I'm what you could call a systems programmer, I write a lot of device drivers, write and/or graft IP stacks into embedded OS kernels, etc. Those applications (as opposed to system level stuff) I do write tend not to have GUI interfaces for human input, but rather process input from sensors that detect things like cars going through tollboths or move network packets around. There's never much other software betweem my code and the hardware, and I like it that way.
How did I get here? Two influences come immediately to mind: my first computer, a Commodore VIC-20, and my high school's VAX 11/750. The Commodore was limited, but you had complete control of the machine, and if you wanted it to do more than just make cute sounds and display characters on a coloured screen you had to learn everything about it. Today's more complicated and powerful machines give you a nice ready-made front end so that graphics and such are comparatively easy to do, and there is speed to spare so you don't have to be as careful with your code. On that simple machine, if you wanted something done you had to talk to the hardware.
The other big pre-university influence, the VAX, was enormously powerful compared to the PCs of the time, but couldn't do real graphics on the VT100 terminals students used. Flashy games and such weren't really the way to go, but I did want to explore what the system could do. So I got into playing with processes, IPC, learning assembler, etc. I also learned a lot about a very complex and powerful OS and how it worked. By the time I got to university, I found working "inside" systems was a lot more interesting -- and generally easier -- than developing user-oriented stuff.
That interest spurred me into getting a co-op job with a printer company, where I did real systems work on controller OSs (we called them "executives"). And that experience got me into a job doing different sorts of embedded and realtime work, but almost always at a systems level. I haven't always singlemindedly focused on this sort of thing, I did graphics and databases in school and some amount of GUI and RDBMS work professionally, but it was never as fun or satisfying for me as the systems stuff. With systems work, you still have that sense of really controlling the machine that you just can't get when you have to ask somebody else's OS or GUI API's do do work on your behalf.
Your rose-coloured outlook really misses the point. Big business is rapidly transforming the Net from an egalitarian forum for the exchange of ideas to a one-way street with token interactivity where You The Consumer is fed as much marketing as they can dish out and where your choice for content is limited to what they want you to see. DMCA, UCITA, anti-"hacking" laws, it all leads to a corporate-led dumbing down of the Internet so that it becomes just another boob tube.
What these companies see when they think of all of their employees connected to the Net is not a better-informed and more empowered workforce, they see a huge audience of potential consumers. Of course they want more people to be connected -- the marketroids cynically call us "eyeballs" and "clicks" and god knows what other automaton-like terms. The bigger the audience, the more justification for advertising dollars and the more money they'll make.
Don't get me wrong, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Right now the internet is still a great resource, and being connected is a great source of empowerment and education. But at the same time, don't confuse greed with altruism; at the same time they tell you they're increasing your freedom and access, they're busy trying to limit your choices to what benefits them.
A game that reaches hundreds of thousands or even millions of people eventually becomes more than a product to be sold, it becomes part of our culture. But the shelf life of these things is fairly short, a few years at the most, but on the other hand it takes several decades for the music or game to become public domain. In the meantime, the original printings of the work degrade, or the hardware they require disappears, and because of the copyright "protection" the work disappears altogether. And of course since there's no longer any money to be made from it, the owners of the copyright just let it gather dust on a tape somewhere. And ultimately, by the time anyone interested can legally distribute it or emulate it, no one is around who remembers it.
Clearly, the laws must be changed. Any sane government should recognize that even popular culture items are part of the overall culture and it's in the public interest to preserve them. The duration of copyright protection needs to be shortened. One way to do this which would quell the corporate fear of having a money-maker torn from them by the law and given to the public domain, would be to tie some sort of "marketability burden of proof" on the item -- if it hasn't been sold, made money, etc, in several years, and it's past the expiry, off it goes into public domain. If it's still selling, then the copyright holder gets an extension.
But regardless, something must be changed. We lose enough information on a daily basis as it is, we don't need laws that force us to lose our culture to bit rot.
It's true that a non-flat surface will radiate heat better due to increased surface area. But when you slap a heat sink on top of the chip, you're not trying to radiate heat away at all! You want to conduct the heat from one item (the chip) to the other (the heat sink) so that the heat sink, with its comparatively enormous surface area, can radiate the heat away. The idea is to increase the efficiency with which heat transfers from the casing to the heat sink, and assuming that the heat sink's bottom surface is flat, the best way to do this is to make the chip casing's surface as flat as possible so that the "contact patch" (to use an automotive term) between the heat sink and the chip casing is as large as possible. Essentially, the more direct contact there is between the casing and the heat sink, the larger the cross-sectional area of the surface through which the heat gets transferred and therefore the faster the heat transfers. Simple physics. And my Athlon, formerly a 550, is all the faster for it.
This once again exposes the real problem with Napster, which is that it's a big central target which can be blocked, can be sued, and can be coerced into blocking users or groups of users.
There are ways around some of that, of course, and it's terribly unlikely that all 335,435 IP addresses these guys supposedly identified will be trackable -- on the other hand, given the legal climate that exists around this stuff identifying the users isn't the RIAA's mission, just banning as many IP addresses as possible. Still, this is a big problem.
All of which leads to the real solution, a distributed system like Gnutella. With no central server and no real way to track what any specific user is searching for, it's a much more private solution. Granted it takes more bandwidth, but it's impossible to shut down in this way.
OK here's the thing -- the suit is against the part of mp3.com -- mymp3.com -- that allows people to download mp3's of music they can "prove" that they own. The reason the RIAA sued this part of mp3.com's business -- and only this part, as far as the ruling is concerned -- is that in order for mymp3.com to do this, they had to make and then distribute copies of copyrighted works. Despite the very good intentions of mymp3, I'm not sure that they really have much of a legal leg to stand on. Even taking fair use into account, *you* as the purchaser have a limited right to make copies for yourself etc, but I'm not sure you can argue that the seller does.
It's true that the artists whose CDs are sold through mp3.com have agreed to this, but others haven't and those are the ones the suit concerns.
At any rate, here's the real, sinister, bad reason for this suit and why the RIAA is so hot and bothered about MP3.com. It's about distribution. MP3.com allows "the little guy" artists to sell their music at a low cost and with a lot of exposure. The transactions that occur, be they the buying of MP3s or of CDs, are done between the buyer, mp3.com, and the artists, without the involvement of the RIAA's companies. There's little overhead and less greed than at the RIAA's members, which is why the typical CD from mp3.com is priced around the $5 to $8 range (I've bought a lot of them and I love it). So between the ability to sample the music by downloading the free mp3's, and getting a good deal on CDs, and allowing artists to get a decent cut of the sale prices, MP3.com has a really attractive business model for all concerned. And this is what the RIAA really hates, and legally there's nothing they can really do about it. But the MyMP3 suit gives them a chance to hurt MP3.com and possibly get rid of it as a legitimate competitor. And so the war continues.
Hey look, these guys put out a neat little terminal that gets people onto the internet and lets the company make tons of money from ISP subscriptions. That's great. But if they screw up their end-user agreement such that it's possible for anyone to buy the thing at a low price without obligation to purchase the ISP, that's their fault. If I then come along and modify the thing to do what I want, I own it, I'm not violating anything, and I can do what I very well please with it. It's not like these guys are some kind of charity and we're blatantly violating the spirit of some covenental agreement we signed with them that happens to have a loophole in it ; we're doing what we want with something we own.
People get taken for a ride by the twisted wording of licencing agreements, credit card terms, and tons of other fine print every day. If it turns out that one of these big boys inadvertently gives everyone a much better deal than they originally intended, there is nothing legally or morally wrong with taking advantage of that.
Frankly, what really is disgusting, and IMO morally wrong, is for companies like iOpener to then turn around and cry outrage and blame "hackers" for "lost revenue". It's typical of our corporate culture to pass the buck for your own screw ups, and the iOpener fiasco is just another example of their willingness to scapegoat anything non mainstream to get their way.
At any rate, I was all excited about getting one for $50, to play MP3s on, but for $199 (and with all the other pieces parts I have lying around) I can build something just as good and more expandable.
"So far, the Internet seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of television's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing," said Billington.
Uh huh. So let's not try to improve anything, let's keep the books in dusty shelves far away from where anyone could get at them so that we can feel good about ourselves in our big, white, superior building.
"It is dangerous to promote the illusion that you can get anything you want by sitting in front of a computer screen." He described this as "arrogance" and "hubris".
...and just what do you think you're exhibiting? Humility and self-abasement? You're basically saying that because we want to view books on our computer screens rather than have to travel to get them, we're all sex-obsessed illiterate morons.
What I want to know is, how does one become the Librarian of Congress, and more importantly how do you kick the Librarian of Congress out of office? This guy is just an arrogant luddite.
argued that WAVE America was simply wrong. That it was neither necessary, since the amount of school violence had been insanely exaggerated, nor effective -- kids could hardly be expected to accurately gauge the emotional or mental states of their classmates. I also argued that it was dangerous, that anonymous reporting was one of the primary tools of every evil political system in modern times. I reminded them that some of the smartest, most interesting and ultimately successful kids often experienced extreme and systematic harassment and brutality for being different, alienated or otherwise non-normal. That if educators, politicians or private corporations like Pinkerton really cared about school safety, they would do something to protect these outcasts.
A lot of the motivation for this kind of system, that is to say the reason it will sell, is that it discourages individualism and independent thinking. Jon makes it sound as though he needed to point out that the chilling effect such a system would have on the more eccentric and intelligent students is an accident that the company may have overlooked. I'm betting it's a feature designed into the sytem from the start.
In a corporatist system, what's the point of school? To create new crops of consumers. And what happens if people are allowed to form their own thoughts and ideas and are allowed nonconformist behaviors? They might question the barrage of advertising, might not believe what the corporate-owned media tells them, might want to challenge the pro-business anti-individual laws that the government passes at the behest of the corporations.
So of course this will work. The only people more hated than the jocks are the smart kids, the oddballs, because at least they can't or won't fight back while the jocks will. So now we'll give any kid with a grudge the power to report anything they don't like about someone. And of course the schools will just eat this up, just like they do now when they suspend kindergarteners who play cops and robbers, because it makes them look proactive and responsible. And we'll have schools that are free of creativity and individualism, schools that teach that backbiting and fear of authority are cherished values.
This clearly is the product of an evil political system. It's the political system that's taking root now and will become dominant if something isn't done to stop it.
What are you smoking, and where do I get some? Really, have you already forgotten the efforts of Microsoft to abolish time and a half overtime for their hourly contract employees? When they tried to get the state of Washington to exclude "information tech" workers wholesale from that particular benefit?
Try going there yourself before shooting off like that.
Contract workers are one thing, employees are another. I've been to Microsoft's campus for interop meetings they've hosted, and it's quite a nice place to work. Every employee has an office, every building has a cafeteria, there are break rooms on every floor with racks of free soft drinks. From a visitor's perspective I'll say that they cater very well. People who work at Microsoft spend a great deal of time there, and the company makes an effort to ensure that these employees don't mind being there. The department I dealt with has meetings one Friday afternoon each month where beer is served. No one complains about their salary, or the stock options, etc.
The point is, certainly from a physical comfort standpoint it's quite a nice place to be an employee. The culture is weird and ethically I could never work there, but that doesn't mean its an unpleasant place to spend half a week.
Based on the way they've explained it, you don't really have to get your own copy to understand how it would have to work. There are only so many ways to code a driver. So those of us who do have experience writing drivers -- and a few of us have already posted -- do have something to offer the discussion, thank you very much.
I like the line about "safe and stable... keeps inexperienced developers out of the Linux kernel"
Yeah right. Device drivers for Linux and other Unixes aren't that difficult to write, and besides who would let an inexperienced programmer mess with a device driver anyway? You still have to understand basic concepts like I/O ranges, interrupt handlers, DMA, etc., so really other than a time savings when porting from Windows to Linux (or other) this doesn't get you anything at all.
The only way they could implement this the way they claim -- with most of the driver sitting in user space making calls to a loadable module -- is for the module to be bloated and generic. The userspace "driver" then calls the LKM, with ioctls or some other mechanism, to get the real work done. Sounds like a great deal of indirection which would probably hurt performance.
Getting cross-platform compatibility for device drivers isn't difficult as long as you exclude Windows from the mix. I've written numerous device drivers for various hardware, and had to port them from old SVR3 to UnixWare and Linux. In each case the kernel calls are different, the methods have different parameters etc, but basically in most cases it's similar enough that you could almost write a Perl script to convert from one to the other. Obviously this isn't true of Windows, so I guess if you're really desperate to get a driver for Windows and you only know Unix this might fit the bill. And of course your "driver" won't work at all if they you don't install their module, and if they choose to not support or drop support for a particular OS you're up the creek.
My advice... If you don't know how to port your driver to a different OS, hire a contractor who does and keep the source code when they're done.
I'm sure Esther Dyson is a very intelligent person. But I also think she's hardly in a position to represent the interests of "the common person" in the ICANN. She's the very rich daughter of a very rich and famous physicist who went to Harvard not to get an education but to make connections, and has basically used her social status and name recognition to get where she is. Based on her writings and pronouncements, which haven't always been very impressive, I'm at a loss to understand why "the digerati" (blech) treat her as some kind of Hari Seldon of the internet.
At any rate, it doesn't surprise me that she's not a very good leader of ICANN. She's probably so used to people automatically kowtowing to her that she has no patience for anyone questioning her dictates. It's not that she's "redefining politics" or any of that babble ; she's simply not equipped to deal with people that question her marching orders. It's a classic case of a spoiled child throwing tantrums, and the only reason she's being treated otherwise is that people are still afraid to say anything negative about her.
-- "Today's children need guidance. And nothing gets a bigger response out of kids than a list of rules hung on a wall."
As several posters (gclef among others) have said, it's the use that should determine the legality. This ruling will help enforce that.
The whole problem with the anti-deCSS and CPHack suits is that they are predicated on the assumption that because the code in question could be used to commit illegal acts, it will be. And if you consider software to be a "tool" or a "device" then legally you might get away with that argument. But where does that stop? You can print the code to deCSS on a T-shirt for example. Should that be banned because it constitutes a threat? No! It's speech, just like teaching physics is speech -- are we going to ban that because someone could take the information and make a bomb with it?
To ban code simply because it could be abused is to trample on everyone's rights just to protect a few select interests. We don't allow that in any other arena -- we are allowed to do and have all sorts of dangerous things which could be misused to cause harm. Software, and speech, should not be any different. Punish people for their actions, not their words. If someone writes a virus, that's fine. If someone infects an unwilling person's system with a virus, that is a crime. Until a crime is committed, though, we have a constitutional right to say and do whatever we want. Does that make it tougher for law enforcement? Sure. But does that preserve everyone's rights equally? Yes! And that's why this ruling is good, and important.
Ouch, you were so close to the truth I could taste it. I think much of what you say is true, but you miss the important point that Microsoft IS in the Entertainment Industry.
See, now, there you go. You've done just the same thing JonKatz did: you can't see the forest for the tree. You want to continue to think that Microsoft is "the enemy" by redefining the way it controls PC software.
The point is, Microsoft only dominates one thing: the PC market. The Entertainment Industry I'm referring to is Hollywood and Big Music, and they're the real threat because they're the ones lobbying for things like the DMCA. Things that use the law to take everyone's freedoms away. Microsoft acts in unscrupulous ways in that it abuses the fact that its OS ships on virtually every Intel-type PC sold. The much bigger and more dangerous big entertainment companies have gotten together and are trying to use the law to ensure that you can only buy products that they have sanctioned and that they receive money for (like DVD players) and unlike Microsoft they are actively trying -- and succeeding -- in preventing free software from competing with them.
At the risk of repeating myself, what you miss, and what Jon Katz has evidently missed, is that while we celebrate Microsoft's legal woes, a much worse enemy is already acquiring a much tighter hold on a much more wide-ranging marketplace than Microsoft ever tried to control.
You're right, Jon, we already live in a post-microsoft world. But not in the way you seem to think.
On the one hand, the breakup of Microsoft is largely irrelevant. Microsoft's success in the world of operating systems has peaked. Windows 2000 is the beginning of the end ; its mediocre performance and its failure to establish a strong presence in the server market means that MS will never own the enterprise. And its challengers on the desktop are winning as well ; Microsoft is in retreat on all fronts. And because Microsoft is now a well-established company with stable stock value, a successful career at Microsoft no longer means retiring as a millionaire at age 30. They can't attract the talent they need to keep going. The justice department may well accelerate their decline, but they aren't the cause of it.
On the other hand, you talk of choices between operating systems, etc, etc, and how the world will be all wonderful and happy now that the great beast Microsoft has been slain. Guess again. There's a new sheriff in town, and this time it's got the law on its side and the courts in its pocket. And its name is... the Entertainment Industry. Yes, Microsoft dumbed down computing for the masses and in doing so they reduced the quality of the experience. But they didn't have the millions of dollars of lobbying power that the MPAA, RIAA, and other consortiums of faceless companies have to force their wares down our throats. While Microsoft may have bundled apps in order to kill their competition, the entertainment industry simply gets laws passed to kill theirs.
So we can all jump for joy and celebrate the fact that we can run any operating system we want on our machines. But we're really just kicking the dying giant, while the real enemy creeps up on us from all sides.
Slightly tangential question
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Somebody in an earlier post mentioned that Be tried to sell their own hardware before becoming a strictly software company. That reminded me of the much-hyped "geek port" that the Be PPC boxen sported. Just what was this thing anyway? Any links for specs? I seem to remember a lot of magazine quotes along the lines of "mmm... geeeek poort" (voice of Homer J. Simpson). So what was this uber-cool interface anyway?
Well, what a surprise: hyperlinks are legal! I really like the term "alleged hyperlinking" used in the article. As if. Folks, the whole idea behind the Web is that it consists of hyperlinks. Originally the whole of the Web was supposed to be connected such that you could get from one place to another via these links, without ever having to type a URL.
Attempting to prevent this was just another way that large businesses could corrupt and usurp an existing system, and this judge clearly made the right decision -- even if his reasoning seemed to be in the wrong context.
Wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot put things from ZDNet and the other non-technical IT publications (like anything that mentions the Gartner Group's pontifications) into a separate Topics category so that we could filter them out? I mean, Jon Katz is better than this stuff; at least he tries to research his subject. If we can filter him out I think it's only fair to allow us to shield ourselves from this garbage.
I don't mean to flame here, but I really don't think the summary you provided reflects a very good discussion. On the one hand you had Mr. O'Reilly pretty much arguing by analogy the whole time, and on the other hand you had Mr. Bezos doing the classic used car salesman's pitch of "I'll get back to you on that" and "I'll have to talk to my manager". The "I'll get back to you on that" is accomplished by pushing the problem out to a place where he can make a promise to "try" (i.e. see to what extent he can allow independent developers to use "his invention" without harming his case against B&N) without having to commit immediately. The "I'll have to talk to my manager" allows him to be the good cop and Amazon's patent lawyers to be the bad cop. The upshot is, he still basically represents a big business trying to rake in as much as possible, consequences be damned, and I'm afraid that all that happened here is that Jeff talks a very good talk and told Tim just what he wants to hear. The "I'm just a little guy against giants like Wal-Mart" and "I'm just like Netscape" angles are simply attempts to get on Tim's good side and turn the discussion from "me against you" to "us against them". That is, after all, what a good used car salesman does.
As far as the patentability issue, there should be no compromise: this simply must stop here. Someone in an earlier post said (roughly) that the reason for all the outcry over this is that this one click "innovation" is so simple and obvious that even people who can barely write "hello world" in a programming language are disgusted. And they should be. There is nothing more here than an attempt to use the law as a crowbar, to get any advantage, no matter how tenuous and no matter what its consequences, against Amazon's competitors. For Jeff Bezos to compare his company to Netscape is indeed arresting, but only because it's incredible that someone in the retail business whose company simply uses tools that others (including Netscape) have developed, would have the hubris to compare themselves to Netscape.
Tim says, "The social norms of the Internet and of the Open Source community, which have proven so productive in the development of the Web, need to be recognized, honored, and upheld. The public relations cost of violating those norms needs to be high." Everyone knows that the patent system is totally broken. Not everyone chooses to use it. Those who do, like Amazon, deserve all the flak they receive. The only thing these companies understand is dollars, and the only way to make them behave is to make the consequences of their actions translate into lost revenue.
This is annoying in that it's not documented. But heaven forbid anyone, and especially Microsoft, finds that the "standards" don't meet their needs.
Well, that's what standards bodies are for. You have to realize that the IETF (and other standards bodies) committees aren't just composed of some sort of godlike beings who hand down edicts, they're composed of people from the various companies that actually implement the standards. So if MS really has a beef with a standard that they want changed, they should take it up with the standards body and get their modifications documented.
This whole meme flap is just silly. The gist of it, that the objective of the battle is to infect enough minds with the idea by voting day, is quite correct. But really the whole issue boils down to a lot of technologically unsophisticated people (the majority of the voters) being caught in a tug of war between the right-wingers and the people who oppose them. It all boils down to who can put more wool over whose eyes, and who can be the most convincing. That's it. There are no ideas wandering around infecting minds or any such nonsense. It's all just a battle of propaganda.
To answer another post, yeah, using "meme" instead of "idea" is just a way to sound l33t.
This is a thinly veiled attempt at boosting myCIO.com's advertising revenue. Go look at the article, it's got all the hallmarks of classic FUD, including nonspecific terms and pseudotechnical gobbletygook. And my favorite part, about how Linux and Solaris systems can't ever be permanently fixed, you have to have your enterprise servers scanned over and over again.
Oh well, this is just a "consultant" screwing over gullible CIO's. I guess it's no different than a televangelist screwing over old ladies. Except that good operating systems don't get smeared by televangelists...
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I'm what you could call a systems programmer, I write a lot of device drivers, write and/or graft IP stacks into embedded OS kernels, etc. Those applications (as opposed to system level stuff) I do write tend not to have GUI interfaces for human input, but rather process input from sensors that detect things like cars going through tollboths or move network packets around. There's never much other software betweem my code and the hardware, and I like it that way.
How did I get here? Two influences come immediately to mind: my first computer, a Commodore VIC-20, and my high school's VAX 11/750. The Commodore was limited, but you had complete control of the machine, and if you wanted it to do more than just make cute sounds and display characters on a coloured screen you had to learn everything about it. Today's more complicated and powerful machines give you a nice ready-made front end so that graphics and such are comparatively easy to do, and there is speed to spare so you don't have to be as careful with your code. On that simple machine, if you wanted something done you had to talk to the hardware.
The other big pre-university influence, the VAX, was enormously powerful compared to the PCs of the time, but couldn't do real graphics on the VT100 terminals students used. Flashy games and such weren't really the way to go, but I did want to explore what the system could do. So I got into playing with processes, IPC, learning assembler, etc. I also learned a lot about a very complex and powerful OS and how it worked. By the time I got to university, I found working "inside" systems was a lot more interesting -- and generally easier -- than developing user-oriented stuff.
That interest spurred me into getting a co-op job with a printer company, where I did real systems work on controller OSs (we called them "executives"). And that experience got me into a job doing different sorts of embedded and realtime work, but almost always at a systems level. I haven't always singlemindedly focused on this sort of thing, I did graphics and databases in school and some amount of GUI and RDBMS work professionally, but it was never as fun or satisfying for me as the systems stuff. With systems work, you still have that sense of really controlling the machine that you just can't get when you have to ask somebody else's OS or GUI API's do do work on your behalf.
And that's how it went.
Your rose-coloured outlook really misses the point. Big business is rapidly transforming the Net from an egalitarian forum for the exchange of ideas to a one-way street with token interactivity where You The Consumer is fed as much marketing as they can dish out and where your choice for content is limited to what they want you to see. DMCA, UCITA, anti-"hacking" laws, it all leads to a corporate-led dumbing down of the Internet so that it becomes just another boob tube.
What these companies see when they think of all of their employees connected to the Net is not a better-informed and more empowered workforce, they see a huge audience of potential consumers. Of course they want more people to be connected -- the marketroids cynically call us "eyeballs" and "clicks" and god knows what other automaton-like terms. The bigger the audience, the more justification for advertising dollars and the more money they'll make.
Don't get me wrong, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Right now the internet is still a great resource, and being connected is a great source of empowerment and education. But at the same time, don't confuse greed with altruism; at the same time they tell you they're increasing your freedom and access, they're busy trying to limit your choices to what benefits them.
A game that reaches hundreds of thousands or even millions of people eventually becomes more than a product to be sold, it becomes part of our culture. But the shelf life of these things is fairly short, a few years at the most, but on the other hand it takes several decades for the music or game to become public domain. In the meantime, the original printings of the work degrade, or the hardware they require disappears, and because of the copyright "protection" the work disappears altogether. And of course since there's no longer any money to be made from it, the owners of the copyright just let it gather dust on a tape somewhere. And ultimately, by the time anyone interested can legally distribute it or emulate it, no one is around who remembers it.
Clearly, the laws must be changed. Any sane government should recognize that even popular culture items are part of the overall culture and it's in the public interest to preserve them. The duration of copyright protection needs to be shortened. One way to do this which would quell the corporate fear of having a money-maker torn from them by the law and given to the public domain, would be to tie some sort of "marketability burden of proof" on the item -- if it hasn't been sold, made money, etc, in several years, and it's past the expiry, off it goes into public domain. If it's still selling, then the copyright holder gets an extension.
But regardless, something must be changed. We lose enough information on a daily basis as it is, we don't need laws that force us to lose our culture to bit rot.
It's true that a non-flat surface will radiate heat better due to increased surface area. But when you slap a heat sink on top of the chip, you're not trying to radiate heat away at all! You want to conduct the heat from one item (the chip) to the other (the heat sink) so that the heat sink, with its comparatively enormous surface area, can radiate the heat away. The idea is to increase the efficiency with which heat transfers from the casing to the heat sink, and assuming that the heat sink's bottom surface is flat, the best way to do this is to make the chip casing's surface as flat as possible so that the "contact patch" (to use an automotive term) between the heat sink and the chip casing is as large as possible. Essentially, the more direct contact there is between the casing and the heat sink, the larger the cross-sectional area of the surface through which the heat gets transferred and therefore the faster the heat transfers. Simple physics. And my Athlon, formerly a 550, is all the faster for it.
This once again exposes the real problem with Napster, which is that it's a big central target which can be blocked, can be sued, and can be coerced into blocking users or groups of users.
There are ways around some of that, of course, and it's terribly unlikely that all 335,435 IP addresses these guys supposedly identified will be trackable -- on the other hand, given the legal climate that exists around this stuff identifying the users isn't the RIAA's mission, just banning as many IP addresses as possible. Still, this is a big problem.
All of which leads to the real solution, a distributed system like Gnutella. With no central server and no real way to track what any specific user is searching for, it's a much more private solution. Granted it takes more bandwidth, but it's impossible to shut down in this way.
OK here's the thing -- the suit is against the part of mp3.com -- mymp3.com -- that allows people to download mp3's of music they can "prove" that they own. The reason the RIAA sued this part of mp3.com's business -- and only this part, as far as the ruling is concerned -- is that in order for mymp3.com to do this, they had to make and then distribute copies of copyrighted works. Despite the very good intentions of mymp3, I'm not sure that they really have much of a legal leg to stand on. Even taking fair use into account, *you* as the purchaser have a limited right to make copies for yourself etc, but I'm not sure you can argue that the seller does.
It's true that the artists whose CDs are sold through mp3.com have agreed to this, but others haven't and those are the ones the suit concerns.
At any rate, here's the real, sinister, bad reason for this suit and why the RIAA is so hot and bothered about MP3.com. It's about distribution. MP3.com allows "the little guy" artists to sell their music at a low cost and with a lot of exposure. The transactions that occur, be they the buying of MP3s or of CDs, are done between the buyer, mp3.com, and the artists, without the involvement of the RIAA's companies. There's little overhead and less greed than at the RIAA's members, which is why the typical CD from mp3.com is priced around the $5 to $8 range (I've bought a lot of them and I love it). So between the ability to sample the music by downloading the free mp3's, and getting a good deal on CDs, and allowing artists to get a decent cut of the sale prices, MP3.com has a really attractive business model for all concerned. And this is what the RIAA really hates, and legally there's nothing they can really do about it. But the MyMP3 suit gives them a chance to hurt MP3.com and possibly get rid of it as a legitimate competitor. And so the war continues.
Happy Beltaine!
Hey look, these guys put out a neat little terminal that gets people onto the internet and lets the company make tons of money from ISP subscriptions. That's great. But if they screw up their end-user agreement such that it's possible for anyone to buy the thing at a low price without obligation to purchase the ISP, that's their fault. If I then come along and modify the thing to do what I want, I own it, I'm not violating anything, and I can do what I very well please with it. It's not like these guys are some kind of charity and we're blatantly violating the spirit of some covenental agreement we signed with them that happens to have a loophole in it ; we're doing what we want with something we own.
People get taken for a ride by the twisted wording of licencing agreements, credit card terms, and tons of other fine print every day. If it turns out that one of these big boys inadvertently gives everyone a much better deal than they originally intended, there is nothing legally or morally wrong with taking advantage of that.
Frankly, what really is disgusting, and IMO morally wrong, is for companies like iOpener to then turn around and cry outrage and blame "hackers" for "lost revenue". It's typical of our corporate culture to pass the buck for your own screw ups, and the iOpener fiasco is just another example of their willingness to scapegoat anything non mainstream to get their way.
At any rate, I was all excited about getting one for $50, to play MP3s on, but for $199 (and with all the other pieces parts I have lying around) I can build something just as good and more expandable.
Happy Beltaine!
God, what an idiot:
...and just what do you think you're exhibiting? Humility and self-abasement? You're basically saying that because we want to view books on our computer screens rather than have to travel to get them, we're all sex-obsessed illiterate morons.
"So far, the Internet seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of television's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-literate chatter, shortened attention spans, and near-total subservience to commercial marketing," said Billington.
Uh huh. So let's not try to improve anything, let's keep the books in dusty shelves far away from where anyone could get at them so that we can feel good about ourselves in our big, white, superior building.
"It is dangerous to promote the illusion that you can get anything you want by sitting in front of a computer screen." He described this as "arrogance" and "hubris".
What I want to know is, how does one become the Librarian of Congress, and more importantly how do you kick the Librarian of Congress out of office? This guy is just an arrogant luddite.
argued that WAVE America was simply wrong. That it was neither necessary, since the amount of school violence had been insanely exaggerated, nor effective -- kids could hardly be expected to accurately gauge the emotional or mental states of their classmates. I also argued that it was dangerous, that anonymous reporting was one of the primary tools of every evil political system in modern times. I reminded them that some of the smartest, most interesting and ultimately successful kids often experienced extreme and systematic harassment and brutality for being different, alienated or otherwise non-normal. That if educators, politicians or private corporations like Pinkerton really cared about school safety, they would do something to protect these outcasts.
A lot of the motivation for this kind of system, that is to say the reason it will sell, is that it discourages individualism and independent thinking. Jon makes it sound as though he needed to point out that the chilling effect such a system would have on the more eccentric and intelligent students is an accident that the company may have overlooked. I'm betting it's a feature designed into the sytem from the start.
In a corporatist system, what's the point of school? To create new crops of consumers. And what happens if people are allowed to form their own thoughts and ideas and are allowed nonconformist behaviors? They might question the barrage of advertising, might not believe what the corporate-owned media tells them, might want to challenge the pro-business anti-individual laws that the government passes at the behest of the corporations.
So of course this will work. The only people more hated than the jocks are the smart kids, the oddballs, because at least they can't or won't fight back while the jocks will. So now we'll give any kid with a grudge the power to report anything they don't like about someone. And of course the schools will just eat this up, just like they do now when they suspend kindergarteners who play cops and robbers, because it makes them look proactive and responsible. And we'll have schools that are free of creativity and individualism, schools that teach that backbiting and fear of authority are cherished values.
This clearly is the product of an evil political system. It's the political system that's taking root now and will become dominant if something isn't done to stop it.
What are you smoking, and where do I get some? Really, have you already forgotten the efforts of Microsoft to abolish time and a half overtime for their hourly contract employees? When they tried to get the state of Washington to exclude "information tech" workers wholesale from that particular benefit?
Try going there yourself before shooting off like that.
Contract workers are one thing, employees are another. I've been to Microsoft's campus for interop meetings they've hosted, and it's quite a nice place to work. Every employee has an office, every building has a cafeteria, there are break rooms on every floor with racks of free soft drinks. From a visitor's perspective I'll say that they cater very well. People who work at Microsoft spend a great deal of time there, and the company makes an effort to ensure that these employees don't mind being there. The department I dealt with has meetings one Friday afternoon each month where beer is served. No one complains about their salary, or the stock options, etc.
The point is, certainly from a physical comfort standpoint it's quite a nice place to be an employee. The culture is weird and ethically I could never work there, but that doesn't mean its an unpleasant place to spend half a week.
Sounds good. I wonder how long it'll take for the RIAA to file a lawsuit and get an injunction banning its distribution?
Based on the way they've explained it, you don't really have to get your own copy to understand how it would have to work. There are only so many ways to code a driver. So those of us who do have experience writing drivers -- and a few of us have already posted -- do have something to offer the discussion, thank you very much.
I like the line about "safe and stable... keeps inexperienced developers out of the Linux kernel"
Yeah right. Device drivers for Linux and other Unixes aren't that difficult to write, and besides who would let an inexperienced programmer mess with a device driver anyway? You still have to understand basic concepts like I/O ranges, interrupt handlers, DMA, etc., so really other than a time savings when porting from Windows to Linux (or other) this doesn't get you anything at all.
The only way they could implement this the way they claim -- with most of the driver sitting in user space making calls to a loadable module -- is for the module to be bloated and generic. The userspace "driver" then calls the LKM, with ioctls or some other mechanism, to get the real work done. Sounds like a great deal of indirection which would probably hurt performance.
Getting cross-platform compatibility for device drivers isn't difficult as long as you exclude Windows from the mix. I've written numerous device drivers for various hardware, and had to port them from old SVR3 to UnixWare and Linux. In each case the kernel calls are different, the methods have different parameters etc, but basically in most cases it's similar enough that you could almost write a Perl script to convert from one to the other. Obviously this isn't true of Windows, so I guess if you're really desperate to get a driver for Windows and you only know Unix this might fit the bill. And of course your "driver" won't work at all if they you don't install their module, and if they choose to not support or drop support for a particular OS you're up the creek.
My advice... If you don't know how to port your driver to a different OS, hire a contractor who does and keep the source code when they're done.
I'm sure Esther Dyson is a very intelligent person. But I also think she's hardly in a position to represent the interests of "the common person" in the ICANN. She's the very rich daughter of a very rich and famous physicist who went to Harvard not to get an education but to make connections, and has basically used her social status and name recognition to get where she is. Based on her writings and pronouncements, which haven't always been very impressive, I'm at a loss to understand why "the digerati" (blech) treat her as some kind of Hari Seldon of the internet.
At any rate, it doesn't surprise me that she's not a very good leader of ICANN. She's probably so used to people automatically kowtowing to her that she has no patience for anyone questioning her dictates. It's not that she's "redefining politics" or any of that babble ; she's simply not equipped to deal with people that question her marching orders. It's a classic case of a spoiled child throwing tantrums, and the only reason she's being treated otherwise is that people are still afraid to say anything negative about her.
--
"Today's children need guidance. And nothing gets a bigger response out of kids than a list of rules hung on a wall."
As several posters (gclef among others) have said, it's the use that should determine the legality. This ruling will help enforce that.
The whole problem with the anti-deCSS and CPHack suits is that they are predicated on the assumption that because the code in question could be used to commit illegal acts, it will be. And if you consider software to be a "tool" or a "device" then legally you might get away with that argument. But where does that stop? You can print the code to deCSS on a T-shirt for example. Should that be banned because it constitutes a threat? No! It's speech, just like teaching physics is speech -- are we going to ban that because someone could take the information and make a bomb with it?
To ban code simply because it could be abused is to trample on everyone's rights just to protect a few select interests. We don't allow that in any other arena -- we are allowed to do and have all sorts of dangerous things which could be misused to cause harm. Software, and speech, should not be any different. Punish people for their actions, not their words. If someone writes a virus, that's fine. If someone infects an unwilling person's system with a virus, that is a crime. Until a crime is committed, though, we have a constitutional right to say and do whatever we want. Does that make it tougher for law enforcement? Sure. But does that preserve everyone's rights equally? Yes! And that's why this ruling is good, and important.
Ouch, you were so close to the truth I could taste it. I think much of what you say is true, but you miss the important point that Microsoft IS in the Entertainment Industry.
See, now, there you go. You've done just the same thing JonKatz did: you can't see the forest for the tree. You want to continue to think that Microsoft is "the enemy" by redefining the way it controls PC software.
The point is, Microsoft only dominates one thing: the PC market. The Entertainment Industry I'm referring to is Hollywood and Big Music, and they're the real threat because they're the ones lobbying for things like the DMCA. Things that use the law to take everyone's freedoms away. Microsoft acts in unscrupulous ways in that it abuses the fact that its OS ships on virtually every Intel-type PC sold. The much bigger and more dangerous big entertainment companies have gotten together and are trying to use the law to ensure that you can only buy products that they have sanctioned and that they receive money for (like DVD players) and unlike Microsoft they are actively trying -- and succeeding -- in preventing free software from competing with them.
At the risk of repeating myself, what you miss, and what Jon Katz has evidently missed, is that while we celebrate Microsoft's legal woes, a much worse enemy is already acquiring a much tighter hold on a much more wide-ranging marketplace than Microsoft ever tried to control.
You're right, Jon, we already live in a post-microsoft world. But not in the way you seem to think.
On the one hand, the breakup of Microsoft is largely irrelevant. Microsoft's success in the world of operating systems has peaked. Windows 2000 is the beginning of the end ; its mediocre performance and its failure to establish a strong presence in the server market means that MS will never own the enterprise. And its challengers on the desktop are winning as well ; Microsoft is in retreat on all fronts. And because Microsoft is now a well-established company with stable stock value, a successful career at Microsoft no longer means retiring as a millionaire at age 30. They can't attract the talent they need to keep going. The justice department may well accelerate their decline, but they aren't the cause of it.
On the other hand, you talk of choices between operating systems, etc, etc, and how the world will be all wonderful and happy now that the great beast Microsoft has been slain. Guess again. There's a new sheriff in town, and this time it's got the law on its side and the courts in its pocket. And its name is... the Entertainment Industry. Yes, Microsoft dumbed down computing for the masses and in doing so they reduced the quality of the experience. But they didn't have the millions of dollars of lobbying power that the MPAA, RIAA, and other consortiums of faceless companies have to force their wares down our throats. While Microsoft may have bundled apps in order to kill their competition, the entertainment industry simply gets laws passed to kill theirs.
So we can all jump for joy and celebrate the fact that we can run any operating system we want on our machines. But we're really just kicking the dying giant, while the real enemy creeps up on us from all sides.
Somebody in an earlier post mentioned that Be tried to sell their own hardware before becoming a strictly software company. That reminded me of the much-hyped "geek port" that the Be PPC boxen sported. Just what was this thing anyway? Any links for specs? I seem to remember a lot of magazine quotes along the lines of "mmm... geeeek poort" (voice of Homer J. Simpson). So what was this uber-cool interface anyway?
Well, what a surprise: hyperlinks are legal! I really like the term "alleged hyperlinking" used in the article. As if. Folks, the whole idea behind the Web is that it consists of hyperlinks. Originally the whole of the Web was supposed to be connected such that you could get from one place to another via these links, without ever having to type a URL.
Attempting to prevent this was just another way that large businesses could corrupt and usurp an existing system, and this judge clearly made the right decision -- even if his reasoning seemed to be in the wrong context.
Wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot put things from ZDNet and the other non-technical IT publications (like anything that mentions the Gartner Group's pontifications) into a separate Topics category so that we could filter them out? I mean, Jon Katz is better than this stuff; at least he tries to research his subject. If we can filter him out I think it's only fair to allow us to shield ourselves from this garbage.
Here's what I posted on their talkback...
I don't mean to flame here, but I really don't think the summary you provided reflects a very good discussion. On the one hand you had Mr. O'Reilly pretty much arguing by analogy the whole time, and on the other hand you had Mr. Bezos doing the classic used car salesman's pitch of "I'll get back to you on that" and "I'll have to talk to my manager". The "I'll get back to you on that" is accomplished by pushing the problem out to a place where he can make a promise to "try" (i.e. see to what extent he can allow independent developers to use "his invention" without harming his case against B&N) without having to commit immediately. The "I'll have to talk to my manager" allows him to be the good cop and Amazon's patent lawyers to be the bad cop. The upshot is, he still basically represents a big business trying to rake in as much as possible, consequences be damned, and I'm afraid that all that happened here is that Jeff talks a very good talk and told Tim just what he wants to hear. The "I'm just a little guy against giants like Wal-Mart" and "I'm just like Netscape" angles are simply attempts to get on Tim's good side and turn the discussion from "me against you" to "us against them". That is, after all, what a good used car salesman does.
As far as the patentability issue, there should be no compromise: this simply must stop here. Someone in an earlier post said (roughly) that the reason for all the outcry over this is that this one click "innovation" is so simple and obvious that even people who can barely write "hello world" in a programming language are disgusted. And they should be. There is nothing more here than an attempt to use the law as a crowbar, to get any advantage, no matter how tenuous and no matter what its consequences, against Amazon's competitors. For Jeff Bezos to compare his company to Netscape is indeed arresting, but only because it's incredible that someone in the retail business whose company simply uses tools that others (including Netscape) have developed, would have the hubris to compare themselves to Netscape.
Tim says, "The social norms of the Internet and of the Open Source community, which have proven so productive in the development of the Web, need to be recognized, honored, and upheld. The public relations cost of violating those norms needs to be high." Everyone knows that the patent system is totally broken. Not everyone chooses to use it. Those who do, like Amazon, deserve all the flak they receive. The only thing these companies understand is dollars, and the only way to make them behave is to make the consequences of their actions translate into lost revenue.
This is annoying in that it's not documented. But heaven forbid anyone, and especially Microsoft, finds that the "standards" don't meet their needs.
Well, that's what standards bodies are for. You have to realize that the IETF (and other standards bodies) committees aren't just composed of some sort of godlike beings who hand down edicts, they're composed of people from the various companies that actually implement the standards. So if MS really has a beef with a standard that they want changed, they should take it up with the standards body and get their modifications documented.
They do this to _every_ protocol they get their hands on. IPP, LPD, DHCP, Java, hell even their version of traceroute isn't right.
Bah.
This whole meme flap is just silly. The gist of it, that the objective of the battle is to infect enough minds with the idea by voting day, is quite correct. But really the whole issue boils down to a lot of technologically unsophisticated people (the majority of the voters) being caught in a tug of war between the right-wingers and the people who oppose them. It all boils down to who can put more wool over whose eyes, and who can be the most convincing. That's it. There are no ideas wandering around infecting minds or any such nonsense. It's all just a battle of propaganda.
To answer another post, yeah, using "meme" instead of "idea" is just a way to sound l33t.
This is a thinly veiled attempt at boosting myCIO.com's advertising revenue. Go look at the article, it's got all the hallmarks of classic FUD, including nonspecific terms and pseudotechnical gobbletygook. And my favorite part, about how Linux and Solaris systems can't ever be permanently fixed, you have to have your enterprise servers scanned over and over again.
Oh well, this is just a "consultant" screwing over gullible CIO's. I guess it's no different than a televangelist screwing over old ladies. Except that good operating systems don't get smeared by televangelists...