That's the first reason it's different. There are quite a few more. It's smart to read the patent and the included description of prior art before speaking.
Four years ago (4.5, given a bit of lead time for them to come up with the idea, implement it, fill out the paperwork and stuff) the details of this were absolutely unheard of.
Everyone seems to LOVE pretending it's a patent on something that has existed forever. If the patent were filed TODAY, you would be right. It wasn't. It was filed just over 4 years ago, when the digital music industry didn't exist!
Please, use some sense. Unless you can name prior art that meets all the restrictions described in the patent claims (not the overview, the actual claims, then it is not an obvious patent.)
I bet you can't.
Cyberfox!
p.s. PeelBoy, your post was picked at random. There are a few dozen equivelantly un-thinking posts like it, so don't think I'm singling you out.
It's plausible (to extend your question to a reasonable level) that a more general purpose device (PDA + MP3 player) could be considered a different enough device that it would not be subject to the claims. If a PDA shipped with an MP3 player and software to connect and get MP3's from the net or your computer, then it might have to be fought in the courts.
If it were an aftermarket application, then the device wasn't 'designed' to do this, and therefore most likely wouldn't qualify.
To answer your original question, however, I believe it could be reasonable argued that the primary purpose of the unit was the specialized playback of digitized audio obtained over the Internet or from your home computer.
Thus it would be subject to the patent licensing claims. This is why a general purpose PDA which had an aftermarket MP3 player would not fall under those claims. It's primary purpose is not digital audio playback, although it's capable of it coincidentally.
This would all very likely get fought out in the courts, though.
The primary point I was making is that given the specific nature of the product, I believe there is no prior art, despite people saying extremely ignorant things about their Macintoshes, Commodore 64s, and laptops being prior art.
Uhhh... If you read the actual text of the patent, you'd see where they reference MiniDisc, and explain why their part is different.
This isn't a bogus patent. They ARE specialized, they ARE different, and they DID come up with something new. Now the only question is whether it falls into the Comptons argument: Patent protection would cause more harm to a new industry than the lack of patent protection will cause to the company in question. At least that's my guess.
I did not see a particular section that covered 'or software implementing this process', so the answer is no, a general purpose portable computer implementing the same functionality would not be covered under the patent.
The Rio I have in front of me has: A keypad (same as in the patent). A interface (similar to the modem in the patent) to my computer. A LCD display (similar to what is described in the patent).
The portions that the current crop of portable digital audio players don't match are more in LACK than in inclusion. These include recording (although that's changing), ordering content directly, and the inclusion of a more-than-PC communication system. Subsetting a patented device is not immunity from the patent. It just means you'll probably have to fight in court.
I've read their patent (yes it was granted, come on people do your research), I've read their press release, and I will preface this with IANAL, as always.
This patent (5914941) seems reasonable.
If you honestly think you know of prior art for a specialized audio playback device integrating a hard drive or solid state memory with a dedicated interface to be able to obtain music from the Internet or a personal computer that dates before 1995, I'd love to hear about it.
No, your Powerbook with a music player doesn't count. It's not a specialized audio playback device. No, your Minidisc doesn't count, it doesn't have the interface, and it doesn't have a hard drive or solid state memory.
OBVIOUSLY your Amiga with a network card, and playing MOD files doesn't count, it's not specialized *AND* it's not portable.
Listen up. These people came up with something original in 1995. It's obvious to us now, but it wasn't obvious that all these pieces could work together back then. They thought of it, they produced a working model (yes, they did, check out their site), and they patented it.
I don't like it, and I think there is POTENTIAL for it to be partially broken based on non-specific algorithms. However, MPEG1 Layers 1, 2, *AND* 3 are all mentioned in their patent, and they even say that Layer 3 is preferrable.
It's also worth looking at their current professional associations. Creative Labs *AND* Diamond both have notable relationships with these people, which means that both of them probably are aware of this, and are probably willing to work with them.
I agree that many patents suck, and I hope to heck that this goes the way of the Comptons patent.
Cut audiohighway some slack, though. They DID innovate, they AREN'T patenting the action of breathing, or the letter 'e' or the wheel or anything obvious. It's obvious to you and I *NOW*, but it in 1995 the idea that there would be a market for a dedicated device like what we now see as the Rio was NOVEL. When the Rio was RELEASED even, the majority of people weren't sure if there was a market for it. We now know better, but look how long it took?
These people guessed right, they produced hardware, they described it, and they applied for a patent.
I keep seeing people talking about the 'natural progression of technology'. If you see something that others DON'T see, whether it's the natural progression of technology or not, make it, patent it, and build a damn business around it. The biggest wins are almost ALWAYS people who predicted the growth right, and got there first. I sure as hell don't begrudge them THAT.
In closing, I'll repeat: if you honestly think you know of a specialized audio playback device integrating a hard drive or solid state memory with a dedicated interface to be able to obtain music from either the Internet or a personal computer that dates before 1995, please post it!
I don't think it exists, and if you let go the knee-jerk reaction (same as I had!), I'll bet you think it doesn't either.
Cyberfox!
p.s. Few people will be happier than I if I'm shown wrong, and/or the patent is overturned on any basis. I just don't believe it will.
You don't fight FUD with 'my fscking operating system fscking beats up your fscking operating system!' You fight it with:
'Yes, NT server is twice as fast for serving static web pages, but how many of your pages are static?'
and
'NT is twice as fast for that application, which is impressive and commendable, but if you look at the bandwidth numbers, Linux will saturate a T1 on a much lower price point piece of hardware. Plus Linux costs quite a bit less than half what NT costs, even if you ignore the hardware costs.'
Greetings, I for one am cheering. Nullsoft and Frankel are the little guys, and this is another instance where the little guys created a superior product, kicked some major ass with it, and got rewarded for it.
Everyone is complaining that AOL is going to harm WinAmp. That's nonsense... What it really means is that it's another piece of their 'toolkit' for new users. There's no percentage in them changing it at all, when they can just ship it. It's all about how comprehensive a service they provide. It's ShoutCast that they want, and Nullsoft's name behind it. This lets them do that.
As for Spinner.com, why in the world would they make it a top 40 station? Why would they make it ANYTHING but what has made it successful? Their goal (despite what it may seem like!) isn't to be purely mediocre. It's to make money. If Spinner.com's current formats are making money, then they won't change. Pardon me, but...DUH!
Advertising may appear, but I'll bet it'll be less intrusive than radio ads. Whoa, the free ride is over?!? What a concept... Once again, 'Duh'. You want top notch content, it has to get paid for somehow.
At the core, I'm proud of Nullsoft and I'm glad to see them getting rewarded for having produced a top notch application and GIVEN IT AWAY for all this time. Bravo.
It doesn't make sense to me... The only times I burn out at companies are when the companies themselves are screwed up, and can't provide me with interesting work to do for the 60-80hrs/week I *LIKE* to spend there.
I program at home, I program at work, hell I write code on napkins, notebooks, and book-margins while sitting at a restaurant eating dinner.
The absolute best companies I've worked for were ones where I spent 80+ hrs/week for months on end doing amazingly cool development.
Burnout is only a factor for programmers if you work for a company that can't keep your mind occupied.
I can't STAND most large companies, as they're always ass-backward, and the developers are parceled out little tiny tasks to complete, and then micromanaged all to hell for those parcels. In small companies, you do EVERYTHING.
My first job out of college (10 years ago, dropped out to take a $35K/year job (I make well more than 2x that now) on the other coast), I developed two commercial products from scratch, convinced the company to set up an internal network, specced and hand-built the network (including running cable), did technical support, did sales, reverse-engineered software, and wrote probably a thousand small tools to automate tasks. I *LOVED* it there, and I only burned out when they got big and corporate, and wanted me to only do a single task or so.
Boredom kills.
If you have a passion for what you do, find a company that needs someone who has a passion for it. Not a company that just needs another body to clock in and out. You won't burn out until the company does.
When I bought my Rio, people laughed, and said, 'Wait for real products, like Compact Flash cards, and hard drives, and CD-ROMs!'
My response then was, 'Without a market, nobody serious is GOING to make a real product.'
RCA is quoted here as saying that the Rio proved a market, and that's why they are going ahead and making it.
I still listen to my Rio, but I'm very aware that it's technology is not what it could have been.
You have to vote with your money in order to get the business world to wake up and listen, and I give major props to all who did.
MP3 isn't just a pirate music format, and that's something that major corporations are recognizing now, BECAUSE of people who put their money where their hopes were.
Huzzah to RCA, definitely, for making a real product, but just as many huzzahs to everyone who bought a Rio in order to help build a new market!
Cyberfox!
p.s. I have over 96MB of CompactFlash cards already, because I have a digital camera. The zero-memory issue is non-existent for me, as I'll just drop one of my 40MB CF card into it until I get a microdrive. I'll buy a Lyra as soon as it hits the shelves.
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away (from pdpvax)...
IBM equipment was extremely expensive, and came with a service warranty. That service warranty included a pretty much dedicated customer service representative, who was like that neighbor who never stops dropping by. 'Howdy-ho neighbor!'
IBM's parts were very very proprietary, but some companies had figured out the trick of making peripherals for it. Heck, some companies made peripherals that IBM didn't!
If you bought a part that was non-IBM, and the service rep found out about it, he had the power to go to his boss and say, 'Hey, they bought a non-IBM part. We can, through this clause in their contract, revoke their service agreement without having to pay them the remaining time-adjusted value.' He would then go to a management person in the company, and make it clear that unless the person who made that purchasing decision was fired, the company would lose its (several million dollar, often!) service contract with IBM.
*poof* People got fired. Well, duh.
This didn't happen if you bought IBM, of course. That's where the phrase Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM came from. It wasn't that people wanted to make that decision or that there was in-company pressure to always buy the top name brand (there rarely is!), it was that IBM had the sheer power to enforce that kind of internal meddling.
Red Hat does not now, and (imho) never will have that kind of power. To compare them to any company with single-source powers is utter nonsense.
It has since become used as a catchphrase for the general tendency for company management to be more comfortable with an established company than a unbacked, unknown, possibly fly-by-night company. I would say that that's not possible in the Free Software world, but that's not true. How many people think that I could cleanly upgrade my archaic Yggdrasil installation to a modern-day one? Probably zip, because it's too old, and too different from all the current installs. It's no longer supported. 'But the source is open, it'll always be supported!' they cry. Don't you believe it. Sometimes, people Just Don't Care anymore. That leaves things just as unsupported as if they had been proprietary!
If my company had standardized on the Yggdrasil installation, forever ago, would our programs run on anyone else's systems now? NO!
That's why companies look for the top dog in the field, the established company, the one with financing. That's Red Hat right now. In The Future, All Restaurants Will Be Taco Bell...and all Linux installs will be LSB-compliant, but until that time, Red Hat is the one with Brand Recognition. They also happen to funnel a hell of a lot of cash directly into people WRITING REAL FREE SOFTWARE. They're not just the guys in the red hats, they're also the guys in the white hats still.
Cut them some slack where that's concerned, okay? As a friend says, 'Dey bein' real good to the s'ware biz right now...'
Greetings, Exactly! NPJAVA32.DLL. That was the key eventually for me.
I got it... Same thing you did, went into MSDEV, and poked around. If you look at your debug window under MSDEV, you'll find that it's loading the DLLs from your Netscape directory instead of its own directory. I moved all the DLLs out of the normal Netscape directory (and the Plugins directory) to an 'ouch' directory under each location respectively, and re-ran apprunner, and it worked to some approximation of fine.
Unfortunately, I can't figure out for the life of me how to make Apprunner NOT look at the Netscape DLLs to run, which means I can't run Netscape on the same system as Mozilla, a Very Bad Thing(tm) if I want to test it and yet be able to really browse when I need to.
The instruction at "0x503371b0" referenced memory at "0x014e51a8". The memory could not be "written".
The dosbox with the debug messages shows:
nsComponentManager: Using components dir: C:\mozilla\bin\components width was not set height was not set Reading file... Reading file...Done The Messenger component is available. Initializing... Messenger has been bootstrapped! The Composer component is available. Initializing... Composer has been bootstrapped! Reading file... Reading file...Done Reading file... Reading file...Done
runtime error R6016 - not enough space for thread data
Is anyone else seeing this?
I'm trying to work out how to submit it as a bug report right now, but if nobody else sees it maybe it's just my system...
Public discussion is a waste of time if the discussion is based on a misunderstanding. What is accomplished by arguing about an illusion?
The shattering of the illusion. If one person holds an illusion, in a community as large as ours there's a good chance that others do as well. If it is brought to light, then it can be answered where all can see.
Also, any organization the likes of OSI can not spend its time answering thousands of one-on-one questions. The best one can hope for is that they answer publicly and quickly the issues that bubble to the top out of community discussion.
Public discussion is never a waste of time. If you are wrong, you learn and others who might believe the same learn. If you are right, then the issue is brought to the table. Even if you are wrong, the fact that people misinterpret what you've said is a valuable piece of information for any public organization.
Speak publicly, be proud of speaking up, and be willing to acknowledge when you're wrong.
If I feel that the OSI or SPI or ESR or BP or whomever has made a mistake, or more specifically I disagree with them, I have a responsibility to make it public. I agree that it's not necessary to make it public in a nasty, furnace-heated fashion, but it is absolutely essential that it be brought to light.
Why?
Because that's the essence of democracy. Because if we have speakers, we must have a method of informing them that we disagree, and showing others why, so that they too can decide to agree or disagree with more information, or even to shoot down our information if it's bad. Private disagreement (email and such) is good, and a useful thing, but it doesn't get the issues out in front of people who may not have thought them through yet.
This is fundamental to our community, and ESR absolutely has to understand that. In fact, anyone who claims to speak for us, has to be aware that their every action will be publicly discussed, and that this is a good thing.
It's healthy.
If public second guessing of your actions bothers you, then you need to not be in the public eye. There is no public figure who does NOT recieve constant second guessing, and in the case of our representatives (which ESR is trying to be), this is 100% appropriate, as it should help guide them.
The most valuable thing in ESR's latest essay is that they did take a look at the Apple license, and are negotiating a 1.1 version of it. To quote:
I wasn't much injured by learning that many people thought the license was broken and OSI had made a wrong call -- I've got a bit more courage than to collapse over that, it just meant OSI had a duty to re-examine and maybe re-negotiate.
This is the fundamental nature of directed public outrage, and public debate. What he calls an electronic lynching bee, I call the voice of the community. Certainly, when people flame personal attacks, it seems much more like a lynch mob, but the core fact is that the sheer level of community outrage forced a reexamination of the license. Hopefully it forces a reexamination of the future licenses they consider as well.
So what does this all mean?
It means don't hesitate to air your disagreements in public. It's not 'immature' to discuss and disagree in public.
It means do hesitate to call names, spout vitriol, and all the other things you should know better than to do already.
It also means that ESR himself shouldn't resort to these things as well (although he does write them much better). I think that RMS and Perens disagreements with him were appropriate and absolutely necessary for the community to see to be informed, and to raise the necessary public outrage to get them to renegotiate. His backhanded insults to them and their public comments are just as unnecessary as the worst Slashdot kiddies and their spiritual kin, only written much better and more subtly.
In the end, though, I consider the statement that the OSI is renegotiating a 1.1 license to be the (sadly lacking otherwise) acknowledgement that they did make a mistake, and are trying to fix it. This makes me much happier personally, because it means that they are listening to the community. With that knowledge, I feel substantially more secure about their goals.
Greetings, Well, there are actually a lot of reasons...
One is that they do make licensing money off of each copy of software PRODUCED (*NOT* sold. If you want to make 10,000 copies of a game, you need to pay them $100,000 (for example) to make them. If you only sell 1,000 of them at $30 per, you eat the $70,000 loss.
In the mean time, they sell the machine itself at substantially under hardware cost, and make it up in games. Thus, the BIG number to the console manufacturers is: # of sw titles licensed/unit. What this means in short is that if they've sold 1M PSX2's, and licensed 5M titles*copies at $10 each, that they have a $50 'buffer' over the hardware price that means that they can sell it at $50 undercost and break even. That's *NOT* including in-house developed games, of course. (It's also not including cost of media, which eats into that because they must press on custom media in order to manage piracy prevention mechanics, but it's a reasonable overview.)
Given that, not everyone will EVER be able to ship a PSX2 title, and the same is true for almost any console with any power. It'll be undercosted from the HW side, and they'll tack title and copycount licensing costs onto the SW side where the money (and volume!) is.
ALSO, there's the REAL problem that not everybody is going to make a good game. In fact, a lot of people are going to make really BAD games. (Fantastic Four, for example.) If you let just anyone publish for your platform, you end up with a disturbing load of bad games. If you make a minimum bar that you have to get past (including content restrictions!) you improve your overall average at the cost of losing the occasional brilliant piece of work that didn't have enough support.
There are also content restrictions, as I mentioned above. Basically, this means that you have to convince Sony that your game is good enough for them to let you sell it on their platform. (Nintendo has MUCH more stringent content restrictions because of the demographic of their product line.) These content restrictions get less and less as the platform ages. Partially because they REALLY REALLY want the initial games to be incredible Best Of Breed games, and partially because fewer top-quality manufacturers want to develop for it as the performance curve catches up to it.
All this combines to make the console manufacturers want to restrict who can ACTUALLY produce games for their platform. However, having the simulator available in GPL'ed form means some major things if it's publicly available. The most interesting of which is that it accelerates the generational advances in games. I comment on that elsewhere in these comments, but the basic idea is that it lets people grok the HW faster than they would if they could only work with a proprietary simulator or even just the chipset itself.
So, in summary, don't expect to be able to develop games on the GPL'ed simulator, but you CAN expect to learn a LOT about the hardware from it, and maybe just enough to be able to convince a game company to let you work with them on a game for the PSX2!
So the sim is GPL'ed as well...? Sweet! The next question is whether it's going to be available seperately or not...?
Basically, is all of this something that falls into the (reasonable) GPL situation of 'if you license it, you get the source, if you don't, it's not available, unless you can get it from someone else who has licensed it'?
I don't know if Sony sees it this way or not, but I can definitely picture this being a GREAT way for people who want game industry jobs to learn the innards of the engine before applying for work at game companies, for example. This would accelerate the normal 'hardware internals' advances amazingly.
(What I mean by that is that the normal game-generations start with 'standard libraries, standard coding', and accelerate with better libraries, more asm-oriented programming, then better and better understanding of how to use the hardware to the absolute maximum... If you start out with a simulator whose source is 100% available, and 100% accurate, then your ability to understand the hardware enough to max it is jumpstarted really really strongly! This means Good Things(tm)!)
Anyhow, the jist is that I'd like to know if this stuff is going to be available to non-Sony developers at all, especially prior to the actual US launch...?
Slashdot Mirror
Greetings,
DAT isn't random access.
That's the first reason it's different. There are quite a few more. It's smart to read the patent and the included description of prior art before speaking.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
when the digital music industry didn't exist!
To forestall someone else, I should have said, 'when the digital downloadable portable music player industry didn't exist!'
The point still stands, however.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
No, no, no, and once and for all, NO.
This is NOT an obvious patent.
Four years ago (4.5, given a bit of lead time for them to come up with the idea, implement it, fill out the paperwork and stuff) the details of this were absolutely unheard of.
Everyone seems to LOVE pretending it's a patent on something that has existed forever. If the patent were filed TODAY, you would be right. It wasn't. It was filed just over 4 years ago, when the digital music industry didn't exist!
Please, use some sense. Unless you can name prior art that meets all the restrictions described in the patent claims (not the overview, the actual claims, then it is not an obvious patent.)
I bet you can't.
Cyberfox!
p.s. PeelBoy, your post was picked at random. There are a few dozen equivelantly un-thinking posts like it, so don't think I'm singling you out.
Greetings,
It's plausible (to extend your question to a reasonable level) that a more general purpose device (PDA + MP3 player) could be considered a different enough device that it would not be subject to the claims. If a PDA shipped with an MP3 player and software to connect and get MP3's from the net or your computer, then it might have to be fought in the courts.
If it were an aftermarket application, then the device wasn't 'designed' to do this, and therefore most likely wouldn't qualify.
To answer your original question, however, I believe it could be reasonable argued that the primary purpose of the unit was the specialized playback of digitized audio obtained over the Internet or from your home computer.
Thus it would be subject to the patent licensing claims. This is why a general purpose PDA which had an aftermarket MP3 player would not fall under those claims. It's primary purpose is not digital audio playback, although it's capable of it coincidentally.
This would all very likely get fought out in the courts, though.
The primary point I was making is that given the specific nature of the product, I believe there is no prior art, despite people saying extremely ignorant things about their Macintoshes, Commodore 64s, and laptops being prior art.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
P TO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/sr chnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='5914941'.WKU.&OS=PN/591 4941&RS=PN/5914941
What the... That link didn't work at all. ARGH. Evidently Slashdot can't handle really long URL's, or URL's in quotes.
The URL is:
http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=
But for some reason I can't include it in an "a href=" tag.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
Or in better form, and straight from the horses mouth, you can get it from the USPTO.
Of particular interest is the description, as well, in which a lot of the points you want to raise are addressed.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
Uhhh... If you read the actual text of the patent, you'd see where they reference MiniDisc, and explain why their part is different.
This isn't a bogus patent. They ARE specialized, they ARE different, and they DID come up with something new. Now the only question is whether it falls into the Comptons argument: Patent protection would cause more harm to a new industry than the lack of patent protection will cause to the company in question. At least that's my guess.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
Hello?!? Knock, Knock?
Did you read this at all? This isn't a software patent!
Why in the world you would post, when you have no basic comprehension at all, is beyond me. Think, think, think before you post.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
I did not see a particular section that covered 'or software implementing this process', so the answer is no, a general purpose portable computer implementing the same functionality would not be covered under the patent.
The Rio I have in front of me has:
A keypad (same as in the patent).
A interface (similar to the modem in the patent) to my computer.
A LCD display (similar to what is described in the patent).
The portions that the current crop of portable digital audio players don't match are more in LACK than in inclusion. These include recording (although that's changing), ordering content directly, and the inclusion of a more-than-PC communication system. Subsetting a patented device is not immunity from the patent. It just means you'll probably have to fight in court.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
I've read their patent (yes it was granted, come on people do your research), I've read their press release, and I will preface this with IANAL, as always.
This patent (5914941) seems reasonable.
If you honestly think you know of prior art for a specialized audio playback device integrating a hard drive or solid state memory with a dedicated interface to be able to obtain music from the Internet or a personal computer that dates before 1995, I'd love to hear about it.
No, your Powerbook with a music player doesn't count. It's not a specialized audio playback device. No, your Minidisc doesn't count, it doesn't have the interface, and it doesn't have a hard drive or solid state memory.
OBVIOUSLY your Amiga with a network card, and playing MOD files doesn't count, it's not specialized *AND* it's not portable.
Listen up. These people came up with something original in 1995. It's obvious to us now, but it wasn't obvious that all these pieces could work together back then. They thought of it, they produced a working model (yes, they did, check out their site), and they patented it.
I don't like it, and I think there is POTENTIAL for it to be partially broken based on non-specific algorithms. However, MPEG1 Layers 1, 2, *AND* 3 are all mentioned in their patent, and they even say that Layer 3 is preferrable.
It's also worth looking at their current professional associations. Creative Labs *AND* Diamond both have notable relationships with these people, which means that both of them probably are aware of this, and are probably willing to work with them.
I agree that many patents suck, and I hope to heck that this goes the way of the Comptons patent.
Cut audiohighway some slack, though. They DID innovate, they AREN'T patenting the action of breathing, or the letter 'e' or the wheel or anything obvious. It's obvious to you and I *NOW*, but it in 1995 the idea that there would be a market for a dedicated device like what we now see as the Rio was NOVEL. When the Rio was RELEASED even, the majority of people weren't sure if there was a market for it. We now know better, but look how long it took?
These people guessed right, they produced hardware, they described it, and they applied for a patent.
I keep seeing people talking about the 'natural progression of technology'. If you see something that others DON'T see, whether it's the natural progression of technology or not, make it, patent it, and build a damn business around it. The biggest wins are almost ALWAYS people who predicted the growth right, and got there first. I sure as hell don't begrudge them THAT.
In closing, I'll repeat: if you honestly think you know of a specialized audio playback device integrating a hard drive or solid state memory with a dedicated interface to be able to obtain music from either the Internet or a personal computer that dates before 1995, please post it!
I don't think it exists, and if you let go the knee-jerk reaction (same as I had!), I'll bet you think it doesn't either.
Cyberfox!
p.s. Few people will be happier than I if I'm shown wrong, and/or the patent is overturned on any basis. I just don't believe it will.
Greetings,
If you'd bothered to check their website like I did, you'd find that they have been granted the patent, and it is patent number 5914941.
Cyberfox!
Don't be silly. This isn't a software patent at all.
Greetings,
You don't fight FUD with 'my fscking operating system fscking beats up your fscking operating system!' You fight it with:
'Yes, NT server is twice as fast for serving static web pages, but how many of your pages are static?'
and
'NT is twice as fast for that application, which is impressive and commendable, but if you look at the bandwidth numbers, Linux will saturate a T1 on a much lower price point piece of hardware. Plus Linux costs quite a bit less than half what NT costs, even if you ignore the hardware costs.'
That is how you fight FUD.
Be smart, it's our only advantage.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
I for one am cheering. Nullsoft and Frankel are the little guys, and this is another instance where the little guys created a superior product, kicked some major ass with it, and got rewarded for it.
Everyone is complaining that AOL is going to harm WinAmp. That's nonsense... What it really means is that it's another piece of their 'toolkit' for new users. There's no percentage in them changing it at all, when they can just ship it. It's all about how comprehensive a service they provide. It's ShoutCast that they want, and Nullsoft's name behind it. This lets them do that.
As for Spinner.com, why in the world would they make it a top 40 station? Why would they make it ANYTHING but what has made it successful? Their goal (despite what it may seem like!) isn't to be purely mediocre. It's to make money. If Spinner.com's current formats are making money, then they won't change. Pardon me, but...DUH!
Advertising may appear, but I'll bet it'll be less intrusive than radio ads. Whoa, the free ride is over?!? What a concept... Once again, 'Duh'. You want top notch content, it has to get paid for somehow.
At the core, I'm proud of Nullsoft and I'm glad to see them getting rewarded for having produced a top notch application and GIVEN IT AWAY for all this time. Bravo.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
It doesn't make sense to me... The only times I burn out at companies are when the companies themselves are screwed up, and can't provide me with interesting work to do for the 60-80hrs/week I *LIKE* to spend there.
I program at home, I program at work, hell I write code on napkins, notebooks, and book-margins while sitting at a restaurant eating dinner.
The absolute best companies I've worked for were ones where I spent 80+ hrs/week for months on end doing amazingly cool development.
Burnout is only a factor for programmers if you work for a company that can't keep your mind occupied.
I can't STAND most large companies, as they're always ass-backward, and the developers are parceled out little tiny tasks to complete, and then micromanaged all to hell for those parcels. In small companies, you do EVERYTHING.
My first job out of college (10 years ago, dropped out to take a $35K/year job (I make well more than 2x that now) on the other coast), I developed two commercial products from scratch, convinced the company to set up an internal network, specced and hand-built the network (including running cable), did technical support, did sales, reverse-engineered software, and wrote probably a thousand small tools to automate tasks. I *LOVED* it there, and I only burned out when they got big and corporate, and wanted me to only do a single task or so.
Boredom kills.
If you have a passion for what you do, find a company that needs someone who has a passion for it. Not a company that just needs another body to clock in and out. You won't burn out until the company does.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
When I bought my Rio, people laughed, and said, 'Wait for real products, like Compact Flash cards, and hard drives, and CD-ROMs!'
My response then was, 'Without a market, nobody serious is GOING to make a real product.'
RCA is quoted here as saying that the Rio proved a market, and that's why they are going ahead and making it.
I still listen to my Rio, but I'm very aware that it's technology is not what it could have been.
You have to vote with your money in order to get the business world to wake up and listen, and I give major props to all who did.
MP3 isn't just a pirate music format, and that's something that major corporations are recognizing now, BECAUSE of people who put their money where their hopes were.
Huzzah to RCA, definitely, for making a real product, but just as many huzzahs to everyone who bought a Rio in order to help build a new market!
Cyberfox!
p.s. I have over 96MB of CompactFlash cards already, because I have a digital camera. The zero-memory issue is non-existent for me, as I'll just drop one of my 40MB CF card into it until I get a microdrive. I'll buy a Lyra as soon as it hits the shelves.
Greetings,
Nobody ever got fired for choosing Red Hat.
Storytime boys and girls!
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away (from pdpvax)...
IBM equipment was extremely expensive, and came with a service warranty. That service warranty included a pretty much dedicated customer service representative, who was like that neighbor who never stops dropping by. 'Howdy-ho neighbor!'
IBM's parts were very very proprietary, but some companies had figured out the trick of making peripherals for it. Heck, some companies made peripherals that IBM didn't!
If you bought a part that was non-IBM, and the service rep found out about it, he had the power to go to his boss and say, 'Hey, they bought a non-IBM part. We can, through this clause in their contract, revoke their service agreement without having to pay them the remaining time-adjusted value.' He would then go to a management person in the company, and make it clear that unless the person who made that purchasing decision was fired, the company would lose its (several million dollar, often!) service contract with IBM.
*poof* People got fired. Well, duh.
This didn't happen if you bought IBM, of course. That's where the phrase Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM came from. It wasn't that people wanted to make that decision or that there was in-company pressure to always buy the top name brand (there rarely is!), it was that IBM had the sheer power to enforce that kind of internal meddling.
Red Hat does not now, and (imho) never will have that kind of power. To compare them to any company with single-source powers is utter nonsense.
It has since become used as a catchphrase for the general tendency for company management to be more comfortable with an established company than a unbacked, unknown, possibly fly-by-night company. I would say that that's not possible in the Free Software world, but that's not true. How many people think that I could cleanly upgrade my archaic Yggdrasil installation to a modern-day one? Probably zip, because it's too old, and too different from all the current installs. It's no longer supported. 'But the source is open, it'll always be supported!' they cry. Don't you believe it. Sometimes, people Just Don't Care anymore. That leaves things just as unsupported as if they had been proprietary!
If my company had standardized on the Yggdrasil installation, forever ago, would our programs run on anyone else's systems now? NO!
That's why companies look for the top dog in the field, the established company, the one with financing. That's Red Hat right now. In The Future, All Restaurants Will Be Taco Bell...and all Linux installs will be LSB-compliant, but until that time, Red Hat is the one with Brand Recognition. They also happen to funnel a hell of a lot of cash directly into people WRITING REAL FREE SOFTWARE. They're not just the guys in the red hats, they're also the guys in the white hats still.
Cut them some slack where that's concerned, okay? As a friend says, 'Dey bein' real good to the s'ware biz right now...'
*cough*
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
Exactly! NPJAVA32.DLL. That was the key eventually for me.
I got it... Same thing you did, went into MSDEV, and poked around. If you look at your debug window under MSDEV, you'll find that it's loading the DLLs from your Netscape directory instead of its own directory. I moved all the DLLs out of the normal Netscape directory (and the Plugins directory) to an 'ouch' directory under each location respectively, and re-ran apprunner, and it worked to some approximation of fine.
Unfortunately, I can't figure out for the life of me how to make Apprunner NOT look at the Netscape DLLs to run, which means I can't run Netscape on the same system as Mozilla, a Very Bad Thing(tm) if I want to test it and yet be able to really browse when I need to.
Damn...
Cyberfox!
Under Windows NT 4, I get a crash:
ToolTipText: apprunner.exe - Application Error
The instruction at "0x503371b0" referenced memory at "0x014e51a8". The memory could not be "written".
The dosbox with the debug messages shows:
nsComponentManager: Using components dir: C:\mozilla\bin\components
width was not set
height was not set
Reading file...
Reading file...Done
The Messenger component is available. Initializing...
Messenger has been bootstrapped!
The Composer component is available. Initializing...
Composer has been bootstrapped!
Reading file...
Reading file...Done
Reading file...
Reading file...Done
runtime error R6016
- not enough space for thread data
Is anyone else seeing this?
I'm trying to work out how to submit it as a bug report right now, but if nobody else sees it maybe it's just my system...
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
Public discussion is a waste of time if the discussion is based on a misunderstanding. What is accomplished by arguing about an illusion?
The shattering of the illusion. If one person holds an illusion, in a community as large as ours there's a good chance that others do as well. If it is brought to light, then it can be answered where all can see.
Also, any organization the likes of OSI can not spend its time answering thousands of one-on-one questions. The best one can hope for is that they answer publicly and quickly the issues that bubble to the top out of community discussion.
Public discussion is never a waste of time. If you are wrong, you learn and others who might believe the same learn. If you are right, then the issue is brought to the table. Even if you are wrong, the fact that people misinterpret what you've said is a valuable piece of information for any public organization.
Speak publicly, be proud of speaking up, and be willing to acknowledge when you're wrong.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
If I feel that the OSI or SPI or ESR or BP or whomever has made a mistake, or more specifically I disagree with them, I have a responsibility to make it public. I agree that it's not necessary to make it public in a nasty, furnace-heated fashion, but it is absolutely essential that it be brought to light.
Why?
Because that's the essence of democracy. Because if we have speakers, we must have a method of informing them that we disagree, and showing others why, so that they too can decide to agree or disagree with more information, or even to shoot down our information if it's bad. Private disagreement (email and such) is good, and a useful thing, but it doesn't get the issues out in front of people who may not have thought them through yet.
This is fundamental to our community, and ESR absolutely has to understand that. In fact, anyone who claims to speak for us, has to be aware that their every action will be publicly discussed, and that this is a good thing.
It's healthy.
If public second guessing of your actions bothers you, then you need to not be in the public eye. There is no public figure who does NOT recieve constant second guessing, and in the case of our representatives (which ESR is trying to be), this is 100% appropriate, as it should help guide them.
The most valuable thing in ESR's latest essay is that they did take a look at the Apple license, and are negotiating a 1.1 version of it. To quote:
I wasn't much injured by learning that many people thought the license was broken and OSI had made a wrong call -- I've got a bit more courage than to collapse over that, it just meant OSI had a duty to re-examine and maybe re-negotiate.
This is the fundamental nature of directed public outrage, and public debate. What he calls an electronic lynching bee, I call the voice of the community. Certainly, when people flame personal attacks, it seems much more like a lynch mob, but the core fact is that the sheer level of community outrage forced a reexamination of the license. Hopefully it forces a reexamination of the future licenses they consider as well.
So what does this all mean?
It means don't hesitate to air your disagreements in public. It's not 'immature' to discuss and disagree in public.
It means do hesitate to call names, spout vitriol, and all the other things you should know better than to do already.
It also means that ESR himself shouldn't resort to these things as well (although he does write them much better). I think that RMS and Perens disagreements with him were appropriate and absolutely necessary for the community to see to be informed, and to raise the necessary public outrage to get them to renegotiate. His backhanded insults to them and their public comments are just as unnecessary as the worst Slashdot kiddies and their spiritual kin, only written much better and more subtly.
In the end, though, I consider the statement that the OSI is renegotiating a 1.1 license to be the (sadly lacking otherwise) acknowledgement that they did make a mistake, and are trying to fix it. This makes me much happier personally, because it means that they are listening to the community. With that knowledge, I feel substantially more secure about their goals.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
Sometimes it feels like it...
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
cypherpunks/cypherpunks
It's everywhere you want to be.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
Well, there are actually a lot of reasons...
One is that they do make licensing money off of each copy of software PRODUCED (*NOT* sold. If you want to make 10,000 copies of a game, you need to pay them $100,000 (for example) to make them. If you only sell 1,000 of them at $30 per, you eat the $70,000 loss.
In the mean time, they sell the machine itself at substantially under hardware cost, and make it up in games. Thus, the BIG number to the console manufacturers is: # of sw titles licensed/unit. What this means in short is that if they've sold 1M PSX2's, and licensed 5M titles*copies at $10 each, that they have a $50 'buffer' over the hardware price that means that they can sell it at $50 undercost and break even. That's *NOT* including in-house developed games, of course. (It's also not including cost of media, which eats into that because they must press on custom media in order to manage piracy prevention mechanics, but it's a reasonable overview.)
Given that, not everyone will EVER be able to ship a PSX2 title, and the same is true for almost any console with any power. It'll be undercosted from the HW side, and they'll tack title and copycount licensing costs onto the SW side where the money (and volume!) is.
ALSO, there's the REAL problem that not everybody is going to make a good game. In fact, a lot of people are going to make really BAD games. (Fantastic Four, for example.) If you let just anyone publish for your platform, you end up with a disturbing load of bad games. If you make a minimum bar that you have to get past (including content restrictions!) you improve your overall average at the cost of losing the occasional brilliant piece of work that didn't have enough support.
There are also content restrictions, as I mentioned above. Basically, this means that you have to convince Sony that your game is good enough for them to let you sell it on their platform. (Nintendo has MUCH more stringent content restrictions because of the demographic of their product line.) These content restrictions get less and less as the platform ages. Partially because they REALLY REALLY want the initial games to be incredible Best Of Breed games, and partially because fewer top-quality manufacturers want to develop for it as the performance curve catches up to it.
All this combines to make the console manufacturers want to restrict who can ACTUALLY produce games for their platform. However, having the simulator available in GPL'ed form means some major things if it's publicly available. The most interesting of which is that it accelerates the generational advances in games. I comment on that elsewhere in these comments, but the basic idea is that it lets people grok the HW faster than they would if they could only work with a proprietary simulator or even just the chipset itself.
So, in summary, don't expect to be able to develop games on the GPL'ed simulator, but you CAN expect to learn a LOT about the hardware from it, and maybe just enough to be able to convince a game company to let you work with them on a game for the PSX2!
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
DJ!
So the sim is GPL'ed as well...? Sweet! The next question is whether it's going to be available seperately or not...?
Basically, is all of this something that falls into the (reasonable) GPL situation of 'if you license it, you get the source, if you don't, it's not available, unless you can get it from someone else who has licensed it'?
I don't know if Sony sees it this way or not, but I can definitely picture this being a GREAT way for people who want game industry jobs to learn the innards of the engine before applying for work at game companies, for example. This would accelerate the normal 'hardware internals' advances amazingly.
(What I mean by that is that the normal game-generations start with 'standard libraries, standard coding', and accelerate with better libraries, more asm-oriented programming, then better and better understanding of how to use the hardware to the absolute maximum... If you start out with a simulator whose source is 100% available, and 100% accurate, then your ability to understand the hardware enough to max it is jumpstarted really really strongly! This means Good Things(tm)!)
Anyhow, the jist is that I'd like to know if this stuff is going to be available to non-Sony developers at all, especially prior to the actual US launch...?
Cyberfox!