Yes, but some of the boxes are laptops and their memory costs more. Some laptops are not upgradeable.
I would love to be able to load Win2K on the company laptops (commercials would never accept Linux where I work). But almost all of them can't be upgraded anywhere near the requirements of Win2K.
So we are stuck with Win98, hardly a enterprise level operating system!
" Why don't they realise that they only reason the Internet has been so successfull is because it works by using a set of standard protocols that anyone can adopt and use. "
Because the have realised that they got rich by locking out competitors.
Like many other customers receiving similar notices, Martin simply went elsewhere.
"I told them where they could stick their modem and cable equipment and proceeded to cancel my cable TV and modem accounts," Martin wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com. "They are a communications provider. They are not censors or a government agency! Adelphia will never get another penny from me and I hope others follow suit."
Well, I meant MPAA, my mistake...
But if the guy who wrote DeCSS could get arrested because of pressure from the EEUU you could get the same happening here...
The microserf says:
"This effectively makes it impossible for commercial software companies to include source code that is licensed under the GPL into their products, since by doing so, they are constrained to give away the fruits of their labor. As we think about technology, IP rights, and the public sector of knowledge, we need an intellectual model that encourages interaction, not a model that drives them apart. We believe that a shared source model, coupled with continuing contributions to public standards, provides a path that is preferable to the open source approach founded on the GPL."
I aggree with it, but would add that the problem is on the actual "intellectual model" rather than the GPL. If the IP laws were adequate, the GPL would not be needed.
In my mind, the problem is that laws have been bought that keep knowlege for ever (in software terms 30 years is forever) in corporate hands.
Also, from the point of view of Real, they want to be able to play *everything* in Windows, but they don't want the M$ media format to be crossplatform, because this is one of their major competitive advantages (If the Linux port of the player really works some day).
Porting the M$ codecs to Linux would be a bad move. They are more interested in the format used by content providers (they pay for the servers) than what the users are running (for free) and they would be doing a favor to M$ by giving its format a bigger user base that could tilt content providers towards M$ media format.
If Linux on the desktop catches up, and this could happen this year with kde2, USB, mozilla, the new 3D (games) stuff in XFree and the new office suites, then, crossplatform will be very important for streaming content, the same way it is for html now, and the content providers could favor a format that can be used in every desktop (as opposed to Win and Mac only).
The specification is LGPLed. This should reassure other card vendors.
Also, it is quite telling that they whent for LGPL straight away.
It is probably the best way to create a "de facto standard" if you are not one of the big 5 or 6 software powerhouses. It is much better than waiting for a standards body to go through a formal process that would take years.
It would be great if now the OS comunity has enough power to start setting up the first draft for future standards, instead of the big bad gorillas!
At the end of the day, this is supposed to be a community, with some (very diffuse) values. One of them is free source. And this shows on the moderation. this is an intended effect.
I agree with you but remember, this is a conspiracy theory: The moderators are chosen by a program. You can look at this program is on the slashdot code. But you (and me) are trusting slashdot in that they are running this same code in the real server. Pirilon
There are a number of clever and subtle ways to bias the discussion and some of them include the way you choose the people that will get the moderation points, without touching the editorial part of the news.
Lets say that the administrator is interested in putting out more articles about "enterprise computing" (something VA could possibly be interested in doing, if they where unethical) as opposed to "civil rights disscusion":
All you have to do is to change the algorithm that chooses moderators and make it give more points to people that did post on enterprise computing threads.
This will mean that the next round of moderators will "probably" give more points to people talking about enterprise computing (generally that is what they would be interested in and good at because otherwise they wouldn't post to the enterprise threads) who in turn will come back to talk more often because the good posts get moderated up!.
You do the opposite for the "Civil rights" type of guy, so he doesn't get a chance of doing moderation, and is less likely to be moderated up (or down, but this would only show to him that there is no interest on this threads).
After some time of running this system you would have a site where there is a lot more talking about enterprise computing and the community would just think that _they_as_a_community_ stopped being interested in civil rights or whatever.
It would be very dificult for anyone to be able to tell that the way moderators are chosen is twicked because the results are just probabilisticly leaning towards some spin, and this spin is coming from commentators, not from editorialists.
I'm glad the person it happend to is a smart, level headed, guy who can express himself effectivly and doesn't seem to be doing stuff "just for the attention".
We are very lucky
First, the MPAA lawyers forget to seal the exhibit that holds the code to DeCSS, so _everyone_ can link to it _legally_. I cracked myself laughin at that!
Second, they choose the wrong country (a country that actually cares about privacy, consumer rights and freedom of speech) and the wrong guy (a teenager that didn't even do the reverse engineering himself!) for their crusade.
Third, they try to sue the whole internet and try to make linking (basically telling somebody where he can find something) illegal.
The whole thing is bound to backfire. People is starting to pay attention to the legality of country codes and a protection squema that takes away legal "fair use" rights from the user. On top of that, the business model holliwood companys base their operations (selling content as opposed to content serving) is been questioned.
"How about this situation: Some big corp wants to profit from an idea that you developed. Why shouldn't they be allowed to? Because it was your idea. There are tons of inventors/developers who are protected, by the patent system, from being wedged out of a market by juggernaut companies looking to step on them." There are some problems there. Many times independent developers don't have the money to maintain a legal fight against a big company over a patent. Many times you don't even know that you are breaking a patent until you get sued, because you don't have the money to do patent research. And even if you do have it, there are some obvious things that are being patented due to failures in the patent office and cab be used against you. As an example. If it wasn't for the public coverage on amazon's one click patent, half the net would be in breach of this one right now! Javier
At the current rate of growth in the storage media sizes, you can fit _all_ your data on a disk (CD, DVD, etc...). So would only have to make a copy of your old backups every, say, ten years (to be on the safe side. Javier
Now lets say they invent a new media format and put a "Person Lock(tm)" on it. This would allow them to charge each individual a different price. They could use the excuse that if you buy classical music, they can use the money to "support" (I mean rip off) classical musicians instead of this noisy rock bands, or they could give "student discounts" so if you are a student, you can still buy media.
well that is what they are doing at a different scale!
"Selling some crappy Bruce Willis film for US$35 in the US, $55 in Germany and $15 in India is what they're doing, and sooner or later, the MPA is going to find their names after the "v." in some lawsuit. But not one started by the US government. "
Indeed. And it should be in Europe, where we get the biggest rip off. I hope somebody in Norway is reading this!
They _where_ in a bad position, and have taken the _only_ way forward.
As Tim Sweeney (Unreal programmer) pointed on his rant about programming languages, games have a big influence in the course of graphics technology. Last year it looked like ActiveX was winning more and more mindshare in the games industry. If it weren't for John Carmack and the Linux crowd, M$ would have had its way. Now OpenGL is back again, but it needs the support of the community. The only way to get it is to support open source.
I think OpenGL is in the same position as Netscape. They are cross-platform, and what is clear now from the success of Linux is that bein cross-platform is a huge advantage! OpenGL will be a success and will draw money towards SGI enviroment. If they change their business model and work out how to cash a part of this money, they will be back again. If you look at Sun, they are making money of Java even though you can get all of the stuff for free (except the EEJB brand). But they make money because people thinks about SUN when they think about Java.
In short. I expect both Mozilla and OpenGL to be big successes in the medium term.
Well, if M$ can argue that Explorer is part of the operation system, just because they have spread the code all arround windows, we sure can create a DVD viewer wich uses the knowledge that was (legally) gained by reverse engineering the encription. If the decription code is an integral part of the dvd viewer (for a judge and most of the non technical people out there is probably enough to make them compile into the same binary), it would be within the law.
Well, this may be offtopic for a copiright discussion, but it is very interesting to note that it can be applied to the act of reverse engineering the Xing player. Under this precedent it would be legal, even if done in the EEUU. Therefore, to publish the knowledge adquired by doing so, would be legal, so even if DeCSS can be stopped on the grounds of the DMCA (I hope not), the act of publishing the encription algorithm and encription keys is completely legal! (tip) Somebody should sue the RIAA for breach of fair use consumer rights.
understand copirights this would be applied to end users as well. Wow, then that means that making _any_ modification to windows (eg. changing a ini file) is unlawful. Should we run windows from read only drivers, then?
If I where blind, I would lend myself to this sort of things. First: it gives you hope. Second: you stand a chance to get it working good enough in your livespan (~20 years from now) Third: even a 10x10 bmp is better than nothing. Four: you are HELPING OTHER PEOPLE. Would you sit on your ass and do nothing? Javier
At the moment Micosoft is a huge single Entity(and growing!). At some point the size of a company will limit how quickly it can react to market forces an make decisions. To keep a company that size must surely involve 'bureaucratic red tape' to keep the company coordinated and run as smooth as possible. I aggree with that, but you have to consider the advantages of a big single Entity: They can leverage their market share and put people out of business (like netscape), impose "the facto" standards, cut aggresive market deals, use big money to lobby or corrupt goverments, etc. The first one of this is what the DOJ is using, but if that wasn't the case, M$ would be able to use all this tactics to grow even more, maybe out of the reach of any individual goverment.
Slashdot Mirror
What bothers me is that they are scared enough to transfer control of the music distribution business to Microsoft.
Before they have any time to look at it, MS will have control of _their_ distribution business.
It is disturbing that they prefer that instead of working out that their model doesn't work any more.
Yes, but some of the boxes are laptops and their memory costs more. Some laptops are not upgradeable.
I would love to be able to load Win2K on the company laptops (commercials would never accept Linux where I work). But almost all of them can't be upgraded anywhere near the requirements of Win2K.
So we are stuck with Win98, hardly a enterprise level operating system!
" Why don't they realise that they only reason the Internet has been so successfull is because it works by using a set of standard protocols that anyone can adopt and use. " Because the have realised that they got rich by locking out competitors.
"I can think of fewer than five examples of MS relationships gone bad in the past (blockstackers, DRDOS, Sun/Java, um... kerberos?) "
Well, I can think some more...
IBM (OS/2)
Netscape
Borland
Wordperfect
Lotus
Apple
Real Networks
Fraunhoffer
Like many other customers receiving similar notices, Martin simply went elsewhere.
"I told them where they could stick their modem and cable equipment and proceeded to cancel my cable TV and modem accounts," Martin wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com. "They are a communications provider. They are not censors or a government agency! Adelphia will never get another penny from me and I hope others follow suit."
Well, I meant MPAA, my mistake...
But if the guy who wrote DeCSS could get arrested because of pressure from the EEUU you could get the same happening here...
The microserf says:
"This effectively makes it impossible for commercial software companies to include source code that is licensed under the GPL into their products, since by doing so, they are constrained to give away the fruits of their labor. As we think about technology, IP rights, and the public sector of knowledge, we need an intellectual model that encourages interaction, not a model that drives them apart. We believe that a shared source model, coupled with continuing contributions to public standards, provides a path that is preferable to the open source approach founded on the GPL."
I aggree with it, but would add that the problem is on the actual "intellectual model" rather than the GPL. If the IP laws were adequate, the GPL would not be needed.
In my mind, the problem is that laws have been bought that keep knowlege for ever (in software terms 30 years is forever) in corporate hands.
What about TiVo type systems, where you can say "Channel 5" or "record this" or "TV Schedule"? or "knocking on heavens door" for mp3, etc...
Would it be a good solution for them?
Also, from the point of view of Real, they want to be able to play *everything* in Windows, but they don't want the M$ media format to be crossplatform, because this is one of their major competitive advantages (If the Linux port of the player really works some day).
Porting the M$ codecs to Linux would be a bad move. They are more interested in the format used by content providers (they pay for the servers) than what the users are running (for free) and they would be doing a favor to M$ by giving its format a bigger user base that could tilt content providers towards M$ media format.
If Linux on the desktop catches up, and this could happen this year with kde2, USB, mozilla, the new 3D (games) stuff in XFree and the new office suites, then, crossplatform will be very important for streaming content, the same way it is for html now, and the content providers could favor a format that can be used in every desktop (as opposed to Win and Mac only).
The specification is LGPLed. This should reassure other card vendors.
Also, it is quite telling that they whent for LGPL straight away.
It is probably the best way to create a "de facto standard" if you are not one of the big 5 or 6 software powerhouses. It is much better than waiting for a standards body to go through a formal process that would take years.
It would be great if now the OS comunity has enough power to start setting up the first draft for future standards, instead of the big bad gorillas!
Well, I think that is a Good Thing (tm).
At the end of the day, this is supposed to be a community, with some (very diffuse) values. One of them is free source. And this shows on the moderation. this is an intended effect.
I agree with you but remember, this is a conspiracy theory: The moderators are chosen by a program. You can look at this program is on the slashdot code. But you (and me) are trusting slashdot in that they are running this same code in the real server. Pirilon
Disclaimer: I don't think this will happen but...
There are a number of clever and subtle ways to bias the discussion and some of them include the way you choose the people that will get the moderation points, without touching the editorial part of the news.
Lets say that the administrator is interested in putting out more articles about "enterprise computing" (something VA could possibly be interested in doing, if they where unethical) as opposed to "civil rights disscusion":
All you have to do is to change the algorithm that chooses moderators and make it give more points to people that did post on enterprise computing threads.
This will mean that the next round of moderators will "probably" give more points to people talking about enterprise computing (generally that is what they would be interested in and good at because otherwise they wouldn't post to the enterprise threads) who in turn will come back to talk more often because the good posts get moderated up!.
You do the opposite for the "Civil rights" type of guy, so he doesn't get a chance of doing moderation, and is less likely to be moderated up (or down, but this would only show to him that there is no interest on this threads).
After some time of running this system you would have a site where there is a lot more talking about enterprise computing and the community would just think that _they_as_a_community_ stopped being interested in civil rights or whatever.
It would be very dificult for anyone to be able to tell that the way moderators are chosen is twicked because the results are just probabilisticly leaning towards some spin, and this spin is coming from commentators, not from editorialists.
VERY paranoic but there you go... Pirilon
I'm glad the person it happend to is a smart, level headed, guy who can express himself effectivly and doesn't seem to be doing stuff "just for the attention".
We are very lucky
First, the MPAA lawyers forget to seal the exhibit that holds the code to DeCSS, so _everyone_ can link to it _legally_. I cracked myself laughin at that!
Second, they choose the wrong country (a country that actually cares about privacy, consumer rights and freedom of speech) and the wrong guy (a teenager that didn't even do the reverse engineering himself!) for their crusade.
Third, they try to sue the whole internet and try to make linking (basically telling somebody where he can find something) illegal.
The whole thing is bound to backfire. People is starting to pay attention to the legality of country codes and a protection squema that takes away legal "fair use" rights from the user.
On top of that, the business model holliwood companys base their operations (selling content as opposed to content serving) is been questioned.
Holliwood's stupidity is infinite!
This is where the virical nature of GPL will help us!
The source of the basic infrastructure of the operating system will _allways_ be free for Linux.
That is a big improvement in freedom.
javier
"How about this situation: Some big corp wants to profit from an idea that you developed. Why shouldn't they be allowed to? Because it was your idea. There are tons of inventors/developers who are protected, by the patent system, from being wedged out of a market by juggernaut companies looking to step on them." There are some problems there.
Many times independent developers don't have the money to maintain a legal fight against a big company over a patent.
Many times you don't even know that you are breaking a patent until you get sued, because you don't have the money to do patent research. And even if you do have it, there are some obvious things that are being patented due to failures in the patent office and cab be used against you.
As an example. If it wasn't for the public coverage on amazon's one click patent, half the net would be in breach of this one right now!
Javier
At the current rate of growth in the storage media sizes, you can fit _all_ your data on a disk (CD, DVD, etc...).
So would only have to make a copy of your old backups every, say, ten years (to be on the safe side.
Javier
Now lets say they invent a new media format and put a "Person Lock(tm)" on it.
This would allow them to charge each individual a different price.
They could use the excuse that if you buy classical music, they can use the money to "support" (I mean rip off) classical musicians instead of this noisy rock bands, or they could give "student discounts" so if you are a student, you can still buy media.
well that is what they are doing at a different scale!
Javier
"Selling some crappy Bruce Willis film for US$35 in the US, $55 in Germany and $15 in India is what they're doing, and sooner or later, the MPA is going to find their names after the "v." in some lawsuit. But not one started by the US government. "
Indeed.
And it should be in Europe, where we get the biggest rip off.
I hope somebody in Norway is reading this!
Javier
They _where_ in a bad position, and have taken the _only_ way forward.
As Tim Sweeney (Unreal programmer) pointed on his rant about programming languages, games have a big influence in the course of graphics technology. Last year it looked like ActiveX was winning more and more mindshare in the games industry. If it weren't for John Carmack and the Linux crowd, M$ would have had its way.
Now OpenGL is back again, but it needs the support of the community. The only way to get it is to support open source.
I think OpenGL is in the same position as Netscape. They are cross-platform, and what is clear now from the success of Linux is that bein cross-platform is a huge advantage! OpenGL will be a success and will draw money towards SGI enviroment. If they change their business model and work out how to cash a part of this money, they will be back again.
If you look at Sun, they are making money of Java even though you can get all of the stuff for free (except the EEJB brand). But they make money because people thinks about SUN when they think about Java.
In short. I expect both Mozilla and OpenGL to be big successes in the medium term.
Well, if M$ can argue that Explorer is part of the operation system, just because they have spread the code all arround windows, we sure can create a DVD viewer wich uses the knowledge that was (legally) gained by reverse engineering the encription.
If the decription code is an integral part of the dvd viewer (for a judge and most of the non technical people out there is probably enough to make them compile into the same binary), it would be within the law.
Well, this may be offtopic for a copiright discussion, but it is very interesting to note that it can be applied to the act of reverse engineering the Xing player. Under this precedent it would be legal, even if done in the EEUU.
Therefore, to publish the knowledge adquired by doing so, would be legal, so even if DeCSS can be stopped on the grounds of the DMCA (I hope not), the act of publishing the encription algorithm and encription keys is completely legal!
(tip) Somebody should sue the RIAA for breach of fair use consumer rights.
understand copirights this would be applied to end users as well.
Wow, then that means that making _any_ modification to windows (eg. changing a ini file) is unlawful.
Should we run windows from read only drivers, then?
If I where blind, I would lend myself to this sort of things.
First: it gives you hope. Second: you stand a chance to get it working good enough in your livespan (~20 years from now) Third: even a 10x10 bmp is better than nothing. Four: you are HELPING OTHER PEOPLE. Would you sit on your ass and do nothing? Javier
At the moment Micosoft is a huge single Entity(and growing!). At some point the size of a company will limit how quickly it can react to market forces an make decisions. To keep a company that size must surely involve 'bureaucratic red tape' to keep the company coordinated and run as smooth as possible.
I aggree with that, but you have to consider the advantages of a big single Entity:
They can leverage their market share and put people out of business (like netscape), impose "the facto" standards, cut aggresive market deals, use big money to lobby or corrupt goverments, etc.
The first one of this is what the DOJ is using, but if that wasn't the case, M$ would be able to use all this tactics to grow even more, maybe out of the reach of any individual goverment.