download.com also used to use it to speed up downloads. Kontiki has been around for a while. They may even pre-date BitTorrent, but I can't find hard dates to know for sure.
Yet that clause was put in those books prior to Google Book search existing, so it couldn't have been written with Google in mind.
So Google can also check the timestamp of every robots.txt file it downloads and ignore any dated prior to 1998? Can I ask the local Wal-Mart when they posted the No Shoplifting signs in their dressing rooms, and ignore any that were there before I was?
It fails the 'is this contract fair' test too, since the courts have repeatedly rules that you can reproduce portions of the books and it's fair use.
Google is not reproducing "portions" of the books in question - they're reproducing the entire book, cover-to-cover. That they allow the public to see only a couple sentences at a time is irrelevant.
The book publishers tolerate extracts in book reviews without complaint, and without attempting to enforce this clause, indicating acceptance of the worthlessness of this clause.
The clause is a reminder that the copyright holder has certain rights guaranteed by the law. It's not worthless because in a copyright infringement case, the attorneys can show the book as evidence, point to the clear warning, and prove that there was no doubt as to the copyright holder's intentions.
The book publishers tolerate fair use, but that clause isn't supposed to stop fair use, and Google isn't engaging in fair use.
Finally, some publishers are not complaining about Google Book Search, and their books have that clause, which suggests the first point is true (that that clause was not intended to block benefitial use).
The clause doesn't need to be intended for Google. It's clearly an open restriction to anyone - it says the publisher or author will enforce the rights. It works just like a "No Shoplifting" sign - it's not addressed solely to some class of people that were alive when it was posted. In any case, the fact that some publishers aren't complaining isn't much evidence. Presumably, those same publishers would happily opt-in to Book Search if Google had a sudden inspiration of non-evilness and decided to do things the right way.
What is search if it isn't promotion!?
You should re-read the clause you cited. It says "promote the progress." The question is whether Google will cause more people to write books with this program. I don't - I think that instead we'll see publishers spending a small fortune on forcing Google to switch to an entirely reasonable model of asking nicely before they rip and distribute millions of copyrighted books.
It's a nice idea, but the vast majority of people demand RIAA music, and if a big name stops distributing it, those people will just take their business elsewhere.
I hope you have enough command of the English language to make it unnecessary to define a "thing."
I'm tired of people proudly justifying morally bankrupt actions based on wordplay. I've played along, but no more. It's people like my parent poster who are making life hard on the people who want to do the right thing.
Well, yes, except that you're stealing the music and films. Not to mention demonstrating why the movie and music industries need to implement DRM technologies that Slashdotters tend to loathe.
Regarding this, do you hold copyright on a work if you don't claim it? I mean, if you don't have a little "Copyright 2006 Raoul666" at the bottom of, say, a web page you write, can you sue someone for infringement if they stumble on it and put it somewhere? I'm genuinely curious.
It depends on where you live. In the U.S. and many other countries, all works are protected by copyright the moment they are in a tangible form. (Of course, this assumes that the content in question is eligible for copyright anyway. Some works are not.) You don't even need to include the copyright notice.
In the U.S., this is sort of a psuedo-protection - you can sue if somebody makes a copy without your permission, but you are limited in how much you can collect - I believe it's "actual damages", but I don't know for sure. In contrast, that amount can be increased substantially if the work is registered. Last I checked, statuatory damages for a registered work can be up to $150,000 per infringing copy.
Authors also receive copyright protection for works written under a pseudonym (Raul666) or anonymously, but it can be harder to collect money in this case because you have to prove you created the work.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and have no legal training. This isn't legal advice.
The response that most GPL advocates provide (and that I think I agree with overall) is that a EULA restricts your rights to less than what copyright law allows, while the GPL extends them, with conditions. EULAs are a use license - you are not permitted to install or operate the software unless you agree with the EULA.
The GPL is a distribution license - you may do whatever you wish to do with the software (the GPL even says so), and you also may also automatically receive a license to copy and distribute the software - actions that copyright law typically prohibit. In order to do these additional actions, you have to agree to restictions placed on your additional rights, not the original rights that you always had.
Note that some GPL software comes with a clickwrap license. I think that most of this can be attributed to developers that don't understand the legal nuances of the GPL, and are just copying what they see everybody else doing.
Macs didn't do what people wanted, and they ignored them , so the Computer Center dumped them.
I'm curious. What didn't they do? Was this a general-purpose lab or something more specialized? It seems to me that 99% of typical lab users need Microsoft Word, a good web browser, the ability to read PC disks, and a printer.
I have been to churches that push the tithe far harder than I would think is appropriate, but I can't think of a time where I've heard somebody declare tithing a condition to salvation. I think and hope that such a view would be rejected by the vast majority of churches (in modern times, of course - the indulgences are an analogy of your complaint, but those were news almost 500 years ago).
As for God being the extortionist, how can he extort what is already his? (Psalm 24:1-2, Romans 11:35)
I tithe to my church, not because I fear being struck down by God or shunned by my church for not doing so, but because I witness lives being radically changed for the better every week. This change isn't just salvation - homeless people from all faiths are being fed and clothed, parks are being cleaned, and broken families are being healed. I see miracles every day - not the flashy kind, but the kind where hope appears suddenly and without explanation in a hopeless situation. I can part with some money twice a month if it will help improve so many people's lives for the better.
You're right about not having native widgets exposed in the web browser. Sorry about that. When I wrote my earlier response, I didn't quite understand the point you were getting at.
Perhaps what we need is as simple as exposing these additional controls through HTML's <input> element or XForms.
I think very few people truly understood the potential of what the web could become...Sir Berners-Lee certainly didn't. One of the few who did might have been Microsoft. In an ironic way, Microsoft's sudden about-face in embracing the Internet and releasing Internet Explorer may have been the smartest decision they ever made, because if they had missed the chance, they would be irrelevant today, and everybody would be running their apps on Netscape servers.
By the way, I don't mean to negate your good points, but TrimPath and Active Widgets both have decent data grid widgets, if you're looking at using them for a particular project.
I think formal, unbiased education on copyright law would be a great thing. Unfortunately, I don't think it'll stay that way for long. The copyright industries are going to see an "in" and send their lobbyists on a feeding frenzy.
Why do we try and force a "real application" through a web browser? The way we are treating browsers these days, it seems like they are less about information presentation/sharing and more about actual application-type functionality. Web applications have a number of good qualities, from the user's perspective. They allow ubiquitous access, work on essentially any modern computer (Firefox will run apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux with no problem), and can be kept updated automatically. I don't know where you draw the line between "presentation/sharing" and "application-type functionality," but remember - Microsoft was worried enough about Netscape achieiving the exact effect that you're talking about that they started giving away a web browser to cut off Netscape's revenue stream.
I thought that was what all the GUI libraries that come with your OS were meant for! GUI libraries pre-date the Internet. I think that today, they're mostly there for legacy purposes. From a developer's perspective, a single code base that runs everywhere is much more appealing.
Rather than taking an incremental approach and altering the core purpose of "web browsing", why don't we get all of the major technology companies that exist today to agree to support ONE standard for the remote binding of locally displayed user interface components. Do you really think we could get W3C, Sun, Apple, Mozilla, Adobe, and Microsoft to sit at a table and agree on anything?
I'm pretty sure this is what Bill Gates was after when he envisioned.NET, what Sun hoped Java would be, what Macromedia hoped Flash would be. Yes, but each of those companies also envisioned that their platform would become the market leader and choke out the competition. Cooperation doesn't last for long when everybody is intent in killing their competitors off.
All we have is a [slowly] improving mess of HTML, CSS and Javascript. AJAX makes a difference, but only so far as it accomplishes the goal of ONE standard for fat-client, desktop application type functionality. It has a long way to go, but I'm still excited by how these languages are able to play off each other's strengths. It's a powerful platform that continues to grow in its abilities as more browsers implement more of the specs.
Seriously, are all the big players so greedy that they can't ALL band together, for the good of humanity and advancement of technology, to agree on ONE standard? ONLY ONE? Now you're catching on.
Take some time, flesh out a good model, agree to standardize, build new products, free and proprietary, and let's make the shift to these well-defined products. It's a nice idea. So is the W3C. I don't think it's likely that we're ever going to see a world where the standards are followed by all the major players.
Of course, his application doesn't work on every OS and every type of system (terrible in and of itself), but hey, if we had ONE standard for UI binding to network-enabled logic (web-services, remote components, anything at all), maybe it could. I think the one, standard, network-enabled binding is the collective W3C specs. It's the closest thing we have to a world where everything of value is accessible anywhere. It's not here yet, but when it gets here, it'll be amazing.
You Yahoos don't get nearly enough credit for what you do (and I have no idea why Google's reputation is invincible - I've seen more than enough for them to be on my "evil" list).
Congratulations on your release, and thank you for continuing to do amazingly cool stuff. Oh, and make sure you continue to keep your marketing droids in check, mmkay?;)
I don't think these are the mark of the beast. Those come during the Tribulation, which many (but not all) Biblical scholars believe comes after the Rapture. It is possible, however, that the mark will be RFID implants. It's just not these implants.
I still would quit my job if I was required to get chipped. I would cite privacy reasons and a fear of big needles.
Do you have ANY idea how much space a year's worth of video tapes takes up? I was curious and bored, so I did the math...
A VHS tape is 7.375 inches long x 4.0625 inches wide x 1 inch thick. Each tape can hold up to 36 hours of footage on a special security time-lapse VCR. Let's be conservative and say that you'll run the cameras into a quad split, enabling you to record four cameras per tape. That means you need two tapes to store 36 hours of footage from eight cameras.
The number of hours in a year varies. There are, on average, about 365 1/4 days per year (one leap year after every four). Each day is 24 hours, or 8,766 hours per year. You need twice as many hours of tape, since you're running two tapes for your cameras, or 17,532 hours. That works out to 487 tapes over the year.
Returning to our VHS tape dimensions, each tape is 29.96 cubic inches. Therefore, 487 tapes will take 14,591 cubic inches, or 8.44 cubic feet for one year's worth of tapes.
Disclaimer: I don't profess to have any competency in math. I barely passed Trigonometry, after being removed from the Pre-Calculus class on the Honors track. Therefore, it's more than likely I flubbed up somewhere. Don't rely on these numbers for anything important, like constructing a multi-million $CURRENCY datacenter. Thank you.
Again, without actual numbers to back up your claims, I can't take them very seriously. "Wager" all you want. I want to see real data. I don't have numbers, and neither do you. However, I know the alternatives run faster than Norton because I've done this before, several times. In no cases were machines I administer that were running these alternative packages infected by a virus or spyware.
Even then, you'll likely have a difficult time offering capability parity. I know you may not like to admit this, but NAV does offer a lot of functionality. I admit it: Norton Internet Security (I presume you mean the entire suite, not just the anti-virus component) offers a lot of functionality. I simply think the performance tradeoff does not pay for the features.
Even when going with the best of the best alternative firewalls, anti-virus solutions, email scanners and so forth, you will have a difficult time matching NAV's feature set comparably. Alone, no. Combined together, I think the alternatives match Norton's offering feature-for-freature, and provide two features that Norton lacks: reasonable memory usage and raw speed.
And your metric for measuring security is still rather flawed. While RAM consumption and CPU usage is easily measured in a quantitative fashion, "security" is not. Your test depends wholly on the individual attacking the system, how accessible the network is, and so forth. Even then, it's not a solid measure by any means. It's not something you could show to a CTO without being laughed at. The hypothetical experiment in question assumes that the machines are identical (I specified that earlier), attached "directly" to the same network, and matched in every way except the security software running on them.
What, precisely, would you have me show to the CTO? I can't give him or her numbers from Symantec, because they don't provide any. I could show the CTO the quantitative numbers from RAM and processor usage that you mentioned. Then I could show independent test results for each product, and point out that with a security-in-depth approach, that naturally the CTO was already implementing, the security software doesn't need to be able to stop every threat because many will be stopped at the network border. The documents would speak for themselves.
Frankly, I'll just stick with OpenBSD. That's nice, but I think we were discussing Windows desktops here.
The first problem I see with your experiment is that you're comparing software that offers vastly different capabilities. Some do more than others, for instance. Like I said, some include email scanning, while others don't. Some include firewall capabilities, while others don't.
I'm sorry that I wasn't clear. I meant that running all of those products in memory simultaneously is better for performance than running Norton in memory.
Second, you're trying to give a quantitative value to something that is qualitative. What metric do you use to measure the vulnerability of a particular PC? Sure, you can throw a certain amount of malicious software at it, but that's not a realistic test.
The measure is simple - which computer protected with its respective packages and attached directly to the network will be infected by a worm or hacked by a malicious user first? If you re-read my comment, you'll find that I said that both computers will be "just as protected." If both computers will be equally difficult to penetrate, why waste the extra memory and CPU on Norton?
I would wager that if you took two identical PC's, installed Norton Internet Security on one, and AVG Free Edition, Sygate Personal Firewall (R.I.P.), and Ad-Aware on the other, you'd find that the latter computer is just as protected and runs substantially faster than the Norton-infected one.
The first step I take when I'm working on somebody's computer is to remove Norton and install these replacements. Most people are shocked that their computer runs as fast as it does, especially considering that many of these people have always had Norton installed because it came with their computer.
Just because these products must use continuous system resources doesn't mean they need all of them. That would kind of defeat the purpose of having a computer.
Let's get a librarian to confirm this, but I don't think that's how it works most of the time. I can't believe that the 3 million items in my local university library are hand-me-downs.
Actually, you, me, and everyone else on this planet has what are termed Fair Use Rights. Some examples of Fair Use Rights are that you can quote brief sections of a copyrighted work for the purposes of literary review or criticism. Conceptually, Google makes two copies of the book in order to offer it for searching - an entire copy of the book stored on its servers, and snippets of that copy offered for public consumption.
I contend that neither copy meets requirements for fair use. In the first copy, Google is making an entire copy of the work. The copy deprives the publisher of a sale (Google didn't buy the book), copies the entire work, and intends to use that copy for commercial purposes (offering snippets from it on a public web site). There's no review or criticism at that stage, because the public doesn't see it...it's just being downloaded into a database.
The second copy (from the database to the end-user) doesn't feel like Fair Use either. I don't see any literary review or criticism attached to Google Book Search...just sentences from the book offered without question, on-demand, at the request of searchers. It's not a matter of offering the same snippet to everybody, as a typical fair-use case would; instead, they propose to offer separate snippets based on what the user asks for. Again, this service is inherently commercial - its goal is solely to get people to visit Google so they can benefit from the increased exposure and hopefully sell an ad or two.
This is probably the reason why she (and many other people and institutions) believe that Google is in the right on this issue, and why the publishers are trying to use allegations issued in the press, rather than the courts to fight against it.
If the publishers had a reasonably strong case in court for this issue, they probably wouldn't be trying their "ham-handed appeals" in their press releases and in the popular press.
The publishers are using the court to fight this, and Google is also fighting this in the popular press - or did you miss Google's own press page and Eric Schmidt's "'ham-handed appeal'" in the Wall Street Journal?
Unfortunately, Google is proposing to do something which would be of great benefit to all of mankind, and it might have a negative impact on some publisher's profits, and they are fighting claw, tooth, and nail to avoid that!
I'm both an author and a publisher, but I welcome this change -- I'd love to see my work reach wider audiences and I'm not too worried about losing a few percentage points of profits. In fact, it might be that if more people could easily find my work on Google, more of them would go out of their way to purchase it!
I actually agree with you. I think the publishers that are fighting this are short-sighted, just like I think the recording industry should find a way to co-exist with peer-to-peer networks. I don't think anybody is denying that the program itself would be a benefit for publishers and authors.
What I am personally worried about is requiring publishers to opt-out, not opt-in, to Book Search. I think the legal situation is clear, and Google needs to do the "non-evil" thing and ask for permission before including these books. You'd give permission, right? If I was in the publishing business, I would too, and I can't believe we're the only two people with an ounce of common sense.
Amazon.com has been running Search Inside the Book far longer than Google, and nobody complains because they're doing the right thing and asking the publishers to participate, not forcing them to opt-out. Google's opt-out program is especially egregious, because not only do they want publishers to opt-out, they want them to opt-out every title, and won't accept a blanket opt-out from the company.
That's wrong, and I think Google should be ashamed of themselves. The way to get people to like you is not to force yourself on them. It's not the way the Old Google did things.
1. The work is in the public domain, and can be used without worrying about the license. 2. (Much more likely) The deceased's estate is the copyright holder, and can legally consent to a license change, if it chooses to do so.
See, that's strange, because all I do is hit CTRL + ALT + DEL, then click "Change Password".
On my machine, Ctrl+Alt+Delete pulls up Task Manager. I'm too lazy to look up why that happens. I've heard it has something to do with the computer being on a domain.
I have to wonder, however, just how much simpler the Windows solution is if you can't predictably tell where a global key sequence will take you.
The right in question is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
I would argue: 1. Copyright laws do not "promote the progress" the way the founding fathers intended, because by the time a work reaches the public domain (particularly software, as *almost no* copyrighted software is in the public domain due to an expired copyright), it is already obsolete. 2. "Science and useful arts" limits the breadth of what can be protected more narrowly than what copyright laws allow. 3. "Limited times" does not mean the life of the author plus 75 years, nor does it mean the law can be amended every ten years to have the effect of making copyrights permanent. 4. "Authors and inventors" implies individuals and not corporations.
In short, I have no problem giving the authors and inventors of the Constitution intellectual property protection rights, as long as they don't trample on mine in return.
A 14-year copyright is plenty. If the owner wants to extend it longer, charge a percentage of the work's gross revenue on a sliding scale until you hit 90% of revenues to keep it protected, and cap the copyright to a maximum possible duration of 28 years. Use the new income to preserve and duplicate the deposit copies in the Library of Congress, so anybody that wants the work can get to it after copyright expires.
Slashdot Mirror
download.com also used to use it to speed up downloads. Kontiki has been around for a while. They may even pre-date BitTorrent, but I can't find hard dates to know for sure.
Yet that clause was put in those books prior to Google Book search existing, so it couldn't have been written with Google in mind.
So Google can also check the timestamp of every robots.txt file it downloads and ignore any dated prior to 1998? Can I ask the local Wal-Mart when they posted the No Shoplifting signs in their dressing rooms, and ignore any that were there before I was?
It fails the 'is this contract fair' test too, since the courts have repeatedly rules that you can reproduce portions of the books and it's fair use.
Google is not reproducing "portions" of the books in question - they're reproducing the entire book, cover-to-cover. That they allow the public to see only a couple sentences at a time is irrelevant.
The book publishers tolerate extracts in book reviews without complaint, and without attempting to enforce this clause, indicating acceptance of the worthlessness of this clause.
The clause is a reminder that the copyright holder has certain rights guaranteed by the law. It's not worthless because in a copyright infringement case, the attorneys can show the book as evidence, point to the clear warning, and prove that there was no doubt as to the copyright holder's intentions.
The book publishers tolerate fair use, but that clause isn't supposed to stop fair use, and Google isn't engaging in fair use.
Finally, some publishers are not complaining about Google Book Search, and their books have that clause, which suggests the first point is true (that that clause was not intended to block benefitial use).
The clause doesn't need to be intended for Google. It's clearly an open restriction to anyone - it says the publisher or author will enforce the rights. It works just like a "No Shoplifting" sign - it's not addressed solely to some class of people that were alive when it was posted. In any case, the fact that some publishers aren't complaining isn't much evidence. Presumably, those same publishers would happily opt-in to Book Search if Google had a sudden inspiration of non-evilness and decided to do things the right way.
What is search if it isn't promotion!?
You should re-read the clause you cited. It says "promote the progress." The question is whether Google will cause more people to write books with this program. I don't - I think that instead we'll see publishers spending a small fortune on forcing Google to switch to an entirely reasonable model of asking nicely before they rip and distribute millions of copyrighted books.
It's a nice idea, but the vast majority of people demand RIAA music, and if a big name stops distributing it, those people will just take their business elsewhere.
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/stealing
Definitions 1, 1a, 1b, 1c, and 1d.
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/property
Definitions 2b and 2c.
I hope you have enough command of the English language to make it unnecessary to define a "thing."
I'm tired of people proudly justifying morally bankrupt actions based on wordplay. I've played along, but no more. It's people like my parent poster who are making life hard on the people who want to do the right thing.
What they are doing is stealing.
Well, yes, except that you're stealing the music and films. Not to mention demonstrating why the movie and music industries need to implement DRM technologies that Slashdotters tend to loathe.
Regarding this, do you hold copyright on a work if you don't claim it? I mean, if you don't have a little "Copyright 2006 Raoul666" at the bottom of, say, a web page you write, can you sue someone for infringement if they stumble on it and put it somewhere? I'm genuinely curious.
It depends on where you live. In the U.S. and many other countries, all works are protected by copyright the moment they are in a tangible form. (Of course, this assumes that the content in question is eligible for copyright anyway. Some works are not.) You don't even need to include the copyright notice.
In the U.S., this is sort of a psuedo-protection - you can sue if somebody makes a copy without your permission, but you are limited in how much you can collect - I believe it's "actual damages", but I don't know for sure. In contrast, that amount can be increased substantially if the work is registered. Last I checked, statuatory damages for a registered work can be up to $150,000 per infringing copy.
Authors also receive copyright protection for works written under a pseudonym (Raul666) or anonymously, but it can be harder to collect money in this case because you have to prove you created the work.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and have no legal training. This isn't legal advice.
The response that most GPL advocates provide (and that I think I agree with overall) is that a EULA restricts your rights to less than what copyright law allows, while the GPL extends them, with conditions. EULAs are a use license - you are not permitted to install or operate the software unless you agree with the EULA.
The GPL is a distribution license - you may do whatever you wish to do with the software (the GPL even says so), and you also may also automatically receive a license to copy and distribute the software - actions that copyright law typically prohibit. In order to do these additional actions, you have to agree to restictions placed on your additional rights, not the original rights that you always had.
Note that some GPL software comes with a clickwrap license. I think that most of this can be attributed to developers that don't understand the legal nuances of the GPL, and are just copying what they see everybody else doing.
IANAL.
Macs didn't do what people wanted, and they ignored them , so the Computer Center dumped them.
I'm curious. What didn't they do? Was this a general-purpose lab or something more specialized? It seems to me that 99% of typical lab users need Microsoft Word, a good web browser, the ability to read PC disks, and a printer.
I have been to churches that push the tithe far harder than I would think is appropriate, but I can't think of a time where I've heard somebody declare tithing a condition to salvation. I think and hope that such a view would be rejected by the vast majority of churches (in modern times, of course - the indulgences are an analogy of your complaint, but those were news almost 500 years ago).
As for God being the extortionist, how can he extort what is already his? (Psalm 24:1-2, Romans 11:35)
I tithe to my church, not because I fear being struck down by God or shunned by my church for not doing so, but because I witness lives being radically changed for the better every week. This change isn't just salvation - homeless people from all faiths are being fed and clothed, parks are being cleaned, and broken families are being healed. I see miracles every day - not the flashy kind, but the kind where hope appears suddenly and without explanation in a hopeless situation. I can part with some money twice a month if it will help improve so many people's lives for the better.
I'd just like to say that I would mod samzenpus funny for the best Slashdot department in recent memory, if I were able.
:)
Thanks for the chuckle
You're right about not having native widgets exposed in the web browser. Sorry about that. When I wrote my earlier response, I didn't quite understand the point you were getting at.
Perhaps what we need is as simple as exposing these additional controls through HTML's <input> element or XForms.
I think very few people truly understood the potential of what the web could become...Sir Berners-Lee certainly didn't. One of the few who did might have been Microsoft. In an ironic way, Microsoft's sudden about-face in embracing the Internet and releasing Internet Explorer may have been the smartest decision they ever made, because if they had missed the chance, they would be irrelevant today, and everybody would be running their apps on Netscape servers.
By the way, I don't mean to negate your good points, but TrimPath and Active Widgets both have decent data grid widgets, if you're looking at using them for a particular project.
I think formal, unbiased education on copyright law would be a great thing. Unfortunately, I don't think it'll stay that way for long. The copyright industries are going to see an "in" and send their lobbyists on a feeding frenzy.
Why do we try and force a "real application" through a web browser? The way we are treating browsers these days, it seems like they are less about information presentation/sharing and more about actual application-type functionality.
.NET, what Sun hoped Java would be, what Macromedia hoped Flash would be.
Web applications have a number of good qualities, from the user's perspective. They allow ubiquitous access, work on essentially any modern computer (Firefox will run apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux with no problem), and can be kept updated automatically. I don't know where you draw the line between "presentation/sharing" and "application-type functionality," but remember - Microsoft was worried enough about Netscape achieiving the exact effect that you're talking about that they started giving away a web browser to cut off Netscape's revenue stream.
I thought that was what all the GUI libraries that come with your OS were meant for!
GUI libraries pre-date the Internet. I think that today, they're mostly there for legacy purposes. From a developer's perspective, a single code base that runs everywhere is much more appealing.
Rather than taking an incremental approach and altering the core purpose of "web browsing", why don't we get all of the major technology companies that exist today to agree to support ONE standard for the remote binding of locally displayed user interface components.
Do you really think we could get W3C, Sun, Apple, Mozilla, Adobe, and Microsoft to sit at a table and agree on anything?
I'm pretty sure this is what Bill Gates was after when he envisioned
Yes, but each of those companies also envisioned that their platform would become the market leader and choke out the competition. Cooperation doesn't last for long when everybody is intent in killing their competitors off.
All we have is a [slowly] improving mess of HTML, CSS and Javascript. AJAX makes a difference, but only so far as it accomplishes the goal of ONE standard for fat-client, desktop application type functionality.
It has a long way to go, but I'm still excited by how these languages are able to play off each other's strengths. It's a powerful platform that continues to grow in its abilities as more browsers implement more of the specs.
Seriously, are all the big players so greedy that they can't ALL band together, for the good of humanity and advancement of technology, to agree on ONE standard? ONLY ONE?
Now you're catching on.
Take some time, flesh out a good model, agree to standardize, build new products, free and proprietary, and let's make the shift to these well-defined products.
It's a nice idea. So is the W3C. I don't think it's likely that we're ever going to see a world where the standards are followed by all the major players.
Of course, his application doesn't work on every OS and every type of system (terrible in and of itself), but hey, if we had ONE standard for UI binding to network-enabled logic (web-services, remote components, anything at all), maybe it could.
I think the one, standard, network-enabled binding is the collective W3C specs. It's the closest thing we have to a world where everything of value is accessible anywhere. It's not here yet, but when it gets here, it'll be amazing.
You Yahoos don't get nearly enough credit for what you do (and I have no idea why Google's reputation is invincible - I've seen more than enough for them to be on my "evil" list).
;)
Congratulations on your release, and thank you for continuing to do amazingly cool stuff. Oh, and make sure you continue to keep your marketing droids in check, mmkay?
I don't think these are the mark of the beast. Those come during the Tribulation, which many (but not all) Biblical scholars believe comes after the Rapture. It is possible, however, that the mark will be RFID implants. It's just not these implants.
I still would quit my job if I was required to get chipped. I would cite privacy reasons and a fear of big needles.
Do you have ANY idea how much space a year's worth of video tapes takes up?
I was curious and bored, so I did the math...
A VHS tape is 7.375 inches long x 4.0625 inches wide x 1 inch thick. Each tape can hold up to 36 hours of footage on a special security time-lapse VCR. Let's be conservative and say that you'll run the cameras into a quad split, enabling you to record four cameras per tape. That means you need two tapes to store 36 hours of footage from eight cameras.
The number of hours in a year varies. There are, on average, about 365 1/4 days per year (one leap year after every four). Each day is 24 hours, or 8,766 hours per year. You need twice as many hours of tape, since you're running two tapes for your cameras, or 17,532 hours. That works out to 487 tapes over the year.
Returning to our VHS tape dimensions, each tape is 29.96 cubic inches. Therefore, 487 tapes will take 14,591 cubic inches, or 8.44 cubic feet for one year's worth of tapes.
Disclaimer: I don't profess to have any competency in math. I barely passed Trigonometry, after being removed from the Pre-Calculus class on the Honors track. Therefore, it's more than likely I flubbed up somewhere. Don't rely on these numbers for anything important, like constructing a multi-million $CURRENCY datacenter. Thank you.
Again, without actual numbers to back up your claims, I can't take them very seriously. "Wager" all you want. I want to see real data.
I don't have numbers, and neither do you. However, I know the alternatives run faster than Norton because I've done this before, several times. In no cases were machines I administer that were running these alternative packages infected by a virus or spyware.
Even then, you'll likely have a difficult time offering capability parity. I know you may not like to admit this, but NAV does offer a lot of functionality.
I admit it: Norton Internet Security (I presume you mean the entire suite, not just the anti-virus component) offers a lot of functionality. I simply think the performance tradeoff does not pay for the features.
Even when going with the best of the best alternative firewalls, anti-virus solutions, email scanners and so forth, you will have a difficult time matching NAV's feature set comparably.
Alone, no. Combined together, I think the alternatives match Norton's offering feature-for-freature, and provide two features that Norton lacks: reasonable memory usage and raw speed.
And your metric for measuring security is still rather flawed. While RAM consumption and CPU usage is easily measured in a quantitative fashion, "security" is not. Your test depends wholly on the individual attacking the system, how accessible the network is, and so forth. Even then, it's not a solid measure by any means. It's not something you could show to a CTO without being laughed at.
The hypothetical experiment in question assumes that the machines are identical (I specified that earlier), attached "directly" to the same network, and matched in every way except the security software running on them.
What, precisely, would you have me show to the CTO? I can't give him or her numbers from Symantec, because they don't provide any. I could show the CTO the quantitative numbers from RAM and processor usage that you mentioned. Then I could show independent test results for each product, and point out that with a security-in-depth approach, that naturally the CTO was already implementing, the security software doesn't need to be able to stop every threat because many will be stopped at the network border. The documents would speak for themselves.
Frankly, I'll just stick with OpenBSD.
That's nice, but I think we were discussing Windows desktops here.
Thanks for the debate.
The first problem I see with your experiment is that you're comparing software that offers vastly different capabilities. Some do more than others, for instance. Like I said, some include email scanning, while others don't. Some include firewall capabilities, while others don't.
I'm sorry that I wasn't clear. I meant that running all of those products in memory simultaneously is better for performance than running Norton in memory.
Second, you're trying to give a quantitative value to something that is qualitative. What metric do you use to measure the vulnerability of a particular PC? Sure, you can throw a certain amount of malicious software at it, but that's not a realistic test.
The measure is simple - which computer protected with its respective packages and attached directly to the network will be infected by a worm or hacked by a malicious user first? If you re-read my comment, you'll find that I said that both computers will be "just as protected." If both computers will be equally difficult to penetrate, why waste the extra memory and CPU on Norton?
I would wager that if you took two identical PC's, installed Norton Internet Security on one, and AVG Free Edition, Sygate Personal Firewall (R.I.P.), and Ad-Aware on the other, you'd find that the latter computer is just as protected and runs substantially faster than the Norton-infected one.
The first step I take when I'm working on somebody's computer is to remove Norton and install these replacements. Most people are shocked that their computer runs as fast as it does, especially considering that many of these people have always had Norton installed because it came with their computer.
Just because these products must use continuous system resources doesn't mean they need all of them. That would kind of defeat the purpose of having a computer.
Let's get a librarian to confirm this, but I don't think that's how it works most of the time. I can't believe that the 3 million items in my local university library are hand-me-downs.
Actually, you, me, and everyone else on this planet has what are termed Fair Use Rights . Some examples of Fair Use Rights are that you can quote brief sections of a copyrighted work for the purposes of literary review or criticism.
Conceptually, Google makes two copies of the book in order to offer it for searching - an entire copy of the book stored on its servers, and snippets of that copy offered for public consumption.
I contend that neither copy meets requirements for fair use. In the first copy, Google is making an entire copy of the work. The copy deprives the publisher of a sale (Google didn't buy the book), copies the entire work, and intends to use that copy for commercial purposes (offering snippets from it on a public web site). There's no review or criticism at that stage, because the public doesn't see it...it's just being downloaded into a database.
The second copy (from the database to the end-user) doesn't feel like Fair Use either. I don't see any literary review or criticism attached to Google Book Search...just sentences from the book offered without question, on-demand, at the request of searchers. It's not a matter of offering the same snippet to everybody, as a typical fair-use case would; instead, they propose to offer separate snippets based on what the user asks for. Again, this service is inherently commercial - its goal is solely to get people to visit Google so they can benefit from the increased exposure and hopefully sell an ad or two.
This is probably the reason why she (and many other people and institutions) believe that Google is in the right on this issue, and why the publishers are trying to use allegations issued in the press, rather than the courts to fight against it.
If the publishers had a reasonably strong case in court for this issue, they probably wouldn't be trying their "ham-handed appeals" in their press releases and in the popular press.
The publishers are using the court to fight this, and Google is also fighting this in the popular press - or did you miss Google's own press page and Eric Schmidt's "'ham-handed appeal'" in the Wall Street Journal?
Unfortunately, Google is proposing to do something which would be of great benefit to all of mankind, and it might have a negative impact on some publisher's profits, and they are fighting claw, tooth, and nail to avoid that!
I'm both an author and a publisher, but I welcome this change -- I'd love to see my work reach wider audiences and I'm not too worried about losing a few percentage points of profits. In fact, it might be that if more people could easily find my work on Google, more of them would go out of their way to purchase it!
I actually agree with you. I think the publishers that are fighting this are short-sighted, just like I think the recording industry should find a way to co-exist with peer-to-peer networks. I don't think anybody is denying that the program itself would be a benefit for publishers and authors.
What I am personally worried about is requiring publishers to opt-out, not opt-in, to Book Search. I think the legal situation is clear, and Google needs to do the "non-evil" thing and ask for permission before including these books. You'd give permission, right? If I was in the publishing business, I would too, and I can't believe we're the only two people with an ounce of common sense.
Amazon.com has been running Search Inside the Book far longer than Google, and nobody complains because they're doing the right thing and asking the publishers to participate, not forcing them to opt-out. Google's opt-out program is especially egregious, because not only do they want publishers to opt-out, they want them to opt-out every title, and won't accept a blanket opt-out from the company.
That's wrong, and I think Google should be ashamed of themselves. The way to get people to like you is not to force yourself on them. It's not the way the Old Google did things.
You're forgetting a very simple fact:
The library purchased all of the books it loans.
Google did not.
In that case, one of two things happens:
1. The work is in the public domain, and can be used without worrying about the license.
2. (Much more likely) The deceased's estate is the copyright holder, and can legally consent to a license change, if it chooses to do so.
See, that's strange, because all I do is hit CTRL + ALT + DEL, then click "Change Password".
On my machine, Ctrl+Alt+Delete pulls up Task Manager. I'm too lazy to look up why that happens. I've heard it has something to do with the computer being on a domain.
I have to wonder, however, just how much simpler the Windows solution is if you can't predictably tell where a global key sequence will take you.
The right in question is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
I would argue:
1. Copyright laws do not "promote the progress" the way the founding fathers intended, because by the time a work reaches the public domain (particularly software, as *almost no* copyrighted software is in the public domain due to an expired copyright), it is already obsolete.
2. "Science and useful arts" limits the breadth of what can be protected more narrowly than what copyright laws allow.
3. "Limited times" does not mean the life of the author plus 75 years, nor does it mean the law can be amended every ten years to have the effect of making copyrights permanent.
4. "Authors and inventors" implies individuals and not corporations.
In short, I have no problem giving the authors and inventors of the Constitution intellectual property protection rights, as long as they don't trample on mine in return.
A 14-year copyright is plenty. If the owner wants to extend it longer, charge a percentage of the work's gross revenue on a sliding scale until you hit 90% of revenues to keep it protected, and cap the copyright to a maximum possible duration of 28 years. Use the new income to preserve and duplicate the deposit copies in the Library of Congress, so anybody that wants the work can get to it after copyright expires.