Does that also apply if you buy it used? What if you don't get the booklet with the device? (I did get the booklet, but I've never opened it, and the PS3 has never asked me whether I agree to any EULA.)
Legally speaking, they can't enforce an "agreement" for which there is no evidence you even knew about. An agreement is only an agreement if both parties agree to it.
From my perspective, I've purchased a piece of hardware with which I can do whatever I want. I'm aware that I would have to agree to an EULA to use PSN, but I won't do that, so how would Sony claim to have any sort of agreement with me at all?
(That's a serious question. Would they have any legal basis for claiming their new EULA terms are in fact binding on me?)
They aren't taking anything away, they just aren't giving you anything anymore. Only on Slashdot could the two possibly be confused by people who call themselves intelligent.
... Unless they're going to try to ninja-update firmware of PS3s not connected to PSN, regardless of whether they have the latest firmware installed, and just say "we updated the EULA, and that applies to all devices regardless of firmware version". Whether it would hold up in court after the fact is pretty much irrelevant (in the same way that laws against murder are pretty much irrelevant to the murder victim).
When you purchased the machine, it came with a EULA that specifically said Sony could update the EULA at anytime for any reason.
I bought my machine used. I never saw an EULA, and I have never been asked to agree to one by the PS3 (even when I did a complete system reset). (Of course, I've never connected to PSN, nor do I have a PSN account.)
IF the original EULA said something along the lines of "We may change or update this EULA at any time." then the only thing i can say(within legal bounds) is to accept the new EULA or return the hardware and ask for a refund, but i'm sure allot of people won't do either.
I bought my PS3 used, and as far as I'm aware I've never agreed to any EULA at all (and I've never connected to PSN). The only reason my PS3 is on the internet is for Netflix. Am I at risk of ninja updates merely by being connected to the internet, regardless of whether I connect to PSN?
By "staying offline", I hope you just mean "staying off of PSN".
I shouldn't have to agree to an EULA for a firmware update I don't have installed, just to use my Netflix disc.
I bought my PS3 used, and I've never connected to PSN. As far as I'm aware, I haven't agree to any EULA at all.
I guess the root of my worry is, if I have the pre-April 1 firmware installed, can they still ninja-update my PS3? (Speaking technically, not legally. Does anyone know whether that functionality is present?)
The only actual humans they give a damn about are their stockholders.
Corporations will move production back here as soon as their stockholders agree to work for the same low wages as those foreigners, which will allow prices to stay at or near their current levels. As others point out, it's not the corporations keeping production overseas, it's their customers.
Did the NLC report also compare effective purchasing power of these employees, rather than just trumpeting "OMG 50 cents per hour!"? I mean, maybe they only earn $5 per day or whatever, and that would suck here, but chances are it pays well enough for them to eat and get them a roof over their head. Did they compare those wages to the alternatives available to those workers? Did they bother figuring out what the cost of living is in that area?
As far as I can tell, they didn't. They're simply making unsupported assertions and expecting us to take their word for it. They may be right, but why should I have to go do a bunch of independent research to find out?
"50 cents per hour" doesn't mean anything without some economic context. The NLC report states that the wages are "below subsistence level" but they offer no evidence that this is the case, nor do they offer any evidence that this is worse than the alternative employment available to these workers.
(I'm not defending KYE, I'm only pointing out that the NLC report is incomplete and is an insufficient basis for attacking Microsoft.)
Their whole report makes it seem like Microsoft deliberately and knowingly enforced these oppressive conditions. The NLC report quotes a "Teenaged Microsoft Worker" complaining about the conditions; that makes it seem like this worker is a direct employee of Microsoft. That isn't the case.
In other words, the NLC report is explicitly making misleading statements in an attempt to stir up indignation at these working conditions. Right goal, wrong method.
MS has said they will look into it, but so far has not done anything about the conditions.
Last I checked, this was just some Chinese company that Microsoft contracted with to make some hardware. Yeah, maybe they're bad working conditions, but we're blaming the wrong people here. You're assuming Microsoft can do something about it. Microsoft basically has two choices: ask the Chinese company nicely to shape up, or stop doing business with them. They likely have contracts and such, so it's possibly a legal landmine to just cut off all business relations.
Basically what I'm getting at is that it's not just a simple switch that Microsoft can throw over in Redmond.
Speaking in a more general sense, we complain about China producing all our electronic gizmos, but do we really want to pay the inevitably higher prices that will result if we manufacture all this stuff here in the US? My iPhone was expensive enough as it is; how much would it cost if it were made entirely in the US?
I know several people whose mobile phone access shows up as coming from Texas, though they don't live in Texas. Google just uses someone's geolocation database, but carriers like AT&T don't have to follow that... for a while my friend thought his account had been hacked as well, but it was repeatable - clear the list of sessions, then connect from his phone, and a Texas entry would show up.
Have you checked whether that was the case for you?
What? As far as I know, Valve has never required a third-party dev to remove their DRM before selling their games on Steam. For example, the Steam version of Bioshock (the first one) kept its SecuROM DRM - even though it didn't have a disc to check.
Do you have any examples? (I don't mean examples of third-party devs voluntarily removing their own DRM for the Steam version without being asked, I mean examples of Valve explicitly telling a third party they had to remove their DRM before they could sell their game on Steam.)
If you buy from a reputable vendor, you have exactly the same recourse you'd have buying from Best Buy - return it.
You're going to complain about cost of shipping or something, I'm sure. That's true. But if you pay less for the item in the first place, and most of the time you'll get the right thing (after all, you're talking about an edge case here), so you'll come out ahead even if once in a while you have to return something.
There's a rather important difference between "catering to only some users" and "catering to zero users".
At least meeting the closed-source driver devs halfway (e.g. by making a schedule for ABI changes) means those closed-source drivers will be usable with the kernel for a time, meaning the target device will actually be able to run Linux, meaning Linux will get a bigger market share.
Refusing to meet them halfway, though, directly results in a smaller market share, because those closed-source drivers never get written, and the device owner turns to another OS to run its device.
Stores like Best Buy often charge restocking fees on open electronics. What's your point?
At any rate, it's not hard to google the model number and see if people have had trouble getting it to work with your distro, see whether the manufacturer has changed chipsets under the hood, and so on and so forth. Isn't that part of what I said earlier, in step two?
You can't complain that an alternative solution doesn't work if you ignore part of the instructions.
No, but they're wrong for being unwilling to meet them halfway (even something as simple as a clear schedule for ABI changes and deprecation). There's nothing wrong with adding a little method to the madness.
Step one would be: don't shop at Best Buy, as you're probably paying too much.
Step two would be: shop at home, online, where you can compare both prices and compatibility with your OS.
I think these steps are valid whether or not you're a clueless end-user. Clueless end-users are more than capable of comparison shopping online (and if the end-user really wants to buy from Best Buy, they can look at Best Buy's website without leaving home).
Shouldn't it just determine if the DLL was damaged and replace it with the correct, working patched version if it is? Sorry, but automatically throwing their hands up and saying "you're fucked" is the Microsoft shortcut for not being able to fix their own security problems.
Isn't that what they did last time, and it caused bluescreens?
Do you want every single patch, no matter how small, to try to detect rootkits and, if a rootkit is detected, replace every DLL in the system with known clean copies? That's absurd.
The problem wasn't that the DLL the patch installed caused bluescreens, it's that DLLs the patch didn't touch - because it wasn't patching them - were now incompatible with the clean (patched) DLL (because they were part of the rootkit).
What do you propose Microsoft do about it? Patch the DLLs anyway, knowing it will cause bluescreens? Provide the entire slew of kernel DLLs for download via Windows Update, and install all of them every time there's a kernel patch?
I don't mind what MS is doing at all - they're doing their best to make sure that their users won't get bluescreens, even if they're rooted.
Adobe's products are a major reason Apple sells well in the first place.
That was true in the past, but I don't really think it's true any more. My filmmaker friends tell me Apple's own Final Cut Pro is better than Adobe Premiere for pretty much everything, and I'm sure there are lists out there of feature films made with FCP proving it's not just my friends that think so.
Apple needs Adobe as much if not more than Adobe needs Apple.
Despite Photoshop, I really don't think this is true anymore. Apple pushed out of the "professional artist" niche a long time ago; they're more focused on college kids nowadays (where they're not focusing on, well, everyone), and for everyday use, not just image editing. Adobe could drop their OSX products entirely today, and Apple probably wouldn't even notice the slight dip in their Mac sales.
I'm not an economist, I just think you're overestimating Adobe's importance to Apple's survival. And obviously Apple agrees with me; you yourself said so:
Apple changed the rules without telling Adobe
This isn't the first time - remember the whole 64-bit Cocoa thing? Apple first told Adobe, "don't worry that your products are written with 32-bit Cocoa, you'll be able to switch to 64-bit just fine, you won't have to rewrite everything from scratch." Then what did they do? They dropped 64-bit Cocoa with no warning, even though it was largely finished.
Does Apple care whether they have Adobe's support? Obviously not, and you can't really think they haven't run the numbers to figure out how much that will hurt their bottom line.
perhaps threatening Apple with some-sort of discontinuing of it's products on Macs may knock some sense into Apple
As far as I can tell, Apple lost interest in keeping Adobe's products on OSX a long time ago... about when they suddenly dropped their 64-bit Cocoa plans despite their earlier promise to Adobe that they'd have a migration path which wouldn't require a complete rewrite.
I might be remembering things wrong, but it appears to me Apple doesn't really care if Adobe goes running to Microsoft for comfort.
Sure, if you're developing the exact same software now that you were "a few years ago". If your runtime requirements have not increased. If you don't want to add graphics features to your software which were not available back then. If you don't want to upgrade to a newer, better version of your development environment. (Get the point yet?)
I learned C++ using Visual C++ 6 on an old hand-me-down IBM Thinkpad with 64MB RAM and a 133MHz Pentium running Windows 2000. It worked pretty well at the time. By your logic, it should still work pretty well, a decade later... but any programmer who is satisfied developing on that sort of machine is not a programmer I want to be working with.
I worked for a guy like you once. We were doing data processing work - huge CSV files full of customer data and do processing on them to clean them up - and some programming work to automate said processing. He had us doing that work on ancient Pentium III machines with 128MB RAM that tended to bluescreen with too much hard drive activity. Sure, the machines could "handle" the work we were doing, but when I brought in my own personal laptop - a then-four-year-old Pentium 4m with 512MB RAM - my productivity literally tripled. He eventually banned personal laptops from the office for reasons beyond anyone's comprehension, and didn't seem to care that our productivity suffered.
Oh, but the Pentium III machines "worked", right? *eye roll*
I'm not saying I'd give my kids a brand new $600 computer twice a year. I'm saying I'd give them a $600 computer to start with, and common sense should tell you that this whole topic is only relevant if they actually show interest in things that would require a mid-range computer, like gaming or programming; if all they want is to waste time on Facebook, I'd probably just get them an iPad (or whatever the equivalent is ten years from now, assuming prices on that sort of gadget have gone down by then) and call it good.
Not every kid needs their own computer, but if I'm going to get my kid a computer, then I see no reason to take on the maintenance headaches and risks associated with buying low-end, used computers from eBay (or wherever). I'd rather buy new parts to build a computer that I know I can fix if something goes wrong.
I think your missed the part where my parent post said "via SSH" and I questioned that. But no matter, others have replied with links to ways to shut down Windows machines from remote Linux machines.
Growing up, my computers were always four-year-old hand-me-down laptops that were often damaged (e.g. one had a broken screen, and most had batteries that no longer held a charge). I didn't own a *new* computer until after I was married, and even then I only bought it because it sucks being tethered to the wall in class.
At any rate, I didn't mean kids need high end machines, but buying low-end, cheap, used laptops will not help them any if they want to go into a computer-related field, and it will only make maintenance harder on the parent when the hard drive dies again.
At my previous place of employment I built several $600 desktops that were perfectly capable of handling software development, and that is probably the sort of thing I'd build my kids when they're old enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Does that also apply if you buy it used? What if you don't get the booklet with the device? (I did get the booklet, but I've never opened it, and the PS3 has never asked me whether I agree to any EULA.)
Legally speaking, they can't enforce an "agreement" for which there is no evidence you even knew about. An agreement is only an agreement if both parties agree to it.
From my perspective, I've purchased a piece of hardware with which I can do whatever I want. I'm aware that I would have to agree to an EULA to use PSN, but I won't do that, so how would Sony claim to have any sort of agreement with me at all?
(That's a serious question. Would they have any legal basis for claiming their new EULA terms are in fact binding on me?)
Nope, I've checked. It's not connected to PSN.
They aren't taking anything away, they just aren't giving you anything anymore. Only on Slashdot could the two possibly be confused by people who call themselves intelligent.
... Unless they're going to try to ninja-update firmware of PS3s not connected to PSN, regardless of whether they have the latest firmware installed, and just say "we updated the EULA, and that applies to all devices regardless of firmware version". Whether it would hold up in court after the fact is pretty much irrelevant (in the same way that laws against murder are pretty much irrelevant to the murder victim).
When you purchased the machine, it came with a EULA that specifically said Sony could update the EULA at anytime for any reason.
I bought my machine used. I never saw an EULA, and I have never been asked to agree to one by the PS3 (even when I did a complete system reset). (Of course, I've never connected to PSN, nor do I have a PSN account.)
What now?
IF the original EULA said something along the lines of "We may change or update this EULA at any time." then the only thing i can say(within legal bounds) is to accept the new EULA or return the hardware and ask for a refund, but i'm sure allot of people won't do either.
I bought my PS3 used, and as far as I'm aware I've never agreed to any EULA at all (and I've never connected to PSN). The only reason my PS3 is on the internet is for Netflix. Am I at risk of ninja updates merely by being connected to the internet, regardless of whether I connect to PSN?
By "staying offline", I hope you just mean "staying off of PSN".
I shouldn't have to agree to an EULA for a firmware update I don't have installed, just to use my Netflix disc.
I bought my PS3 used, and I've never connected to PSN. As far as I'm aware, I haven't agree to any EULA at all.
I guess the root of my worry is, if I have the pre-April 1 firmware installed, can they still ninja-update my PS3? (Speaking technically, not legally. Does anyone know whether that functionality is present?)
The only actual humans they give a damn about are their stockholders.
Corporations will move production back here as soon as their stockholders agree to work for the same low wages as those foreigners, which will allow prices to stay at or near their current levels. As others point out, it's not the corporations keeping production overseas, it's their customers.
Did the NLC report also compare effective purchasing power of these employees, rather than just trumpeting "OMG 50 cents per hour!"? I mean, maybe they only earn $5 per day or whatever, and that would suck here, but chances are it pays well enough for them to eat and get them a roof over their head. Did they compare those wages to the alternatives available to those workers? Did they bother figuring out what the cost of living is in that area?
As far as I can tell, they didn't. They're simply making unsupported assertions and expecting us to take their word for it. They may be right, but why should I have to go do a bunch of independent research to find out?
"50 cents per hour" doesn't mean anything without some economic context. The NLC report states that the wages are "below subsistence level" but they offer no evidence that this is the case, nor do they offer any evidence that this is worse than the alternative employment available to these workers.
(I'm not defending KYE, I'm only pointing out that the NLC report is incomplete and is an insufficient basis for attacking Microsoft.)
Their whole report makes it seem like Microsoft deliberately and knowingly enforced these oppressive conditions. The NLC report quotes a "Teenaged Microsoft Worker" complaining about the conditions; that makes it seem like this worker is a direct employee of Microsoft. That isn't the case.
In other words, the NLC report is explicitly making misleading statements in an attempt to stir up indignation at these working conditions. Right goal, wrong method.
MS has said they will look into it, but so far has not done anything about the conditions.
Last I checked, this was just some Chinese company that Microsoft contracted with to make some hardware. Yeah, maybe they're bad working conditions, but we're blaming the wrong people here. You're assuming Microsoft can do something about it. Microsoft basically has two choices: ask the Chinese company nicely to shape up, or stop doing business with them. They likely have contracts and such, so it's possibly a legal landmine to just cut off all business relations.
Basically what I'm getting at is that it's not just a simple switch that Microsoft can throw over in Redmond.
Speaking in a more general sense, we complain about China producing all our electronic gizmos, but do we really want to pay the inevitably higher prices that will result if we manufacture all this stuff here in the US? My iPhone was expensive enough as it is; how much would it cost if it were made entirely in the US?
I know several people whose mobile phone access shows up as coming from Texas, though they don't live in Texas. Google just uses someone's geolocation database, but carriers like AT&T don't have to follow that... for a while my friend thought his account had been hacked as well, but it was repeatable - clear the list of sessions, then connect from his phone, and a Texas entry would show up.
Have you checked whether that was the case for you?
Steam requires them to remove it all
What? As far as I know, Valve has never required a third-party dev to remove their DRM before selling their games on Steam. For example, the Steam version of Bioshock (the first one) kept its SecuROM DRM - even though it didn't have a disc to check.
Do you have any examples? (I don't mean examples of third-party devs voluntarily removing their own DRM for the Steam version without being asked, I mean examples of Valve explicitly telling a third party they had to remove their DRM before they could sell their game on Steam.)
They modded you informative, but you deserved a "+1 Humorously Insightful" ;)
If you buy from a reputable vendor, you have exactly the same recourse you'd have buying from Best Buy - return it.
You're going to complain about cost of shipping or something, I'm sure. That's true. But if you pay less for the item in the first place, and most of the time you'll get the right thing (after all, you're talking about an edge case here), so you'll come out ahead even if once in a while you have to return something.
There's a rather important difference between "catering to only some users" and "catering to zero users".
At least meeting the closed-source driver devs halfway (e.g. by making a schedule for ABI changes) means those closed-source drivers will be usable with the kernel for a time, meaning the target device will actually be able to run Linux, meaning Linux will get a bigger market share.
Refusing to meet them halfway, though, directly results in a smaller market share, because those closed-source drivers never get written, and the device owner turns to another OS to run its device.
Which is better?
Stores like Best Buy often charge restocking fees on open electronics. What's your point?
At any rate, it's not hard to google the model number and see if people have had trouble getting it to work with your distro, see whether the manufacturer has changed chipsets under the hood, and so on and so forth. Isn't that part of what I said earlier, in step two?
You can't complain that an alternative solution doesn't work if you ignore part of the instructions.
No, but they're wrong for being unwilling to meet them halfway (even something as simple as a clear schedule for ABI changes and deprecation). There's nothing wrong with adding a little method to the madness.
Step one would be: don't shop at Best Buy, as you're probably paying too much.
Step two would be: shop at home, online, where you can compare both prices and compatibility with your OS.
I think these steps are valid whether or not you're a clueless end-user. Clueless end-users are more than capable of comparison shopping online (and if the end-user really wants to buy from Best Buy, they can look at Best Buy's website without leaving home).
Shouldn't it just determine if the DLL was damaged and replace it with the correct, working patched version if it is? Sorry, but automatically throwing their hands up and saying "you're fucked" is the Microsoft shortcut for not being able to fix their own security problems.
Isn't that what they did last time, and it caused bluescreens?
Do you want every single patch, no matter how small, to try to detect rootkits and, if a rootkit is detected, replace every DLL in the system with known clean copies? That's absurd.
The problem wasn't that the DLL the patch installed caused bluescreens, it's that DLLs the patch didn't touch - because it wasn't patching them - were now incompatible with the clean (patched) DLL (because they were part of the rootkit).
What do you propose Microsoft do about it? Patch the DLLs anyway, knowing it will cause bluescreens? Provide the entire slew of kernel DLLs for download via Windows Update, and install all of them every time there's a kernel patch?
I don't mind what MS is doing at all - they're doing their best to make sure that their users won't get bluescreens, even if they're rooted.
I probably meant Carbon, not Cocoa... I don't keep track.
I probably meant Carbon, not Cocoa. I don't keep track of that stuff very well.
Adobe's products are a major reason Apple sells well in the first place.
That was true in the past, but I don't really think it's true any more. My filmmaker friends tell me Apple's own Final Cut Pro is better than Adobe Premiere for pretty much everything, and I'm sure there are lists out there of feature films made with FCP proving it's not just my friends that think so.
Apple needs Adobe as much if not more than Adobe needs Apple.
Despite Photoshop, I really don't think this is true anymore. Apple pushed out of the "professional artist" niche a long time ago; they're more focused on college kids nowadays (where they're not focusing on, well, everyone), and for everyday use, not just image editing. Adobe could drop their OSX products entirely today, and Apple probably wouldn't even notice the slight dip in their Mac sales.
I'm not an economist, I just think you're overestimating Adobe's importance to Apple's survival. And obviously Apple agrees with me; you yourself said so:
Apple changed the rules without telling Adobe
This isn't the first time - remember the whole 64-bit Cocoa thing? Apple first told Adobe, "don't worry that your products are written with 32-bit Cocoa, you'll be able to switch to 64-bit just fine, you won't have to rewrite everything from scratch." Then what did they do? They dropped 64-bit Cocoa with no warning, even though it was largely finished.
Does Apple care whether they have Adobe's support? Obviously not, and you can't really think they haven't run the numbers to figure out how much that will hurt their bottom line.
perhaps threatening Apple with some-sort of discontinuing of it's products on Macs may knock some sense into Apple
As far as I can tell, Apple lost interest in keeping Adobe's products on OSX a long time ago... about when they suddenly dropped their 64-bit Cocoa plans despite their earlier promise to Adobe that they'd have a migration path which wouldn't require a complete rewrite.
I might be remembering things wrong, but it appears to me Apple doesn't really care if Adobe goes running to Microsoft for comfort.
Sure, if you're developing the exact same software now that you were "a few years ago". If your runtime requirements have not increased. If you don't want to add graphics features to your software which were not available back then. If you don't want to upgrade to a newer, better version of your development environment. (Get the point yet?)
I learned C++ using Visual C++ 6 on an old hand-me-down IBM Thinkpad with 64MB RAM and a 133MHz Pentium running Windows 2000. It worked pretty well at the time. By your logic, it should still work pretty well, a decade later... but any programmer who is satisfied developing on that sort of machine is not a programmer I want to be working with.
I worked for a guy like you once. We were doing data processing work - huge CSV files full of customer data and do processing on them to clean them up - and some programming work to automate said processing. He had us doing that work on ancient Pentium III machines with 128MB RAM that tended to bluescreen with too much hard drive activity. Sure, the machines could "handle" the work we were doing, but when I brought in my own personal laptop - a then-four-year-old Pentium 4m with 512MB RAM - my productivity literally tripled. He eventually banned personal laptops from the office for reasons beyond anyone's comprehension, and didn't seem to care that our productivity suffered.
Oh, but the Pentium III machines "worked", right? *eye roll*
I'm not saying I'd give my kids a brand new $600 computer twice a year. I'm saying I'd give them a $600 computer to start with, and common sense should tell you that this whole topic is only relevant if they actually show interest in things that would require a mid-range computer, like gaming or programming; if all they want is to waste time on Facebook, I'd probably just get them an iPad (or whatever the equivalent is ten years from now, assuming prices on that sort of gadget have gone down by then) and call it good.
Not every kid needs their own computer, but if I'm going to get my kid a computer, then I see no reason to take on the maintenance headaches and risks associated with buying low-end, used computers from eBay (or wherever). I'd rather buy new parts to build a computer that I know I can fix if something goes wrong.
I think your missed the part where my parent post said "via SSH" and I questioned that. But no matter, others have replied with links to ways to shut down Windows machines from remote Linux machines.
Growing up, my computers were always four-year-old hand-me-down laptops that were often damaged (e.g. one had a broken screen, and most had batteries that no longer held a charge). I didn't own a *new* computer until after I was married, and even then I only bought it because it sucks being tethered to the wall in class.
At any rate, I didn't mean kids need high end machines, but buying low-end, cheap, used laptops will not help them any if they want to go into a computer-related field, and it will only make maintenance harder on the parent when the hard drive dies again.
At my previous place of employment I built several $600 desktops that were perfectly capable of handling software development, and that is probably the sort of thing I'd build my kids when they're old enough.
Cool, thanks :)