If the US armed forces are big enough to invade Afghanistan, they're big enough to invade several other countries.
All WIPO countries must pass a DMCA, and the US can place an embargo on non-WIPO countries.
In the US libdvdCSS they might be illegal hacks, in France and New Zealand the CSS itself is illegal, and in the rest of the world they're both quite fine.
In NZ, it's not the CSS but the region coding that constitutes a restraint of trade.
it's adding support for an additional format to existing players... you've already got a DVD player, so what do you have to worry about?
Now watch the DVD-Video standard be end-of-lifed in favor of Wintendo Media, with no more new discs in the format. The studios will like this because MPEG-4 lets them fit twice the video onto each DVD at the same (subjective) quality so that they can advertise more "special features." In addition, the 128-bit elliptic curve crypto used in Wintendo Media is a couple zillion times harder to brute-force than the nominally 40-bit but effectively 28-bit homemade CSS cryptosystem. (It's about 28-bit with a plaintext attack on the known format of an MPEG-2 bitstream.)
So, if you contact Apple, they will say "Don't talk to us, we don't own it, talk to Sorenson."
And if you talk to Sorenson, they will say "We'd LOVE to license it to you, really we would, but we cannot without Apple's approval, go talk to them".
So why not arrange a three-way conference call among the three legal departments? On most telephone exchanges, it's as easy as click, dial, click, discuss terms.
That is, unless Sorenson is right, and (as rumored) Microsoft is StrongARMing Apple with terms such as "if you release QuickTime for Linux, we discontinue Office for Mac."
Yes, and books that aren't written using 10,00-feature word processors aren't worth reading either...
You're correct that a movie script written in Word and a movie script written in Emacs are essentially the same text file. However, without good writing (no matter what text editor used), good acting, and good editing, there's no movie. Even Hollywood seems not to fully understand this.
The computer is designed and marketed for MAKING your own DVD's
Only if you have an expensive video camera.
What you are missing is that Apple has made it so easy to author movies and DVD's that anybody can do it. Even geeks.
And it'll lack big explosions because the effects software still costs upwards of five figures. And it'll most probably be horribly acted, directed, and edited. And it will probably lack plot because most users are not professional screenwriters.
EfDTT, under 1/2 KB, uses only 10% CPU
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New iMac Announced
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I forget how long it takes to decrypt a DVD
EfDTT by Charles Hannum, whose source code fits under half a kilobyte, can descramble CSS data in real-time using only 10% of a G4 Cube's CPU power. Think of what an implementation that uses more tables can do.
Developers *need* to tune the app for 64-bit
on
New iMac Announced
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· Score: 1
any real app can be compiled on 32 or 64 bit machines without changing the code.
True, but today's compilers won't give nearly the same performance as a specially-tuned version, and Adobe is not going to put the PHOTOSHOP® name on a product that performs like a dog.
What you need is apache running gallery. All you do is upload your photos
From film? A good scanner is very expensive, and digital cameras don't convert all the legacy negatives that consumers have shot over the last 30 years, let alone the undeveloped film they continue to shoot, especially from disposable cameras.
Yeah, the GBA with its whopping 256 simultaneous colors on screen is far better than the Saturn and PSX that only supported a piddly 16.8 million.
Wrong. GBA has 32,768 colors (five bits each of red, green, and blue) in bitmap modes, and it can display more than 256 simultaneous colors even in character modes using blending modes. Besides, how many colors do you need in a cel game?
Yes, GBA is very powerful for 2-D graphics. It has 128 simultaneous sprites with 32 rotation/scaling specifications, plus up to four character background layers (less with background rotation/scaling).
While Nintendo currently have the hand-held crown it stopped accepting developers for the GBA a long time ago claiming that 400 was enough. From the handful of decent titles I'd guess it isn't.
Just because you can't sign up for Wario World (Nintendo's official developer support program) doesn't mean you can't develop GBA games and get published with one of the Tier-B publishers. If you want to get into GBA development, get yourself VisualBoyAdvance and GCC targeted for ARM7TDMI and start hacking. Then you can try your games on hardware with an MBV2 cable or Flash Advance Linker from Lik-Sang
Like the GBA it would almost certainly use an ARM chip as that's the only supported processor for Windows 'CE' 2002.
ARM or MIPS or PowerPC or x86 makes little difference compared to the graphics chip. Nintendo's GBA supports up to 128 sprites on top of four layers of scrolling, two layers of scrolling and one layer of rotation, two layers of rotation, or a bitmap. IIRC, Windows CE devices have only a bitmap and no hardware sprites, not even one for a mouse pointer because most of them are pen-based.
Link up Super Circuit brings back the days of the good old Super Mario Kart on SNES.
And some of the bugs in both implementation and specification.
On the Gamecube we have Super Smash Bros. Melee
I agree that SSB2 is the best thing since SSB1 (the Mario Party games suck eggs), but unlocking half the hidden stuff requires unlocking all the hidden characters, and one of the characters requires playing 1,000 Vs. matches at 5 minutes a piece. Is this just a way to get players to buy more controllers when they wear out?
since GBA is just a ARM7 + custom sound off the APB
Wrong. The GBA programming model includes a 16.78 MHz ARM7TDMI, plus custom chips that do DMA (that is, hardware-accelerated memcpy()), legacy tone generation, sound FIFOing, pulse-width modulation, and background and sprite scrolling, scaling, and rotation. (Read More...)
different enough that nitendo cant sue and developers have to recompile but easy enought that you could have a compiler switch do all the work
Sorry, it's not as easy as a recompile of a program that uses the Allegro library. The graphics subsystems may be too different. AFAIK, Windows CE devices use only a dumb frame buffer; GBA has six modes, three character graphics modes (some include affine mapping) with up to 128 sprites on top, and three framebuffer modes with up to 128 sprites on top.
(except the sound and that could be redone easy enough)
Heck, Nintendo even calls the GBA's FIFO-based sound system "Direct Sound," no relation to Microsoft's DirectSound.
And the songwriters' organizations haven't sued you for writing songs that are too similar to the songs they control? Remember, the finite (sub-trillion) number of melodies combined with the birthday paradox makes it extremely likely that one of the songs you wrote is "similar enough" to one of theirs.
The main thrusts of the law are:... Retailers have the right to sell copying equipment
One of the rules of statutory law is that when two laws on the books conflict, courts must follow the more recent law, and in this case, the later law is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed after the Audio Home Recording Act; therefore, wherever the AHRA contradicts the DMCA, the DMCA has the force of most recent law.
"My recording of my brother's wedding is uncopyable, because my MiniDisc decks act as if I and my brother don't own the copyright on it."
You don't. I assume you used at least one piece of proprietary music in the wedding program. I feel justified in making this assumption because most weddings I've attended have used at least one piece of proprietary music.
I didn't think there was a royalty included on normal CD-Rs.
In both the US and Canada, there are patent royalties due to Taiyo Yuden and two other companies for all use of CD-R technology, and in Canada, there are also taxes levied on both types of drive and blank media, but Canada provides some defences to copyright infringement for non-commercial home copying of sound recordings and underlying musical works (of which there are only a limited number).
How? The Western tuning systems can create only a limited number of possible melodies, and the big publishers already own hundreds of thousands of them. Even if they don't own the particular melodies that make up the song you just wrote, they're skilled at convincing a court that your song is similar enough to something in their back catalog.
They could theoretically fork off a copy of linux, but there's still the GPL to contend with, which causes major problems with the integration of patented or licensed technologies.
Not necessarily. Applications that run on the Linux kernel need not be under the GPL, as the kernel headers carry an exception similar to that of the Guile license. Linus has also allowed companies to produce proprietary kernel modules <cough>NVIDIA</cough> under conditions.
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The US is not the world.
In the US libdvdCSS they might be illegal hacks, in France and New Zealand the CSS itself is illegal, and in the rest of the world they're both quite fine.
In NZ, it's not the CSS but the region coding that constitutes a restraint of trade.
It's not replacing DVD-quality video
That's what they want you to think.
it's adding support for an additional format to existing players ... you've already got a DVD player, so what do you have to worry about?
Now watch the DVD-Video standard be end-of-lifed in favor of Wintendo Media, with no more new discs in the format. The studios will like this because MPEG-4 lets them fit twice the video onto each DVD at the same (subjective) quality so that they can advertise more "special features." In addition, the 128-bit elliptic curve crypto used in Wintendo Media is a couple zillion times harder to brute-force than the nominally 40-bit but effectively 28-bit homemade CSS cryptosystem. (It's about 28-bit with a plaintext attack on the known format of an MPEG-2 bitstream.)
So, if you contact Apple, they will say "Don't talk to us, we don't own it, talk to Sorenson."
And if you talk to Sorenson, they will say "We'd LOVE to license it to you, really we would, but we cannot without Apple's approval, go talk to them".
So why not arrange a three-way conference call among the three legal departments? On most telephone exchanges, it's as easy as click, dial, click, discuss terms.
That is, unless Sorenson is right, and (as rumored) Microsoft is StrongARMing Apple with terms such as "if you release QuickTime for Linux, we discontinue Office for Mac."
Yes, and books that aren't written using 10,00-feature word processors aren't worth reading either...
You're correct that a movie script written in Word and a movie script written in Emacs are essentially the same text file. However, without good writing (no matter what text editor used), good acting, and good editing, there's no movie. Even Hollywood seems not to fully understand this.
The computer is designed and marketed for MAKING your own DVD's
Only if you have an expensive video camera.
What you are missing is that Apple has made it so easy to author movies and DVD's that anybody can do it. Even geeks.
And it'll lack big explosions because the effects software still costs upwards of five figures. And it'll most probably be horribly acted, directed, and edited. And it will probably lack plot because most users are not professional screenwriters.
I forget how long it takes to decrypt a DVD
EfDTT by Charles Hannum, whose source code fits under half a kilobyte, can descramble CSS data in real-time using only 10% of a G4 Cube's CPU power. Think of what an implementation that uses more tables can do.
any real app can be compiled on 32 or 64 bit machines without changing the code.
True, but today's compilers won't give nearly the same performance as a specially-tuned version, and Adobe is not going to put the PHOTOSHOP® name on a product that performs like a dog.
What you need is apache running gallery. All you do is upload your photos
From film? A good scanner is very expensive, and digital cameras don't convert all the legacy negatives that consumers have shot over the last 30 years, let alone the undeveloped film they continue to shoot, especially from disposable cameras.
Yeah, the GBA with its whopping 256 simultaneous colors on screen is far better than the Saturn and PSX that only supported a piddly 16.8 million.
Wrong. GBA has 32,768 colors (five bits each of red, green, and blue) in bitmap modes, and it can display more than 256 simultaneous colors even in character modes using blending modes. Besides, how many colors do you need in a cel game?
Yes, GBA is very powerful for 2-D graphics. It has 128 simultaneous sprites with 32 rotation/scaling specifications, plus up to four character background layers (less with background rotation/scaling).
3-D isn't everything.
Yeah, sure GBA is great, when you can actually see whats on the screen.
That's because early games' palettes didn't correct for the GBA display's gamma of 4. Newer games compensate for this with a lookup table.
I want a fuckin' backlight.
"Fuckin" and "back" I can't help you with, but "light" is coming very soon. Watch this site for updates.
While Nintendo currently have the hand-held crown it stopped accepting developers for the GBA a long time ago claiming that 400 was enough. From the handful of decent titles I'd guess it isn't.
Just because you can't sign up for Wario World (Nintendo's official developer support program) doesn't mean you can't develop GBA games and get published with one of the Tier-B publishers. If you want to get into GBA development, get yourself VisualBoyAdvance and GCC targeted for ARM7TDMI and start hacking. Then you can try your games on hardware with an MBV2 cable or Flash Advance Linker from Lik-Sang
Like the GBA it would almost certainly use an ARM chip as that's the only supported processor for Windows 'CE' 2002.
ARM or MIPS or PowerPC or x86 makes little difference compared to the graphics chip. Nintendo's GBA supports up to 128 sprites on top of four layers of scrolling, two layers of scrolling and one layer of rotation, two layers of rotation, or a bitmap. IIRC, Windows CE devices have only a bitmap and no hardware sprites, not even one for a mouse pointer because most of them are pen-based.
Link up Super Circuit brings back the days of the good old Super Mario Kart on SNES.
And some of the bugs in both implementation and specification.
On the Gamecube we have Super Smash Bros. Melee
I agree that SSB2 is the best thing since SSB1 (the Mario Party games suck eggs), but unlocking half the hidden stuff requires unlocking all the hidden characters, and one of the characters requires playing 1,000 Vs. matches at 5 minutes a piece. Is this just a way to get players to buy more controllers when they wear out?
Intel got exclusive rights to StrongARM
Nintendo got exclusive rights to Atlantis
since GBA is just a ARM7 + custom sound off the APB
Wrong. The GBA programming model includes a 16.78 MHz ARM7TDMI, plus custom chips that do DMA (that is, hardware-accelerated memcpy()), legacy tone generation, sound FIFOing, pulse-width modulation, and background and sprite scrolling, scaling, and rotation. (Read More...)
different enough that nitendo cant sue and developers have to recompile but easy enought that you could have a compiler switch do all the work
Sorry, it's not as easy as a recompile of a program that uses the Allegro library. The graphics subsystems may be too different. AFAIK, Windows CE devices use only a dumb frame buffer; GBA has six modes, three character graphics modes (some include affine mapping) with up to 128 sprites on top, and three framebuffer modes with up to 128 sprites on top.
(except the sound and that could be redone easy enough)
Heck, Nintendo even calls the GBA's FIFO-based sound system "Direct Sound," no relation to Microsoft's DirectSound.
I'm well aware that copyrights last longer than life
I was agreeing with what you said and providing more info and a call to action.
in Virginia, you have the option of paying a $400 uninsured motorist fee and not getting any insurance on your car
Indiana also has an "uninsured motorist" program, but it costs $40,000.
10 Audio cd's of music that I made.
And the songwriters' organizations haven't sued you for writing songs that are too similar to the songs they control? Remember, the finite (sub-trillion) number of melodies combined with the birthday paradox makes it extremely likely that one of the songs you wrote is "similar enough" to one of theirs.
I seem to recall that software buyers have a right to make personal backup copies of install media just as media buyers do.
There is 17 USC 117, but where two laws on the books conflict, the courts will follow the more recent law.
The main thrusts of the law are: ... Retailers have the right to sell copying equipment
One of the rules of statutory law is that when two laws on the books conflict, courts must follow the more recent law, and in this case, the later law is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed after the Audio Home Recording Act; therefore, wherever the AHRA contradicts the DMCA, the DMCA has the force of most recent law.
"My recording of my brother's wedding is uncopyable, because my MiniDisc decks act as if I and my brother don't own the copyright on it."
You don't. I assume you used at least one piece of proprietary music in the wedding program. I feel justified in making this assumption because most weddings I've attended have used at least one piece of proprietary music.
Insurance is voluntary
Not in Indiana. If an officer stops your vehicle, and you can't produce proof of automotive liability insurance, you can go to jail.
I didn't think there was a royalty included on normal CD-Rs.
In both the US and Canada, there are patent royalties due to Taiyo Yuden and two other companies for all use of CD-R technology, and in Canada, there are also taxes levied on both types of drive and blank media, but Canada provides some defences to copyright infringement for non-commercial home copying of sound recordings and underlying musical works (of which there are only a limited number).
Write songs for the fun of it
How? The Western tuning systems can create only a limited number of possible melodies, and the big publishers already own hundreds of thousands of them. Even if they don't own the particular melodies that make up the song you just wrote, they're skilled at convincing a court that your song is similar enough to something in their back catalog.
Well, if you chose to live in the boondocks
Not everybody chooses where to live. Some people don't have upwards $200,000 to move house.
They could theoretically fork off a copy of linux, but there's still the GPL to contend with, which causes major problems with the integration of patented or licensed technologies.
Not necessarily. Applications that run on the Linux kernel need not be under the GPL, as the kernel headers carry an exception similar to that of the Guile license. Linus has also allowed companies to produce proprietary kernel modules <cough>NVIDIA</cough> under conditions.