The key difference is that it would be a good thing for the Ogg Vorbis format to spread and become as widely used as possible. Nobody really wants to sees WMA become any more popular; it's best to just offer basic functionality for *nix systems that wouldn't otherwise have it. It's a tight balance: trying to make the free system better without giving any more power to the secret format gods.
SuSE Linux Openexchange Server 4
Base license with ten groupware clients and an unlimited number of external e-mail clients (POP3/IMAP)
Order no.: 2118-1INT
US $ 1,249.00
The article title "Burn A Song For 99 Cents" is misleading. They're offering the same crap we've seen before; encrypted DRM-laden tracks that you can't use anywhere but your machine, without their approval.
Check out their FAQ:
9. Can I burn CDs?
Yes. If you subscribe to any catalog that offers CD burning, you can burn up to 10 tracks a month.
10 tracks per month? That's not even one whole CD! Give me a break. And it's pretty obvious that not all of their "catalogs" will allow burning. This is a perversion of fair use: "oh, you want to take it with you? Well, that'll cost you another $___".
I will never pay a single dime for crippled formats.
I have a hard time believing that the millions of 12:00-blink-blink idiots on AOL are suddenly deciding to abandon their safe little world and jump ship to less idiot-friendly ISPs. I have no problem with idiots using AOL; I just wish that it didn't give AOL the money and the power to affect the future of the internet.
But they do have better focus on ease-of-use than almost any software company out there. Hasn't anyone here tried to talk people away from AOL? I have, and they won't leave. It's almost as though they... like it.
That link just ruined my day. I had been assuming that the dotcom crash took those idiots down. How is it possible that iwon.com is still in business?
Obligatory Moronic Business Plan:
Pay users to visit our site
Profit!
Network driver fiasco
on
Ask Donald Becker
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
You wrote and maintain a lot of Linux network drivers. Unfortunately, these drivers stopped being included in Linus' kernel because he dislikes the backwards-compatibility code in them (throwing out the baby with the bathwater, if you ask me, but this is Slashdot and I dare not criticize the Great Leader too much). Sadly, the end-users are the ones that really suffer.
Is this still the case and is there any hope of this deadlock ending? I know some folks have stepped up to maintain what's left of your code in the kernel; are they doing an adequate job?
...But not many people know that working rocket belts actually exist. They were developed for the Army in the late 1950s, and after the Army decided they were not suitable for military use, dedicated civilians kept a few models in operation.
Today, three rocket belts are known to exist. Two are owned by Howard "Kinnie" Gibson, a daredevil and stuntman who acquired the patent on an essential part of the design.
If they were invented in the late 1950s, how is it possible that some guy still has a patent on part of the design, over 40 years later?
If the wireless companies are going to sell phones that won't work with any other service provider, it should be their problem when all these crippled phones end up in landfills.
The DMCA requires Verizon expeditiously to produce the information in the Subpoena.
None of the arguments raised by Verizon justifies refusing to comply with a subpoena validly issued by this court.
That's not correct. The DMCA requires Verizon to identify the owners of files on Verizon's system, but only if the complaining party can identify the work being infringed. This isn't too terrible in the case of files hosted at Verizon, because Verizon can easily check that there really does appear to be copyright infringement going on.
But it's not clear that section 512(h) applies to situations where files aren't hosted at the ISP. The reasons why it shouldn't are obvious: the ISP has no way to judge the truthfulness of the claim, and what would result would be immediate power for any copyright holder to demand the identity of an internet user at any time, with zero requirement of a legitimate claim against that user. Such a system would be ripe for abuse and harassment of users.
In Mozilla, anyway, you can see a list of the trusted certificate authorities. There's a lot of them in there; Verisign couldn't have bought all of them (yet).
I think a lot of people out there use some other browser than Mozilla, though, so you might want to see what certs that other browser supports.
The IPCS work "controls the critical path to roadway openings," the Deloitte auditors wrote. "There is virtually no history available to determine whether the compressed [system and software] testing period that the Project hopes to achieve can in fact actually be achieved."
"Compressed testing period" means they're behind schedule, and they're going to cut corners actually testing their stuff. Bad bad bad.
I've never heard of a "compressed" schedule actually working. It usually means that the programmers submitted a schedule detailing how long things would take, and management turned around and rewrote the schedule to hit a specific target date. It means the schedule is a fantasy made up to satisfy some PHB.
It tends to rely on blocklists, many of which have demonstrated unfair practices in the past.
The more SpamAssassin is used, the more spammers will specifically avoid doing things SpamAssassin checks for.
It's a gigantic heap of perl, the Write-Only (tm) language. I hate the fact that every perl program demands I mess up the package manager on my system by blindly downloading a half-dozen new modules. And it's slow!
depends on what you call perfect
on
Awari Solved
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
There are lots of games where you can create a "perfect" player that can do as well as possible against other "perfect" players.
The thing that's interesting is making a program that plays as well as possible against imperfect players, as demonstrated by the RoShamBo Programming Competition.
You might consider stealing an idea from Invisible Records, and set up a website for turning fans into "field reps" that do local promotion of the band. Put all that hyped-up-fan energy to work!
Meg Lee Chin appears to be doing this on her current tour.
There's no inherent "latency" involved in copper wires, just lower bandwidth and higher noise due to interference and reflections. Signal propagation velocity in copper and fiber are actually quite similar, 0.6c to 0.8c depending on material. Fiber is often slower than copper in actual propagation velocity.
Most interesting of all, will the FSF actually do what it always said it'd do, and protect this GPLd software?
The FSF never said that. They said that they'll protect GPLed software on which they own the copyright. On any other code, they have no legal standing to do anything even if they wanted to. That's why the FSF asks for copyright assignment from contributors.
Puhlease. This is a total troll. Even if you believe that redhat is suddenly going to do a total 180, and start trying to close up their code, the poster's obvious DMCA and GPL trolling should make moderators think twice. Who in their right minds mods this up? Hint: learn how trademark law and the DMCA work before you use them as a club.
If there is a legal mindset that distribution of copyrighted content requires a legal contract between the distributor and each and every user or customer, I hope the OSI will consider it in the public interest to attempt a countering trend: the view that existing copyright law (as applied to books for the last hundred years) is good enough.
There are many reasons why click-through licenses are bad:
They obviously place the software distributor in a place of power over the end user, something that free software is supposed to combat.
There is no clear way to define who agreed to what. What if the purchaser isn't the same as the user? What if a user installs software on a computer and then resells that computer, with it's software, to another user.
Software licensing is too complicated. That complication is a barrier to entry for small, independent software authors. Promotion of a software "fair use" doctrine that says that click-through licenses are unnecessary seems to be in the public interest.
Click-through licenses provide a convenient method for a downhill slide towards prohibition of other fair uses, such as reverse engineering or published benchmarks or criticism. They may also provide a mechanism for other onerous goals: censorship ("you agree not to use this software to produce communist manifestos"), patent abuse ("you agree that our patents are valid"), barring trade or competition ("you agree not to sell this program to Pakistan or the FBI")... The list is endless. Not that this is what's planned, but once the door is opened, who knows where it leads?
Every additional click-through license in use marginalizes the existing non-click-through licenses, making them seem more like some lunatic fringe rather than plain use of copyright law. No matter how OSI feels about the FSF and the GPL, I as a user understand and appreciate the GPL's stand on this issue: "You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it.
Click-wrap licenses, if they spread to other media, will quickly lead us into a "pay-per-use" world. Click-wrap issues have barely been touched by the courts, and a small push in the right direction now may help keep us away from that path.
Please fight to keep click-wrap licenses away from Free and Open-Source Software. I understand that overly cautious lawyers (is there another kind?) will wring their hands over the idea of bucking the trend, but this is a battle worth fighting.
"Use" contracts make no sense (and have been shot down by courts when applied to other copyrighted content). Though you have not provided any details as to why the party in question wants them, I fail to see a compelling legal reason why they should be allowed.
Please reply to eds at reric.net if I can be of any assistance.
$82.50 per year you too can subscribe to The Chronicle of Higher Education, and read articles about how the greedy content industries are screwing us into the ground.
Most of the stupid motherboard manufacturers (no doubt in cahoots with the BIOS authors) only offer their BIOS images in formats that can be loaded under DOS or Windows. So from time to time I'm glad I still have one dusty DOS boot floppy around.
Seems really brain-damaged, though. Who really wants to write and maintain stupid 16-bit code nowadays, and then have to depend on the user to track down a bootable disk to actually run your code. Hardly seems like rocket science to write linux userspace code to do the same job and then they'd be able to give away bootable floppies that run their code automatically.
Probably copyright infringement, ala my.mp3.com
on
Borrowing ROMs
·
· Score: 2
Anybody remember the my.mp3.com lawsuit? The court found that making a copy of a copyrighted work is infringement, even if there's a real, honest, copy out there somewhere restricting who gets access to the copy.
So as far as the law's concerned, it doesn't seem to matter one bit that there's a stack of legal cartridges in the corner. If copies have been made and are downloaded to customers, it's infringement.
Just another area where common sense and judicial rulings disagree. Of course, my.mp3.com was just one case, and maybe another judge will disagree.
Are the answers matched up with the wrong questions? It sure looks as though the answers, while interesting, have nothing to do with the question asked. Look at the answer to #3, it sure looks like it belongs with question #2.
Slashdot Mirror
The key difference is that it would be a good thing for the Ogg Vorbis format to spread and become as widely used as possible. Nobody really wants to sees WMA become any more popular; it's best to just offer basic functionality for *nix systems that wouldn't otherwise have it. It's a tight balance: trying to make the free system better without giving any more power to the secret format gods.
I will never pay a single dime for crippled formats.
But they do have better focus on ease-of-use than almost any software company out there. Hasn't anyone here tried to talk people away from AOL? I have, and they won't leave. It's almost as though they... like it.
Obligatory Moronic Business Plan:
Is this still the case and is there any hope of this deadlock ending? I know some folks have stepped up to maintain what's left of your code in the kernel; are they doing an adequate job?
Today, three rocket belts are known to exist. Two are owned by Howard "Kinnie" Gibson, a daredevil and stuntman who acquired the patent on an essential part of the design.
If they were invented in the late 1950s, how is it possible that some guy still has a patent on part of the design, over 40 years later?
If the wireless companies are going to sell phones that won't work with any other service provider, it should be their problem when all these crippled phones end up in landfills.
That's not correct. The DMCA requires Verizon to identify the owners of files on Verizon's system, but only if the complaining party can identify the work being infringed. This isn't too terrible in the case of files hosted at Verizon, because Verizon can easily check that there really does appear to be copyright infringement going on.
But it's not clear that section 512(h) applies to situations where files aren't hosted at the ISP. The reasons why it shouldn't are obvious: the ISP has no way to judge the truthfulness of the claim, and what would result would be immediate power for any copyright holder to demand the identity of an internet user at any time, with zero requirement of a legitimate claim against that user. Such a system would be ripe for abuse and harassment of users.
CA links
CA links
I think a lot of people out there use some other browser than Mozilla, though, so you might want to see what certs that other browser supports.
"Compressed testing period" means they're behind schedule, and they're going to cut corners actually testing their stuff. Bad bad bad.
I've never heard of a "compressed" schedule actually working. It usually means that the programmers submitted a schedule detailing how long things would take, and management turned around and rewrote the schedule to hit a specific target date. It means the schedule is a fantasy made up to satisfy some PHB.
You might want to consider collaborating with the group working on bogofilter, which is basically the same thing, done in C.
The thing that's interesting is making a program that plays as well as possible against imperfect players, as demonstrated by the RoShamBo Programming Competition.
Meg Lee Chin appears to be doing this on her current tour.
link link link
Puhlease. This is a total troll. Even if you believe that redhat is suddenly going to do a total 180, and start trying to close up their code, the poster's obvious DMCA and GPL trolling should make moderators think twice. Who in their right minds mods this up? Hint: learn how trademark law and the DMCA work before you use them as a club.
There are many reasons why click-through licenses are bad:
- They obviously place the software distributor in a place of power over the end user, something that free software is supposed to combat.
- There is no clear way to define who agreed to what. What if the purchaser isn't the same as the user? What if a user installs software on a computer and then resells that computer, with it's software, to another user.
- Software licensing is too complicated. That complication is a barrier to entry for small, independent software authors. Promotion of a software "fair use" doctrine that says that click-through licenses are unnecessary seems to be in the public interest.
- Click-through licenses provide a convenient method for a downhill slide towards prohibition of other fair uses, such as reverse engineering or published benchmarks or criticism. They may also provide a mechanism for other onerous goals: censorship ("you agree not to use this software to produce communist manifestos"), patent abuse ("you agree that our patents are valid"), barring trade or competition ("you agree not to sell this program to Pakistan or the FBI")... The list is endless. Not that this is what's planned, but once the door is opened, who knows where it leads?
- Every additional click-through license in use marginalizes the existing non-click-through licenses, making them seem more like some lunatic fringe rather than plain use of copyright law. No matter how OSI feels about the FSF and the GPL, I as a user understand and appreciate the GPL's stand on this issue: "You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it.
- Click-wrap licenses, if they spread to other media, will quickly lead us into a "pay-per-use" world. Click-wrap issues have barely been touched by the courts, and a small push in the right direction now may help keep us away from that path.
Please fight to keep click-wrap licenses away from Free and Open-Source Software. I understand that overly cautious lawyers (is there another kind?) will wring their hands over the idea of bucking the trend, but this is a battle worth fighting."Use" contracts make no sense (and have been shot down by courts when applied to other copyrighted content). Though you have not provided any details as to why the party in question wants them, I fail to see a compelling legal reason why they should be allowed.
Please reply to eds at reric.net if I can be of any assistance.
$82.50 per year you too can subscribe to The Chronicle of Higher Education, and read articles about how the greedy content industries are screwing us into the ground.
Seems really brain-damaged, though. Who really wants to write and maintain stupid 16-bit code nowadays, and then have to depend on the user to track down a bootable disk to actually run your code. Hardly seems like rocket science to write linux userspace code to do the same job and then they'd be able to give away bootable floppies that run their code automatically.
So as far as the law's concerned, it doesn't seem to matter one bit that there's a stack of legal cartridges in the corner. If copies have been made and are downloaded to customers, it's infringement.
Just another area where common sense and judicial rulings disagree. Of course, my.mp3.com was just one case, and maybe another judge will disagree.
Are the answers matched up with the wrong questions? It sure looks as though the answers, while interesting, have nothing to do with the question asked. Look at the answer to #3, it sure looks like it belongs with question #2.
None of this will be possible once you all surrender minute-by-minute control over all your computing devices to Microsoft. Duh.