Some geek will buy one for $10, take it apart and discover how to,
among other things, extract the pictures. This information will go onto his website.
Lots of other geeks will buy the cameras, use the hack to extract
the pictures and treat them as cheap non-disposable digital cameras.
It will turn out that the cameras are actually a loss-leader.
Lawyers, DMCA threats, vilification, fire, brimstone,
cancellation of the product.
The thing is, it's pretty simple to get around this scenario.
Simply:
Sell the cameras themselves (with cables and software) as a
retail product and at a fair price (i.e. one that makes a modest
profit) and offer the same services (prints and PhotoCDs) for a fee.
Require a deposit on the "disposable" version that the customer
gets back when they return the camera for picture processing such that
the deposit plus initial price together cover the camera's replacement
cost.
This assumes that the cost of the retail version is around the
same as the cost of a "disposable" plus deposit plus cost of cables and
that the deposit is still low enough that it's not a big deal to lose
the camera.
If it isn't, this enterprise looks pretty doomed to me.
Re:Take that, Christian Right
on
Saving the Net
·
· Score: 1
Don't arbitrarily lump Christians in with the conservatives, that's
stereotyping. Open mind - good; stereotyping - bad.
Sheesh! You make one joke, and everyone leaps down your throat.
(Well, okay, it wasn't so much of a joke as a humourous exaggeration,
but still.)
In any case, to clarify: I'm not referring to Christians. I'm
referring to that political/cultural movement known (typically by
outsiders) as "The Christian Right" or "The Religious Right". This is
a conglomeration of Christianity and conservative values.
Political conservatives like this because it gives them access to
the Christian vote and it lets them propagate their agenda outside of
political campaigns through the use of TV and radio preachers (thus
side-stepping campaign funding laws.) Christians tend to go for this
because quite a lot of them don't know the Bible all that well and in
any case, they'll vote for someone who says he's a Christian because
that means he's on the side of good, right?
So, as a Christian of a non-right-wing leaning who occasionally
gets into political discussions with other Christians of a more Conservative persuasion, I find it
ironic and slightly satisfying that Conservative thought more closely
resembles Satanist doctrine than Christian.
Kill them. Kill them a lot. Kill them slowly and painfully with a death by 1000 lawyers. Drain their monetary life's blood a dollar at a time in such a way that they
see it going and know they can't get it back.
Three words: minor shareholders' lawsuit.
This is where the minority shareholders sue the company for loss of earnings due to poor management practices. I'm thinking that pissing off the entire computer-using world might coung as such.
Also, I wonder if such a suit might even include the Canopy Group?
Take that, Christian Right
on
Saving the Net
·
· Score: 1
As George Lakoff explained in Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't (University of Chicago, 1995), conservatives consider strength a "moral value". Strong is good. Weak is bad.
And if you want to really piss off a conservative, you can then point out that this idea--Strong good, weak bad--is Satanist dogma.
On the other hand, the reverse--Strong Bad--answers his email in a really funny manner.
That's only once or twice, because there just isn't that much legally distributable
material that can reach the required "critical mass" for BitTorrent to be effective and necessary.
So who wants to hack apt-get to use BitTorrent? Really, for something like the Debian project where the bandwidth has to be paid for by volunteers, this would be perfect.
Buying a PC is very much like finding a mechanic. Unless you know cars or know the mechanic's reputation, you're gambling.
There are very good whitebox makers out there, and there are swindlers who'll sell you any old piece of junk for $50 less than the price of a good system. You have to find the honest and competent dealers to get a good system. That or you need to spec the components down to the model numbers and insist that the shop use those parts or you won't buy it.
(I used to suggest to friends that they get a name-brand system such as Compaq or Dell because you'd at least get a minimum of quality, but I've heard enough complaints about them that I don't know if that's true anymore.)
My last two PCs were whitebox systems and they've both been pretty trouble-free, but each time, I asked around for the name of a reputable dealer first.
Students should be learning with a command line. No GUI apps to start. Learn from the ground up. Otherwise you'll be able to
do things, but not necessarily understand them.
The problem is not with GUI-based languages; it's with tools that hide their inner workings from you. VB is like that but so is VC and MFC.
Smalltalk, on the other hand, is also purely GUI-based but it's also completely transparent. The entire system--including the GUI (usually)--is written in Smalltalk and you can browse it and modify it just like any other part of the system.
(A good open-source Smalltalk system is Squeak if you're interested.)
I get the impression from looking at M$-ware that they have divided the world into rulers and peons with their developers in the ruling class and the customers as the peons. When this extends into their development tools it's either "this is too hard for you to understand" (in the case of VB and the like) or "you don't need to know this--just read the API documentation" for VC. Whether or not a GUI is involved is relevant only in that MS seems to be trying to get rid of the CLI.
If I were teaching a programming course, I would avoid MS tools (and those that try to emulate them) like the plague.
Especially as we have 80 lines of identical code including comments which is the real kicker.
IIRC, they weren't identical, just very similar. Given that the person who reported this is not a programmer, I wouldn't be surprised if the similarities in the comments were along the lines of the phrases "signal handler", "process', "page fault" and so on--stuff that's ordinary CS terminology.
Alternately, they were things defined in POSIX with comments taken from the description in the standard. The set of signal numbers comes right to mind.
I have the SCO and Linux versions of these side by side right now and they're pretty similar. The comments are slightly different (the GNU version cites the origin while SCO does not) but I can see how an unschooled reviewer could consider them similar. I wouldn't be surprised if the offending code came from there, stdio.h or one of the other standard parts of the system.
Re:SCO still packs a punch?
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 1
The only unfortunate part is that this would reward the people who did this.
Well, if Perens is right, the real villain is the VC group that funded Caldera and apparently has been micromanaging them forever. So why don't the minor shareholders sue them for mismanaging the company? Not only is it their fault and not only do they deserve it, but they've got deep pockets too.
(Personally, I think shareholder lawsuits are a flaw of the legal system, but I'm willing to make an exception in this case.)
but MSNBC reported (I
think Joe Scarborough did it) that no Newscorp/Rupert Murdock station would accept a PAID ADVERTISEMENT that was against this deregulation.
This surprised me not at all.
A few years back, when Murdoch was a Canadian citizen, he tried to get British Peerage, which is illegal for Canadians and so was blocked by the Prime Minister. This did not please Murdoch and so the issue became front-page news on the National Post, the Canadian national newspaper he'd founded not long before. That's right--he used his newspaper chain as a venue for a temper tantrum. (IIRC, Murdoch eventually gave up Canadian citizenship so he could get his lordship. Good riddance, I say.)
More seriously, he also ordered all of his papers to run editorials opposing a particular major land-claim settlement with various First Nations groups.
And then, there was the town that got so pissed off at him that they started their own local newspaper.
Anyway, y'all had best start investing in printing presses and broadcast licenses. The only way you'll get decent media now is if you make it yourselves.
I think the truth is just that Microsoft intends to integrate DRM very tightly with their OS and browser, and they're aren't going to try to backport that to, say, Win98...
No, see, it's just that Microsoft wants people to buy new copies of Windows. This change means that you won't be able to get the most recent IE without upgrading. It's simple short-term greed.
BTW, with this move, there's a window of opportunity for Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror et.al. For the next two years or so--until Longhorn is widely adopted--the MS web standard won't change. Web designers will have to stay compatible with this release of IE if they want to keep the majority of their audience. This means that any reasonably up-to-date browser will soon also be compatible with the majority of websites so competition will be based on the quality of software, not whether it will work on a particular website.
AOL, and not Nullsoft, probably owns the rights to WASTE, and
so only AOL can release the software under the GPL.
Actually, the copyright message (at least in one source file) says
Copyright Nullsoft. As long as whoever authorized the release of WASTE
at Nullsoft had the authority to do so, it's out and there's nothing
AOL can legally do about it. Remember--exactly the same thing
happened with Gnutella and I never heard of anyone getting fired over
it.
My paranoid conspiracy theory is that AOL wants this
technology to be out there because it creates demand for high-speed
networks. Only, they don't want to get sued by (the rest of)
Hollywood so they make it look like an accident.
Nullsoft does the GPL'd dirty work, everyone downloads the source
code and then AOL slaps them on the wrist. If they get sued, they can
argue that they followed best practices for those circumstances.
The question I kept asking myself as I read the article was, "What's so hard about just tarring, gzipping and burning each month's mail spool to CD-ROM?"
3000 resumes a month isn't likely to fill even one CD.
I suspect that this article is actually a complaint about those pesky equal-opportunity employment regulations.
This is just FUD. They're trying to pollute the entire Linux market so that one of the successful vendors will buy them out just to shut them up.
I mean, this bit pretty much gives it away:
Similar to analogous efforts underway in the music industry, we are
prepared to take all actions necessary to stop the ongoing violation
of our intellectual property or other rights.
If that's not the corporate equivalent of twirling your moustache and laughing evilly, I don't know what is.
They laughed at me at the academy
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 0, Funny
You may scoff at my robots now, MARVIN MINSKY, but you will not be laughing so loudly when you see my legions of GIANT ROBOT SOLDIERS. They will CRUSH you in their GIANT METAL CLAWS and issue metallic LAUGHTER as you beg for mercy.
If they scare enough of their current customers into thinking that Linux has intellectual property problems then they might retain some key accounts for another round of upgrades.
Almost, but not quite. What they're really trying to do is get bought out while their stock is still worth something. They're hoping that this lawsuit will do so much damage to Linux sales that somebody will buy them just to shut 'em up.
There's an incorrect assumption implicit in the question of why people write OSS, which is that writing software is somehow a terrible labour. Most of us got into programming because we enjoy it. Contributing to an OSS project is no skin off my nose.
I write OSS for all sorts of reasons, depending on what the project is. It's not so hard or so much effort that I need to review my priorities before starting.
License changes aren't required
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
The only difference between bullet-proof personal privacy protection and Orwellian DRM measures is who has the private key. And if you have the source code (and the GPL requires that you can get it), you can always set your own private key.
DRM is about taking away the user's control of their computer. The GPL is about making sure that the user has full control of their computer.
Linux, because it's system software under the GPL, is already anti-DRM.
Set your prices low enough that it's cheaper to roll over than to defend against an infringement suit.
It's cheaper in the short-term to just give in to these assholes, but if everyone always fought every garbage patent, it would put them out of business.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's how it's going to go:
The thing is, it's pretty simple to get around this scenario. Simply:
This assumes that the cost of the retail version is around the same as the cost of a "disposable" plus deposit plus cost of cables and that the deposit is still low enough that it's not a big deal to lose the camera.
If it isn't, this enterprise looks pretty doomed to me.
Sheesh! You make one joke, and everyone leaps down your throat. (Well, okay, it wasn't so much of a joke as a humourous exaggeration, but still.)
In any case, to clarify: I'm not referring to Christians. I'm referring to that political/cultural movement known (typically by outsiders) as "The Christian Right" or "The Religious Right". This is a conglomeration of Christianity and conservative values.
Political conservatives like this because it gives them access to the Christian vote and it lets them propagate their agenda outside of political campaigns through the use of TV and radio preachers (thus side-stepping campaign funding laws.) Christians tend to go for this because quite a lot of them don't know the Bible all that well and in any case, they'll vote for someone who says he's a Christian because that means he's on the side of good, right?
So, as a Christian of a non-right-wing leaning who occasionally gets into political discussions with other Christians of a more Conservative persuasion, I find it ironic and slightly satisfying that Conservative thought more closely resembles Satanist doctrine than Christian.
Three words: minor shareholders' lawsuit.
This is where the minority shareholders sue the company for loss of earnings due to poor management practices. I'm thinking that pissing off the entire computer-using world might coung as such.
Also, I wonder if such a suit might even include the Canopy Group?
As George Lakoff explained in Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't (University of Chicago, 1995), conservatives consider strength a "moral value". Strong is good. Weak is bad.
And if you want to really piss off a conservative, you can then point out that this idea--Strong good, weak bad--is Satanist dogma.
On the other hand, the reverse--Strong Bad--answers his email in a really funny manner.
Also,
You don't need to agree with Stallman's preamble to find the license terms useful.
So who wants to hack apt-get to use BitTorrent? Really, for something like the Debian project where the bandwidth has to be paid for by volunteers, this would be perfect.
I must now refer you to the ageless wisdom of James "Kibo" Parry on this subject:
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA IS ABOUT BREAST CANCER
Really! Just google for "Battlestar Galactica" and "breast cancer".
Buying a PC is very much like finding a mechanic. Unless you know cars or know the mechanic's reputation, you're gambling.
There are very good whitebox makers out there, and there are swindlers who'll sell you any old piece of junk for $50 less than the price of a good system. You have to find the honest and competent dealers to get a good system. That or you need to spec the components down to the model numbers and insist that the shop use those parts or you won't buy it.
(I used to suggest to friends that they get a name-brand system such as Compaq or Dell because you'd at least get a minimum of quality, but I've heard enough complaints about them that I don't know if that's true anymore.)
My last two PCs were whitebox systems and they've both been pretty trouble-free, but each time, I asked around for the name of a reputable dealer first.
The problem is not with GUI-based languages; it's with tools that hide their inner workings from you. VB is like that but so is VC and MFC.
Smalltalk, on the other hand, is also purely GUI-based but it's also completely transparent. The entire system--including the GUI (usually)--is written in Smalltalk and you can browse it and modify it just like any other part of the system.
(A good open-source Smalltalk system is Squeak if you're interested.)
I get the impression from looking at M$-ware that they have divided the world into rulers and peons with their developers in the ruling class and the customers as the peons. When this extends into their development tools it's either "this is too hard for you to understand" (in the case of VB and the like) or "you don't need to know this--just read the API documentation" for VC. Whether or not a GUI is involved is relevant only in that MS seems to be trying to get rid of the CLI.
If I were teaching a programming course, I would avoid MS tools (and those that try to emulate them) like the plague.
IIRC, they weren't identical, just very similar. Given that the person who reported this is not a programmer, I wouldn't be surprised if the similarities in the comments were along the lines of the phrases "signal handler", "process', "page fault" and so on--stuff that's ordinary CS terminology.
Alternately, they were things defined in POSIX with comments taken from the description in the standard. The set of signal numbers comes right to mind. I have the SCO and Linux versions of these side by side right now and they're pretty similar. The comments are slightly different (the GNU version cites the origin while SCO does not) but I can see how an unschooled reviewer could consider them similar. I wouldn't be surprised if the offending code came from there, stdio.h or one of the other standard parts of the system.
Well, if Perens is right, the real villain is the VC group that funded Caldera and apparently has been micromanaging them forever. So why don't the minor shareholders sue them for mismanaging the company? Not only is it their fault and not only do they deserve it, but they've got deep pockets too.
(Personally, I think shareholder lawsuits are a flaw of the legal system, but I'm willing to make an exception in this case.)
D'oh! You're right.
My apologies to Mr. Murdoch.
For this, at least.
This surprised me not at all.
A few years back, when Murdoch was a Canadian citizen, he tried to get British Peerage, which is illegal for Canadians and so was blocked by the Prime Minister. This did not please Murdoch and so the issue became front-page news on the National Post, the Canadian national newspaper he'd founded not long before. That's right--he used his newspaper chain as a venue for a temper tantrum. (IIRC, Murdoch eventually gave up Canadian citizenship so he could get his lordship. Good riddance, I say.)
More seriously, he also ordered all of his papers to run editorials opposing a particular major land-claim settlement with various First Nations groups.
And then, there was the town that got so pissed off at him that they started their own local newspaper.
Anyway, y'all had best start investing in printing presses and broadcast licenses. The only way you'll get decent media now is if you make it yourselves.
No, see, it's just that Microsoft wants people to buy new copies of Windows. This change means that you won't be able to get the most recent IE without upgrading. It's simple short-term greed.
BTW, with this move, there's a window of opportunity for Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror et.al. For the next two years or so--until Longhorn is widely adopted--the MS web standard won't change. Web designers will have to stay compatible with this release of IE if they want to keep the majority of their audience. This means that any reasonably up-to-date browser will soon also be compatible with the majority of websites so competition will be based on the quality of software, not whether it will work on a particular website.
This might lose MS their web monopoly.
AOL, and not Nullsoft, probably owns the rights to WASTE, and so only AOL can release the software under the GPL.
Actually, the copyright message (at least in one source file) says Copyright Nullsoft. As long as whoever authorized the release of WASTE at Nullsoft had the authority to do so, it's out and there's nothing AOL can legally do about it. Remember--exactly the same thing happened with Gnutella and I never heard of anyone getting fired over it.
My paranoid conspiracy theory is that AOL wants this technology to be out there because it creates demand for high-speed networks. Only, they don't want to get sued by (the rest of) Hollywood so they make it look like an accident.
Nullsoft does the GPL'd dirty work, everyone downloads the source code and then AOL slaps them on the wrist. If they get sued, they can argue that they followed best practices for those circumstances.
The question I kept asking myself as I read the article was, "What's so hard about just tarring, gzipping and burning each month's mail spool to CD-ROM?"
3000 resumes a month isn't likely to fill even one CD.
I suspect that this article is actually a complaint about those pesky equal-opportunity employment regulations.
This is just FUD. They're trying to pollute the entire Linux market so that one of the successful vendors will buy them out just to shut them up.
I mean, this bit pretty much gives it away:
Similar to analogous efforts underway in the music industry, we are prepared to take all actions necessary to stop the ongoing violation of our intellectual property or other rights.
If that's not the corporate equivalent of twirling your moustache and laughing evilly, I don't know what is.
ALL HAIL YOUR NEW METALLIC OVERLORDS!!!11!!
Hear that?
That's the sound of the world's virus writers drooling.
Almost, but not quite. What they're really trying to do is get bought out while their stock is still worth something. They're hoping that this lawsuit will do so much damage to Linux sales that somebody will buy them just to shut 'em up.
And I'm going to completely blow the competition out of the water with my ground-breaking business plan:
I'm a genius!
I write OSS for all sorts of reasons, depending on what the project is. It's not so hard or so much effort that I need to review my priorities before starting.
The only difference between bullet-proof personal privacy protection and Orwellian DRM measures is who has the private key. And if you have the source code (and the GPL requires that you can get it), you can always set your own private key.
DRM is about taking away the user's control of their computer. The GPL is about making sure that the user has full control of their computer.
Linux, because it's system software under the GPL, is already anti-DRM.
It's cheaper in the short-term to just give in to these assholes, but if everyone always fought every garbage patent, it would put them out of business.
And that would be cheaper in the long run.
for a FAQ that explains when you need a good IP lawyer and how to find one. I'm surprised that there isn't one yet, actually.