Somebody writes an e-mail system where sending messages cost money. Lets say 50 cents per message. That looks like a lot, but bare with me...
You read the message, and, if you want it, you accept it and the operator cancels the charge. Otherwise the sender gets charged.
You don't charge your friends, or any wanted mail but you do charge commercial entities and spammers (if you want).
Money from charges goes to the mail operator, so it does make some $$$ from the service. But this $$$ don't come from you, unless you are adept to send unwanted mail.
Now lets see how much do this 10-15 new customers cost: 15,000 cents x 50 cents / 10 new customers = 600$.
That would be a day. For a year he would be charged about 200,000$.
That would stop most spammers.
From the petition:
* South Korea just ordered 120.000 open source office solutions and is looking to save up to 80% of previous costs.
* Great Britain plans the mandatory introduction of open source software in the public sector.
* The development of secure software with openly accessible source codes plays a central role within the EU commision's IT initiative "e-europe".
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
On the server side of things they are on the "they fight at you" stage.
On the client, they are at the "They laugh at you", but that is _second_ stage. Considering that focus on the desktop came after focus on the server that is good enough for me. Actually, the relevance of this arguments about the linux desktop is that MS is starting to see scenarios where they stop laughing and start fighting coming closer. Otherwise it wouldn't be news.
I was running Windows as my primary desktop and Linux as my secondary until three months ago. Now it is the opposite. I have got vcl (www.videolan.org) for dvd viewing and xine (xine.sourceforge.net) for all the other video formats. Mozilla for the web. Kmail for mail. Open Office for those nasty MS office files you get sent. And I play wolfenstein (my preferred game) and all of Id games and a lot of free ones on Linux. I use kinkatta and jabber fot instant messaging.
The packaging systems are improving, so I only have to use urpmi against a ftp server everytime I need something.
And kde is getting better and better.
So basically, Linux can do almost all that Windows will do and I get control, and source code, and no crappy restrictions on things like givving applications to my friends, activation, content rights management, etc.
In fact, it is much better value. And I think a lot of people thinks the same way.
That from a home user point of view. If you look at goverment needs, where they can save so many $$$ by not having to pay and audit licences, and use open data formats, Linux has a lot of scope there as well (see korean, chinese, german, french and UK goverments at different stages of linux use on the desktop).
There are some viruses for european phones already.
If you have an API for controling more of the phone's features, you can bet that viruses will pop up. And it is much more dificult to reformat a phone than a PC's hard drive:-)
Actually, The register run an article on January 12th.
It had _very_ strong wording:
"Any sane person seeing these licensing terms can only do as Duchene suggests: destroy all copies of Borland software and turn to one of the other proprietary, or better free, products available."
I think this is big enough for a PC magazine to be able to call MS and ask what their opinion is.
It will probably end up like... "At press time no MS official was available for comment." That will be enough for now.
But within a year, when the Korean goverment decides to replace windows from ALL of their machines there are chances to see a leaked internal marketing memo or something similar. Just for fun lets imagine how would it start...
"Why did we loose the South Korean market".
I know that this is unlikely to happen, but it is possible and if it happens I will be cracking myself up!
If they start making broken CDs massively, all you will trust will be mp3. And you can be sure as hell that if the music is good enough there will be good quality mp3s around.
And if they buy legislation in the USA, it will take them about 5 years to impose it worldwide.
I used to read a java forum when MS was deep into the java legal war.
There were a resident troll that all of us suspected to be paid by _somebody_. The only thing this guy did during his day was to introduce noise and FUD in the list.
There where a java advocacy list but this wasn't it. It was java development.
I wonder if the same tactic is or will be used against slashdot.(Off course this time it would have to be a credible troll)
The last statement in the article is from Monsanto's PR guy:
"I'm really pretty proud of what we did," Kaley said. "Was it perfect? No. Could we be second-guessed? Sure. But I think we mostly did what any company would do, even today."
I miss the old quake3 logo. I don't like the console like controler in the new logo because quake was originally a pc game and most people around here use pcs for gaming!
If anything, the Napster case has prompted artists to fight for a better arrangement whith their record companies.
Maybe changing the balance toward artists, so they can decide how do they distribute their work, and not destroying the whole copyright concept, would be enough for many people.
As things stand right now, I feel ethically correct to copy RIAA's protected stuff. Maybe this and other legislative changes would change it.
If I know that 90% of the money I pay goes to productive people like musicians, sound tehcnicians, etc... (and this is possible with internet distribution and without spending money in pushing marketroid manufactured culture) I wouldn't mind to pay for my music.
Also I would like a free market where people can charge different amounts for different products. Maybe a start up band shouldn't charge as much as a reputed musician.
Maybe what is needed is a wikipedia for documentation. Usually programmers are not very good at documentation, and users find difficult to get into docbook and stuff.
Wikipedia have got about 20000 articles in just one year, some of them of very good quality.
If we were to give users the ability to do the documentation themselves, I bet they would use the oportunity.
The teaching from wikipedia is that you get good quality writing if enough people works on it. Something like code peer review.
A program could be written that just do the mixing with the dj's voice.
Let me explain the idea:
Given that many dj's have a repertoire of songs they play usually, and play them many times, what about caching the mp3s in your harddrive, and only get the dj's voice and mixing instructions from the webcast, only saving the mp3s the first time you listen to them.
This would save a lot of bandwith, _and_ you end up with all the music you have been listening to cached on your hard drive.
And it has got one more advantage. If you already have all the songs, you are getting only the dj's voice and _no_ music is exchanged, so no royalties can be asked for!
On xine.sourceforge.net there is the following note:
Note: xine does not support locked/encrypted DVDs, as there seem to be legal problems in that area. At this point it is unclear what the legal implications of providing that functionality are.
Does this news mean that until the ruling is made it is ok for them to include CSS decrypting code in Xine?
I really like the quote he/she makes on the Philosophy paper:
"One final quote from Vaidhyanathan, this time talking directly about
the DMCA:
This law has one major provision that upends more than 200 years
of democratic copyright law. It forbids the "cracking" of
electronic gates that protect works - even those portions of works
that might be in the public domain or subject to fair use. It puts
the power to regulate copying in the hands of engineers and the
companies that employ them.
"
As it happens, this is an "autoemployed" engineer using the power that the U.S.A. laws have given engineers to regulate the use of this copirighted material, in this case allowing access to it:-)
Slashdot Mirror
If you are going to charge people to send email, you better get them properly identified, so you can find wich account you are going to charge.
I have got a better Idea.
Somebody writes an e-mail system where sending messages cost money. Lets say 50 cents per message. That looks like a lot, but bare with me...
You read the message, and, if you want it, you accept it and the operator cancels the charge. Otherwise the sender gets charged.
You don't charge your friends, or any wanted mail but you do charge commercial entities and spammers (if you want).
Money from charges goes to the mail operator, so it does make some $$$ from the service. But this $$$ don't come from you, unless you are adept to send unwanted mail.
Now lets see how much do this 10-15 new customers cost: 15,000 cents x 50 cents / 10 new customers = 600$.
That would be a day. For a year he would be charged about 200,000$.
That would stop most spammers.
From the petition:
* South Korea just ordered 120.000 open source office solutions and is looking to save up to 80% of previous costs.
* Great Britain plans the mandatory introduction of open source software in the public sector.
* The development of secure software with openly accessible source codes plays a central role within the EU commision's IT initiative "e-europe".
It seems they forgot about South Africa
Remember the old quotation from Ghandy...
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
On the server side of things they are on the "they fight at you" stage.
On the client, they are at the "They laugh at you", but that is _second_ stage. Considering that focus on the desktop came after focus on the server that is good enough for me. Actually, the relevance of this arguments about the linux desktop is that MS is starting to see scenarios where they stop laughing and start fighting coming closer. Otherwise it wouldn't be news.
I was running Windows as my primary desktop and Linux as my secondary until three months ago. Now it is the opposite. I have got vcl (www.videolan.org) for dvd viewing and xine (xine.sourceforge.net) for all the other video formats. Mozilla for the web. Kmail for mail. Open Office for those nasty MS office files you get sent. And I play wolfenstein (my preferred game) and all of Id games and a lot of free ones on Linux. I use kinkatta and jabber fot instant messaging.
The packaging systems are improving, so I only have to use urpmi against a ftp server everytime I need something.
And kde is getting better and better.
So basically, Linux can do almost all that Windows will do and I get control, and source code, and no crappy restrictions on things like givving applications to my friends, activation, content rights management, etc.
In fact, it is much better value. And I think a lot of people thinks the same way.
That from a home user point of view. If you look at goverment needs, where they can save so many $$$ by not having to pay and audit licences, and use open data formats, Linux has a lot of scope there as well (see korean, chinese, german, french and UK goverments at different stages of linux use on the desktop).
" I mean, I can respect the technical achievements of Quake III"
You just answered your own question: Carmack is a programmer, so probably he just enjoys the "technical achievements". No small thing to me.
It's sort of what OS people does, but making a bit more money.
I see that you know the stuff, and you are happy to answer people's questions on slashdot.
Would it be too much to ask you to drop on wikipedia and add some of this knowledge to the physics section?
A fellow physicist and wikipedian.
There are some viruses for european phones already.
:-)
If you have an API for controling more of the phone's features, you can bet that viruses will pop up. And it is much more dificult to reformat a phone than a PC's hard drive
Actually, The register run an article on January 12th.
It had _very_ strong wording:
"Any sane person seeing these licensing terms can only do as Duchene suggests: destroy all copies of Borland software and turn to one of the other proprietary, or better free, products available."
That, I guess, is bad PR as well.
I think this is big enough for a PC magazine to be able to call MS and ask what their opinion is.
It will probably end up like... "At press time no MS official was available for comment." That will be enough for now.
But within a year, when the Korean goverment decides to replace windows from ALL of their machines there are chances to see a leaked internal marketing memo or something similar. Just for fun lets imagine how would it start...
"Why did we loose the South Korean market".
I know that this is unlikely to happen, but it is possible and if it happens I will be cracking myself up!
And why it did take it against SUSE instead of against the writer of the application?
Or if they are going to do something against Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, etc...
And what the name of the application is?
If they start making broken CDs massively, all you will trust will be mp3. And you can be sure as hell that if the music is good enough there will be good quality mp3s around.
And if they buy legislation in the USA, it will take them about 5 years to impose it worldwide.
That is far too much time to stop the tide.
I used to read a java forum when MS was deep into the java legal war.
There were a resident troll that all of us suspected to be paid by _somebody_. The only thing this guy did during his day was to introduce noise and FUD in the list.
There where a java advocacy list but this wasn't it. It was java development.
I wonder if the same tactic is or will be used against slashdot.(Off course this time it would have to be a credible troll)
" I think FreeBSD CDs may even predate Windows CDs"
Do you mean that Windows CDs could eat FreeBSD CDs? That would give a new meaning to market competition!
How long can they keep the light stopped without too much degradation of the signal?
The last statement in the article is from Monsanto's PR guy:
"I'm really pretty proud of what we did," Kaley said. "Was it perfect? No. Could we be second-guessed? Sure. But I think we mostly did what any company would do, even today."
I miss the old quake3 logo. I don't like the console like controler in the new logo because quake was originally a pc game and most people around here use pcs for gaming!
The Linux multiplayer test of wolftensdein has keept me entertained for many, many hours.
And it's only one map!
If anything, the Napster case has prompted artists to fight for a better arrangement whith their record companies.
Maybe changing the balance toward artists, so they can decide how do they distribute their work, and not destroying the whole copyright concept, would be enough for many people.
As things stand right now, I feel ethically correct to copy RIAA's protected stuff. Maybe this and other legislative changes would change it.
If I know that 90% of the money I pay goes to productive people like musicians, sound tehcnicians, etc... (and this is possible with internet distribution and without spending money in pushing marketroid manufactured culture) I wouldn't mind to pay for my music.
Also I would like a free market where people can charge different amounts for different products. Maybe a start up band shouldn't charge as much as a reputed musician.
Maybe what is needed is a wikipedia for documentation. Usually programmers are not very good at documentation, and users find difficult to get into docbook and stuff.
Wikipedia have got about 20000 articles in just one year, some of them of very good quality.
If we were to give users the ability to do the documentation themselves, I bet they would use the oportunity.
The teaching from wikipedia is that you get good quality writing if enough people works on it. Something like code peer review.
A program could be written that just do the mixing with the dj's voice.
Let me explain the idea:
Given that many dj's have a repertoire of songs they play usually, and play them many times, what about caching the mp3s in your harddrive, and only get the dj's voice and mixing instructions from the webcast, only saving the mp3s the first time you listen to them.
This would save a lot of bandwith, _and_ you end up with all the music you have been listening to cached on your hard drive.
And it has got one more advantage. If you already have all the songs, you are getting only the dj's voice and _no_ music is exchanged, so no royalties can be asked for!
So they can leverage all the marketing and political bribes from Microsoft and use it for a different means.
Ironic.
On xine.sourceforge.net there is the following note:
:-)
Note: xine does not support locked/encrypted DVDs, as there seem to be legal problems in that area. At this point it is unclear what the legal implications of providing that functionality are.
Does this news mean that until the ruling is made it is ok for them to include CSS decrypting code in Xine?
If so, can somebody e-mail them, please?
I really like the quote he/she makes on the Philosophy paper:
:-)
"One final quote from Vaidhyanathan, this time talking directly about
the DMCA:
This law has one major provision that upends more than 200 years
of democratic copyright law. It forbids the "cracking" of
electronic gates that protect works - even those portions of works
that might be in the public domain or subject to fair use. It puts
the power to regulate copying in the hands of engineers and the
companies that employ them.
"
As it happens, this is an "autoemployed" engineer using the power that the U.S.A. laws have given engineers to regulate the use of this copirighted material, in this case allowing access to it
Ironic...
"This applies to movies and music."
And what about software?
And in other news Mr Icaza has publicly announced plans for porting J# to Linux.