The more there are these uses for getting the raw DVD data, the harder it's going to be for the MPAA to get roadblacks enacted. This isn't a toy for a bunch of hackers (as important as you and I may see that to be), it's businesses with sound (and more understandable to the common man) justifications for bypassing anti-copying provisions. Hopefully its existence will even help the DeCSS case.
As I mentioned in a previous article, anybody who needs evidence that most people who download MP3's do not buy the CD need only look at the 300,000 people who illegally downloaded Metallica songs in the course of two days.
Agreed, most people who download a given MP3 don't buy the CD; but that's irrelevant. What truly matters is how many of them would have bought the CD in the absence of Napster, et al, and how many actually did buy the CD anyway. The evidence we have doesn't indicate a huge loss from Napster. Given that, it should be hard to argue that draconian changes to copyright law, encryption et al are necessary or cost-effective measures for reducing illegal distribution, and easy to argue that such measures will significantly inconvenience consumers.
Feh. Christianity teaches that you should obey God's rules, because otherwise you will be punished. Truly moral people Do The Right Thing because it is the right thing, because they care about their fellow human beings, and strive to make the world better for one and all.
How many pints of blood have *you* given to the Red Cross?
You're going to write an operating system in a graphical programming language?
I think it depends what you mean by graphical programming language. I see it as one where the logical structure of the code is laid out graphically, rather than via indents and curly braces. I once thought of trying to generate something rather like this for writing Unix shell scripts. Shell scripts are notoriously write-only, with long lines of strange characters, and multiple command-line programs all piping into each other. While I put together code to run a mailing list using these tools, it wasn't always the most pleasant thing. A tool where each command was represented by a graphical symbol, with visuals to show how the output of one program was fed into the input of one or more others and widgets on the symbols to set flags and command line inputs, might have made it a more pleasant task.
I think that's key. There are too many proto-gurus who have it in their heads that they are the next uber-guru. This field of endeavor isn't that much different in that respect than sports. You may be the superstar in high school, among the better players in college, a name on the roster in some farm club and just another fan in the stands when it comes to the big leagues.
Perhaps, but you can certainly be an expert without being *the* expert. While I can't answer every question on comp.lang.c++.moderated, I am the C++ guru at my office, and there's a high degree of satisfaction in solving someone's problem in a minute when they've been struggling for hours with that problem.
Re:But here's a question...Plse help
on
Universal Access
·
· Score: 1
Instant on computers.
Note that if you can really trust the OS and other constantly running programs not to cruft up (allocate memory and never deallocate it, etc.), you can simply have a sleep mode, where the memory and virtual memory is maintained until the user is ready to use the machine again. Generally the consumer OSes aren't reliable enough to do this with for long periods of time, though.
The article doesn't address something which interests me. Aren't the copyrights on some of these games, especially the old arcade ones, about to expire?
No. Thanks to the numerous extensions to the duration of copyrights enacted at the behest of Disney, et al., no one reading this message will be alive when the copyrights expire, even if the duration is not extended yet again the next time a Mickey Mouse cartoon might come out of copyright.
While I'm sure the author of the article has some points, keep in mind that none of the benchmarks (except maybe the memory bandwidth one) take AltiVec into acount.
Note that memory bandwidth could limit just how much benefit you can get from Altivec.
However, at this point one of the main weaknesses of the Apple machines, compared to Intel ones, is the 3-D rendering ability. The ATI Rage 128 chipset is definitely a second-class citizen compared to the latest chips from NVidia and 3DFX. Hopefully they'll be looking at using ATI's upcoming chipset, and that will live up to some of the hype.
This whole thing sinks or swims on the trade secret argument.
Actually, it doesn't. Not at all. The trade secret issue is a red herring.
In Microsoft's original letter, no mention was made of trade secrets, simply of simple copyright violation and the need to request removal of violating materials by ISPs or similar orgs, as laid out in the DMCA (in sections *other* than those related to encryption (a la DeCSS), etc.) As such, as much as I hate to say it, if any comments quoted more than a reasonable fair use section of the document, Slashdot doesn't have a legal leg to stand on and this is just a bit of grandstanding.
Jeff makes a good point about entry pages not chewing up much bandwidth like FascDot originally said, and about it being a temporary placeholder, but personally I find them utterly annoying.
One of the biggest annoyances is that they mess up the "back" button behavior, you clikc back and end up on the same page you started from. There's a (possibly) easy fix for this, the browsers simply should remove any auto-forwarding page from the stack of viewed web pages. I believe I have registered this as a Mozilla feature request.
"Berk" is cockney rhyming slang, where a phrase or rhyming word is used in place of the actual word. For example, "trouble and strife" for wife. In some cases, the rhyming slang itself gets shortened, as in "butcher's hook" for "look" getting shortened to simply "butchers", as in "I had a butcher's at the new dual G3 Apple." In the case of berk, it is short for "Berkshire Hunt". Now, think what that might rhyme with...
As I understand copyright and/or trademark law, even if a company doesn't really care about a particular (alleged) violation, they have to pursue it
This is trademark only, an any IP lawyer should know that. According to the rinkworks notice, the claim was "contributory copyright infringement."
As someone with a mortgage loan held by BoA and a checking account there, I wrote them a nastygram threatening to take my business elsewhere and explaining why.
Do you realize what this means? Using mechanical tools and chemicals on the one hand, and scanning graphics (and etching them) on the other hand, we could place on the moon BOTH steaming hot grits AND Natalie Portman, naked and petrified!
Not to mention, we could put the DeCSS code on it! Let's see the MPAA stamp out *that* copy!:-)
If they don't like something in the Constitution, they should try to amend it, not introduce unconstitutional bills.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia took Congress to task the other day for relying on the courts to nullify blatantly unconstitutional bills, by the way.
But hell, back in 1988 George Bush got the support of flag-wrapped Americans by chastising Dukakis for vetoing a bill requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance that Dukakis's advisors had told him was unconstitutional.
So if I borrowed 100 CDs from a friend for an afternoon and registered them, then returned the CDs, I would be able to listen to music I hadn't purchased.
But you could do exactly the same by ripping the CDs, or copying them to audio tape, and none of the devices involved could tell whether you were legally entitled to do so. Now certainly you couldn't do this in an afternoon, but devices that speed up the copying job (such as high-speed tape dubbers) are not illegal. A hardware/software combination for computers that likewise sped up this process would also not be illegal.
1) unless you have a 286 or even an 8088 I think you have a cdrom drive. What computer made in the last 6 years doesn't?
An iOpener, for one.
2) there a many freeware and GNU cdda extracting and mp3 encoding programs. ripping a song only takes a few minutes. My cdrom rips at 8x, so 30-45 seconds per song.
It takes on the order of an hour or so to rip a CD, convert to MP3, label the songs correctly, and plunk it on a CD-R with a few other albums.
I look behind me, and I see ~100 CDs. That's 12 8 hour days worth of ultra-exciting MP3 creation, or something more than $3,000 at my current hourly rate. *That's* not a significant savings? Who are you, Bill Gates?
3) why would you need upload your cd collection anywhere?
Said 100 CDs being worth somewhat more than $1,000, I'd rather not have to have them in my office, carry them around, etc.
Oh, puh-leaze. According to the article, "Rakoff disagreed with MP3.com's argument that its music service is the 'functional equivalent' of storing CDs that had already been purchased."
Hello? Are or are not all copies of a given CD nigh-identical copies? We can either copy the 650 megabytes from my system to theirs, or we can check beforehand whether they already have a nigh-identical copy, and skip doing that copy. That *IS* functionally equivalent.
Now, if the judge had ruled the system illegal for some other reason, that would be different. But since this completely incorrect "fact" seems to be a key part of his ruling, the rest of the findings of law collapse like a house of cards.
I read the article and all I came up with was a resounding duh.
I disagree. There were several interesting bits of info IMHO. First, they are doing good business selling the iOpener in its planned role. Thus the hacker market isn't as attractive as it might otherwise be. Second, while the LCD price they get is good, supply is a real issue, so expanding the market for their machines is problematic compared to getting more $ per customer, by providing services after the sale. Third, they feel that the market for a low-end hacker machine is going to be satisfied by others soon.
If it weren't for a couple of these issues, it would make sense for Netpliance to sell a hacker's machine, with a higher base price and no service contract. This article explains why that doesn't appeal to the Netpliance guys.
Copyrights must be defended if they are to remain enforceable.
No they don't, that only applies to trademarks. Moreover, as copyright owner, you can negotiate whatever settlement you wish, including giving the violator time to correct the violation.
Slashdot Mirror
Bidders' Edge were doing something to Ebay's site that Ebay didn't want them to do.
I hereby prohibit the RIAA and their appointed representatives from checking to see if I have DeCSS on my web site...
The more there are these uses for getting the raw DVD data, the harder it's going to be for the MPAA to get roadblacks enacted. This isn't a toy for a bunch of hackers (as important as you and I may see that to be), it's businesses with sound (and more understandable to the common man) justifications for bypassing anti-copying provisions. Hopefully its existence will even help the DeCSS case.
As I mentioned in a previous article, anybody who needs evidence that most people who download MP3's do not buy the CD need only look at the 300,000 people who illegally downloaded Metallica songs in the course of two days.
Agreed, most people who download a given MP3 don't buy the CD; but that's irrelevant. What truly matters is how many of them would have bought the CD in the absence of Napster, et al, and how many actually did buy the CD anyway. The evidence we have doesn't indicate a huge loss from Napster. Given that, it should be hard to argue that draconian changes to copyright law, encryption et al are necessary or cost-effective measures for reducing illegal distribution, and easy to argue that such measures will significantly inconvenience consumers.
There is no morality without God.
Feh. Christianity teaches that you should obey God's rules, because otherwise you will be punished. Truly moral people Do The Right Thing because it is the right thing, because they care about their fellow human beings, and strive to make the world better for one and all.
How many pints of blood have *you* given to the Red Cross?
You're going to write an operating system in a graphical programming language?
I think it depends what you mean by graphical programming language. I see it as one where the logical structure of the code is laid out graphically, rather than via indents and curly braces. I once thought of trying to generate something rather like this for writing Unix shell scripts. Shell scripts are notoriously write-only, with long lines of strange characters, and multiple command-line programs all piping into each other. While I put together code to run a mailing list using these tools, it wasn't always the most pleasant thing. A tool where each command was represented by a graphical symbol, with visuals to show how the output of one program was fed into the input of one or more others and widgets on the symbols to set flags and command line inputs, might have made it a more pleasant task.
I think that's key. There are too many proto-gurus who have it in their heads that they are the next uber-guru. This field of endeavor isn't that much different in that respect than sports. You may be the superstar in high school, among the better players in college, a name on the roster in some farm club and just another fan in the stands when it comes to the big leagues.
Perhaps, but you can certainly be an expert without being *the* expert. While I can't answer every question on comp.lang.c++.moderated, I am the C++ guru at my office, and there's a high degree of satisfaction in solving someone's problem in a minute when they've been struggling for hours with that problem.
Instant on computers.
Note that if you can really trust the OS and other constantly running programs not to cruft up (allocate memory and never deallocate it, etc.), you can simply have a sleep mode, where the memory and virtual memory is maintained until the user is ready to use the machine again. Generally the consumer OSes aren't reliable enough to do this with for long periods of time, though.
The article doesn't address something which interests me. Aren't the copyrights on some of these games, especially the old arcade ones, about to expire?
No. Thanks to the numerous extensions to the duration of copyrights enacted at the behest of Disney, et al., no one reading this message will be alive when the copyrights expire, even if the duration is not extended yet again the next time a Mickey Mouse cartoon might come out of copyright.
It's patents that only last ~20 years.
While I'm sure the author of the article has some points, keep in mind that none of the benchmarks (except maybe the memory bandwidth one) take AltiVec into acount.
Note that memory bandwidth could limit just how much benefit you can get from Altivec.
However, at this point one of the main weaknesses of the Apple machines, compared to Intel ones, is the 3-D rendering ability. The ATI Rage 128 chipset is definitely a second-class citizen compared to the latest chips from NVidia and 3DFX. Hopefully they'll be looking at using ATI's upcoming chipset, and that will live up to some of the hype.
This whole thing sinks or swims on the trade secret argument.
Actually, it doesn't. Not at all. The trade secret issue is a red herring.
In Microsoft's original letter, no mention was made of trade secrets, simply of simple copyright violation and the need to request removal of violating materials by ISPs or similar orgs, as laid out in the DMCA (in sections *other* than those related to encryption (a la DeCSS), etc.) As such, as much as I hate to say it, if any comments quoted more than a reasonable fair use section of the document, Slashdot doesn't have a legal leg to stand on and this is just a bit of grandstanding.
hot bowls of grits down their pants. i can understand, it might ruin their hard rock image
I know that hot grits down my pants would stop me from being rock hard...
Oh, you said "hard rock". My mistake...
Jeff makes a good point about entry pages not chewing up much bandwidth like FascDot originally said, and about it being a temporary placeholder, but personally I find them utterly annoying.
One of the biggest annoyances is that they mess up the "back" button behavior, you clikc back and end up on the same page you started from. There's a (possibly) easy fix for this, the browsers simply should remove any auto-forwarding page from the stack of viewed web pages. I believe I have registered this as a Mozilla feature request.
What's a berk?
"Berk" is cockney rhyming slang, where a phrase or rhyming word is used in place of the actual word. For example, "trouble and strife" for wife. In some cases, the rhyming slang itself gets shortened, as in "butcher's hook" for "look" getting shortened to simply "butchers", as in "I had a butcher's at the new dual G3 Apple." In the case of berk, it is short for "Berkshire Hunt". Now, think what that might rhyme with...
As I understand copyright and/or trademark law, even if a company doesn't really care about a particular (alleged) violation, they have to pursue it
This is trademark only, an any IP lawyer should know that. According to the rinkworks notice, the claim was "contributory copyright infringement."
As someone with a mortgage loan held by BoA and a checking account there, I wrote them a nastygram threatening to take my business elsewhere and explaining why.
True. Boobs are nice, but they ain't everything (unless you're still in puberty)
That's as maybe, but I bet she has trouble getting guys to look her in the eyes, if you know what I mean (and I think you do)...
Actually, pulling Occam's Razor into the picture, the evidence seems to indicate that it's a lot simpler to say that there is a God, than not.
Question posed to atheist: "Where did the universe come from?"
Atheist: "Ummm...."
Question posed to monotheist: "Where did the universe come from?"
Monotheist: "God created it."
"Then where did God come from?"
Monotheist: "Ummm..."
It doesn't simplify things, it just changes the question slightly.
Do you realize what this means? Using mechanical tools and chemicals on the one hand, and scanning graphics (and etching them) on the other hand, we could place on the moon BOTH steaming hot grits AND Natalie Portman, naked and petrified!
:-)
Not to mention, we could put the DeCSS code on it! Let's see the MPAA stamp out *that* copy!
If they don't like something in the Constitution, they should try to amend it, not introduce unconstitutional bills.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia took Congress to task the other day for relying on the courts to nullify blatantly unconstitutional bills, by the way.
But hell, back in 1988 George Bush got the support of flag-wrapped Americans by chastising Dukakis for vetoing a bill requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance that Dukakis's advisors had told him was unconstitutional.
So if I borrowed 100 CDs from a friend for an afternoon and registered them, then returned the CDs, I would be able to listen to music I hadn't purchased.
But you could do exactly the same by ripping the CDs, or copying them to audio tape, and none of the devices involved could tell whether you were legally entitled to do so. Now certainly you couldn't do this in an afternoon, but devices that speed up the copying job (such as high-speed tape dubbers) are not illegal. A hardware/software combination for computers that likewise sped up this process would also not be illegal.
1) unless you have a 286 or even an 8088 I think you have a cdrom drive. What computer made in the last 6 years doesn't?
An iOpener, for one.
2) there a many freeware and GNU cdda extracting and mp3 encoding programs. ripping a song only takes a few minutes. My cdrom rips at 8x, so 30-45 seconds per song.
It takes on the order of an hour or so to rip a CD, convert to MP3, label the songs correctly, and plunk it on a CD-R with a few other albums.
I look behind me, and I see ~100 CDs. That's 12 8 hour days worth of ultra-exciting MP3 creation, or something more than $3,000 at my current hourly rate. *That's* not a significant savings? Who are you, Bill Gates?
3) why would you need upload your cd collection anywhere?
Said 100 CDs being worth somewhat more than $1,000, I'd rather not have to have them in my office, carry them around, etc.
A reasonable ruling.
Oh, puh-leaze. According to the article, "Rakoff disagreed with MP3.com's argument that its music service is the 'functional equivalent' of storing CDs that had already been purchased."
Hello? Are or are not all copies of a given CD nigh-identical copies? We can either copy the 650 megabytes from my system to theirs, or we can check beforehand whether they already have a nigh-identical copy, and skip doing that copy. That *IS* functionally equivalent.
Now, if the judge had ruled the system illegal for some other reason, that would be different. But since this completely incorrect "fact" seems to be a key part of his ruling, the rest of the findings of law collapse like a house of cards.
Anybody got a clue stick for him?
I read the article and all I came up with was a resounding duh.
I disagree. There were several interesting bits of info IMHO. First, they are doing good business selling the iOpener in its planned role. Thus the hacker market isn't as attractive as it might otherwise be. Second, while the LCD price they get is good, supply is a real issue, so expanding the market for their machines is problematic compared to getting more $ per customer, by providing services after the sale. Third, they feel that the market for a low-end hacker machine is going to be satisfied by others soon.
If it weren't for a couple of these issues, it would make sense for Netpliance to sell a hacker's machine, with a higher base price and no service contract. This article explains why that doesn't appeal to the Netpliance guys.
Not quite. An a and a d disappear from aadstro. His username is lenigan and mail system is
astro uiuc edu.
There's another fellow who rot13s his address as well as having a word to subtract, that one is a little trickier.
As an international reader, I have absolutely no clue how much a "pound" is.
At current exchange rates, a pound is 1.716 Euros or 1.56 USD (U.S. Dollars). Hope this helps.
(Gonna get smacked one of these days...)
Copyrights must be defended if they are to remain enforceable.
No they don't, that only applies to trademarks. Moreover, as copyright owner, you can negotiate whatever settlement you wish, including giving the violator time to correct the violation.