Yeah, it's cheaper than it was the first time, but you have to create a cross-platform music player that doesn't suck, come up with a DRM scheme, host a bunch of servers, continually update the store with new music, and support all of this, as well as pay bandwidth costs. Then you have to spend millions advertising it, and convincing people to use it.
Might be easier than it was the first time, but it's still darn tough. Most online music stores lose money. The reason that iTMS is profitable is the scale and the strategic benefits.
That's the idea behind things like AiR or XUL or Web 2.0 - programs that run on all OSes. We're getting to the point where it's possible to create a program that's totally platform agnostic without being really slow like Java. Back in the day, programs had to target the specific hardware - you wrote programs for a type of mainframe and patched them to work with newer models. Then they worked only with a certain hardware/OS combination - like Win32 on x86. Now Linux and OS X are making it so that you can easily get programs that can be efficiently ported with little headache. All you need is the right OS. Now, we're reaching the point where the OS won't even matter - all you need is the right runtime. As long as you have a standards-compliant (or mostly-compliant) browser, you can use web apps.
Except that their "Making available" defense has been beaten before, so they're forced to fall back on actual infringement. They have to have received a chunk of the file from you in order to get very far with the suit.
Copyright infringement suits can be filed against any alleged perpetrator in any fashion. They don't have to do it evenly. In fact, it's impossible for the RIAA to even sue all file-sharers, as there are dozens of millions.
To answer your main question, the reason they're not hitting Harvard is because Harvard's cyber law guys are willing to stand up for the students. Specifically, they oppose the idea of serving as the "unpaid enforcement arm of the provincial interests of the RIAA". While not anti-copyright, they oppose the strong-arm tactics.
Anyhow, the point seems to be that while the RIAA is hitting schools that pass along the letters, they're not going after Harvard, which I'm sure NYCL (who rocks, btw) is trying to point out - any powerful group offering resistance to the RIAA will be left alone.
Ok then. One company decided to start shipping faster routers, and not to be outdone, every other company followed suit. I guess the idea is that you can replace a/b/g routers with draft-n routers in a lot of situations, especially if the vendor assures compatibility with the final version of 802.11n. I think that "bored" describes the situation adequately. The companies didn't want to sit and wait on the IEEE in order to start making more money.
I think it's hard to accuse CC of malpractice here. They don't claim the licenses as individually suitable for your work and situation, they just offer boilerplate licenses that you can pick if you desire. It's the end-user who decides if the license is right for them. The licenses don't come couched as legal advice, they just offer an option. The problem on the licensing side is that the photographer selected a license without thinking about it. Really, it's hard to imagine a situation where any re-use of his photos of kids by an unaffiliated group would have gone over well with the kids and their families. Therefore he should have picked copyright and then just blanketly given the campers permission to use the photos. Or he should have picked CC-by-NC. Or a -ND license. Any of those would have prevented this, and even the quickest thought from him (or a lawyer's advice) would have avoided this.
I would dispute that this was a crowd photo. There are only two recognizable people in the photo. While the girl in question is the further from the camera of the two, she's clearly the subject, as the title of the photo is "Alison for peace", while she's giving a peace sign and the other girl (and the guy behind the other girl) isn't even even looking at the camera.
In general in Big-O notation, "n" is whatever the algorithm scales with. In this specific instance, I think 'n' might be pixels. The processing power required to perform ray-tracing scales with the log of the number of pixels, while power needed for rasterization scales linearly with the number of pixels.
I'm not saying that that's how I want the game to be played, I'm saying that that's how the game can be played. And when a company threatens someone who mentions their violations by accusing them of violating an EULA, and then says that compliance is a secondary priority, they've blown their chance to make excuses and fix it themselves.
He seems to think they are running a stripped down Linux distro on this box. You seem to think the same. Why do you think this?
Well, they've said that they're running Linux on the box (gary-MM, halfway down the page). People also found evidence of Linux on the Hava using nmap and strings(1). I'm assuming it's with a patch-set, but you're right in that it could probably just be compiled with only certain modules. As far as the "for something", given the list of Busybox tools, the idea that they're using at least a handful of them does not surprise me. Maybe there are ways around using them, but that's not the point.
I'm fully aware that Linux is a kernel, not an OS. However, between Linux and Busybox, you've got most of the necessary platform to run their proprietary program on, which was what I meant originally. From Hava's perspective, the goal is to have a platform to run their media-streaming and GUI software on for the box.
Ya know, if you keep using "OS" and "Linux" synonymously I'm going to have a hard time understanding what you are talking about.
I didn't use OS and Linux interchangeably. Everywhere where I said OS I either meant it generically or used it in a context ("write or license") that disqualified Linux.
There is no obligation at all to inform the company that they're violating. The second someone downloads a copy of the binary or buys a piece of the hardware without the GPL included (and the source available), the company broke the law. The record labels and other groups who sue for copyright infringement generally provide no warnings whatsoever. It's definitely polite to give the company several weeks and several chances to respond, but it's not necessary.
The company made a conscious choice to bundle Linux and Busybox with their product. This was a choice made even before the product was on the market. They demoed the product 4 months ago, and have been selling it commercially for 2 months. There's no way that the company wasn't aware of the fact that they were distributing Linux. And if the company (which presumably includes programmers and engineers) honestly want to claim that they had no idea what the GPL was, they're nuts.
When they were confronted about the fact that they were in violation of the law (about 3 weeks ago), they brushed it off, "jokingly" accusing the guy who discovered it of reverse-engineering and violating the EULA, then saying that the forums were for paying customers only. They also ignored phone calls. When they admitted to it (2 weeks ago), they said they'd put it on a timetable, and not make legal compliance a top priority. When someone says "you're doing something illegal and could get sued for it", the right answer isn't "I'll have to contact the engineering team and see what the expected scope (level of effort) is and then balance it against our other development tasks". You don't balance legal compliance against "other development tasks". Especially since the relevant modules are in their SVN or whatever. IMHO, they've sort of brought it upon themselves.
They've got some sort of proprietary application running on the set-top box. The box needs an OS, and for a start-up company (they demoed the product in May and it went on sale in July), it must be cheaper to use Linux than to license or write an embedded OS. There are patch-sets for Linux and ways to set up module loading to make it pretty lightweight and (real-time) low-latency. Since all they need from the OS is basic hardware management and then running whatever proprietary program they use, Linux fits their need. As to why they need the Busybox daemons, who knows.
There's a line in the GPLv2 that says "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it", and that it should be distributed ona medium customarily used for software interchange
IANAL, but it doesn't sound like a proprietary unpacker would meet those requirements.
Ok, but it's not a two-body problem. When you look at the Euro and Canadian dollar, they're both slightly rising or static relative to other currencies, but the US$ is definitely falling relative to other currencies (including the C$ and the Euro). So while "Euro rising" and "dollar falling" both explain the difference between the Euro and dollar, but only "dollar falling" correctly identifies the overall trend (across the whole currency market).
The consoles use custom (more limited) version of OpenGL or D3D. Sony's subset is called Open GL ES I think. And the 360 runs some hybrid of DX9 and DX10.
We're talking an expo here, not a concert or a sports game. Having worked concerts and fairs of various sizes in an organizational and production capacity, I can say that 50,000 people sitting on their asses watching sports or a band is vastly different from 50,000 people actively wandering around a venue doing dozens of different things. When you have a mobile, active crowd instead of a seated, passive crowd, then 50,000 is a whole heck of a lot of people.
The problem is that at venues like that, and at campaign rallies or other large events (even concerts), the police work closely with the organizers and the event security. While they're not subservient to the organizers, they do listen to them. In fact, the organizers probably had to pay the sheriff's office (or the campus police, or whoever) for the protection. When it works, it works rather well. When it doesn't work, we get something like this.
Not that this is going to be a popular point, but when someone is holding a private event, they have the right to kick you out. This happens at football games or basketball games, and this happens at concerts quite a bit. It can happen just as easily at times at a political event. If they rent the venue and have any barrier for entry (checking student IDs, tickets, whatever), they can throw you out.
MediaDefender is a company that the RIAA and MPAA hire to pollute Bittorrent trackers with fake torrents, track torrent usage, and spew false data out to torrents.
A group called "MediaDefender-Defender" got someone's password and spilled thousands of emails from within MediaDefender. Apparently some idiot forwarded all his corporate mail to Gmail, and used an easy password.
"MiiVi" was an attempt by MediaDefender to create a fake file-sharing site to entrap people. About two people fell for it, then they were exposed by Torrentfreak.
You should care because this company lied about its involvement with an attempt to "entrap" (legally, it's not entrapment, but it's still pretty morally grey). You might also care because it's another attempt by the RIAA and MPAA to screw over file-sharers. Or maybe you don't care about it. There's no assurance that you'll find everything on Slashdot interesting.
Apple understands that to break 10-20% marketshare, they have to license the OS (because some people need things like more options or reliable hardware updates, that Apple won't provide). But they can still shoot for a larger marketshare under that cap.
What is this assumption people have that a large company can only sell one product? There is no "Apple is selling the iPhone, therefore Macs will languish" in reality. A company is perfectly capable of selling of having three wide-ranging brands.
They're still not "locking you to iTunes". This was an update that added (sorely needed, IMHO) anti-data-corruption features to the iPod. A side-effect of those features was to break compatibility with 3rd-party players. A new feature affecting third party programs is not a new phenomenon, and it's not Apple's fault. Within a week or two, someone will work out how the algorithm works, and they'll duplicate it, and all will be well.
SCO probably loses its administrative fees as a result of the conversion. It's not impossible to take those fees from a fiduciary if you set your mind to it (IANAL, but worked a in a law office), and that's with an honest, responsible fiduciary.
The only question with the licenses is to what degree they reflected a UNIX license and to what degree they also covered SCO's copyrights independent of UNIX. And interest is a factor, as you mentioned. That 7% probably reflects a lower interest rate over 3 years or so. Otherwise, if it's 7%/year, then SCO owes 100-125% of those license fees.
On a dual-processor Intel machine, you have to move to FB-DIMMs. I'm not sure if there are currently DDR3 FB-DIMMs, but I don't think so. If there were DDR3 FB-DIMMs, they'd also be quad-channel.
On a dual-processor AMD machine, you have NUMA (non-uniform memory architecture), so each each processor (processor, not core) has its own set of memory and its own bus, meaning you have 2 dual-channel busses.
The point is that most current installations support 10/100. When considering upgrading to GbE (10 Gbps isn't available in desktops at reasonable prices), you can get half the speed without switching from Cat 5 to Cat 5e or Cat 6 at the end-user end. One router can cover two dozen cubicles, and at draft-N speeds, that's not much of a problem for email/web.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's cheaper than it was the first time, but you have to create a cross-platform music player that doesn't suck, come up with a DRM scheme, host a bunch of servers, continually update the store with new music, and support all of this, as well as pay bandwidth costs. Then you have to spend millions advertising it, and convincing people to use it.
Might be easier than it was the first time, but it's still darn tough. Most online music stores lose money. The reason that iTMS is profitable is the scale and the strategic benefits.
That's the idea behind things like AiR or XUL or Web 2.0 - programs that run on all OSes. We're getting to the point where it's possible to create a program that's totally platform agnostic without being really slow like Java. Back in the day, programs had to target the specific hardware - you wrote programs for a type of mainframe and patched them to work with newer models. Then they worked only with a certain hardware/OS combination - like Win32 on x86. Now Linux and OS X are making it so that you can easily get programs that can be efficiently ported with little headache. All you need is the right OS. Now, we're reaching the point where the OS won't even matter - all you need is the right runtime. As long as you have a standards-compliant (or mostly-compliant) browser, you can use web apps.
Except that their "Making available" defense has been beaten before, so they're forced to fall back on actual infringement. They have to have received a chunk of the file from you in order to get very far with the suit.
Copyright infringement suits can be filed against any alleged perpetrator in any fashion. They don't have to do it evenly. In fact, it's impossible for the RIAA to even sue all file-sharers, as there are dozens of millions.
To answer your main question, the reason they're not hitting Harvard is because Harvard's cyber law guys are willing to stand up for the students. Specifically, they oppose the idea of serving as the "unpaid enforcement arm of the provincial interests of the RIAA". While not anti-copyright, they oppose the strong-arm tactics.
Anyhow, the point seems to be that while the RIAA is hitting schools that pass along the letters, they're not going after Harvard, which I'm sure NYCL (who rocks, btw) is trying to point out - any powerful group offering resistance to the RIAA will be left alone.
Ok then. One company decided to start shipping faster routers, and not to be outdone, every other company followed suit. I guess the idea is that you can replace a/b/g routers with draft-n routers in a lot of situations, especially if the vendor assures compatibility with the final version of 802.11n. I think that "bored" describes the situation adequately. The companies didn't want to sit and wait on the IEEE in order to start making more money.
I think it's hard to accuse CC of malpractice here. They don't claim the licenses as individually suitable for your work and situation, they just offer boilerplate licenses that you can pick if you desire. It's the end-user who decides if the license is right for them. The licenses don't come couched as legal advice, they just offer an option. The problem on the licensing side is that the photographer selected a license without thinking about it. Really, it's hard to imagine a situation where any re-use of his photos of kids by an unaffiliated group would have gone over well with the kids and their families. Therefore he should have picked copyright and then just blanketly given the campers permission to use the photos. Or he should have picked CC-by-NC. Or a -ND license. Any of those would have prevented this, and even the quickest thought from him (or a lawyer's advice) would have avoided this.
I would dispute that this was a crowd photo. There are only two recognizable people in the photo. While the girl in question is the further from the camera of the two, she's clearly the subject, as the title of the photo is "Alison for peace", while she's giving a peace sign and the other girl (and the guy behind the other girl) isn't even even looking at the camera.
IANAL
Correct, but the more pixels, the more calculations to determine what colors to set.
In general in Big-O notation, "n" is whatever the algorithm scales with. In this specific instance, I think 'n' might be pixels. The processing power required to perform ray-tracing scales with the log of the number of pixels, while power needed for rasterization scales linearly with the number of pixels.
I'm not saying that that's how I want the game to be played, I'm saying that that's how the game can be played. And when a company threatens someone who mentions their violations by accusing them of violating an EULA, and then says that compliance is a secondary priority, they've blown their chance to make excuses and fix it themselves.
Well, they've said that they're running Linux on the box (gary-MM, halfway down the page). People also found evidence of Linux on the Hava using nmap and strings(1). I'm assuming it's with a patch-set, but you're right in that it could probably just be compiled with only certain modules. As far as the "for something", given the list of Busybox tools, the idea that they're using at least a handful of them does not surprise me. Maybe there are ways around using them, but that's not the point.
I'm fully aware that Linux is a kernel, not an OS. However, between Linux and Busybox, you've got most of the necessary platform to run their proprietary program on, which was what I meant originally. From Hava's perspective, the goal is to have a platform to run their media-streaming and GUI software on for the box.
Ya know, if you keep using "OS" and "Linux" synonymously I'm going to have a hard time understanding what you are talking about.
I didn't use OS and Linux interchangeably. Everywhere where I said OS I either meant it generically or used it in a context ("write or license") that disqualified Linux.
There is no obligation at all to inform the company that they're violating. The second someone downloads a copy of the binary or buys a piece of the hardware without the GPL included (and the source available), the company broke the law. The record labels and other groups who sue for copyright infringement generally provide no warnings whatsoever. It's definitely polite to give the company several weeks and several chances to respond, but it's not necessary.
The company made a conscious choice to bundle Linux and Busybox with their product. This was a choice made even before the product was on the market. They demoed the product 4 months ago, and have been selling it commercially for 2 months. There's no way that the company wasn't aware of the fact that they were distributing Linux. And if the company (which presumably includes programmers and engineers) honestly want to claim that they had no idea what the GPL was, they're nuts.
When they were confronted about the fact that they were in violation of the law (about 3 weeks ago), they brushed it off, "jokingly" accusing the guy who discovered it of reverse-engineering and violating the EULA, then saying that the forums were for paying customers only. They also ignored phone calls. When they admitted to it (2 weeks ago), they said they'd put it on a timetable, and not make legal compliance a top priority. When someone says "you're doing something illegal and could get sued for it", the right answer isn't "I'll have to contact the engineering team and see what the expected scope (level of effort) is and then balance it against our other development tasks". You don't balance legal compliance against "other development tasks". Especially since the relevant modules are in their SVN or whatever. IMHO, they've sort of brought it upon themselves.
(IANAL)
They've got some sort of proprietary application running on the set-top box. The box needs an OS, and for a start-up company (they demoed the product in May and it went on sale in July), it must be cheaper to use Linux than to license or write an embedded OS. There are patch-sets for Linux and ways to set up module loading to make it pretty lightweight and (real-time) low-latency. Since all they need from the OS is basic hardware management and then running whatever proprietary program they use, Linux fits their need. As to why they need the Busybox daemons, who knows.
There's a line in the GPLv2 that says "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it", and that it should be distributed ona medium customarily used for software interchange
IANAL, but it doesn't sound like a proprietary unpacker would meet those requirements.
Ok, but it's not a two-body problem. When you look at the Euro and Canadian dollar, they're both slightly rising or static relative to other currencies, but the US$ is definitely falling relative to other currencies (including the C$ and the Euro). So while "Euro rising" and "dollar falling" both explain the difference between the Euro and dollar, but only "dollar falling" correctly identifies the overall trend (across the whole currency market).
The consoles use custom (more limited) version of OpenGL or D3D. Sony's subset is called Open GL ES I think. And the 360 runs some hybrid of DX9 and DX10.
We're talking an expo here, not a concert or a sports game. Having worked concerts and fairs of various sizes in an organizational and production capacity, I can say that 50,000 people sitting on their asses watching sports or a band is vastly different from 50,000 people actively wandering around a venue doing dozens of different things. When you have a mobile, active crowd instead of a seated, passive crowd, then 50,000 is a whole heck of a lot of people.
The problem is that at venues like that, and at campaign rallies or other large events (even concerts), the police work closely with the organizers and the event security. While they're not subservient to the organizers, they do listen to them. In fact, the organizers probably had to pay the sheriff's office (or the campus police, or whoever) for the protection. When it works, it works rather well. When it doesn't work, we get something like this.
Not that this is going to be a popular point, but when someone is holding a private event, they have the right to kick you out. This happens at football games or basketball games, and this happens at concerts quite a bit. It can happen just as easily at times at a political event. If they rent the venue and have any barrier for entry (checking student IDs, tickets, whatever), they can throw you out.
MediaDefender is a company that the RIAA and MPAA hire to pollute Bittorrent trackers with fake torrents, track torrent usage, and spew false data out to torrents.
A group called "MediaDefender-Defender" got someone's password and spilled thousands of emails from within MediaDefender. Apparently some idiot forwarded all his corporate mail to Gmail, and used an easy password.
"MiiVi" was an attempt by MediaDefender to create a fake file-sharing site to entrap people. About two people fell for it, then they were exposed by Torrentfreak.
You should care because this company lied about its involvement with an attempt to "entrap" (legally, it's not entrapment, but it's still pretty morally grey). You might also care because it's another attempt by the RIAA and MPAA to screw over file-sharers. Or maybe you don't care about it. There's no assurance that you'll find everything on Slashdot interesting.
Apple understands that to break 10-20% marketshare, they have to license the OS (because some people need things like more options or reliable hardware updates, that Apple won't provide). But they can still shoot for a larger marketshare under that cap.
What is this assumption people have that a large company can only sell one product? There is no "Apple is selling the iPhone, therefore Macs will languish" in reality. A company is perfectly capable of selling of having three wide-ranging brands.
They're still not "locking you to iTunes". This was an update that added (sorely needed, IMHO) anti-data-corruption features to the iPod. A side-effect of those features was to break compatibility with 3rd-party players. A new feature affecting third party programs is not a new phenomenon, and it's not Apple's fault. Within a week or two, someone will work out how the algorithm works, and they'll duplicate it, and all will be well.
SCO probably loses its administrative fees as a result of the conversion. It's not impossible to take those fees from a fiduciary if you set your mind to it (IANAL, but worked a in a law office), and that's with an honest, responsible fiduciary.
The only question with the licenses is to what degree they reflected a UNIX license and to what degree they also covered SCO's copyrights independent of UNIX. And interest is a factor, as you mentioned. That 7% probably reflects a lower interest rate over 3 years or so. Otherwise, if it's 7%/year, then SCO owes 100-125% of those license fees.
On a dual-processor Intel machine, you have to move to FB-DIMMs. I'm not sure if there are currently DDR3 FB-DIMMs, but I don't think so. If there were DDR3 FB-DIMMs, they'd also be quad-channel.
On a dual-processor AMD machine, you have NUMA (non-uniform memory architecture), so each each processor (processor, not core) has its own set of memory and its own bus, meaning you have 2 dual-channel busses.
The point is that most current installations support 10/100. When considering upgrading to GbE (10 Gbps isn't available in desktops at reasonable prices), you can get half the speed without switching from Cat 5 to Cat 5e or Cat 6 at the end-user end. One router can cover two dozen cubicles, and at draft-N speeds, that's not much of a problem for email/web.