Same here. It is because it is required by the US FAA of flights from other countries arriving on American soil. (Going through 2 sets of x-rays - one into the international departure area, and a separate one into United Airlines check-in bit). The difference between arriving at LA airport and back in Auckland was that in Auckland there were no part-time soldiers wandering around with itchy fingers on the trigger of M-16s...
Well, I live in New Zealand. As with most English-speaking countries, almost all our traffic is to/from the US. Until recently (a few years ago) all traffic was charged either per hour or per megabyte. (I'm old enough to remember charges per kilobyte). We now have a fairly fat pipe to CA, US (google for Southern Cross Cable), but all NZ telcos still have much higher bandwidth charges than companies in the US.
The ex-monopoly telecom (imaginatively called NZ Telecom) just brought in traffic caps to its ADSL (the ex flat-rate plan is limited to 128kbit/s) mainly because of the amount of p2p traffic that leaves the NZ networks.
And I can't believe worldcom is going to collapse just because of (albeit very large) fraud - why should some accountancy stuff affect a still sound business model? You don't need to answer that, I already know, but I still think it's stupid...
... for people who download these thinking they are downloading the "real deal". At least the studios are using technical means and not legal means to attack those who break copyright (no I won't use the "p" word). People who download songs and movies continuously only make bandwidth more expensive and/or capped for the rest of us.
I think it's kind of funny - we waited overnight to download "TPM" only to discover it was "Pearl Harbor" with the title changed.
3dfx lost it by itself...
on
The Age of Nvidia
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I used to work demoing Creative hardware, and one thing still sticks in my mind. 3dfx decided to stop "just" making chips and started making their own boards (starting with voodoo3). I think this was utter lunacy, as they had no existing retail infrastructure.
Creative and Diamond both had (and have) very large distribution networks etc, and when they were told they were getting no more 3dfx chips they both turned to Nvidia in a big hurry. And the rest is history...
I'd never heard of nvidia until that all happened!
the congressman's reply to Microsoft is unbelievable. We need politicians like that in New Zealand! (And US, Aust, Europe...).
Here's part of his rebuttal, in response to MS's claim: "4. The bill imposes the use of open source software without considering the dangers that this can bring from the point of view of security, guarantee, and possible violation of the intellectual property rights of third parties."
Questions of intellectual property fall outside the scope of this bill, since they are covered by specific other laws. The model of free software in no way implies ignorance of these laws, and in fact the great majority of free software is covered by copyright. In reality, the inclusion of this question in your observations shows your confusion in respect of the legal framework in which free software is developed. The inclusion of the intellectual property of others in works claimed as one's own is not a practice that has been noted in the free software community; whereas, unfortunately, it has been in the area of proprietry software. As an example, the condemnation by the Commercial Court of Nanterre, France, on 27th September 2001 of Microsoft Corp. to a penalty of 3 million francs in damages and interest, for violation of intellectual property (piracy, to use the unfortunate term that your firm commonly uses in its publicity).
I haven't heard about this - anyone know what they did in France for violating IP laws?
parent didn't say this, but there is a great program (comes standard with tetex/latex on linux) called pdftex (and pdflatex) that as the name suggests, makes pdf files from the raw.tex. Probably a lot easier than going from.dvi...
The product is aimed at enterprises, to provide centralised control over security. All the secure NICs in a company are managed by a central policy server, which configures them and sets up access rights. Communication with the policy server is encrypted. One policy server supports up to 1000 NICs.
Sounds like it's using some proprietry protocols. Also, the network card will not work if plugged into a different switch. You'd better trust 3com a lot if you use this stuff.
because the view of the USPTO (which gets funding based on the number of patents granted) is that it is better for a U.S. company to have a dodgy patent than a company from some scummy foreign country, where it might be used to harm U.S. commerce.
But also because qualified people who could examine technical patents make far much more in the private sector. Then again, I wonder how qualified you have to be to understand the above patent...
Fuck you. Fuck you and your sig. But especially your sig. Thank god I realised immediately what was happening and managed to get to a virtual console and runlevel 6 while I could... and I'm not exactly a novice either...
You missed his point re IP addresses. Xtra tells DSL customers that JetStart (the budget DSL) has to use dynamic IPs because they are running out of IPs. Of course, this is so that you have to pay more if you want a static IP. Telecom also forces other DSL providers to not provide static IPs on the JetStart service.
I'm not even an American, and I know this one... they don't want ALL spam. They only want spam that is in some way fradulent or illegal - eg pyramid schemes.
I'd prefer it to drop a few frames here and there than drop whole scenes.
I noticed this scene-dropping one day on a re-run of "the simpsons"... some scenes had been removed - it was quite noticeable (and irritating).
In New Zealand, at least, it turned out to be a contractual obligation - the tapes the TV station receives for re-runs have some scenes cut out as supplied by whoever ones the rights to Simpsons (Fox I believe). I don't know whether it is for more ads, or to make re-runs less exciting than originals.
I know that TV stations cut scenes out of movies. I'll never forgive one of our stations for cutting a scene out of the Labyrinth, where the little worms says "Cor! If she had've gone that way, she would have gone straight to the castle!". It is like a 2 second scene...
Or you could just cut off your thumbs and flush them down the toilet when you see the Gest^H^H^H^Hpolice coming. Poof! No password!
But how do you cut off the second one after doing the first one? And how do you pick them up afterwards????
I noticed some replies saying the SMP and APM are not trivial features, but I'd just like to add the following, as I actually tried it (obviously without thinking about it).
I built APM as a module, in the hope that I wouldn't have to re-compile the whole kernel to get it supported. Now, this seems quite obvious (once you know it). APM (or APCI) is required if you want the machine to power itself off. This is the last step that happens, after all the processes are killed, etc. This also includes unmounting filesystems. After all the filesystems are unmounted, you can't access any modules.
Come to think of that, maybe they shouldn't allow APM to be built as a module. (Although obviously shutdown isn't the only use of APM!)
I don't think running diff on the binaries would work, because listing the functions in a different order within the source code would make the binaries look completely different.
As others have mentioned, using a parse tree to look at the underlying structure of the logic is a better way of checking programs for copying.
Being from New Zealand, I don't think you can generalise with statements like "restrictive domestic laws of other countries".
U.S. courts claim jurisdiction over many things that occur outside the states, and many US federal laws cover things that occur outside US boundaries - eg illegal to bribe overseas officials, even if you do it from outside U.S. territory.
Here's something to think about. In many western countries, the age of consent is 16. In the Australian territory of Northern Territory, it is (or was) 12. (!!??!) By US definition, this is child pornography.
Also, remember that under the WIPO treaties, large (and not-so-large) US companies have lots of power over companies in other countries regarding trademarks and copyrights, and I would say that these powers are often abused. Of course, this happens for non-US companies too, it's just that there are so many more large US ones.
As patents are covered by these treaties, the US seems to be of the opinion "it is good for the US economy if US companies hold many patents that would otherwise go to non-US companies".
I'm not saying what is right or wrong, and I don't want this post to look anti-US, just add a bit of balance. Eg the N.Z. government, under some pressure from U.S. government, is reviewing it's copyright laws to move them into line regarding copyright of digital materials.
So I guess my point is that U.S. laws are being effected in other countries as well. I don't think U.S. yahoo should be subject to French laws, but if they had a French office then a French magistrate could argue that they were operating in France. U.S. judges do this stuff too.
At the recent ISMIR conference in Indiana, I saw a demonstration of a very similar thing from the Franhoffer (sp) people - it was pretty cool. Just to clarify some of the questions posed by above comments:
1) No tampering is done to the audio - ie there is no watermark, it is "just" signal processing.
2) The system I saw could take any 3 or 4 seconds, so that means that a fingerprint was calculated over the whole song. This means they must have some clever algorithms to make sure that the hash is calculated using the same time slices (or something...)
3) The song has to be in the database. So that means that the fingerprint has already been calculated, and probably had metadata assigned to it either by hand or using mp3 id3 tags (this is a guess). The fingerprint size is about 16KB per song, which seems pretty reasonable.
4) The technique only works on a per-recording basis, so even the same performer doing a slightly different version or another recording won't match if that recording was not already fingerprinted.
5) The version I saw was standard PC software, using audio input through the microphone.
My suspicion is that this technology is more likely to be of value to copyright holders looking to automatically identify violations (eg public airings, radio stations not paying royalties) than it will be useful to joe sixpack (or even people like us...)
I have a hard time looking at MAPS vs. the spammers as us agsinst them anymore. For me this has turned into one of those moral dilemas wherein the actions taken by maps are nearly as deplorable as those they are attempting to defeat.
This is (was...) my feeling on the old ORBS service that was based here in New Zealand. It shut down because two of the biggest ISPs in the country got court orders against it. Telecom, the ex-state monopoly, and ORBS didn't get on. Remember when everyone thought above.net was blackholing ORBS? It was Telecom "accidentally" listing BGP routes with low cost and then discarding the packets. And the guy running ORBS had a personal financial dispute with Telecom, and said something along the lines of <paraphrase>an attack on me is an attack on the ORBS service</paraphrase> and blackholed them for that!!!
Anyway, now that MAPS is the incumbent, they want to make it a subscription-based service. As the parent comment says, the aims are laudable, but the methods are not. Eg, blackholing ALL IP traffic to a site based on spam email.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you even try that link?
www.linuxbios.org redirects to http://www.acl.lanl.gov/linuxbios/index.html, which cannot be resolved...
Same here. It is because it is required by the US FAA of flights from other countries arriving on American soil. (Going through 2 sets of x-rays - one into the international departure area, and a separate one into United Airlines check-in bit). The difference between arriving at LA airport and back in Auckland was that in Auckland there were no part-time soldiers wandering around with itchy fingers on the trigger of M-16s...
... what do you think we have all those sheep for?
(You Aussies are not allowed to answer this question!).
Well,
I live in New Zealand. As with most English-speaking countries, almost all our traffic is to/from the US. Until recently (a few years ago) all traffic was charged either per hour or per megabyte. (I'm old enough to remember charges per kilobyte). We now have a fairly fat pipe to CA, US (google for Southern Cross Cable), but all NZ telcos still have much higher bandwidth charges than companies in the US.
The ex-monopoly telecom (imaginatively called NZ Telecom) just brought in traffic caps to its ADSL (the ex flat-rate plan is limited to 128kbit/s) mainly because of the amount of p2p traffic that leaves the NZ networks.
And I can't believe worldcom is going to collapse just because of (albeit very large) fraud - why should some accountancy stuff affect a still sound business model? You don't need to answer that, I already know, but I still think it's stupid...
... for people who download these thinking they are downloading the "real deal". At least the studios are using technical means and not legal means to attack those who break copyright (no I won't use the "p" word).
People who download songs and movies continuously only make bandwidth more expensive and/or capped for the rest of us.
I think it's kind of funny - we waited overnight to download "TPM" only to discover it was "Pearl Harbor" with the title changed.
I used to work demoing Creative hardware, and one thing still sticks in my mind. 3dfx decided to stop "just" making chips and started making their own boards (starting with voodoo3). I think this was utter lunacy, as they had no existing retail infrastructure.
Creative and Diamond both had (and have) very large distribution networks etc, and when they were told they were getting no more 3dfx chips they both turned to Nvidia in a big hurry. And the rest is history...
I'd never heard of nvidia until that all happened!
Very interesting... I was on holiday at that time, and wasn't reading slashdot :)
Sounds like MS (or their subsidiary) could have cleared it up out-of-court for relatively little.
parent didn't say this, but there is a great program (comes standard with tetex/latex on linux) called pdftex (and pdflatex) that as the name suggests, makes pdf files from the raw .tex. Probably a lot easier than going from .dvi...
Sounds like it's using some proprietry protocols. Also, the network card will not work if plugged into a different switch. You'd better trust 3com a lot if you use this stuff.
Uh, isn't the speed of sound about 300-330 metres per second? Depends what he means by slightly...
because the view of the USPTO (which gets funding based on the number of patents granted) is that it is better for a U.S. company to have a dodgy patent than a company from some scummy foreign country, where it might be used to harm U.S. commerce.
But also because qualified people who could examine technical patents make far much more in the private sector. Then again, I wonder how qualified you have to be to understand the above patent...
Fuck you. Fuck you and your sig. But especially your sig. Thank god I realised immediately what was happening and managed to get to a virtual console and runlevel 6 while I could... and I'm not exactly a novice either...
I fart in your general direction...You missed his point re IP addresses. Xtra tells DSL customers that JetStart (the budget DSL) has to use dynamic IPs because they are running out of IPs. Of course, this is so that you have to pay more if you want a static IP. Telecom also forces other DSL providers to not provide static IPs on the JetStart service.
I'm not even an American, and I know this one... they don't want ALL spam. They only want spam that is in some way fradulent or illegal - eg pyramid schemes.
I know that TV stations cut scenes out of movies. I'll never forgive one of our stations for cutting a scene out of the Labyrinth, where the little worms says "Cor! If she had've gone that way, she would have gone straight to the castle!". It is like a 2 second scene...
Or you could just cut off your thumbs and flush them down the toilet when you see the Gest^H^H^H^Hpolice coming. Poof! No password! But how do you cut off the second one after doing the first one? And how do you pick them up afterwards????
I noticed some replies saying the SMP and APM are not trivial features, but I'd just like to add the following, as I actually tried it (obviously without thinking about it).
I built APM as a module, in the hope that I wouldn't have to re-compile the whole kernel to get it supported. Now, this seems quite obvious (once you know it). APM (or APCI) is required if you want the machine to power itself off. This is the last step that happens, after all the processes are killed, etc. This also includes unmounting filesystems. After all the filesystems are unmounted, you can't access any modules.
Come to think of that, maybe they shouldn't allow APM to be built as a module. (Although obviously shutdown isn't the only use of APM!)
I don't think running diff on the binaries would work, because listing the functions in a different order within the source code would make the binaries look completely different.
As others have mentioned, using a parse tree to look at the underlying structure of the logic is a better way of checking programs for copying.
U.S. courts claim jurisdiction over many things that occur outside the states, and many US federal laws cover things that occur outside US boundaries - eg illegal to bribe overseas officials, even if you do it from outside U.S. territory.
Here's something to think about. In many western countries, the age of consent is 16. In the Australian territory of Northern Territory, it is (or was) 12. (!!??!) By US definition, this is child pornography.
Also, remember that under the WIPO treaties, large (and not-so-large) US companies have lots of power over companies in other countries regarding trademarks and copyrights, and I would say that these powers are often abused. Of course, this happens for non-US companies too, it's just that there are so many more large US ones. As patents are covered by these treaties, the US seems to be of the opinion "it is good for the US economy if US companies hold many patents that would otherwise go to non-US companies".
I'm not saying what is right or wrong, and I don't want this post to look anti-US, just add a bit of balance. Eg the N.Z. government, under some pressure from U.S. government, is reviewing it's copyright laws to move them into line regarding copyright of digital materials.
So I guess my point is that U.S. laws are being effected in other countries as well. I don't think U.S. yahoo should be subject to French laws, but if they had a French office then a French magistrate could argue that they were operating in France. U.S. judges do this stuff too.
--
At the recent ISMIR conference in Indiana, I saw a demonstration of a very similar thing from the Franhoffer (sp) people - it was pretty cool. Just to clarify some of the questions posed by above comments:
1) No tampering is done to the audio - ie there is no watermark, it is "just" signal processing.
2) The system I saw could take any 3 or 4 seconds, so that means that a fingerprint was calculated over the whole song. This means they must have some clever algorithms to make sure that the hash is calculated using the same time slices (or something...)
3) The song has to be in the database. So that means that the fingerprint has already been calculated, and probably had metadata assigned to it either by hand or using mp3 id3 tags (this is a guess). The fingerprint size is about 16KB per song, which seems pretty reasonable.
4) The technique only works on a per-recording basis, so even the same performer doing a slightly different version or another recording won't match if that recording was not already fingerprinted.
5) The version I saw was standard PC software, using audio input through the microphone.
My suspicion is that this technology is more likely to be of value to copyright holders looking to automatically identify violations (eg public airings, radio stations not paying royalties) than it will be useful to joe sixpack (or even people like us...)
It has been very humid recently - our freezer also has heaps of build-up.
I wonder if he's any relation to the guy who made the jet-powered beer-cooler?
That's easy to solve. type "apt-get install gzip"
reminds me of someone's sig I've seen....
'I hope when I'm gone, people will remember me and say: "I wonder where Kinko got the plutonium from?"'
--
This is (was...) my feeling on the old ORBS service that was based here in New Zealand. It shut down because two of the biggest ISPs in the country got court orders against it. Telecom, the ex-state monopoly, and ORBS didn't get on. Remember when everyone thought above.net was blackholing ORBS? It was Telecom "accidentally" listing BGP routes with low cost and then discarding the packets. And the guy running ORBS had a personal financial dispute with Telecom, and said something along the lines of <paraphrase>an attack on me is an attack on the ORBS service</paraphrase> and blackholed them for that!!!
Anyway, now that MAPS is the incumbent, they want to make it a subscription-based service. As the parent comment says, the aims are laudable, but the methods are not. Eg, blackholing ALL IP traffic to a site based on spam email.