People said the same thing about the Sklyarov case, and within days of boycottadobe.com going up Adobe was begging the government NOT to prosecute him.
File your gripes. Quickly. (800) 953-SNOW or:
Blizzard Entertainment P.O. Box 18979 Irvine, CA 92623
Go take a look at Sun's sales numbers for 2001 and Q1 2002. Given that they have X86 machines ready to hit the market in June, the chances of Sun being able to convince already reluctant buyers that Sparc systems are still worth the money are rather low, especially now that big iron is being replaced with clusters of cheap systems. Sparc may not be dead, but Sparc's future as a commodity item is dim at best.
So I'm wondering... why doesn't Apple just dump mpeg4 and spend less money support vorbis/tarkin? Developing a free, open-sourced video format would only be good for Apple, probably save Apple money, and hell, Apple is already doing Open Source work with OS X.
How about good books for very technical people who know pretty much diddly-squat about a topic, yet are not "dummies" books written for the average AOL user who doesn't know that the scroll wheel is also a middle mouse button? I constantly end up with computer books about a topic that make far too many unncessary references to semi-related stuff, and are written in a way that makes things unclear until having read the details about a topic multiple times.
A good example is O'Reilly's "Learning Python" by Lutz and Ascher. The text is good, but often gets off track with references to C, or assuming that the reader knows about object oriented programming, dragging down people new to OO coding and slowing the read. Keep the extra crap in obvious sidebars.
Also, please have the books looked over for errors and stupidity. A while back I picked up a book on Perl, in the interests of kindness I will not list the title. Many of the example Perl scripts found in the first chapters failed to execute properly, so I decided to check out the included CD which contained all the example code. Many filenames and directories on the CD included spaces; sort of moronic for a book intended for UNIX users (And yes, the examples on CD failed to execute properly, even with the supplied version of Perl that I compiled/installed.). This is not the only book I have seen like this.
As for paper/ebooks, offer the book online in PDF format at a discount, and include a copy of the book on CD-ROM with the paper copy. My favorite computer book of all time is "The UNIX System Administration Handbook." by Evi Nemeth and others. Unfortunately, it comes only in a paperback edition, and I had to start leaving my copy on the shelf above my desk because after falling in love with the book and hauling all over the place, it started falling apart. A heavy duty hardbound edition with a CDROM version supplied would have been such a better option.
Anyway, if you got this far, hope you enjoyed my $.02.
Resume spamming got me both of my last two jobs when I needed them, and it gave me something to do while I was calling people about jobs and between interviews/job fairs. It may be sleazy, but at least I can pay my rent.
Larry Ellison has stated that if Apple ever starts going under again, he will buy it just to keep the, around and piss off Bill Gates. Can someone convince him that buying Loki and making people think that "if the CEO of Oracle considers Linux gaming viable, it really must be," would truly piss off Bill Gates and Fester Ballmer?
Moments later, HP CEO Carly Fiorina announced that this technology, while superior to current current designs, is to be abandoned and sold to intel (At a loss.) during the upcoming Compaq merger.
"Will this spawn development of breakthrough products? Will this help administrators of these old system finally take control of their network?"
Yes and yes. Now developers can do just about anything with the code, and the being able to do so will allow for bettered versions of the original code to replace some of the still antiquated code out there with newer, better versions, as well as improving interoperability with those ancient programs and newer stuff.
From the Post: "AOL, which bought Netscape in 1999, wants Microsoft to cease its contested business practices and pay damages."
Netscape was already giving their Navigator/Communicator products away by the time AOL bought the company. In other words, they were not actually making any money from the product, unless you count their money losing web site that happens to be the browser's default home page, which only would have lost MORE money due to increased bandwidth costs had IE not managed to pick up so much market share.
In other words, what damages is AOL actually suing for? They knew that Netscape's position in the market had already been destroyed when they bought Netscape, and were quite aware of Microsoft's efforts to make IE king of browsers. It seems to me that AOL is really just trying to find some way to get some money from their idiotic purchase of Netscape, which they have yet to actually market to THEIR OWN USER BASE.
"What makes you think MS won't cave and build DRM into XBox2"
Who cares about Xbox2? Consoles have a lifespan of at least five years before an updated version is released, just to recoup the sales of loss-leader early hardware once the later revisions can be produced cheaply and sold at a profit, not to mention the fact that general consumers will only spend a few hundred dollars on a console every so often. This sort of technology will be going into Xbox as we know it, and it will be going in soon. DRM for television is still a few years away, and it will be a few years after that before the media companies, networks, broadcasters, FCC, and congress iron out the details, and a few years after that for the conversion to some new TV formats we keep hearing about actually happens (If it happens at all, more likely something else will come along and push the current schemes out of the way.), all the while the old frequencies will end up staying in the hands of broadcasters and not being turned over to people who might use them for something more worthwhile than the crap that ends up on American TV. Consumers who will buy PVR extensions for the Xbox will want it working immediately, that means a repeat of the whole Tivo mess.
First, the bad: Microsoft getting into everyone's living room means that as Linux and OpenOffice slowly gain market share and begin pushing M$ out of the PC marketspace, M$ is finding a new market to keep pissing us off in.
Next, the good: If Microsoft incorporates PVR technology into the Xbox, at least the big media companies will end up suing someone who can afford the lawyers to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court.
"The question you should be asking is, why is China making such a big deal out of this now, when they haven't before?"
They aren't making a big deal out of this; CNN is. This kind of thing happens all the time, little press releases pop up here and there. The only difference this time is that some asshole at CNN.com decided to make it front-page news, and other morons picked up the story from there.
AOL buying Red Hat would be so cool. IBM has already given Linux some serious credibility in the Business world; if AOL buys Linux, suddenly Linux gains credibility among millions of home users.
Everyone in the industry has already caught on that AOL no longer cares about pissing off Microsoft. XP doesn't come with AOL, Microsoft runs advertisements that insult AOL. MSN messenger (Attempts to.) compete with AIM, one of AOLs coolest marketing gimmicks. If.net and Hailstorm manage to take off, AOL's plan to stop using IE as the AOL browser could be seriously cramped. AOL is very afraid of Microsoft, and Microsoft knows it; at the same time, AOL is in a wonderful position to strike back: AOL has a brand that is almost as well recognized as Microsoft, yet unsullied by numerous mass media reports of security flaws and sleazy corporate dealings.
Promoting and distributing the OS would also be no big problem for AOL; it would just be another CD to add into the millions of free CD packs they mail out every month now. Adding a linux downloads area similar to freshmeat but for newbies would be a great promotion for their broadband efforts. A nice deal with a good OEM to sell AOL/Red Hat based PCs at a discounted rate could take this to a whole new level. If the antitrust suit ends with Microsoft having to stop OEMs from selling dual-boot systems, even better for AOL/Red Hat. A deal for AOL/Red Hat support of a few major video games (Easily done with advance planning and help from the great folks at Loki.) could push things, perhaps with Doom ]|[ or UT II hitting linux.
Personally I think that this story could be quite true. I have a few friends working 60+ hour weeks on some secret Red Hat related research and testing at AOL, and given that most of their servers run on HPUX or Solaris (And the associated hardware), it would not surprise me if this was a result of their work.
I am so hoping that this is not just a rumor. Should this come to pass, Microsoft will suddenly learn the true might of the Penguin, and little Billy Gates will have to hide behind Fester Ballmer as Microsoft faces the full fury of the free software hordes, spurred on by Steve Case.
If Adobe goes through with this, you can be assured that other companies will follow. Know what that means? Asian pirates will just start swapping and selling English-language versions, unless Asian companies can create and poularize comparable software. In the long run, this will lead to an asian technical elite that uses english more and more, as well as a great boost for english among asian college students. This will help solidfy English as the common language for international business, and put Americans in an even better position.
We need to stop the export of strong encryption. While we are at it, we should probably go ahead and prevent foreigners from CREATING strong encryption. There is no reason for Operation Infinite Justice to target all those criminal foreign programmers, especially those evil terrorist scum behind GNUPG, those foreign OpenSSH programmers, the entire development staff of OpenBSD, and probably a good dozen other groups. Hell, as long as we are at it, we should probably bomb all of Ireland and India, I hear that they have quite a few proficient programmers who could produce this stuff as well. And what about that Schneier guy? His "Applied Cryptography" is probably the number one source of information about writing crypto apps as well, we should probably kill him so that he can stop showing people how easy it is to write crypto apps with rudimentary programming skills.
Fuck it, why don't we just nuke EVERYONE else and start wearing helmets everywhere. Because, you know, we just need to be safe.
If these guys were any good at research, they would have noticed that the largest single contributor to both the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns (Not to mention plenty of other campaigns worldwide.) was Microsoft, the mother of all "... software firms that do not do enough to make their products secure." and realize that they have no hope of getting these laws passed in the US.
I want to know what happens to the lawyers who come up with this sort of crap to begin with. This is not the first time a company has done something absolutely moronic on what is seems likely to be the misguided advice of overzealous lawyers.
Does anyone know what these companies do to lawyers who come up with ideas like this? Especially lawyers dealing with digital IP, a relatively new area. Do they get fired, censured, or do companies tend to assume that since the interests of the company were really in mind, and rabid consumers did something surprising, the lawyers are not at fault?
Of course, the EU will probably create it's own EU-wide DMCA soon bought to you by the usual suspects, but that's neither here nor there."
Europe is not one country yet. Europe does not have its own continent-wide DMCA yet. The point I was trying to make is that if Europeans do not start paying some more attention to the awful shit their own leaders do, you are all eventually going to end up living in states that are just as corporatized as the US has become, and many of you don't have nearly as many constitutionally guaranteed rights to things like freedom of religion, speech, and assembly that the US does.
I am warning the Europeans: letting Johansen be indicted like this is a very, very bad thing. It starts in Norway, it will spread out across Europe and eventually your human rights will be given away to protect the profits of multinational corporations, all in the name of protecting IP rights of corporations that cooperate to scam artists out of the rights to content they created in the first place.
I say all this because over and over again I see Europeans on the internet complaining about American companies being behind all of this, and commenting about the US government as some far reaching arm of corporate power. But I rarely see Europeans complaining about their own leaders being coerced into working against them for these corporations, most of which operate in far too many countries to really be considered American (And many of the companies involved, like Sony or Virgin were never American in the first place.). Right now you all have a very good chance make some noise and get your leaders in line. Don't blow it.
Well, given that he was indicted by Norwegian authorities, at least now the European Slashdotters can stop acting so damned superior and complaining about America running this whole mess, because now we know that your leaders are sleazy coporate puppets, just like ours.
Of course, were I Norwegian I would be burning up the phone lines with calls to said leaders right now, but I don't live there, so knock yourselves out.
Slashdot Mirror
People said the same thing about the Sklyarov case, and within days of boycottadobe.com going up Adobe was begging the government NOT to prosecute him.
File your gripes. Quickly. (800) 953-SNOW or:
Blizzard Entertainment
P.O. Box 18979
Irvine, CA 92623
Go take a look at Sun's sales numbers for 2001 and Q1 2002. Given that they have X86 machines ready to hit the market in June, the chances of Sun being able to convince already reluctant buyers that Sparc systems are still worth the money are rather low, especially now that big iron is being replaced with clusters of cheap systems. Sparc may not be dead, but Sparc's future as a commodity item is dim at best.
Congratz and mad propz, Rob.
So I'm wondering... why doesn't Apple just dump mpeg4 and spend less money support vorbis/tarkin? Developing a free, open-sourced video format would only be good for Apple, probably save Apple money, and hell, Apple is already doing Open Source work with OS X.
How about good books for very technical people who know pretty much diddly-squat about a topic, yet are not "dummies" books written for the average AOL user who doesn't know that the scroll wheel is also a middle mouse button? I constantly end up with computer books about a topic that make far too many unncessary references to semi-related stuff, and are written in a way that makes things unclear until having read the details about a topic multiple times.
A good example is O'Reilly's "Learning Python" by Lutz and Ascher. The text is good, but often gets off track with references to C, or assuming that the reader knows about object oriented programming, dragging down people new to OO coding and slowing the read. Keep the extra crap in obvious sidebars.
Also, please have the books looked over for errors and stupidity. A while back I picked up a book on Perl, in the interests of kindness I will not list the title. Many of the example Perl scripts found in the first chapters failed to execute properly, so I decided to check out the included CD which contained all the example code. Many filenames and directories on the CD included spaces; sort of moronic for a book intended for UNIX users (And yes, the examples on CD failed to execute properly, even with the supplied version of Perl that I compiled/installed.). This is not the only book I have seen like this.
As for paper/ebooks, offer the book online in PDF format at a discount, and include a copy of the book on CD-ROM with the paper copy. My favorite computer book of all time is "The UNIX System Administration Handbook." by Evi Nemeth and others. Unfortunately, it comes only in a paperback edition, and I had to start leaving my copy on the shelf above my desk because after falling in love with the book and hauling all over the place, it started falling apart. A heavy duty hardbound edition with a CDROM version supplied would have been such a better option.
Anyway, if you got this far, hope you enjoyed my $.02.
Funny, they don't seem to be blocking Gaim. Interesting selectivity.
Resume spamming got me both of my last two jobs when I needed them, and it gave me something to do while I was calling people about jobs and between interviews/job fairs. It may be sleazy, but at least I can pay my rent.
Can you even build a beowulf cluster of these?
Larry Ellison has stated that if Apple ever starts going under again, he will buy it just to keep the, around and piss off Bill Gates. Can someone convince him that buying Loki and making people think that "if the CEO of Oracle considers Linux gaming viable, it really must be," would truly piss off Bill Gates and Fester Ballmer?
Moments later, HP CEO Carly Fiorina announced that this technology, while superior to current current designs, is to be abandoned and sold to intel (At a loss.) during the upcoming Compaq merger.
"Will this spawn development of breakthrough products? Will this help administrators of these old system finally take control of their network?"
Yes and yes. Now developers can do just about anything with the code, and the being able to do so will allow for bettered versions of the original code to replace some of the still antiquated code out there with newer, better versions, as well as improving interoperability with those ancient programs and newer stuff.
"The US doesn't make any money off of those, simply because it does not own them."
Funny, the last time I checked the United States created the internet, including those domains, and does own them.
From the Post: "AOL, which bought Netscape in 1999, wants Microsoft to cease its contested business practices and pay damages."
Netscape was already giving their Navigator/Communicator products away by the time AOL bought the company. In other words, they were not actually making any money from the product, unless you count their money losing web site that happens to be the browser's default home page, which only would have lost MORE money due to increased bandwidth costs had IE not managed to pick up so much market share.
In other words, what damages is AOL actually suing for? They knew that Netscape's position in the market had already been destroyed when they bought Netscape, and were quite aware of Microsoft's efforts to make IE king of browsers. It seems to me that AOL is really just trying to find some way to get some money from their idiotic purchase of Netscape, which they have yet to actually market to THEIR OWN USER BASE.
"What makes you think MS won't cave and build DRM into XBox2"
Who cares about Xbox2? Consoles have a lifespan of at least five years before an updated version is released, just to recoup the sales of loss-leader early hardware once the later revisions can be produced cheaply and sold at a profit, not to mention the fact that general consumers will only spend a few hundred dollars on a console every so often. This sort of technology will be going into Xbox as we know it, and it will be going in soon. DRM for television is still a few years away, and it will be a few years after that before the media companies, networks, broadcasters, FCC, and congress iron out the details, and a few years after that for the conversion to some new TV formats we keep hearing about actually happens (If it happens at all, more likely something else will come along and push the current schemes out of the way.), all the while the old frequencies will end up staying in the hands of broadcasters and not being turned over to people who might use them for something more worthwhile than the crap that ends up on American TV. Consumers who will buy PVR extensions for the Xbox will want it working immediately, that means a repeat of the whole Tivo mess.
First, the bad: Microsoft getting into everyone's living room means that as Linux and OpenOffice slowly gain market share and begin pushing M$ out of the PC marketspace, M$ is finding a new market to keep pissing us off in.
Next, the good: If Microsoft incorporates PVR technology into the Xbox, at least the big media companies will end up suing someone who can afford the lawyers to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court.
"The question you should be asking is, why is China making such a big deal out of this now, when they haven't before?"
They aren't making a big deal out of this; CNN is. This kind of thing happens all the time, little press releases pop up here and there. The only difference this time is that some asshole at CNN.com decided to make it front-page news, and other morons picked up the story from there.
AOL buying Red Hat would be so cool. IBM has already given Linux some serious credibility in the Business world; if AOL buys Linux, suddenly Linux gains credibility among millions of home users.
.net and Hailstorm manage to take off, AOL's plan to stop using IE as the AOL browser could be seriously cramped. AOL is very afraid of Microsoft, and Microsoft knows it; at the same time, AOL is in a wonderful position to strike back: AOL has a brand that is almost as well recognized as Microsoft, yet unsullied by numerous mass media reports of security flaws and sleazy corporate dealings.
Everyone in the industry has already caught on that AOL no longer cares about pissing off Microsoft. XP doesn't come with AOL, Microsoft runs advertisements that insult AOL. MSN messenger (Attempts to.) compete with AIM, one of AOLs coolest marketing gimmicks. If
Promoting and distributing the OS would also be no big problem for AOL; it would just be another CD to add into the millions of free CD packs they mail out every month now. Adding a linux downloads area similar to freshmeat but for newbies would be a great promotion for their broadband efforts. A nice deal with a good OEM to sell AOL/Red Hat based PCs at a discounted rate could take this to a whole new level. If the antitrust suit ends with Microsoft having to stop OEMs from selling dual-boot systems, even better for AOL/Red Hat. A deal for AOL/Red Hat support of a few major video games (Easily done with advance planning and help from the great folks at Loki.) could push things, perhaps with Doom ]|[ or UT II hitting linux.
Personally I think that this story could be quite true. I have a few friends working 60+ hour weeks on some secret Red Hat related research and testing at AOL, and given that most of their servers run on HPUX or Solaris (And the associated hardware), it would not surprise me if this was a result of their work.
I am so hoping that this is not just a rumor. Should this come to pass, Microsoft will suddenly learn the true might of the Penguin, and little Billy Gates will have to hide behind Fester Ballmer as Microsoft faces the full fury of the free software hordes, spurred on by Steve Case.
"what geek wants to run an AOL OS??"
All the geeks gave up on Red Hat around the time the shipped with a broken GCC. Real geeks are all using Mandrake, Debian, or BSD...
If Adobe goes through with this, you can be assured that other companies will follow. Know what that means? Asian pirates will just start swapping and selling English-language versions, unless Asian companies can create and poularize comparable software. In the long run, this will lead to an asian technical elite that uses english more and more, as well as a great boost for english among asian college students. This will help solidfy English as the common language for international business, and put Americans in an even better position.
Shweeet.
We need to stop the export of strong encryption. While we are at it, we should probably go ahead and prevent foreigners from CREATING strong encryption. There is no reason for Operation Infinite Justice to target all those criminal foreign programmers, especially those evil terrorist scum behind GNUPG, those foreign OpenSSH programmers, the entire development staff of OpenBSD, and probably a good dozen other groups. Hell, as long as we are at it, we should probably bomb all of Ireland and India, I hear that they have quite a few proficient programmers who could produce this stuff as well. And what about that Schneier guy? His "Applied Cryptography" is probably the number one source of information about writing crypto apps as well, we should probably kill him so that he can stop showing people how easy it is to write crypto apps with rudimentary programming skills.
Fuck it, why don't we just nuke EVERYONE else and start wearing helmets everywhere. Because, you know, we just need to be safe.
"An influential body of researchers..."
If these guys were any good at research, they would have noticed that the largest single contributor to both the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns (Not to mention plenty of other campaigns worldwide.) was Microsoft, the mother of all "... software firms that do not do enough to make their products secure." and realize that they have no hope of getting these laws passed in the US.
I want to know what happens to the lawyers who come up with this sort of crap to begin with. This is not the first time a company has done something absolutely moronic on what is seems likely to be the misguided advice of overzealous lawyers.
Does anyone know what these companies do to lawyers who come up with ideas like this? Especially lawyers dealing with digital IP, a relatively new area. Do they get fired, censured, or do companies tend to assume that since the interests of the company were really in mind, and rabid consumers did something surprising, the lawyers are not at fault?
When what you really want is 100%, 4.5% is absolutely diddly-squat.
Especially to egomaniacs like Steve Jobs and the people he works with.
"Repeat after me: Europe is not one country.
Of course, the EU will probably create it's own EU-wide DMCA soon bought to you by the usual suspects, but that's neither here nor there."
Europe is not one country yet. Europe does not have its own continent-wide DMCA yet. The point I was trying to make is that if Europeans do not start paying some more attention to the awful shit their own leaders do, you are all eventually going to end up living in states that are just as corporatized as the US has become, and many of you don't have nearly as many constitutionally guaranteed rights to things like freedom of religion, speech, and assembly that the US does.
I am warning the Europeans: letting Johansen be indicted like this is a very, very bad thing. It starts in Norway, it will spread out across Europe and eventually your human rights will be given away to protect the profits of multinational corporations, all in the name of protecting IP rights of corporations that cooperate to scam artists out of the rights to content they created in the first place.
I say all this because over and over again I see Europeans on the internet complaining about American companies being behind all of this, and commenting about the US government as some far reaching arm of corporate power. But I rarely see Europeans complaining about their own leaders being coerced into working against them for these corporations, most of which operate in far too many countries to really be considered American (And many of the companies involved, like Sony or Virgin were never American in the first place.). Right now you all have a very good chance make some noise and get your leaders in line. Don't blow it.
Well, given that he was indicted by Norwegian authorities, at least now the European Slashdotters can stop acting so damned superior and complaining about America running this whole mess, because now we know that your leaders are sleazy coporate puppets, just like ours.
Of course, were I Norwegian I would be burning up the phone lines with calls to said leaders right now, but I don't live there, so knock yourselves out.