I'm sure this network will be used to share protected speech and not copyrighted binaries.
I don't think this system will be usable for piracy. Have you ever used <hat foil="tin">Freenet</hat>? Because of all the hopping though random nodes, "random" routes and encrypted traffic it's quite slow.
Take the example of the average "anonymous proxy" on the internet. After someone finds the proxy, it usually takes about 5 to 10 hours before the proxie's bandwith is completely saturated making it unusable. Even if Tor is to loadbalance all it's nodes, it's still going to be SLOW with the added encryption etc. Remember kids, using proxies that are close to you isn't anonimity but asking for problems with the law (usually why people want to use anonymous proxies is to avoid problems their employer/government could create).
Lastly, most anonymous networks are unreliable by nature. Freenet is unreliable because it drops "unpopular" keys and their content in favour of popular keys. Anonymous relays (eg mixmasters) are known to drop messages at random.
I personally don't think it is a big deal to pay money to rent a DVD and then keep a copy for _personal_ use only.
Where I live (.be), this is actually a right. If you rent something from the library (CD/DVD/books), you are free to take a copy for personaly use or fair use in studies, since the money you paid to the library also goes to the copyright holders. When you rent something at a videostore, you may only take a copy for personal use.
In neither cases are you allowed to redistribute the material (this includes lending someone your copy). The only exception is for fair use in studies if (and only if) the material comes from a library. There are restrictions on how much of material you may reuse, but these are regulated according to the different types of media.
Stop taking away _my_ rights as a customer and I won't take away your "IP" rights.
Surprisingly enough though, when you actually BUY a product here, you are not allowed to make copies for personal use if the license doesn't allow it. The license however, has to be either on the cover of the box, the cover of the manual, or an unopened seal (like the kind on software products). If you don't agree with the license, you may return the UNUSED (this is the important part) product back according to basic consumer rights in 3 working days (or 15 working days if the sale happened by telephone, postal order or internet). If you sell your product, you MUST either destroy or donate (to the buyer) all copies you made for personal use.
I remember a case in the '90s where a parent was brought to court for copying ALL Disney videos in a videostore for his kid. The judge ruled in favour of the parent as the copies were for personal use. However, nobody has been tried here in the past couple of years for a library/videostore copying crime. Downloading material from the net however isn't actively persued here (yet), but SELLING stuff you downloaded is. You'll often find shifty people at junk sales selling pirated software, and they hardly ever get caught.
Hold it right there... You're forgetting one of the most common mistakes: there/their/they're (and sadly also theyre and theire). I can't believe how many emails I've read that make my eyes bleed when I see this.
What's perhaps worst of all is that these are people who claim to be fluent in English. I don't care if you make typos or common spelling errors, and I hardly ever point them out (as it seems to annoy people instead of improving their spelling), but this is the worst kind of atrocity you can do to the english languague.
When I do have to send out email to others in the company I do this old fashioned thing called "Proof-reading"
Reading that mail one last time before frantically smashing ctrl-enter (or in most cases, clicking send) should be mandatory if you're sending corporate email. But it just doesn't end with spelling or grammar really, some people don't even bother making a cohorent text. I'm often the victim of the dreaded subject-only emails, where 3 or 4 somewhat related words are supposed to a very descriptive analysis of a problem. My favourite is perhaps the just plain stupid mail. For example:
Our internet seems to be down, could you fix it please?
The problem isn't people losing linguistic skill because of technology, but people not having a clue in the first place. The article mentions people who use exclamation marks and ALL CAPS. The only words I tend to set in capitals (surrounded by underscores no less) are "_NEVER_" and "_ALWAYS_". This way I am sure that my correspondants read this part extra carefully because there's that one word in capitals in the middle of the text surrounded by these alien characters that really don't belong in written text.
If I'm a neo-Nazi in the USA and run a Nazi web site, and you live in Germany and mirror the site, you'll be in trouble, not me. I've done nothing illegal, merely immoral. In all likelihood, neither has Lycos.
Perhaps it could be compared to that, but here we have a law that says it's illegal to encourage people to do illegal things. If you encourage a mob to grab bricks and throw them through windows, and it can be proven that they threw bricks because you encouraged them, then you're also liable for those charges. In fact, in case of a mob you'd be held accountable for the damage the entire mob did, while individual persons under ideal circumstances will be held accountable for their damage.
Let's take this to the non-geek world, and compare this to advertising folders that get shoved down your mailbox every day. This is basicly the same thing as going to the companies that distribute those folders, and shoving their mailbox full of folders untill their hallway is full.
While it might be funny to do this, it's definatly more of a crime than shoving one folder down a mailbox that says "No commercial print".
Under the premise that it wouldn't DDoS those sites, which is a crime in most places. In theory, sites not coping with requests and slowing down is nice, in reality that's pretty tricky to do, and may well have opened up a hole for people to be held accountable for their actions.
At worst, it's civil disobedience (though not directed at government) or an organized, peaceful protest.
At best this is throwing bricks at a shopwindow and saying : "It was supposed to stop when the window was about to crack".
I have no love for spammers, but Lycos is playing a risky game. DoS attacks are still punished more severely than spam.
Whats to prevent spammers from reporting lycos to their ISPs, well, the ISPs would not be too kind to the spammers either.
ISPs have to earn money too. They don't care unless the backbone's full or they're not getting paid. Most colocated services in Europe have prices that include a complete rack and x MBit. If you need more, just call them, and within half a day you're up x MBit, no questions asked. Hey, it's your IP range. If it gets RBLed, they don't really care.
Hey, I like the idea of punishing spammers, but Lycos is playing a game that's very dangerous. They're doing DOS-attacks (by proxy) on servers, and where I live that's actually a crime. While sending lots of unwanted e-mail will get you a slap on the wrist, DOS'ing a machine without written consent actually gets you jailtime. Where is the liability here when someone installs this screensaver? Is the end-user responsible for the DOS, or is Lycos responsible?
Another point on this is that this only brings more traffic to the Internet. I know, what's a few measily packets when people are leeching torrents like mad, but still. While this effectively disables spammers for a while, remember that you can't fight fire with fire (or SYN with SYN in this case).
And what about machines that accidentally get on the list of machines to be abused? Hey, I know that in theory only bad guys get on the list, but I've had enough customers actually get on an RBL while they don't spam.
This is dangerous ground we're walking here, and sooner or later someone is going to call their lawyer. The ISP that provides internet access for the spammer perhaps, or perhaps even the spammer who knows that where he lives sending spam is nothing compared to DOS.
In particular, MSN works with companies such as SBC and Qwest and will "borrow" home users IP's for temp useage.
Elaborate please... I can understand that they might sell e-mail adresses to spammers, but actually cooperate and provide them with bandwidth and home user IP's (good thing those are mostly RBL'ed) is a while other matter. Do you have any proof for this? Or at least a tin-foil hat webpage?
So many people here think that spam is originating from China, when in reality, it does not.
Say hello to open relays, anonymous (unusable) proxies and what else... Look, I'm not going to argue with you that most mail coming from China isn't chinese, but this hardly explains the connection between MSN and spammers other than the possibility of them selling the addresses. If MSN was keen enough on spamming, don't you think they'd provide the spammers with means easier than dynamic home IPs?
Of course, the government made sure that can spam did not injure that practise.
What I've learnt about governments is that most of them don't have the technical understanding to see the fundamental problem, and they have no inclination or time to learn to understand the kind of problems that arise.
Yes, governments have advisors, and they still have to translate techbabble to laymans terms. Those laymans terms get turned into law-speak, and somewhere along the way an idea to punish someone becomes a loophole, either because there is an error in translation or there is political intrest in letting the problem exist.
Sometimes I really don't understand business techniques, surely they would make more money selling them individually than waiting for someone/company to buy 100,000?
The idea here is that they can cut the price down on 100.000 units in manufacturing and shipping. Imagine for a second that they need to make one. The cost to make it would be 70$. This is so high because they need to fire up ye olde machines to press the cases, print the boards, the people that do the manual stuff, etc. Now, shipping one unit to one person costs 40$.
However, if they make 100.000. The cost to make it drops to 20$. All those machines are already running, the staff is already there. The shipping is in bulk container, so it probably costs 10.000$ to ship the lot.
Oh yes, they could make 100.000 units and sell them seperatly as orders come in, but they run the risk of having 90.000 units in stock they can't get rid of, which makes it a very unlucrative business.
So, yes, you're going to have to sell these in bulk as a manufacturer if you want to have some profit. And that's what motivates everyone who's doing business.
Can I get even one piece of useful information pertaining to the actual performance of this thing?
Well, performance of Vias is less than your average intel or AMD. I've played with a couple of Via based machines, and to be honest they're good enough for cheap low-end desktop solutions, but don't start doing things that need power. You can run the average webbrowser, wordprocessor and mailclient on it, but don't expect things to be fast. But hey, they're 100$.
These things are ideal for PXE booting kiosk PCs. Schools, libraries, etc can be greatly helped with cheap solutions like these.
Down to the facts, I've used some Vias to encode some DVDs to divx format and it takes a looooooong time. Most likely due to the fact that the CPU misses some extensions that Intel and AMD provide.
Conclusion: don't build your 1337 gaming boxes on these things. It won't work.
This causes his mail server to be unable to handle emails destined for AOL, because they know his IP is in a dynamic range for Charter.
That's because your ISP doesn't update their information. I've had this very same problem with a local ISP and a customer of ours that explicitly told his ISP that he wanted to host a mailserver. First of they "forgot" to open port 25 (as by default it's closed on inbound connections), then they "forgot" to update their lists.
It took them 3 weeks to update that list, and add another one for the RBLs to catch up. In the meantime our customer was helped by relaying his mail over our mailservers. Of course, this is a problem for any small to medium business that decides to run their own mailserver with ISPs that really don't do what they're being paid to do.
Sometimes, I've seen my own dynamic IP come up as blacklisted on services, but a closer inspection typically shows they just blacklisted the whole ISP, or at least their whole pool of dynamic addresses.
As it should be. What the hell are you doing relaying mail from a dynamic IP anyway? I know, it's everyone's right to set up a mailserver, but with the problems of virii setting up their own SMTP servers, spammers commanding armies of drone-workstations, and whatever they may think of in the future this is a measure that warrants the inconvenience. If you'd like to run an SMTP server, talk to your provider to get into a range that's not 100% dynamic IP address and hasn't been labeled as such. They'll charge you more, that's true, but you'll be free to send mail as much as you wish. If you don't want to pay more, relay your mail over your ISPs mailserver.
Re:TV piracy is next?
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TV Piracy is Next
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· Score: 2, Interesting
But why buy the DVD's when I downloaded it already for free? Because I still believe content creators should be paid.
Hell, invent a system that allows you to download and share TV WITHOUT the ads legally where the actual creators of the show get a bigger cut instead of the middleman (the ones making the boxes), and I'd jump on it.
I bought (starting jan 2004), 12 boxes of series, somewhere between 30 and 40 movies, and then I'm not even counting the cheap ones (the ones you pick up in some store between 3 and 10 €). I bought a single season of farscape, until I noticed that they had put ADVERTISEMENT on the DVDs. You know, if you add them as trailers, I won't nag, but if they FORCE you to watch ads on stuff you actually pay for I don't buy that crap anymore.
Hell, everyone reading slashdot knows how bittorrent works, and 99% of us have used it for Evil. Except for perhaps students, most of us would be willing to pay for quality shows if we got DVD quality at good prices. Boxes are usually priced pretty well, unless it's a money hungry franchise drawing it's dying breath (*cough* Star Trek *cough*), and make up the largest part (counting discs, not packages) of my collection.
Will I ever buy the 23 seasons of Friends? Nope. Will I/Have I downloaded them? Nope, not even "for a friend". Yes, leeching this stuff is stealing, but if I hadn't downloaded it first, I most likely wouldn't have seen it anyway.
The movie industry is so keen on stopping piracy that they've actually hindered themselves more in this direction than they have helped their cause. DVD Zones stand in the way of promoting their shows across continents. So now we buy DVD players that can be put in region free modes. Copyright protection schemes like CSS have failed miserably and hindered a free and open adoption of DVD movies in free operating systems.
Re:I'd Like to Run Linux -- Just No Time
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Linux Kernel to Fork?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Why is it that every Windows XP user thinks the goal of the Linux community is to convince windows user to make the switch?
Because some people are overzaelous in their free software speeches to the masses. Linux users have a bad rep for a few bad elements.
Dude - just stick with Winblows. You have no time to "know linux", as you put it, so just stick with what you know.
Everyone should use what they want to use (at home at least). You like MacOS? Be my guest. Windows? Go right ahead. Linux? Hell yeah! People should be encouraged to try and use open source software, not forced. If people don't have the time to learn new things, let them use whatever they want.
Please, developers, don't dumb Linux apps/distros down so much that it looks and feels like Windows.
Please, end-users, stop having this elitist feeling because you're running linux. If apps and distros want to dumb down their applications to increase the amount of users, let them. A good example is perhaps lprng versus cups. Cups is easy to setup and use, lprng is not that easy to setup and use. If normal users can setup their printservers using an easy tool, and power users can set it up with their favourite tool, who is going to complain? It's a matter of choice.
As soon as we make linux distributions easy enough for Joe Common to use, and decide that Random J. Hacker can't do things the way he wants to do them then we're in trouble. Then it's no longer a matter of choice, but a matter of locking in people to solutions that only work in 80% of all cases.
Wow, this article is pure uneducated guesswork...
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Linux Kernel to Fork?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Well, this was fun to read. This article is about as educated about the subject as the average donkey.
In a worrying parallel to the issue that stopped Unix becoming a mass-market product in the 1980s - leaving the field clear for Microsoft
Uhm, what gave MS the edge in the 80s was cheap i386 (well, actually 8088) hardware, and a relatively cheap OS (MS-DOS). Unix servers cost an arm and a leg in those days, and many companies/people wanted a pc as cheap as possible. Buying an i386 in those days meant running DOS, and the "marketplace" standardized around MS-DOS.
Each version of the kernel requires applications to be compiled specifically for it.
Utter bull. Upgrade kernels as much as you like, it won't break software unless you change major/minor numbers perhaps. The same thing will happen to windows if you start running stuff for win2k on win'95. But this is rather a matter of features in the kernel, not compilation against the kernel.
So at some point, Linux founder Linus Torvalds will fork off version 2.7 to accommodate the changes, Morton said at the SDForum open source conference.
And the big news is? This happens every couple of years, with stable versions having even minor version numbers and unstable versions having odd minor version numbers. This helps admins and users to effectively KNOW which versions are good for everyday use, and which versions are experimental and for developers.
He cited clustering as a feature sought for Linux.
Well, imagine a Beowulf cluster... How long have those patches existed? There's several ways to build a cluster as long as you patch your kernel.
OSDL does not anticipate, for example, having to ever rewrite the kernel, which would take 15 years, Morton said.
And why on earth would they want to do that? Linux is on the right track, so why bother with an entire rewrite of good functional code with good design.
Open source has focused on software such as the operating system, kernels, runtime libraries, and word processors.
It's also focussed on multimedia (xmms, mplayer, xine), webservers (apache), mailservers (sendmail, qmail, postfix)... I'd rather have people say that open source has focussed on internet servers than stuff it needs to make an OS run and wordprocessors. This like saying that an oven is primarily being used for making toast, while actually it also bakes cake, pizza and whatever you toss inside.
I'm sorry, this kind of article belongs in the trashbin. Either the journalist doesn't know what he's writing about, or he's being paid to know nothing about the subject. One of the things that keeps suprising me in business IT journalism is the lack of knowledge these people have about the subjects they're writing about.
Since in every HL2/Steam/Valve thread on Slashdot Steam seems to get blown out of proportion, let's take a moment to review some of the good qualities of Steam:
This loosely translates to: Since we know everytime Valve gets mentioned on slashdot, steam causes quite the controvery and the discussions about it never resolve anything, or contribute to anything, let's discuss it again and again and again...
I fully expect a properly stored vehicle would work just fine in 30 years. I would be extremely pissed off if Nissan managed to stop all cars 30 years old from starting, whether properly stored or not.
I'm not a big fan of DRM on this level, for the reasons that in the (near) future my software might not be activated when the company goes broke. However comparing this situation to cars and carparts is like comparing apples to oranges. In 30 years from now Nissan will not stop your car from starting, but neither will Valve stop your already installed Half Life 2 from starting. In 30 years from now however, your Nissan won't get a new sparklet because that type isn't sold anymore, and most likely in 30 years from now you won't be able to play HL2.
Now, let's all step back for a second and breathe and look at the games we bought over the past 10 years. Have you recently played a 10 year old game? Were you planning on doing that? I think that the maximum lifetime for a game is 5 years AT MOST. Most don't even have a lifetime of a couple of months.
OK, so in 10 years from now, your half life 2 copy might not work anymore and you've wasted a couple of bucks. In the meantime you've played the game for about a year, downloaded a couple of mods, etc. In 10 years from now, if Valve goes belly up, most likely the activation part will have long been cracked, and if Valve is no more who is going to sue you? Vivendi? They'll be too busy protecting the copyright on their newer games by then.
Is the Half Life brand name so unknown they should be forced to deal with a publisher to make sales? With a brand name as popular as this, I am sure Valve was in a position to tell Vivendi "jump" if Vivendi said no to a copy protection free game.
Ah, speculation at best is always one of my favourite things on slashdot. First of all, we don't know the contents of the contracts signed between Vivendi and Valve. For all we know the CEO of Vivendi demanded that he be paid tribute in roast beef and nubile maidens, although it is much more likely that it contains clauses that deal with currency.
Second of all, software is usually contracted before it is finished. When Valve started playing with the idea for Half Life 2 I'm pretty sure that their CEO was having talks with Vivendi. While it's quite possible they were already developing when the contract was signed, companies usually don't start writing software before they know that it can be sold. And yes, millions of geeks would love to play half life 2, but Valve needs to think about having a publisher who will actually publish the game. While steam is nice for delivering the game online, many people want "the box". The deal with Vivendi will most likely give them extra resources to put into developing half life 2 (eg. extra cashflow pays the wages of those dozen or more programmers, artists and level designers).
Third, why would Valve want a copy protection free game in the first place? Every pirated copy of HL2 means they stand to lose money as well. Sure, there will be cracks and such, but with a system as steam they try to garantee that nobody STEALS their revenue.
The damage is done. And another set of consumers are casualties of this odd war against them.
Everyone that has been waiting for half life 2 knows that the release date is Tuesday Nov 16. If you buy a game before the official release date, and you know that they use an activation code you should ask yourself the question "When I get home am I going to able to play this?"
I see a lot of posts saying "Valve en Vivendi are screwing over the consumer.". Well, wait 'till tuesday evening to see if they are. Things are looking good at the moment as the boxes are on the shelves. Vivendi most likely will not want all those people who bought this game to return their boxes next week, because then they stand to lose lots of money.
Everyone should calm down before shouting "Ripoff!", and think before they pick up stuff in the store that they know isn't released officially yet.
The inherent psychological principle is that if you mentally dissociate your job from the context of your normal life, then you are willing to put up with a constant low level of dissatisfaction in exchange for a reward of "play time" or "toys".
I don't think that toys themselves are the cause of disasociation of work- and play-time, but the mentality parents give their children when it comes to toys. If you get toys that are both educational and entertaining (no, that doesn't include "Harry Potter legos") you can stimulate a child to get interested in other things.
Also, the amount of toys parents buy for their children contributes to this. I don't know a single male person my age that didn't own a Transformer, but the ones that owned dozens are the ones that are most likely to make the distinction between work time being horrendous and relaxation time the ultimate goal.
Thus, by encouraging your children to "play", you are psychologically destroying them and reducing their future potential to that of an assembly line worker.
Playtime for me included also reading. Encouraging your kids to read books about things they like (or things they might like if they picked up a book every now and then) will get them interested in other things. Instead of buying the 50$ game, get a 50$ book on the working of the human body (a kids book, not an encyclopedia), or perhaps on astronomy. No, that doesn't mean every single kid needs to become a geek/nerd, but if you stimulate children to read, they'll make leaps in their education instead of small steps.
People endure 40-60 hours of pure crap every week of their lives with the dubious reward of "vacation", or a nice car, or time to watch TV as their only reward.
After I come home from work, I need some form of entertainment, even for a short while. I need to be able to divert my thoughts from work, or else I'll be pondering about some problem until I go to bed and wake up with the next morning. Man is not a machine designed to work all the time. I don't work in order to have a fast car, some expensive vacation, but in order to have food on my table and a place that has a roof to put that pesky table in. I enjoy my work to a certain degree, but if I can leave it in the office, you can be damned sure that I will.
Teach your children to live and enjoy life, rather than to simply endure it.
Failing that, use shock collars that are controlled by remote control and zap'm for being slackers.
Many recent Lego products lack complexity and imagination
When I was a small kid there were 3 kinds of legos: ordinary legos, technics (more special cubes and moving parts), and big cubes for the smaller children. I visited a toy shop a couple of weeks ago, and when I came to the lego department I saw 200 (number exaggerated for dramatisation) spin-offs including the movie spin-offs, etc. Lego had a good product, branched out trying to reach "new audiences" (read: make more profit) and in the end destroyed a succesfull toy by making too many variations.
Oh sure, when I was a kid there were a few spin-offs like medeaval castles or some space-like setting, but never the blatant "hop along the latest hype so we can make more cash"-type of thing. Parents aren't much inclined to fork over 75€ for small Harry Potter lego-set when the 50€ Harry Potter videogame makes their child equally happy.
A lot of discussion has gone into this at my workplace, because as it turns out, most geeks have at some point owned legos. The general concensus is that most kids are more interested in video games than lego anyway. Lego takes more effort to play with (construct it yourself) than the average video game. I'm 26 and played with legos between ages 6 and 12. Most kids aged between 8 and 12 have computers (or consoles), and who wants to play with bricks if you've got a whole assortment of games at your disposal?
They are also much more expensive than I remember.
Legos never were really that cheap, but it was a toy that lasted years instead of the couple of days it takes to finish or get bored with a video game. When I have kids I'll keep that in mind, if lego is still around by then.
Nintendo's claim could be that SG was using "Metroid", "Zelda" etc within the meta tags for the page, or perhaps more extensive terms like "Zelda: Wind Waker" "Metroid video game" and so forth [snip] Is that legal? It's a business practice.
Where I live we have a trade law that explicitly forbids the use of someone elses name in advertising as the main subject of the advert. The law is commonly referred to as "competition falsification" (loosely translated, IANAL and legalese doesn't translate very well either). It basicly boils down to the fact that competitors can't use the name of rivaling companies to attract attention to their advert if the name of (the product of) the rivaling company is used as a means of grabbing the attention of the consumer.
For instance, if I have a linux consulting company, and would start my advertisement with "MICROSOFT SUCKS" in a giant font, and below I would use a regular font to advertise my company, that would violate this particular law. However, if I were to set my company name in the giant font, and lateron claim that my company believes microsoft sucks (or some comparative study that needn't be backed by officials claims that it does) I wouldn't get into trouble at all.
Meta tags are of course a whole other subject. Meta tags aren't used to display giant letters, but to draw traffic from search engines that harvest their data from the web. If explained correctly in court, and it can be proven that company X put those meta tags there in order to draw traffic using company Y's name, it still falls under the same law.
Usually these kind of things get settled before they reach court. Company X removes the meta tags, and two weeks later company Y appears on top of the search engine again. When they do go to court however depending on the goodwill of company X they will either receive a symbolic slap on the wrist or a hefty fine. It all depends greatly on the circumstances, and most judges are sound enough to come to the right conclusion (if properly explained what the problem is about).
In this case however, Nintendo wouldn't stand a chance (well, at least not under this particular law). Nintendo obviously isn't a competitor in the adult entertainment industry, and the page itself is a "blog" by definition. I can freely use the words "Microsoft sucks" in the meta tags of my weblog if that is my opinion and relevant to a post on my blog, and I don't see the difference with "Zelda rocks" if that is in the content of my blog.
What this basicly is, is Nintendo (pardon my french) playing "Let's see who's got the biggest dick" using their lawyers, claiming that their IP is being used to draw traffic to an adult entertainment site. The IP card gets you very far in the courts, although any judge with proper information (in this country) will most likely rule that as long as there is content on the page of a user stating likes and dislikes in a weblog the meta tags can stay since they are relevant and not a violation of IP.
You think the Valley Girl is bad? If you speak dutch you should listen to "Ome Laurus". For those of you that don't know dutch, the test sample says: "You're there, now get out so I can get to my beer".
lots of code for the kernel, modules, busybox etc. but what I want to know is, do we actually get the source code to the application itself?
Most likely not. You see, if they release the source for this program there is no incentive anymore to buy the device, and any geek with a compiler and a handheld will be able to run this without Tom Tom ever making a dollar.
I like open source software, and I am all for someone developing an open source GPS-program, but these people need to make money. The community should be happy with the fact that they actually sticked to the rules and released the patches to the software they used, unlike some companies.
We'll never get rid of closed source software, but if both open and closed source software can benefit from eachother (eg Linux & Tom Tom), I still find the product a lot cooler than some windows CE box.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think this system will be usable for piracy. Have you ever used <hat foil="tin">Freenet</hat>? Because of all the hopping though random nodes, "random" routes and encrypted traffic it's quite slow.
Take the example of the average "anonymous proxy" on the internet. After someone finds the proxy, it usually takes about 5 to 10 hours before the proxie's bandwith is completely saturated making it unusable. Even if Tor is to loadbalance all it's nodes, it's still going to be SLOW with the added encryption etc. Remember kids, using proxies that are close to you isn't anonimity but asking for problems with the law (usually why people want to use anonymous proxies is to avoid problems their employer/government could create).
Lastly, most anonymous networks are unreliable by nature. Freenet is unreliable because it drops "unpopular" keys and their content in favour of popular keys. Anonymous relays (eg mixmasters) are known to drop messages at random.
Where I live (.be), this is actually a right. If you rent something from the library (CD/DVD/books), you are free to take a copy for personaly use or fair use in studies, since the money you paid to the library also goes to the copyright holders. When you rent something at a videostore, you may only take a copy for personal use.
In neither cases are you allowed to redistribute the material (this includes lending someone your copy). The only exception is for fair use in studies if (and only if) the material comes from a library. There are restrictions on how much of material you may reuse, but these are regulated according to the different types of media.
Surprisingly enough though, when you actually BUY a product here, you are not allowed to make copies for personal use if the license doesn't allow it. The license however, has to be either on the cover of the box, the cover of the manual, or an unopened seal (like the kind on software products). If you don't agree with the license, you may return the UNUSED (this is the important part) product back according to basic consumer rights in 3 working days (or 15 working days if the sale happened by telephone, postal order or internet). If you sell your product, you MUST either destroy or donate (to the buyer) all copies you made for personal use.
I remember a case in the '90s where a parent was brought to court for copying ALL Disney videos in a videostore for his kid. The judge ruled in favour of the parent as the copies were for personal use. However, nobody has been tried here in the past couple of years for a library/videostore copying crime. Downloading material from the net however isn't actively persued here (yet), but SELLING stuff you downloaded is. You'll often find shifty people at junk sales selling pirated software, and they hardly ever get caught.
Nope, it's english.
Sounds like something from Invader Zim
Hold it right there... You're forgetting one of the most common mistakes: there/their/they're (and sadly also theyre and theire). I can't believe how many emails I've read that make my eyes bleed when I see this.
What's perhaps worst of all is that these are people who claim to be fluent in English. I don't care if you make typos or common spelling errors, and I hardly ever point them out (as it seems to annoy people instead of improving their spelling), but this is the worst kind of atrocity you can do to the english languague.
Reading that mail one last time before frantically smashing ctrl-enter (or in most cases, clicking send) should be mandatory if you're sending corporate email. But it just doesn't end with spelling or grammar really, some people don't even bother making a cohorent text. I'm often the victim of the dreaded subject-only emails, where 3 or 4 somewhat related words are supposed to a very descriptive analysis of a problem. My favourite is perhaps the just plain stupid mail. For example:
The problem isn't people losing linguistic skill because of technology, but people not having a clue in the first place. The article mentions people who use exclamation marks and ALL CAPS. The only words I tend to set in capitals (surrounded by underscores no less) are "_NEVER_" and "_ALWAYS_". This way I am sure that my correspondants read this part extra carefully because there's that one word in capitals in the middle of the text surrounded by these alien characters that really don't belong in written text.
Perhaps it could be compared to that, but here we have a law that says it's illegal to encourage people to do illegal things. If you encourage a mob to grab bricks and throw them through windows, and it can be proven that they threw bricks because you encouraged them, then you're also liable for those charges. In fact, in case of a mob you'd be held accountable for the damage the entire mob did, while individual persons under ideal circumstances will be held accountable for their damage.
Let's take this to the non-geek world, and compare this to advertising folders that get shoved down your mailbox every day. This is basicly the same thing as going to the companies that distribute those folders, and shoving their mailbox full of folders untill their hallway is full.
While it might be funny to do this, it's definatly more of a crime than shoving one folder down a mailbox that says "No commercial print".
Under the premise that it wouldn't DDoS those sites, which is a crime in most places. In theory, sites not coping with requests and slowing down is nice, in reality that's pretty tricky to do, and may well have opened up a hole for people to be held accountable for their actions.
At best this is throwing bricks at a shopwindow and saying : "It was supposed to stop when the window was about to crack".
I have no love for spammers, but Lycos is playing a risky game. DoS attacks are still punished more severely than spam.
ISPs have to earn money too. They don't care unless the backbone's full or they're not getting paid. Most colocated services in Europe have prices that include a complete rack and x MBit. If you need more, just call them, and within half a day you're up x MBit, no questions asked. Hey, it's your IP range. If it gets RBLed, they don't really care.
Hey, I like the idea of punishing spammers, but Lycos is playing a game that's very dangerous. They're doing DOS-attacks (by proxy) on servers, and where I live that's actually a crime. While sending lots of unwanted e-mail will get you a slap on the wrist, DOS'ing a machine without written consent actually gets you jailtime. Where is the liability here when someone installs this screensaver? Is the end-user responsible for the DOS, or is Lycos responsible?
Another point on this is that this only brings more traffic to the Internet. I know, what's a few measily packets when people are leeching torrents like mad, but still. While this effectively disables spammers for a while, remember that you can't fight fire with fire (or SYN with SYN in this case).
And what about machines that accidentally get on the list of machines to be abused? Hey, I know that in theory only bad guys get on the list, but I've had enough customers actually get on an RBL while they don't spam.
This is dangerous ground we're walking here, and sooner or later someone is going to call their lawyer. The ISP that provides internet access for the spammer perhaps, or perhaps even the spammer who knows that where he lives sending spam is nothing compared to DOS.
Elaborate please... I can understand that they might sell e-mail adresses to spammers, but actually cooperate and provide them with bandwidth and home user IP's (good thing those are mostly RBL'ed) is a while other matter. Do you have any proof for this? Or at least a tin-foil hat webpage?
Say hello to open relays, anonymous (unusable) proxies and what else... Look, I'm not going to argue with you that most mail coming from China isn't chinese, but this hardly explains the connection between MSN and spammers other than the possibility of them selling the addresses. If MSN was keen enough on spamming, don't you think they'd provide the spammers with means easier than dynamic home IPs?
What I've learnt about governments is that most of them don't have the technical understanding to see the fundamental problem, and they have no inclination or time to learn to understand the kind of problems that arise.
Yes, governments have advisors, and they still have to translate techbabble to laymans terms. Those laymans terms get turned into law-speak, and somewhere along the way an idea to punish someone becomes a loophole, either because there is an error in translation or there is political intrest in letting the problem exist.
They make those on assembly lines? I thought those were made the traditional way.
The idea here is that they can cut the price down on 100.000 units in manufacturing and shipping. Imagine for a second that they need to make one. The cost to make it would be 70$. This is so high because they need to fire up ye olde machines to press the cases, print the boards, the people that do the manual stuff, etc. Now, shipping one unit to one person costs 40$.
However, if they make 100.000. The cost to make it drops to 20$. All those machines are already running, the staff is already there. The shipping is in bulk container, so it probably costs 10.000$ to ship the lot.
Oh yes, they could make 100.000 units and sell them seperatly as orders come in, but they run the risk of having 90.000 units in stock they can't get rid of, which makes it a very unlucrative business.
So, yes, you're going to have to sell these in bulk as a manufacturer if you want to have some profit. And that's what motivates everyone who's doing business.
Well, performance of Vias is less than your average intel or AMD. I've played with a couple of Via based machines, and to be honest they're good enough for cheap low-end desktop solutions, but don't start doing things that need power. You can run the average webbrowser, wordprocessor and mailclient on it, but don't expect things to be fast. But hey, they're 100$.
These things are ideal for PXE booting kiosk PCs. Schools, libraries, etc can be greatly helped with cheap solutions like these.
Down to the facts, I've used some Vias to encode some DVDs to divx format and it takes a looooooong time. Most likely due to the fact that the CPU misses some extensions that Intel and AMD provide.
Conclusion: don't build your 1337 gaming boxes on these things. It won't work.
That's because your ISP doesn't update their information. I've had this very same problem with a local ISP and a customer of ours that explicitly told his ISP that he wanted to host a mailserver. First of they "forgot" to open port 25 (as by default it's closed on inbound connections), then they "forgot" to update their lists.
It took them 3 weeks to update that list, and add another one for the RBLs to catch up. In the meantime our customer was helped by relaying his mail over our mailservers. Of course, this is a problem for any small to medium business that decides to run their own mailserver with ISPs that really don't do what they're being paid to do.
As it should be. What the hell are you doing relaying mail from a dynamic IP anyway? I know, it's everyone's right to set up a mailserver, but with the problems of virii setting up their own SMTP servers, spammers commanding armies of drone-workstations, and whatever they may think of in the future this is a measure that warrants the inconvenience. If you'd like to run an SMTP server, talk to your provider to get into a range that's not 100% dynamic IP address and hasn't been labeled as such. They'll charge you more, that's true, but you'll be free to send mail as much as you wish. If you don't want to pay more, relay your mail over your ISPs mailserver.
Hell, invent a system that allows you to download and share TV WITHOUT the ads legally where the actual creators of the show get a bigger cut instead of the middleman (the ones making the boxes), and I'd jump on it.
I bought (starting jan 2004), 12 boxes of series, somewhere between 30 and 40 movies, and then I'm not even counting the cheap ones (the ones you pick up in some store between 3 and 10 €). I bought a single season of farscape, until I noticed that they had put ADVERTISEMENT on the DVDs. You know, if you add them as trailers, I won't nag, but if they FORCE you to watch ads on stuff you actually pay for I don't buy that crap anymore.
Hell, everyone reading slashdot knows how bittorrent works, and 99% of us have used it for Evil. Except for perhaps students, most of us would be willing to pay for quality shows if we got DVD quality at good prices. Boxes are usually priced pretty well, unless it's a money hungry franchise drawing it's dying breath (*cough* Star Trek *cough*), and make up the largest part (counting discs, not packages) of my collection.
Will I ever buy the 23 seasons of Friends? Nope. Will I/Have I downloaded them? Nope, not even "for a friend". Yes, leeching this stuff is stealing, but if I hadn't downloaded it first, I most likely wouldn't have seen it anyway.
The movie industry is so keen on stopping piracy that they've actually hindered themselves more in this direction than they have helped their cause. DVD Zones stand in the way of promoting their shows across continents. So now we buy DVD players that can be put in region free modes. Copyright protection schemes like CSS have failed miserably and hindered a free and open adoption of DVD movies in free operating systems.
Because some people are overzaelous in their free software speeches to the masses. Linux users have a bad rep for a few bad elements.
Everyone should use what they want to use (at home at least). You like MacOS? Be my guest. Windows? Go right ahead. Linux? Hell yeah! People should be encouraged to try and use open source software, not forced. If people don't have the time to learn new things, let them use whatever they want.
Please, end-users, stop having this elitist feeling because you're running linux. If apps and distros want to dumb down their applications to increase the amount of users, let them. A good example is perhaps lprng versus cups. Cups is easy to setup and use, lprng is not that easy to setup and use. If normal users can setup their printservers using an easy tool, and power users can set it up with their favourite tool, who is going to complain? It's a matter of choice.
As soon as we make linux distributions easy enough for Joe Common to use, and decide that Random J. Hacker can't do things the way he wants to do them then we're in trouble. Then it's no longer a matter of choice, but a matter of locking in people to solutions that only work in 80% of all cases.
Well, this was fun to read. This article is about as educated about the subject as the average donkey.
Uhm, what gave MS the edge in the 80s was cheap i386 (well, actually 8088) hardware, and a relatively cheap OS (MS-DOS). Unix servers cost an arm and a leg in those days, and many companies/people wanted a pc as cheap as possible. Buying an i386 in those days meant running DOS, and the "marketplace" standardized around MS-DOS.
Utter bull. Upgrade kernels as much as you like, it won't break software unless you change major/minor numbers perhaps. The same thing will happen to windows if you start running stuff for win2k on win'95. But this is rather a matter of features in the kernel, not compilation against the kernel.
And the big news is? This happens every couple of years, with stable versions having even minor version numbers and unstable versions having odd minor version numbers. This helps admins and users to effectively KNOW which versions are good for everyday use, and which versions are experimental and for developers.
Well, imagine a Beowulf cluster... How long have those patches existed? There's several ways to build a cluster as long as you patch your kernel.
And why on earth would they want to do that? Linux is on the right track, so why bother with an entire rewrite of good functional code with good design.
It's also focussed on multimedia (xmms, mplayer, xine), webservers (apache), mailservers (sendmail, qmail, postfix)... I'd rather have people say that open source has focussed on internet servers than stuff it needs to make an OS run and wordprocessors. This like saying that an oven is primarily being used for making toast, while actually it also bakes cake, pizza and whatever you toss inside.
I'm sorry, this kind of article belongs in the trashbin. Either the journalist doesn't know what he's writing about, or he's being paid to know nothing about the subject. One of the things that keeps suprising me in business IT journalism is the lack of knowledge these people have about the subjects they're writing about.
This loosely translates to: Since we know everytime Valve gets mentioned on slashdot, steam causes quite the controvery and the discussions about it never resolve anything, or contribute to anything, let's discuss it again and again and again...
I'm not a big fan of DRM on this level, for the reasons that in the (near) future my software might not be activated when the company goes broke. However comparing this situation to cars and carparts is like comparing apples to oranges. In 30 years from now Nissan will not stop your car from starting, but neither will Valve stop your already installed Half Life 2 from starting. In 30 years from now however, your Nissan won't get a new sparklet because that type isn't sold anymore, and most likely in 30 years from now you won't be able to play HL2.
Now, let's all step back for a second and breathe and look at the games we bought over the past 10 years. Have you recently played a 10 year old game? Were you planning on doing that? I think that the maximum lifetime for a game is 5 years AT MOST. Most don't even have a lifetime of a couple of months.
OK, so in 10 years from now, your half life 2 copy might not work anymore and you've wasted a couple of bucks. In the meantime you've played the game for about a year, downloaded a couple of mods, etc. In 10 years from now, if Valve goes belly up, most likely the activation part will have long been cracked, and if Valve is no more who is going to sue you? Vivendi? They'll be too busy protecting the copyright on their newer games by then.
Ah, speculation at best is always one of my favourite things on slashdot. First of all, we don't know the contents of the contracts signed between Vivendi and Valve. For all we know the CEO of Vivendi demanded that he be paid tribute in roast beef and nubile maidens, although it is much more likely that it contains clauses that deal with currency.
Second of all, software is usually contracted before it is finished. When Valve started playing with the idea for Half Life 2 I'm pretty sure that their CEO was having talks with Vivendi. While it's quite possible they were already developing when the contract was signed, companies usually don't start writing software before they know that it can be sold. And yes, millions of geeks would love to play half life 2, but Valve needs to think about having a publisher who will actually publish the game. While steam is nice for delivering the game online, many people want "the box". The deal with Vivendi will most likely give them extra resources to put into developing half life 2 (eg. extra cashflow pays the wages of those dozen or more programmers, artists and level designers).
Third, why would Valve want a copy protection free game in the first place? Every pirated copy of HL2 means they stand to lose money as well. Sure, there will be cracks and such, but with a system as steam they try to garantee that nobody STEALS their revenue.
Everyone that has been waiting for half life 2 knows that the release date is Tuesday Nov 16. If you buy a game before the official release date, and you know that they use an activation code you should ask yourself the question "When I get home am I going to able to play this?"
I see a lot of posts saying "Valve en Vivendi are screwing over the consumer.". Well, wait 'till tuesday evening to see if they are. Things are looking good at the moment as the boxes are on the shelves. Vivendi most likely will not want all those people who bought this game to return their boxes next week, because then they stand to lose lots of money.
Everyone should calm down before shouting "Ripoff!", and think before they pick up stuff in the store that they know isn't released officially yet.
I don't think that toys themselves are the cause of disasociation of work- and play-time, but the mentality parents give their children when it comes to toys. If you get toys that are both educational and entertaining (no, that doesn't include "Harry Potter legos") you can stimulate a child to get interested in other things.
Also, the amount of toys parents buy for their children contributes to this. I don't know a single male person my age that didn't own a Transformer, but the ones that owned dozens are the ones that are most likely to make the distinction between work time being horrendous and relaxation time the ultimate goal.
Playtime for me included also reading. Encouraging your kids to read books about things they like (or things they might like if they picked up a book every now and then) will get them interested in other things. Instead of buying the 50$ game, get a 50$ book on the working of the human body (a kids book, not an encyclopedia), or perhaps on astronomy. No, that doesn't mean every single kid needs to become a geek/nerd, but if you stimulate children to read, they'll make leaps in their education instead of small steps.
After I come home from work, I need some form of entertainment, even for a short while. I need to be able to divert my thoughts from work, or else I'll be pondering about some problem until I go to bed and wake up with the next morning. Man is not a machine designed to work all the time. I don't work in order to have a fast car, some expensive vacation, but in order to have food on my table and a place that has a roof to put that pesky table in. I enjoy my work to a certain degree, but if I can leave it in the office, you can be damned sure that I will.
Failing that, use shock collars that are controlled by remote control and zap'm for being slackers.
When I was a small kid there were 3 kinds of legos: ordinary legos, technics (more special cubes and moving parts), and big cubes for the smaller children. I visited a toy shop a couple of weeks ago, and when I came to the lego department I saw 200 (number exaggerated for dramatisation) spin-offs including the movie spin-offs, etc. Lego had a good product, branched out trying to reach "new audiences" (read: make more profit) and in the end destroyed a succesfull toy by making too many variations.
Oh sure, when I was a kid there were a few spin-offs like medeaval castles or some space-like setting, but never the blatant "hop along the latest hype so we can make more cash"-type of thing. Parents aren't much inclined to fork over 75€ for small Harry Potter lego-set when the 50€ Harry Potter videogame makes their child equally happy.
A lot of discussion has gone into this at my workplace, because as it turns out, most geeks have at some point owned legos. The general concensus is that most kids are more interested in video games than lego anyway. Lego takes more effort to play with (construct it yourself) than the average video game. I'm 26 and played with legos between ages 6 and 12. Most kids aged between 8 and 12 have computers (or consoles), and who wants to play with bricks if you've got a whole assortment of games at your disposal?
Legos never were really that cheap, but it was a toy that lasted years instead of the couple of days it takes to finish or get bored with a video game. When I have kids I'll keep that in mind, if lego is still around by then.
Where I live we have a trade law that explicitly forbids the use of someone elses name in advertising as the main subject of the advert. The law is commonly referred to as "competition falsification" (loosely translated, IANAL and legalese doesn't translate very well either). It basicly boils down to the fact that competitors can't use the name of rivaling companies to attract attention to their advert if the name of (the product of) the rivaling company is used as a means of grabbing the attention of the consumer.
For instance, if I have a linux consulting company, and would start my advertisement with "MICROSOFT SUCKS" in a giant font, and below I would use a regular font to advertise my company, that would violate this particular law. However, if I were to set my company name in the giant font, and lateron claim that my company believes microsoft sucks (or some comparative study that needn't be backed by officials claims that it does) I wouldn't get into trouble at all.
Meta tags are of course a whole other subject. Meta tags aren't used to display giant letters, but to draw traffic from search engines that harvest their data from the web. If explained correctly in court, and it can be proven that company X put those meta tags there in order to draw traffic using company Y's name, it still falls under the same law.
Usually these kind of things get settled before they reach court. Company X removes the meta tags, and two weeks later company Y appears on top of the search engine again. When they do go to court however depending on the goodwill of company X they will either receive a symbolic slap on the wrist or a hefty fine. It all depends greatly on the circumstances, and most judges are sound enough to come to the right conclusion (if properly explained what the problem is about).
In this case however, Nintendo wouldn't stand a chance (well, at least not under this particular law). Nintendo obviously isn't a competitor in the adult entertainment industry, and the page itself is a "blog" by definition. I can freely use the words "Microsoft sucks" in the meta tags of my weblog if that is my opinion and relevant to a post on my blog, and I don't see the difference with "Zelda rocks" if that is in the content of my blog.
What this basicly is, is Nintendo (pardon my french) playing "Let's see who's got the biggest dick" using their lawyers, claiming that their IP is being used to draw traffic to an adult entertainment site. The IP card gets you very far in the courts, although any judge with proper information (in this country) will most likely rule that as long as there is content on the page of a user stating likes and dislikes in a weblog the meta tags can stay since they are relevant and not a violation of IP.
Then again, IANAL.
You think the Valley Girl is bad? If you speak dutch you should listen to "Ome Laurus". For those of you that don't know dutch, the test sample says: "You're there, now get out so I can get to my beer".
Most likely not. You see, if they release the source for this program there is no incentive anymore to buy the device, and any geek with a compiler and a handheld will be able to run this without Tom Tom ever making a dollar.
I like open source software, and I am all for someone developing an open source GPS-program, but these people need to make money. The community should be happy with the fact that they actually sticked to the rules and released the patches to the software they used, unlike some companies.
We'll never get rid of closed source software, but if both open and closed source software can benefit from eachother (eg Linux & Tom Tom), I still find the product a lot cooler than some windows CE box.