It didn't help that Fox juggled the order of episodes.
Hmmm, that would make it tricky. At least here in the UK, Sci-Fi channel got it right. And they showed all of 'em, including the 3 that Fox never bothered with (one of which, the second-to-last I think, was the best episode in the series, if you ask me).
You cannot even compare PHP and ASP.NET. PHP is a simple document embedded code web framework. ASP.NET is a component oriented web framework.
Have you considered that ~95% of all web applications are incredibly simple, and are therefore more suited to the document embedded code paradigm, and that therefore the vast majority of ASP.NET programmers use it in this way, because it can be used that way too?
I'll admit at this point that I haven't used ASP.NET, my experience of ASP is limited to the old non.NET version. But, I think some of these points can be raised based on what I know of ASP.NET so I'm going to do it anyway:
1.) Component driven - All the power of OOP vs PHPs OOP which is just an after thought
What I believe you mean here is that ASP.NET applications can make use of objects implemented in any of the.NET managed code languages, storing them in session or application scope and accessing their methods.
I'll agree that this is a useful technique, but will point out the PHP supports similar operations with Java and CORBA objects, and COM and.NET objects have been added (under Windows only, although I would have thought a mono.NET implementation will follow) for version 5. It isn't quite as smooth, but you can achieve similar results with not a lot more effort. I've personally only used the Java integration, which was very helpful.
2.) Event driven - Everyone who has used VB/Delphi/C++ Builder knows what a time saver this paradigm is.
I use a very simple PHP wrapper script that allows me to write pages of an application as objects that have methods called on them to represent various actions. Users are allowed or denied access to methods based on configuration in a database for flexibility. I am not sure how this compares with the event driven behaviours of ASP.NET, but I find it hard to believe they're any more convenient.
3.) Browser abstraction 4.) Unified coding model. No more fiddling with half the code in JavaScript and half on whatever you use on server side.
I'm not sure what either of these refer to. I'd be glad to have their benefits explained to me.
But from what I know about Java programmers, they tend to complicate things unnecessarily applying every engineering principle EVERYWHERE.
There are people like that. And some of the core Java APIs show signs of this kind of mentality too. I've dumped AWT in favour of my own GUI library because all the levels of abstraction just make it too damned slow -- by doing this I've halved application startup times, and now my library's getting close to working I'm actually spending less time writing the applications, too.
Cowboys-in-space, what a stupid concept. Lifted straight from a fake American dream. Had nothing interesting, no proper stoyline, no intriquing science-fiction element.
To address your comments 1 at a time:
Cowboys-in-space. Cowboys doesn't seem quite right -- more kind of bandits. But you got the general feel, at least.
Stupid concept. I'll agree there -- it really didn't seem to work right, and this is probably one of the reasons so few people watched it first time around. It feels dumb.
Had nothing interesting. I think the characters were interesting, and that was enough to make me watch; after all, there are a lot of very popular shows where the characters are the only thing even approximately out of the ordinary.
No proper storyline. How many episodes did you watch before coming to this conclusion?
No intriguing science-fiction element. Well, that's hard to judge -- a character who's been turned prescient-but-slightly-crazy by medical experimentation? I think that counts. It's probably the only one, though, and is soft SF at that. Yeah, sorry, it's not hard SF.
But, guess what, other people have different tastes, and resent your suggestion that they shouldn't be allowed to indulge them. If you don't like it, don't watch it. Nobody's forcing you.
I'm sorry you didn't like it. And yes, it was cancelled because a lot of people thought the format was bad and didn't look beyond that, which is a shame. Because behind that was some of the best written TV I've seen in years.
The sentence is bullshit made up by a register journalist who hadn't read the judge's decision. This decision only applies to the sale of modchips in the UK and doesn't touch on any other aspect of their legality.
A piece of advice: it seems from the text of the judgement in this case that Sony contested that making backup copies of PS2 games is not necessary, as they will replace any damaged discs free of charge.
You might want to try taking them up on that offer.
The judgement in this case (linked by someone above) talks about this in depth. Apparently an ephemeral copy can be infringing, and in this case it was held by the judge that PS2 games are sold with a license that only permits them to be used in the country of sale (I believe he neglected to take into account UK laws regarding interpretation of consumer contracts while reaching this decision, though) so such a copy _is_ infringement and circumvention devices are therefore illegal.
Thus the person below who has given details of how this might be achieved for gamecubes has broken UK law.
Actually, he ruled that one individual sold modchips knowing that they would be used to circumvent copyright in contravention of the Copyright Act 1988. The judgment is specific to this individual's case and doesn't make generalisations.
Thanks for the link. I see a few problems with this ruling, some of which may leave it open to appeal, and some of which may allow others in similar situations to argue that it does not apply as not all relevant facts were presented by the defense in this case.
1. It is stated in p.3 that all PS2 games are the copyright property of Sony. This is clearly not the case.
2. p.10 states "There is no dispute that the security system adopted by Sony is a copy-protection means." This means that the defendant didn't dispute it; somebody else may attempt to dispute this in future. In fact, I believe it isn't a copy-protection means as it does _not_ prevent copies of the data on PS2 game discs from being copied; it merely prevents those copies from being used afterwards. Note that this dispute only applies to the phrasing of the 1988 act, not the 2003 act.
3. The section discussing the copying of the game into memory in order to play it concentrates solely on whether such a copy is a copy under the meaning of the copyright act, and does not touch on whether or not the copy is licensed. It may be the case that such a copy is licensed under common law. This is grounds for an appeal I believe, as the judgement does not show that all the conditions needed for infringement are actually present.
4. No non-infringing uses of modchips have been considered (e.g. loading 'homebrew' games, or modified versions of PS2 Linux).
5. Paragraph 31 states 'Each of the PS2 games intended for the United Kingdom market has marked on it the words "for home use only". This is said to give the user a licence to use in the countries in which they were issued, i.e. in the United Kingdom.' This is a very narrow interpretation of the phrase "home use" which is not compatible with UK legislation covering consumer contracts, that state that whenever there is an ambiguity in a contract that whatever interpretation is most favourable to the consumer should be assumed. Clearly this should allow the consumer to use the games wherever he feels is 'home', and not limited to the United Kingdom.
6. The same mistake is made in interpreting the technical notice that games are only compatible with PAL equipment as an exclusion of license -- it is not an explicit exclusion, and such the consumer should be considered to have the broadest license that could be read from it.
As an aside, it is nice to see that the judge was sensible enough to reject Sony's theory that it didn't matter whether or not the defendant knew that copies 'made with[sic]' the chips he supplied would be infringing or not, due to them being outside of the UK and possibly in jurisdictions where their copies would be legal.
A method by which a plurality of alleged inventors may submit a plurality of patent applications to a plurality of patent offices using a computer network, connection to which may be facilitated by a plurality of independent service providers over a variety of communication methods, including but not limited to telephone lines, cable television connections, satellite uplinks, digital subscriber line technologies and paper cups tied together with a piece of string.
(I call this method 'e-mailing a patent attorney')
A method for distributing information to a plurality of uncoordinated user stations each of which is configured for communications with a multiplicity of independently-operated servers via a non-proprietary network includes steps for providing a distribution service that distributes updates for a plurality of different products, and providing a transporter software component to each of the plurality of uncoordinated user stations, wherein the transporter software component at each user station automatically effects communication sessions with the distribution service via the non-proprietary network for the purpose of obtaining updates for each of at least a subset of the plurality of different products that are installed on that user station.
Translation: a service on a non-homogenous network (e.g. the Internet) allows users to download a piece of software that automatically downloads updates to other software installed on their computers (but not necessarily for all of that software).
It doesn't have to be obvious in the usual sense of the word. Basically, the question is, if you asked an expert in the field in 1990 what the best way of solving the problem (e.g. how to distribute multiple software updates over a communications network) was, would they immediately come up with the same answer. I think they would.
PE is incompatible with COFF, whatever MS claims, because they changed the meaning of one of the fields in the relocation headers, meaning that PE files have slightly different displacement values than equivalent COFF files.
Yeah, but the GP's point is that there is technically no reason you couldn't add more execution units to an HT processor in order to make it support more 'virtual' processors with a better performance, just keeping a single logical instruction dispatcher to organise everything. This would still be HT, after a fashion, but you actually would get equivalent performance to having multiple processors. Possibly better because you could have more useful combinations, like the execution units of two xeons in a single unit that provides 3 virtual processors, all of which run at approximately full speed in most cases, rather than the 2 full speed + 2 slow processors you'd normally get.
In the area that I work, in the early days of commercially available software, vendors tried to charge more when users wanted to move their software to faster machines. That idea did not last long and is now a distant memory.
It is? I thought Oracle still did that. OK, a quick glance at their web site tells me that they aren't, but it's within the last 5 years that they've stopped, I'm sure of that.
Anyone who runs a firewall and does not currently have it set up similar to this should block outgoing port 25 connections that do not originate from your mail server immediately.
Sorry, can't do that. I frequently use telnet out of workstations on my network to connect to port 25 on other machines to verify SMTP setups are correct there.
I also use P2P software that has random port assignments, so a small proportion of the users I connect to with that will be on port 25, and I'd rather not interfere with it.
Perhaps it's just me, but egress filtering is the default behaviour on all FW boxes I set up. And I'm not even that much of a harcore security geek.
Are you sure? I've never met a non-hardore security geek who knows what 'egress filtering' is. And you seem to admit to having installed firewalls that aren't software packages that run on the PC they're protecting. This is definitely the behaviour of a security geek.
99% of users don't need to and will never run a mail server, DNS server, whatever from their cable modem. All leaving these ports open does is allow the spambots and botnets to spread unabated.
Hang on, you haven't read the article have you?
It's not talking about preventing users from running servers. It's talking about preventing users from using services in particular ways that look like they might be an attack of some kind.
Send too many e-mails, have your e-mail access shut down. Make too many web requests and they'll assume you have something like code red. Use port 6346 and they'll assume you're running gnutella and shut that down too. OK, I'm joking about that last one, but it's the obvious next step.
Who said I'm only allowed to use port 25 for sending e-mails?
This annoys me, actually -- one of the ISPs I've used in the past has an automatic proxy server that grabs every connection on port 25 and sends it to their own outgoing mail server. Damn it! I use SMTP for doing VRFY, alias expansions and other operations that can't be done through a relay server. I have P2P software that uses randomly chosen ports, 1/64K of which will be port 25. Stop assuming everyone uses the internet in the same way as the mindless zombies.
You've got some serious problems with your configuration if you're getting more than minimal swapping on that.
I currently have mozilla, several putty (ssh client) sessions, a few command prompts, an MPEG encoder (open but idle), Photoshop 5, and winword open for a total non-cache usage of 190MB. And Photoshop's configured to use half of my 256MB of available RAM whatever it actually needs (screwed up memory management if you ask me, but that's what it does), although not all of that is swapped in. Kill photoshop and it would be down to about 100Mb. Use Internet Explorer or Opera rather than memory-hogging Mozilla, and I could probably knock another 30Mb off that if I had the inclination.
One of the previous articles suggests they provide a categorised list, and BT is only using the 'illegal child porn' category.
Still, I'd like to see some kind of independent arbitration. Preferably through the court service, as you say, which is the correct institution to make decisions as to what's legal and what isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
It didn't help that Fox juggled the order of episodes.
Hmmm, that would make it tricky. At least here in the UK, Sci-Fi channel got it right. And they showed all of 'em, including the 3 that Fox never bothered with (one of which, the second-to-last I think, was the best episode in the series, if you ask me).
You cannot even compare PHP and ASP.NET. PHP is a simple document embedded code web framework. ASP.NET is a component oriented web framework.
.NET version. But, I think some of these points can be raised based on what I know of ASP.NET so I'm going to do it anyway:
.NET managed code languages, storing them in session or application scope and accessing their methods.
.NET objects have been added (under Windows only, although I would have thought a mono .NET implementation will follow) for version 5. It isn't quite as smooth, but you can achieve similar results with not a lot more effort. I've personally only used the Java integration, which was very helpful.
Have you considered that ~95% of all web applications are incredibly simple, and are therefore more suited to the document embedded code paradigm, and that therefore the vast majority of ASP.NET programmers use it in this way, because it can be used that way too?
I'll admit at this point that I haven't used ASP.NET, my experience of ASP is limited to the old non
1.) Component driven - All the power of OOP vs PHPs OOP which is just an after thought
What I believe you mean here is that ASP.NET applications can make use of objects implemented in any of the
I'll agree that this is a useful technique, but will point out the PHP supports similar operations with Java and CORBA objects, and COM and
2.) Event driven - Everyone who has used VB/Delphi/C++ Builder knows what a time saver this paradigm is.
I use a very simple PHP wrapper script that allows me to write pages of an application as objects that have methods called on them to represent various actions. Users are allowed or denied access to methods based on configuration in a database for flexibility. I am not sure how this compares with the event driven behaviours of ASP.NET, but I find it hard to believe they're any more convenient.
3.) Browser abstraction
4.) Unified coding model. No more fiddling with half the code in JavaScript and half on whatever you use on server side.
I'm not sure what either of these refer to. I'd be glad to have their benefits explained to me.
But from what I know about Java programmers, they tend to complicate things unnecessarily applying every engineering principle EVERYWHERE.
There are people like that. And some of the core Java APIs show signs of this kind of mentality too. I've dumped AWT in favour of my own GUI library because all the levels of abstraction just make it too damned slow -- by doing this I've halved application startup times, and now my library's getting close to working I'm actually spending less time writing the applications, too.
Cowboys-in-space, what a stupid concept. Lifted straight from a fake American dream. Had nothing interesting, no proper stoyline, no intriquing science-fiction element.
To address your comments 1 at a time:
Cowboys-in-space. Cowboys doesn't seem quite right -- more kind of bandits. But you got the general feel, at least.
Stupid concept. I'll agree there -- it really didn't seem to work right, and this is probably one of the reasons so few people watched it first time around. It feels dumb.
Had nothing interesting. I think the characters were interesting, and that was enough to make me watch; after all, there are a lot of very popular shows where the characters are the only thing even approximately out of the ordinary.
No proper storyline. How many episodes did you watch before coming to this conclusion?
No intriguing science-fiction element. Well, that's hard to judge -- a character who's been turned prescient-but-slightly-crazy by medical experimentation? I think that counts. It's probably the only one, though, and is soft SF at that. Yeah, sorry, it's not hard SF.
But, guess what, other people have different tastes, and resent your suggestion that they shouldn't be allowed to indulge them. If you don't like it, don't watch it. Nobody's forcing you.
I'm sorry you didn't like it. And yes, it was cancelled because a lot of people thought the format was bad and didn't look beyond that, which is a shame. Because behind that was some of the best written TV I've seen in years.
At a guess, it didn't work so they don't know who to pay. Come on, what do you expect from beta testing MS software?
Nah, the French aren't in Spain. They can't be. The Germans put their towels out on it at 5am this morning.
The sentence is ambiguous
The sentence is bullshit made up by a register journalist who hadn't read the judge's decision. This decision only applies to the sale of modchips in the UK and doesn't touch on any other aspect of their legality.
A piece of advice: it seems from the text of the judgement in this case that Sony contested that making backup copies of PS2 games is not necessary, as they will replace any damaged discs free of charge.
You might want to try taking them up on that offer.
Yes, we are, apparently.
The judgement in this case (linked by someone above) talks about this in depth. Apparently an ephemeral copy can be infringing, and in this case it was held by the judge that PS2 games are sold with a license that only permits them to be used in the country of sale (I believe he neglected to take into account UK laws regarding interpretation of consumer contracts while reaching this decision, though) so such a copy _is_ infringement and circumvention devices are therefore illegal.
Thus the person below who has given details of how this might be achieved for gamecubes has broken UK law.
Actually, he ruled that one individual sold modchips knowing that they would be used to circumvent copyright in contravention of the Copyright Act 1988. The judgment is specific to this individual's case and doesn't make generalisations.
Read the judgment that someone linked above.
Thanks for the link. I see a few problems with this ruling, some of which may leave it open to appeal, and some of which may allow others in similar situations to argue that it does not apply as not all relevant facts were presented by the defense in this case.
1. It is stated in p.3 that all PS2 games are the copyright property of Sony. This is clearly not the case.
2. p.10 states "There is no dispute that the security system adopted by Sony is a copy-protection means." This means that the defendant didn't dispute it; somebody else may attempt to dispute this in future. In fact, I believe it isn't a copy-protection means as it does _not_ prevent copies of the data on PS2 game discs from being copied; it merely prevents those copies from being used afterwards. Note that this dispute only applies to the phrasing of the 1988 act, not the 2003 act.
3. The section discussing the copying of the game into memory in order to play it concentrates solely on whether such a copy is a copy under the meaning of the copyright act, and does not touch on whether or not the copy is licensed. It may be the case that such a copy is licensed under common law. This is grounds for an appeal I believe, as the judgement does not show that all the conditions needed for infringement are actually present.
4. No non-infringing uses of modchips have been considered (e.g. loading 'homebrew' games, or modified versions of PS2 Linux).
5. Paragraph 31 states 'Each of the PS2 games intended for the United Kingdom market has marked on it the words "for home use only". This is said to give the user a licence to use in the countries in which they were issued, i.e. in the United Kingdom.' This is a very narrow interpretation of the phrase "home use" which is not compatible with UK legislation covering consumer contracts, that state that whenever there is an ambiguity in a contract that whatever interpretation is most favourable to the consumer should be assumed. Clearly this should allow the consumer to use the games wherever he feels is 'home', and not limited to the United Kingdom.
6. The same mistake is made in interpreting the technical notice that games are only compatible with PAL equipment as an exclusion of license -- it is not an explicit exclusion, and such the consumer should be considered to have the broadest license that could be read from it.
As an aside, it is nice to see that the judge was sensible enough to reject Sony's theory that it didn't matter whether or not the defendant knew that copies 'made with[sic]' the chips he supplied would be infringing or not, due to them being outside of the UK and possibly in jurisdictions where their copies would be legal.
A method by which a plurality of alleged inventors may submit a plurality of patent applications to a plurality of patent offices using a computer network, connection to which may be facilitated by a plurality of independent service providers over a variety of communication methods, including but not limited to telephone lines, cable television connections, satellite uplinks, digital subscriber line technologies and paper cups tied together with a piece of string.
(I call this method 'e-mailing a patent attorney')
A method for distributing information to a plurality of uncoordinated user stations each of which is configured for communications with a multiplicity of independently-operated servers via a non-proprietary network includes steps for providing a distribution service that distributes updates for a plurality of different products, and providing a transporter software component to each of the plurality of uncoordinated user stations, wherein the transporter software component at each user station automatically effects communication sessions with the distribution service via the non-proprietary network for the purpose of obtaining updates for each of at least a subset of the plurality of different products that are installed on that user station.
Translation: a service on a non-homogenous network (e.g. the Internet) allows users to download a piece of software that automatically downloads updates to other software installed on their computers (but not necessarily for all of that software).
It doesn't have to be obvious in the usual sense of the word. Basically, the question is, if you asked an expert in the field in 1990 what the best way of solving the problem (e.g. how to distribute multiple software updates over a communications network) was, would they immediately come up with the same answer. I think they would.
May be true of some of his speeches, but a speech delivered to parliament is a matter of public record and may be freely quoted anywhere, I believe.
PE is incompatible with COFF, whatever MS claims, because they changed the meaning of one of the fields in the relocation headers, meaning that PE files have slightly different displacement values than equivalent COFF files.
See the comment near the top of outcoff.c in NASM for more details.
RDOFF is an experimental system that you couldn't run a real OS off. It doesn't support dynamic linking, for a start.
(I developed it for fun and to test the at-the-time new modular object file output backend for NASM)
Yeah, but the GP's point is that there is technically no reason you couldn't add more execution units to an HT processor in order to make it support more 'virtual' processors with a better performance, just keeping a single logical instruction dispatcher to organise everything. This would still be HT, after a fashion, but you actually would get equivalent performance to having multiple processors. Possibly better because you could have more useful combinations, like the execution units of two xeons in a single unit that provides 3 virtual processors, all of which run at approximately full speed in most cases, rather than the 2 full speed + 2 slow processors you'd normally get.
In the area that I work, in the early days of commercially available software, vendors tried to charge more when users wanted to move their software to faster machines. That idea did not last long and is now a distant memory.
It is? I thought Oracle still did that. OK, a quick glance at their web site tells me that they aren't, but it's within the last 5 years that they've stopped, I'm sure of that.
Anyone who runs a firewall and does not currently have it set up similar to this should block outgoing port 25 connections that do not originate from your mail server immediately.
Sorry, can't do that. I frequently use telnet out of workstations on my network to connect to port 25 on other machines to verify SMTP setups are correct there.
I also use P2P software that has random port assignments, so a small proportion of the users I connect to with that will be on port 25, and I'd rather not interfere with it.
Nice suggestion, though.
Perhaps it's just me, but egress filtering is the default behaviour on all FW boxes I set up. And I'm not even that much of a harcore security geek.
Are you sure? I've never met a non-hardore security geek who knows what 'egress filtering' is. And you seem to admit to having installed firewalls that aren't software packages that run on the PC they're protecting. This is definitely the behaviour of a security geek.
99% of users don't need to and will never run a mail server, DNS server, whatever from their cable modem. All leaving these ports open does is allow the spambots and botnets to spread unabated.
Hang on, you haven't read the article have you?
It's not talking about preventing users from running servers. It's talking about preventing users from using services in particular ways that look like they might be an attack of some kind.
Send too many e-mails, have your e-mail access shut down. Make too many web requests and they'll assume you have something like code red. Use port 6346 and they'll assume you're running gnutella and shut that down too. OK, I'm joking about that last one, but it's the obvious next step.
Who said I'm only allowed to use port 25 for sending e-mails?
This annoys me, actually -- one of the ISPs I've used in the past has an automatic proxy server that grabs every connection on port 25 and sends it to their own outgoing mail server. Damn it! I use SMTP for doing VRFY, alias expansions and other operations that can't be done through a relay server. I have P2P software that uses randomly chosen ports, 1/64K of which will be port 25. Stop assuming everyone uses the internet in the same way as the mindless zombies.
You've got some serious problems with your configuration if you're getting more than minimal swapping on that.
I currently have mozilla, several putty (ssh client) sessions, a few command prompts, an MPEG encoder (open but idle), Photoshop 5, and winword open for a total non-cache usage of 190MB. And Photoshop's configured to use half of my 256MB of available RAM whatever it actually needs (screwed up memory management if you ask me, but that's what it does), although not all of that is swapped in. Kill photoshop and it would be down to about 100Mb. Use Internet Explorer or Opera rather than memory-hogging Mozilla, and I could probably knock another 30Mb off that if I had the inclination.
One of the previous articles suggests they provide a categorised list, and BT is only using the 'illegal child porn' category.
Still, I'd like to see some kind of independent arbitration. Preferably through the court service, as you say, which is the correct institution to make decisions as to what's legal and what isn't.