I strongly doubt that the patents contain anything of worth(essentially all internet-connected DRM systems already include platform authorization, platform de-authorization, and a payment system, which is all you need to support selling, 'gifting', returns, and resale, so I'd be hard pressed to see anything worth mentioning on top of what already exists); but (given that the only reason that 'digital resale' is a novelty is because of DRM systems), I suspect they contain plenty of flowcharts and arrows, and outline a system that is given legal force by the good old DMCA...
Unless you get caught by the Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc. 'licensed not sold' problem, you can 'sell' kindle books and idevice apps and such. You just don't have any way, without violating the DMCA, of actually making them work.
It's almost true for books. In 99% of the time, a book from a used book store or library functions identically to a brand new book. Maybe the spine has a crease, but that doesn't really affect your use of the book.
Authors have survived for centuries with people redistributing used books. They will survive for centuries more with people redistributing used ebooks.
I suspect that, for books, what really scares them(at least the ones that are actually thinking, and not just bitching about anything that stands between them and their dream of getting paid per-eyeball-per-second for everything the've ever touched) would be an efficient secondary market.
Used books, barring serious abuse, retain condition well; but the market for them is physically segregated: New and used books are often sold through different channels(except textbooks, which usually hover right over their target population), in different stores, etc.
So long as that is the case, the impact is blunted. If, say, Amazon were able to add a checkbox to the Kindle that allowed a user to 'sell' a book for half what they bought it for(probably in Amazon credit rather than cash) and then Amazon seamlessly and immediately offered that 'copy' for sale to the very next person who went to buy a copy(and, since they wouldn't have to pay the publisher anything, they could presumably offer a modest discount off 'new' and still make a much greater margin), then the publisher could be up shit creek.
Remember the tragic story of how centuries of people being able to freely sell/lend/whatever the fuck they want printed books exterminated all authors and creativity, leaving only a scarred wasteland, bereft of culture and picked clean by locusts?
Oh, wait, neither do I. Because. It. Didn't. Fucking. Happen.
I hope the old characters are integral to the plot and don't just appear in a token torch-passing at the start. I'm hoping more like Obi-Wan in the original movie.
With a little trick photography to deal with the height problem, all three of them will get to take turns playing Yoda.
Obviously, it isn't exactly news that a number of copyright holders have...expansively optimistic... interpretations of what rights exactly they hold. Some of this seems to be pure self-righteous delusion. Some of it seems to be deliberate spin aimed at shoving the discourse(and state of law) in their preferred direction.
In the specific case of talking about 'fair use', while trying to sell licenses, though, I have to wonder if they are incurring any responsibility... If a mechanic or a plumber gave you false advice as to the nature of the repairs you needed, in order to sell them to you, they'd be well into 'sleazy at best, open to legal action for fraud at worst' territory. Is it OK if you are pseudo-providing legal advice? (They would obviously deny being in the position of providing you with legal advice; but a 'here is when you need a license or you just might be unprotected when we sue you' statement sure sounds like legal advice to me...)
I don't know exactly who was responsible, or how it happened; but they managed to go from 'concept so sweeping it makes Civilization look myopic' to '5 mini-games, all shitty, plus a low rent 3d modelling application that lets you share penises with eyeballs online'
1. 'Cell Stage': Ooh, a more or less direct unimprovement of Flow a flash game from 2006!
2. 'Creature Stage': Hasn't everyone always wanted to see Simlife rebooted as a terrible over-the-shoulder 3rd person action title?
3.'Tribal Stage': Because the world needs more really terrible RTSes.
4.'Civilization Stage': See #3. So terrible that even the game's developers had mercy and added a 'superweapon' that would automatically cause you to win the stage and end the pain.
5.'Space Stage':Is it possible to clone Escape Velocity and simultaneously add lots of fiddly complexity and suck out any reason to play? Lets find out!
Given what peanuts it costs to rent some EC2 instances or something, I do expect anybody who wants to require a bunch of fancy server hooks to get it right. If they can't do that, perhaps they should back off and take on a challenge more in line with their abilities.
The wonderful thing is that the DLC will be crazy overpriced(and support for the mod scene won't exactly be up to Bethesda standards...); but if it doesn't sell they'll just kill off the game entirely...
Heavy server dependence, plus one-time-purchase-of-boxed-game = the game is on deathwatch from day 1.
If they don't move enough DLC/microtransactions/assorted other 'freemium' bullshit to make running the servers viable, out go the lights. If they do, welcome to SimCityVille...
Technically, the 'social' bullshit couldn't work offline, since it depends on interactions with other players; but it wouldn't exactly have been rocket surgery to bang together some modestly plausible "region" parameters to get single player working just fine.
So, yes there are things that could not have been done locally; but the enforced centrality of those things to the game is largely artificial, and (had they wanted to) most of them could have simply been made optional, or replaced by a few pseudo-randomized demand curves(ie. for trade of goods and services between cities and such).
To be fair, they implement DRM because the content rights holders want them to. Apple fought to be able to remove DRM from the songs they sell, and they convinced the industry to let them remove it some time ago, which is great and hopefully can expand to the other digital content soon.
Yes and no. Specifically, music yes, video generally not(but at least 3rd-party unencrypted video in the correct format will work), ebooks(see video). 'Apps', 100% Apple's show, and locked down harder than anything. At least ipods always played music from 3rd-party sources...
This approach MAKES A LOT OF SENSE! You have to admit, regardless of your feelings towards apple, this is a step in the direction of breaking down artificial barriers.
Given that it apparently has enough detail for a patent application, I'm going with 'step in the direction of adding complexity to artificial barriers'. Back in the old days, we had this 'first sale' stuff, by which people who bought things could just resell them if they felt like it! Totally crazy stuff. You just went out and did it. No patent-pending techniques required.
Good money says that any system worth patenting will be a crippled, DRM-laden, 'content-provider' approved, closed store where Apple will suffer you to do a limited subset of what we used to think of as "What we have a right to do with what we buy" in exchange for their cut.
Local attackers might be fundamentally unsolvable, I'll leave that one to the physicists; but attackers who don't get to modify the hardware face the limits of the fact that software is ultimately math, and math about which certain things can be proven.
It is true that it is arduous and/or impossible to prove many of the properties we are interested in in software complex enough to actually have any customers; but it isn't impossible in the general sense.
I wonder if they realize all we need to do is attack from the undefended parts of NK (i.e. not on the border with SK) and take out their dismal food supply.
GG
You more or less have your pick of scenarios where the North Korea loses(albeit most of them come with a side of a few million civilian casualties, which is considered rather tasteless). The trouble is that you have a much slimmer set of options if you want the North to not manage to zerg-rush and/or go artillery-happy against a nontrivial slice of South Korea first...
Against inferior opponents, winning isn't the problem, it's the business of 'not losing' during the winning process that can really get unpleasant.
I'm pretty sure that the last time Korea's togetherness issues really came to the surface, the shooting between US and Chinese troops was hardly accidental...
You can just download Python and learn to program just fine with that. I don't need a piece of hardware for that.
It is actually a bit curious how dubiously suited the rPi is to its theoretical objective(compared to the obvious strategy of just running freely available software on the ridiculously powerful beige wintels that clutter the world); but how much of a giant kick in the ass it gave the 'dev boards that aren't either weedy microcontrollers or $1500, just call our sales team' market.
The people who make 'ARM-based server motherboards' generally bundle them with cases and sell them as network attached storage devices. (Anything mentioned on the Debian on Orion or Debian on Kirkwood pages will be discussing ARM 'servers' based on those Marvel SoCs, some of which have a reasonable number of drive bays).
Some ARM dev boards will also break out an SATA port; but generally only one, (something like Freescale's i.MX53 dev board) as they usually focus on being dev boards, with the SATA port just there because dev boards usually populate all the pins the device can handle, not because you are supposed to use them for server work.
In the cheap seats, a small minority of the hackable tablet/set-top-box focused devices have SATA support. The Allwinner A10, which is cheap as dirt and all over the place, provides it; but substantially fewer devices break it out. The mele A1000 and A2000 are some of the few.
In practice, what you really are asking for doesn't exist(to my knowledge). Your best bet, today, is probably to find a NAS that suits you and has decent 3rd-party firmware support, and call it a day. Virtually nothing else has multiple drive support, and(while NAS devices can have a bit of sticker shock, dev boards aren't known for mass-market pricing, or for niceties like 'microATX form factor', so you'd end up having to hack on the case anyway).
There just isn't an ARM equivalent to, say, any of the cheap microATX Intel Atom or AMD APU based boards($60-$100 once you add some RAM) which draw a bit more power; but are almost insultingly capable in terms of peripherals and raw punch by comparison.
Liquid oxygen and kerosene is a reasonably common propellant, I wonder if anybody has worked out the piping challenges of getting your(totally steampunk) liquid oxygen and whale oil rocket off the ground?
It's things like Europa and robots on Mars that make me want to punch the 'Cry, cry, we need to put a man back on the moon, because something!' crowd.
Was the Apollo program a heroic piece of engineering? No question. But does the moon have any major virtues aside from being close enough to man-in-a-can with relatively primitive life support gear? It's a hostile, sterile rock with not a whisper of atmosphere(and conveniently close and well-lit for the telescope crew). We have basically no reason to suspect that it has, or ever had, anything approaching life. Mars is a practically shirtsleeves environment by comparison, and Europa is under serious suspicion of having some serious organic chemistry going down under the ice. What sort of grainy, sepia-toned nostalgia wankfest would have us putzing around the moon, again, when there is other cool stuff to poke at?
This is a terrible move by a dying entity that is showing its irrelevance by going back further into the dark ages.
Worse than that... Shopping at Best Buy would be a lot more pleasant if they allowed more of their employees to work somewhere other than on site. No, I don't want the extended protection plan.
They are essentially pimps with respect to privacy: It's not that they have your good at heart; but they have a very strong interest in making sure that only paying customers get access.
Slashdot Mirror
I strongly doubt that the patents contain anything of worth(essentially all internet-connected DRM systems already include platform authorization, platform de-authorization, and a payment system, which is all you need to support selling, 'gifting', returns, and resale, so I'd be hard pressed to see anything worth mentioning on top of what already exists); but (given that the only reason that 'digital resale' is a novelty is because of DRM systems), I suspect they contain plenty of flowcharts and arrows, and outline a system that is given legal force by the good old DMCA...
Unless you get caught by the Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc. 'licensed not sold' problem, you can 'sell' kindle books and idevice apps and such. You just don't have any way, without violating the DMCA, of actually making them work.
It's almost true for books. In 99% of the time, a book from a used book store or library functions identically to a brand new book. Maybe the spine has a crease, but that doesn't really affect your use of the book.
Authors have survived for centuries with people redistributing used books. They will survive for centuries more with people redistributing used ebooks.
I suspect that, for books, what really scares them(at least the ones that are actually thinking, and not just bitching about anything that stands between them and their dream of getting paid per-eyeball-per-second for everything the've ever touched) would be an efficient secondary market.
Used books, barring serious abuse, retain condition well; but the market for them is physically segregated: New and used books are often sold through different channels(except textbooks, which usually hover right over their target population), in different stores, etc.
So long as that is the case, the impact is blunted. If, say, Amazon were able to add a checkbox to the Kindle that allowed a user to 'sell' a book for half what they bought it for(probably in Amazon credit rather than cash) and then Amazon seamlessly and immediately offered that 'copy' for sale to the very next person who went to buy a copy(and, since they wouldn't have to pay the publisher anything, they could presumably offer a modest discount off 'new' and still make a much greater margin), then the publisher could be up shit creek.
Remember the tragic story of how centuries of people being able to freely sell/lend/whatever the fuck they want printed books exterminated all authors and creativity, leaving only a scarred wasteland, bereft of culture and picked clean by locusts?
Oh, wait, neither do I. Because. It. Didn't. Fucking. Happen.
I hope the old characters are integral to the plot and don't just appear in a token torch-passing at the start. I'm hoping more like Obi-Wan in the original movie.
With a little trick photography to deal with the height problem, all three of them will get to take turns playing Yoda.
Obviously, it isn't exactly news that a number of copyright holders have...expansively optimistic... interpretations of what rights exactly they hold. Some of this seems to be pure self-righteous delusion. Some of it seems to be deliberate spin aimed at shoving the discourse(and state of law) in their preferred direction.
In the specific case of talking about 'fair use', while trying to sell licenses, though, I have to wonder if they are incurring any responsibility... If a mechanic or a plumber gave you false advice as to the nature of the repairs you needed, in order to sell them to you, they'd be well into 'sleazy at best, open to legal action for fraud at worst' territory. Is it OK if you are pseudo-providing legal advice? (They would obviously deny being in the position of providing you with legal advice; but a 'here is when you need a license or you just might be unprotected when we sue you' statement sure sounds like legal advice to me...)
I don't know exactly who was responsible, or how it happened; but they managed to go from 'concept so sweeping it makes Civilization look myopic' to '5 mini-games, all shitty, plus a low rent 3d modelling application that lets you share penises with eyeballs online'
1. 'Cell Stage': Ooh, a more or less direct unimprovement of Flow a flash game from 2006!
2. 'Creature Stage': Hasn't everyone always wanted to see Simlife rebooted as a terrible over-the-shoulder 3rd person action title?
3.'Tribal Stage': Because the world needs more really terrible RTSes.
4.'Civilization Stage': See #3. So terrible that even the game's developers had mercy and added a 'superweapon' that would automatically cause you to win the stage and end the pain.
5.'Space Stage':Is it possible to clone Escape Velocity and simultaneously add lots of fiddly complexity and suck out any reason to play? Lets find out!
Given what peanuts it costs to rent some EC2 instances or something, I do expect anybody who wants to require a bunch of fancy server hooks to get it right. If they can't do that, perhaps they should back off and take on a challenge more in line with their abilities.
Do you think that EA employees would rate their games that high? They've seen what goes in to the sausage...
The wonderful thing is that the DLC will be crazy overpriced(and support for the mod scene won't exactly be up to Bethesda standards...); but if it doesn't sell they'll just kill off the game entirely...
Heavy server dependence, plus one-time-purchase-of-boxed-game = the game is on deathwatch from day 1.
If they don't move enough DLC/microtransactions/assorted other 'freemium' bullshit to make running the servers viable, out go the lights. If they do, welcome to SimCityVille...
Technically, the 'social' bullshit couldn't work offline, since it depends on interactions with other players; but it wouldn't exactly have been rocket surgery to bang together some modestly plausible "region" parameters to get single player working just fine.
So, yes there are things that could not have been done locally; but the enforced centrality of those things to the game is largely artificial, and (had they wanted to) most of them could have simply been made optional, or replaced by a few pseudo-randomized demand curves(ie. for trade of goods and services between cities and such).
To be fair, they implement DRM because the content rights holders want them to. Apple fought to be able to remove DRM from the songs they sell, and they convinced the industry to let them remove it some time ago, which is great and hopefully can expand to the other digital content soon.
Yes and no. Specifically, music yes, video generally not(but at least 3rd-party unencrypted video in the correct format will work), ebooks(see video). 'Apps', 100% Apple's show, and locked down harder than anything. At least ipods always played music from 3rd-party sources...
This approach MAKES A LOT OF SENSE! You have to admit, regardless of your feelings towards apple, this is a step in the direction of breaking down artificial barriers.
Given that it apparently has enough detail for a patent application, I'm going with 'step in the direction of adding complexity to artificial barriers'. Back in the old days, we had this 'first sale' stuff, by which people who bought things could just resell them if they felt like it! Totally crazy stuff. You just went out and did it. No patent-pending techniques required.
Good money says that any system worth patenting will be a crippled, DRM-laden, 'content-provider' approved, closed store where Apple will suffer you to do a limited subset of what we used to think of as "What we have a right to do with what we buy" in exchange for their cut.
Local attackers might be fundamentally unsolvable, I'll leave that one to the physicists; but attackers who don't get to modify the hardware face the limits of the fact that software is ultimately math, and math about which certain things can be proven.
It is true that it is arduous and/or impossible to prove many of the properties we are interested in in software complex enough to actually have any customers; but it isn't impossible in the general sense.
I wonder if they realize all we need to do is attack from the undefended parts of NK (i.e. not on the border with SK) and take out their dismal food supply.
GG
You more or less have your pick of scenarios where the North Korea loses(albeit most of them come with a side of a few million civilian casualties, which is considered rather tasteless). The trouble is that you have a much slimmer set of options if you want the North to not manage to zerg-rush and/or go artillery-happy against a nontrivial slice of South Korea first...
Against inferior opponents, winning isn't the problem, it's the business of 'not losing' during the winning process that can really get unpleasant.
I'm pretty sure that the last time Korea's togetherness issues really came to the surface, the shooting between US and Chinese troops was hardly accidental...
Solving problems (programming) can help improve problem solving skills.
Plus, would you trust a transplant surgeon who doesn't understand modularity, re-use, and object-oriented design?
You can just download Python and learn to program just fine with that. I don't need a piece of hardware for that.
It is actually a bit curious how dubiously suited the rPi is to its theoretical objective(compared to the obvious strategy of just running freely available software on the ridiculously powerful beige wintels that clutter the world); but how much of a giant kick in the ass it gave the 'dev boards that aren't either weedy microcontrollers or $1500, just call our sales team' market.
-Doctor, my kid is sick!
-Have you tried turning him off and on again?
That's not a programmer, that's an MDSE-certified health professional...
Your options are... limited.
The people who make 'ARM-based server motherboards' generally bundle them with cases and sell them as network attached storage devices. (Anything mentioned on the Debian on Orion or Debian on Kirkwood pages will be discussing ARM 'servers' based on those Marvel SoCs, some of which have a reasonable number of drive bays).
Some ARM dev boards will also break out an SATA port; but generally only one, (something like Freescale's i.MX53 dev board) as they usually focus on being dev boards, with the SATA port just there because dev boards usually populate all the pins the device can handle, not because you are supposed to use them for server work.
In the cheap seats, a small minority of the hackable tablet/set-top-box focused devices have SATA support. The Allwinner A10, which is cheap as dirt and all over the place, provides it; but substantially fewer devices break it out. The mele A1000 and A2000 are some of the few.
In practice, what you really are asking for doesn't exist(to my knowledge). Your best bet, today, is probably to find a NAS that suits you and has decent 3rd-party firmware support, and call it a day. Virtually nothing else has multiple drive support, and(while NAS devices can have a bit of sticker shock, dev boards aren't known for mass-market pricing, or for niceties like 'microATX form factor', so you'd end up having to hack on the case anyway).
There just isn't an ARM equivalent to, say, any of the cheap microATX Intel Atom or AMD APU based boards($60-$100 once you add some RAM) which draw a bit more power; but are almost insultingly capable in terms of peripherals and raw punch by comparison.
Words can't express the chilling nausea brought on by learning that my post above is no longer outrageous enough to be obvious sarcasm...
Liquid oxygen and kerosene is a reasonably common propellant, I wonder if anybody has worked out the piping challenges of getting your(totally steampunk) liquid oxygen and whale oil rocket off the ground?
It's things like Europa and robots on Mars that make me want to punch the 'Cry, cry, we need to put a man back on the moon, because something!' crowd.
Was the Apollo program a heroic piece of engineering? No question. But does the moon have any major virtues aside from being close enough to man-in-a-can with relatively primitive life support gear? It's a hostile, sterile rock with not a whisper of atmosphere(and conveniently close and well-lit for the telescope crew). We have basically no reason to suspect that it has, or ever had, anything approaching life. Mars is a practically shirtsleeves environment by comparison, and Europa is under serious suspicion of having some serious organic chemistry going down under the ice. What sort of grainy, sepia-toned nostalgia wankfest would have us putzing around the moon, again, when there is other cool stuff to poke at?
If the peons are so smart, why didn't they have their parents pay them through business school, like I did?
It's laziness like that that keeps them from making something of themselves; but at least it justifies how much more money I make...
This is a terrible move by a dying entity that is showing its irrelevance by going back further into the dark ages.
Worse than that... Shopping at Best Buy would be a lot more pleasant if they allowed more of their employees to work somewhere other than on site. No, I don't want the extended protection plan.
They are essentially pimps with respect to privacy: It's not that they have your good at heart; but they have a very strong interest in making sure that only paying customers get access.