the video card,
is more work than
drawing something
writing it to the video card
or am I missing something?
I wouldn't call X "inherently problematic" -- it's networking abilities are an amazing technical achievement. Yet 99% of the time, X is used on the local system, and therefore 60-80% of its effort is spent needlessly shoving graphics up and down the network stack. In the graphics world, where something that improves speed by 20% is hailed as a breakthrough, reducing your workload by two-thirds would be amazing.
Sure, getting around this would be problematic for exactly the reasons you cited -- but it doesn't mean that X doesn't have what, for most purposes, is a built-in bottleneck.
That's the beauty of the DMCA. You're absolutely right -- the copy protection stops you from using your fair use rights. However, the DMCA clecerly makes any effort to get around copy protection illegal, even if said copy protection prevents you from exercising your fair use rights.
I can't really go on further without using a steam of expletives.
The American Heritage lists the words as "regional," which may be a polite way to call it slang. It doesn't say which "region," but it's probably American. I know it's used here in the Southeast.
You make more money, and you're never threatened with jail time.
You're SUPPOSED to round 82.845 down
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 1
...(for example, 'round(82.845)' returns '82.84' instead of '82.85').
I know at first it seems a little weird, but modern statistics teaches that you should round to the nearest even number, not the next number up.
By always rounding up, you assure that your numbers will be slightly too high. By rounding to the nearest even number, the odds are greater that you'll end up closer to the real answer.
This is especially important in computers where you might by rounding thousands/millions of times.
I don't know the vagaries of VBScript, and wouldn't be shocked if the documentation said otherwise-- but rounding to the nearest even number is correct-- it's not a bug.
The file sending function, which is primarily intended to move the files within a home network of ReplayTV boxes, is not feasible for sending content over the Internet.
Programs stored at medium quality (not even up to VHS standards, mind you) are often gigs in size. Furthermore, the SonicBlue transport mechanism is nowhere near as efficient as FTP. It can easily take over 20 hours to send a half hour, medium quality show to someone, OVER BROADBAND.
The industry argument about the file transferring is a red herring. Make no mistake, the big boys are not really scared of SB's dysfunctional file transfer capabilities-- it's the ad skipping that pisses them off.
Like the internet, advertising treats attempts to block it as an outage and routes around it. Look what happened on the web with animations, pop-ups, placement within content, etc.
It's only a matter of time before advertisers/networks fight back by abandoning current advertising formats and adopt more obnoxious ones. 30-second ad breaks every three minutes, ads inserted between scene cuts, aggressive product placement, non-standard ad lengths (10-seconds, 40 seconds), are all the kinds of things I expect we have to look forward to.
If you're going to flame me, could you at least flame what I said?
The only thing you had right was my assumption about contigency fees. Of course, that wasn't mentioned in the article, but you knew that because you "read the f***ing article," didn't you?
It's a good thing that the lawyers representing the Toshiba users with bad floppy drives didn't roll over like these ones did. Toshiba compensated hundreds of thousands of people who got faulty floppy drives. The awards varied in size, many were as small as this. Toshiba was able to reach a very high percentage of them with ads and mailings.
But I guess this would be too hard for Microsoft.
Finally, I never said that Microsoft proposed the settlent-- only that it was a sweetheart deal for both them and the lawyers suing them.
If you want to flame something, flame that. At least I said that.
First of all, Microsoft gets to give away something that virtually costs them nothing. I assume they get to write it off at it's full retail value as well. Hell, they might even be making money on this.
Second, I'll bet the lawyers, who are supposed to be representing the folks who got overcharged, didn't include their contigency fees as the "compensation too small to be worth paying." They'll be raking in dozens of millions.
And the folks who these clowns are representing? They get nothing. The whole point of a class action suit is that the lawyers are supposed to reprent the class as they would a client-- what client would say, "keep 50 million for yourself, but give any money that I deserve away." These guys should be disbarred for even considering that offer.
As weird as it is to say, California is the only party here speaking sense.
Since so much open source is dependent upon the GPL, and nobody knows for sure how enforceable it is, I wouldn't mind finding out. Better to know now that we're building castles in the sand than years later.
And if it IS going to court, I'd prefer that the lawyers prosecuting it be a bunch of arrogant fools too dumb to keep their mouths shut about their legal strategy before going to court, rather than the top-shelf lawyers likely to represent a huge multinational corporation.
Does George really think the quality of finely- calibrated medical instruments will tarnish the reputation of Star Wars light sabers which disintegrate into 40 pieces of plastic the third time a weak four-year-old swings them?
Actually, as I remember the caning thing, by and large polls showed Americans as not being particularly supportive of the vandal. It was the family and especially the press that was trying to whip up a sense of outrage, but America wasn't buying.
That being said, I don't know how analagous the 2 situations are, even. The kid in (Singapore?) broke a law over there WHILE he was over there. He received due process, although the punishment was harsh by US standards. Sklyarov, as far as I can tell, is being held for acts he committed legally in another jurisdiction which happen not to be legal over here. Due process (at least his constitutional rights) appear to have been waived. The US (my home country, FWIW) is so full of BS on this one it's hard believe.
What's that saying, "The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it." Looks like you're saying the same thing will happen here. It'd be much more complex once counter-measures got involved, but it would ultimately still work.
Media consolidation: the process by which large media providers control more and more media. An obvious corollary is that the little guy is getting frozen out of the equation.
Think AOL/Time-Warner. At one time, AOL, Time, and Warner Brothers represented 3 of the largest media companies on earth. Now they're one company. Do you think this makes it cheaper or more expensive to obtain access to media?
Where the phrase applies here is that for Joe User to gain access to content, his ISP now has to go through another middleman. While AOL/Time-Warner or Earthlink will probably get sweetheart deals for this, Alteran's Fly-by-Night Local ISP service will probably get a more expensive rate per customer. This is why the big ISPs, like AOL, are not fighting this development-- they get to strangle out the few remaining mom and pops without incurring the fallout of being anti-competitive.
I think you're assuming that the proxy will be open by default, and just pick on the largest ISPs they can find. I suspect they'll block everyone and then wait for ISPs to buzz them requesting access.
I would be very surprised if the anonymizing services could really afford these fees with the number of non-subscribers they're carrying.
---QUOTE---
I am also puzzled how Microsoft and the BSA can compel such inventory actions...
---END QUOTE---
Microsoft compels such actions by including a provision in their GROUP site licenses saying that the purchaser agrees to perform audits upon request of BSA/MS/whatever.
Otherwise I'm not sure they'd be able to get it done.
I am so sick of rootkits being compared to hammers.
Hammers are EXTREMELY useful tools only occasionally used for mayhem.
Rootkits, OTOH, while having an extremely limited set of legitimate uses, are almost always downloaded and used for the express purpose of gaining access to a machine that the user shouldn't be on. Period. We all know it.
I'm not saying that these guys should be sued/liable. But to continally defend this kind of software without acknowledging it for what it really is just takes away from the legitimacy of the main arguments.
Uhm... not to pick a fight or anything, but your comment about Germans not getting due process is exactly the kind of thing that makes people throughout the world really annoyed at us Americans.
This guy IS getting due process. Due process means getting your day in court before having your rights/property taken away. In Germany, like America, getting your day in court can be quite time-consuming and expensive. Often, a plaintiff makes an offer-- if you agree to their conditions, they will not take you to court to try to get their way.
That is what is happening here. The unfortunate problem is that apparently Adobe is hiring their lawyers on contingency, so the only way the lawyers get any money is if the offending party gives it to them.
If Adobe is the benificent coporate entity they advertise themselves as, they'll give the lawyers 2 grand US, tell them to shut up, and accept the agreement that K-Illustrator will change its name.
If not, screw 'em. I've been meaning to learn the
GIMP anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
"I dont agree. It's not your local ISPs fault that there aren't multiple providers in your area (assuming we are talking about you) or multiple service options. If there was enough money to be made in an area, there would most likely be more providers."
I'm not sure what world you're living in. It IS MOST ASSUREDLY my local ISP's fault that there are not multiple provider's in my area.
Verizon ran every dirty trick in the book to stop me from getting access through DSLi (out of Florida, who had an EXCELLENT TOS) instead of buying Verizon's restricted, overpriced DSL in North Carolina. I fought with them for over 14 months. I called the friggin' Utilities Commission on them. Unfortunately, by the time that bore fruit, every intelligently run provider had read the writing on the wall -- there's no way to make a profit when every single customer has to fight through the SUC for over a year, for God's sake.
The reason I am stuck with crappy TOS is because of Verizon, straight and simple. Verizon covers something like 20% of the country. Most of the Baby Bells aren't any better.
I'm not saying everyone who has a NAT fought with a Baby Bell for a year. But most of them have been cheated out of a decent, affordable TOS by one.
Since virtually none exist because of illegal behavior, you shouldn't be so surprised or indignant that many folks choose to get around them.
"Has anyone yet found an app that runs on 98 that doesn't at all on XP? I'm Seriously curious, because other than stuff dependant on .VXDs I haven't been able to find any."
Diablo II was completely hosed on my XP laptop. Not sure how common a problem that was for others (I imagine I would have heard about it if it was a lot of folks that couldn't run D2). Don't really remember what vxd's did specifically, but I imagine anything using DirectX wouldn't need anything else for video.
"And besides if we let the private sector take charge then we are still left with a choice. We will be able to choose not to purchase Palidium enabled hardware/software.
What is going to happen the first time a motherboard manufacturer has a non-palidium board outsell a Palidium enabled board?"
There's a problem with your line of reasoning-- and you'll see it if you ever try to buy a laptop without also buying Windows.
My money is on your NOT being able to get a non-Palladium board after industry hashes all this out.
Industry loves to conspire to deprive users of choice. Why compete to make money when you can collude and save yourself a lot of effort?
While I think this devlopment is better than Hollings-- hell, like some other poster said, the fact that it pisses off Valenti is good in and of itself.
But we still need to watch our backs.
Microsoft's spokesman:
;-)
"Lowering and removing licensing barriers is not only great for the consumer electronics and software industries, but also offers consumers the benefits of better quality video at smaller file sizes," said Michael Aldridge, lead product manager for Windows Digital Media division at Microsoft.
I don't think I have anything to add to this except a smiley.
"Every producer has a monopoly over their products, be it Office, Solaris, Paradox, or Access. Just like in Highlander, there can be only one (who gets the right to maintain the product, licensing aside.)"
Methinks you misunderstand what a monopoly is, at least legally. Making a unique product that no one else has or can sell is NOT a monopoly. It is legitimate competition. But any entity controlling a specific market segment to the point where that segment cannot reasonably be called competitive IS a monopoly.
Microsoft has been found, despite using every delay tactic and technicality money could buy, to have a monopoly in the desktop OS market. You may disagree with this conclusion, but it is a legal FACT.
Monopolies are not illegal-- but EXTENDING them, as the previous poster pointed out, by using the monopoly to freeze competition in market segments which are not yet monopolized, IS illegal.
This is why MS's giving away and embedding IE in its OS was illegal.
It is also why Sun giving away its office suite is not.
Which is it?
It's easy to call bullshit on something that was never said. He just mentioned user license seats as an expense of running a large DB.
As other people have pointed out, this whole storage space discussion is a Straw Man / Red Herring. If you read the article, it mentions that there's a DB size over which they'll pay a premium according to contract. Maybe you don't believe the guy, but repeating that storage is cheap is completely irrelevent.
For example, if you don't like the performance, then that is a complaint against the specific Xserver you are running, not against X itself.
Perhaps you could tell me what I'm not getting here. It seems obvious that
- drawing something,
- abstracting it for networking,
- pushing it down the tcp/ip stack,
- immediately pulling it BACK UP through the tcp/ip stack,
- de-abstracting it,
- writing it to the video card,
is more work than- drawing something
- writing it to the video card
or am I missing something?I wouldn't call X "inherently problematic" -- it's networking abilities are an amazing technical achievement. Yet 99% of the time, X is used on the local system, and therefore 60-80% of its effort is spent needlessly shoving graphics up and down the network stack. In the graphics world, where something that improves speed by 20% is hailed as a breakthrough, reducing your workload by two-thirds would be amazing.
Sure, getting around this would be problematic for exactly the reasons you cited -- but it doesn't mean that X doesn't have what, for most purposes, is a built-in bottleneck.
That's the beauty of the DMCA. You're absolutely right -- the copy protection stops you from using your fair use rights. However, the DMCA clecerly makes any effort to get around copy protection illegal, even if said copy protection prevents you from exercising your fair use rights.
I can't really go on further without using a steam of expletives.
The American Heritage lists the words as "regional," which may be a polite way to call it slang. It doesn't say which "region," but it's probably American. I know it's used here in the Southeast.
You make more money, and you're never threatened with jail time.
I know at first it seems a little weird, but modern statistics teaches that you should round to the nearest even number, not the next number up.
By always rounding up, you assure that your numbers will be slightly too high. By rounding to the nearest even number, the odds are greater that you'll end up closer to the real answer.
This is especially important in computers where you might by rounding thousands/millions of times.
I don't know the vagaries of VBScript, and wouldn't be shocked if the documentation said otherwise-- but rounding to the nearest even number is correct-- it's not a bug.
Can't speak to the rest of VBScript, though.
The file sending function, which is primarily intended to move the files within a home network of ReplayTV boxes, is not feasible for sending content over the Internet.
Programs stored at medium quality (not even up to VHS standards, mind you) are often gigs in size. Furthermore, the SonicBlue transport mechanism is nowhere near as efficient as FTP. It can easily take over 20 hours to send a half hour, medium quality show to someone, OVER BROADBAND.
The industry argument about the file transferring is a red herring. Make no mistake, the big boys are not really scared of SB's dysfunctional file transfer capabilities-- it's the ad skipping that pisses them off.
Like the internet, advertising treats attempts to block it as an outage and routes around it. Look what happened on the web with animations, pop-ups, placement within content, etc.
It's only a matter of time before advertisers/networks fight back by abandoning current advertising formats and adopt more obnoxious ones. 30-second ad breaks every three minutes, ads inserted between scene cuts, aggressive product placement, non-standard ad lengths (10-seconds, 40 seconds), are all the kinds of things I expect we have to look forward to.
If you're going to flame me, could you at least flame what I said?
The only thing you had right was my assumption about contigency fees. Of course, that wasn't mentioned in the article, but you knew that because you "read the f***ing article," didn't you?
It's a good thing that the lawyers representing the Toshiba users with bad floppy drives didn't roll over like these ones did. Toshiba compensated hundreds of thousands of people who got faulty floppy drives. The awards varied in size, many were as small as this. Toshiba was able to reach a very high percentage of them with ads and mailings.
But I guess this would be too hard for Microsoft.
Finally, I never said that Microsoft proposed the settlent-- only that it was a sweetheart deal for both them and the lawyers suing them.
If you want to flame something, flame that. At least I said that.
--alt
First of all, Microsoft gets to give away something that virtually costs them nothing. I assume they get to write it off at it's full retail value as well. Hell, they might even be making money on this.
Second, I'll bet the lawyers, who are supposed to be representing the folks who got overcharged, didn't include their contigency fees as the "compensation too small to be worth paying." They'll be raking in dozens of millions.
And the folks who these clowns are representing? They get nothing. The whole point of a class action suit is that the lawyers are supposed to reprent the class as they would a client-- what client would say, "keep 50 million for yourself, but give any money that I deserve away." These guys should be disbarred for even considering that offer.
As weird as it is to say, California is the only party here speaking sense.
And if it IS going to court, I'd prefer that the lawyers prosecuting it be a bunch of arrogant fools too dumb to keep their mouths shut about their legal strategy before going to court, rather than the top-shelf lawyers likely to represent a huge multinational corporation.
--alteran
Does George really think the quality of finely- calibrated medical instruments will tarnish the reputation of Star Wars light sabers which disintegrate into 40 pieces of plastic the third time a weak four-year-old swings them?
That being said, I don't know how analagous the 2 situations are, even. The kid in (Singapore?) broke a law over there WHILE he was over there. He received due process, although the punishment was harsh by US standards. Sklyarov, as far as I can tell, is being held for acts he committed legally in another jurisdiction which happen not to be legal over here. Due process (at least his constitutional rights) appear to have been waived. The US (my home country, FWIW) is so full of BS on this one it's hard believe.
--alt
You are so right.
What's that saying, "The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it." Looks like you're saying the same thing will happen here. It'd be much more complex once counter-measures got involved, but it would ultimately still work.
My bust.
--alt
Think AOL/Time-Warner. At one time, AOL, Time, and Warner Brothers represented 3 of the largest media companies on earth. Now they're one company. Do you think this makes it cheaper or more expensive to obtain access to media?
Where the phrase applies here is that for Joe User to gain access to content, his ISP now has to go through another middleman. While AOL/Time-Warner or Earthlink will probably get sweetheart deals for this, Alteran's Fly-by-Night Local ISP service will probably get a more expensive rate per customer. This is why the big ISPs, like AOL, are not fighting this development-- they get to strangle out the few remaining mom and pops without incurring the fallout of being anti-competitive.
--alt
I would be very surprised if the anonymizing services could really afford these fees with the number of non-subscribers they're carrying.
--alt
I am also puzzled how Microsoft and the BSA can compel such inventory actions...
---END QUOTE---
Microsoft compels such actions by including a provision in their GROUP site licenses saying that the purchaser agrees to perform audits upon request of BSA/MS/whatever.
Otherwise I'm not sure they'd be able to get it done.
--alt
Hammers are EXTREMELY useful tools only occasionally used for mayhem.
Rootkits, OTOH, while having an extremely limited set of legitimate uses, are almost always downloaded and used for the express purpose of gaining access to a machine that the user shouldn't be on. Period. We all know it.
I'm not saying that these guys should be sued/liable. But to continally defend this kind of software without acknowledging it for what it really is just takes away from the legitimacy of the main arguments.
This guy IS getting due process. Due process means getting your day in court before having your rights/property taken away. In Germany, like America, getting your day in court can be quite time-consuming and expensive. Often, a plaintiff makes an offer-- if you agree to their conditions, they will not take you to court to try to get their way.
That is what is happening here. The unfortunate problem is that apparently Adobe is hiring their lawyers on contingency, so the only way the lawyers get any money is if the offending party gives it to them.
If Adobe is the benificent coporate entity they advertise themselves as, they'll give the lawyers 2 grand US, tell them to shut up, and accept the agreement that K-Illustrator will change its name.
If not, screw 'em. I've been meaning to learn the GIMP anyway.
--alteran