That might make good logical sense, but physically it's not practical or efficient. The amount of overhead (in silicon) would not be worth the functionality.
Networks are accessed ( and consequently used) differently than memory, due to latency and reliability issues. Logically you could make the internet appear to be a big logical address space, but accessing it in that manner wouldn't provide much value.
Grabbing data in chunks or streaming data are better suited to networks than using memory addressing. If network access times came down to the sub 1 ms range, some memory mapped applications might become more feasible.
The ISP buys BANDWIDTH, not a network infrastructure, or more precisely they rent high speed big pipes from internet backbone providers.
My ISP for example Frontier, owns the last mile to my door, and all the hardware, cables, switches, DSL modems and the like on that last mile. Those costs have already been expended and will stay the same unless they expand the network. If that was all I was connected to however, I'd be greatly dissappointed. I really don't care what Judy the homemaker or Phil the out-of-work software developer have shared on their WinME hard drives. I want the WHOLE internet.
For that, Frontier buys bandwidth from various sources Sprint, MCI, etc. They buy that bandwidth in the form of $X per MBytes/sec, which translates into T1s, T3s and the like. So while Frontier is using a monthly fee to try and recoup their investment they made in hardware on their end, they are also are spending a portion of that fee to pay for the big pipe to the rest of the internet.
They don't actually buy a large enough amount of bandwidth for everyone on their service to be downloading 1 Mb/s at the same time. That is a T1s worth of bandwidth per user. A T1 costs hundreds or thousands a month, and Frontier is only charging $50/month. The bandwidth alone would be a net loss for my ISP.
What the ISP is actually doing is providing a service that distributes the cost of large bandwidth pipes (T1s,T3s,etc) to multiple users. This has the caveat that everyone can't be downloading at T1 speeds all the time, or there isn't anything to share!
So if 90% of the users are using 10% of the bandwidth, and 10% of the users are using 90% of the bandwidth, and there's not enough bandwidth to go around. What's an ISP to do? They rent more big pipes coming in, which increases their monthly cost, which they need to pass on to the users. They can either raise everyone's flat rate, which means the users that aren't utilizing very much bandwidth are subsidizing heavy users. Or, they can charge the heavy users more, a.k.a. the more you play the more you pay.
This leads us to ask why the the backbone internet providers charge so much for bandwidth, and more particularly why do they charge high monthly fees, rather than a flat one time charge for access to the network. First, the setup cost for these networks is HUGE, many many millons of dollars. No ISP could afford to buy a lifetime membership to that network. Second, maintance costs are high, it requires full time employees (which don't work for free) to keep the infrastructure humming. And third, they require that money each month to keep expanding their networks. There is not nearly enough backbone bandwidth available out there, for every internet user to be downloading streaming movies at the same time. So that money is being used to maintan and build more network, which the ISPs in turn leases more of to satisfy the appitite of the heavy users.
The cost of high speed internet connections will eventually go down, once network capacity catches up with demand. We'll get their slowly, but not in a giant leap. Companies have to stay profitable in the near term, not just the long term or they go out of business (Witness the Dot Com debaucle). So bandwidth providers will role out bandwidth slowly, as to not make the mistake of saturating the market with to much bandwidth. That would cause the price of bandwidth to drop drastically, but also put a lot of bandwidth providers out of business (Which in turn will bring prices back up). The bandwidth providers don't want to go the way of the bandwidth gatekeepers (ISP's). An excess surplus of ISP's caused broadbandth prices to drop unrealistically low, making many lose money and go out of business.
Have you talked to potential scientific/ engineering customers? It seems to me games would be a big gamble of a market to hit. But scientists and engineers on the other hand are adopting x86 Linux based boxes in droves. If you haven't targetted to this market yet, you might find you're already missing sales on the Windows platform. And most importantly, what are your current customers saying? Do they want Linux support?
I'm not a software guy, but I'm a hardware guy. I really don't know what types of software are vectorizeable, but I'm familiar with some industries that are embracing Linux FORCEFULLY. I'd talked to them before I'd worry about the game market. At least find out if a vectorizing compiler would help them.
My list:
Industry: EDA (Electronic Design Automation)
Software from these guys frequently lists at 30k-300k for a single license limited to a few years. They won't think twice about buying tools that work better, and they are moving from UNIX to Linux.
Companies: Avanti, Synopsys, Cadence,
Mentor Graphics, Synplicity,
Silicon Perspectives,...
Industry: Scientists
Universities, IBM, Whole slew of government,
GE, Aerospace, Medical,...
There is definitely room for your opinion on how much you are willing to give up in the name of security. And I hope for everyone's sake, that there are some in congress arguing your points, or completely unbalanced regulations will be enacted.
Security is a myth. It cannot be had.
Complete security is a myth. But the degree of security you have is variable. The basic social argument here is that Anarchy has very little security. There is no authority to give any protection, and no law to declare any behavior illegal. That would include all sorts of evil and grotesk acts. But far from these "obvious laws" there is also laws to allow intelligence to act proactively to apprehend people intent on doing terror. In this case, privacy laws have to be crafted to balance the threat of abuse by government vs. threat of terroist attack vs. your willingness to take your security into your own hands. You obviously lean towards not getting the government all that involved (in this arena) and take the responsiblity on yourself. There's definitely room for your view. Our opinions are going to be based on how much we trust our government and fellow citizens working for the government.
People die in terrorist attacks in Isreal all the time, and that country has a very sophisticated security apparatus. What makes you think we'll do any better?
Israel certainly has terrible problems with terrorism, and it's likely we can't implement better anti-terrorism systems. However, Israel deals with many more terrorism attempts than we do. If Israel only had the U.S.A.'s level of security measures they would be in much worse shape than they are now. Anti-terrorism measures reduces risk, doesn't eliminate it. That's true for the U.S as much as Israel.
A more effective policy may be to one: Kill all known terrorists now, and two: Figure out what's pissing the majority of them off and STOP DOING IT.
You're right. And although this takes us a little off topic, I'll add my 2 cents on this as well. If what they want is to wipe Israel off the map. Are we to get out of their way or worse yet, support them? Are we going to do that? If what they want is that we give them money because we are such a wealthy nation, do we reward terrorism and do that? We need to do what we can in the area of "Not pissing them off", but that can only extend to the point that we aren't held hostage by them. We should never allow terrorists to breach our morals, or deny our sovereignty.
While everyone here almost unanimously cries that mandatory backdoors wouldn't work, or that it would amount to tyranny. Think about this:
1) Your openess to this type of legislation depends on how willing you are to give up some of your freedom for security. Ultimately, governments always exist to restrict some freedom (some loony isn't free to kill people after all), in exchange for security. Any freshman anthropology class covers that. Maybe you haven't been affected directly enough yet to think it is necessary.
2) If you think this is some new type of breach of privacy. Come on. Postal mail is already this way.
3) If you think it won't work. As someone pointed out earlier, with Carnivore everywhere, people using encryption without backdoors can be detected (and located). Data hiding won't work for long either. I recently read that a prof. at a major university has developed a program that can make very accurate odds of whether a picture contains hidden information. It can't decode the information, but that just goes back to my last statement.
4) If you think the risk of abuse is too great. Maybe, maybe you're right. But if you're worried about financial information, think about how much goes through the postal system already. And as far as the bad employee abusing information, remeber far fewer human hands will touch your electronic data than your postal mail. Also this gets back to your sense of security. At some point you'll take the risk of your information being exposed to the government in exchange for the safety of not getting hit by a terrorist attack.
Ultimately, to be secure you must give up some privacy. The hard question is how much privacy must we give up in order to achieve that security. It's not an easy question, and I'm not sure where that line should be drawn.
But people, please don't be so naive to think that it simply goes without saying that encryption backdoors are unexceptable tyranny. It's just not so. I agree this may not be the first action that should be taken, and for technical reasons that many have pointed out, it wouldn't even work today. However, it can be made to work tomorrow. And someday, if the other measures we take to secure our world are still incomplete, far fewer of you will be so quick to denounce encryption backdoors.
Breaking up MS wouldn't have solved the problem anyway. There would just be two companies with monopolies, and the company with Office would have no incentive to support more platforms, as it would cost enormous amounts of money to port the applications.
A real solution would be passing a law that all commercial Word Processing/Spreadsheet/Presentation applications(Office Apps) regardless of manufacturer, would have to support a standard format defined by a standards body. The standard would be freely available. The standard must also be the default and natively supported format. The penalty to MS would be that they are forced to release their current Office file formats to this standards body to be the baseline for the standard.
Any and all companies (including MS) would not be prevented from extended the formats or developing something new. However, their products must support the standard first. For the user to use the proprietary formats the user would be forced to manually chose a different file format. Like selecting ".rtf" instead of ".doc" is now. Practically, no one would do it, and anyone acheiving a monopoly on file formats would effectively be blocked.
This would spur an enormous amount of competition in the office/productivity software space. And we would be guarenteed that StarOffice, KOffice, WordPerfect, and the like, could become 100% compatible.
You seem to mistake the ability to take something with the right to take something. CPRM and SDMI do not stop anyone from receiving something that is freely given away. Hence, these technologies won't stop Open Source. They don't prevent anyone from using GPL, BSD or any other license. So you are confused. If an independent artist or producer chooses to release a work freely, these technologies won't stop them.
You are mistaking the fact that you currently have the ability to digitally copy a piece of music or video or program with the idea that you have the right to do so. You don't. When you do so, you break the law. Except in _limited_ fair use circustances. Giving a copy to your friend, does not qualify fair use. Making a documentary about music and using a clip does.
You say, I'm just copying numbers, I'm not actually taking anything. Just because someone leaves their door unlocked doesn't give you the right to enter their house and take pictures of it. Even though that doesn't take anything of theirs either.
The only "risk" I see DRM posing to Open Source products, is that they may not get support for some multimedia apps that Win/Mac does. And while this might limit the growth potential of Linux on the Desktop, that makes a very large assumption that Linux could ever make it on the Desktop anyways. It still doesn't stop Open Source developers from creating their own multimedia tools and porting them to Windows/Mac so there's free tools for everyone (Gimp).
You gripe about the technology. It's a waste of your time and effort, it won't yield the results you want. That's because you're griping about the symptom, not the disease. DRM technologies are mearly tools created to enforce the law. Instead, gripe about the laws to your senator, and try to change peoples opinion about buying music or producing music under such restrictions. While it's a long shot, at least it has a chance, unlike your current method. Change the laws, or better yet producers attitudes towards DRM, and all of a sudden there's no need for it.
How does developing Linux and Linux based applications fit into IBM's long history of being a leader in developing a massive IP portfolio?
Does IBM see Linux merely as a platform that can't be controlled by MS, or do they see it as something more? Is it merely another platform to plug users in to IBM's proprietary software, or is it a venture to try to make software which more closely meets user needs?
I have nothing against proprietary systems. It is just that if the company is going to "Spend One Billion Dollars on Linux", I'd rather PR didn't spin that as some altruistic venture. It's one thing to spend money developing the Linux kernel, gcc, filesystems, gui environments, networking protocols, etc., and releasing them as Open Source. It's a completely different thing to port proprietary programs to Linux, closed source.
What's the projected break down in Open Source development vs. closed source development of that "One Billon Dollars"? Does IBM plan to make money directly from software they develop Open Source, or do they merely see such software as enabling the sales of their proprietary software?
While we're patenting things, beware if your want to sell something. I now hold the patent on exchanging money for goods or services. Using money, instead of bartering, is here by decreed as a unique and non-obvious way of doing business.
From now on all exchanges of money for goods/services owe me a 5% royalty. This includes filing taxes. Making said exchange via the internet is subject to a 10% royalty, because it is even less obvious than doing it in person.
HP has the beginning of some drivers on source forge. I'm using them now to print from my HP Photo Smart 1000. Works pretty good. I still use the cdj550 gs driver for plain old text, as it doesn't use as much ink.
1. a standard location for fonts
2. a standard lib that renders the fonts that
a. X Windows uses
b. ghostscript uses
c. anything else uses (StarOffice, Tex ?)
3. anti-alias support (yes, X4.0.2 has this, but you have to explicitly use it)
4. You don't have to do anything other than copy a font file to the aformentioned standard location to get it recognized by everything!
5. Maybe, an extensible font library, supporting some sort of plugin architecture for adding new font formats.
As best as I recall Athlon was clean room built from the ground up, so there are no royalties to Intel for the Athlon/Duron chips. I do recall AMD paying royalties for their 586 line of chips. I searched all over, but did not find anything pertaining to royalties to Intel and the Athlon. The only thing I could find was this quote:
"In December 1995, the Company signed a five-year, comprehensive cross-license agreement with Intel. The cross-license is royalty-bearing for the Company's products that use certain Intel technologies. The Company is required to pay Intel minimum nonrefundable royalties through 2000."
Which is available at:
http://www.amd.com/about/investor/1999annual/not e1 2.html
Unfortunately the Fed missed the real opportunity to slap on something that Microsoft really wouldn't like, and it wouldn't be nearly so controversial as a break up. Force MS to support standard, open, and free file formats and interfaces.
In fact the government should ask the ACM or IEEE to come up with open and free standards for Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Presentation software, Databases, Boomarks, network file sharing, Scripting languages, and the like. These need to be of equivalent or better quality and capabilities than Microsoft's existing formats/interfaces. Then a ACM or IEEE standard is defined that states that to be ACM/IEEE xxxx.xx certified you must support these formats/interfaces NATIVELY, by DEFAULT, and as easy and similar to use as any proprietary formats as technically possible. Then force Microsoft to make their operating system and applications to be compliant with the most recent version of the standard.
This wouldn't stop Microsoft from continueing to play their games with their own proprietary formats and interfaces, but their products would at least get along nicely with any software that also supports these open and free standards.
Microsoft would always have to face the fact that as the standard evolved to support similar features to anything they added to their own proprietary features, they would have to support the standard implementation as well. This should over time make them want to just start supporting the open and free standard system, since they have to anyhow. They can then spend more of the effort making a better to use system, rather than a difficult to live without system.
You probably can pick up the CS information handling stuff that you'd miss from a CE or EE degree on the job. CE or maybe better yet, EE with leanings towards CE, gives the background neccessary to design systems from the electron up.
Then when you're done, you're free to take either route. Trying to go the other way, CS to CE, might not be as easy. You'll miss out on the circuits, digital systems, electromagnetics, linear and digital integrated circuits classes. Which although not uneccessary for for CS, are crucial to computer system hardware at the board and chip level.
If you disagree, what log have you been sleeping under? Everybody knows this by now.
If there were ever two true things that could be said about the internet it's that Al Gore, "took the initiative to create the internet", and that Red Hat started the open source movement. Come on people this is common knowledge!
We need Linux Standard Base, to develop further, and hopefully get all of the major distros on board. Then LSB need's a registered trademark of their own, which they can grant or yank. 3rd party verification companies or the distro companies themselves could act as agents granting the right to use the logo, but the LSB group would retain the ability to yank the logo, or yank the distro's right to grant logo privledges.
So, someone like RedHat could do their own verification of software to LSB, and then grant the right for that piece of software to use the logo. The LSB group could revoke that right if RedHat issued that right when they shouldn't have. Also, they could revoke RedHat's right to grant the logo, if they make too many bad grants.
"consumers who have no idea their online movements are being tracked, and who certainly have the right to pursue individual cultural interests without worring that they're being watched. "
What? The law doesn't only apply when your being watched. Even if no one was watching that doesn't justify breaking copyright law. Katz, your a loon, and your condoning theft.
I don't want Napster to go away, so if blocking people who use it for illegal activity solves the problem, then so be it. Leaving it as the status quo is bound to make the gov. pass some sort of law that makes software like Napster illegal all together. For heaven sakes, you act as if their throwing everyone in prison. Find a real cause.
I want one of these outfits to except payment by credit card. That way not only do you get rid of the headache of writing checks, but you can get frequent flyer miles for everything!
Tux wearing a Kevlar "FUD" Vest, avoiding shot from a "very rich geek".
Or, Tux or Linus climbing out of a computer monitor while "someone" tries to tell you to "pay no attention to the OS behind firewall".
Or, dipict some companies trying to hold back the flood of open source software while others ride the wave. I think I particularly like this one. I'm picturing Tux wearing a red hat, carrying a green inflatable SUSE dinosaur (if that's what it is), and throwing a Debian logo marked frisbee, riding a surf board. Supporting OSS companies could be riding the wave too.
It has a climbing wall, which isn't accessible by paraplegics and the like.
But seriously, I'm all for site design that is usable by the largest audience possible. Personally, I like pages that work when you turn the grapics off. What I fear is how rediculously far things could go if legislation is used to force this down our throats.
This also may be touchy on first admendment grounds. Will commercial artists be forced to create braille descriptions of all their works?
I'm a digital logic designer, so of course I'm interested, but I think many people would find it is very interesting stuff. I know some software types who told me they're practically afraid of learning how the hardware works, and I guess that's OK if you stay in application space. But, for those that kernal hack, write device drivers, hack gcc, or wish to write cache efficient code, I think gaining an understanding of the digital logic level of things can be very beneifical in becoming good at it. Also, the more parallel we design our computers, the more our software is going to have to deal with digital logic design issues. A big issue in digital logic design is latency and synchronization, which is also an issue in software working with ever increasingly, pervasively, parallel systems. People who are good at one of these fields will have developed a good skill set that should transfer well to the other.
I can only imagine this makes things even better over in the Linux PPC world. Speaking of which, how are the new G4s and Linux? Can gcc take advantage of the new processor, and is there currently any support for 3D (although, if not already there I imagine coming shortly)?
Slashdot Mirror
That might make good logical sense, but physically it's not practical or efficient. The amount of overhead (in silicon) would not be worth the functionality.
Networks are accessed ( and consequently used) differently than memory, due to latency and reliability issues. Logically you could make the internet appear to be a big logical address space, but accessing it in that manner wouldn't provide much value.
Grabbing data in chunks or streaming data are better suited to networks than using memory addressing. If network access times came down to the sub 1 ms range, some memory mapped applications might become more feasible.
The ISP buys BANDWIDTH, not a network infrastructure, or more precisely they rent high speed big pipes from internet backbone providers.
My ISP for example Frontier, owns the last mile to my door, and all the hardware, cables, switches, DSL modems and the like on that last mile. Those costs have already been expended and will stay the same unless they expand the network. If that was all I was connected to however, I'd be greatly dissappointed. I really don't care what Judy the homemaker or Phil the out-of-work software developer have shared on their WinME hard drives. I want the WHOLE internet.
For that, Frontier buys bandwidth from various sources Sprint, MCI, etc. They buy that bandwidth in the form of $X per MBytes/sec, which translates into T1s, T3s and the like. So while Frontier is using a monthly fee to try and recoup their investment they made in hardware on their end, they are also are spending a portion of that fee to pay for the big pipe to the rest of the internet.
They don't actually buy a large enough amount of bandwidth for everyone on their service to be downloading 1 Mb/s at the same time. That is a T1s worth of bandwidth per user. A T1 costs hundreds or thousands a month, and Frontier is only charging $50/month. The bandwidth alone would be a net loss for my ISP.
What the ISP is actually doing is providing a service that distributes the cost of large bandwidth pipes (T1s,T3s,etc) to multiple users. This has the caveat that everyone can't be downloading at T1 speeds all the time, or there isn't anything to share!
So if 90% of the users are using 10% of the bandwidth, and 10% of the users are using 90% of the bandwidth, and there's not enough bandwidth to go around. What's an ISP to do? They rent more big pipes coming in, which increases their monthly cost, which they need to pass on to the users. They can either raise everyone's flat rate, which means the users that aren't utilizing very much bandwidth are subsidizing heavy users. Or, they can charge the heavy users more, a.k.a. the more you play the more you pay.
This leads us to ask why the the backbone internet providers charge so much for bandwidth, and more particularly why do they charge high monthly fees, rather than a flat one time charge for access to the network. First, the setup cost for these networks is HUGE, many many millons of dollars. No ISP could afford to buy a lifetime membership to that network. Second, maintance costs are high, it requires full time employees (which don't work for free) to keep the infrastructure humming. And third, they require that money each month to keep expanding their networks. There is not nearly enough backbone bandwidth available out there, for every internet user to be downloading streaming movies at the same time. So that money is being used to maintan and build more network, which the ISPs in turn leases more of to satisfy the appitite of the heavy users.
The cost of high speed internet connections will eventually go down, once network capacity catches up with demand. We'll get their slowly, but not in a giant leap. Companies have to stay profitable in the near term, not just the long term or they go out of business (Witness the Dot Com debaucle). So bandwidth providers will role out bandwidth slowly, as to not make the mistake of saturating the market with to much bandwidth. That would cause the price of bandwidth to drop drastically, but also put a lot of bandwidth providers out of business (Which in turn will bring prices back up). The bandwidth providers don't want to go the way of the bandwidth gatekeepers (ISP's). An excess surplus of ISP's caused broadbandth prices to drop unrealistically low, making many lose money and go out of business.
Supply and Demand BABY, that's where it's at!
What's behind Libranet that is going to prevent it from going the way of so many other Debian based distros?
Have you talked to potential scientific/ engineering customers? It seems to me games would be a big gamble of a market to hit. But scientists and engineers on the other hand are adopting x86 Linux based boxes in droves. If you haven't targetted to this market yet, you might find you're already missing sales on the Windows platform. And most importantly, what are your current customers saying? Do they want Linux support?
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I'm not a software guy, but I'm a hardware guy. I really don't know what types of software are vectorizeable, but I'm familiar with some industries that are embracing Linux FORCEFULLY. I'd talked to them before I'd worry about the game market. At least find out if a vectorizing compiler would help them.
My list:
Industry: EDA (Electronic Design Automation)
Software from these guys frequently lists at 30k-300k for a single license limited to a few years. They won't think twice about buying tools that work better, and they are moving from UNIX to Linux.
Companies: Avanti, Synopsys, Cadence,
Mentor Graphics, Synplicity,
Silicon Perspectives,
Industry: Scientists
Universities, IBM, Whole slew of government,
GE, Aerospace, Medical,
Industry: Communications (wireless,copper,& fiber)
Universities, Nortel, Ericson, Texas Instr.,
Cable/DSL modem companies,
While everyone here almost unanimously cries that mandatory backdoors wouldn't work, or that it would amount to tyranny. Think about this:
1) Your openess to this type of legislation depends on how willing you are to give up some of your freedom for security. Ultimately, governments always exist to restrict some freedom (some loony isn't free to kill people after all), in exchange for security. Any freshman anthropology class covers that. Maybe you haven't been affected directly enough yet to think it is necessary.
2) If you think this is some new type of breach of privacy. Come on. Postal mail is already this way.
3) If you think it won't work. As someone pointed out earlier, with Carnivore everywhere, people using encryption without backdoors can be detected (and located). Data hiding won't work for long either. I recently read that a prof. at a major university has developed a program that can make very accurate odds of whether a picture contains hidden information. It can't decode the information, but that just goes back to my last statement.
4) If you think the risk of abuse is too great. Maybe, maybe you're right. But if you're worried about financial information, think about how much goes through the postal system already. And as far as the bad employee abusing information, remeber far fewer human hands will touch your electronic data than your postal mail. Also this gets back to your sense of security. At some point you'll take the risk of your information being exposed to the government in exchange for the safety of not getting hit by a terrorist attack.
Ultimately, to be secure you must give up some privacy. The hard question is how much privacy must we give up in order to achieve that security. It's not an easy question, and I'm not sure where that line should be drawn.
But people, please don't be so naive to think that it simply goes without saying that encryption backdoors are unexceptable tyranny. It's just not so. I agree this may not be the first action that should be taken, and for technical reasons that many have pointed out, it wouldn't even work today. However, it can be made to work tomorrow. And someday, if the other measures we take to secure our world are still incomplete, far fewer of you will be so quick to denounce encryption backdoors.
Breaking up MS wouldn't have solved the problem anyway. There would just be two companies with monopolies, and the company with Office would have no incentive to support more platforms, as it would cost enormous amounts of money to port the applications.
A real solution would be passing a law that all commercial Word Processing/Spreadsheet/Presentation applications(Office Apps) regardless of manufacturer, would have to support a standard format defined by a standards body. The standard would be freely available. The standard must also be the default and natively supported format. The penalty to MS would be that they are forced to release their current Office file formats to this standards body to be the baseline for the standard.
Any and all companies (including MS) would not be prevented from extended the formats or developing something new. However, their products must support the standard first. For the user to use the proprietary formats the user would be forced to manually chose a different file format. Like selecting ".rtf" instead of ".doc" is now. Practically, no one would do it, and anyone acheiving a monopoly on file formats would effectively be blocked.
This would spur an enormous amount of competition in the office/productivity software space. And we would be guarenteed that StarOffice, KOffice, WordPerfect, and the like, could become 100% compatible.
You seem to mistake the ability to take something with the right to take something. CPRM and SDMI do not stop anyone from receiving something that is freely given away. Hence, these technologies won't stop Open Source. They don't prevent anyone from using GPL, BSD or any other license. So you are confused. If an independent artist or producer chooses to release a work freely, these technologies won't stop them.
You are mistaking the fact that you currently have the ability to digitally copy a piece of music or video or program with the idea that you have the right to do so. You don't. When you do so, you break the law. Except in _limited_ fair use circustances. Giving a copy to your friend, does not qualify fair use. Making a documentary about music and using a clip does.
You say, I'm just copying numbers, I'm not actually taking anything. Just because someone leaves their door unlocked doesn't give you the right to enter their house and take pictures of it. Even though that doesn't take anything of theirs either.
The only "risk" I see DRM posing to Open Source products, is that they may not get support for some multimedia apps that Win/Mac does. And while this might limit the growth potential of Linux on the Desktop, that makes a very large assumption that Linux could ever make it on the Desktop anyways. It still doesn't stop Open Source developers from creating their own multimedia tools and porting them to Windows/Mac so there's free tools for everyone (Gimp).
You gripe about the technology. It's a waste of your time and effort, it won't yield the results you want. That's because you're griping about the symptom, not the disease. DRM technologies are mearly tools created to enforce the law. Instead, gripe about the laws to your senator, and try to change peoples opinion about buying music or producing music under such restrictions. While it's a long shot, at least it has a chance, unlike your current method. Change the laws, or better yet producers attitudes towards DRM, and all of a sudden there's no need for it.
How does developing Linux and Linux based applications fit into IBM's long history of being a leader in developing a massive IP portfolio?
Does IBM see Linux merely as a platform that can't be controlled by MS, or do they see it as something more? Is it merely another platform to plug users in to IBM's proprietary software, or is it a venture to try to make software which more closely meets user needs?
I have nothing against proprietary systems. It is just that if the company is going to "Spend One Billion Dollars on Linux", I'd rather PR didn't spin that as some altruistic venture. It's one thing to spend money developing the Linux kernel, gcc, filesystems, gui environments, networking protocols, etc., and releasing them as Open Source. It's a completely different thing to port proprietary programs to Linux, closed source.
What's the projected break down in Open Source development vs. closed source development of that "One Billon Dollars"? Does IBM plan to make money directly from software they develop Open Source, or do they merely see such software as enabling the sales of their proprietary software?
Thank you,
Ryan Warner
While we're patenting things, beware if your want to sell something. I now hold the patent on exchanging money for goods or services. Using money, instead of bartering, is here by decreed as a unique and non-obvious way of doing business.
From now on all exchanges of money for goods/services owe me a 5% royalty. This includes filing taxes. Making said exchange via the internet is subject to a 10% royalty, because it is even less obvious than doing it in person.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
HP has the beginning of some drivers on source forge. I'm using them now to print from my HP Photo Smart 1000. Works pretty good. I still use the cdj550 gs driver for plain old text, as it doesn't use as much ink.
HP Inkjet Website at SourceForge
1. a standard location for fonts
2. a standard lib that renders the fonts that
a. X Windows uses
b. ghostscript uses
c. anything else uses (StarOffice, Tex ?)
3. anti-alias support (yes, X4.0.2 has this, but you have to explicitly use it)
4. You don't have to do anything other than copy a font file to the aformentioned standard location to get it recognized by everything!
5. Maybe, an extensible font library, supporting some sort of plugin architecture for adding new font formats.
As best as I recall Athlon was clean room built from the ground up, so there are no royalties to Intel for the Athlon/Duron chips. I do recall AMD paying royalties for their 586 line of chips. I searched all over, but did not find anything pertaining to royalties to Intel and the Athlon. The only thing I could find was this quote:
t e1 2.html
"In December 1995, the Company signed a five-year, comprehensive cross-license agreement with Intel. The cross-license is royalty-bearing for the Company's products that use certain Intel technologies. The Company is required to pay Intel minimum nonrefundable royalties through 2000."
Which is available at:
http://www.amd.com/about/investor/1999annual/no
Correct me if you have another source.
Unfortunately the Fed missed the real opportunity to slap on something that Microsoft really wouldn't like, and it wouldn't be nearly so controversial as a break up. Force MS to support standard, open, and free file formats and interfaces.
In fact the government should ask the ACM or IEEE to come up with open and free standards for Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Presentation software, Databases, Boomarks, network file sharing, Scripting languages, and the like. These need to be of equivalent or better quality and capabilities than Microsoft's existing formats/interfaces. Then a ACM or IEEE standard is defined that states that to be ACM/IEEE xxxx.xx certified you must support these formats/interfaces NATIVELY, by DEFAULT, and as easy and similar to use as any proprietary formats as technically possible. Then force Microsoft to make their operating system and applications to be compliant with the most recent version of the standard.
This wouldn't stop Microsoft from continueing to play their games with their own proprietary formats and interfaces, but their products would at least get along nicely with any software that also supports these open and free standards.
Microsoft would always have to face the fact that as the standard evolved to support similar features to anything they added to their own proprietary features, they would have to support the standard implementation as well. This should over time make them want to just start supporting the open and free standard system, since they have to anyhow. They can then spend more of the effort making a better to use system, rather than a difficult to live without system.
You probably can pick up the CS information handling stuff that you'd miss from a CE or EE degree on the job. CE or maybe better yet, EE with leanings towards CE, gives the background neccessary to design systems from the electron up.
Then when you're done, you're free to take either route. Trying to go the other way, CS to CE, might not be as easy. You'll miss out on the circuits, digital systems, electromagnetics, linear and digital integrated circuits classes. Which although not uneccessary for for CS, are crucial to computer system hardware at the board and chip level.
If there were ever two true things that could be said about the internet it's that Al Gore, "took the initiative to create the internet", and that Red Hat started the open source movement. Come on people this is common knowledge!
This could be good, in that I could switch my girlfriend's computer to linux.
We need Linux Standard Base, to develop further, and hopefully get all of the major distros on board. Then LSB need's a registered trademark of their own, which they can grant or yank. 3rd party verification companies or the distro companies themselves could act as agents granting the right to use the logo, but the LSB group would retain the ability to yank the logo, or yank the distro's right to grant logo privledges.
So, someone like RedHat could do their own verification of software to LSB, and then grant the right for that piece of software to use the logo. The LSB group could revoke that right if RedHat issued that right when they shouldn't have. Also, they could revoke RedHat's right to grant the logo, if they make too many bad grants.
"consumers who have no idea their online movements are being tracked, and who certainly have the right to pursue individual cultural interests without worring that they're being watched. "
What? The law doesn't only apply when your being watched. Even if no one was watching that doesn't justify breaking copyright law. Katz, your a loon, and your condoning theft.
I don't want Napster to go away, so if blocking people who use it for illegal activity solves the problem, then so be it. Leaving it as the status quo is bound to make the gov. pass some sort of law that makes software like Napster illegal all together. For heaven sakes, you act as if their throwing everyone in prison. Find a real cause.
I want one of these outfits to except payment by credit card. That way not only do you get rid of the headache of writing checks, but you can get frequent flyer miles for everything!
Tux wearing a Kevlar "FUD" Vest, avoiding shot from a "very rich geek".
Or, Tux or Linus climbing out of a computer monitor while "someone" tries to tell you to "pay no attention to the OS behind firewall".
Or, dipict some companies trying to hold back the flood of open source software while others ride the wave. I think I particularly like this one. I'm picturing Tux wearing a red hat, carrying a green inflatable SUSE dinosaur (if that's what it is), and throwing a Debian logo marked frisbee, riding a surf board. Supporting OSS companies could be riding the wave too.
Ryan
It has a climbing wall, which isn't accessible by paraplegics and the like.
But seriously, I'm all for site design that is usable by the largest audience possible. Personally, I like pages that work when you turn the grapics off. What I fear is how rediculously far things could go if legislation is used to force this down our throats.
This also may be touchy on first admendment grounds. Will commercial artists be forced to create braille descriptions of all their works?
Are you saying that the following heirarchy is not legal?
Killer App, License: GPL
|
+--Moll's Library, License: GPL
|
+--Troll's Library, License: QPL 2.0
Dynamic Links by the way.
Why? What clause in the GPL prevents this? If Killer App was some other License I could see the problem, but this sounds fair to me.
Ryan
I'm a digital logic designer, so of course I'm interested, but I think many people would find it is very interesting stuff. I know some software types who told me they're practically afraid of learning how the hardware works, and I guess that's OK if you stay in application space. But, for those that kernal hack, write device drivers, hack gcc, or wish to write cache efficient code, I think gaining an understanding of the digital logic level of things can be very beneifical in becoming good at it. Also, the more parallel we design our computers, the more our software is going to have to deal with digital logic design issues. A big issue in digital logic design is latency and synchronization, which is also an issue in software working with ever increasingly, pervasively, parallel systems. People who are good at one of these fields will have developed a good skill set that should transfer well to the other.
I can only imagine this makes things even better over in the Linux PPC world. Speaking of which, how are the new G4s and Linux? Can gcc take advantage of the new processor, and is there currently any support for 3D (although, if not already there I imagine coming shortly)?
Ryan