That they're disabling support for the Atom platform is irrelevant. They're disabling support for a platform that they don't sell.
The trouble is they're not disbling support.
Their software works with the Atom, because the Atom's API characteristics are no different than other 8086 microprocessors.
There is no special support to disable.
Adding code to block something that otherwise works is not disabling support or removing support.
It's blacklisting.
The difference is that failing to support isn't actionable or anti-competitive: you can't expect your competitors to go out of their way to interoperate with you.
However if it does work, then blacklisting a chip based on hardware ID is not removing support, it's a direct action to attempt to kill a competitor.
It's like MS including code in Windows 3.1 to detect competing versions of DOS, and force a crash.
It'd be like Internet Explorer containing code to detect if it was connecting to a web server running Apache, and refuse to load the page, if Apache was detected.
It's not correct to say this act is disabling support for Apache, in fact, it's blacklisting something to make sure it doesn't work.
Oh yeah... and the word support is imprecise. It can refer to either 'A is compatible with B'.
And also: the vendor will provide support (as in you can call them), if you have difficulty making A work with B.
In many cases, two things will work together, even when they are not officially supported, they are compatible but you don't get support.
Of course... Apple can specify whatever terms they like for their support services.
They don't even have to provide support at all, they can certainly choose not to provide assistance with their OS running on unapproved hardware.
However, as for compatibility. Intentionally breaking interoperability through blacklists may be actionable by the competition.
(Which are companies selling Netbooks, that, if not for the blacklist could be made to run OS X)
The same type of economic power other hardware makers such as Sun have. And they can't force you by contract to use only Sun hardware with SunOS, either, E.G. they can't bar you from designing or finding your own hardware to run their software on.
It's not advertised as an upgrade. The word upgrade isn't even used to describe it.
OSes are not normally associated with hardware, except on embedded devices. And those only run simple code burned into ROM chips, known as firmware.
The MacOSX EULA explicitly states that you can only use on Mac hardware.
The Sherman AntiTrust act and Section 3 of the Clayton act prohibit artificially tying two of your products together by contract if those types of products are normally available separately in an anti-competitive way: when you are a company that has the massive amount of economic power that Apple has.
Just ask Microsoft what the courts thought about them forcing Windows users to buy Internet Explorer with every purchase of Windows.
There's a big difference between making the gearing of the engine a different size, and adding a detector to the car body, programmed to lock up if it detects installation into a certain type of engine.
using a non-standard size doesn't discriminate against other engine manufacturers.
What, the same style of user experience policy that makes all iPhone apps require Apple approval, and gets AMIGA emulators banned, because hobbyists might be able to access a BASIC interpreter and have too much fun?
The problem is the Atom supports a similar instruction set to the standard processors.
Dropping support in this case means they are adding explicit code designed solely to prevent use on a processor the OS would otherwise work with.
If Microsoft modified Windows 7 64-bit edition to BAN support for AMD 64-bit processors,
and therefore encourage users to utilize only Microsoft Approved or Microsoft Manufactured hardware that utilizes Intel microprocessors.
Microsoft would be in court, at the wrong side of a lawsuit, pretty fast...
Again: it's not about hardware vendors not supporting a chip.
It's about hardware vendors adding code specifically designed to prevent use of a chip that otherwise works just fine.
In case you didn't look at the site too carefully, their password keeping applet utilizes client-side javascript and a "packing key" you chose locally to encrypt all information using AES256, so not even they can see your passwords.
They call it "host-proof" hosting.
Your Packing Key never gets sent or saved to the server, so not even Passpack staff knows it. As far as the world outside your browser is concerned, your Packing Key is a complete mystery. Without it, it is impossibile to see, access or use your Passpack
The only concern I would have: should be (1) if there's a flaw in the client-side code, for example, if there's a XSS hole that might allow another site you visit to leech info from an open passpack window.
(2) Someone's successful phishing or keylogging on your PC to capture the passpack key.
(3) Someone compromising their site and altering the client-side javascript app to leak or compromise the key and the passpack.
Passpack.com.
Actually, the site seems uncharacteristically sluggish at the moment... better be sure to download the offline client and use it to keep a local backup of the DB.
Good enough for personal passwords. For really sensitive enterprise stuff, it may be ideal to use an Enterprise password management product, such as a Passpack appliance (whenever they get to making that), or Citrix Password Manager.
Generally the requirements for businesses include strong encryption, multi-user access, and role-based access controls..
Most simple DB methods lack detailed access controls.
Some Enterprise password managers also provide options to allow a user to utilize the password to login to something, from the application, it will launch a browser or ssh/telnet directly with login details filled..
In some cases, allows user login without their workstation allowing them to know what the password actually is that is being submitted.
Or requires a separate action be taken to 'see' the password, which generates a special audit record.
That way, if someone's terminated, or stripped of certain roles (and therefore access to certain passwords), it may not be quite as urgent to change them all immediately, or the passwords they actually chose to view can be changed first.
Policy might be for a password to always be changed to a new random password within 3 days
of someone clicking on the "show me this password" link. To ensure use of the PWM is for one-time access, and protect against improper practices such as _writing down_ passwords or recording them outside the official DB.
That depends on what you mean by information, and what you mean by free. If all info were free, it could be a bit chaotic, finding useful information would be hard, since all the useless crap would be just as available as the bits you care about... price is part of what sorts information.
Think about it.. don't the books you pay for tend to be more polished than your average blog?
Don't you trust what a medical textbook or an article in a for-pay peer-refereed journal says about a disease a little more than you trust the Wikipedia article that is filled with [[citation needed]] superscripts?
I don't want potential ID thiefs to know my account numbers.
I don't want my neighbors to know what's in my e-mailbox.
If I write a piece of software as a professional developer, I want to be able to sell my work and make a living off of it. That means I want it to cost something.
I don't want my customers to have a right to give it away to other people in their industry, so they don't have to buy my work.
Capitalism is the closest thing to a free society the world has ever seen, and the computing industry would totally fall apart if the market value of all digital content dropped to $0.
Computer scientists, musicians, artists, authors, film directors, playwrights, dancers, possibly athletes, would all be out of work.
Oh yes, and politicians would be in trouble as well.
In many ways, we are more free because information (in general) is not free.
I think you missed a point. The ggggp asked a question about the gggggp: So I ask again: how is this modded troll? (Unless they misread the URL.)
Some anon responded with Probably because information wants to be free as the reason.
*Aside from the fact, the existence of schemes such as moderation clearly demonstrates some info doesn't want to be 'free'
There is this matter that the phrase appears not stated as a metaphor.
Metaphors are certainly valid in certain contexts, but they're not valid in this one.
It makes no sense to get this type of dialog:
Person1: How come there is life on earth?
Person2: Because Nature Abhor's a vacuum
Wouldn't you agree that Person2 is not really providing a valid answer to the question?
Nature having an opinion has nothing to do with the foundation for the question, and trying to interpret it as a metaphor doesn't result in a seeing response that makes sense either.
There is a context in which the phrase makes sense as a metaphor, but not as a reason for a thing. The phrase is attributable to Steward Brand who was first recorded as saying it, and it was:
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.
Note the important part that is missing, all reference to the metaphorical conflict, information wants to be expensive just as much as it wants to be free.
Information doesn't tend to be free in the manner that Electricity tends to follow the path of least resistance.
In fact, the impression you suggest is contrary to the laws of thermodynamics.
Information tends to disperse and degrade to randomness, as entropy tends to increase.
Information disperses, and then degrades.
No media magnetic, optical, or otherwise, is able to record information forever. A great deal of manual effort is required to spread information and a great deal of manual effort and cost is required to keep anything 'free'.
A lot more information has disappeared from existence forever than has been made free and kept free.
Example: Many bits of source code that were once freely available on the internet can no longer be found, as authors stopped paying for hosting or tore down their sites.
Yes, there are internet archive projects, but again: that's not information tending to be free, that's a monumental effort to defeat the laws of physics.
They can't archive everything.
They'll copy your model anyways, if you're small, you can't afford that many business patents (getting a patent is expensive, and litigating patents is also expensive and will put you out of business, unless you are successful against corporate army of lawyers).
Patents nowadays are very much for lawyers and large corporations BY lawyers and large corporations. They provide very little / no effective protection to the little guy.
If Google stopped crawling and listing his sites, he'd probably retaliate by initiating a legal action against Google, for unfair competition, or something of that nature, and get some judge to write up a quick injunction ordering Google to stop failing to index his sites.
Word of Google's evil act would be all over the news media, television stations, etc, that Murdoch controls, etc...
IOW, I suspect matters would get really nasty if Google actually tried to do exactly what he suggests he'd want (and stop making his stuff searchable).
Hm... only Hydrogen-powered cars allowed to enter or leave the dome.
Only electric yard equipment allowed.
The trouble is the difficulty enforcing that..
I suppose hidden surveillance cameras and combustion detecters could be mounted to the underside of the dome at regular intervals to detect any infractions.
If an application is not open source, then by definition, it cannot be free software...
Not all Open Source licenses necessarily satisfy the free software definition, however.
An example might be a program distributed as open source that you cannot use for commercial purposes, for example: it's subject to a patent, or a library it depends on is subject to a patent, and the included license only provides a patent license grant for non-commercial purposes.
Example would be: RSAREF. The RSA Reference library which used to be needed to compile and use PGP.
Until RSA Security's patent on the RSA cryptography expired, the RSA algorithm in the US could only be legally utilized by the RSAREF library, which included a grant only for non-commercial purposes.
So PGP could never qualify as free software, no matter what the sw license.
The DMCA doesn't make it illegal to bypass security protections. The anti-circumvention provisions only pertain to circumventing technological measures that effectively control access to a copyright work
Using a custom boot PROM to run a general purpose OS on the box doesn't bypass any measures that effectively protect copyright material.
And he's asking how to defeat that..
people can and have defeated it, the
information regarding how to 'hack' the hardware to load your own OS should become common knowledge...
Slashdot Mirror
That they're disabling support for the Atom platform is irrelevant. They're disabling support for a platform that they don't sell.
The trouble is they're not disbling support. Their software works with the Atom, because the Atom's API characteristics are no different than other 8086 microprocessors. There is no special support to disable.
Adding code to block something that otherwise works is not disabling support or removing support.
It's blacklisting.
The difference is that failing to support isn't actionable or anti-competitive: you can't expect your competitors to go out of their way to interoperate with you.
However if it does work, then blacklisting a chip based on hardware ID is not removing support, it's a direct action to attempt to kill a competitor.
It's like MS including code in Windows 3.1 to detect competing versions of DOS, and force a crash.
It'd be like Internet Explorer containing code to detect if it was connecting to a web server running Apache, and refuse to load the page, if Apache was detected.
It's not correct to say this act is disabling support for Apache, in fact, it's blacklisting something to make sure it doesn't work.
Oh yeah... and the word support is imprecise. It can refer to either 'A is compatible with B'.
And also: the vendor will provide support (as in you can call them), if you have difficulty making A work with B.
In many cases, two things will work together, even when they are not officially supported, they are compatible but you don't get support.
Of course... Apple can specify whatever terms they like for their support services. They don't even have to provide support at all, they can certainly choose not to provide assistance with their OS running on unapproved hardware.
However, as for compatibility. Intentionally breaking interoperability through blacklists may be actionable by the competition.
(Which are companies selling Netbooks, that, if not for the blacklist could be made to run OS X)
The same type of economic power other hardware makers such as Sun have. And they can't force you by contract to use only Sun hardware with SunOS, either, E.G. they can't bar you from designing or finding your own hardware to run their software on.
It's not advertised as an upgrade. The word upgrade isn't even used to describe it.
OSes are not normally associated with hardware, except on embedded devices. And those only run simple code burned into ROM chips, known as firmware.
The MacOSX EULA explicitly states that you can only use on Mac hardware.
The Sherman AntiTrust act and Section 3 of the Clayton act prohibit artificially tying two of your products together by contract if those types of products are normally available separately in an anti-competitive way: when you are a company that has the massive amount of economic power that Apple has.
Just ask Microsoft what the courts thought about them forcing Windows users to buy Internet Explorer with every purchase of Windows.
There's a big difference between making the gearing of the engine a different size, and adding a detector to the car body, programmed to lock up if it detects installation into a certain type of engine.
using a non-standard size doesn't discriminate against other engine manufacturers.
What, the same style of user experience policy that makes all iPhone apps require Apple approval, and gets AMIGA emulators banned, because hobbyists might be able to access a BASIC interpreter and have too much fun?
The problem is the Atom supports a similar instruction set to the standard processors.
Dropping support in this case means they are adding explicit code designed solely to prevent use on a processor the OS would otherwise work with.
If Microsoft modified Windows 7 64-bit edition to BAN support for AMD 64-bit processors, and therefore encourage users to utilize only Microsoft Approved or Microsoft Manufactured hardware that utilizes Intel microprocessors.
Microsoft would be in court, at the wrong side of a lawsuit, pretty fast...
Again: it's not about hardware vendors not supporting a chip.
It's about hardware vendors adding code specifically designed to prevent use of a chip that otherwise works just fine.
In case you didn't look at the site too carefully, their password keeping applet utilizes client-side javascript and a "packing key" you chose locally to encrypt all information using AES256, so not even they can see your passwords.
They call it "host-proof" hosting.
Your Packing Key never gets sent or saved to the server, so not even Passpack staff knows it. As far as the world outside your browser is concerned, your Packing Key is a complete mystery. Without it, it is impossibile to see, access or use your Passpack
The only concern I would have: should be (1) if there's a flaw in the client-side code, for example, if there's a XSS hole that might allow another site you visit to leech info from an open passpack window.
(2) Someone's successful phishing or keylogging on your PC to capture the passpack key.
(3) Someone compromising their site and altering the client-side javascript app to leak or compromise the key and the passpack.
Passpack.com. Actually, the site seems uncharacteristically sluggish at the moment... better be sure to download the offline client and use it to keep a local backup of the DB.
Good enough for personal passwords. For really sensitive enterprise stuff, it may be ideal to use an Enterprise password management product, such as a Passpack appliance (whenever they get to making that), or Citrix Password Manager.
Generally the requirements for businesses include strong encryption, multi-user access, and role-based access controls.. Most simple DB methods lack detailed access controls.
Some Enterprise password managers also provide options to allow a user to utilize the password to login to something, from the application, it will launch a browser or ssh/telnet directly with login details filled..
In some cases, allows user login without their workstation allowing them to know what the password actually is that is being submitted. Or requires a separate action be taken to 'see' the password, which generates a special audit record.
That way, if someone's terminated, or stripped of certain roles (and therefore access to certain passwords), it may not be quite as urgent to change them all immediately, or the passwords they actually chose to view can be changed first.
Policy might be for a password to always be changed to a new random password within 3 days of someone clicking on the "show me this password" link. To ensure use of the PWM is for one-time access, and protect against improper practices such as _writing down_ passwords or recording them outside the official DB.
That depends on what you mean by information, and what you mean by free. If all info were free, it could be a bit chaotic, finding useful information would be hard, since all the useless crap would be just as available as the bits you care about... price is part of what sorts information.
Think about it.. don't the books you pay for tend to be more polished than your average blog? Don't you trust what a medical textbook or an article in a for-pay peer-refereed journal says about a disease a little more than you trust the Wikipedia article that is filled with [[citation needed]] superscripts?
I don't want potential ID thiefs to know my account numbers.
I don't want my neighbors to know what's in my e-mailbox.
If I write a piece of software as a professional developer, I want to be able to sell my work and make a living off of it. That means I want it to cost something.
I don't want my customers to have a right to give it away to other people in their industry, so they don't have to buy my work.
Capitalism is the closest thing to a free society the world has ever seen, and the computing industry would totally fall apart if the market value of all digital content dropped to $0.
Computer scientists, musicians, artists, authors, film directors, playwrights, dancers, possibly athletes, would all be out of work.
Oh yes, and politicians would be in trouble as well.
In many ways, we are more free because information (in general) is not free.
I think you missed a point. The ggggp asked a question about the gggggp: So I ask again: how is this modded troll? (Unless they misread the URL.)
Some anon responded with Probably because information wants to be free as the reason.
*Aside from the fact, the existence of schemes such as moderation clearly demonstrates some info doesn't want to be 'free'
There is this matter that the phrase appears not stated as a metaphor.
Metaphors are certainly valid in certain contexts, but they're not valid in this one. It makes no sense to get this type of dialog:
Person1: How come there is life on earth?
Person2: Because Nature Abhor's a vacuum
Wouldn't you agree that Person2 is not really providing a valid answer to the question?
Nature having an opinion has nothing to do with the foundation for the question, and trying to interpret it as a metaphor doesn't result in a seeing response that makes sense either.
There is a context in which the phrase makes sense as a metaphor, but not as a reason for a thing. The phrase is attributable to Steward Brand who was first recorded as saying it, and it was:
Note the important part that is missing, all reference to the metaphorical conflict, information wants to be expensive just as much as it wants to be free.
Information doesn't tend to be free in the manner that Electricity tends to follow the path of least resistance.
In fact, the impression you suggest is contrary to the laws of thermodynamics.
Information tends to disperse and degrade to randomness, as entropy tends to increase.
Information disperses, and then degrades. No media magnetic, optical, or otherwise, is able to record information forever. A great deal of manual effort is required to spread information and a great deal of manual effort and cost is required to keep anything 'free'.
A lot more information has disappeared from existence forever than has been made free and kept free.
Example: Many bits of source code that were once freely available on the internet can no longer be found, as authors stopped paying for hosting or tore down their sites.
Yes, there are internet archive projects, but again: that's not information tending to be free, that's a monumental effort to defeat the laws of physics. They can't archive everything.
Google is probably on quite solid ground if they can get so much as a formal request for them to stop indexing his sites.
As far what Murdoch says in public, it doesn't really qualify as a formal request authorized by the company.
The press release isn't very good evidence that a company-authorized request is made for delisting of content from Google search.
It's not. Parent poster was saying They take that away and now we're defenseless in front of gigantic corporations
But the truth is, little guys are defenseless even with patent law.
They would have to somehow keep it clear, otherwise it would pile up, and the added weight would eventually crush the dome.
Plus, there is this matter of residents living in the dark... no sunlight ever, would start to effect people in bad ways..
It's within a judge's prerogative to change their mind. What makes you think Clarence Thomas won't?
They'll copy your model anyways, if you're small, you can't afford that many business patents (getting a patent is expensive, and litigating patents is also expensive and will put you out of business, unless you are successful against corporate army of lawyers).
Patents nowadays are very much for lawyers and large corporations BY lawyers and large corporations. They provide very little / no effective protection to the little guy.
If Google stopped crawling and listing his sites, he'd probably retaliate by initiating a legal action against Google, for unfair competition, or something of that nature, and get some judge to write up a quick injunction ordering Google to stop failing to index his sites.
Word of Google's evil act would be all over the news media, television stations, etc, that Murdoch controls, etc...
IOW, I suspect matters would get really nasty if Google actually tried to do exactly what he suggests he'd want (and stop making his stuff searchable).
That's a common misconception. Information doesn't want to be free, some people want all information to be free.
Some people conduct the fallacy of ascribing human-like qualities such as emotion to inanimate objects (fallacy of anthropomorthism).
They're probably not too concerned about plants. The place is almost always covered with snow, no big plants grow.
They are changing the climate of that small area regardless... with the clear-panelled dome, they are essentially turning it into a giant greenhouse.
Things would be able to grow that couldn't have a chance otherwise.
Absent the proper climate controls, under the right conditions: it can rain inside a huge dome like that, as water vapor collects near the roof.
It'd be nasty rain though, polluted no doubt.
Hm... only Hydrogen-powered cars allowed to enter or leave the dome.
Only electric yard equipment allowed.
The trouble is the difficulty enforcing that..
I suppose hidden surveillance cameras and combustion detecters could be mounted to the underside of the dome at regular intervals to detect any infractions.
If an application is not open source, then by definition, it cannot be free software...
Not all Open Source licenses necessarily satisfy the free software definition, however.
An example might be a program distributed as open source that you cannot use for commercial purposes, for example: it's subject to a patent, or a library it depends on is subject to a patent, and the included license only provides a patent license grant for non-commercial purposes.
Example would be: RSAREF. The RSA Reference library which used to be needed to compile and use PGP.
Until RSA Security's patent on the RSA cryptography expired, the RSA algorithm in the US could only be legally utilized by the RSAREF library, which included a grant only for non-commercial purposes.
So PGP could never qualify as free software, no matter what the sw license.
The DMCA doesn't make it illegal to bypass security protections. The anti-circumvention provisions only pertain to circumventing technological measures that effectively control access to a copyright work
Using a custom boot PROM to run a general purpose OS on the box doesn't bypass any measures that effectively protect copyright material.
And he's asking how to defeat that.. people can and have defeated it, the information regarding how to 'hack' the hardware to load your own OS should become common knowledge...
So? The SSH program can be used to hack into other people's servers.
Does that mean when anyone asks how to use SSH to get into their server, we should tell them "Don't try to hack into servers", and refuse to assist?