BSA Chief: Software Pirates Face Increased Crackdown

Their most popular lie: The software industry suffers billions in damages from software piracy. - No, that's wrong. There is no damage in the billions. They lose potential profits, but it's absolutely not proven that these would actually have been earned in a different scenario. And even the profits that actually didn't materialize are not damage - after all, there's no right to profits and no guarantee of profits. They can fail to materialize for all sorts of reasons. Software is simply not a thing, nothing that you produce and then steal. Software pirate is anyway a silly word: none of those people stand in front of the software crate with a gun or knife and demand it to copy itself...

I find this arrogant attitude of the BSA and thus also of the companies it represents (yes, that also includes IBM and Apple, who otherwise come across rather positively to me) almost as infuriating as the behavior of the music industry. This silly attitude that you have a God-given right to profits in the billions (because that's what they're talking about with their claim!) and the evil copiers are directly stealing them is nothing but silly window dressing.

Sure, a company that develops something and then explicitly can't market that product anymore because of illegal copies is in a tough spot - and then really does have reason to speak of damage. That has happened in the area of computer games (LucasArts never properly marketed two games because copies were already out there before they even hit the market).

But none of the companies organized in the BSA have such a position. On the contrary, the biggest rip-off artists are in there, squeezing every penny out of customers and not always delivering the quality that customers actually want - software updates that conveniently skip a major release because then you can charge money for the update. Buggy software that eats data, where the manufacturer then refuses all liability for these software errors (just like product liability in the software sector is a foreign concept for many companies in general).

Of course, companies have a right to enforce their contracts - software license agreements included. After all, no one is forced to buy this software. But this general criminalization of your own customers, this constant suspicion that they would always cheat anyway and this ongoing victim mentality especially of the software giants pisses me off.

At heise online news there's the original article.

Fuji Discontinues Medium Format Cameras

Orks. Fuji and Bronica exiting the medium format market. Fuji in particular had some really cool cameras on offer - they will leave gaps behind. Where else is there such a compact rangefinder camera for 6x9 format? Or something comparable to the highly flexible 6x8 (ok, the Mamiya 67 comes close - but only 6x7, not 6x8). Too bad.

At PhotographyBLOG there's the original article.

Gibson threatens: "Arnold, I'm waiting!"

Power-obsessed muscleman versus religious nut. As actors, I liked them better ...

At NETZEITUNG.DE Wissenschaft I found the original article.

Links are being criminalized

Why an admin can no longer work on Wikipedia. And what extortion methods are being used to delete topics, just because some industrial interests are behind them - no matter how absurd and ridiculous the accusations are. Simply flex financial muscles and the matter is settled for these bullies. Completely regardless of how citizens' rights are trampled underfoot.

I found the netbib weblog and the original article.

Music Industry Against Radio Recording

And more griping from rights administrators and customer extortionists. Yeah right, private radio recordings are responsible for the fact that this concentrated incompetence in the management offices of music conglomerates can't afford the latest Mercedes every year anymore. Lack of competence and company activities completely out of touch with the market are of course never to blame for their decline. Nor the fact that they were simply so stupid and ignored the Internet as a platform for so long - even today the actual music corporations contribute nothing or very little of their own, but manage at best to latch onto others (and even then they still complain).

These clowns will probably only be satisfied when someone wipes their ass for them and they get paid for it. And even then you probably have to bring your own toilet paper...

At netbib weblog you can find the original article.

Not enough soldiers? So what, where's the Photoshop?

In this country, you simply grab a couple of 1-euro workers and put them in spare uniforms

At Telepolis News (29.10.2004) you can find the original article.

project: darkwave

Label that distributes music by Nickie Jaine and Black Tape for a Blue Girl, among others. I find Nickie Jaine's voice absolutely impressive. There you can also find a whole range of songs as MP3s for download and many audio samples. And it's not one of the major labels with their copy paranoia.

And no, this is not my usual music. Every now and then you have to listen to something new.

Here's the original article.

SanDisk's budget 2GB Secure Digital card

Crazy. 2 GB for 200 dollars. Under 200 euros. Back in the day you were happy if you had a hard drive that worked — today you've got tiny plastic postage stamps with that kind of capacity. Even crazier: today's megapixel monsters actually make these cards necessary ...

At Engadget you can find the original article.

The Security of Checks and Balances

The discrepancy between theoretical and actual separation of powers. Not only in the USA, but here in Germany too, the executive is once again trying to seize all power and push the judiciary and legislature to the margins. A development that should alarm anyone who believes in democratic systems. This makes the small victories for democracy all the more important — such as, for example, Parliament's rejection of the European Commission. Unfortunately, in situations like those we're currently being presented with by governments (I can barely stand to hear the drivel about "we are at war with terrorists" anymore — that's complete nonsense; people who say such things have no idea what war really is or have repressed it if they once knew), the other branches of power are often harnessed to the government's cause. An independent Bundestag that also contradicts the government, even when the government belongs to the leading faction, is just as important as constitutional courts that keep politicians in check. Otherwise we'll get 1984, albeit with a delay, but still just as Orwell once imagined it ...

You can find the original article at Schneier on Security here.

58,000 ballots missing in Florida

United Banana-States of America

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

Opel Crisis: Competition with Sweden over the Vectra

Doesn't it get a bit tight when so many people crawl up to the GM managers? I find it disgusting how there's haggling going on and countries are played off against each other. But that's how it works today - first you do nothing when industry gets bought away, then you do even less when everything gets stripped down, and afterwards people try to play everything against each other just to squeeze out the last drop. The blessing of this so-called great globalization.

I found this at tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD and the original article.

TuneFinder X

Cool. You enter a melody and the program delivers the song. Problem: I might be able to hum a song, but a) it won't sound anything like the original and b) I still can't input the notes of the melody into a keyboard from that. I could also whistle the melody, but then Jutta always complains ... Here's the original article.

Mediation Committee: Mail Order Customers Should Bear Return Shipping Costs

Because it's annoying for shippers when customers exercise their rights, these are simply being cut back.

You can find the original article on heise online news.

Website operator warned for hardware notification

Now it's even forbidden to report on the existence of devices, if it's up to the lawyers of a mysterious design patent holder.

At heise online news there's the original article.

Barroso wants to reshape Commission

Actually, he could send half the team home. But it will probably just be a minor cosmetic adjustment.

At WDR.de you can find the original article.

OpenZaurus 3.5.1 is released! :: OpenZaurus ::

A new version of OpenZaurus - the alternative to the Sharp ROM - is out. And now available in three variants. Without GUI (interesting for those who use the Zaurus as a small mobile control computer and don't need a GUI), an Opie version (the familiar environment that also comes with the Sharp ROM in an older version) and a GPE version. The latter is particularly cool because it's based on an X server and can therefore run normal X programs.

Here's the original article.

Bill Clementson: Allegro CL 7.0 released

Nice what Franz built into Allegro Common Lisp. However, the exorbitant price for Allegro CL is still rather off-putting for hobbyists. Yes, I know about the free version, but it's not really usable on all platforms - because, for example, on OS X the GUI part has always been missing so far.

At Planet Lisp you can find the original article.

Federal Government Fears Loss of Image

Based on my indirect experiences with Hamburg's authorities, I can well imagine that they would come up with nonsense like the claim that the far-right threat is being massively exaggerated. These are very strange people in the Immigration Office in Hamburg. And to Mr. Schily: Germany's reputation abroad is the last thing I'm concerned about when I see the increasingly strong activities of right-wing extremists.

At Telepolis News (26.10.2004) there's the original article.

The E-Business Weblog: The Pain in the Neck

You should stop me. You should arrest me. You should prevent me from stealing people's time. Those poor people! Helpless victims of an intrusive, mind-straining blogger! If I keep blogging, everyone will lose their minds. Do something! Shut down the Internet! Rain brains from the sky! Duplicate cat pictures! This can't go on. - okay, so I think we bloggers owe help to that poor man. I'm in favor of launching an action "Stop Roell." Who will design an appropriate logo for it?

Here you can find the original article.

Double Your Data Volume with the PROshift+ Adapter

Not really new, but elegantly implemented: a shift of the camera within a larger image field produces two images that are then stitched together in the computer to create a larger image. Of course, this only works if the lens also provides the necessary image circle.

At PhotographyBLOG you can find the original article.

iPod Photo, doesn't rock?

Cool. Ok, Phil Askey doesn't quite like it, but he's not always the measure of all things. I don't always agree with him on cameras either.

For me, Apple's description sounds pretty cool. Automatic syncing of downscaled images to the iPod, display via simple cable directly on the TV. You can take your digital photos with you and torture relatives with the obligatory vacation slideshows without having to bring a computer along.

Ok, an integrated card reader would certainly have been awesome, but then Apple would have had to commit to a format and that would have been a bit much. However, they could have implemented USB synchronization with the camera, that certainly would have been possible. But maybe an update will come next year. Anyway, it sounds appealing enough to me that I'm already thinking about whether I should talk my current 30GB iPod off to Jutta to get myself the new Photo part. At Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com) there's the original article.

Cassini probe approached Saturn moon Titan

Things are getting exciting!

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

A party where everyone can become anything

At least the fact that they want to wall off Düsseldorf and Cologne I consider an exceedingly sensible measure. Actually, you could fence in the entire Rhineland. As far as I'm concerned, they could even charge admission during carnival season.

The original article is available at WDR.de.

Fred Miranda Releases Velvia Vision Plug-in

Sounds quite interesting. Sure, you can do all of it by hand if you know how. But not everyone feels like figuring it all out themselves - a plugin like that is pretty handy. And Fred produces quite decent plugins - his Stair Interpolation is still one of the best upsizing tools.

You can find the original article at PhotographyBLOG.

James Tauber : Cleese

A project that wants to build an operating system on Python. Launch the Python environment directly from the bootloader and from there on program everything in Python. Funny idea. And why not - Lisp machines were also practical devices, Java machines exist by now, Native Oberon has been around for a long time - a native Python would be exactly the right thing.

Here's the original article.

Stuttgart: State Minister Slaps Party Colleague

I'm certainly in favor of corporal punishment for politicians: but it should only be administered by voters. Otherwise, I've always been of the opinion that Southern Italy begins below Frankfurt and therefore Italian conditions in state parliaments down there are completely normal.

At tagesschau.de - The ARD News you can find the original article.

Sarah McLachlan - World On Fire

Nice idea. Instead of making a stupid frenetic video, she simply had herself filmed and donated the money that would have gone into production. And now incorporated into the non-video, showing where all the money is going and putting it in relation to what individual production costs would have been.

And as a nice side benefit, her music is also quite pleasant to listen to.

Here's the original article.

Stupid Users

I can now count myself among them. Really. I just spent 45 minutes searching for an import problem with iMovie - my clips played with sound on the camera, played a sound during import (on the camera as well as - when display off - on PC speakers) and showed normally loud sound in the timeline too (after I set the recording to 16bit - I got that tip from the iMovie FAQ). Well, only when playing back did no sound come out at all.

Eventually I noticed the small icon in the menu bar where the sound waves were stolen from the speaker symbol. After I turned the sound back on, there was also noise coming from the speaker during playback.

Oh man. But at least the MVX 150i from Canon is a really cute little camera with enough features for me. Now I just need to try it out tomorrow in daylight to see what it's like - in the dark it of course has heavy noise in the image.

Not that I needed a camera, but I've always been tempted to make something with my iMovie. And as the guy from the Shockwave always says so nicely: Boys need Toys. You should really start to get scared when I extend my Python Desktop Server with rendering features for video formats.

EU Commissioner wants to see Castro die

The biting reflexes of so-called democratically and Christian-oriented politicians in Europe and supposedly free America ...

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD there is the original article.

Gambit Scheme 4.0 beta 10 released!

Very nice. Gambit Scheme was one of my favorite playthings many years ago - among other things, I tinkered with it long enough back then until I had a DOS version. One that was even reasonably usable. And the features of 4.0 sound very interesting. Especially the comprehensive Unicode support and the threading system sound very good.

At Rainer Joswig's Lisp News you can find the original article.

Retrocomputing - MIT CADR Lisp Machines

I tried out the emulator for the MIT CADR mentioned in P2879 on a Linux machine. Since it's based on SDL, it needs a direct console or X running directly on the console - it's not network transparent. But otherwise: really excellent. Ok, boot takes forever, but once it has booted, the response time on an approximately 1 GHz Epia is quite acceptable. Optimize the code a bit, get a somewhat more powerful machine and you have a nice historical CADR running. Without having to revive the old hardware. Just beautiful. You get directly into the normal system and have the entire screen for a large listener. With the system menu you can then split the screen into editor windows (with the good old ZWEI) and listener (the Lisp prompts). Mail is included, Telnet and a few more tools for Lisp development. Very nice, the whole thing.

The keyboard emulation is still problematic - you can hardly find special characters. The special characters are oriented towards American keyboards, the normal letters on the other hand to the local keyboard mapping, but not all keys are functional - the umlaut keys of the German keyboard produce breaks, but don't deliver the special characters that actually lie on them and are thus missing.

Besides, the mouse still has serious problems: the area where it can move gets smaller and smaller, so it becomes increasingly difficult to click anywhere.

Otherwise though, really impressive work overall. This could turn into a really nice thing, even if the machine uses not Common Lisp but one of its many predecessors.

If anyone starts it directly from the console without X, don't be alarmed: the special characters are ok. SDL uses AA-Lib internally and thus emulates the graphical elements with characters on the text console. A bit unusual, but quite usable if you don't have X at hand at the moment.

By the way, after startup the machine seems to calculate in the octal system. A (5 6) gives 36 and a (3 4) gives 14. You can probably set the base somewhere for how numbers are displayed. My Symbolics manuals (the Symbolics and the CADR are related) didn't provide anything directly, but I also didn't feel like rummaging through 1 meter of paper.

Here's the original article.

Genscher mistakenly signed CSU membership application

Really now. Simply slipping Genschman a CSU party motion, that's really mean.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

Java predecessor celebrates birthday: 30 years of p-System

Oh yes, the UCSD-p system. A beautifully baroque system with oddly obscure system libraries and its statically designed file system, which drove many a user to madness. The editor was nice. And made me receptive to vi. In the first years of my computer science classes, I still had fun with UCSD Pascal - unfortunately, it was then switched to CP/M and first Pascal M and then Turbo Pascal.

At heise online news there is the original article.

Ken Iverson is dead

Probably none of the kids today know him anymore - the inventor of APL and J. Two of the strangest and most interesting programming languages. His work certainly influenced many programmers and language designers, and in my opinion, he deserves to be seen on the same level as McCarthy (Lisp inventor), Kristen Nygaard (Simula and thus OO inventor) and Alan Kay (Smalltalk father). After Kristen Nygaard, he was the second great figure in language design to pass away.

Here's the original article.

Retrocomputing - Symbolics Lisp Machine Emulation

Someone is already working on the Symbolics emulation. And their approach is extra cool: they OCRed the Lisp sources of the Symbolics microcode from the patent document, converted them, and now they're building an emulator and working their way through the microcode instructions that are missing from the patent. Some people—fortunately—simply have too much free time.

Here's the original article.

Acupuncture soon a statutory health insurance benefit?

Why should the effectiveness of acupuncture suddenly be better documented than traditional remedies, when only 1000 patients participated and - problematically by principle - no real double-blind test was conducted? Sorry, but the study doesn't really prove very much. Okay, it does provide an indication that the whole thing should be investigated further - but to claim that it is better documented than medication treatment strikes me as somewhat exaggerated.

At WDR.de you can find the original article.

The Suggestive Question of the Works Council

Well, one has to wonder what the works council got out of it in return for proceeding this way. Or what interests are behind acting like this - including at the union. Possible fears that colleagues might realize that a bad works council and an inactive union aren't helpful?

Of course, in their arguments they'll certainly claim that they prevented employees from being fired. And they'll probably pat themselves on the back and praise how well and prudently they acted. It's a lie, but it sure sounds good...

At Industrial Technology & Witchcraft there's the original article.

lispmeister: A booting CADR emulator

Great. Someone is building an emulator for the MIT CADR Lisp machine. Since many other systems originated from it (including the Symbolics machines), this could be a very interesting starting point for an open Lisp machine emulator - maybe someday I'll be able to run my Genera 8.3 on a free emulator?

At Planet Lisp there is the original article.

Münster is the world's most livable city

Absolutely crazy. Münster is nice and all - but I definitely wouldn't call this provincial dump the most livable city. Seems like some people had rose-tinted glasses on when making their voting decision...

You can find the original article at WDR.de.

Opel Vote with Tricks

Yeah, those nice guided votes. Gives you a warm, democratic feeling in your belly.

At Industrial Technology & Witchcraft you can find the original article.

Study: Less Employment Protection Does Not Create New Jobs

Of course not. Only March hares and other crazy people believe such things.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find den Originalartikel.

Sharp Kills US Zaurus Line

Sharp is now shutting down US distribution after European distribution. Just like Sony already did.

You can find the original article at Gizmodo.

Slashdot | IP Tunneling Through Nameservers

For people who still believe that a firewall could control traffic from inside to outside and back. IP over DNS is not just a pipe dream, but a valid concept with working example code. This way — provided you control a nameserver somewhere outside (which is nowadays possible for anyone with a cheap root server and a domain registration) — you can get through every firewall, as long as name resolution is allowed in the local network — even if the computer in question otherwise has no access to the outside (i.e. can neither send/receive mail nor surf the web — because if it can do that, it already has a trivial channel to the outside).

A good reason why you should implement nameservers on the firewall so that only internal hosts are resolved towards the inside, and resolution of external hosts should only be done on the proxy server. Or why in some areas you might simply need to cut the cable to the outside for security reasons.

Here's the original article.

STUDY WHAT WE DO

Interesting anecdote. Yes, the Bush administration doesn't care about reality and doesn't think to study it - it acts arbitrarily and autocratically without regard for facts. Unfortunately, as the rest of the world studies the wonderful new world that the Bush administration has created through its actions, it becomes clear that the Bush administration has lost touch with reality.

I found the original article at Gibson Blog.

Animal Planet :: Corwin's Carnival of Creatures

Ok, so I knew that these critters are unusual for Chinese bird's nests, but I didn't know that they're the only true cave-dwelling birds among birds - and especially the only birds with sonar. Weird.

Here you can find the original article.

Bibble Labs - Professional Photo-Manipulation Software

I don't often link to commercial software, but I'll make an exception here. The reason: the software - a pretty nice image management and processing application - now runs identically on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. For Linux, you can even choose between RPM and DEB package formats. And as a Debian user, I naturally like that sort of thing. The only thing missing now would be for them to learn that Debian, like RPMs, make sense not just for Intel processors, and to also produce a PowerPC version of it - then you could manage images on Linux-powered Macs as well.

Update: after I installed the test version, I have to say the program looks very promising. However, the current version still seems a bit rushed - at least in the OS X version there are one or two problems. Dialog boxes (particularly noticeable with all floating toolboxes) occasionally have disabled dialog elements, even though they can normally be clicked. The main window sometimes just won't minimize or collapse to the title bar (WindowShade). The Preferences dialog hung when I moved the mouse around a bit over the tooltips of the options. The (switchable) docking check for tools makes the response very sluggish and jerky.

However, I was immediately impressed by the proper support for Canon's RAW formats and the good integration of image edits - every change is visible live, even with .CRW files. And the changes are only saved as .bib files, the original files remain untouched. The background conversion works quite well too, although there's a small pause when a batch conversion starts, but after that you can browse through the images quickly again.

I only tried the Pro version because Work-Queues (consolidation of images from various folders) and multithreading would be important for me - my images are organized on disk chronologically and roughly thematically, but to compile a gallery or arrange a printing job, for example, I need to consolidate various image sources. And without multithreading you have to wait for the conversions - which can definitely be annoying.

Bibble might actually be a useful complement to iView Media Pro. Because with the latter, image editing is rather meager and primitive (especially the possibilities for influencing CRW files), but on the other hand, searching in large image collections is brilliantly well solved. Both iView Media (you might even be able to skip the Pro version) and Bibble can access the same directory tree without any problems, and this way you can use the strengths of both programs. The use of Photoshop could then definitely be dispensed with in one or another case, because really it would then only be needed for possible effects or special sharpening.

Compared to Canon's own software, Bibble wins by a mile in any case. It seems faster and is much more powerful. And the image results can easily be compared.

Here's the original article.

F#, a functional language for .Net

Sometimes Microsoft produces something nice. Ok, it's Microsoft Research - if anything intelligent is produced there at all, then it's there. But it's pretty cool to be able to use an OCaml-like language in .NET.

Not that I would use .NET anywhere

At Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog there's the original article.

Photo Matt - Bizarre Windows Behavior

Matt Mullenweg is really having fun with Windows: an automatic security update just rebooted his computer and ate a few hours of his work. Somehow I understand why I prefer Apple's method much more, which just tells me that something is available instead of automatically pushing it to disk. Above all, it's absolutely stupid that an automatic update bypasses all application dialogs for saving open files. But all the Windows advocates will now surely provide a thousand reasons why this was all the user's fault. By the way, Matt is no novice or anything like that - he's the programmer of WordPress and normally you can assume he has a reasonable level of computer competence. If even he has his system eat his data just like that, then this feature probably isn't that easy or obvious to disable or document. Here's the original article.

10,000 jobs are being cut

And so the extortion of workers and the lies about the location's weaknesses continue - squeezing out whatever can be squeezed and a bit more. Until it doesn't work anymore - and then it will be too late, because then it will crash. This madness should better come to an end before it shows results that we will all regret.

At WDR.de you can find the original article.

EU Energy Commissioner Failed

Hmm. Due to lack of knowledge about energy policy. 6. Sit down.

At Megawatt: The Last Latent Appliance Fetishist there's the original article.