To MPA's credit, they have voluntarily retracted their claim. IMSLP will also be working on technical measures to prevent any future attacks.
Love to know what they're going to be. Obviously they could run their own DNS, but the registrar can still pull the glue records pointing the world at their DNS servers.
I guess you could use a registrar that doesn't have a tendency to roll over without at least reading the letters (that particular one didn't specifically mention the DMCA but other than that the tone was more-or-less the same), but I was under the impression that the whole point of the DMCA was to force the ISP to pull content first and ask questions later - essentially forcing the legal threat onto the person who's least equipped to deal with them. So really you'd want a registrar outside the US - and preferably outside any country with similar legislation.
Depending on where you are in the world, this is a very dangerous route to take.
IIRC (and IANAL) the UK (which is considerably more speed-camera friendly than the US) has already had a case where someone tried to prove the equipment itself was fundamentally flawed (as opposed to simply suffering a temporary malfunction, which the set of photos with a set delay between them prove). He lost pretty miserably - it appears that when the legal system has gone to great effort to certify an electronic device as being sufficiently accurate to convict, it really doesn't like someone arguing that the device isn't.
I'm not a big fan of Wine in a commercial environment. If your employer has paid for software and expects to go back to the vendor for support - unless the vendor has officially stated "Fully supported under Wine!", what do you think will happen the first time there's an issue - regardless of whether or not the blame can be pinned on Wine?
Not to mention that the likelihood of "X" going belly up doesn't work as well as you'd expect it to for a number of reasons:
1. Most businesses rely on a lot of other businesses, any of which would present a problem if they went belly up. Adding another company to that list is not as much of a disaster as you imagine.
2. Just because a business has gone to the wall doesn't mean all their products cease to be useful overnight. Particularly a company the size of Microsoft - if they went out of business (no matter how absurd that sounds), it's a sure-fire 100% copper-bottomed guarantee that someone else - maybe another software firm, maybe some sort of VC-backed consortium - would jump in, restructure the firm and keep the products alive. Or at the very least devise a migration plan.
I don't think that's really going to achieve much, certainly not outside of hobbyists.
Rationale: No business chooses an OS because "it's Windows". They choose an OS because "the applications we need to run function under Windows".
Now, assuming those applications are commercial applications that have been purchased and something goes wrong - come on, you've all called up technical support. First question that's going to get asked? "What version of Windows are you using?"
What's going to happen if the answer is "I'm not, I'm running ReactOS"? Bet you anything you like it's a very polite "go away".
Indeed, but if they're looking at the whole picture (and they'd be foolish not to), cost of licensing is only part of the cost.
I can't believe I'm saying that, I sound like a Microsoft shill. Eurgh. I'll have to get in the shower after I've posted this.
Anyway, how much does it cost to migrate to Linux if your company depends on a application(s) that are Windows only? That, I would argue, is one of the big things keeping people on Windows.
Before the Digital Economy Act, that's exactly how it did work.
Copyright holders have always been able to enforce their copyrights legally in the UK, it's just that it would require sniffing out infringers themselves (easy enough - join a few torrents, get a list of all the IP addresses sharing with you then filter that list so all you're left with is IP addresses in the UK) then subpoenaing the ISPs to get the associated names and addresses.
Obviously there are huge holes - not least of which is that ISPs have historically not kept particularly reliable records linking IP address leases to subscribers - but that's the gist of it.
The DEA shifts much of this burden onto ISPs and at the same time eliminates the complication of having to go through the legal system (with all the checks, balances and rules about actually having evidence that implies) by instigating the "three strikes and you're out" idea.
Not strictly true, there are ways and means around it. Usually by informing your clients that you may process data outside the EU, and if they don't like that the correct course of action is to take their business elsewhere.
How else do you think we have to deal with Indian call centres?
The reason it's getting complaints on/. is while most of the general public will be absolutely fine, the techie nature here means quite a few people are likely to be running servers on their domestic connection.
You really want one layer of NAT for that at most - the layer at your gateway. If your ISP puts you on carrier-grade NAT, you're stuffed.
Doubtless ISPs will offer a real, honest-to-FSM IPv4 address, but they won't offer it to domestic subscribers. It'll be business users only, and it'll cost extra. I'm not even going to get into the mess that'll come about if you're in the middle of a contract when the ISP puts you on a NAT'ed connection. Even if you can resolve the inevitable dispute (presumably by getting out of your contract early), doing so is unlikely to be quick or easy.
I grant you that Hairyfeet has an interesting way with words, but if you see past the foaming at the mouth s/he (ok, almost certainly he) makes a lot of sense.
NOBODY chooses an OS for idealistic reasons. Well, nobody in the real world. Practicality rules above all else and if you don't understand that, you will never get widespread adoption in a given market.
All your staff know Windows and only Windows? Windows it is. Do you have any idea how much it costs to re-train staff or hire new? The risks involved in hiring new staff? You'd be barking mad to do it unless you had a damn good reason.
You need to run an application which only runs under Windows? Windows it is. Business is risky enough as it is, you're certainly not going to tie the success of your business to some random product neither you nor anybody in your industry has ever heard of for idealistic reasons purely because it's the only thing you can find that runs under Linux. (Forget Wine. Nobody's going to call their software vendor, ask for support and then say "Oh, by the way it's not actually running on Windows..." because they know what will happen. The vendor will just hang up on them.)
Contrariwise, you have a bunch of staff who know Linux, no budget for server software and no particular need to run Windows on the server? Then, (and pretty much only then), Linux it shall be.
No, but modern cars almost invariably use a lot of onboard computer systems, and interrogating those systems requires a device which is only available to the franchised dealers.
OBD-II attempts to work around this by providing a legally-mandated, standardised diagnostics system. I'm given to understand that manufacturers are known to work around this mandate by ensuring that if you hook up a plain OBD-II diagnostics machine, the car gives the bare minimum information it has to. If you hook up the official device, you get a lot more.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw.
Right now, the "unreasonable man" is the games industry. The unreasonable man may not always succeed in his attempts to adapt the world to himself. Indeed, he may fail 95% of the time. But the other 5% of the time, progress is made - and it's made in the direction dictated by the unreasonable man.
The GPL explicitly doesn't ban selling the product - the FSF has always been very clear on that.
Of course, a side-effect of the GPL is I can buy one copy of a product and release the source code totally free of charge out of the goodness of my heart and there's nothing the person who sold it to me can do. Which means it's vanishingly unlikely anyone will ever have much luck trying to sell GPL'd software.
If you're in an urban area and the problem is the line itself rather than the route it has to take to get to the exchange, order a second line then have the first disconnected;)
Certainly used to be the case that Symantec Enterprise AV wasn't too bad. Small footprint, didn't hog system resources, didn't clutter up the desktop with pointless "I'm still here! Aren't I wonderful!" alerts.
Too much, in fact. As a sysadmin I regularly had people ask me to install AV or (in one or two cases) go out and install a third-party AV product, thinking I'd shipped them a PC with no AV.
IIRC the big thing that drove it (though I can't cite a source because I'm going off a lecture I heard years ago) was TQM.
Essentially, for years Japanese firms were well-known for producing cheap, nasty knock-offs of Western products. And I mean really cheap and nasty. Sure, companies occasionally outsourced manufacturing to Japan but in such cases, by and large the design was kept in the west and Japan just provided the factories and built products to Western specifications.
Thinking about it, that's not too different from how things are working out in China now.
Anyhow, the story goes that a number of Japanese firms got rather fed up of being known as suppliers of cheap knock-offs. So the companies which had hitherto been designing and building knock-offs started to develop quality control practices - practices which at the time were probably superior to what much of the West was using. This was combined with their expertise in getting things done cheaply, and the result is what we have now.
All this takes time, you understand. Many years of incremental improvements, many years to shake off the old reputation.
The theory is that sooner rather than later, the Chinese firms producing cheap knock-offs will have the same idea. Doubtless they won't be able to produce for the same price as what they're doing now, but they don't need to. They just need to be able to produce at a price that's competitive, not a price that's so absurdly competitive everyone else may as well give up. I wouldn't be too surprised if they wind up doing just that and some of the better-connected African countries will become the next world source for cheap knock-offs.
OF COURSE I'm cherrypicking! Every piece of software has it's advantages and it's disadvantages, and I could just as easily cherrypick advantages to Linux and use them to query why anyone would ever run Windows.
My point is that in the F/OSS world, as a proportion of the total number of software products out there a greater number are, by and large, behind their commercial brethren. Frequently a decade or more behind. If you depend on commercial software in that category, anyone suggesting using the F/OSS equivalent is practically guaranteed to get some very odd looks.
Obviously if you don't depend on software in that category - which it sounds like you personally don't - you don't really need to care.
Refusing to even contemplate that someone else may have a point when they level criticism at your software of choice - that is fanboyism. (Note I said contemplate. I don't consider it fanboyism if your reaction to such criticism is to say "Well, maybe you're right, maybe I am. Let us examine the evidence..." and ultimately decide you're still happy with your choice.)
That's not really an automator equivalent. The problem with most of those macro recording apps is they don't deal very gracefully if the behaviour of the application you're automating sometimes does something different (for instance if you feed it a specific filetype) - or if they can, you have to write something that looks a lot like code.
Automator can be entirely GUI driven and has a rich library of things it can do, those things integrate with applications like iTunes, iPhoto and each block is effectively a magic box where some sort of object goes in one end, something happens and a different sort of object comes out the other.
It's difficult to explain without actually sitting someone in front of it, but I hope this screenshot gives you an idea:
Gimp, for instance - is a great product, but if you look at the history of Photoshop you'll find that it's missing quite a few features - both basic things like colour management and more advanced things like adjustment layers - which Photoshop has had for 10 years or more.
Scribus - like Gimp, a cracking piece of software. Using it is like using Aldus Pagemaker circa 1994 but on a higher-res screen with more colours.
I wasn't exaggerating when I said 10 or 15 years. That's equivalent to the state of the art in about 1996.
If you seriously think nothing has been added to commercial software since then except bloat, I suggest you install NT 4. You'll be browsing the web with either Netscape Navigator 3.0 or IE 3. Neither of which supported CSS - hell, CSS didn't exist until December 1996.
If you want an office suite, chances are it'll be Office '95.
Moving on from Microsoft products, photo editing is courtesy of Photoshop 4. You didn't have colour management - that came with version 5 in 1998. However, you did have 16 bit per channel support. Both of these are major issues which come up over and over again when there's a discussion about The Gimp.
In terms of interacting with other systems, SSH was released in 1995. But there's a strong chance you won't be using that, because a lot of business applications were still running on commercial Unixes - or maybe even VMS - which almost invariably expected you to telnet in.
You'd be surprised. It's not just large organisations, some smaller companies interact with applications provided by larger organisations and that interaction demands IE.
Because you can't run have than one version of IE installed simultaneously. So as a web dev, you'd spend much of your time upgrading and downgrading browsers rather than actually developing for the web.
I doubt it. Everyone's got a different idea of what's wrong with the desktop environments.
Myself, I suspect that good UI design is an art. Which is a fancy way of saying "nobody really knows how to do it properly, there's little in the way of definitively right or wrong ways to do it so those involved just pretend they do and you wind up with a small number of artists and a vast number of art critics."
Slashdot Mirror
To MPA's credit, they have voluntarily retracted their claim. IMSLP will also be working on technical measures to prevent any future attacks.
Love to know what they're going to be. Obviously they could run their own DNS, but the registrar can still pull the glue records pointing the world at their DNS servers.
I guess you could use a registrar that doesn't have a tendency to roll over without at least reading the letters (that particular one didn't specifically mention the DMCA but other than that the tone was more-or-less the same), but I was under the impression that the whole point of the DMCA was to force the ISP to pull content first and ask questions later - essentially forcing the legal threat onto the person who's least equipped to deal with them. So really you'd want a registrar outside the US - and preferably outside any country with similar legislation.
They could have downshifted their vehicles but I would hate to be the mechanic to fix their transmissions.
Really? I'd love to. Mechanics charge by the hour, y'know.
Depending on where you are in the world, this is a very dangerous route to take.
IIRC (and IANAL) the UK (which is considerably more speed-camera friendly than the US) has already had a case where someone tried to prove the equipment itself was fundamentally flawed (as opposed to simply suffering a temporary malfunction, which the set of photos with a set delay between them prove). He lost pretty miserably - it appears that when the legal system has gone to great effort to certify an electronic device as being sufficiently accurate to convict, it really doesn't like someone arguing that the device isn't.
I'm not a big fan of Wine in a commercial environment. If your employer has paid for software and expects to go back to the vendor for support - unless the vendor has officially stated "Fully supported under Wine!", what do you think will happen the first time there's an issue - regardless of whether or not the blame can be pinned on Wine?
Not to mention that the likelihood of "X" going belly up doesn't work as well as you'd expect it to for a number of reasons:
1. Most businesses rely on a lot of other businesses, any of which would present a problem if they went belly up. Adding another company to that list is not as much of a disaster as you imagine.
2. Just because a business has gone to the wall doesn't mean all their products cease to be useful overnight. Particularly a company the size of Microsoft - if they went out of business (no matter how absurd that sounds), it's a sure-fire 100% copper-bottomed guarantee that someone else - maybe another software firm, maybe some sort of VC-backed consortium - would jump in, restructure the firm and keep the products alive. Or at the very least devise a migration plan.
I don't think that's really going to achieve much, certainly not outside of hobbyists.
Rationale: No business chooses an OS because "it's Windows". They choose an OS because "the applications we need to run function under Windows".
Now, assuming those applications are commercial applications that have been purchased and something goes wrong - come on, you've all called up technical support. First question that's going to get asked? "What version of Windows are you using?"
What's going to happen if the answer is "I'm not, I'm running ReactOS"? Bet you anything you like it's a very polite "go away".
Indeed, but if they're looking at the whole picture (and they'd be foolish not to), cost of licensing is only part of the cost.
I can't believe I'm saying that, I sound like a Microsoft shill. Eurgh. I'll have to get in the shower after I've posted this.
Anyway, how much does it cost to migrate to Linux if your company depends on a application(s) that are Windows only? That, I would argue, is one of the big things keeping people on Windows.
Before the Digital Economy Act, that's exactly how it did work.
Copyright holders have always been able to enforce their copyrights legally in the UK, it's just that it would require sniffing out infringers themselves (easy enough - join a few torrents, get a list of all the IP addresses sharing with you then filter that list so all you're left with is IP addresses in the UK) then subpoenaing the ISPs to get the associated names and addresses.
Obviously there are huge holes - not least of which is that ISPs have historically not kept particularly reliable records linking IP address leases to subscribers - but that's the gist of it.
The DEA shifts much of this burden onto ISPs and at the same time eliminates the complication of having to go through the legal system (with all the checks, balances and rules about actually having evidence that implies) by instigating the "three strikes and you're out" idea.
Not strictly true, there are ways and means around it. Usually by informing your clients that you may process data outside the EU, and if they don't like that the correct course of action is to take their business elsewhere.
How else do you think we have to deal with Indian call centres?
The reason it's getting complaints on /. is while most of the general public will be absolutely fine, the techie nature here means quite a few people are likely to be running servers on their domestic connection.
You really want one layer of NAT for that at most - the layer at your gateway. If your ISP puts you on carrier-grade NAT, you're stuffed.
Doubtless ISPs will offer a real, honest-to-FSM IPv4 address, but they won't offer it to domestic subscribers. It'll be business users only, and it'll cost extra. I'm not even going to get into the mess that'll come about if you're in the middle of a contract when the ISP puts you on a NAT'ed connection. Even if you can resolve the inevitable dispute (presumably by getting out of your contract early), doing so is unlikely to be quick or easy.
I grant you that Hairyfeet has an interesting way with words, but if you see past the foaming at the mouth s/he (ok, almost certainly he) makes a lot of sense.
NOBODY chooses an OS for idealistic reasons. Well, nobody in the real world. Practicality rules above all else and if you don't understand that, you will never get widespread adoption in a given market.
All your staff know Windows and only Windows? Windows it is. Do you have any idea how much it costs to re-train staff or hire new? The risks involved in hiring new staff? You'd be barking mad to do it unless you had a damn good reason.
You need to run an application which only runs under Windows? Windows it is. Business is risky enough as it is, you're certainly not going to tie the success of your business to some random product neither you nor anybody in your industry has ever heard of for idealistic reasons purely because it's the only thing you can find that runs under Linux. (Forget Wine. Nobody's going to call their software vendor, ask for support and then say "Oh, by the way it's not actually running on Windows..." because they know what will happen. The vendor will just hang up on them.)
Contrariwise, you have a bunch of staff who know Linux, no budget for server software and no particular need to run Windows on the server? Then, (and pretty much only then), Linux it shall be.
No, but modern cars almost invariably use a lot of onboard computer systems, and interrogating those systems requires a device which is only available to the franchised dealers.
OBD-II attempts to work around this by providing a legally-mandated, standardised diagnostics system. I'm given to understand that manufacturers are known to work around this mandate by ensuring that if you hook up a plain OBD-II diagnostics machine, the car gives the bare minimum information it has to. If you hook up the official device, you get a lot more.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw.
Right now, the "unreasonable man" is the games industry. The unreasonable man may not always succeed in his attempts to adapt the world to himself. Indeed, he may fail 95% of the time. But the other 5% of the time, progress is made - and it's made in the direction dictated by the unreasonable man.
The GPL explicitly doesn't ban selling the product - the FSF has always been very clear on that.
Of course, a side-effect of the GPL is I can buy one copy of a product and release the source code totally free of charge out of the goodness of my heart and there's nothing the person who sold it to me can do. Which means it's vanishingly unlikely anyone will ever have much luck trying to sell GPL'd software.
If you're in an urban area and the problem is the line itself rather than the route it has to take to get to the exchange, order a second line then have the first disconnected ;)
Certainly used to be the case that Symantec Enterprise AV wasn't too bad. Small footprint, didn't hog system resources, didn't clutter up the desktop with pointless "I'm still here! Aren't I wonderful!" alerts.
Too much, in fact. As a sysadmin I regularly had people ask me to install AV or (in one or two cases) go out and install a third-party AV product, thinking I'd shipped them a PC with no AV.
IIRC the big thing that drove it (though I can't cite a source because I'm going off a lecture I heard years ago) was TQM.
Essentially, for years Japanese firms were well-known for producing cheap, nasty knock-offs of Western products. And I mean really cheap and nasty. Sure, companies occasionally outsourced manufacturing to Japan but in such cases, by and large the design was kept in the west and Japan just provided the factories and built products to Western specifications.
Thinking about it, that's not too different from how things are working out in China now.
Anyhow, the story goes that a number of Japanese firms got rather fed up of being known as suppliers of cheap knock-offs. So the companies which had hitherto been designing and building knock-offs started to develop quality control practices - practices which at the time were probably superior to what much of the West was using. This was combined with their expertise in getting things done cheaply, and the result is what we have now.
All this takes time, you understand. Many years of incremental improvements, many years to shake off the old reputation.
The theory is that sooner rather than later, the Chinese firms producing cheap knock-offs will have the same idea. Doubtless they won't be able to produce for the same price as what they're doing now, but they don't need to. They just need to be able to produce at a price that's competitive, not a price that's so absurdly competitive everyone else may as well give up. I wouldn't be too surprised if they wind up doing just that and some of the better-connected African countries will become the next world source for cheap knock-offs.
OF COURSE I'm cherrypicking! Every piece of software has it's advantages and it's disadvantages, and I could just as easily cherrypick advantages to Linux and use them to query why anyone would ever run Windows.
My point is that in the F/OSS world, as a proportion of the total number of software products out there a greater number are, by and large, behind their commercial brethren. Frequently a decade or more behind. If you depend on commercial software in that category, anyone suggesting using the F/OSS equivalent is practically guaranteed to get some very odd looks.
Obviously if you don't depend on software in that category - which it sounds like you personally don't - you don't really need to care.
Refusing to even contemplate that someone else may have a point when they level criticism at your software of choice - that is fanboyism. (Note I said contemplate. I don't consider it fanboyism if your reaction to such criticism is to say "Well, maybe you're right, maybe I am. Let us examine the evidence..." and ultimately decide you're still happy with your choice.)
That's not really an automator equivalent. The problem with most of those macro recording apps is they don't deal very gracefully if the behaviour of the application you're automating sometimes does something different (for instance if you feed it a specific filetype) - or if they can, you have to write something that looks a lot like code.
Automator can be entirely GUI driven and has a rich library of things it can do, those things integrate with applications like iTunes, iPhoto and each block is effectively a magic box where some sort of object goes in one end, something happens and a different sort of object comes out the other.
It's difficult to explain without actually sitting someone in front of it, but I hope this screenshot gives you an idea:
Click
I said "so much". I did not say "All".
Gimp, for instance - is a great product, but if you look at the history of Photoshop you'll find that it's missing quite a few features - both basic things like colour management and more advanced things like adjustment layers - which Photoshop has had for 10 years or more.
Scribus - like Gimp, a cracking piece of software. Using it is like using Aldus Pagemaker circa 1994 but on a higher-res screen with more colours.
I wasn't exaggerating when I said 10 or 15 years. That's equivalent to the state of the art in about 1996.
If you seriously think nothing has been added to commercial software since then except bloat, I suggest you install NT 4. You'll be browsing the web with either Netscape Navigator 3.0 or IE 3. Neither of which supported CSS - hell, CSS didn't exist until December 1996.
If you want an office suite, chances are it'll be Office '95.
Moving on from Microsoft products, photo editing is courtesy of Photoshop 4. You didn't have colour management - that came with version 5 in 1998. However, you did have 16 bit per channel support. Both of these are major issues which come up over and over again when there's a discussion about The Gimp.
In terms of interacting with other systems, SSH was released in 1995. But there's a strong chance you won't be using that, because a lot of business applications were still running on commercial Unixes - or maybe even VMS - which almost invariably expected you to telnet in.
You'd be surprised. It's not just large organisations, some smaller companies interact with applications provided by larger organisations and that interaction demands IE.
Had to deal with one only the other day. I don't think they had any performance issues, but to be fair it was a core 2 quad with 4GB RAM ;)
Because you can't run have than one version of IE installed simultaneously. So as a web dev, you'd spend much of your time upgrading and downgrading browsers rather than actually developing for the web.
I doubt it. Everyone's got a different idea of what's wrong with the desktop environments.
Myself, I suspect that good UI design is an art. Which is a fancy way of saying "nobody really knows how to do it properly, there's little in the way of definitively right or wrong ways to do it so those involved just pretend they do and you wind up with a small number of artists and a vast number of art critics."