In the DVD world a number of modifications have been made to DVD firmware to make drives region free, including complete replacements for the firmware.
I think the end result of this is that a whole new range of firmware for CD and DVD drives is going to come out to overcome the Macrovision hack.
I don't think anyone has explained to the record industry that such hacks result in the RIAA paying Macrovision truck loads of money for an extremely short period of protection!
..if a boycott of international conferences held in the US can be organised, this will certainly attract political notice that the DMCA is asinine.
Ensuring that all conferences are held in some other country outside the "land of free speech" would certainly highlight that free speech is not so free anymore.
Simply explain to your father that he is wrong, at least on the evidence so far.
Skylarov wrote and broke Adobe's encryption in Russia, where it is legal to make personal backup copies of everything. In fact I believe it may even be illegal to prevent such copies being made, in which case Adobe may be breaking Russian law, where I presume they have registered offices and thus can be charged and their company directors arrested.
Unless Skylarov wrote his program in the US he has committed no US crime. US laws should not be be enforced on citizens of other countries unless such crimes are committed on US territory. [there are exceptions to this, but copyright laws shouldn't be one of them].
our economy was a lot healthier before we gave up England as our overlord
With all due respect, whilst a number of your countrymen have long wished to become a totally independent nation and remove the Queen as Head of State, you were partially pushed into giving up England as your overlord/ major trading partner when we joined the EU (or Common Market as it was then), which meant we started to buy all our agricultural products and most other goods from Europe.
In addition to the facts stated in the parent post, this case provides the perfect opportunity to show what is wrong with the DMCA. Up till now the RIAA and companies who like the DMCA have been able to carefully chose opponents who can be tarred with a piracy brush (e.g. Corley & 2600, DeCSS in general) and can therefore throw a lot of mud at the defendant in the hope that some sticks.
Felten is for the EFF a perfect case of why the DMCA is a bad law and if they can get it ruled unconstitutional then Skylarov and Corley in effect receive a 'Get out of jail free' card.
why bother writing a game for linux in the first place. Who would buy it? There is an increasing number of Linux users out there who are willing to pay for games. Loki seems to be making money out of porting games, and whilst I grant you the market ain't as big as the Windows games market, there is a market. Unix is a growing games market, whereas Windows is a very crowded market where only the best 1 or 2 percent succeed.
A professional windows programmer such as myself will never touch Linux Why not? Quake and Doom were developed in a Unix environment first, and many games companies use Unix (incl. Linux) workstations for graphics development. If you are going to be a serious games programmer you had better get rid of your misconceptions fast. You should use whatever platform offers the best tools and in some cases those tools are Unix only
The simple fact is that a lot of games programming still requires low level programming in places, and a nice friendly GUI environment isn't always the solution.
And forget the GPL -- that will kill any hope of money The GPL doesn't kill any hope of money since you don't have to make GPL games on a Linux system. You can make a game using your own libraries and/or libraries which are LGPL'ed) and still keep your source code private if you insist.
Personally I think it would be a good thing if games developers to open source their code after a couple of years so that games which became abandonware could be supported by others.
no chance of making a buck There's a hell of a lot of contract software engineers who have no trouble taking home $150000+ per year working on Unix systems.
Don't loose sight of what people use computers for -- doing things, not messing with etc directories. Which is why software which requires stability is run on Unix systems (old joke - I'll grant NT is getting better; I work on both).
[OK the previous message is from a baby troll who hasn't grown up beyond AC posts, but I couldn't resist]
The word "good" in the authors article is a very imprecise word. Does good software have lots of features, is it free of bugs, or is it an innovative 'I never knew I needed it till I saw it' type of package.
Software need only fall into one or possibly two of the above categories in order to reach the accolade of 'good'. There are even packages in use today that are in mainstream use that are not necessarily good but have just become ubiquitous by default. [Windows Notepad springs to mind -its minimally featured, you can't edit large files with it, yet everyone uses it at some point or other].
There are other packages (e.g. games) which take nowhere near 10 years to develop (Minesweeper is incredibly simple but is a great game and is virtually unchanged since Windows 3.0/1).
Nope, sorry. Moz has lots of nice features, but I think the KDE integrated browser (Konqueror) is streets ahead in terms of useability [I will concede IE5 is at least on level pegging with Konqueror].
Moz appears to be very unresponsive at times (on both Windows and Linux), and I hope the development team devote some effort to sorting this out.
Why post previous comment as an AC?
I prefer to use Linux in general but I'm perfectly happy to admit IE5+ is an excellent browser.
However, even if Netscape dies, I think Mozilla will go on. At present Moz appears to be nice and fairly well featured, but the downside is that it is slow and unresponsive running on either Linux and NT. I hope this is corrected by the time Moz gets to 1.0....
Just installed Mozilla (Linux and Win 0.92) a few days ago, and whilst I am impressed with the new features against Netscape 4.7x, I'm not impressed with the speed and responsiveness of it. Window redrawing and general GUI response appears to be excruciatingly slow.
I'm not exactly running on leading edge equipment (Linux K6-2 366, Windows K6-2 500) but both have adequate memory, and Konqueror (KDE) and KMail appear to have no such problems. I just hope it doesn't take Mozilla 7 years to get fast enough.
Nope, sorry KDE and esp KIllustrator is essentially a German production (the master development servers are hosted in Germany) and Dr Uwe Satler works at a German University (Magdeburg). It's only Adobe who are US owned and even they have registered offices in Germany, so US law dossn't apply (unfortunatley in this case, but they don't recognise software patents in Germany [yet] so it's not all bad)
I get a choice between CDE and olwm. Evil cruel Sun!
I can't stand either, dunno about you. Why not install KDE, Gnome or your favourite X Window environment of choice ?
I believe it's possible to compile KDE for a Solaris target, and you can even install it with just user privelages if you don't have root access. I'm sure the same must apply to other GUIs and Window Managers.
Personally, I'd like this year to be the year I become a Microsoft free zone, apart from perhaps a dual boot system to run games on. Up to now I have legally paid for (most of) the own MS software and contributed to their enormous revenues, but as Microsoft appears to becoming increasingly unfriendly to people like me who build my PCs up from components and change systems regularly. I started to change from MS to Linux about 3-4 years ago when I had the choice between paying a lot of money for NT Server or a free Linux installation. I am spending more and more time running Linux at both server asnd desktop as the quality of the desktop software improves. I'd say my major breakpoint will come when I can import, view/edit and export MSOffice files to KOffice [ I know StarOffice does this, but I don't like the package].
I wanted to compare Linux and KDE to Windows 2000 simply because both are modern operating systems, not some 5 year old jalopy [Ok, I grant the 5 year old jalopy is still used in a lot of places].
When I said I expected KDE and Linux to look as purty as Windows, that didn't mean to look Windows, merely to be as neat and offer similar levels of eye-candy, and to look as professional. Up until a copuple of years ago I would have said most X system displays look distinctly amateurish.
I'm a bit biased against StarOffice - I tried 5.0 and found I didn't like the interface and also found I didn't trust it to write Word documents. Maybe it's got better since then.
Last time I checked, Gnome and KDE were both bigger than an entire Windows 95 OSR2 installation.
I think a fairer comparison would be with a Windows 2000 installation, but its a fair cop that KDE is not a small installation anymore. Anyway my last RH7.1 installation of KDE came with KOffice and a true comparison would be to the total installation size of Windows 2K plus Office.
But what do you expect when everyone has been winging for several years about how poor Open Source desktops are in terms of quality and features when compared to Windows ?
Now KDE (and possibly Gnome) are getting close in terms of having large amounts of quality, decent software people are starting to winge about how bloated it is. My answer is to say "you know you've just saved several hundred dollars per PC by not installing MS Windows and Office ? Well spend $40-50 of those dollars on putting a 256MB DIMM in each PC".
For years we've been saying that Linux desktops need to look as purty as Windows and have the same volume of quality software (and crash less often than Windows). Well now we're very close to getting what we want you can hardly complain about the amount of memory/ disk space it eats.
Konqueror is slowly becoming my web browser of choice over Netscape and even IE [yes I know its an MS product, but IE is still a good browser]
(looking forward to when KOffice can reliably edit MS-Word documents so I can kill my last Microsoft PC)
If the European Union gets its own domain, what about other free trade zones, e.g. NAFTA and the equivalent Asian associations ? Surely they too would qualify for a TLD.
All you have to do if they fail to refund your money in the UK is to say "Do you really want a visit and fine from Trading Standards; if you don't give me a refund now." - Works every time for me.
If a product is not 'fit for purpose' (and that can include the fact that the game you've bought is buggy) you have a right to a refund which overrides any statement in a shop that they will not refund your money.
Actually despite using KDE, if this is a trademark violation complaint bought by Adobe I am on the side of Adobe. Unless it can be shown that Illustrator is too generic then there is little excuse for the author not to change the name. When they do change the name, PLEASE, PLEASE choose something without a K on the front -I'd just like my programs to have sensible names. Something like VectorDraw would be fine and is so generic that a trademark case would fall at the first hurdle.
However, in the UK you are able to bring unreasonable charges to the attention of professional bodies. A couple of grand for a single cease and desist letter sounds fairly unreasonable to me.
German law also sounds rather different from UK law in the sense that in the UK you cannot bring about a civil action unless you have 'standing' i.e. you are directly involved in the complaint. What this means is that unless the firm has authorisation to act on Adobe's behalf it wouldn't be allowed to persue this action.
..that at least appears close to making money. Almost everyone else in the technology market seems to have caught a cold, and in some cases it appears to be pneumonia.
Even if this profit is as a result of buying Cygnus, then at least the Linux side of the business is not a total black hole.
Ah well, $600K down, only $2.3bn to go till they catch up to Micrososfts quarterly figures
Perhaps there is a case for the US saying "We invented the internet, everyone on it is subject to our commercial laws, otherwise we'll shut down your connections!"
Yes there can be competition; several cases have been won in the EU courts concerning 'grey' imports (Levi Jeans IIRC) when importers buying goods from abroad find they can sell cheaper than the recognised importers. DVDs should be no different in this regard.
IP restrictions have little to do with this type of competition. Although the goods sold may be almost exactly the same [some US DVDs have better features than their EU counterparts], competition on price alone can be a good thing. We are meant to be a global economy; it should work in our favour for once.
Incidentally, I have no objections to copyright patents, et al. I think in the main they are a good thing, allowing inventors and artists to make a fair buck out of their efforts. I do have some quibbles over the length of copyright and certain types of patent (esp. S/W) though, since with copyright your descendants 4 times removed can still have copyright over your works (95 years, thanks to Disney). Copyright should last about 20-30 years, and software patents about 5-7 IMO.
Provide everyone with access to your computer with a separate login id and route all their http accesses through a proxy server (squid/ apache). That way you get logs of what is accessed without blocking anything...
I'm sure most of us view region encoding as anti-competitive, and indeed I have bought lots of region one DVDs to avoid UK DVD pricing, so what is the best way, as a UK citizen, to get our voice heard in this review ??
Incidentally, I would be interested to know what UK/ EU law has to say concerning fair use, DeCSS, obtaining or hacking your DVD player to be region free, and other DVD related issues. I know the Designs and Copyright Act 1988 may be relevant.
Slashdot Mirror
In the DVD world a number of modifications have been made to DVD firmware to make drives region free, including complete replacements for the firmware.
I think the end result of this is that a whole new range of firmware for CD and DVD drives is going to come out to overcome the Macrovision hack.
I don't think anyone has explained to the record industry that such hacks result in the RIAA paying Macrovision truck loads of money for an extremely short period of protection!
..if a boycott of international conferences held in the US can be organised, this will certainly attract political notice that the DMCA is asinine.
Ensuring that all conferences are held in some other country outside the "land of free speech" would certainly highlight that free speech is not so free anymore.
Simply explain to your father that he is wrong, at least on the evidence so far.
Skylarov wrote and broke Adobe's encryption in Russia, where it is legal to make personal backup copies of everything. In fact I believe it may even be illegal to prevent such copies being made, in which case Adobe may be breaking Russian law, where I presume they have registered offices and thus can be charged and their company directors arrested.
Unless Skylarov wrote his program in the US he has committed no US crime. US laws should not be be enforced on citizens of other countries unless such crimes are committed on US territory. [there are exceptions to this, but copyright laws shouldn't be one of them].
our economy was a lot healthier before we gave up England as our overlord
With all due respect, whilst a number of your countrymen have long wished to become a totally independent nation and remove the Queen as Head of State, you were partially pushed into giving up England as your overlord/ major trading partner when we joined the EU (or Common Market as it was then), which meant we started to buy all our agricultural products and most other goods from Europe.
In addition to the facts stated in the parent post, this case provides the perfect opportunity to show what is wrong with the DMCA. Up till now the RIAA and companies who like the DMCA have been able to carefully chose opponents who can be tarred with a piracy brush (e.g. Corley & 2600, DeCSS in general) and can therefore throw a lot of mud at the defendant in the hope that some sticks.
Felten is for the EFF a perfect case of why the DMCA is a bad law and if they can get it ruled unconstitutional then Skylarov and Corley in effect receive a 'Get out of jail free' card.
why bother writing a game for linux in the first place. Who would buy it?
There is an increasing number of Linux users out there who are willing to pay for games. Loki seems to be making money out of porting games, and whilst I grant you the market ain't as big as the Windows games market, there is a market. Unix is a growing games market, whereas Windows is a very crowded market where only the best 1 or 2 percent succeed.
A professional windows programmer such as myself will never touch Linux
Why not? Quake and Doom were developed in a Unix environment first, and many games companies use Unix (incl. Linux) workstations for graphics development. If you are going to be a serious games programmer you had better get rid of your misconceptions fast. You should use whatever platform offers the best tools and in some cases those tools are Unix only
The simple fact is that a lot of games programming still requires low level programming in places, and a nice friendly GUI environment isn't always the solution.
And forget the GPL -- that will kill any hope of money
The GPL doesn't kill any hope of money since you don't have to make GPL games on a Linux system. You can make a game using your own libraries and/or libraries which are LGPL'ed) and still keep your source code private if you insist.
Personally I think it would be a good thing if games developers to open source their code after a couple of years so that games which became abandonware could be supported by others.
no chance of making a buck
There's a hell of a lot of contract software engineers who have no trouble taking home $150000+ per year working on Unix systems.
Don't loose sight of what people use computers for -- doing things, not messing with etc directories.
Which is why software which requires stability is run on Unix systems (old joke - I'll grant NT is getting better; I work on both).
[OK the previous message is from a baby troll who hasn't grown up beyond AC posts, but I couldn't resist]
The word "good" in the authors article is a very imprecise word. Does good software have lots of features, is it free of bugs, or is it an innovative 'I never knew I needed it till I saw it' type of package.
Software need only fall into one or possibly two of the above categories in order to reach the accolade of 'good'. There are even packages in use today that are in mainstream use that are not necessarily good but have just become ubiquitous by default. [Windows Notepad springs to mind -its minimally featured, you can't edit large files with it, yet everyone uses it at some point or other].
There are other packages (e.g. games) which take nowhere near 10 years to develop (Minesweeper is incredibly simple but is a great game and is virtually unchanged since Windows 3.0/1).
Nope, sorry. Moz has lots of nice features, but I think the KDE integrated browser (Konqueror) is streets ahead in terms of useability [I will concede IE5 is at least on level pegging with Konqueror].
Moz appears to be very unresponsive at times (on both Windows and Linux), and I hope the development team devote some effort to sorting this out.
Why post previous comment as an AC?
I prefer to use Linux in general but I'm perfectly happy to admit IE5+ is an excellent browser.
However, even if Netscape dies, I think Mozilla will go on. At present Moz appears to be nice and fairly well featured, but the downside is that it is slow and unresponsive running on either Linux and NT. I hope this is corrected by the time Moz gets to 1.0....
Just installed Mozilla (Linux and Win 0.92) a few days ago, and whilst I am impressed with the new features against Netscape 4.7x, I'm not impressed with the speed and responsiveness of it. Window redrawing and general GUI response appears to be excruciatingly slow.
I'm not exactly running on leading edge equipment (Linux K6-2 366, Windows K6-2 500) but both have adequate memory, and Konqueror (KDE) and KMail appear to have no such problems. I just hope it doesn't take Mozilla 7 years to get fast enough.
Nope, sorry KDE and esp KIllustrator is essentially a German production (the master development servers are hosted in Germany) and Dr Uwe Satler works at a German University (Magdeburg). It's only Adobe who are US owned and even they have registered offices in Germany, so US law dossn't apply (unfortunatley in this case, but they don't recognise software patents in Germany [yet] so it's not all bad)
Isn't it ironic, don't you think ? .dot com and use the shares in the john
You've bought a
With apologies to A. Morrisette
..they're not going to be watching the Superbowl on it then (or are they) ?
I get a choice between CDE and olwm. Evil cruel Sun!
I can't stand either, dunno about you. Why not install KDE, Gnome or your favourite X Window environment of choice ?
I believe it's possible to compile KDE for a Solaris target, and you can even install it with just user privelages if you don't have root access. I'm sure the same must apply to other GUIs and Window Managers.
Personally, I'd like this year to be the year I become a Microsoft free zone, apart from perhaps a dual boot system to run games on. Up to now I have legally paid for (most of) the own MS software and contributed to their enormous revenues, but as Microsoft appears to becoming increasingly unfriendly to people like me who build my PCs up from components and change systems regularly. I started to change from MS to Linux about 3-4 years ago when I had the choice between paying a lot of money for NT Server or a free Linux installation. I am spending more and more time running Linux at both server asnd desktop as the quality of the desktop software improves. I'd say my major breakpoint will come when I can import, view/edit and export MSOffice files to KOffice [ I know StarOffice does this, but I don't like the package].
I wanted to compare Linux and KDE to Windows 2000 simply because both are modern operating systems, not some 5 year old jalopy [Ok, I grant the 5 year old jalopy is still used in a lot of places].
When I said I expected KDE and Linux to look as purty as Windows, that didn't mean to look Windows, merely to be as neat and offer similar levels of eye-candy, and to look as professional. Up until a copuple of years ago I would have said most X system displays look distinctly amateurish.
I'm a bit biased against StarOffice - I tried 5.0 and found I didn't like the interface and also found I didn't trust it to write Word documents. Maybe it's got better since then.
Last time I checked, Gnome and KDE were both bigger than an entire Windows 95 OSR2 installation.
I think a fairer comparison would be with a Windows 2000 installation, but its a fair cop that KDE is not a small installation anymore. Anyway my last RH7.1 installation of KDE came with KOffice and a true comparison would be to the total installation size of Windows 2K plus Office.
But what do you expect when everyone has been winging for several years about how poor Open Source desktops are in terms of quality and features when compared to Windows ?
Now KDE (and possibly Gnome) are getting close in terms of having large amounts of quality, decent software people are starting to winge about how bloated it is. My answer is to say "you know you've just saved several hundred dollars per PC by not installing MS Windows and Office ? Well spend $40-50 of those dollars on putting a 256MB DIMM in each PC".
For years we've been saying that Linux desktops need to look as purty as Windows and have the same volume of quality software (and crash less often than Windows). Well now we're very close to getting what we want you can hardly complain about the amount of memory/ disk space it eats.
Konqueror is slowly becoming my web browser of choice over Netscape and even IE [yes I know its an MS product, but IE is still a good browser]
(looking forward to when KOffice can reliably edit MS-Word documents so I can kill my last Microsoft PC)
If the European Union gets its own domain, what about other free trade zones, e.g. NAFTA and the equivalent Asian associations ? Surely they too would qualify for a TLD.
Soyuz has a limited lifetime on orbit.....
If the Russians found the money to resurrect Buran, would this do the job ??
All you have to do if they fail to refund your money in the UK is to say "Do you really want a visit and fine from Trading Standards; if you don't give me a refund now." - Works every time for me.
If a product is not 'fit for purpose' (and that can include the fact that the game you've bought is buggy) you have a right to a refund which overrides any statement in a shop that they will not refund your money.
Actually despite using KDE, if this is a trademark violation complaint bought by Adobe I am on the side of Adobe. Unless it can be shown that Illustrator is too generic then there is little excuse for the author not to change the name. When they do change the name, PLEASE, PLEASE choose something without a K on the front -I'd just like my programs to have sensible names. Something like VectorDraw would be fine and is so generic that a trademark case would fall at the first hurdle.
However, in the UK you are able to bring unreasonable charges to the attention of professional bodies. A couple of grand for a single cease and desist letter sounds fairly unreasonable to me.
German law also sounds rather different from UK law in the sense that in the UK you cannot bring about a civil action unless you have 'standing' i.e. you are directly involved in the complaint. What this means is that unless the firm has authorisation to act on Adobe's behalf it wouldn't be allowed to persue this action.
..that at least appears close to making money. Almost everyone else in the technology market seems to have caught a cold, and in some cases it appears to be pneumonia.
Even if this profit is as a result of buying Cygnus, then at least the Linux side of the business is not a total black hole.
Ah well, $600K down, only $2.3bn to go till they catch up to Micrososfts quarterly figures
Perhaps there is a case for the US saying "We invented the internet, everyone on it is subject to our commercial laws, otherwise we'll shut down your connections!"
Then wait for the howls of outrage!!
Yes there can be competition; several cases have been won in the EU courts concerning 'grey' imports (Levi Jeans IIRC) when importers buying goods from abroad find they can sell cheaper than the recognised importers. DVDs should be no different in this regard.
IP restrictions have little to do with this type of competition. Although the goods sold may be almost exactly the same [some US DVDs have better features than their EU counterparts], competition on price alone can be a good thing. We are meant to be a global economy; it should work in our favour for once.
Incidentally, I have no objections to copyright patents, et al. I think in the main they are a good thing, allowing inventors and artists to make a fair buck out of their efforts. I do have some quibbles over the length of copyright and certain types of patent (esp. S/W) though, since with copyright your descendants 4 times removed can still have copyright over your works (95 years, thanks to Disney). Copyright should last about 20-30 years, and software patents about 5-7 IMO.
Provide everyone with access to your computer with a separate login id and route all their http accesses through a proxy server (squid/ apache). That way you get logs of what is accessed without blocking anything...
I'm sure most of us view region encoding as anti-competitive, and indeed I have bought lots of region one DVDs to avoid UK DVD pricing, so what is the best way, as a UK citizen, to get our voice heard in this review ??
Incidentally, I would be interested to know what UK/ EU law has to say concerning fair use, DeCSS, obtaining or hacking your DVD player to be region free, and other DVD related issues. I know the Designs and Copyright Act 1988 may be relevant.