I think this one has been around for a while. I downloaded it a couple years ago. (It just wasn't well-advertised on their web page.) I was disappointed when I found out they weren't actually documenting the ICQ protocol -- they're just telling you how to write an application that will communicate with the ICQ client, which still has to be installed and running on the end-user's computer.
Also look at statements like this, from their licence agreement:
You may not use the ICQ API for or in conjunction with any products having chat ability, presence indication "buddy system-like" functionality or instant messaging capabilities ("Competing Products")
And this:
TERM AND TERMINATION. This license shall continue for a year or until terminated, whichever is first.
Another quote from the article, about the downloading compressed data patent:
"It was a brilliant idea at the time," he says, "and the only reason people say, 'It's crap,' is because they're looking in hindsight 10 years later."
Let's just assume for a minute that he's right, and Amazon is right, and so is NCR, Rambus, Apple, AltaVista, eBay, NetZero, Symantec, GeoWorks, CDDB, British Telecom, Micorsoft, Priceline, and everyone else. If companies and individuals had to pay an additional royalty fee for implementing the "innovations" of each of these companies, where would we be today? Would the web exist if it had been patented?
What is claimed is:
- a panel
- a plurality of discrete display elements arranged relative to said panel to present, when selectively categorized, user instructions and key information to a user of said device; said decrete display elements being small in size to enable said user instructions and key information to be presented over substantially all of said panel.
Translation: an LCD display. Made of pixels.
- a plurality of discrete switches for entering data when actuated
Translation: a keyboard
...
- means for executing said machine instructions including machine instructions including means for selectively energizing said display elements so as to present on said panel that key information and those of said user instructions which are associated with those of said discrete switches which are to be used in association with said machine instructions being executed so as to present to said user a variable user instructions format and a veriable key format which are a function of said machine instructions being executed as said machine instructions are executed so as to facilitate the entry of data
I don't like this whole registration/activation thing very much. The less information I give Microsoft, the better. After reading this rumour about a certain feature built-in to Microsoft's DCOM, I'd really rather not tell Microsoft who I am. Here's a snippet:
Microsoft has been compiling a massive database of names, registration codes, product keys, and linking them with data pulled from e-mail addresses stored in Outlook, Outlook Express, etc. as well as the serial numbers that can now be easily obtained from any Pentium-III CPU.
Microsoft has been coordinating their efforts clandestinely with other software manufacturers and predict law enforcement will be to a point where they can finally enforce copyright and anti-piracy laws by around 2005.
Keep in mind this is is only a rumour... but even if it's false right now, I woulnd't be surprised if we see this sort of thing some years down the road. This ties really well into the whole activation thing -- once Microsoft gets enough information on you, you're in their database. And with Microsoft integrating DRM into Windows XP, it's not too much of a stretch to wonder if every SDMI'ed MP3 you download will have an entry in Microsoft's little database. That's the big danger of having one company controlling too much of your software.
Most people don't like ads, so they get ingored. Why don't people like ads?
90% of them look like they were slapped together in 2 minutes. A cheap-looking ad does not inspire confidence in the quality of the site behind the link. Every ad I remember clicking on looked like it was made by a professional graphic artist. Yes, computers are capable of displaying more than 16 colours.
No originality. Oh look, someone else is trying to make their ad look like a Windows dialog box. It was cool the first time, now I just ignore them.
Animated garbage to catch our attention. Whether they be dancing credit cards, animation in a fake windows dialog box, or just a flashing background -- almost all animation is there just to get my attention. Well, it works -- I say, "my god that's annoying", and scroll down the page without a second thought.
Misleading messages. Click the fast-moving object and win a prize! Okay, maybe this belongs under item 2, "no originality"
Unclear messages. A surprising number of ads don't give enough of an idea what you'll get by clicking. In the beginning, this was a marketing tactic -- "hmm, I wonder what this means... maybe I'll check it out." I admit, I did it myself. Now, it's so common, it's not worth our time to look at every obscure ad.
Dislike of interruption. Unlike traditional media, the internet is interactive. While surfing, I have a "plan", if you will. I know where I want to go next -- and it's not to that advertiser's web site. The ad has to be more interesting than the other content on the same page. It doesn't help that most ads cause the page I'm currently reading to disappear.
Lack of other interesting ads. If 98% of the ads aren't worth my attention, my eyes will be trained to automatically ignore the ad.
Untargeted ads. A corollary to the above, most of the ads I have zero interest in even if I did notice them. Online casinos, credit cards, some shareware program -- I'm not interested in any of these things.
Perception that ads are annoying. Corollary 2: popup windows, animated visual pollution, and the rest of the above -- all contributing to the notion that ads are a scurge that should be ignored.
Putting your cell phone in vibrate mode works for most people. However, it's always the case that the person whose phone rings will have a vibrator that sounds like an electric lawnmower.
So the guy owns Fairtunes...
And now he's setting up Napster II...
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that these two ideas go together quite nicely. I'd go for a system where I pay a buck for each song I download, if I knew the money was going to the artist instead of to some corporate bank account to pay for the Backstreet Boys' next publicity campaign. And I'm sure the artists themselves would like the idea. Metallica might even like it.
Take it back. Say it doesn't work right with your setup. Then get all your friends to do the same.
I used to have some pity for the recording industry and the movie industry, but now that I see how regularly the RIAA and MPAA try to screw over their own customers -- even those customers that aren't doing anything wrong -- I feel absoutely no guilt when I download the latest MP3s from Napster, or the latest movies from some web site. (Well, both are perfectly legal in my country thanks to blank media taxes, but that's beside the point...)
If you've been working on it in your spare time for 6 months and the employer says the project belongs to them, I'd say they owe you a few hundred hours of overtime pay.:-)
I read the proposal, and I'm left wondering, what does it mean, exactly? I'm don't pretend to know anything about hardware protocols and whatnot, but this proposal doesn't seem to serve a purpose. (I guess that's half of what the above article says.)
So, the hard drive can contain a function. We don't know what that function will be. But at least hardware manufacturers are free to add one. (Only one function, mind you.) So while the actual function is not in the standard, all hardware manufacturers could decide to put in the same one at some point down the road. Are they thinking we'll be surprised when they decide to drop in a "CPRM" function in this little slot?
Of course, I could be completely wrong. I'm no technical expert or anything.
I had a similar experience... in Windows, I had to create batch files for ls, rm, mv, cp...
Then I discovered some sort of "power toys" package from Microsoft that included ported versions of ls, rm, mv, and so on (much better than the Win9x equivalents.) Microsoft probably ported them from BSD like they did with the ftp command. Unfortunately, since I got a new computer, I haven't been able to find them again.
Does anyone know of a shell that's been ported to Windows 2000? Or if not an entire shell, just the command-line tools would make me happy.
If you're trying to sell an MP3 player to the masses, they're going to be pretty impressed by a tiny coin-sized disc that holds a few hours of music. Especially if the only other options are flash (expensive, low-capacity) and CD-R (big, need a burner, hardly bigger than dataplay). There are going to be many manufacturers making them -- surely at least one of them won't screw up as badly as Sony did with their pseudo-mp3 stick. (Unless the RIAA/SDMI makes them restrict it so badly that nobody will want it.)
I'd like to see some kind of "open" standard for high-capacity recordable media. Made by geeks, not corporations. (The big problem with applying the open-source model to hardware is the manufacturing costs.) All the new ones -- DataPlay, DVD, future hard discs, etc -- come with mandatory content control.
Or maybe (and this is what I'm hoping for) he's just trying to break up their monopoly. If this makes record companies start offering services we want, that's fine -- but they'll still be in total control of the music industry, and be able to charge whatever price they want. I'm sure if they could ensure that music is relatively secure (ie. distributed on DVD-audio or digitally with Windows Media on Windows XP with a secure SDMI-approved sound card -- and don't even think this won't happen, because it will), then they'd be more than happy to sell us singles at $3 or $4 a pop. It would be better if their monopoly power was taken away -- and this might just be a way to do that.
I tried the word "Mark". (That's my name.) It was declined. I guess someone else owns the trademark to my name. Hope I don't get a cease and desist letter about that...
and I guess I need a time. Silly me. But look, no lameness filter on the above.
2001-03-28 10:00:00
(but now I triggered the posting within 60 seconds lameness filter. Go ahead and laugh.)
Normally, I'm one of those people who likes Microsoft and rolls my eyes at all the Microsoft-bashing that is typical on a web site like this. However, this one is just a little bit too much even for me. How can they try to equate free with being bad? So what if you can't sell it for a hundred dollars per boxed copy? Regardless of the fact that I despise businesspeople who think the world must revolve around profit, it's not even a completely bad for business -- free software simply doesn't fit in the "traditional" business model. And what's this about stifling innovation? And even scarier, that we should legislate to prevent the huge Linux Threat? I guess the next step is to put all us non-profit software developers in jail for ruining the corporate world.
In all fairness to Microsoft, though, I should remember that this is just one of their executives speaking on behalf of their corporate interests, (ie typical "money rules all" corporate attitudes), and doesn't mean that everything and everyone related in some way to Microsoft is evil.
How many ways can you possibly do it? Like the Rambus case the other day, if there is a small number of ways to do something, someone else could easily come up with the same method by chance. (This is especially likely when you have thousands of individuals trying to come up with user-friendly shopping systems.) On the flipside, if there are so many ways to do something that someone could easily modify the method to avoid infringing on the patent, it's not worthwhile to get a patent in the first place. Patents are fine when they're protecting a brilliant idea that nobody else would have thought of, but Amazon's "idea" doesn't seem to be so incredible.
I wonder what would happen if you got rid of all the middle-aged judges, lawyers, and record industry execs, and replaced them with geeks.
Well, let's not even go that far. What if we replaced the judges with a few ordinary citizens of the 18-30 crowd -- people who grew up on the internet. No offence to any older people who are in touch with technology -- it just strikes me that most of the legal types out there seem to believe that their job is to maintain the status quo. Are they really representing public opinion?
I wonder what will happen when the internet generation gets control.
There is the potential of this turning into the equivalent of cinema's NC-17 rating. Many movie theatres and rental outlets (such as Blockbuster) have a policy of not carrying NC-17 films, in the name of being "family-friendly." As a result, an NC-17 rating for a film is equivalent to commercial death. Producers do whatever they can to avoid the NC-17 rating, and thus the rating becomes meaningless, as it is never used.
If making an "M" game means it will be less profitable, game producers will stop making "M" games. Under pressure from the game producers, the raters will start giving a "T" rating for games that should have been an "M", meaning you're going to find all the violence of "M" games in "T" games.
What's the point of having an "M" rating if nobody wants to use it?
Re:Been done here for ages, and it works.
on
The Unblinking Eye
·
· Score: 1
There were similar stories in the Canadian media a few weeks ago. Ontario casinos are equipped with face-reginition technology, designed to catch known cheats and other criminals. (Note that they don't scan everyone who walks into a casino -- just those who look suspicious.) This technology is in use in casinos in the United States as well.
Normally I'd be more than willing to jump on the paranoia bandwagon, but in this case, technology is being used to fight real crime. Not surprisingly, there has been talk of this technology being installed in other areas, such as banks. Personally, I can't wait until we're able to nab criminals from orbit using high-resolution satellites. Or even better, high-resolution satellites equipped with lasers.:)
Look at a science fiction movie. In Star Trek, they walk around with these data commucation devices. (They don't necessarily use HTTP, but it's some sort of data browser.) In fact, I've noticed quite a few of these silly patents are things that have been covered in science fiction.
The recent essay by John Gilmore is another "required reading". I realized something that isn't entirely obvious from listening to industry execs and so on. The DMCA essentially allows corporations to create new laws on their own.
Under the DMCA, it is illegal to bypass content control systems. That means that if a corporation can come up with a way to remove our rights -- even if those rights are legally protected -- it's illegal for a consumer to do anything about it. For example, we all know that CSS eliminates some of our fair use rights. The DMCA makes it illegal to bypass CSS. Therefore, we have lost our rights by default. SDMI is another example. We have the right to freely copy music for personal use. The RIAA didn't like this, so they created SDMI, and boom! it's illegal to make a copy of my own music.
Big corporations are now in control of the legal system.
The article says that games are downloaded from some sort of network rather than from CD. (The wording makes it sound as though it doesn't have any CD-ROM inputs at all.) Presumably this means they're downloaded direct from Sega. That sounds like a pretty good copy-protection measure. There may be some limited communication between other users, but that will again go through Sega servers, allowing for traffic monitoring. Who's to say your console won't report to Sega what games you're playing? (Of course, the stats will only be used "in aggregate,";) but if all games are licenced from some central location, it would be very easy to do a quick licence verification, as is done in certain other online games.)
Slashdot Mirror
Also look at statements like this, from their licence agreement: And this: Really, it's not a big deal at all.
Translation: an LCD display. Made of pixels.
Translation: a keyboard Where do these people learn to write this way?
Keep in mind this is is only a rumour... but even if it's false right now, I woulnd't be surprised if we see this sort of thing some years down the road. This ties really well into the whole activation thing -- once Microsoft gets enough information on you, you're in their database. And with Microsoft integrating DRM into Windows XP, it's not too much of a stretch to wonder if every SDMI'ed MP3 you download will have an entry in Microsoft's little database. That's the big danger of having one company controlling too much of your software.
Putting your cell phone in vibrate mode works for most people. However, it's always the case that the person whose phone rings will have a vibrator that sounds like an electric lawnmower.
So the guy owns Fairtunes...
And now he's setting up Napster II...
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that these two ideas go together quite nicely. I'd go for a system where I pay a buck for each song I download, if I knew the money was going to the artist instead of to some corporate bank account to pay for the Backstreet Boys' next publicity campaign. And I'm sure the artists themselves would like the idea. Metallica might even like it.
Take it back. Say it doesn't work right with your setup. Then get all your friends to do the same.
I used to have some pity for the recording industry and the movie industry, but now that I see how regularly the RIAA and MPAA try to screw over their own customers -- even those customers that aren't doing anything wrong -- I feel absoutely no guilt when I download the latest MP3s from Napster, or the latest movies from some web site. (Well, both are perfectly legal in my country thanks to blank media taxes, but that's beside the point...)
If you've been working on it in your spare time for 6 months and the employer says the project belongs to them, I'd say they owe you a few hundred hours of overtime pay. :-)
I read the proposal, and I'm left wondering, what does it mean, exactly? I'm don't pretend to know anything about hardware protocols and whatnot, but this proposal doesn't seem to serve a purpose. (I guess that's half of what the above article says.)
So, the hard drive can contain a function. We don't know what that function will be. But at least hardware manufacturers are free to add one. (Only one function, mind you.) So while the actual function is not in the standard, all hardware manufacturers could decide to put in the same one at some point down the road. Are they thinking we'll be surprised when they decide to drop in a "CPRM" function in this little slot?
Of course, I could be completely wrong. I'm no technical expert or anything.
I had a similar experience... in Windows, I had to create batch files for ls, rm, mv, cp...
Then I discovered some sort of "power toys" package from Microsoft that included ported versions of ls, rm, mv, and so on (much better than the Win9x equivalents.) Microsoft probably ported them from BSD like they did with the ftp command. Unfortunately, since I got a new computer, I haven't been able to find them again.
Does anyone know of a shell that's been ported to Windows 2000? Or if not an entire shell, just the command-line tools would make me happy.
If you're trying to sell an MP3 player to the masses, they're going to be pretty impressed by a tiny coin-sized disc that holds a few hours of music. Especially if the only other options are flash (expensive, low-capacity) and CD-R (big, need a burner, hardly bigger than dataplay). There are going to be many manufacturers making them -- surely at least one of them won't screw up as badly as Sony did with their pseudo-mp3 stick. (Unless the RIAA/SDMI makes them restrict it so badly that nobody will want it.)
I'd like to see some kind of "open" standard for high-capacity recordable media. Made by geeks, not corporations. (The big problem with applying the open-source model to hardware is the manufacturing costs.) All the new ones -- DataPlay, DVD, future hard discs, etc -- come with mandatory content control.
Or maybe (and this is what I'm hoping for) he's just trying to break up their monopoly. If this makes record companies start offering services we want, that's fine -- but they'll still be in total control of the music industry, and be able to charge whatever price they want. I'm sure if they could ensure that music is relatively secure (ie. distributed on DVD-audio or digitally with Windows Media on Windows XP with a secure SDMI-approved sound card -- and don't even think this won't happen, because it will), then they'd be more than happy to sell us singles at $3 or $4 a pop. It would be better if their monopoly power was taken away -- and this might just be a way to do that.
I tried the word "Mark". (That's my name.) It was declined. I guess someone else owns the trademark to my name. Hope I don't get a cease and desist letter about that...
and I guess I need a time. Silly me. But look, no lameness filter on the above. 2001-03-28 10:00:00 (but now I triggered the posting within 60 seconds lameness filter. Go ahead and laugh.)
2001-03-28
Normally, I'm one of those people who likes Microsoft and rolls my eyes at all the Microsoft-bashing that is typical on a web site like this. However, this one is just a little bit too much even for me. How can they try to equate free with being bad? So what if you can't sell it for a hundred dollars per boxed copy? Regardless of the fact that I despise businesspeople who think the world must revolve around profit, it's not even a completely bad for business -- free software simply doesn't fit in the "traditional" business model. And what's this about stifling innovation? And even scarier, that we should legislate to prevent the huge Linux Threat? I guess the next step is to put all us non-profit software developers in jail for ruining the corporate world.
In all fairness to Microsoft, though, I should remember that this is just one of their executives speaking on behalf of their corporate interests, (ie typical "money rules all" corporate attitudes), and doesn't mean that everything and everyone related in some way to Microsoft is evil.
How many ways can you possibly do it? Like the Rambus case the other day, if there is a small number of ways to do something, someone else could easily come up with the same method by chance. (This is especially likely when you have thousands of individuals trying to come up with user-friendly shopping systems.) On the flipside, if there are so many ways to do something that someone could easily modify the method to avoid infringing on the patent, it's not worthwhile to get a patent in the first place. Patents are fine when they're protecting a brilliant idea that nobody else would have thought of, but Amazon's "idea" doesn't seem to be so incredible.
I wonder what would happen if you got rid of all the middle-aged judges, lawyers, and record industry execs, and replaced them with geeks.
Well, let's not even go that far. What if we replaced the judges with a few ordinary citizens of the 18-30 crowd -- people who grew up on the internet. No offence to any older people who are in touch with technology -- it just strikes me that most of the legal types out there seem to believe that their job is to maintain the status quo. Are they really representing public opinion?
I wonder what will happen when the internet generation gets control.
< from the boycott-rambus dept.
The unfortunate thing is that you can't boycott Rambus if Rambus is getting a cut of everyone else's sales.
There is the potential of this turning into the equivalent of cinema's NC-17 rating. Many movie theatres and rental outlets (such as Blockbuster) have a policy of not carrying NC-17 films, in the name of being "family-friendly." As a result, an NC-17 rating for a film is equivalent to commercial death. Producers do whatever they can to avoid the NC-17 rating, and thus the rating becomes meaningless, as it is never used.
If making an "M" game means it will be less profitable, game producers will stop making "M" games. Under pressure from the game producers, the raters will start giving a "T" rating for games that should have been an "M", meaning you're going to find all the violence of "M" games in "T" games.
What's the point of having an "M" rating if nobody wants to use it?
There were similar stories in the Canadian media a few weeks ago. Ontario casinos are equipped with face-reginition technology, designed to catch known cheats and other criminals. (Note that they don't scan everyone who walks into a casino -- just those who look suspicious.) This technology is in use in casinos in the United States as well.
:)
Normally I'd be more than willing to jump on the paranoia bandwagon, but in this case, technology is being used to fight real crime. Not surprisingly, there has been talk of this technology being installed in other areas, such as banks. Personally, I can't wait until we're able to nab criminals from orbit using high-resolution satellites. Or even better, high-resolution satellites equipped with lasers.
Look at a science fiction movie. In Star Trek, they walk around with these data commucation devices. (They don't necessarily use HTTP, but it's some sort of data browser.) In fact, I've noticed quite a few of these silly patents are things that have been covered in science fiction.
The recent essay by John Gilmore is another "required reading". I realized something that isn't entirely obvious from listening to industry execs and so on. The DMCA essentially allows corporations to create new laws on their own.
Under the DMCA, it is illegal to bypass content control systems. That means that if a corporation can come up with a way to remove our rights -- even if those rights are legally protected -- it's illegal for a consumer to do anything about it. For example, we all know that CSS eliminates some of our fair use rights. The DMCA makes it illegal to bypass CSS. Therefore, we have lost our rights by default. SDMI is another example. We have the right to freely copy music for personal use. The RIAA didn't like this, so they created SDMI, and boom! it's illegal to make a copy of my own music.
Big corporations are now in control of the legal system.
The article says that games are downloaded from some sort of network rather than from CD. (The wording makes it sound as though it doesn't have any CD-ROM inputs at all.) Presumably this means they're downloaded direct from Sega. That sounds like a pretty good copy-protection measure. There may be some limited communication between other users, but that will again go through Sega servers, allowing for traffic monitoring. Who's to say your console won't report to Sega what games you're playing? (Of course, the stats will only be used "in aggregate," ;) but if all games are licenced from some central location, it would be very easy to do a quick licence verification, as is done in certain other online games.)