Yes. The license can grant you additional rights beyond those you get from fair use in copyright. But the poster seemed to think that using software on two computers was automatically legal, and only "technical piracy", whatever that is.
So my install of a purchased software package on my other computer is essentially legally pirated software.
Waiter, I'll have what he's having.
"Fair use" doesn't mean "I feel like copying it." For instance, posting the entirety of an article is not fair use. It means some very specific exemptions, such as an archival backup copy. If you're using it on a second computer, that's neither archival nor backup.
Do whatever you want, argue about what the law should be, but don't fool yourself into thinking it's legal as the law stands.
Re:The true question....
on
e-Denounce
·
· Score: 2
Anyway, from the first time the term started being used, warez was always pronounced "wares", to rhyme with "bears".
Thank you. I cracked a game or two myself so I could put them on my Lt. Kernal [not-sic] hard drive, and can vouch for this.
Seems to me that saying "war-ez" to look cool is like pronouncing the first syllable of "Croissandwich" in French to look cultured. It sounds like something Phil Stubbs would do.
But then, I never used the pound sign as an L, either. Had too much sparkle.
How can you POSSIBLY write off business losses that are greater than your business expenses?
If I spend $1000 printing ugly signs, and make zero profits, then I have a business loss of $1000.
Going back to the multifamily improvements analogy - I actually did this. I bought a house, turned 50% of it into a rental property, got roommates, and counted 50% of all home improvements as rental expenses. But I couldn't take a deduction for more than I spent! The worksheet is really simple - Write your rental/home business income on line 1, write your rental/home business expenses on line 2, subtract 2 from 1 and write the result on line 3 as your gain or loss.
Similarly, you can deduct the amount of any monetary gifts to charity, but you no longer have that money, so it's still a net loss (financially)! There might be some tax benefits to TIMING your charitable gifts so they balance out large gains in the same year, but you will never end up with more money from tax deductions than you would have if you hadn't lost/given away your own money.
Anyone who thinks they can actually save money on taxes by intentionally running a money-losing business is stupid. Then again, anyone who thinks they can make money selling Herbalife is stupid, so it's a good match.
Slashdot at its best
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
As we all know, Slashdot is mostly about a bunch of geeks arguing about topics they don't really know about but claim to be experts on. (And yes, I include myself in that group for most values of "topic".)
This article is about time travel. None of us are in the field. None of us have done it. None of us have seen anyone else do it. Few, if any, of us have read a single front-to-back thesis on which the proto-science is based, or anything else more detailed than SciAm. Yet the thread now has SEVEN HUNDRED COMMENTS, filled with the usual "I hate to introduce facts into the conversation" and "No, no, you just don't get how it works!"
It doesn't get any better than this.
Re:From the article...
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 2
It's like claiming that for an algorithm with exponential complexity it's just "an engineering problem" to build a computer that can run it in reasonable time.
Yes, that's exactly what it's like - and that's a very reasonable and important claim:
- I figured out a way to break 40-bit keys. Of course, most computers would take forever, but they'll get faster over time, so it's just an engineering problem.
- I came up with a framework to let every application have its own independent window to draw to the screen, and its own independent memory space and time slice. Of course, today's computers are way too slow to make it usable, but that's just an engineering problem.
- I've come up with a method to create highly realistic 3-D drawings by actually tracing the path of photons from their light sources back to the eye. It's way too slow to work, but I'm sure there are optimizations we can find.. engineering problem.
- Instead of all these binary data formats that require detailed foreknowledge of the schema, what if we created a textual representation, and had a standard textual format for the schema itself, and assumed that all computers were interconnected and could fetch the schema on demand? Of course, disk space and bandwidth are scace today, but...
- I devised an algorithm to compress video to a significant percentage of its normal size. Right now it takes 4x real time, but...
Claiming that you've solved the theoretical problem, leaving only engineering details, is a HUGE deal. As a software engineer, of course, I hate to be told that something is a SMOP, but let's be realistic. Engineering is about the faster/cheaper/better tradeoffs; science is about whether it's possible in the first place.
Repeat after me: THEY. ARE. REQUIRED. TO. DEFEND. THEIR. TRADEMARK. VIGOROUSLY.
It even says so. In the article. Which you read before spouting off, didn't you?
If Intel doesn't attempt to defend their mark against Yoga Inside, they will lose their right to defend other, truly competing, marks.
My guess: Intel doesn't much care if they win or lose the case. According to trademark law, they have to defend against all infringements, so that's what they're doing. The law doesn't say they have to win.
Not only did this clock exist with a 10-key keypad, but it went one BETTER - it had *digital* tuning, and you could punch in the frequency to tune to. This was the only alarm clock I've ever seen (besides Bose) that combined digital tuning with a vacuum-fluorescent display instead of an unreadable LCD. 12 FM and 6 AM presets.
It was made by GE in the 1970s and early 1980s; unfortunately, my drunk roommate destroyed mine when he broke it and tried to "fix" it. Greatest alarm clock ever built.
Optical plastic fiber (e.g. SPDIF) CAN introduce jitter. Some brands are apparently better than other brands; all things considered, I'd tend to doubt that Monster is a "better brand", but you never know.
Search rec.audio.pro for recent discussions of that.
You have enormous balls, to actually admit to having anything to do with that system.
Are we both talking about the world's largest mail system, the one that handles over 3,000 pieces per SECOND in a single namespace, that blocks a hundred million pieces of spam a day coming FROM the net, that hardly lets any spam out TO the net, that sends intra-AOL mail, with zero loss, live bad-address feedback, and two-phase commit in under a second, that scales better and cheaper than sendmail and qmail and zmail and imapd and Critical Path and PostOffice and every other COTS server, that can route itself around nearly any kind of hardware or network or even site outage without even queueing transactions, that can manage each mailbox redundantly across multiple sites, that has been the single biggest hardware installation of any fault-tolerant platform it's run on, that allows every piece of hardware and software to be replaced with the system up, that is more tunable than a Steinway and more monitorable than a T22, that is the ONLY large mail system that's been running outage-free since 1998?
The only balls it took were for me to appear to take full credit for something that I only rewrote, not wrote, that was later rewritten again by the highly talented development team I hired, and that was maintained and improved throughout by an equally talented sysadmin team reporting to my counterpart in operations.
I'm sorry if it's not skinnable or buzzword-compliant or 1337 or free (as in bird). There are lots of end-user features that I wish it had, that might have made it more suitable for TW, but that the business folks prioritized below other features. And keeping a high-effectiveness, low-collateral-loss spam filter working when you're the spammers' biggest target is a 24x7 battle of impossibilities. But from an engineering perspective? Every vendor, every contractor, every partner who has seen the design of this system knows there's no other mail server that even comes close. HP once told us: "You don't push the envelope. You perforate it."
They may run "an" AOL client and they may read mail off "an" AOL server but how do you know they are the same client/server as what the rank and file use?
Their implementation was essentialy a POP3 interface running on the IMAP ports.
Actually, no. The core design of the AOL mail system is, coincidentally, a near-perfect fit to the IMAP disconnected model, with unique message IDs, per-part fetching (text vs. attachment), efficient indexes to read less-efficient messages, host-based storage, etc. It is NOTHING like POP3. In fact, as I recall, CS begged us to develop a POP3 server instead of IMAP, since CompuServe Classic had one, and we declined.
The main problems were that (a) some aspects of MIME were never fully integrated into AOL mail, and (b) *every single* IMAP client is buggier (wrt protocol implementation) than you can possibly imagine, and we never had time or cooperation to work around all the bugs.
I'd be curious to know which features you felt were 'discarded'. Aside from POP3, I don't remember declining any strong requests from CS while I was running the mail team.
How many people here thing that Mr. Pittman ever had a problem with his AOL mail? I'd bet dollars to pesos that anyone at AOL with a capital "C" in their title has their e-mail running off their own custom-built server.
How much you want to bet? It ain't so. They run the AOL client and read mail off the AOL servers, and have ever since AOL migrated off QuickMail around 1989. The problem is not with the AOL mail system per se, but with a total system that just doesn't fit together. See my post above.
Jay "Chief Architect begins with a capital C too" Levitt
What exactly constitutes "AOL email services," and where was the problem exactly?
I left AOL before most of this actually hit production. But when I was there, the problem was basically this:
- Wrong tool for the job. AOL mail, as many have said, was not originally designed to be a corporate server. AOL itself, minus the Unix geeks, has used AOL e-mail via the AOL client since about 1989. But TW was using a big groupware server (Exchange or Lotus or the like), with forms, workflows, the whole bit. To change over to a text-and-attachment-based system was foolish; to do it in a few months was absurd. Many of us fought the idea vigorously, but in the end, the merger logistics team won the battle in the name of dogfood.
- Worse, what TW was using *wasn't* our dog food - that was the AOL client and servers, which is incredibly reliable and instantaneous for internal mail, and pretty darn good for Internet mail in the past few years - average delivery time in the seconds. But what TW needed to use was the IMAP gateway. The developers on that are excellent, but have never been given the time to really mature the product. Some major architecture changes kept getting pushed back for more urgent matters, both real and perceived. And while the IMAP server speaks nearly perfect IMAP, no client does; we didn't have the time or cooperation to figure out how to work around bugs in OE or Outlook.
- It sounds like they were trying to use the Netscape client. As we all know, that's a couple revs behind Mozilla, and even Mozilla mail doesn't feel quite ready for prime time yet to me.
- Obviously, Gerald Levin didn't want to be GeraldL982341@aol.com, so we tried to graft an aliasing system on top. Sounds from the "misdirected mail" like it either didn't work out or (more likely) was prone to user error.
- tswinzig mentions the spam filters; that's a good point. I can see how they might have caused trouble, and by commingling internal and customer mail, you lose the ability to have the best configuration for each task.
- However, the message limits and attachment-size limits would NOT be a problem. Those haven't been actual physical limits in years; they they are business rules and can be configured as needed. (Can you imagine how many copies of Windows XP would sit in people's mailboxes if every AOL member could send arbitrarily-sized attachments?)
It's a shame. The AOL core mail system is actually much faster, more reliable, and cheaper to run than sendmail (if I do say so myself). But by putting TW on before it was ready, and before the resources could be committed to make it a first-class IMAP server, they screwed both TW and any chance of getting respectability as a business e-mail solution.
Seriously, there are a thousand good reasons to switch to TCP/IP. What advantages do they gain by sticking with what they have?
Most new content areas ARE served via (tunnelled) HTTP to the web browser. For the longest time, though, the advantage of the proprietary forms language was speed. AOL's forms engine, while primitive by today's standards, can render screens on slower computers a LOT faster than IE or Mozilla can, and in many fewer bytes. The protocol was designed when 2400-baud modems were the vanguard of speed.
As for the functional areas, the AOL proprietary protocol has one HUGE advantage over straight TCP/IP - it does NOT require the client to know what server it's talking to. That means things like scaling, stateful routing, server upgrades, failovers, etc. can all be done invisibly to the client. Even today, this isn't really possible on the internet; rotating DNS has many limits, and you can't guarantee that someone hasn't cached an IP address. IP-based protocols like Oscar still have to layer all these features over TCP/IP.
That still requires processing the full content of the message to discover that it's spam. Big sites like AOL spend millions of dollars on equipment to process mail that will eventually hit the bit bucket. Much better to stop it before it hits.
The "e-stamps" model has been looked at and rejected for two reasons:
1. Political: You would need to get EVERYONE to agree on a new standard. We can't even get everyone to upgrade sendmail. We can't even get everyone to agree that closing relays is a good thing.
2. The technology-scaling challenges in creating and tracking such stamps are overwhelming, and perhaps impossible to overcome. As someone pointed out, the USPS is a monolithic system, and it's easy for them to make sure all stamps are at least cursorily checked for authenticity. Not so with e-mail, which is a store-and-forward system. You can't open a connection from each final-hop mail server to the origin, so you need some sort of "one-time pad", which is difficult (impossible?) to do without centralization.
Slashdot Mirror
The commercials called it a cruh-sandwich. Just like many Americans say cruh-sahnt.
Yes. The license can grant you additional rights beyond those you get from fair use in copyright. But the poster seemed to think that using software on two computers was automatically legal, and only "technical piracy", whatever that is.
Did this guy just get modded up to 4 for POSTING THE (non-slashdotted) ARTICLE THAT WAS LINKED?!
Man, do I know what to do for karma now.
So my install of a purchased software package on my other computer is essentially legally pirated software.
Waiter, I'll have what he's having.
"Fair use" doesn't mean "I feel like copying it." For instance, posting the entirety of an article is not fair use. It means some very specific exemptions, such as an archival backup copy. If you're using it on a second computer, that's neither archival nor backup.
Do whatever you want, argue about what the law should be, but don't fool yourself into thinking it's legal as the law stands.
Anyway, from the first time the term started being used, warez was always pronounced "wares", to rhyme with "bears".
Thank you. I cracked a game or two myself so I could put them on my Lt. Kernal [not-sic] hard drive, and can vouch for this.
Seems to me that saying "war-ez" to look cool is like pronouncing the first syllable of "Croissandwich" in French to look cultured. It sounds like something Phil Stubbs would do.
But then, I never used the pound sign as an L, either. Had too much sparkle.
How can you POSSIBLY write off business losses that are greater than your business expenses?
If I spend $1000 printing ugly signs, and make zero profits, then I have a business loss of $1000.
Going back to the multifamily improvements analogy - I actually did this. I bought a house, turned 50% of it into a rental property, got roommates, and counted 50% of all home improvements as rental expenses. But I couldn't take a deduction for more than I spent! The worksheet is really simple - Write your rental/home business income on line 1, write your rental/home business expenses on line 2, subtract 2 from 1 and write the result on line 3 as your gain or loss.
Similarly, you can deduct the amount of any monetary gifts to charity, but you no longer have that money, so it's still a net loss (financially)! There might be some tax benefits to TIMING your charitable gifts so they balance out large gains in the same year, but you will never end up with more money from tax deductions than you would have if you hadn't lost/given away your own money.
Anyone who thinks they can actually save money on taxes by intentionally running a money-losing business is stupid. Then again, anyone who thinks they can make money selling Herbalife is stupid, so it's a good match.
As we all know, Slashdot is mostly about a bunch of geeks arguing about topics they don't really know about but claim to be experts on. (And yes, I include myself in that group for most values of "topic".)
This article is about time travel. None of us are in the field. None of us have done it. None of us have seen anyone else do it. Few, if any, of us have read a single front-to-back thesis on which the proto-science is based, or anything else more detailed than SciAm. Yet the thread now has SEVEN HUNDRED COMMENTS, filled with the usual "I hate to introduce facts into the conversation" and "No, no, you just don't get how it works!"
It doesn't get any better than this.
It's like claiming that for an algorithm with exponential complexity it's just "an engineering problem" to build a computer that can run it in reasonable time.
Yes, that's exactly what it's like - and that's a very reasonable and important claim:
- I figured out a way to break 40-bit keys. Of course, most computers would take forever, but they'll get faster over time, so it's just an engineering problem.
- I came up with a framework to let every application have its own independent window to draw to the screen, and its own independent memory space and time slice. Of course, today's computers are way too slow to make it usable, but that's just an engineering problem.
- I've come up with a method to create highly realistic 3-D drawings by actually tracing the path of photons from their light sources back to the eye. It's way too slow to work, but I'm sure there are optimizations we can find.. engineering problem.
- Instead of all these binary data formats that require detailed foreknowledge of the schema, what if we created a textual representation, and had a standard textual format for the schema itself, and assumed that all computers were interconnected and could fetch the schema on demand? Of course, disk space and bandwidth are scace today, but...
- I devised an algorithm to compress video to a significant percentage of its normal size. Right now it takes 4x real time, but...
Claiming that you've solved the theoretical problem, leaving only engineering details, is a HUGE deal. As a software engineer, of course, I hate to be told that something is a SMOP, but let's be realistic. Engineering is about the faster/cheaper/better tradeoffs; science is about whether it's possible in the first place.
Repeat after me: THEY. ARE. REQUIRED. TO. DEFEND. THEIR. TRADEMARK. VIGOROUSLY.
It even says so. In the article. Which you read before spouting off, didn't you?
If Intel doesn't attempt to defend their mark against Yoga Inside, they will lose their right to defend other, truly competing, marks.
My guess: Intel doesn't much care if they win or lose the case. According to trademark law, they have to defend against all infringements, so that's what they're doing. The law doesn't say they have to win.
Not only did this clock exist with a 10-key keypad, but it went one BETTER - it had *digital* tuning, and you could punch in the frequency to tune to. This was the only alarm clock I've ever seen (besides Bose) that combined digital tuning with a vacuum-fluorescent display instead of an unreadable LCD. 12 FM and 6 AM presets.
It was made by GE in the 1970s and early 1980s; unfortunately, my drunk roommate destroyed mine when he broke it and tried to "fix" it. Greatest alarm clock ever built.
Oh, and it was called the "Great Awakening."
Optical plastic fiber (e.g. SPDIF) CAN introduce jitter. Some brands are apparently better than other brands; all things considered, I'd tend to doubt that Monster is a "better brand", but you never know.
Search rec.audio.pro for recent discussions of that.
I think "Real Soon Now" was coined (in its capitalized, ironic form) by Jerry Pournelle in Byte.
Um, perhaps the fact that Linux actually has some working mail server and client software?
For corporate use? Right. "OK, Mr. Turner, first you type e-l-m. No, it isn't in color. No, I'm afraid you can't colorize it."
You have enormous balls, to actually admit to having anything to do with that system.
Are we both talking about the world's largest mail system, the one that handles over 3,000 pieces per SECOND in a single namespace, that blocks a hundred million pieces of spam a day coming FROM the net, that hardly lets any spam out TO the net, that sends intra-AOL mail, with zero loss, live bad-address feedback, and two-phase commit in under a second, that scales better and cheaper than sendmail and qmail and zmail and imapd and Critical Path and PostOffice and every other COTS server, that can route itself around nearly any kind of hardware or network or even site outage without even queueing transactions, that can manage each mailbox redundantly across multiple sites, that has been the single biggest hardware installation of any fault-tolerant platform it's run on, that allows every piece of hardware and software to be replaced with the system up, that is more tunable than a Steinway and more monitorable than a T22, that is the ONLY large mail system that's been running outage-free since 1998?
The only balls it took were for me to appear to take full credit for something that I only rewrote, not wrote, that was later rewritten again by the highly talented development team I hired, and that was maintained and improved throughout by an equally talented sysadmin team reporting to my counterpart in operations.
I'm sorry if it's not skinnable or buzzword-compliant or 1337 or free (as in bird). There are lots of end-user features that I wish it had, that might have made it more suitable for TW, but that the business folks prioritized below other features. And keeping a high-effectiveness, low-collateral-loss spam filter working when you're the spammers' biggest target is a 24x7 battle of impossibilities. But from an engineering perspective? Every vendor, every contractor, every partner who has seen the design of this system knows there's no other mail server that even comes close. HP once told us: "You don't push the envelope. You perforate it."
You should do so well.
They may run "an" AOL client and they may read mail off "an" AOL server but how do you know they are the same client/server as what the rank and file use?
Because I wrote the mail system.
Jay
Maybe this explains AOL's interest in Linux?
Sorry, Linux has what to do with mail server and client software?
I have had my AOL mail account for months and never use it. No one in NOC does.
Hey, just like the on-call instructions.
Their implementation was essentialy a POP3 interface running on the IMAP ports.
Actually, no. The core design of the AOL mail system is, coincidentally, a near-perfect fit to the IMAP disconnected model, with unique message IDs, per-part fetching (text vs. attachment), efficient indexes to read less-efficient messages, host-based storage, etc. It is NOTHING like POP3. In fact, as I recall, CS begged us to develop a POP3 server instead of IMAP, since CompuServe Classic had one, and we declined.
The main problems were that (a) some aspects of MIME were never fully integrated into AOL mail, and (b) *every single* IMAP client is buggier (wrt protocol implementation) than you can possibly imagine, and we never had time or cooperation to work around all the bugs.
I'd be curious to know which features you felt were 'discarded'. Aside from POP3, I don't remember declining any strong requests from CS while I was running the mail team.
How many people here thing that Mr. Pittman ever had a problem with his AOL mail? I'd bet dollars to pesos that anyone at AOL with a capital "C" in their title has their e-mail running off their own custom-built server.
How much you want to bet? It ain't so. They run the AOL client and read mail off the AOL servers, and have ever since AOL migrated off QuickMail around 1989. The problem is not with the AOL mail system per se, but with a total system that just doesn't fit together. See my post above.
Jay "Chief Architect begins with a capital C too" Levitt
What exactly constitutes "AOL email services," and where was the problem exactly?
I left AOL before most of this actually hit production. But when I was there, the problem was basically this:
- Wrong tool for the job. AOL mail, as many have said, was not originally designed to be a corporate server. AOL itself, minus the Unix geeks, has used AOL e-mail via the AOL client since about 1989. But TW was using a big groupware server (Exchange or Lotus or the like), with forms, workflows, the whole bit. To change over to a text-and-attachment-based system was foolish; to do it in a few months was absurd. Many of us fought the idea vigorously, but in the end, the merger logistics team won the battle in the name of dogfood.
- Worse, what TW was using *wasn't* our dog food - that was the AOL client and servers, which is incredibly reliable and instantaneous for internal mail, and pretty darn good for Internet mail in the past few years - average delivery time in the seconds. But what TW needed to use was the IMAP gateway. The developers on that are excellent, but have never been given the time to really mature the product. Some major architecture changes kept getting pushed back for more urgent matters, both real and perceived. And while the IMAP server speaks nearly perfect IMAP, no client does; we didn't have the time or cooperation to figure out how to work around bugs in OE or Outlook.
- It sounds like they were trying to use the Netscape client. As we all know, that's a couple revs behind Mozilla, and even Mozilla mail doesn't feel quite ready for prime time yet to me.
- Obviously, Gerald Levin didn't want to be GeraldL982341@aol.com, so we tried to graft an aliasing system on top. Sounds from the "misdirected mail" like it either didn't work out or (more likely) was prone to user error.
- tswinzig mentions the spam filters; that's a good point. I can see how they might have caused trouble, and by commingling internal and customer mail, you lose the ability to have the best configuration for each task.
- However, the message limits and attachment-size limits would NOT be a problem. Those haven't been actual physical limits in years; they they are business rules and can be configured as needed. (Can you imagine how many copies of Windows XP would sit in people's mailboxes if every AOL member could send arbitrarily-sized attachments?)
It's a shame. The AOL core mail system is actually much faster, more reliable, and cheaper to run than sendmail (if I do say so myself). But by putting TW on before it was ready, and before the resources could be committed to make it a first-class IMAP server, they screwed both TW and any chance of getting respectability as a business e-mail solution.
Jay, the ex-AOL Mail Guy
Suddenly they've decided not to honour contracts that they've bought out.
If you don't pay anything for the service, is it still a binding contract? Or is the "consideration" your eyeballs?
Seriously, there are a thousand good reasons to switch to TCP/IP. What advantages do they gain by sticking with what they have?
Most new content areas ARE served via (tunnelled) HTTP to the web browser. For the longest time, though, the advantage of the proprietary forms language was speed. AOL's forms engine, while primitive by today's standards, can render screens on slower computers a LOT faster than IE or Mozilla can, and in many fewer bytes. The protocol was designed when 2400-baud modems were the vanguard of speed.
As for the functional areas, the AOL proprietary protocol has one HUGE advantage over straight TCP/IP - it does NOT require the client to know what server it's talking to. That means things like scaling, stateful routing, server upgrades, failovers, etc. can all be done invisibly to the client. Even today, this isn't really possible on the internet; rotating DNS has many limits, and you can't guarantee that someone hasn't cached an IP address. IP-based protocols like Oscar still have to layer all these features over TCP/IP.
That still requires processing the full content of the message to discover that it's spam. Big sites like AOL spend millions of dollars on equipment to process mail that will eventually hit the bit bucket. Much better to stop it before it hits.
How do you know who to sue? You follow the money.
The "e-stamps" model has been looked at and rejected for two reasons:
1. Political: You would need to get EVERYONE to agree on a new standard. We can't even get everyone to upgrade sendmail. We can't even get everyone to agree that closing relays is a good thing.
2. The technology-scaling challenges in creating and tracking such stamps are overwhelming, and perhaps impossible to overcome. As someone pointed out, the USPS is a monolithic system, and it's easy for them to make sure all stamps are at least cursorily checked for authenticity. Not so with e-mail, which is a store-and-forward system. You can't open a connection from each final-hop mail server to the origin, so you need some sort of "one-time pad", which is difficult (impossible?) to do without centralization.
Jay the ex-AOL mail guy