Vonage specifically tells you you will never get through to a 911 call center. They say (over and over) it will patch you through to a local fire/police dispatcher, NOT a 911 call center. That said, I've never dialed 911 in my life (Vonage or otherwise) so I can't say whether it works as advertised or not.
I completely agree. And to add, down with these generic products. I can get a set-top box the size of a small toaster, a gaming console(the PS2 slim) and webTV box and they'd all take up less room than a "personal computer" solution.
If people need a solution for recording TV shows, buy one. If you want to play games, buy a XBox, PlayStation or Gamecube. When will people learn that economy is lost in diversification?
Err, what? The XBox360 is only sporting a 20GB drive, and last I recall, devicesmuchsmallerthanNintendo's have drives that are anywhere from 20GB-80GB.
I think you misunderstand "breaking and entering". The only legal requirement to be "breaking and entering" is to have to manipulate a physical object to gain access to a private area you do not own, and have not obtained permission to use. In this case, turning a doorknob satisfies this requirement.
So, don't go running into people's houses and sitting on their couch just yet. I know this may be far-fetched, but I think they might mind...would you?
Yeah, exactly, because commenting has something to do with Journalism (huh?), and of course Pamela Jones doesn't mention anywhere that it is a non-commercial site, and she reserves the right to moderate as she sees fit. Oh wait, yeah she does:
Comments Guidelines
Groklaw is a noncommercial site. It's my home on the internet, and just like if I invited you to my home, I'd appreciate it if you helped keep it clean, tidy and a friendly place to visit.
The Groklaw goal has always been civil speech and devotion to the truth, even when discussing those to whom we are opposed. Especially then. Groklaw has never been just a news site, althought it is a news site, because we have a purpose: to unFUD the FUD by laying out the facts. We pool our knowledge and work as a group. Our discussions require tolerance and politeness, so that we can focus on our goal.
We don't need hatefulness, or crudity, or venom. The truth is enough. While I welcome your comments, kindly keep them on the topics at hand. I reserve the right to moderate, although I have no duty to do so. You are responsible for your comments. This is a legal research and antiFUD site and we work as a community on projects. Therefore, divisive topics are not appropriate here. Keep in mind that Groklaw has visitors from all over the world. I would like everyone to feel at home, so please stick to the one thing that we share in common, an interest in legal cases in the news, currently SCO v. Everybody.
Consequently, I will delete any nasty or obscene remarks, any obvious trolling, any personal attacks, any illegal suggestions, any URLs to loathsome content or dangerous or annoying scripts, at a minimum. I reserve the right to remove user accounts as well. If you have any licensing instructions, include them in your comments. I will also remove misleading or incorrect statements or links thereto made by persons having an interest in the stock price of any company involved in any of the cases we cover on Groklaw, and no permission is granted to any such persons to reproduce the content of Groklaw. [Emphasis mine]
This has nothing to do with journalistic integrity. Don't try to confuse the issue of whether or not it's OK to hunt someone down and publish personal information about them and their relatives with whether or not you can write whatever you want on someone else's private website, even after they've told you they won't tolerate certain behavior and reserve the right to ban/delete accounts/comments.
While your article is fascinating, looking backwards to find all your solutions is hardly insightful.
Martin Fowler has tremendous insight, which is not to say we should swallow Agile Development or XP whole, but rather look to the New Methodology for ways to improve.
Your article mentions looking to government and large corporations for the answers about the Right way to program. I suppose it refers to someone like Microsoft, who has no real notion of unit testing in their software development process?
This isn't meant to be a dig against your article or old methods; it is meant to be a dig against those who would hide behind a shield of contempt for the "latest buzzwords" to avoid change.
I praise any organization that looks for the Right Way to design and write their software, because it takes courage, and in the long run, that software will become an asset intead of a liability. I think the methods espoused in The New Methodology/Agile Programming have a lot to offer us as we refine our methods to create The Right Way, and is time very well spent.
Very clever, but those are considered "transient" because they do not involve viewing. Further, ISPs typically have certain protections against suits filed as a result of user usage. If it is the user requesting the data, it is the user that has "created" those copies. Routers are also special in that they don't necessarily keep the data they route, and never "view" it...copying to RAM as an end user for the purpose of viewing/listening IS considered creating an infringing copy.
I had it out with a lawyer on this stuff a few months back here on Slashdot. I took your position, and the lawyer took the "AllofMP3.com is illegal" position. I got schooled.
And I'll explain why in one sentence:
In the U.S., creating a copy of a song is a protected action reserved for copyright holders ONLY, and when you download a song coming over the wire to your computer, you have made a copy (illegally).
I tried all kinds of arguments about the copy being made in Russia, import laws, etc., but they are all moot. In reality, copies are made all the time in computing, and copyright law counts them ALL as copies, even copying to RAM. Anyway, I stopped using AllofMP3.com since.
Further, I don't think it is obvious that buying music overseas is inherently illegal when it involves downloading, but it is. Even if you were paying $17/album, if the copyright holder themselves did not authorize it (regardless of the legality of the service in the foreign country), it is illegal to download it to a computer in the USA, since that is where the copy was made (well, one of the MANY copies).
I think the main point here is "Wow, copyright law is foobar'd!", rather than "Ooohhh, you're a bad person for using AllofMP3.com", but I suppose someone could easily take either position.
No, I bought a copy of Windows yesterday from them, OEM. They charged me $5.00 for the molex splitter, and then refunded $5.00 as a "sale". They still do it, they just don't advertise it. Try adding OEM MS Windows to your cart to see what I mean.
Yes! Check the Zaurus Software Index for all you Zaurus needs...I've owned three of these and have loved them all...
You can run Kismet, play nethack, even run servers like apache, etc. I VNC into mine from my laptop, making data entry a snap. Even when no other connections are available, wireless adhoc works great.
It is pricy though...not for the frugal.
They even have X windows on it, an entirely free ROM (called OpenZaurus), and a version of Konqueror for it. Bochs, SNES9X, and other emulators work as well. It comes with a terminal emulator, and I found it to be a good general purpose linux box. Even the package format is just a glorified tgz (kind of along the lines of.deb packages), so the whole thing (including at home development) is pretty easy.
True, though GP was insinutating that he meant *illegal* use against people, seeing how the analogy was to illegal use of peer to peer.
So, while a LOT of gun use has been in wars against people, that doesn't rate as illegal.
Either way, even though the statistic is BS, the underlying point is correct. I wish folks wouldn't reinforce good points with stats that *are* flamebait (after all, this isn't a discussion about gun control or use, but about peer to peer).
Hard to say...it gets included with lots of Linux distros, which they aren't counting.
Also, I've installed it a few times on my Gentoo box, but that all comes out of the portage tree.
This might match well (in one way or another) to Windows and Mac users, but I think almost all Linux users use it, and most wouldn't have downloaded it from mozilla.org.
I knew someone would mention this...and I actually use it all the time, both at work and at home. In fact, I started using the Ion3 window manager instead of KDE because I like how screen handled application management so much.
Anyway, thanks for the tip. For those that don't know, you can use screen to multiplex one physical screen across many bash sessions, without having more than one terminal. Switching between them is quite easy, and you can think of it kind of like the buffer system in emacs, only more friendly.
The other big feature that Bhalo05 mentioned is the ability to kill the xterm or SSH session running screen without warning. Screen will continue to run, and when you log back in, simply type "screen -r" (the r stands for "reattach") and you will be exactly back where you were before you lost the xterm, SSH connection, whatever.
I do this at work a lot, SSHing into a Linux box with a copy of emacs running, and bash sessions that run scripts for network services I need to test, as well as sessions running for compiling and one "general purpose" session for command line stuff. I can just close my SSH at night, knowing that in the morning, all my programs and bash sessions will be exactly like I left them.
And, as Bhalo05 said, very useful for running emerge in the background. =)
Load time is linked to memory usage. The biggest performance killer, hands down, is poor memory usage that leads to disk swapping.
For people that like to run 30 programs at once (most everyone but me, it seems), having a small memory footprint in your desktop apps is a big deal.
So, go ahead and benchmark Quake3, but for non-gamers who aren't running production servers, load time matters. What else are you going to benchmark? Checking email, Slashdot loading times and printing?
For the record, I am a linux gamer, and my machine is tweaked for performance, and I do run benchmarks in UT2004, Doom3, Quake3, etc...but that's not where most Linux users are, and they don't care how many FPS I can get in the latest linux-ported FPS.
Bing, wrong.
They won't be "smaller", since it isn't compiled statically.
Try again.
Load time is what matters. Whether statically or dynamically linked, the code has to load. Whether its from the binary itself or from some shared lib, doesn't matter.
By the way, I actually do statically link some of my binaries. So, yeah, the binaries WOULD be smaller. This doesn't really affect the speed issue I mentioned above, though.
My point is that you can reduce the amount of unecessary code loading, speeding up load times while reducing memory usage. Your mileage will vary, but it works quite well for some packages.
Then you didn't configure correctly. The main optimizations in Gentoo come from compiling code specifically for your setup. For example, I know that I don't really care about Gnome support, since I'm a KDE user. I can tell Gentoo this, and it will configure and compile accordingly, i.e. leaving out support for Gnome, and therefore making the final binary smaller, or at least hook into fewer libraries.
Ditto for any number of different flags: arts, dvd+rw, theora, qt, kde, cups, whatever...
The end result is that your binaries tend to be smaller (and therefore faster loading) because they aren't genercially compiled to run everywhere, and don't have hooks into all the KDE and all the Gnome libraries, for example.
This applies even more if you remove GUI support for certain programs by setting the flag "-X" - this will provide a very clean, small compile meant for the command line only. This is useful for someone like me who does most everything at the command line, except surf the web (I like pretty pictures).
As far as "wasting time", I'm constantly amazed that people complain about this. Gentoo COMES with a CD that is their reference snapshot, and is all binary. You can be up and running with VERY little compilation, and then just run emerge in the background (either using at Ctrl-Alt-F[1-6] term, or even in an xterm, although for X related stuff, it's nice to be able to quit X and know your compile is still going). So, you run pre-compiled binaries for a couple of days while you emerge, quit X, fire it back up, and you're running under your newly custom-compiled setup. I've done this on 7 computers, including a P3 700, Pentium M 1400, Athlon XP 1700+ and an Athlon64 3000+, with RAM going from 256 MB to 1GB. It's never been a problem, and in all cases, I've been up and running in a couple of hours.
The DMCA allows for reversing for interoperability so long as the reversing does not violate other elements of copyright law. Essentially, reversing is not enough, you have to be doing something illegal besides.
Now, we are legally allowed to make "backup" copies of games under coyright law, but somehow it is illegal to mod your box to play them...I agree, this is wrong. Of course, 99% of modders use their box to play illegal copies of games, so while technically it should be illegal, the current standing of things is understandable.
In the case of Nikon, I can't see any piracy coming from this. This is pure reversing-for-interoperability. In fact, this is the poster-boy case for why reversing is protected in the DMCA. Not so with modded consoles.
The BNet case is also a poster-child case, but has a bunch of other intricate complexities that have it bogged down in court. A Nikon case would be much more clean cut, I would think.
Yes, and the last decision was handed down on 30 Sept of last year...the appeal is pending. I wrote two pieces on that very case last year on my webiste. See http://etherplex.org for my discussion of that case.
There were several elements that were different in that case; specifically, the users agreed to (through a click-wrap agreement) that they wouldn't reverse the software. The question then becomes: "Can an agreement you are forced to sign because of copyright law remove privileges protected by copyright law?" A lot of smart people say "No." The EFF has some great info on this.
This is a subtle point: it's a bit like saying that there is a law that protects tenants from being kicked out without at least 30 days notice, but also requires that they sign an agreement with their landlord before moving in. In the particular agreement you signed, it says the landlord can kick out out with only 10 days notice. Is this legal?
This is very interesting, but does not have a parallel in the Nikon case. They would be hard pressed to show that cracking their whitebalance data led to pirating of their software.
This isn't subject to DMCA. DMCA allows reverse engineering for interoperability. No developers, commercial or not, need Nikon's permission to reverse this legally in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
How in hell did this get modded "Informative"?
Vonage specifically tells you you will never get through to a 911 call center. They say (over and over) it will patch you through to a local fire/police dispatcher, NOT a 911 call center. That said, I've never dialed 911 in my life (Vonage or otherwise) so I can't say whether it works as advertised or not.
Someone mod this offtopic; we're talking about OpenBSD, not FreeBSD. =)
I completely agree. And to add, down with these generic products. I can get a set-top box the size of a small toaster, a gaming console(the PS2 slim) and webTV box and they'd all take up less room than a "personal computer" solution.
If people need a solution for recording TV shows, buy one. If you want to play games, buy a XBox, PlayStation or Gamecube. When will people learn that economy is lost in diversification?
In a word: I wouldn't worry about it.
I think you misunderstand "breaking and entering". The only legal requirement to be "breaking and entering" is to have to manipulate a physical object to gain access to a private area you do not own, and have not obtained permission to use. In this case, turning a doorknob satisfies this requirement.
So, don't go running into people's houses and sitting on their couch just yet. I know this may be far-fetched, but I think they might mind...would you?
Comments Guidelines
Groklaw is a noncommercial site. It's my home on the internet, and just like if I invited you to my home, I'd appreciate it if you helped keep it clean, tidy and a friendly place to visit.
The Groklaw goal has always been civil speech and devotion to the truth, even when discussing those to whom we are opposed. Especially then. Groklaw has never been just a news site, althought it is a news site, because we have a purpose: to unFUD the FUD by laying out the facts. We pool our knowledge and work as a group. Our discussions require tolerance and politeness, so that we can focus on our goal.
We don't need hatefulness, or crudity, or venom. The truth is enough. While I welcome your comments, kindly keep them on the topics at hand. I reserve the right to moderate, although I have no duty to do so. You are responsible for your comments. This is a legal research and antiFUD site and we work as a community on projects. Therefore, divisive topics are not appropriate here. Keep in mind that Groklaw has visitors from all over the world. I would like everyone to feel at home, so please stick to the one thing that we share in common, an interest in legal cases in the news, currently SCO v. Everybody.
Consequently, I will delete any nasty or obscene remarks, any obvious trolling, any personal attacks, any illegal suggestions, any URLs to loathsome content or dangerous or annoying scripts, at a minimum. I reserve the right to remove user accounts as well. If you have any licensing instructions, include them in your comments. I will also remove misleading or incorrect statements or links thereto made by persons having an interest in the stock price of any company involved in any of the cases we cover on Groklaw, and no permission is granted to any such persons to reproduce the content of Groklaw.
[Emphasis mine]
This has nothing to do with journalistic integrity. Don't try to confuse the issue of whether or not it's OK to hunt someone down and publish personal information about them and their relatives with whether or not you can write whatever you want on someone else's private website, even after they've told you they won't tolerate certain behavior and reserve the right to ban/delete accounts/comments.
While your article is fascinating, looking backwards to find all your solutions is hardly insightful.
Martin Fowler has tremendous insight, which is not to say we should swallow Agile Development or XP whole, but rather look to the New Methodology for ways to improve.
Your article mentions looking to government and large corporations for the answers about the Right way to program. I suppose it refers to someone like Microsoft, who has no real notion of unit testing in their software development process?
This isn't meant to be a dig against your article or old methods; it is meant to be a dig against those who would hide behind a shield of contempt for the "latest buzzwords" to avoid change.
I praise any organization that looks for the Right Way to design and write their software, because it takes courage, and in the long run, that software will become an asset intead of a liability. I think the methods espoused in The New Methodology/Agile Programming have a lot to offer us as we refine our methods to create The Right Way, and is time very well spent.
Check out WPA.
Very clever, but those are considered "transient" because they do not involve viewing. Further, ISPs typically have certain protections against suits filed as a result of user usage. If it is the user requesting the data, it is the user that has "created" those copies. Routers are also special in that they don't necessarily keep the data they route, and never "view" it...copying to RAM as an end user for the purpose of viewing/listening IS considered creating an infringing copy.
I had it out with a lawyer on this stuff a few months back here on Slashdot. I took your position, and the lawyer took the "AllofMP3.com is illegal" position. I got schooled.
And I'll explain why in one sentence:
In the U.S., creating a copy of a song is a protected action reserved for copyright holders ONLY, and when you download a song coming over the wire to your computer, you have made a copy (illegally).
I tried all kinds of arguments about the copy being made in Russia, import laws, etc., but they are all moot. In reality, copies are made all the time in computing, and copyright law counts them ALL as copies, even copying to RAM. Anyway, I stopped using AllofMP3.com since.
Further, I don't think it is obvious that buying music overseas is inherently illegal when it involves downloading, but it is. Even if you were paying $17/album, if the copyright holder themselves did not authorize it (regardless of the legality of the service in the foreign country), it is illegal to download it to a computer in the USA, since that is where the copy was made (well, one of the MANY copies).
I think the main point here is "Wow, copyright law is foobar'd!", rather than "Ooohhh, you're a bad person for using AllofMP3.com", but I suppose someone could easily take either position.
No, I bought a copy of Windows yesterday from them, OEM. They charged me $5.00 for the molex splitter, and then refunded $5.00 as a "sale". They still do it, they just don't advertise it. Try adding OEM MS Windows to your cart to see what I mean.
You can run Kismet, play nethack, even run servers like apache, etc. I VNC into mine from my laptop, making data entry a snap. Even when no other connections are available, wireless adhoc works great.
It is pricy though...not for the frugal. They even have X windows on it, an entirely free ROM (called OpenZaurus), and a version of Konqueror for it. Bochs, SNES9X, and other emulators work as well. It comes with a terminal emulator, and I found it to be a good general purpose linux box. Even the package format is just a glorified tgz (kind of along the lines of .deb packages), so the whole thing (including at home development) is pretty easy.
Taht is turly amzanig! I raelly nveer hared taht bfeore!
Honestly...that is cool. I wonder why it works? I suppose it could offer some insight into how the mind/eye combo parses language...
True, though GP was insinutating that he meant *illegal* use against people, seeing how the analogy was to illegal use of peer to peer.
So, while a LOT of gun use has been in wars against people, that doesn't rate as illegal.
Either way, even though the statistic is BS, the underlying point is correct. I wish folks wouldn't reinforce good points with stats that *are* flamebait (after all, this isn't a discussion about gun control or use, but about peer to peer).
Hard to say...it gets included with lots of Linux distros, which they aren't counting.
Also, I've installed it a few times on my Gentoo box, but that all comes out of the portage tree.
This might match well (in one way or another) to Windows and Mac users, but I think almost all Linux users use it, and most wouldn't have downloaded it from mozilla.org.
Great...just spewed diet coke all over my monitor after reading your last statement. Well done.
I knew someone would mention this...and I actually use it all the time, both at work and at home. In fact, I started using the Ion3 window manager instead of KDE because I like how screen handled application management so much.
Anyway, thanks for the tip. For those that don't know, you can use screen to multiplex one physical screen across many bash sessions, without having more than one terminal. Switching between them is quite easy, and you can think of it kind of like the buffer system in emacs, only more friendly.
The other big feature that Bhalo05 mentioned is the ability to kill the xterm or SSH session running screen without warning. Screen will continue to run, and when you log back in, simply type "screen -r" (the r stands for "reattach") and you will be exactly back where you were before you lost the xterm, SSH connection, whatever.
I do this at work a lot, SSHing into a Linux box with a copy of emacs running, and bash sessions that run scripts for network services I need to test, as well as sessions running for compiling and one "general purpose" session for command line stuff. I can just close my SSH at night, knowing that in the morning, all my programs and bash sessions will be exactly like I left them.
And, as Bhalo05 said, very useful for running emerge in the background. =)
Load time is linked to memory usage. The biggest performance killer, hands down, is poor memory usage that leads to disk swapping.
For people that like to run 30 programs at once (most everyone but me, it seems), having a small memory footprint in your desktop apps is a big deal.
So, go ahead and benchmark Quake3, but for non-gamers who aren't running production servers, load time matters. What else are you going to benchmark? Checking email, Slashdot loading times and printing?
For the record, I am a linux gamer, and my machine is tweaked for performance, and I do run benchmarks in UT2004, Doom3, Quake3, etc...but that's not where most Linux users are, and they don't care how many FPS I can get in the latest linux-ported FPS.
They won't be "smaller", since it isn't compiled statically.
Try again.
Load time is what matters. Whether statically or dynamically linked, the code has to load. Whether its from the binary itself or from some shared lib, doesn't matter.
By the way, I actually do statically link some of my binaries. So, yeah, the binaries WOULD be smaller. This doesn't really affect the speed issue I mentioned above, though.
My point is that you can reduce the amount of unecessary code loading, speeding up load times while reducing memory usage. Your mileage will vary, but it works quite well for some packages.
Then you didn't configure correctly. The main optimizations in Gentoo come from compiling code specifically for your setup. For example, I know that I don't really care about Gnome support, since I'm a KDE user. I can tell Gentoo this, and it will configure and compile accordingly, i.e. leaving out support for Gnome, and therefore making the final binary smaller, or at least hook into fewer libraries.
Ditto for any number of different flags: arts, dvd+rw, theora, qt, kde, cups, whatever...
The end result is that your binaries tend to be smaller (and therefore faster loading) because they aren't genercially compiled to run everywhere, and don't have hooks into all the KDE and all the Gnome libraries, for example.
This applies even more if you remove GUI support for certain programs by setting the flag "-X" - this will provide a very clean, small compile meant for the command line only. This is useful for someone like me who does most everything at the command line, except surf the web (I like pretty pictures).
As far as "wasting time", I'm constantly amazed that people complain about this. Gentoo COMES with a CD that is their reference snapshot, and is all binary. You can be up and running with VERY little compilation, and then just run emerge in the background (either using at Ctrl-Alt-F[1-6] term, or even in an xterm, although for X related stuff, it's nice to be able to quit X and know your compile is still going). So, you run pre-compiled binaries for a couple of days while you emerge, quit X, fire it back up, and you're running under your newly custom-compiled setup. I've done this on 7 computers, including a P3 700, Pentium M 1400, Athlon XP 1700+ and an Athlon64 3000+, with RAM going from 256 MB to 1GB. It's never been a problem, and in all cases, I've been up and running in a couple of hours.
Right, because *government* doesn't have any influence on social issues... =)
The DMCA allows for reversing for interoperability so long as the reversing does not violate other elements of copyright law. Essentially, reversing is not enough, you have to be doing something illegal besides.
Now, we are legally allowed to make "backup" copies of games under coyright law, but somehow it is illegal to mod your box to play them...I agree, this is wrong. Of course, 99% of modders use their box to play illegal copies of games, so while technically it should be illegal, the current standing of things is understandable.
In the case of Nikon, I can't see any piracy coming from this. This is pure reversing-for-interoperability. In fact, this is the poster-boy case for why reversing is protected in the DMCA. Not so with modded consoles.
The BNet case is also a poster-child case, but has a bunch of other intricate complexities that have it bogged down in court. A Nikon case would be much more clean cut, I would think.
Yes, and the last decision was handed down on 30 Sept of last year...the appeal is pending. I wrote two pieces on that very case last year on my webiste. See http://etherplex.org for my discussion of that case.
There were several elements that were different in that case; specifically, the users agreed to (through a click-wrap agreement) that they wouldn't reverse the software. The question then becomes: "Can an agreement you are forced to sign because of copyright law remove privileges protected by copyright law?" A lot of smart people say "No." The EFF has some great info on this.
This is a subtle point: it's a bit like saying that there is a law that protects tenants from being kicked out without at least 30 days notice, but also requires that they sign an agreement with their landlord before moving in. In the particular agreement you signed, it says the landlord can kick out out with only 10 days notice. Is this legal?
This is very interesting, but does not have a parallel in the Nikon case. They would be hard pressed to show that cracking their whitebalance data led to pirating of their software.
This isn't subject to DMCA. DMCA allows reverse engineering for interoperability. No developers, commercial or not, need Nikon's permission to reverse this legally in the US.