Nonsense. This is the X Window System, not windows. You don't need to recompile a browser for the dreamcast - you just need to compile a working X system for it and run the browser on your x86 box.
Has slashdot really devolved to the point neither of you posters realised this, and no one else corrected you? I would have earlier, but I was away from my computer. *sigh* X is a really wonderful system, you really should research it a little.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Unix solved the problems that constitute true ".dll hell" ages ago, and linux uses the solution. It's not the systems fault that some writer doesn't understand what he's talking about.
If you want to use the new gnucash, you need the libraries it relies on (or a statically compiled version, which may be a workable alternative for a short time but is really an inferior solution in the long run.) This does not constitute.dll hell at all. Dll hell is when two applications on a windows machine require different versions of a shared library. Only one will work, and that is a problem. But on a *nix machine, there is a little something called library versioning that eliminates that problem entirely. Installing the newer libraries gnucash needs will not cause other applications to quit functioning. No.dll hell. Just another misleading slashdot headline.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
If you don't have one, it's no ones fault but your own. All of the best browsers are available for linux. Netscape Navigator 4.7 is fast and stable on even my smallest box (K6 w/ 32megs ram,) Opera, the best (and fastest) graphical browser out there, is available on linux, konquerer rocks, and of course if you are serious about speed lynx and links are both available, and both are fast enough to run very nicely on any machine that will run linux.
I'm never sure if posts like yours (and Timothy's article, for that matter - "X Windows?" Please...) are trolls, FUD, or just ignorant. But if we assume you are neither trollig nor shilling, then one can only conclude neither you nor Timothy has a clue what you are talking about.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Look, the damn thing is a digital vcr. It's cool as that alone. The so-called "service" mostly consists of spying on me and selling the information to marketing companies. I don't want it. I just want a fscking digital vcr, and it was advertised as such - with the "service" an optional extra.
This response is not nearly sufficient. I have no trouble believing it was an oversight and suggested earlier waiting for their response before acting, but this response simply isn't acceptable. This is a property rights issue. They cracked the boxes of non-subscribers without permission and now say they'll fix the damage they caused by september? They should be facing both civil and criminal charges for this.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Actually, Philips, Sony, and Hughes sell the hardware. TiVo sells the software (aka "the service".) Pay attention to the
name of the product... "Philips Personal Video Recorder with TiVo Service" You own the hardware, but you do not
own the software on the drive (or any of the content of MFS -- backgrounds, fonts, sounds, etc.) TiVo is well within
their legal rights to do what ever they want to the software. Please keep in mind this nut left it plugged into the phone line
calling into UUNet and thus costing TiVo money while paying nothing.
Nonsense. I've seen the ads, I know how these things were sold. Who sold them, whether the manufacturer or Tivo, is besides the point. The point being that the customers bought them and the customers own them. Including the bits on the hard drive, subject to normal copyright law restrictions (I own the books on my shelf, I can't copy or resell them but they still belong to me, not the author or publisher.) Tivo has no more right than my 13 year old neighbor to alter them without permission. Those customers (the majority) who subscribe to the service will have given them consent, but customers who bought it for it's stand-alone abilities only have given no such consent. Leaving it plugged into the phone line might well be described as bad judgement - but it was behaviour encouraged by Tivo who made it at least seem that this was the only way to set the clock. Plugging the phone line in no more gave Tivo consent to crack his box than my plugging a line into my personal computer gives you consent to crack it. Anyway, if the expense of providing NTP service to non-subscribers was a concern, they could have simply chosen to only provide it to subscribers (and perhaps even point out the obscure method necessary to set the clock manually.)
My point stands, this was a simple crack job, and if Tivo won't fix the mess they have made of other people's machines quickly and apologize for it profusely, they can and should find themselves facing both criminal charges and a class-action lawsuit.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Excellent post. Should be modded up. Well, unless your bullshitting of course, I don't know enough to be sure but it doesn't look like you are to me.;)
Gotta say Tivo just lost a customer though. I had been thinking about buying one for awhile, had it budgeted for next month. But a bullshit move like this... *sigh*. I don't even care if it is possible to hack the thing back into shape. First off that probably wouldn't be true of one I bought next month, since it will probably come with the new "improved" software only, but more importantly, this is just a total disrespect of the customer and of basic concepts of fairness and decency, not to mention the law. They sold these things. They didn't lease them. Modifying the software like this... well it is illegal and immoral and a damn good sign this company is not one that I want to give any money. I hope they get sued. Better yet, criminal charges should be filed. Seriously. I believe there is a federal law in the US now that makes it a rather serious criminal offense to gain unauthorised access to a computer, and an additional offense to use that access to remove or obstruct capabilities/functions etc of that computer, interfering with its legitimate use... well it's late and I didn't phrase that well, and of course IANAL, but if I owned a Tivo I'd be talking to one. Sadly with our current legal regime in the US, suing them would be an uphill battle, so it probably won't happen unless one of the pissed off customers happens to be rich. Maybe a class action suit? I don't know... but this is definately wrong.
Considering how great Tivo has been on some issues in the past, maybe they will reverse their error. Maybe we shouldn't all just suddenly decide they are evil because of one mistake. Ok not maybe, certainly. Mistakes are made, it's only human. The key will be how they respond in the next few days though. If they stand by this illegal cracking of boxes (it deserves emphasis) that they do NOT own against the owners wishes though, there is simply no excuse for that. On the other hand, maybe someone at Tivo with a little power will pull their head out of the orifice it's jammed in and we will see an apology. Maybe they will fix the damage their little cracking expedition has caused. If so, I urge the victims to forgive them. If not... I say crucify the bastards.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Really, does it? The huge expansion in connectivity, while it has certainly benefited some geeks, has mostly been in hooking up joe blow and jane gno. These are people that were really ok with television, but now that the internet is trendy they have to get onboard. Naturally they gravitate to sites that mimic television, that make things simple, etc etc. And naturally, for that crowd, there can only be a few sites at a time that are popular.
This is nothing to be either surprised or alarmed at. As long as these people and the companies they support don't change the basic structure of the internet, we can coexist. Vigilance is called for, but no less so than yesterday. Watch ICANN, watch ".net" and "hailstorm" and raise the most unholy rucous ever seen when necessary to defend that structure, for certain. But don't panic on this "news." It is, sadly, a given.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
ahh...an issue of "taxation without representation". The ccTLD's are the operators of ALL the international domains (.uk,.fr, etc..). Does that not also include.us? Did.us seperate from the mother commerce agency?? Are we in revolt against ourselves?
Yes,.us is a ccTLD. However, the headline is wrong, sort of... they did not withdraw from ICANN. They withdrew from DNSO, a "support organisation" within ICANN, a protest move. They haven't left ICANN yet, but they are saying very loudly that they have grievances and they will not be ignored.
If they did leave ICANN, they would take one third of total funding (according to the article at least.) This gives them a pretty big stick and they are signalling their willingness to use it. Seems no one is happy with ICANN these days. Even the leasee of.com and.net may be upset, if the ccTLDs and some of the community people that are working on alternative DNS wind up getting together and making.com and.net obsolete. Not a bad idea.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Yeah, it's Norton. He sold his name and face to Symantec, who spent the "goodwill" thus acquired in a most unseemly rush years ago.
Symantec may suck, but in his day Norton was a god. I still have his x86 assembler book, it's quite good. If you use it to teach yourself, as intended, you wind up writing several significant chunks of the Norton Utilities, with his guidance of course. I've often wondered how much (if any) his various competitors owed to that book - as I remember it was just after that book was published that I started seeing the clone product that MS bought for dos 6, whatever the name of it was... the package they pulled scandisk and defrag out of. Oh well, idle speculation that - but it's certainly plausible.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
The Windows XP beta actually includes a personal firewall, enabled by default, so it will probably be quite difficult to compromise out-of-the-box (which is how 99% of users use their systems).
Just how long do you think it will be after XP ships before at least one huge hole is found in the default setup? And how much longer before updated bots start taking advantage of it?
I give it two weeks, max.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
I don't know if you are trolling or if you really believe this, but you're completely off-base. A short bit of research at http://www.findlaw.com/ should be sufficient to set you straight. Copyright on source code applies to the code itself - NOT to the underlying algorithms. Just as, for instance, the copyright on "The Hunt for Red October" prevents me from actually copying any lengthy section of that book, but does not prevent me from writing my own novel about a russian submarine captain trying to defect...
If you implement a program using an algorithm you saw somewhere else, but without actually copying any code, you're legally in the clear. Of course, employers may want their employees to do even more than is absolutely legally necessary to avoid the appearance of wrongdoing. There is some guesswork involved in whether or not a court is going to believe that a given work is "derivitive" of another, and if one can make a good case that no one working on project a ever saw the code from project b that could put an end to a suit rather quickly. Otherwise, it might drag out longer and be more expensive to defend. So it does make sense for a microsoft to prohibit their NT coders from even reading linux source for instance. But it's not at all a legal requirement for them to do that.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
The chinese want to build their own culture. They don't mind a bit to learn from us - they are in fact desperate to do so. But they want to do it on their own terms.
On the mainland, you have a group of old men that basically run the government, and they aren't the most forward thinking. But even they can see that they need to open up to avoid the fate of the Soviets. They just really want to make sure no one admits how bad they screwed up till after they die, essentially. Saving face.
Anyhow, they're dying off. The PRC is becoming more free every day. There is definately a correlation between economic development and interest in liberty. At a certain level of poverty, one spends most of ones energy on necessities, and hardly have time to worry about politics. When you are better off, and have things like free time and the internet... China may well be more free than we are in 20 years.
If they don't get bombed back into the stone age first...
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
While it is an excellent point you make, I must wonder why you imply a correlation between Libertarians and the rhetoric of the war party politicians and their cheerleaders. Libertarians are the one group that consistently point this out. Bevin Chu, Alan Bock and even conservative Libertarian Representative Ron Paul all point out this and other errors in the rhetoric adopted by both wings of the war party - the neocons on the right and the clintonistas on the left.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
What exactly is the span of these three patents, tech-wise? Could anyone shed some light on that?
IIRC, the term of patents is 17 years from filing date. The article didn't state what the filing date was on the three the judge has left in play, but assuming 1990 (the date I remember from earlier reports on this as being the filing date - although the patents were apparently rewritten severely much later, the filing date was kept) which is probably correct, they would expire in 2007.
And on a related matter, what could Infineon risk if they end up guilty of accidentally infringing on these patents?
IANAL, but it's my understanding that since the judge has already ruled there was no willful infringement, the worst they could get would be an order to pay the licensing fee to rambus, both on future production and on already shipped product.
In a case of willful infringement, they would face the same figure multiplied by three.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Also note that all the "better" microkernels (Neutrino, EROS, BeOS) are non-free. I think that's the basic reason that free software projects are not using them.
That's actually not true. L4 is GPL, and highly regarded. HURD will probably be ported to it soon, with a great performance increase.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
If someone wants to sell something, they should be able to.
Sure. But it's a lot easier to sell people stuff at the prices you want to sell at if you outlaw competition. No one should be able to do that.
If they want to use it, they should fill our requests of what we want back for it.
Huh?
That's what the record companies are doing. They are selling a product, like bananas or shirts or motherboards. It is no different from 'physical products' even though many people like to think so.
Here you are completely wrong. It is completely different from real physical property.
I can build a chair, and it's my chair. I can use it as I will, sell it, whatever. If you take it, I can no longer do any of those things. If you copy it, you own your own copy, however.
However, if I discover something useful, and patent it or get a dmca style perpetual copyright on it, and I effectively control an idea. If another guy on the other side of the world comes up with the same idea the next day, having never heard of my idea, I CAN force him not to use his idea. Scientific history is full of nearly-simultaneous discoveries.
You can also copy my copyrighted work indefinately without affecting my copy. So don't try to tell me they are the same thing.
The fact is, the media companies were once extremely important, but technology has rendered them obsolete. Rather than adapting and finding a new way to be productive, they simply want to change the laws to guarantee a continuing revenue stream without them having to do any of the hard work involved in reinventing themselves.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
No, not quite true. FreeBSD supports multiprocessor x86 and has for awhile, NetBSD is rolling out SMP on x86, alpha, sparc, and ppc (see this post for links.
NetBSD took longer, because portable code that will support many platforms easily is their grail. Writing that type of code naturally takes more time.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
You'd be suprised as to how many people haven't run any OS with 2 CPUS
Quite true. The vast majority of boxes are still uniprocessor, and probably will be for awhile.
Personally, I've had some very horrible experiences with Linux/SMP, in fact total disasters. After switching to FreeBSD and SolarisX86 on the same boxes, I got better performance and no more issues.
FreeBSD and Slowaris both have had solid multiprocessing support for awhile. Sun of course makes their biggest margins on the boxes with lots of chips, so they are biased that way. FreeBSD produced excellent SMP early on compared to Linux, but unfortunately it wasn't portable enough to help the other BSDs. (OpenBSD and NetBSD are smaller projects with goals aside from application compatibility and performance, so it's natural their SMP code is developing more slowly.) Linux 2.2 kernel had some trouble going past 4, and wasn't all that good even at 4 or below, but 2.4 does much better. Pre 2.0 kernels had no SMP at all, or only severly broken patches for it, IIRC. So if you tried it again today, you should have less trouble (as long as you handle a kernel upgrade.)
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
It's simply confirmed opt-in. Even the fairly clueless marketdroids understand how important it is to confirm important decisions. They just don't think it's important to confirm opt-in, because any errors are in their favor, and they want to send you spam.
Every legitimate email list already do at least most of this. I'm on a couple that give out regular messages about your subscription, a quick reminder how to opt out or change other settings, and they all confirm subscription before they execute them.
Spammers, however, are scam artists. They really do think they can make "Opt in" mean "I can opt you in, or anyone else can, whenever we feel like it, but it's ok cause you can opt out again whenever you want," and we'll just look at them like a cute and precocious child that has just shown such marvelous cleverness. We're not supposed to notice that the (horribly overrated) cleverness was directed at thievery, no, we should fork over the loot as reward for their dimples and bullshit skill.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Well, they expect that because people do this. I look at it as holding the line, at least.
I don't just go after the email and dial-ups though, I go for the server anytime I can. Many spams originate from.com scams - take out their website and the spam they got out becomes useless. I've gotten quite a few website kills over the years, it's particularly satisfying.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
I guess I don't understand why there's such squawking over the need for games under Linux. I have a Linux box at home for my network server needs, and I have a Windows box for my gaming.
I have the same setup, but for my home system, I would still love to see linux supported as a gaming platform. If Loki succeeds, there goes the only compelling reason to keep a win9x box around at home.
Which means a substantial savings in time and money.
It's funny this came up when it did, I was just thinking last night how this area needs a LUG. I'd be interested in any advice, I'm sure some people with experience organising a LUG will read this sometime...
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
I don't think you want to see how much I'm going to charge you for your new Professionally Engineered Word Processor!
You won't be charging me anything, because I already have a word processor that doesn't crash (and is extremely powerful) and serves my needs perfectly.
Tell me again why RMS can write EMACS and give it away for free but the commercial world claims it would take untold billions to write something like it?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
I used to do what you are doing, have you tried spamcop? It saves me a lot of time. I just forward the spam to spamcop@spamcop.net, I get a reply with a URL, hit the URL, it traces everything for you and prepares a letter you can send with the push of a button. Most of the time it gets stuff right, though of course you still need to double check everything before you send... but it's a great timesaver.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. This is the X Window System, not windows. You don't need to recompile a browser for the dreamcast - you just need to compile a working X system for it and run the browser on your x86 box.
Has slashdot really devolved to the point neither of you posters realised this, and no one else corrected you? I would have earlier, but I was away from my computer. *sigh* X is a really wonderful system, you really should research it a little.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Unix solved the problems that constitute true ".dll hell" ages ago, and linux uses the solution. It's not the systems fault that some writer doesn't understand what he's talking about.
If you want to use the new gnucash, you need the libraries it relies on (or a statically compiled version, which may be a workable alternative for a short time but is really an inferior solution in the long run.) This does not constitute .dll hell at all. Dll hell is when two applications on a windows machine require different versions of a shared library. Only one will work, and that is a problem. But on a *nix machine, there is a little something called library versioning that eliminates that problem entirely. Installing the newer libraries gnucash needs will not cause other applications to quit functioning. No .dll hell. Just another misleading slashdot headline.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
If you don't have one, it's no ones fault but your own. All of the best browsers are available for linux. Netscape Navigator 4.7 is fast and stable on even my smallest box (K6 w/ 32megs ram,) Opera, the best (and fastest) graphical browser out there, is available on linux, konquerer rocks, and of course if you are serious about speed lynx and links are both available, and both are fast enough to run very nicely on any machine that will run linux.
I'm never sure if posts like yours (and Timothy's article, for that matter - "X Windows?" Please...) are trolls, FUD, or just ignorant. But if we assume you are neither trollig nor shilling, then one can only conclude neither you nor Timothy has a clue what you are talking about.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Look, the damn thing is a digital vcr. It's cool as that alone. The so-called "service" mostly consists of spying on me and selling the information to marketing companies. I don't want it. I just want a fscking digital vcr, and it was advertised as such - with the "service" an optional extra.
This response is not nearly sufficient. I have no trouble believing it was an oversight and suggested earlier waiting for their response before acting, but this response simply isn't acceptable. This is a property rights issue. They cracked the boxes of non-subscribers without permission and now say they'll fix the damage they caused by september? They should be facing both civil and criminal charges for this.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Nonsense. I've seen the ads, I know how these things were sold. Who sold them, whether the manufacturer or Tivo, is besides the point. The point being that the customers bought them and the customers own them. Including the bits on the hard drive, subject to normal copyright law restrictions (I own the books on my shelf, I can't copy or resell them but they still belong to me, not the author or publisher.) Tivo has no more right than my 13 year old neighbor to alter them without permission. Those customers (the majority) who subscribe to the service will have given them consent, but customers who bought it for it's stand-alone abilities only have given no such consent. Leaving it plugged into the phone line might well be described as bad judgement - but it was behaviour encouraged by Tivo who made it at least seem that this was the only way to set the clock. Plugging the phone line in no more gave Tivo consent to crack his box than my plugging a line into my personal computer gives you consent to crack it. Anyway, if the expense of providing NTP service to non-subscribers was a concern, they could have simply chosen to only provide it to subscribers (and perhaps even point out the obscure method necessary to set the clock manually.)
My point stands, this was a simple crack job, and if Tivo won't fix the mess they have made of other people's machines quickly and apologize for it profusely, they can and should find themselves facing both criminal charges and a class-action lawsuit.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Excellent post. Should be modded up. Well, unless your bullshitting of course, I don't know enough to be sure but it doesn't look like you are to me. ;)
Gotta say Tivo just lost a customer though. I had been thinking about buying one for awhile, had it budgeted for next month. But a bullshit move like this... *sigh*. I don't even care if it is possible to hack the thing back into shape. First off that probably wouldn't be true of one I bought next month, since it will probably come with the new "improved" software only, but more importantly, this is just a total disrespect of the customer and of basic concepts of fairness and decency, not to mention the law. They sold these things. They didn't lease them. Modifying the software like this... well it is illegal and immoral and a damn good sign this company is not one that I want to give any money. I hope they get sued. Better yet, criminal charges should be filed. Seriously. I believe there is a federal law in the US now that makes it a rather serious criminal offense to gain unauthorised access to a computer, and an additional offense to use that access to remove or obstruct capabilities/functions etc of that computer, interfering with its legitimate use... well it's late and I didn't phrase that well, and of course IANAL, but if I owned a Tivo I'd be talking to one. Sadly with our current legal regime in the US, suing them would be an uphill battle, so it probably won't happen unless one of the pissed off customers happens to be rich. Maybe a class action suit? I don't know... but this is definately wrong.
Considering how great Tivo has been on some issues in the past, maybe they will reverse their error. Maybe we shouldn't all just suddenly decide they are evil because of one mistake. Ok not maybe, certainly. Mistakes are made, it's only human. The key will be how they respond in the next few days though. If they stand by this illegal cracking of boxes (it deserves emphasis) that they do NOT own against the owners wishes though, there is simply no excuse for that. On the other hand, maybe someone at Tivo with a little power will pull their head out of the orifice it's jammed in and we will see an apology. Maybe they will fix the damage their little cracking expedition has caused. If so, I urge the victims to forgive them. If not... I say crucify the bastards.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Really, does it? The huge expansion in connectivity, while it has certainly benefited some geeks, has mostly been in hooking up joe blow and jane gno. These are people that were really ok with television, but now that the internet is trendy they have to get onboard. Naturally they gravitate to sites that mimic television, that make things simple, etc etc. And naturally, for that crowd, there can only be a few sites at a time that are popular.
This is nothing to be either surprised or alarmed at. As long as these people and the companies they support don't change the basic structure of the internet, we can coexist. Vigilance is called for, but no less so than yesterday. Watch ICANN, watch ".net" and "hailstorm" and raise the most unholy rucous ever seen when necessary to defend that structure, for certain. But don't panic on this "news." It is, sadly, a given.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Yes, .us is a ccTLD. However, the headline is wrong, sort of... they did not withdraw from ICANN. They withdrew from DNSO, a "support organisation" within ICANN, a protest move. They haven't left ICANN yet, but they are saying very loudly that they have grievances and they will not be ignored.
If they did leave ICANN, they would take one third of total funding (according to the article at least.) This gives them a pretty big stick and they are signalling their willingness to use it. Seems no one is happy with ICANN these days. Even the leasee of .com and .net may be upset, if the ccTLDs and some of the community people that are working on alternative DNS wind up getting together and making .com and .net obsolete. Not a bad idea.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Yeah, it's Norton. He sold his name and face to Symantec, who spent the "goodwill" thus acquired in a most unseemly rush years ago.
Symantec may suck, but in his day Norton was a god. I still have his x86 assembler book, it's quite good. If you use it to teach yourself, as intended, you wind up writing several significant chunks of the Norton Utilities, with his guidance of course. I've often wondered how much (if any) his various competitors owed to that book - as I remember it was just after that book was published that I started seeing the clone product that MS bought for dos 6, whatever the name of it was... the package they pulled scandisk and defrag out of. Oh well, idle speculation that - but it's certainly plausible.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Just how long do you think it will be after XP ships before at least one huge hole is found in the default setup? And how much longer before updated bots start taking advantage of it?
I give it two weeks, max.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
I don't know if you are trolling or if you really believe this, but you're completely off-base. A short bit of research at http://www.findlaw.com/ should be sufficient to set you straight. Copyright on source code applies to the code itself - NOT to the underlying algorithms. Just as, for instance, the copyright on "The Hunt for Red October" prevents me from actually copying any lengthy section of that book, but does not prevent me from writing my own novel about a russian submarine captain trying to defect...
If you implement a program using an algorithm you saw somewhere else, but without actually copying any code, you're legally in the clear. Of course, employers may want their employees to do even more than is absolutely legally necessary to avoid the appearance of wrongdoing. There is some guesswork involved in whether or not a court is going to believe that a given work is "derivitive" of another, and if one can make a good case that no one working on project a ever saw the code from project b that could put an end to a suit rather quickly. Otherwise, it might drag out longer and be more expensive to defend. So it does make sense for a microsoft to prohibit their NT coders from even reading linux source for instance. But it's not at all a legal requirement for them to do that.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
The chinese want to build their own culture. They don't mind a bit to learn from us - they are in fact desperate to do so. But they want to do it on their own terms.
On the mainland, you have a group of old men that basically run the government, and they aren't the most forward thinking. But even they can see that they need to open up to avoid the fate of the Soviets. They just really want to make sure no one admits how bad they screwed up till after they die, essentially. Saving face.
Anyhow, they're dying off. The PRC is becoming more free every day. There is definately a correlation between economic development and interest in liberty. At a certain level of poverty, one spends most of ones energy on necessities, and hardly have time to worry about politics. When you are better off, and have things like free time and the internet... China may well be more free than we are in 20 years.
If they don't get bombed back into the stone age first...
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
While it is an excellent point you make, I must wonder why you imply a correlation between Libertarians and the rhetoric of the war party politicians and their cheerleaders. Libertarians are the one group that consistently point this out. Bevin Chu, Alan Bock and even conservative Libertarian Representative Ron Paul all point out this and other errors in the rhetoric adopted by both wings of the war party - the neocons on the right and the clintonistas on the left.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
IIRC, the term of patents is 17 years from filing date. The article didn't state what the filing date was on the three the judge has left in play, but assuming 1990 (the date I remember from earlier reports on this as being the filing date - although the patents were apparently rewritten severely much later, the filing date was kept) which is probably correct, they would expire in 2007.
IANAL, but it's my understanding that since the judge has already ruled there was no willful infringement, the worst they could get would be an order to pay the licensing fee to rambus, both on future production and on already shipped product.
In a case of willful infringement, they would face the same figure multiplied by three.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
That's actually not true. L4 is GPL, and highly regarded. HURD will probably be ported to it soon, with a great performance increase.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Sure. But it's a lot easier to sell people stuff at the prices you want to sell at if you outlaw competition. No one should be able to do that.
Huh?
Here you are completely wrong. It is completely different from real physical property.
I can build a chair, and it's my chair. I can use it as I will, sell it, whatever. If you take it, I can no longer do any of those things. If you copy it, you own your own copy, however.
However, if I discover something useful, and patent it or get a dmca style perpetual copyright on it, and I effectively control an idea. If another guy on the other side of the world comes up with the same idea the next day, having never heard of my idea, I CAN force him not to use his idea. Scientific history is full of nearly-simultaneous discoveries.
You can also copy my copyrighted work indefinately without affecting my copy. So don't try to tell me they are the same thing.
The fact is, the media companies were once extremely important, but technology has rendered them obsolete. Rather than adapting and finding a new way to be productive, they simply want to change the laws to guarantee a continuing revenue stream without them having to do any of the hard work involved in reinventing themselves.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
No, not quite true. FreeBSD supports multiprocessor x86 and has for awhile, NetBSD is rolling out SMP on x86, alpha, sparc, and ppc (see this post for links.
NetBSD took longer, because portable code that will support many platforms easily is their grail. Writing that type of code naturally takes more time.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Quite true. The vast majority of boxes are still uniprocessor, and probably will be for awhile.
FreeBSD and Slowaris both have had solid multiprocessing support for awhile. Sun of course makes their biggest margins on the boxes with lots of chips, so they are biased that way. FreeBSD produced excellent SMP early on compared to Linux, but unfortunately it wasn't portable enough to help the other BSDs. (OpenBSD and NetBSD are smaller projects with goals aside from application compatibility and performance, so it's natural their SMP code is developing more slowly.) Linux 2.2 kernel had some trouble going past 4, and wasn't all that good even at 4 or below, but 2.4 does much better. Pre 2.0 kernels had no SMP at all, or only severly broken patches for it, IIRC. So if you tried it again today, you should have less trouble (as long as you handle a kernel upgrade.)
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
It's what the spammers want to think of it as.
It's simply confirmed opt-in. Even the fairly clueless marketdroids understand how important it is to confirm important decisions. They just don't think it's important to confirm opt-in, because any errors are in their favor, and they want to send you spam.
Every legitimate email list already do at least most of this. I'm on a couple that give out regular messages about your subscription, a quick reminder how to opt out or change other settings, and they all confirm subscription before they execute them.
Spammers, however, are scam artists. They really do think they can make "Opt in" mean "I can opt you in, or anyone else can, whenever we feel like it, but it's ok cause you can opt out again whenever you want," and we'll just look at them like a cute and precocious child that has just shown such marvelous cleverness. We're not supposed to notice that the (horribly overrated) cleverness was directed at thievery, no, we should fork over the loot as reward for their dimples and bullshit skill.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Well, they expect that because people do this. I look at it as holding the line, at least.
I don't just go after the email and dial-ups though, I go for the server anytime I can. Many spams originate from .com scams - take out their website and the spam they got out becomes useless. I've gotten quite a few website kills over the years, it's particularly satisfying.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
It's wrong to get something for free if you could have payed for it?
Are you one of these people who think that people exist in order to buy stuff and make corporations profitable?
Believe it or not, there are more important things in life than being a good little consumer and doing as you're told.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
I have the same setup, but for my home system, I would still love to see linux supported as a gaming platform. If Loki succeeds, there goes the only compelling reason to keep a win9x box around at home.
Which means a substantial savings in time and money.
It's funny this came up when it did, I was just thinking last night how this area needs a LUG. I'd be interested in any advice, I'm sure some people with experience organising a LUG will read this sometime...
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
You won't be charging me anything, because I already have a word processor that doesn't crash (and is extremely powerful) and serves my needs perfectly.
Tell me again why RMS can write EMACS and give it away for free but the commercial world claims it would take untold billions to write something like it?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
I used to do what you are doing, have you tried spamcop? It saves me a lot of time. I just forward the spam to spamcop@spamcop.net, I get a reply with a URL, hit the URL, it traces everything for you and prepares a letter you can send with the push of a button. Most of the time it gets stuff right, though of course you still need to double check everything before you send... but it's a great timesaver.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Remember this?
http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kern el /0012.1/1252.html for the link-shy.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."