They are probably positioning themselves to be able to sell lossless encodings through itunes
I seriously doubt this. Apple seems to be approaching the iTunes Music Store with an obsessive look to minimizing their disc and bandwidth usage. If not they'd likely be encoding at 160 kbps or something instead of their current 128 kbps, so as to quiet down the people who don't understand kbps is not a measure of sound quality.:)
I've seen ALAC's space usage described as "a little more than half" of uncompressed audio. This would mean that transmitting a single song as ALAC would take up I would estimate about as many resources as an entire album of AAC to store and transmit. Given the incredible bulk that the iTunes Music Store operates in, this would be sort of problematic. In the absence of widespread demand for such a thing Apple almost certainly won't bother.
Once they are selling these expect the output mp3 feature to disappear.
How so? They sell AACs now, and I can right click AAC files and get a "convert to mp3" option.
The way it works is that you set a preferred "import" format in your preferences, and a right click "convert to" option for that format appears and works on every item in your iTunes library not purchased from the iTunes Music Store. So if Apple sold ALACs yeah sure you wouldn't be able to convert those specific ALACs, but this is not related to ALAC itself.
Ah. Well, I wouldn't exactly say that something must be exactly one of "proprietary" and "open". I'm just saying, you can lose control of a proprietary format:)
I do note in my post above that the DMCA-- which is the only thing blocking unauthorized use of the DVD forum's formats-- is an exception to what I have said. But the DMCA doesn't apply all the time, and as the Lexmark case shows, the cases where it applies are starting to get smaller as judges start actually reading the thing...
For how many years have ATM terminals been exposed to the entire internet?
Well, they weren't exposed to the entire internet. They were on a VPN. Such ATMs are always put on a VPN. But that's the fun part, because the VPN apparently had holes in it.
In other words-- at least this was the theory discussed at the time-- the ATMs had been put on a VPN so that they were inaccessible to the outside world. But other bank computers were apparently allowed in the same VPN. And somehow the Nachi worm got inside the VPN, at which point it was free to infect the ATMs...
And I somehow suspect that in five years, when WinXPEmbedded ATMs are everywhere, if anyone observes it as odd that how ATMs suddenly have a security track record now, we'll have people saying "oh that's just part of the technology, there's nothing you can do about it, it would be the same with any other vendor"...
I don't know if this is what you are trying to say-- I can't quite tell. So please don't take this as an attack.
But just because public space development is good does not mean that NASA is bad, or that bad things happening to NASA are good.
I see a lot of people on slashdot, seemingly mostly libertarians, who seem to be cheering anything bad that happens to NASA on the theory this is somehow a victory for private space development. It isn't. This is not a zero sum game. NASA's loss is not private space development's gain. A gain for private space development is a gain for humanity's involvement in space; a loss for public space development is a loss for humanity's involvement in space, but nothing else.
The things NASA does in space don't supplant what private enterprise would be doing, they supplement it. NASA's goals in space are-- or should be-- to do the things that benefit humanity but which no clear profit model exists from. Meanwhile the advancements NASA creates in space can-- or should be-- models for private enterprise. NASA could and should do more to explicitly encourage private space development and explicitly see themselves as to some extent partners with private space enterprise (I don't know who owns the technology NASA uses in space, I assume the aerospace contractors who built everything do, but I think that technology should be publicly documented and the patents available to the public for use by private operators, since after all the public paid for it) but even as it is private space development can and will benefit from NASA and its presence, and vice versa. Private space development and NASA aren't enemies, this isn't football.
Meanwhile even in the areas where the actions of NASA and private space operators overlap, private space operators simply aren't ready to replace NASA even if they should. Private space development shows great promise but it is truly at an infant stage.
Aside from the above, I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying; you may well be right about salvaging or reclaiming Hubble. looks like Hubble will be entering the atmosphere sometime between 2010 and 2032. They're not there now, but it seems likely private space enterprise may get to the point where they can rescue it before it is lost forever even if NASA isn't interested...
Nah. "Proprietary format" just means "the real world doesn't know how to decode it yet". There isn't some inherent right for proprietary formats to remain proprietary.
There are only a handful of ways a proprietary format can remain proprietary:
License agreements. This is the most common one, and almost certainly Apple is using this one. The idea is that if you give someone a document describing how your formats work you say "if you don't agree to use this information only in certain ways you can't have it", or if you give someone a decoder for the format you say "if you don't agree not to take apart this decoder and see how it works you can't have it". I'd guess the iTunes clickthrough agreement says something like the latter. But this is sort of the entire idea of cleanroom reverse engineering; license agreements like those on iTunes really are no hindrance whatsoever to a reverse engineer, so long as they choose to do that reverse engineering in a way that doesn't violate the license agreement. And that's not really that hard. Pretty much just don't use a disassembler and you're fine.
Patents. I'm pretty sure this one really doesn't work. As far as I am aware-- I can't find an explicit cite for this in a brief google search, maybe someone else can give us one-- reverse engineered implementations created for purposes of compatibility can provide protection against patent claims. Since "formats" and "compatibility" are almost the same word, this makes it often implausible to use patents as a block on unauthorized use or interpretation of a format, such as an audio codec or a video game API. Apple probably has some sort of patent on ALAC-- like all research-oriented commercial software developers, they patent absolutely everything they do-- but I've never known Apple to use patents in this exact fashion and as far as I can tell their success would be incredibly questionable even if they tried. I'd ask the guy who reverse engineered the decoder to look through apple's entries in the USPTO database to see if he can find anything that might refer to ALAC, but he really shouldn't, since hilariously you're safer from patent damage claims if you culture a state of blissful ignorance as to what patents exist out there.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This one is scary, as it grants powers which are essentially stronger than copyrights or patents to anyone who can construe what they do as involving in some way "DRM". The DMCA seems to assert that "mechanisms which effectively control access to a copyrighted work" have some sort of inherent right to remain unbroken. This seems to imply people with proprietary formats do have a right to keep them proprietary so long as they can pretend there's "DRM" in it. However there's a few problems here. It has been questioned whether the nature and implementation of the law is enforceable against a serious challenge, and some uses of the law-- for example putting some kind of "DRM" in a printer cartridge and then using the DMCA to shut down anyone who makes compatible printer cartridges-- have already been smacked down by the courts. Apple has already used the DMCA to keep down software which removes the "DRM" from iTunes Music Store purchases, though the best they can do is force that software to use hosting providers outside the U.S.. But, well, even though the law is wrong, that's actually sort of exactly what the letter and intent of the law are intended to do-- protect things like Fairplay. But attacking unauthorized use of ALAC would follow neither. Attempting to claim ALAC is covered by the DMCA is simply laughable; as has been observed elsewhere in this discussion, it is not and does not contain "DRM" and it provides no limitations on the flow of copyrighted material whatsoever.
Technical barriers. The idea here is, as Microsoft does with SMB or Word, you design your format in such a way as to naturally resist reverse engineering. This is sort of a moot point with ALAC. The decoder's alre
Sony freaks out on their formats because they actually have some kind of power they can gain from those formats. They have an agenda. For example they wanted to turn ATRAC or Minidisc or whatever into a distribution format, one that other people used but that they controlled. They wanted to supplant mp3 and then leverage this to pressure people into using other Sony products. They wanted to control distribution.
But ALAC isn't even intended or positioned for distribution. There's no power in it. ALACs are created in iTunes and ripped from CDs you own, and they're intended to be played back in iTunes and copied to your own personal iPod. Going through the particularly obvious or convenient interface paths in iTunes, there's no reason that once someone creates an ALAC file that ALAC would ever pass into the possession of anyone except them. Apple seems to be almost resisting the idea people could start distributing ALACs the way people distribute FLACs now. So now Apple controls... what? The way iTunes users use iTunes? They had that already, they wrote the thing.
I guess you can say ALAC locks people into iTunes since once they've ripped their collection to ALAC they can't use those ALACs in other programs but... well, no, not really, becuase ALACs are lossless-- that's what they are! So you can just tell iTunes to convert them to mp3s with no degradation or ill effects whatsoever, by simply right clicking on them. Bang, lock-in gone. And the lossy, transcoding-error-prone format Apple's pushing... is an open MPEG format, AAC. If Apple wanted power or to lock people in, they'd be pushing people to rip their iTunes libraries as some WMP-like proprietary lossy format, not pushing people to rip to AAC and then offering their proprietary ALAC as a minor option buried in the iTunes preferences.
Personally I would suspect they used ALAC rather than FLAC simply because they already had the ALAC code internally developed and their engineers were familiar with it. I doubt anywhere near as much thought went into the decision as people seem to be assuming.
Then you really weren't paying attention to Apple before that point where all the slashdot editors bought powerbooks. Apple Legal has always* fallen on any and all leaks in their wall of silence like rabid dogs on a barbeque-sauce-covered Pre-K student. It's just that the media's never actually paid attention before this latest event, so if you're only listening to the media it seems like this is a new development.
But as far as this project goes, if they performed their reverse engineering in a proper manner they shouldn't have anything to worry about.
* At least since Spindler left. But even before that Apple Legal wasn't nice
I was making a "generalization"; a general but personal opinion based on a number of events I had witnessed in the past, and with the manner, seen in the linked article, in which the parallel tracks / X.X.X.X discussion was managed being used as a specific example as partial justification for that opinion.
Linus Tourvalds keeps insisting he's just a coder and nothing more, and Alan Cox and everybody keep insisting he's just a coder and nothing more, but watching him in situations like this... he really is is disturbingly competent as a project manager. Like, to a degree that betrays a large amount of talent. I think he and others really sell him short... but of course one of the reasons he's so effective is because the relatively unassuming way in which he approaches things means people's attention is diverted elsewhere, thus allowing him to actually get stuff done:P
Thomas Edison... you can't point to a truly analagous inventor who worked in a climate with no patents and compare the effects.
How about every single person responsible for the creation and development of computer science?
How about Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, Grace Hopper, John McCarthy, Edsger W. Dijkstra, everyone at Bell Labs from Claude Shannon to Ken Richie, everyone at Xerox PARC during their important period, and (for at least most of his career) Donald Knuth?
Because computer programming was a field in which invention was not patentable anywhere in the world until 1981, and even after that point much or most of the important work was done in areas where patents were no goal or not sought. And I assure you, computer programming is not a field which began in 1981. In fact one could make an excellent argument practically all of the important work in computer science took place before 1981.
Blame the patent office for granting those patents, but not the idea behind patents in general.
If the idea behind patents is clumsy and vague enough that it can't be implemented without the patent office in question granting these disastrous "bad" patents, then wouldn't this essentially indicate some kind of flaw in the idea itself? Because frankly, every patent system in the world so far that allows software patents has granted these bad patents in great number.
It's kind of like, oh I don't know, communism. If Leninism is a good idea so long as you can get an incorrupt and wholly selfless state, but you can't ever get an incorrupt and wholly selfless state, maybe Leninism itself is just not such a good idea.
The patent concept is inherently inappropriate for computer programs. It cannot be implemented in a reasonable fashion, and attempts to implement it through bureaucracy are doomed to spectacular failure.
breach of US law... also "threatening" to withdraw "investement" in a country if you don't get your way should also come under bribery as money is effectively involved
Uh huh.
And the probability of that law being enforced by the current justice department is... what?
This slashdot blurb is the most dense collection of buzzwords I think I've seen in months. I try to make sense of it and all I can see is "Linux crypto hackers open sourced the BSD Microsoft monopoly!"
Out of your four links two are score:0 and one is score:-1. This doesn't seem to speak for "the slashdot community", if such a thing exists.
Perhaps the people who express a dislike for Flash do so not because they simply personally dislike Flash? Because if so, it would make more sense to ask them their reasons why.
You can tell there is a HUGE trend that if a standard is not open source, it is NOT widely accepted by the/. community. Don't even try and play stupid here.
Hm.
So because I fail to back up your generalizations, which you didn't even initially bother to back up with some carefully selective out-of-context quotes, I don't read comments?
Interesting.
I do think there is a tendency for open source and open standards to be preferred and popular on slashdot. There's a good reason for this, since if standards are open (as SWF partially is) and open source implementations are available, people have the freedom to use these standards in the way that best suits them.
But making conclusions about other people's motivations seems highly unreasonable, as does trying to deduce some kind of slashdot hivemind opinion from the comments of a few, as does attacking people if they don't desire to back up your straw men concerning "open source zealots".
Anyhow, you seem to already be pretty convinced the reason people dislike Flash is "a HUGE trend that if a standard is not open source, it is NOT widely accepted by the/. community". If so, why did you phrase your original post in the form of a question?
Your television is standing in your living room right now spewing out copies of things you don't want to hear.
No it isn't. My television is hooked up to receive nothing but static.
I can do that if I want. If I don't want to watch what the TV stations broadcast-- and I don't-- I don't have to. I can simply play my Gamecube in peace.
However if I don't want to deal with what spammers broadcast-- well, I kind of can't do that. The only way for me to avoid spam is to refrain from reading my email, either partially (by way of a "spam filter" that unfortunately must naturally sometimes accidentally target actual mail to me as well in the process) or completely.
For a more apt analogy, should we ban Jehovah's Witnesses and door-to-door salespeople from going around the neighborhood?
We should ban them from entering my living room without permission.
If I place a "no solicitation" sign on my front lawn, that should be sufficient to ban them from getting on my porch.
Slashdot Mirror
They are probably positioning themselves to be able to sell lossless encodings through itunes
:)
I seriously doubt this. Apple seems to be approaching the iTunes Music Store with an obsessive look to minimizing their disc and bandwidth usage. If not they'd likely be encoding at 160 kbps or something instead of their current 128 kbps, so as to quiet down the people who don't understand kbps is not a measure of sound quality.
I've seen ALAC's space usage described as "a little more than half" of uncompressed audio. This would mean that transmitting a single song as ALAC would take up I would estimate about as many resources as an entire album of AAC to store and transmit. Given the incredible bulk that the iTunes Music Store operates in, this would be sort of problematic. In the absence of widespread demand for such a thing Apple almost certainly won't bother.
Once they are selling these expect the output mp3 feature to disappear.
How so? They sell AACs now, and I can right click AAC files and get a "convert to mp3" option.
The way it works is that you set a preferred "import" format in your preferences, and a right click "convert to" option for that format appears and works on every item in your iTunes library not purchased from the iTunes Music Store. So if Apple sold ALACs yeah sure you wouldn't be able to convert those specific ALACs, but this is not related to ALAC itself.
Ah. Well, I wouldn't exactly say that something must be exactly one of "proprietary" and "open". I'm just saying, you can lose control of a proprietary format :)
I do note in my post above that the DMCA-- which is the only thing blocking unauthorized use of the DVD forum's formats-- is an exception to what I have said. But the DMCA doesn't apply all the time, and as the Lexmark case shows, the cases where it applies are starting to get smaller as judges start actually reading the thing...
Also, I don't really understand what you mean by saying that once something is decodeable it is an open standard
I am confused-- what are you referring to? I suspect either you misunderstood something I said or I was unclear.
For how many years have ATM terminals been exposed to the entire internet?
Well, they weren't exposed to the entire internet. They were on a VPN. Such ATMs are always put on a VPN. But that's the fun part, because the VPN apparently had holes in it.
In other words-- at least this was the theory discussed at the time-- the ATMs had been put on a VPN so that they were inaccessible to the outside world. But other bank computers were apparently allowed in the same VPN. And somehow the Nachi worm got inside the VPN, at which point it was free to infect the ATMs...
you could have said the exact same thing about atrac3 as there weren't any music available in it except music that you ripped yourself
Inaccurate
Existing Windows XP embedded based ATMs, made by Diebold, have already been effected by Windows XP-targetting worms. This should be sufficient to demonstrate that the code bases at least share whatever code caused vulnerability to the Nachi worm. The obvious question then becomes, if and when further holes in Windows XP are discovered, what happens if they too are in the code shared with Windows XP Embedded?
I mean, it's just an awfully funny coincidence that the sudden emergence of the term "cyber-crime" in connection with ATMs just happens, after all these years of computer ATMs, to coincide with the introduction of Windows based ATMs.
And I somehow suspect that in five years, when WinXPEmbedded ATMs are everywhere, if anyone observes it as odd that how ATMs suddenly have a security track record now, we'll have people saying "oh that's just part of the technology, there's nothing you can do about it, it would be the same with any other vendor"...
But just because public space development is good does not mean that NASA is bad, or that bad things happening to NASA are good.
Should have been
But just because private space development is good does not mean that NASA is bad, or that bad things happening to NASA are good.
I hope it was still clear what I meant there.
I don't know if this is what you are trying to say-- I can't quite tell. So please don't take this as an attack.
But just because public space development is good does not mean that NASA is bad, or that bad things happening to NASA are good.
I see a lot of people on slashdot, seemingly mostly libertarians, who seem to be cheering anything bad that happens to NASA on the theory this is somehow a victory for private space development. It isn't. This is not a zero sum game. NASA's loss is not private space development's gain. A gain for private space development is a gain for humanity's involvement in space; a loss for public space development is a loss for humanity's involvement in space, but nothing else.
The things NASA does in space don't supplant what private enterprise would be doing, they supplement it. NASA's goals in space are-- or should be-- to do the things that benefit humanity but which no clear profit model exists from. Meanwhile the advancements NASA creates in space can-- or should be-- models for private enterprise. NASA could and should do more to explicitly encourage private space development and explicitly see themselves as to some extent partners with private space enterprise (I don't know who owns the technology NASA uses in space, I assume the aerospace contractors who built everything do, but I think that technology should be publicly documented and the patents available to the public for use by private operators, since after all the public paid for it) but even as it is private space development can and will benefit from NASA and its presence, and vice versa. Private space development and NASA aren't enemies, this isn't football.
Meanwhile even in the areas where the actions of NASA and private space operators overlap, private space operators simply aren't ready to replace NASA even if they should. Private space development shows great promise but it is truly at an infant stage.
Aside from the above, I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying; you may well be right about salvaging or reclaiming Hubble. looks like Hubble will be entering the atmosphere sometime between 2010 and 2032. They're not there now, but it seems likely private space enterprise may get to the point where they can rescue it before it is lost forever even if NASA isn't interested...
There are only a handful of ways a proprietary format can remain proprietary:
You don't need to be a "big J Journalist" to have freedom of the press.
The law should either apply to small and large media sources alike, or apply to none of them.
Sony freaks out on their formats because they actually have some kind of power they can gain from those formats. They have an agenda. For example they wanted to turn ATRAC or Minidisc or whatever into a distribution format, one that other people used but that they controlled. They wanted to supplant mp3 and then leverage this to pressure people into using other Sony products. They wanted to control distribution.
But ALAC isn't even intended or positioned for distribution. There's no power in it. ALACs are created in iTunes and ripped from CDs you own, and they're intended to be played back in iTunes and copied to your own personal iPod. Going through the particularly obvious or convenient interface paths in iTunes, there's no reason that once someone creates an ALAC file that ALAC would ever pass into the possession of anyone except them. Apple seems to be almost resisting the idea people could start distributing ALACs the way people distribute FLACs now. So now Apple controls... what? The way iTunes users use iTunes? They had that already, they wrote the thing.
I guess you can say ALAC locks people into iTunes since once they've ripped their collection to ALAC they can't use those ALACs in other programs but... well, no, not really, becuase ALACs are lossless-- that's what they are! So you can just tell iTunes to convert them to mp3s with no degradation or ill effects whatsoever, by simply right clicking on them. Bang, lock-in gone. And the lossy, transcoding-error-prone format Apple's pushing... is an open MPEG format, AAC. If Apple wanted power or to lock people in, they'd be pushing people to rip their iTunes libraries as some WMP-like proprietary lossy format, not pushing people to rip to AAC and then offering their proprietary ALAC as a minor option buried in the iTunes preferences.
Personally I would suspect they used ALAC rather than FLAC simply because they already had the ALAC code internally developed and their engineers were familiar with it. I doubt anywhere near as much thought went into the decision as people seem to be assuming.
Then you really weren't paying attention to Apple before that point where all the slashdot editors bought powerbooks. Apple Legal has always* fallen on any and all leaks in their wall of silence like rabid dogs on a barbeque-sauce-covered Pre-K student. It's just that the media's never actually paid attention before this latest event, so if you're only listening to the media it seems like this is a new development.
But as far as this project goes, if they performed their reverse engineering in a proper manner they shouldn't have anything to worry about.
* At least since Spindler left. But even before that Apple Legal wasn't nice
I was making a "generalization"; a general but personal opinion based on a number of events I had witnessed in the past, and with the manner, seen in the linked article, in which the parallel tracks / X.X.X.X discussion was managed being used as a specific example as partial justification for that opinion.
Linus Tourvalds keeps insisting he's just a coder and nothing more, and Alan Cox and everybody keep insisting he's just a coder and nothing more, but watching him in situations like this... he really is is disturbingly competent as a project manager. Like, to a degree that betrays a large amount of talent. I think he and others really sell him short... but of course one of the reasons he's so effective is because the relatively unassuming way in which he approaches things means people's attention is diverted elsewhere, thus allowing him to actually get stuff done :P
Thomas Edison ... you can't point to a truly analagous inventor who worked in a climate with no patents and compare the effects.
How about every single person responsible for the creation and development of computer science?
How about Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, Grace Hopper, John McCarthy, Edsger W. Dijkstra, everyone at Bell Labs from Claude Shannon to Ken Richie, everyone at Xerox PARC during their important period, and (for at least most of his career) Donald Knuth?
Because computer programming was a field in which invention was not patentable anywhere in the world until 1981, and even after that point much or most of the important work was done in areas where patents were no goal or not sought. And I assure you, computer programming is not a field which began in 1981. In fact one could make an excellent argument practically all of the important work in computer science took place before 1981.
Blame the patent office for granting those patents, but not the idea behind patents in general.
If the idea behind patents is clumsy and vague enough that it can't be implemented without the patent office in question granting these disastrous "bad" patents, then wouldn't this essentially indicate some kind of flaw in the idea itself? Because frankly, every patent system in the world so far that allows software patents has granted these bad patents in great number.
It's kind of like, oh I don't know, communism. If Leninism is a good idea so long as you can get an incorrupt and wholly selfless state, but you can't ever get an incorrupt and wholly selfless state, maybe Leninism itself is just not such a good idea.
The patent concept is inherently inappropriate for computer programs. It cannot be implemented in a reasonable fashion, and attempts to implement it through bureaucracy are doomed to spectacular failure.
breach of US law... also "threatening" to withdraw "investement" in a country if you don't get your way should also come under bribery as money is effectively involved
Uh huh.
And the probability of that law being enforced by the current justice department is... what?
Is there even a number that small?
This slashdot blurb is the most dense collection of buzzwords I think I've seen in months. I try to make sense of it and all I can see is "Linux crypto hackers open sourced the BSD Microsoft monopoly!"
I think it has its own gravitational field
Then they probably shredded the documents to cover their ass, avoid countersuits, etc.
Is this actually going to work?
I mean, wouldn't the knowledge they shredded documents be about the worst thing possible for them in a countersuit?
your total ignorance... /. has a hivemind and you know it.
Wow.
Out of your four links two are score:0 and one is score:-1. This doesn't seem to speak for "the slashdot community", if such a thing exists.
/. community. Don't even try and play stupid here.
/. community". If so, why did you phrase your original post in the form of a question?
Perhaps the people who express a dislike for Flash do so not because they simply personally dislike Flash? Because if so, it would make more sense to ask them their reasons why.
You can tell there is a HUGE trend that if a standard is not open source, it is NOT widely accepted by the
Hm.
So because I fail to back up your generalizations, which you didn't even initially bother to back up with some carefully selective out-of-context quotes, I don't read comments?
Interesting.
I do think there is a tendency for open source and open standards to be preferred and popular on slashdot. There's a good reason for this, since if standards are open (as SWF partially is) and open source implementations are available, people have the freedom to use these standards in the way that best suits them.
But making conclusions about other people's motivations seems highly unreasonable, as does trying to deduce some kind of slashdot hivemind opinion from the comments of a few, as does attacking people if they don't desire to back up your straw men concerning "open source zealots".
Anyhow, you seem to already be pretty convinced the reason people dislike Flash is "a HUGE trend that if a standard is not open source, it is NOT widely accepted by the
OK. Thank you for clarifying, I did not know that.
Your television is standing in your living room right now spewing out copies of things you don't want to hear.
No it isn't. My television is hooked up to receive nothing but static.
I can do that if I want. If I don't want to watch what the TV stations broadcast-- and I don't-- I don't have to. I can simply play my Gamecube in peace.
However if I don't want to deal with what spammers broadcast-- well, I kind of can't do that. The only way for me to avoid spam is to refrain from reading my email, either partially (by way of a "spam filter" that unfortunately must naturally sometimes accidentally target actual mail to me as well in the process) or completely.
For a more apt analogy, should we ban Jehovah's Witnesses and door-to-door salespeople from going around the neighborhood?
We should ban them from entering my living room without permission.
If I place a "no solicitation" sign on my front lawn, that should be sufficient to ban them from getting on my porch.
In all fairness, he did say Game boy series, not Gameboy. If I remember right the Game Boy Advance has an arm7 and the DS has one arm7 and one arm9?
Though of course according to Nintendo the DS isn't in the Game boy series...