The Xbox-Linux download page has a "Cromwell BIOS" containing no proprietary code. Mod your Xbox console with Cromwell BIOS and boot Ed's Debian GNU/Linux port, and your Xbox is no longer running code copyrighted by Microsoft.
Unfortunately, all that you can find on the Game Cube are mario and zelda.
No. Titles in the Mario and Zelda series are not the only Nintendo-exclusive titles that run on GCN. Look at Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 2 and 3, Star Fox Adventures, Animal Crossing, Metroid Prime (and II and Fusion for Game Boy Player), Pikmin 1 and 2 and Resident Evil 0 and 4. But even if you're tired of the Zelda series, what again makes you think Link's fighting games (Super Smash Bros. Melee and Link vs. Soul Calibur 2) are any worse than the fighting games on Xbox?
Characters that have been around since the NES.
There are Disney-licensed games for the Xbox starring characters that have been around since before the electronic computer was invented. In fact, those characters have been around since the dawn of the perpetual copyright era.
care to let me know how a big, blue box that can't play DVD's
The Xbox comes in blue? I thought the Xbox couldn't play DVD Video titles without the DVD Video decoder software cartridge that plugs into the controller port.
represents "sentiments of small size?"
A GameCube with included Game Boy Player, which can play a few hundred GameCube games and thousands of Game Boy games (judging from goodgbx and goodgba database sizes), costs $150. An Apex DVD player costs $60. Total: $210. An Xbox console, which can play only a few hundred Xbox games, costs $180. The DVD decoder costs $30. Total: $210. Neither is more expensive, but the Xbox is likely to be heavier than the GCN and Apex put together, and you can't play games on a separate TV when a family member is playing Meg Ryan movies on the Xbox for 12 hours straight. You don't even need a questionably legal and hard-to-install modchip to run your own code on a GCN with Game Boy Player; all you need is the MBV2 cable.
"Note And changes or modifications made on the system not expressly approved by the manufacturer could (emphasis mine) void the user's authority to operate the equipment."
Such language is commonplace in documentation for electronic devices because they have to meet government radio frequency emissions standards. In practice, the FCC or CRTC will care only if some device causes an actual interference problem.
"The software included in the Xbox Product is licensed to you, not sold."
Was this Xbox BIOS EULA presented to me before the sale of the Xbox hardware? If not, then it may not be enforceable under contract law in most U.S. states, and it is a sale of a copy under 17 USC 117 and foreign counterparts.
Granted: As long as you don't try to connect a modded Xbox console to Xbox Live service, you'll be OK.
Often, the publisher of a game does not own the copyright in all the works from which the game is derived. Examples include any movie franchise game, any music game, etc. The licensor for those may be different in different territories. Region coding lets Konami release Dance Dance Revolution in Japan while it wrangles with firms that control the U.S. monopolies on the included songs. In fact, some copyright owners refuse to license their recordings for the USA version, which is why the USA version of DDR lacks the song selection of the Japanese version.
Have you ever walked into a store that sells musical instruments? Most such stores stock sheet music, which can be considered a form of musical source code.
Have you ever looked at a MIDI file? MIDI files are tokenized representations of musical source code.
But I don't see any reason to justify my claims either.
All PSPACE-complete problems are decidable by a machine running algorithm that uses P space. This PDF states that the acceptance problem (equivalent to the halting problem) for linear bounded automata (which it calles "linear bounded deterministic Turing machines") is PSPACE-complete. Here's an algorithm that decides it.
OK, my statement may have been a bit misleading. By definition of an LBA (linear bounded automaton), the input for an LBA is the contents of its memory when it is powered on; an LBA has no "input registers", that is, addresses whose contents will change other than by a write to memory by the CPU. Because every LBA has an equivalent (but humongous) finite state machine, it is possible to determine whether any LBA will halt or loop by running it for n cycles where n is the number of states of the machine's memory (n = 2^m where m is the number of bits in the machine's memory). In practice, two identical machines are run in a tortoise-hare configuration (one cycle of the tortoise to two cycles of the hare), and the machine has halted or looped when both machines are in the same state.
Take interactivity into account, and programs that run on real computers will always eventually halt because if nothing else, the power will die, or the CPU will melt, or something.
Write a program which will loop until any key is pressed. When will it halt?
Interactive input is outside the parameters of a Turing machine and thus not related to the halting problem. Besides, in modern operating systems, input is an API call, and API calls are ridiculously easy to handle correctly in a disassembler.
And it's perfectly fine for decompilation to be lossy. The point of decompilation is not to recover the original source code byte-for-byte but to recover something from which a programmer of ordinary skill can recover the gist of the algorithm.
Now, the catch is that during compilation, data and code are mixed in the resulting binary.
Not last time I checked. My compiler emits at least four segments in a compiled program:.text (program code),.rodata (initialized data marked as 'const'),.data (initialized data), and.bss (zero-filled data, which is run-length encoded). Segments.text and.rodata are also write-protected.
Yes, there is a halting problem, but this isn't it. Segments make distinguishing code from data straightforward. I understand that a few programs make platform-specific API calls that write-enable.text would be harder to disassemble (and subsequently decompile), but do most user programs make such calls?
Besides, even if the halting problem were relevant, the halting problem can be solved in a real computer, which has limited memory and is thus a linear bounded automaton rather than a Turing machine.
I understand that many printers, especially at the high end, have hard drives to store fonts. But do their operating systems allow for using the HD as swap space? If not, then optimizing documents to fit in RAM is still valid.
Well, if you're really wealthy, you might try cryogenic freezing.
<sarcasm style="voice-family: Daffy Duck">Ha-ha, very funny. Ha-ha, it is to laugh.</sarcasm>
I did not link to an article about the death of George Harrison. Instead, I linked to an article describing a successful lawsuit against Harrisongs Music on grounds that George Harrison unconsciously copied a copyrighted musical work when writing "My Sweet Lord". How can songwriters learn from this mistake, and what steps can they take to avoid copying other people's songs?
Isn't this the same kind of thinking that brought us the Winmodem and Winprinter?
Winprinters are usually easy to get working on an alternative OS because it's straightforward to get the computer to produce a bitmap that gets sent over the wire, provided that the printer's escape codes to print a bitmap are known. For example, old impact printers were winprinters, and software such as Broderbund's Print Shop let the user copy codes for "set graphics mode at x dpi" and "new line of pixels" out of the printer's manual. The biggest problem with winprinters comes when a manufacturer will not publish the printer's escape codes.
Winmodems, on the other hand, are covered by software patents.
(context: compressing PostScript to fit in a printer's RAM so that it prints faster)
[Optimizing a program to run in a tiny memory space is] less relevant today. People call you a dinosaur and yell insults at you, like "RAM is cheap - just write it quickly so that it runs."
Unless, of course, you're targeting an embedded system such as a handheld game console or PDA, which has no rotating storage. Do PostScript printers have hard drives?
(Context: debating an assertion that Conway's Game of Life has no end condition; therefore, it's not a game. wo1verin3 brings an analogy to Tetris brand games.)
do you know anyone who has "finished" Tetris?
Some falling tetramino games, including Tetris brand games, display fireworks and credits after the player has completed specific objectives. For example, in The New Tetris for N64, it's 500,000 lines summed over all games played.
Copyright ownership guarantees?
on
Open Source Music
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If this is like any other online label, its TOS will require artists to guarantee that any musical works that they wrote and recorded are original. How can an artist guarantee that he did not accidentally copy a popular song? What specific steps can an artist take to avoid George Harrison's fate?
Where is the MPAA or the MPA (international version) mentioned in the BBC article? Or Hollywood for that matter?
How many movies first published by Hollywood studios make it to the UK versus movies first published by British studios? As far as I know, Hollywood is second only to Bollywood (India's movie industry) in movie output.
Of course, since the graphics card is rendering twice or three times as many frames as you're actually seeing, the best way to characterize such a situation would be "vast waste of money."
Either that or "opportunity for a motion blur option in the Control Panel."
nVidia has a nice "All-in-ONE" driver for their cards that quickly and EASILY removes the old and installs the new.
It didn't work on my TNT2 on Windows 2000. The installer for the Detonator driver from about a month ago wanted me to uninstall my existing Detonator driver, reboot, install a new one, and reboot again.
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't we supposed to be boycotting Dr. Seuss Enterprises?
The Xbox-Linux download page has a "Cromwell BIOS" containing no proprietary code. Mod your Xbox console with Cromwell BIOS and boot Ed's Debian GNU/Linux port, and your Xbox is no longer running code copyrighted by Microsoft.
Unfortunately, all that you can find on the Game Cube are mario and zelda.
No. Titles in the Mario and Zelda series are not the only Nintendo-exclusive titles that run on GCN. Look at Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 2 and 3, Star Fox Adventures, Animal Crossing, Metroid Prime (and II and Fusion for Game Boy Player), Pikmin 1 and 2 and Resident Evil 0 and 4. But even if you're tired of the Zelda series, what again makes you think Link's fighting games (Super Smash Bros. Melee and Link vs. Soul Calibur 2) are any worse than the fighting games on Xbox?
Characters that have been around since the NES.
There are Disney-licensed games for the Xbox starring characters that have been around since before the electronic computer was invented. In fact, those characters have been around since the dawn of the perpetual copyright era.
care to let me know how a big, blue box that can't play DVD's
The Xbox comes in blue? I thought the Xbox couldn't play DVD Video titles without the DVD Video decoder software cartridge that plugs into the controller port.
represents "sentiments of small size?"
A GameCube with included Game Boy Player, which can play a few hundred GameCube games and thousands of Game Boy games (judging from goodgbx and goodgba database sizes), costs $150. An Apex DVD player costs $60. Total: $210. An Xbox console, which can play only a few hundred Xbox games, costs $180. The DVD decoder costs $30. Total: $210. Neither is more expensive, but the Xbox is likely to be heavier than the GCN and Apex put together, and you can't play games on a separate TV when a family member is playing Meg Ryan movies on the Xbox for 12 hours straight. You don't even need a questionably legal and hard-to-install modchip to run your own code on a GCN with Game Boy Player; all you need is the MBV2 cable.
"Note And changes or modifications made on the system not expressly approved by the manufacturer could (emphasis mine) void the user's authority to operate the equipment."
Such language is commonplace in documentation for electronic devices because they have to meet government radio frequency emissions standards. In practice, the FCC or CRTC will care only if some device causes an actual interference problem.
"The software included in the Xbox Product is licensed to you, not sold."
Was this Xbox BIOS EULA presented to me before the sale of the Xbox hardware? If not, then it may not be enforceable under contract law in most U.S. states, and it is a sale of a copy under 17 USC 117 and foreign counterparts.
Granted: As long as you don't try to connect a modded Xbox console to Xbox Live service, you'll be OK.
Often, the publisher of a game does not own the copyright in all the works from which the game is derived. Examples include any movie franchise game, any music game, etc. The licensor for those may be different in different territories. Region coding lets Konami release Dance Dance Revolution in Japan while it wrangles with firms that control the U.S. monopolies on the included songs. In fact, some copyright owners refuse to license their recordings for the USA version, which is why the USA version of DDR lacks the song selection of the Japanese version.
I've never seen music source code before
Have you ever walked into a store that sells musical instruments? Most such stores stock sheet music, which can be considered a form of musical source code.
Have you ever looked at a MIDI file? MIDI files are tokenized representations of musical source code.
that is impossible on a real computer.
Which is why I mentioned the tortoise-hare setup, which speeds up the computation for most non-pathological cases.
The infamous "X for dummies" company is going to publish a new book in 2 months: Calculus for dummies.
Sounds like something Cliffs Notes would publish.
But guess what? The company that publishes the For Dummies series bought Cliffs.
But I don't see any reason to justify my claims either.
All PSPACE-complete problems are decidable by a machine running algorithm that uses P space. This PDF states that the acceptance problem (equivalent to the halting problem) for linear bounded automata (which it calles "linear bounded deterministic Turing machines") is PSPACE-complete. Here's an algorithm that decides it.
OK, my statement may have been a bit misleading. By definition of an LBA (linear bounded automaton), the input for an LBA is the contents of its memory when it is powered on; an LBA has no "input registers", that is, addresses whose contents will change other than by a write to memory by the CPU. Because every LBA has an equivalent (but humongous) finite state machine, it is possible to determine whether any LBA will halt or loop by running it for n cycles where n is the number of states of the machine's memory (n = 2^m where m is the number of bits in the machine's memory). In practice, two identical machines are run in a tortoise-hare configuration (one cycle of the tortoise to two cycles of the hare), and the machine has halted or looped when both machines are in the same state.
Take interactivity into account, and programs that run on real computers will always eventually halt because if nothing else, the power will die, or the CPU will melt, or something.
Write a program which will loop until any key is pressed. When will it halt?
Interactive input is outside the parameters of a Turing machine and thus not related to the halting problem. Besides, in modern operating systems, input is an API call, and API calls are ridiculously easy to handle correctly in a disassembler.
And it's perfectly fine for decompilation to be lossy. The point of decompilation is not to recover the original source code byte-for-byte but to recover something from which a programmer of ordinary skill can recover the gist of the algorithm.
Now, the catch is that during compilation, data and code are mixed in the resulting binary.
Not last time I checked. My compiler emits at least four segments in a compiled program: .text (program code), .rodata (initialized data marked as 'const'), .data (initialized data), and .bss (zero-filled data, which is run-length encoded). Segments .text and .rodata are also write-protected.
Yes, there is a halting problem, but this isn't it. Segments make distinguishing code from data straightforward. I understand that a few programs make platform-specific API calls that write-enable .text would be harder to disassemble (and subsequently decompile), but do most user programs make such calls?
Besides, even if the halting problem were relevant, the halting problem can be solved in a real computer, which has limited memory and is thus a linear bounded automaton rather than a Turing machine.
I understand that many printers, especially at the high end, have hard drives to store fonts. But do their operating systems allow for using the HD as swap space? If not, then optimizing documents to fit in RAM is still valid.
Well, if you're really wealthy, you might try cryogenic freezing.
<sarcasm style="voice-family: Daffy Duck">Ha-ha, very funny. Ha-ha, it is to laugh.</sarcasm>
I did not link to an article about the death of George Harrison. Instead, I linked to an article describing a successful lawsuit against Harrisongs Music on grounds that George Harrison unconsciously copied a copyrighted musical work when writing "My Sweet Lord". How can songwriters learn from this mistake, and what steps can they take to avoid copying other people's songs?
Isn't this the same kind of thinking that brought us the Winmodem and Winprinter?
Winprinters are usually easy to get working on an alternative OS because it's straightforward to get the computer to produce a bitmap that gets sent over the wire, provided that the printer's escape codes to print a bitmap are known. For example, old impact printers were winprinters, and software such as Broderbund's Print Shop let the user copy codes for "set graphics mode at x dpi" and "new line of pixels" out of the printer's manual. The biggest problem with winprinters comes when a manufacturer will not publish the printer's escape codes.
Winmodems, on the other hand, are covered by software patents.
(context: compressing PostScript to fit in a printer's RAM so that it prints faster)
[Optimizing a program to run in a tiny memory space is] less relevant today. People call you a dinosaur and yell insults at you, like "RAM is cheap - just write it quickly so that it runs."
Unless, of course, you're targeting an embedded system such as a handheld game console or PDA, which has no rotating storage. Do PostScript printers have hard drives?
(Context: debating an assertion that Conway's Game of Life has no end condition; therefore, it's not a game. wo1verin3 brings an analogy to Tetris brand games.)
do you know anyone who has "finished" Tetris?
Some falling tetramino games, including Tetris brand games, display fireworks and credits after the player has completed specific objectives. For example, in The New Tetris for N64, it's 500,000 lines summed over all games played.
If this is like any other online label, its TOS will require artists to guarantee that any musical works that they wrote and recorded are original. How can an artist guarantee that he did not accidentally copy a popular song? What specific steps can an artist take to avoid George Harrison's fate?
Where is the MPAA or the MPA (international version) mentioned in the BBC article? Or Hollywood for that matter?
How many movies first published by Hollywood studios make it to the UK versus movies first published by British studios? As far as I know, Hollywood is second only to Bollywood (India's movie industry) in movie output.
A perfect dyson sphere would be invisible to the rest of the universe-except for it's massive gravity well, that is.
So it'd look to outsiders like a MACHO, a dead star, perhaps? Would this explain some of the "dark matter" holding galaxies together?
Of course, since the graphics card is rendering twice or three times as many frames as you're actually seeing, the best way to characterize such a situation would be "vast waste of money."
Either that or "opportunity for a motion blur option in the Control Panel."
nVidia has a nice "All-in-ONE" driver for their cards that quickly and EASILY removes the old and installs the new.
It didn't work on my TNT2 on Windows 2000. The installer for the Detonator driver from about a month ago wanted me to uninstall my existing Detonator driver, reboot, install a new one, and reboot again.