I can even register a trademark that someone else has registered.
It is called a TRADEmark because it relates to a trade. If I start a company that makes soft red hats, I can call it "RedHat Soft Wear" and trademark that - precisely because it is a separate trade, and therefore unrelated. I can trademark macdonalds if I set up a deep sea mining company called "macdonalds deep sea mining corporation" - precisely because it is a separate trade. I can set up a journalism and parody site with "Microsoft" in it's name - precisely because it's a different trade.
There's one around somewhere, but I wouldn't advise using it unless you trust the people who run the site. Imagine the security flaws they could add. They could spot when you enter a login password, and send it to themselves. Or they could do worse (I can't imagine what, but the password thing is so simple there has to be worse;).
It's easy to compile a kernel, and diffs are small.
It works for me anyway - But I would suggest staying a week or so behind (unless there's something you *really* need), because there's sometimes a serious bug introduced which takes a while to be found. Let one of the wannabe hackerz kill their system first;)
I don't think it is so tough, except that the Linux kernel is a massive piece of software not designed to do this, and it would be a lot of effort to change it.
It really only needs a totally module based kernel (or a micro kernel). You have a very simple module system (easy to debug), which can load more complex module systems. Then you can swap modules easily (using an auxiliary module to convert the data on the fly between the two). With this mechanism you can even upgrade the more complex module system.
The only restriction you need to apply then is that you must have an appropriate auxiliary module for the upgrade.
Even the overhead of making calls into modules instead of static code can be avoid with a little ring 0 magic:) which I wont go into here.
Now you just need to make the boot code take parts of the boot image (modules required for booting) and run the module loading functions on them.
These people don't do it by informed choice, they do it because they think they can't do the "more advanced" things. One of the rules of user-friendly interfaces - "Don't make users feel stupid".
Unfortunately, windows does by not providing the scripting tools as a part of the OS (and therefore, obviously not easy enough for me). Linux distributions do this by not providing tools to build scripts for common tasks. I remember Windows 3.x had "Windows recorder" (I think it was called).
I don't know exactly what would be appropriate for this, but a GUI app with modules for playing with files from various apps would be useful.
Yes, probably, but when you encode the data as an mp3 after getting it via your driver, the mp3 encoding process removes most of the data that doesn't produce a noticeable audio effect. This means that the watermark probably gets removed.
The only potential problem is that the human sensory system is so complex that there are many ways to remove different bits of data and have the same percieved sound. If the MS Audio format removes data that mp3 keeps, and mp3 removes data that MS Audio keeps, you're left with an mp3 which contains almost no data. This mp3 will sound awful (a few bubbly sounds, some clicks and beeps, and maybe a consonant or two).
That's how to stop piracy (until the official encoder is reverse engineered and the encription is figured out - and you can produce MS Audio files that look like official ones from the record labels). The mp3's produced from ripped MS Audio wont be useable.
This method of encoding could also force individual artists to sign with a record label - there will be *NO* independant artists. This is because if MS Audio becomes a "standard" by mass acceptance, all music would have to be released in that format to be playable for most people, and independant artists wouldn't be able to encode their songs in this format (except for playing on *their* CPU).
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I can use a trademark for a domain name.
I can even register a trademark that someone else has registered.
It is called a TRADEmark because it relates to a trade. If I start a company that makes soft red hats, I can call it "RedHat Soft Wear" and trademark that - precisely because it is a separate trade, and therefore unrelated. I can trademark macdonalds if I set up a deep sea mining company called "macdonalds deep sea mining corporation" - precisely because it is a separate trade. I can set up a journalism and parody site with "Microsoft" in it's name - precisely because it's a different trade.
There's one around somewhere, but I wouldn't advise using it unless you trust the people who run the site. Imagine the security flaws they could add. They could spot when you enter a login password, and send it to themselves. Or they could do worse (I can't imagine what, but the password thing is so simple there has to be worse ;).
Or even, just always update :)
;)
It's easy to compile a kernel, and diffs are small.
It works for me anyway - But I would suggest staying a week or so behind (unless there's something you *really* need), because there's sometimes a serious bug introduced which takes a while to be found. Let one of the wannabe hackerz kill their system first
I don't think it is so tough, except that the Linux kernel is a massive piece of software not designed to do this, and it would be a lot of effort to change it.
:) which I wont go into here.
It really only needs a totally module based kernel (or a micro kernel). You have a very simple module system (easy to debug), which can load more complex module systems. Then you can swap modules easily (using an auxiliary module to convert the data on the fly between the two). With this mechanism you can even upgrade the more complex module system.
The only restriction you need to apply then is that you must have an appropriate auxiliary module for the upgrade.
Even the overhead of making calls into modules instead of static code can be avoid with a little ring 0 magic
Now you just need to make the boot code take parts of the boot image (modules required for booting) and run the module loading functions on them.
These people don't do it by informed choice, they do it because they think they can't do the "more advanced" things. One of the rules of user-friendly interfaces - "Don't make users feel stupid".
Unfortunately, windows does by not providing the scripting tools as a part of the OS (and therefore, obviously not easy enough for me). Linux distributions do this by not providing tools to build scripts for common tasks. I remember Windows 3.x had "Windows recorder" (I think it was called).
I don't know exactly what would be appropriate for this, but a GUI app with modules for playing with files from various apps would be useful.
> Won't there be a watermark.
Yes, probably, but when you encode the data as an mp3 after getting it via your driver, the mp3 encoding process removes most of the data that doesn't produce a noticeable audio effect. This means that the watermark probably gets removed.
The only potential problem is that the human sensory system is so complex that there are many ways to remove different bits of data and have the same percieved sound. If the MS Audio format removes data that mp3 keeps, and mp3 removes data that MS Audio keeps, you're left with an mp3 which contains almost no data. This mp3 will sound awful (a few bubbly sounds, some clicks and beeps, and maybe a consonant or two).
That's how to stop piracy (until the official encoder is reverse engineered and the encription is figured out - and you can produce MS Audio files that look like official ones from the record labels). The mp3's produced from ripped MS Audio wont be useable.
This method of encoding could also force individual artists to sign with a record label - there will be *NO* independant artists. This is because if MS Audio becomes a "standard" by mass acceptance, all music would have to be released in that format to be playable for most people, and independant artists wouldn't be able to encode their songs in this format (except for playing on *their* CPU).