Time Warner likens the circumvention of copyright protection measures to simple theft by arguing that "a fair use defense might allow a user to quote a passage from a book but it does not follow that the user is allowed to break into a bookstore and steal a book."
So, according to Time Warner, making a copy of content I have legally bought and paid for is exactly the same as breaking and entering into a store, and stealing merchandise! The mind boggles... did the Time Warner representative actually manage to say this with a straight face?
DEC used Unix as the operating-system underpinning of it [sic] biggest computer hits, before the PC revolution blind-sided it and Compaq picked up the pieces.
Actually, it used RSX, RSTS, and VAX-VMS, which most of the DECUS software was written for. Digital Unix was an afterthought, and a poor implementation at that. Fortunately (for DEC), the good folks at Berkely used the VAX as the reference implementation of BSD Unix, or Digital would have gone down the tubes even sooner.
As I understand it, MS's reasoning is that under the new law, it's illegal to a) circumvent the licence, b) explain how to circumvent the licence, and c) produce software ('tools') that allow others to circumvent the licence.
By that same reasoning, then, it should also be illegal to a) rob banks, b) explain to other people how to rob banks, and c) produce tools (e.g. masks and guns) that allow others to rob banks. Seems to be a lot of movie and television producers, clothing manufacters, and gun makers are in deep kimchee if this is true... I say we slap an injunction on the corporate officers of Victoria's Secret, since the stocking they produce may be used in a crime!
Your confusing packet size with window size; you're telling the server to use a larger window, it still gets sent across as ~1500 byte packets. Yes, if you've acked data you haven't received, you'll need to restart the whole transfer if any data is dropped (which is very likely if you're using an obscenely large window size), as Stefan says in his article. But if you haven't acked data you haven't yet received, only the (~1500 byte) packets that were lost need be retransmitted (provided your TCP receive stack keeps sufficient buffer space for all the unacknowledged data; this might be true for a 2MByte download, but if you're downloading all of IE, I doubt if you've got that much memory in your system, so much of it would be transmitted multiple times.)
In summary, in a noisy or bandwidth limited environment, playing games with the ACKs probably won't buy you much, and if you congest the pipe to the point where the routers start discarding packets, you're arbitrarily large download is likely to take more, not less, time.
And what's wrong with using the most conveniently available tool for the job? A rational, non-bigoted person wouldn't see anything wrong with using a tool that you already had available and were experienced in using. I also don't see anybody mentioning any Open Source applications that would have been better suited to the task... does StarOffice have this capability?
12706 developers working several years on 3149 projects, and they've still produced fewer lines of code than a single release of Win2K... is this because Open Source is more efficient, less feature-rich, or because it doesn't carry the burden of backwards compatibility with DOS 1.0?
So what the honorable judge is saying is that MP3.COM let's users upload their MP3 files to their server and play them back, it's legal. Even if they install "compression" software on their server that detects duplicate files, and replaces duplicates with a link to the first file. However, if MP3.COM uploads any MP3's ripped from CDs to this very same database, it's illegal? This seems remarkably inconsistant from a technical standpoint.
IANAL, but this probably actually makes sense from a legal standpoint; they fact that two files are abolutely identical bits is legally irrelevant if the "provenance" (i.e. the legal source of the files) is different.
Conclusion: MP3.COM can make a slight change to it's service to require ripping and uploading songs, rather than just checking the CD serial number. This will take much longer for users, but will require no additional disk space on the MP3.COM servers, as surely replacing a string of bits with a pointer to an identical string of bits is a legitimate form of compression.
One doesn't get to be the president of a division by making statements that somebody can point to later as incorrect. Hence the Q. "What's 2 plus two?" A. "How much would you like it to be?" style.
Add to this that SCO has been blasted in the past for making asinine statements about Linux, mostly due to their well-founded fear of Linux eating into their revenues. So yes, I'm sure several staffers inspected these replies closely to make sure they were guaranteed 100% content-free, and thus safe for release. Which explains the long delay in answering, doesn't it?
He does imply a good point, though: transaction processing systems command big bucks in business, and as of yet I haven't seen any open source alternatives. SCO is probably planning on transitioning from an OS company to a middleware company. The only problem is, due to their long track record of arrogance and greed, they've probably already generated negative associations amongst many potential enterprise clients, so IMHO a company starting from scratch would have a better chance of succeeding than one carrying the baggage of Larry Michael's legacy.
The best thing about this is it give Sega nearly instant feedback as to what games the kids are actually playing, so they'll have a much better idea what kinds of games to steer their future development to.
A secondary benefit, of course, is that they can provide bug fixes in internet time (provided they set it up right.
In the long term, I think playing against "artificial intelligence" will always be less interesting then playing against flesh and blood other players. Obviously if you got connectivity for online game rentals, you've got connectivity to multiplayer servers. Now if we could just do something about those network latencies...
The Raymond vs. Lessig debate is a microcosm of modern politics, the conservative vs. the liberal viewpoint. ESR has a cynical distrust of government, based on a belief (perhaps gained from direct experience) that that more power you give to the government, the more likely the government will be to be swayed by rich and powerful special interests to use that power to benefit the few at the expense of the rest. Lessig has a naive trust of government to do the right thing for the greatest common good, uninfluenced by the same rich and powerful special interests that they must pander to to acheive public office.
Personally, I find Raymond's viewpoint to be much closer to reality, and I beleive the fall of comunism proves that the cynical view of human nature is closer to the truth. It may be tempting to think that the one government should be to mold the economic system to acheive the greatest common good, but giving them the power to do almost always backfires; exceptions are made to benefit big campaign contributors (like the banking and real estate industries in the 80's) NOT the people as a whole.
Much as we'd all like to see Micro$oft get spanked, we fear a government that is brazen enough to do so. It should be enough for the government to merely insist that Micro$oft play nice. Also, does it not strike anyone as hypocritcial that on the one hand, the government is attacking Micro$oft as an illegal monopoly, while on the other hand, it is contributing literally billions of dollars to license their software and to defend Micro$oft's intellectual property rights? Wouldn't the easiest sanctions to enforce be to simple declare a moratorium on government purchases from MS and of prosecuting anyone for pirating MS software? In my mind, there should be a constitutional ammendment that states that those that blatantly violate the laws of society should not be subject to protection by the same laws they are flaunting while they do so... in simple terms, if I shoot the person stealing my car, his family shouldn't be allowed to sue me for his injuries.
the real boost for what became Silicon Valley was the $35 billion in federal spending that flowed into California during World War II
Huh? Then why didn't the Los Angeles basin, which received by far the lion's share of this wealth, become Silicon Valley? To the best of my knowledge, Lockheed was the only government contractor doing any work in the Bay Area. Most historians agree that world class universities like Stanford and U.C. Berkelely, and their outstanding graduates, have much more to do with the success of the Silcon Valley than government contracts.
If there is no public funding for its development, it becomes unclear who will contribute to open-source development. Or rather, it is easy to suspect that those who contribute will be heavily self-interested actors pushing those "open standards" in directions that benefit their for-profit endeavors tied to its standards.
To date, this has NOT been true. What makes Nathan think this will change?
If there is no public funding for its development, it becomes unclear who will contribute to open-source development.
God knows Sendmail, BIND, Linux, GNU, etc. wouldn't exist now if they hadn't received public funding! Perhaps the same people that have always contributed to open source will continue to do so. If Nathan is incapable of understanding their motives, perhaps he shouldn't be trying to pass himself off as an expert on open source.
Open-source proponents like Eric Raymond uphold the banner of the "right to fork" standards
No, they support the right to fork code, which is strongly discouraged by social pressures, not law. Source != standards.
which is great for techie programmers looking for cool code, but can really suck for consumers looking for standards that are compatible across the board (something that Microsoft, whatever the failings of its standard, delivers for its customers)
Which is why 100% of applications written for NT4.0 run just fine under Win2K, right? Bwahahahah...
If public policy does not promote compatible standards that serve public needs -- not particular corporate interests -- we are likely to see the whole open-source movement rapidly fragment into an incompatible stew of standards and products that deliver little but confusion to the public.
Partially correct -- public policy SHOULD support open standards. But to date, the governments efforts to do this have been dismal failures. (Anybody remember the ISO/OSI communications protocols? Ada? GOSIP? Does anybody use the POSIX "compliant" APIs supposedly incorporated into NT? Anybody out there ever tried reading the ISO specifications and understanding them, let alone implementing them? So far the IETF methodology has been by far the most successful in creating interoperable standards that people actually use, and it's done this with a minimum of government interference (albeit with government funding).
This is not a "back door"; in order for it to be used, the sysadmin has to be foolish enough to not change the default password for user "piranha". If the sysadmin is a big enough idiot to not change the root password, would you call that a backdoor?
Yes, it is a security hole, and since we give the guys from Redmond flack for their default install being patently insecure, we should ALSO give RedHat the same flack for installing piranha by default... sorry, but that was a really stupid move, RedHat, and we expect better than that from you.
Also, kudos to MSNBC for having a suprisingly unbiased description of the problem.
but surely one way of reducing the bandwidth problems on the web and I guess DOS attacks is to use broadcast IP packets from the webserver.
As others have surely mentioned, multicast (NOT broadcast) IP is usefull for static pages or for streaming audio and video, cases where every customer sees the same thing. But it's not useful for e-commerce, where every customer's page is customized for that specific customer. Likewise with HTTP proxies; caching only helps for static pages.
These satellites had an expected useful lifetime of only 5 years to begin with. That means they're only good until about 2003, doesn't it? Then you'd have to spend another $6 billion or so to replace 'em. So all these satellites are going to go bye-bye soon anyway, no matter what we do.
My question is: did Motorola, who had relatively little investment in this but still got paid for providing all the parts for the satellites and all the mobile phones, make money or lose money on the deal? Remember that SOMEBODY had to pocket the $7 billion the investors are out of...
I don't feel like checking all the math, but in that experimental setup, that "ELF dipole antenna" sure looks like a powerful electromagnet to me! An ELF antenna for 60Hz would be several miles long, and a simple dipole consists of two straight line segments radiating in opposite directions. Can a huge electromagnet effect the reading of a scale? Depends on whats around it. Despite claiming to have performed the experiment, there are not pictures of the apparatus -- only conceptual drawings. Highly suspect.
Fran appears to have re-discovered maglev; they already have trains running using this principle.
I'm going to write a really lousy game, give it a list price of $1000, hire several people to sell "unauthorized copies" of it for $1 on all the auction sites, then sue each of the auction sites for compensation for my lost sales! The beauty of this model is, my software doesn't have to be any good in order for me to get rich!
All sarcasm aside, perhaps the games companies should consider going after the unscrupulous profiteers who are bootlegging their CD, rather than the auction site that can't afford to monitor every posting.
IANAL, but getting "served" via email can't possibly be legally binding. They have no way of ascertaining whether or not the message was received, or who received it (most email servers let you disable automatic return receipts, don't they?) Best thing to do would be to completely ignore the email, make sure you delete all records of it from logs and backups, and later say "Email? What email?"
Now, when they shell out the bucks to send a process server to your location, or if you actually sign for a certified letter, THEN I'd think about doing what they ask -- but only after consulting a lawyer first.
The broadcast radio and television industries have thrived for years on a business model that says they give their content away for free, in return for cash that paid them to insert messages into their content. The marginal cost was zero, and profitability was increased by having the widest distribution possible.
Now along comes the internet, for which marginal cost is also zero. But do the music and motion picture industries want to use the obvious business model for internet content distribution? No, they want to use an ancient business model based on a time when the marginal cost of production and distribution counted for 99.9% of the cost of each unit sold!
Now, before someone screams "artistic integrity", let me point out that the movies are already taking in millions for "product placement", and most concert tours are already sponsored.
Also, while I might object to a verse about "I love coca-cola" on a CD I paid $17.99 for, I probably wouldn't mind casual product mentions on tracks I was getting for free.
The Iridium webpage says these sattelites have an expected lifetime of 5 to 8 years. But I thought low-earth orbits decayed in a couple years. Anyone know how long we've got till these high-tech swords of Damoclese re-enter the atmosphere, and you absorbs the liability if the land on say... Bill Gates new house?
1) THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN "INTUITIVE" INTERFACE! My first experience with the epitomy of intuitive interfaces, the MacIntosh, I could not for the life of me figure out how to get the floppy disk to eject. Clover+E? Yeah, that's intuitive! Drag the disk to the trash? Maybe I'd try that if I wanted to ERASE the disk, but not eject it!
2) There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all interface. Build an interface that novices can use, and experienced users will find it annoying. I personally find Window's habit of doing things without my permission and without informing me very worrisome. Skins are a good thing.
3) Usability testing and focus groups cost money. There is nothing in the Open Source model that says you can't start a commercial software company that takes your favorite OSS and wraps around it a better designed interface. In fact, if you're so smart, why haven't you started your own company? Seriously, though, just this year we have gotten to the point where there are now Linux mega-corporations like Red Hat and VALinux. I expect them to spend the money to research new user interface ideas, and then build them on top of Gnome or KDE as appropriate.
4) Open source is better at building infrastructure: true. Commercial vendors are better at meeting user's needs: you must be kidding. I've got news for you: Microsoft doesn't listen to my feedback, and I have doubts if they listen to anyone else's either. If they did, then why does MSOffice still have a talking paper clip?
5) You must have working infrastructure BEFORE you need innovative user interfaces. The open source movement is still building the framework for software that will be used for the next hundred years. I'd say that their priorities are correct - concentrate on functionality and reliability first and foremost. Leave it up to commerical vendors to tailor it to specific user's needs. GUIs will come and go; BIND and SENDMAIL are forever.
6) There's a old saying in open source: "Show us the code." Rather than bitch, anybody that wants to can develop a better user interface to any program they want. If you think a specific program can be improved, go ahead, improve it! Make it do everything your little heart desires. If others agree with you, it will go into the next release. If not, well then, maybe you've just created a code fork. But hey, you've got the interface you wanted!
5 GBytes is enough memory. The problem now is that the battery life is only 10 hours! Now if they could only get the battery life up to equal the 80 hours of music...
Also, $750 is a bit steep. For that much money, I'd want an integrated PDA and cellphone, all using the same CPU and memory.
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So, according to Time Warner, making a copy of content I have legally bought and paid for is exactly the same as breaking and entering into a store, and stealing merchandise! The mind boggles... did the Time Warner representative actually manage to say this with a straight face?
Actually, it used RSX, RSTS, and VAX-VMS, which most of the DECUS software was written for. Digital Unix was an afterthought, and a poor implementation at that. Fortunately (for DEC), the good folks at Berkely used the VAX as the reference implementation of BSD Unix, or Digital would have gone down the tubes even sooner.
The interviewer seems to have C and Unix confused... after this glaring error, everything else in the article is very suspect!
By that same reasoning, then, it should also be illegal to a) rob banks, b) explain to other people how to rob banks, and c) produce tools (e.g. masks and guns) that allow others to rob banks. Seems to be a lot of movie and television producers, clothing manufacters, and gun makers are in deep kimchee if this is true... I say we slap an injunction on the corporate officers of Victoria's Secret, since the stocking they produce may be used in a crime!
In summary, in a noisy or bandwidth limited environment, playing games with the ACKs probably won't buy you much, and if you congest the pipe to the point where the routers start discarding packets, you're arbitrarily large download is likely to take more, not less, time.
And what's wrong with using the most conveniently available tool for the job? A rational, non-bigoted person wouldn't see anything wrong with using a tool that you already had available and were experienced in using. I also don't see anybody mentioning any Open Source applications that would have been better suited to the task... does StarOffice have this capability?
12706 developers working several years on 3149 projects, and they've still produced fewer lines of code than a single release of Win2K... is this because Open Source is more efficient, less feature-rich, or because it doesn't carry the burden of backwards compatibility with DOS 1.0?
... the district court also ruled the UPS, FedEx, DHS, and the USPS are responsible for any pirated music or software they deliver to customers.
IANAL, but this probably actually makes sense from a legal standpoint; they fact that two files are abolutely identical bits is legally irrelevant if the "provenance" (i.e. the legal source of the files) is different.
Conclusion: MP3.COM can make a slight change to it's service to require ripping and uploading songs, rather than just checking the CD serial number. This will take much longer for users, but will require no additional disk space on the MP3.COM servers, as surely replacing a string of bits with a pointer to an identical string of bits is a legitimate form of compression.
Add to this that SCO has been blasted in the past for making asinine statements about Linux, mostly due to their well-founded fear of Linux eating into their revenues. So yes, I'm sure several staffers inspected these replies closely to make sure they were guaranteed 100% content-free, and thus safe for release. Which explains the long delay in answering, doesn't it?
He does imply a good point, though: transaction processing systems command big bucks in business, and as of yet I haven't seen any open source alternatives. SCO is probably planning on transitioning from an OS company to a middleware company. The only problem is, due to their long track record of arrogance and greed, they've probably already generated negative associations amongst many potential enterprise clients, so IMHO a company starting from scratch would have a better chance of succeeding than one carrying the baggage of Larry Michael's legacy.
A secondary benefit, of course, is that they can provide bug fixes in internet time (provided they set it up right.
In the long term, I think playing against "artificial intelligence" will always be less interesting then playing against flesh and blood other players. Obviously if you got connectivity for online game rentals, you've got connectivity to multiplayer servers. Now if we could just do something about those network latencies...
Personally, I find Raymond's viewpoint to be much closer to reality, and I beleive the fall of comunism proves that the cynical view of human nature is closer to the truth. It may be tempting to think that the one government should be to mold the economic system to acheive the greatest common good, but giving them the power to do almost always backfires; exceptions are made to benefit big campaign contributors (like the banking and real estate industries in the 80's) NOT the people as a whole.
Much as we'd all like to see Micro$oft get spanked, we fear a government that is brazen enough to do so. It should be enough for the government to merely insist that Micro$oft play nice. Also, does it not strike anyone as hypocritcial that on the one hand, the government is attacking Micro$oft as an illegal monopoly, while on the other hand, it is contributing literally billions of dollars to license their software and to defend Micro$oft's intellectual property rights? Wouldn't the easiest sanctions to enforce be to simple declare a moratorium on government purchases from MS and of prosecuting anyone for pirating MS software? In my mind, there should be a constitutional ammendment that states that those that blatantly violate the laws of society should not be subject to protection by the same laws they are flaunting while they do so... in simple terms, if I shoot the person stealing my car, his family shouldn't be allowed to sue me for his injuries.
Huh? Then why didn't the Los Angeles basin, which received by far the lion's share of this wealth, become Silicon Valley? To the best of my knowledge, Lockheed was the only government contractor doing any work in the Bay Area. Most historians agree that world class universities like Stanford and U.C. Berkelely, and their outstanding graduates, have much more to do with the success of the Silcon Valley than government contracts.
If there is no public funding for its development, it becomes unclear who will contribute to open-source development. Or rather, it is easy to suspect that those who contribute will be heavily self-interested actors pushing those "open standards" in directions that benefit their for-profit endeavors tied to its standards.
To date, this has NOT been true. What makes Nathan think this will change?
If there is no public funding for its development, it becomes unclear who will contribute to open-source development.
God knows Sendmail, BIND, Linux, GNU, etc. wouldn't exist now if they hadn't received public funding! Perhaps the same people that have always contributed to open source will continue to do so. If Nathan is incapable of understanding their motives, perhaps he shouldn't be trying to pass himself off as an expert on open source.
Open-source proponents like Eric Raymond uphold the banner of the "right to fork" standards
No, they support the right to fork code, which is strongly discouraged by social pressures, not law. Source != standards.
which is great for techie programmers looking for cool code, but can really suck for consumers looking for standards that are compatible across the board (something that Microsoft, whatever the failings of its standard, delivers for its customers)
Which is why 100% of applications written for NT4.0 run just fine under Win2K, right? Bwahahahah...
If public policy does not promote compatible standards that serve public needs -- not particular corporate interests -- we are likely to see the whole open-source movement rapidly fragment into an incompatible stew of standards and products that deliver little but confusion to the public.
Partially correct -- public policy SHOULD support open standards. But to date, the governments efforts to do this have been dismal failures. (Anybody remember the ISO/OSI communications protocols? Ada? GOSIP? Does anybody use the POSIX "compliant" APIs supposedly incorporated into NT? Anybody out there ever tried reading the ISO specifications and understanding them, let alone implementing them? So far the IETF methodology has been by far the most successful in creating interoperable standards that people actually use, and it's done this with a minimum of government interference (albeit with government funding).
Yes, it is a security hole, and since we give the guys from Redmond flack for their default install being patently insecure, we should ALSO give RedHat the same flack for installing piranha by default... sorry, but that was a really stupid move, RedHat, and we expect better than that from you.
Also, kudos to MSNBC for having a suprisingly unbiased description of the problem.
Personally, I suspect analog television broadcasts will continue side-by-side with HDTV for quite some time after 2006...
You're forgiven. For your spelling too.
but surely one way of reducing the bandwidth problems on the web and I guess DOS attacks is to use broadcast IP packets from the webserver.
As others have surely mentioned, multicast (NOT broadcast) IP is usefull for static pages or for streaming audio and video, cases where every customer sees the same thing. But it's not useful for e-commerce, where every customer's page is customized for that specific customer. Likewise with HTTP proxies; caching only helps for static pages.
My question is: did Motorola, who had relatively little investment in this but still got paid for providing all the parts for the satellites and all the mobile phones, make money or lose money on the deal? Remember that SOMEBODY had to pocket the $7 billion the investors are out of...
Fran appears to have re-discovered maglev; they already have trains running using this principle.
All sarcasm aside, perhaps the games companies should consider going after the unscrupulous profiteers who are bootlegging their CD, rather than the auction site that can't afford to monitor every posting.
Yes, but if the just pressure the ISP, there is nothing to stop Hulbert from repeatedly hiring a new ISP until they catch up with him again, is there?
Now, when they shell out the bucks to send a process server to your location, or if you actually sign for a certified letter, THEN I'd think about doing what they ask -- but only after consulting a lawyer first.
Now along comes the internet, for which marginal cost is also zero. But do the music and motion picture industries want to use the obvious business model for internet content distribution? No, they want to use an ancient business model based on a time when the marginal cost of production and distribution counted for 99.9% of the cost of each unit sold!
Now, before someone screams "artistic integrity", let me point out that the movies are already taking in millions for "product placement", and most concert tours are already sponsored.
Also, while I might object to a verse about "I love coca-cola" on a CD I paid $17.99 for, I probably wouldn't mind casual product mentions on tracks I was getting for free.
The Iridium webpage says these sattelites have an expected lifetime of 5 to 8 years. But I thought low-earth orbits decayed in a couple years. Anyone know how long we've got till these high-tech swords of Damoclese re-enter the atmosphere, and you absorbs the liability if the land on say... Bill Gates new house?
2) There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all interface. Build an interface that novices can use, and experienced users will find it annoying. I personally find Window's habit of doing things without my permission and without informing me very worrisome. Skins are a good thing.
3) Usability testing and focus groups cost money. There is nothing in the Open Source model that says you can't start a commercial software company that takes your favorite OSS and wraps around it a better designed interface. In fact, if you're so smart, why haven't you started your own company? Seriously, though, just this year we have gotten to the point where there are now Linux mega-corporations like Red Hat and VALinux. I expect them to spend the money to research new user interface ideas, and then build them on top of Gnome or KDE as appropriate.
4) Open source is better at building infrastructure: true. Commercial vendors are better at meeting user's needs: you must be kidding. I've got news for you: Microsoft doesn't listen to my feedback, and I have doubts if they listen to anyone else's either. If they did, then why does MSOffice still have a talking paper clip?
5) You must have working infrastructure BEFORE you need innovative user interfaces. The open source movement is still building the framework for software that will be used for the next hundred years. I'd say that their priorities are correct - concentrate on functionality and reliability first and foremost. Leave it up to commerical vendors to tailor it to specific user's needs. GUIs will come and go; BIND and SENDMAIL are forever.
6) There's a old saying in open source: "Show us the code." Rather than bitch, anybody that wants to can develop a better user interface to any program they want. If you think a specific program can be improved, go ahead, improve it! Make it do everything your little heart desires. If others agree with you, it will go into the next release. If not, well then, maybe you've just created a code fork. But hey, you've got the interface you wanted!
Also, $750 is a bit steep. For that much money, I'd want an integrated PDA and cellphone, all using the same CPU and memory.