There is no such thing as "Intellectual property," and the term is used primarily to confuse people like you into thinking the way you are. Copyrights are not patents. Copyright is automatic, patents can be challenged and found invalid. You get copyright on anything you create. Most things aren't patentable. When you group these very distinct concepts under "IP" you fool yourself into making statements like the one you just made.
Either way, both sets of rules include provisions for limited length of rights. Essentially, even when you have a copyright or a patent you don't have any "property", after a period of time you loose those rights.
you get more control over your apps when you compile stuff from scratch..
I agree, but what percentage of your stuff did you actually configure differently from the default? I don't use an rpm based distribution, so I don't know how hard it is there, but with Debian I can install all the basic stuff from binaries, and then the few programs that I want to change the options for I can 'apt-get source', change the options and build the package. With all the development tools and libraries I have on my system, I don't even want to thing about how long it would take me to compile everything. Especially if I had to recompile each time I upgraded.
Anyway, like I said. I don't care it you want to assemble your software by hand, but if it's going to piss you off so much that you're going to complain about it on slashdot, then why are you doing it? (My guess it that the original poster just wanted to tell everybody how 'leet he was for using gentoo.)
Well, I don't know about it costing less then $1.00 to produce an album, but I agree that $20 is rediculous.
I haven't bought a CD from an RIAA member company since 1998. It wasn't so bad for a while, because there was an excelent independant radio station in my area (WAAF, Boston), but just over a year ago they sold the station and have been playing crap ever since*. I was pissed for a while, but I soon found that there are lots of good bands around that you and a friend can go and see play over a few beers for less then the cost of one ticket (or CD) to some "major" rock group, and the music is as good or better. The best part is, when you buy their CD you're handing cash to the artist (usually literally), not to a glorified lobying group that is trying to take away your rights.
If you don't live in an area with a good local music scene you can still find almost all of these bands on the internet. Download their songs, if you like them buy the CD, and you can go back to loving music again.
* If I turn on the radio and flip to AAF nowadays there's like a 10% chance that they'll be playing "Rooster" by Alice In Chains, a 20% chance that it'll be something by the Beastie Boys, and a 50% chance it'll be a commercial. They never play anything that's not on the 30 song long playlist on their website. I don't understand why they still have listeners.
Rather than the key, you have the challenge which the software used on that invocation.
And the response. If you're implying that this device is nothing more then a challenge/response hardware dongle then the protetction has effectively been already broken and this device is useless. You're right, why not just ship a dongle?
The article implied that the data would be useless without the original CD. That is not true unless that data is encrypted in some way. If they want this product to have any benifit at all it better be more then just a dongle, or people can blit the data off the disk, tweak a few instructions, and have a working program.
No matter wether it works how you described or how I described or a combination of the two, it's essentially useless for protection.
I thnk the point is moot. Nobody is going to buy this technology and require their customers to have an extra CD-ROM drive to use their software.
Its not the installing that takes time, its the downloading...at least for dialup users.
I realize that my comment was quite flamesque...
You built X, right? I'm sure that took orders of magnitude longer to build then it did to download.
While I suppose I could download my cycles to charity, I choose to sqander them recklessly on optimizing my system. I'm a horrible person aren't I? I must be wasting tens of ones of dollars worth of cycles that could have been used on something else.
Donating cycles and wasting power are just stupid. I thought that perhaps you might want to spend some time actually using your machine. You know, like doing work or something. If you've built your entire software base from source, I can't amagine that you didn't waste at least a whole day doing it. What did you actually "tune" anyway? How much of your software did you build with non standard options? Compiler optimizations? You can get binary distribution of those too. If you claim that you really do this for some productivity benifit you're either lying, or grossly uninformed. If you do it for fun, then more power to you, but why are you complaining on slashdot about how long it took?
Then again, who am I to talk? I'm wasting time posting this stupid comment instead of working...
If that's the case, then this is truly dumb, and these people have not done anything at all. The impression that I got from reading the company's web site was that the data on the disk was somehow "unreadable" withouth the original. If they didn't encrypt the data then why did they bother with this at all? Did they do ANY research at all into why other forms of copy protetction are ineffective?
Another thing I wonder is how they power this device.
Maybe you should try out these new-fangled pre-compiled binaries. You see, somebody with a faster computer then you compiles the program before you download it so that everybody that wants the software doesn't have to waste time doing what only really needs to be done once.
Having the ability to build a program yourself is nice, and comes in handy occationally, but if you compile everything yourself you're just wasting cycles.
I doubt it. Nobody goes after all the people who distribute Safedisc 2 circumvention software.
Re:I bet $20...
on
CD Copy Stopper
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Try an hour. This uses standard readers. Spoof a ligitamate read and you've got the key. Sniff the IDE bus and you've got the key. The decryption algorithm has to be unencrypted and easily disassembleable on the disk for this to work in a standard reader.
These are enhancements to the standards and the renderer, not enhancements to the browser. As you said, these features "put today's tools far ahead of the late 90's models when it comes to producing and updating web content", they do not noticibly change the user's experience.
That's the thing. Innovations that haven't happened haven't hapened. We don't know what they would have been, because the browser market stagnated when IE4 was included in windows 98, and nothing significant has happend to browsers since. Let's face it, IE6 is essentially the same piece of software as IE4. The only thing that has changed from a "browser" perspective is the renderer. Had microsoft been forced to compete with another dominant player, both sides would have been forced to come up with new and interesting things for the browser to do in order to stand out. We're just now getting to a point where some other browsers are catching up to IE in functionality and innovation is starting again, but we lost almost four years of potential progress. What are the innovations that would have been here by now? We don't know; they never came to be because they were "hobbled".
See, I really did mean what I said as an actual response:)
That's a very good point, however, if you're at all interested in the future of Linux I suggest that you give them the benefit of the doubt and buy it even if you want it only a *little*.
I do have an interest in linux's future, but linux on MY desktop already does eveything I want it to, and games are unimportant in the markets where I would hope to benifit from linux through my job. The linux I am looking for has a bright future already.
2. There is only One true Immortal Sovereign, and I'm not going to buy a game that pretennds to put anything in His place!:)
If you mean what I think you mean, then I feel sorry for you having an inability to accept some fantasy into your life. If your beliefs are strong enough you should be able to use your imagination without fear of betraying them. Video games aren't real.
I believe it is utterly crucial that we keep chinking away at Microsoft's market share.
At who's benifit? Taking market share away from Microsoft just because you are opposed to them or what they do isn't a good enough reason in itself to convince other people to join you. There has to be a clear benifit to the user, which leads to my next point:
If people don't switch to Linux, Microsoft will rule the computer industry with an iron fist for decades to come
Linux is not the only other choice, nor is it necissarily the best choice in all situations.
And my understanding is that even with Palladium there isn't really plan to do away with general purpose hardware. If you run an untrusted OS, it will behave precisely like general purpose hardware (with the Palladium chip disabled). Which means that you'll be able to do everything you want -- except of course run DRM systems that require the use of the Palladium chip.
Exactly. Every consumer has a breaking point. My hope is that this new "feature" will be the thing that pushes most users over the edge and gets them to stop buying. Even better would be for this to show up in the revenue numbers BEFORE somebody cracks the protection, so they can't blame "piracy" for the losses. Unfortunatly, given the security track record of the players involved this won't happen. My prediction is that keys will get leaked in the first 6 months of Palladium's existance because Microsoft won't have the ability to sign all then necissary apps themselves in a timely manner. They'll probably release signing keys to certain partners similarly to how the DVD-CCA released their encoding keys. It will only be a short matter of time before a disgruntled employee or a clueless developer lets it slip. After that will be a new legal push for mandated closed hardware.
Either way it's only a matter of time before the 'IAA's in the entertainment industry digitally protect themselves out of the equation. The less they allow the consumer to do the less they take in in revenue. At some point their revenue will have to become politically insignificant.
I was listening to the local NPR news station this morning, and heard back to back reports from the BBC and from NPR in Washington DC. They both reported the same story about a group of Iraqi reformists in Berlin that took over an embasy. The BBC said that they had planned a peaceful, temporary protest to encourage a change in government in Iraq, but had killed two people and injured four others in the process. Far from peaceful. The NPR report conviniently left out that two people had been killed and described it as a peaceful event.
Even public news broadcasts in the US show bias. Depressing.
Games are the only thing I use windows for. See my e-mail address for why I use linux for work.:)
Get rid of Windows, and there's one less licensing/IP rights nightmare you have to deal with.
I can see how this would be attractive to some people, but the majority of software users and game players don't even look at the licence agreement if they are aware of it's existance. This is not a factor for your average gamer.
Competition is always good for the customer. Even if there are no operating systems left but Linux (yeah, whatever), as long as it is open, there will always be competition (branches).
Compitition doesn't always seem good to the custome though. If all the customer does is play games, and all competition provides is the need to reboot to play some of those games, then what has the user gained through competition?
Cost. Linux is free as in beer. Sure it may take more time to set up (may not) but that is time that I wouldn't be making money anyways.
Again if we talk about the average user, the cash cow of the gaming industry, windows came for "free" with the computer. This is a non-incentive.
The PC gaming market developed when users had a PC for other reasons already. The linux market may need to develop the same way: Gaming companies will develop for linux when users have linux already. You are correct, I would like to see a good answer to the question, but I don't think there is an answer that is valid *right now*, and is good enough to convince companies to invest in linux games.
General purpose components (processors, memory, storage) without DRM enforcement will be readily available until it is governmentally mandated otherwise, and at that point open hardware without DRM would be illegal. This discussion leads to a dead end.
Will Linux users buy these games and support the company?
I don't know about you, but I only buy games if I want to play them. I'm certainly not going to buy a game to "support the community." If I wanted to support the commuinty I'd do just that, and not support transgaming instead.
Most games flop. Hell, most software flops. If there are only a handful of games for linux then the chances are high that they'll all flop - especially if they're older titles that people already bought for windows if they wanted to play them. Linux games have an uphill battle to begin with, because gamers already have windows and they don't want to reboot for one game. Basically ports will never bring success to the linux gaming market, only original games will bring gamers over to linux because linux users (like me, and lots of people I know) will still buy the windows version of the game if it's out first or at all.
The way to a successful linux gaming market doesn't come from a show of confidence from the users. The developers are the ones that have to commit and bring good games to the platform. If they don't, then maybe it's not worth it. Does it really matter if gamers don't use linux? Is there even any benifit to playing games on linux instead of windows?
Java is not an appropriate introductory language. There are basic concepts you should learn before you start to use java. You should learn to use simple data structures, and learn procedural programming and design before you get confused by the syntax of object orientation. You should be learning how the computer works at a low level before you are expected to understand high level concepts and where it is apropriate to use them. If you start the students out with java, which may seem simple to people who already know how to design programs, the students won't understand why and why not to do certain things. They will be forced to learn through trial and error what they should have been taught to begin with.
Instead of putting your effort into helping people who have never programmed before to use java, spend your time convincing the school that the first two semesters should be basic programming with some C and some assembler (not as classes that teach the languages, but using the languages as necissary tools to demonstrate the concepts. In early courses, syntax should only be taught when it is necissary to implement a concept), and a data structures class where C pointers and structures should be introduced moving on to java towards the end. Guaranteed, after the students learn basic concepts well, they'll have no trouble picking up java. They'll also write better code for their entire career.
Slashdot Mirror
and can be held responsible from the patent publication date, not from the date he is notified of infringement.
You con't be held responsible for a period of time before your infringement started.
Intellectual property is intellectual property
There is no such thing as "Intellectual property," and the term is used primarily to confuse people like you into thinking the way you are. Copyrights are not patents. Copyright is automatic, patents can be challenged and found invalid. You get copyright on anything you create. Most things aren't patentable. When you group these very distinct concepts under "IP" you fool yourself into making statements like the one you just made.
Either way, both sets of rules include provisions for limited length of rights. Essentially, even when you have a copyright or a patent you don't have any "property", after a period of time you loose those rights.
you get more control over your apps when you compile stuff from scratch..
I agree, but what percentage of your stuff did you actually configure differently from the default? I don't use an rpm based distribution, so I don't know how hard it is there, but with Debian I can install all the basic stuff from binaries, and then the few programs that I want to change the options for I can 'apt-get source', change the options and build the package. With all the development tools and libraries I have on my system, I don't even want to thing about how long it would take me to compile everything. Especially if I had to recompile each time I upgraded.
Anyway, like I said. I don't care it you want to assemble your software by hand, but if it's going to piss you off so much that you're going to complain about it on slashdot, then why are you doing it? (My guess it that the original poster just wanted to tell everybody how 'leet he was for using gentoo.)
Well, I don't know about it costing less then $1.00 to produce an album, but I agree that $20 is rediculous.
I haven't bought a CD from an RIAA member company since 1998. It wasn't so bad for a while, because there was an excelent independant radio station in my area (WAAF, Boston), but just over a year ago they sold the station and have been playing crap ever since*. I was pissed for a while, but I soon found that there are lots of good bands around that you and a friend can go and see play over a few beers for less then the cost of one ticket (or CD) to some "major" rock group, and the music is as good or better. The best part is, when you buy their CD you're handing cash to the artist (usually literally), not to a glorified lobying group that is trying to take away your rights.
If you don't live in an area with a good local music scene you can still find almost all of these bands on the internet. Download their songs, if you like them buy the CD, and you can go back to loving music again.
* If I turn on the radio and flip to AAF nowadays there's like a 10% chance that they'll be playing "Rooster" by Alice In Chains, a 20% chance that it'll be something by the Beastie Boys, and a 50% chance it'll be a commercial. They never play anything that's not on the 30 song long playlist on their website. I don't understand why they still have listeners.
how many technical people do you know that are good at thinking on their feet?
All the good ones....
If it helps, Apple makes the least expensive consumer machines available if you consider resale value when you buy.
Rather than the key, you have the challenge which the software used on that invocation.
And the response. If you're implying that this device is nothing more then a challenge/response hardware dongle then the protetction has effectively been already broken and this device is useless. You're right, why not just ship a dongle?
The article implied that the data would be useless without the original CD. That is not true unless that data is encrypted in some way. If they want this product to have any benifit at all it better be more then just a dongle, or people can blit the data off the disk, tweak a few instructions, and have a working program.
No matter wether it works how you described or how I described or a combination of the two, it's essentially useless for protection.
I thnk the point is moot. Nobody is going to buy this technology and require their customers to have an extra CD-ROM drive to use their software.
Its not the installing that takes time, its the downloading...at least for dialup users.
I realize that my comment was quite flamesque...
You built X, right? I'm sure that took orders of magnitude longer to build then it did to download.
While I suppose I could download my cycles to charity, I choose to sqander them recklessly on optimizing my system. I'm a horrible person aren't I? I must be wasting tens of ones of dollars worth of cycles that could have been used on something else.
Donating cycles and wasting power are just stupid. I thought that perhaps you might want to spend some time actually using your machine. You know, like doing work or something. If you've built your entire software base from source, I can't amagine that you didn't waste at least a whole day doing it. What did you actually "tune" anyway? How much of your software did you build with non standard options? Compiler optimizations? You can get binary distribution of those too. If you claim that you really do this for some productivity benifit you're either lying, or grossly uninformed. If you do it for fun, then more power to you, but why are you complaining on slashdot about how long it took?
Then again, who am I to talk? I'm wasting time posting this stupid comment instead of working...
If that's the case, then this is truly dumb, and these people have not done anything at all. The impression that I got from reading the company's web site was that the data on the disk was somehow "unreadable" withouth the original. If they didn't encrypt the data then why did they bother with this at all? Did they do ANY research at all into why other forms of copy protetction are ineffective?
Another thing I wonder is how they power this device.
Maybe you should try out these new-fangled pre-compiled binaries. You see, somebody with a faster computer then you compiles the program before you download it so that everybody that wants the software doesn't have to waste time doing what only really needs to be done once.
Having the ability to build a program yourself is nice, and comes in handy occationally, but if you compile everything yourself you're just wasting cycles.
I doubt it. Nobody goes after all the people who distribute Safedisc 2 circumvention software.
Try an hour. This uses standard readers. Spoof a ligitamate read and you've got the key. Sniff the IDE bus and you've got the key. The decryption algorithm has to be unencrypted and easily disassembleable on the disk for this to work in a standard reader.
Don't invest in this company.
These are enhancements to the standards and the renderer, not enhancements to the browser. As you said, these features "put today's tools far ahead of the late 90's models when it comes to producing and updating web content", they do not noticibly change the user's experience.
That's the thing. Innovations that haven't happened haven't hapened. We don't know what they would have been, because the browser market stagnated when IE4 was included in windows 98, and nothing significant has happend to browsers since. Let's face it, IE6 is essentially the same piece of software as IE4. The only thing that has changed from a "browser" perspective is the renderer. Had microsoft been forced to compete with another dominant player, both sides would have been forced to come up with new and interesting things for the browser to do in order to stand out. We're just now getting to a point where some other browsers are catching up to IE in functionality and innovation is starting again, but we lost almost four years of potential progress. What are the innovations that would have been here by now? We don't know; they never came to be because they were "hobbled".
:)
See, I really did mean what I said as an actual response
Which innovations? And how have they hobbled them?
I wish I thought you were joking. Read your comment. It is the answer to your questions.
That's a very good point, however, if you're at all interested in the future of Linux I suggest that you give them the benefit of the doubt and buy it even if you want it only a *little*.
:)
I do have an interest in linux's future, but linux on MY desktop already does eveything I want it to, and games are unimportant in the markets where I would hope to benifit from linux through my job. The linux I am looking for has a bright future already.
2. There is only One true Immortal Sovereign, and I'm not going to buy a game that pretennds to put anything in His place!
If you mean what I think you mean, then I feel sorry for you having an inability to accept some fantasy into your life. If your beliefs are strong enough you should be able to use your imagination without fear of betraying them. Video games aren't real.
I believe it is utterly crucial that we keep chinking away at Microsoft's market share.
At who's benifit? Taking market share away from Microsoft just because you are opposed to them or what they do isn't a good enough reason in itself to convince other people to join you. There has to be a clear benifit to the user, which leads to my next point:
If people don't switch to Linux, Microsoft will rule the computer industry with an iron fist for decades to come
Linux is not the only other choice, nor is it necissarily the best choice in all situations.
And my understanding is that even with Palladium there isn't really plan to do away with general purpose hardware. If you run an untrusted OS, it will behave precisely like general purpose hardware (with the Palladium chip disabled). Which means that you'll be able to do everything you want -- except of course run DRM systems that require the use of the Palladium chip.
Exactly. Every consumer has a breaking point. My hope is that this new "feature" will be the thing that pushes most users over the edge and gets them to stop buying. Even better would be for this to show up in the revenue numbers BEFORE somebody cracks the protection, so they can't blame "piracy" for the losses. Unfortunatly, given the security track record of the players involved this won't happen. My prediction is that keys will get leaked in the first 6 months of Palladium's existance because Microsoft won't have the ability to sign all then necissary apps themselves in a timely manner. They'll probably release signing keys to certain partners similarly to how the DVD-CCA released their encoding keys. It will only be a short matter of time before a disgruntled employee or a clueless developer lets it slip. After that will be a new legal push for mandated closed hardware.
Either way it's only a matter of time before the 'IAA's in the entertainment industry digitally protect themselves out of the equation. The less they allow the consumer to do the less they take in in revenue. At some point their revenue will have to become politically insignificant.
I was listening to the local NPR news station this morning, and heard back to back reports from the BBC and from NPR in Washington DC. They both reported the same story about a group of Iraqi reformists in Berlin that took over an embasy. The BBC said that they had planned a peaceful, temporary protest to encourage a change in government in Iraq, but had killed two people and injured four others in the process. Far from peaceful. The NPR report conviniently left out that two people had been killed and described it as a peaceful event.
Even public news broadcasts in the US show bias. Depressing.
Games are the only thing I use windows for. See my e-mail address for why I use linux for work. :)
Get rid of Windows, and there's one less licensing/IP rights nightmare you have to deal with.
I can see how this would be attractive to some people, but the majority of software users and game players don't even look at the licence agreement if they are aware of it's existance. This is not a factor for your average gamer.
Competition is always good for the customer. Even if there are no operating systems left but Linux (yeah, whatever), as long as it is open, there will always be competition (branches).
Compitition doesn't always seem good to the custome though. If all the customer does is play games, and all competition provides is the need to reboot to play some of those games, then what has the user gained through competition?
Cost. Linux is free as in beer. Sure it may take more time to set up (may not) but that is time that I wouldn't be making money anyways.
Again if we talk about the average user, the cash cow of the gaming industry, windows came for "free" with the computer. This is a non-incentive.
The PC gaming market developed when users had a PC for other reasons already. The linux market may need to develop the same way: Gaming companies will develop for linux when users have linux already. You are correct, I would like to see a good answer to the question, but I don't think there is an answer that is valid *right now*, and is good enough to convince companies to invest in linux games.
I don't understand why you went on this tangent. What does what you said have to do with what I said?
General purpose components (processors, memory, storage) without DRM enforcement will be readily available until it is governmentally mandated otherwise, and at that point open hardware without DRM would be illegal. This discussion leads to a dead end.
Will Linux users buy these games and support the company?
I don't know about you, but I only buy games if I want to play them. I'm certainly not going to buy a game to "support the community." If I wanted to support the commuinty I'd do just that, and not support transgaming instead.
Most games flop. Hell, most software flops. If there are only a handful of games for linux then the chances are high that they'll all flop - especially if they're older titles that people already bought for windows if they wanted to play them. Linux games have an uphill battle to begin with, because gamers already have windows and they don't want to reboot for one game. Basically ports will never bring success to the linux gaming market, only original games will bring gamers over to linux because linux users (like me, and lots of people I know) will still buy the windows version of the game if it's out first or at all.
The way to a successful linux gaming market doesn't come from a show of confidence from the users. The developers are the ones that have to commit and bring good games to the platform. If they don't, then maybe it's not worth it. Does it really matter if gamers don't use linux? Is there even any benifit to playing games on linux instead of windows?
Java is not an appropriate introductory language. There are basic concepts you should learn before you start to use java. You should learn to use simple data structures, and learn procedural programming and design before you get confused by the syntax of object orientation. You should be learning how the computer works at a low level before you are expected to understand high level concepts and where it is apropriate to use them. If you start the students out with java, which may seem simple to people who already know how to design programs, the students won't understand why and why not to do certain things. They will be forced to learn through trial and error what they should have been taught to begin with.
Instead of putting your effort into helping people who have never programmed before to use java, spend your time convincing the school that the first two semesters should be basic programming with some C and some assembler (not as classes that teach the languages, but using the languages as necissary tools to demonstrate the concepts. In early courses, syntax should only be taught when it is necissary to implement a concept), and a data structures class where C pointers and structures should be introduced moving on to java towards the end. Guaranteed, after the students learn basic concepts well, they'll have no trouble picking up java. They'll also write better code for their entire career.
I built my computer myself, and I don't have a machine that came with a Windows 2000 license. I got my Windows 98 license cheap when I was in school.
Head spins...
They meant to say "Netware Client for MacOS", and not the other way around...