The only time it is reasonable for a company to know when I am playing a game/video/something manufactured by them is if they can add something meaningful to my experience.
Look at what Blizzard has done -- you buy a full version of their latest game, and with the key that you get, you can play on battle.net. I consider this to be a worthwhile exchange, because after all I am getting something new from them every time I play their games -- the services of their network.
However, if I were to tell Sony "I just played your stupid game by my lonesome self and you didn't give me anything, but I thought I'd just let you know", I would feel quite stupid.
If I had to buy a dvd for $20 and then watch it and then get charged more, that would be truly sucky.
I hope that the direction that all of this DRM stuff is headed is you get chaged maybe $3 or $4 to watch any movie ever made at any time you want in the comfort of your own home (with discounts for repeat watchings, etc). That is clearly worth the money to me.
It is not Microsoft's responsibility to file any charges here. All they did was manufacture a box where if you don't screw around with it, it behaves properly in terms of DVD-playing.
However, when "Bunnie" decides to play his Lord of the Rings DVD at a public demonstration, Sony (or newline or whoever owns the rights to that DVD) can charge him with unlawfully playing a DVD, just as if he were using deCSS on a linux machine. Then he will go to jail. Microsoft is as much to blame for this as Xing does in the deCSS case, and I don't really remember them (I could be wrong) suing anybody.
Somehow ppl in other parts of the world (than the USA) know how to eat dry food without drinking it down with water. I don't get it. I get a lump in my throat without healthy gulps of liquid of some kind.
Besides, aren't you suppsoed to drink like 3 liters of water a day to be healthy? Or is that terrible damned lies?
There are already many packages that allow for distributed rendering across a network. One of them is chromium (a spin-off of WireGL), which according to some can run Quake in a VR cave (3 walls, stereo).
Like the first post said, this isn't new.
Where is Apple? Where is Sun?
on
Analyzing Palladium
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Given that Microsoft and x86 have a strong hold on the computer market, it's fine that Palladium is going to run on that combination, but what about Sun, SGI, and Apple?
It doesn't look like Apple is getting brought into this at all -- I've heard no mention of either them or Motorola (they make Apple's CPU's right? or am I wrong?) being involved in the whole debate -- and a lot of people use macs.
Furthermore, a lot of.edu's have a thick and manly investment with Sun -- for example half of umich's engineering workstations are ultra 10's or better, and I'm sure the same is true at many other schools. Professors and techy students aren't going to be happy about losing Sun as a usable platform because it's not palladium-compliant or whatever.
Maybe macs and Suns will become more popular because of this Palladium thing because you can still pirate software and not let MS root your box.
Being a grown-up, and being as careful as you are with YOUR hand-held that you care deeply about, how much attention do you pay to where you put it? Ever put it in your pocket and walk into the corner of a desk, thusly crushing the screen? Ever put it in your bookbag and then plop the bag down on the floor? I've broken the touch-sensitive surface of my IIIxe at least twice in the years I've had it, and although it's easy to replace, it's still a hassle. I got a bumper case for it, but it's a pain to take out to dock...
Anyway does anybody really think a bunch of school kids (given some of them are tech-saavy, but...) are going to be able to keep their expensive (it's still more than a bottom of the line TI graphing calculator) PDA's in one piece? I think that has always been part of the argument against giving students laptops too.
I think it's fine and dandy to have a centralized system where a kid can go to a computer in the library and see when his homework is due and look at notes from class, but anything else is just fodder for either breakage or game-playing.
KPMG scans monthly? That's fine, except that the script kiddies scan your networks several times a day for cracks, especially if your site has been successfully defaced before.
While some security scanning service is probably a good thing, but it seems that some intelligent administrating and software choices (hint hint) would be a lot better at preventing problems...
During thawing, to restore the process's memory structure, one would have to do one of two things: Either put the process *exactly* where it was before in system memory, which may not be possible because other programs (perhaps even the OS?) are running in that memory space now.
The other option is to reallocate new memory for the process, and then go through and fix every pointer in the process to point to new memory locations. I will remind you that this is not possible, because processes can do very strange things with pointers and it's not possible to keep track of all of them from the object code side.
Now, if the process could hibernate itself... well that's the same as hitting Save, and Exit in any program.
So the only problem here is that programs that take weeks and/or months to compute stuff need to be written in such a way that you can save every once in a while, so when the power DOES go out, you don't lose that much of what you've processed.
In my opinion OS-level hibernation (which already exists for many windows versions, and seems like it should exist for those big mainframes) coupled with some smart programming (no intractable problems here) would put a thorough end to these shenanigans with losing months of processing time just because the power went out 5 minutes before it finished.
I think that any mode of copy protection is rather flawed. Take audio: Let's say you can no longer rip music straight off of a CD. Well, you can always play the CD and just record the sound that comes out with your sound card. Certainly this is somewhat slower and degrades the quality a little, but it's hard to notice unless you're an audiophile, in which case you won't be using mp3 anyway.
When it comes to capturing TV for example, if you get a TV card, the process of viewing and the process of capturing (it seems to me) are identical no matter what you do. Even if the software that comes with the tv card won't let you record, something will. Even if you have to read from the frame buffer of your video card to get the picture and plug your sound card into itself to get the sound, both of these are still options.
Since I live in a dorm room, my only TV is in fact my computer, and I've been recording shows into divx'd avi's for quite a while now, and I can't complain about the quality at all.
So basically even though it may be more inconvenient to record some signals, it will always be possible, so I don't think there's a reason to make a big fuss about it...
I think that pictures on buttons is a great idea because given that I know what they mean, I can fit more of them in a small portion of the screen than text-labelled buttons.
I think it's silly to try to come up with a single easy way to use something that has such an expansive functionality. If there's some newbie user who needs large labelled buttons to get around, that's fine. And the concept of a 'start' button isn't that bad either. Consider -- if you have only seen people use a lawnmower kind of from a distance, you would never know what exactly you're stupposed to do get it started without reading the manual. So what's wrong with making people learn their way around a start button?
Furthermore, I think that if you don't want to deal with hard drives, you don't have to. If you anchor all your directory trees on the desktop or in 'my documents' or whatever, there won't ever even be a mention of a hard drive icon.
Think about the My Computer icon -- if you don't want to know what's inside it, why would you ever open it up? I think the current paradigm works just fine, if you want to completely ignore the underlying implementation.
On the other hand, all those things are there in case you don't want to screw around with things you know to be an abstraction.
And there's always cygwin bash in case you wanna navigate around that way.
The article we're talking about seems to be sitting at home with a cigarette and a short length of tubing.
The separation between "program" and "input to a program" is not well-defined by any means, which is the distinction the australians are trying to make on this. Consider -- photoshop is a "program", right? Well no it's not because it's just input to a "program" that does different things depending on what bits are in some file. Even an OS is not a program because the program itself is implemented in hardware.
This next one is a stretch, but one might say that hardware is a program that is executed by reality.
So in the end, I believe that there should not be a distinction made between any type of intellectual property, whether it be "input" (aka film that gets displayed) or a "program" (aka film that displays itself on a screen via an executable or something)
As far as EU law, I don't think anybody is preventing you from making a backup of your movie by sticking the "out" of your DVD player into the "in" of your DVD recorder...
I guess what I mean is how difficult would it be to build a craft capable of smashing directly into Mars's atmosphere (perpendicular to suface normal) and slowing down that way? I mean certainly the heat stress would be tremendous, but certainly there's solutions to that...
So the plan is that it smashes down in there, then once it realizes it's slow enough, it can deploy a series of parachutes to slow it down even further...
But if it's optional, then what's the point?
An airline is just another "company" providing a "good service", isn't it? Are we going to have exceptions to this rule? So anything controlled by the FAA gets special treatment... But what about the FDA or the FCC? Those are govt organizations as well, in charge of a major aspect of our public lives, right? Will they be entitled to exceptions to this "optional" rule as well?
Manufacturing a fake license, I imagine, is simply a task of manipulating the appearance of one piece of plastic.
Faking an identity, on the other hand, which is tied to a fingerprint (or palm print.. why not?)AND a retinal scan are two different things. One would have to bribe an awful lot of people to get this done.
On the other hand, it is also possible to fake a fingerprint with some interesting use of rubber. An eye would be more difficult to fake, especially if one had to have both eyes scanned and matched. You can't just take your eyes out, put in glass ones (with a picture of somebody else's retina painted on the back) without losing your own sight, at least in the near future.
The only problem is if you're required to get a retinal scan if you go on the bus/subway or to drive your car, or even to walk into a store...
In general, I'd like for there to be a pretty foolproof system of personal identification, but the paranoia factor (the govt busting you just because you take the subway to a shady part of town once or twice a week?) is pretty strong...
An optional ID isn't optional if a company requires you to have one to use their services. And it seems like an airline (for example) would require you to have one if you wanted to fly. Or a car rental agency to rent. Or a bank to hold your money.
I don't get why you're so concerned about the govt being able to track your movements with an ID card anyway -- face identification software will be doing this job in a few years anyway...
I contributed a little javadoc-related chunk to the JRE (environment for Java development under emacs), and the author promptly put it into the next release. I think at least half of that project is minor contributions from people who want to have something their way, make it, and then decide to submit it...
During the breakup of Yugoslavia, a lot of people got news from TV, but many others turned to the original sources on the Internet. Besides, I don't get what you mean by interactive -- simply because somebody had a webcam aimed at the whole thing doesn't mean they could participate somehow. So I think interactive is the wrong word.
I don't understand why this guy, being able to pull off these attacks, didn't do all of this shit from a cybercafe in the middle of NYC where nobody can ever trace you, or like a terminal at the public library.
But 8 months in juvy is gonna be rough. He ought to be in high school learning shit -- this kid's life is pretty much screwed now because if he ever had a chance to get into a good college, it's gone now. Plus, motivation is gonna be a problem...
I don't understand why the second plane wasn't shot down. The US air force ought to have a crapload of fighters that it can deploy to new york within about 10 minutes. They must have detected the second plane on radar... So why wasn't it shot down over some water or a big field or something? Clearly it would have been bad if the 2nd plane were loaded with people, but when you make the decision -- either a planeful of people or a planeful AND an unknown number when the plane crashes into the middle of NYC...
Now, I guess, the USA is gonna have SAM sites all over the place...
The record companies can argue that you can still do all of the above -- hear a song someplace, but then isntead of downloading it, you can just go to the record store and listen in there. AFAIK, lots of record stores have things where you can listen to a CD before you buy it. So if you decide it's good, you can buy it, and if you decide it sucks, you can get something else. By restricting your ability to get mp3's, the record company isn't really restricting your ability to pre-evaluate some music.
Now clearly, gnutella searches are a lot more convenient than driving all the way to that store in town that lets you listen to stuff befor eyou buy it, but when it comes down to it, you haven't really lost any abilities.
Even amazon.com lets you preview tracks sometimes...
So the record companies will just say "Well we havne't really taken anyting away from you, so shut up".
Slashdot Mirror
The only time it is reasonable for a company to know when I am playing a game/video/something manufactured by them is if they can add something meaningful to my experience.
Look at what Blizzard has done -- you buy a full version of their latest game, and with the key that you get, you can play on battle.net. I consider this to be a worthwhile exchange, because after all I am getting something new from them every time I play their games -- the services of their network.
However, if I were to tell Sony "I just played your stupid game by my lonesome self and you didn't give me anything, but I thought I'd just let you know", I would feel quite stupid.
If I had to buy a dvd for $20 and then watch it and then get charged more, that would be truly sucky.
I hope that the direction that all of this DRM stuff is headed is you get chaged maybe $3 or $4 to watch any movie ever made at any time you want in the comfort of your own home (with discounts for repeat watchings, etc). That is clearly worth the money to me.
Ramble...
It is not Microsoft's responsibility to file any charges here. All they did was manufacture a box where if you don't screw around with it, it behaves properly in terms of DVD-playing.
However, when "Bunnie" decides to play his Lord of the Rings DVD at a public demonstration, Sony (or newline or whoever owns the rights to that DVD) can charge him with unlawfully playing a DVD, just as if he were using deCSS on a linux machine. Then he will go to jail. Microsoft is as much to blame for this as Xing does in the deCSS case, and I don't really remember them (I could be wrong) suing anybody.
It will be interesting to see what happens.
Somehow ppl in other parts of the world (than the USA) know how to eat dry food without drinking it down with water. I don't get it. I get a lump in my throat without healthy gulps of liquid of some kind.
Besides, aren't you suppsoed to drink like 3 liters of water a day to be healthy? Or is that terrible damned lies?
There are already many packages that allow for distributed rendering across a network. One of them is chromium (a spin-off of WireGL), which according to some can run Quake in a VR cave (3 walls, stereo).
Like the first post said, this isn't new.
Given that Microsoft and x86 have a strong hold on the computer market, it's fine that Palladium is going to run on that combination, but what about Sun, SGI, and Apple?
.edu's have a thick and manly investment with Sun -- for example half of umich's engineering workstations are ultra 10's or better, and I'm sure the same is true at many other schools. Professors and techy students aren't going to be happy about losing Sun as a usable platform because it's not palladium-compliant or whatever.
It doesn't look like Apple is getting brought into this at all -- I've heard no mention of either them or Motorola (they make Apple's CPU's right? or am I wrong?) being involved in the whole debate -- and a lot of people use macs.
Furthermore, a lot of
Maybe macs and Suns will become more popular because of this Palladium thing because you can still pirate software and not let MS root your box.
What do you think?
Being a grown-up, and being as careful as you are with YOUR hand-held that you care deeply about, how much attention do you pay to where you put it? Ever put it in your pocket and walk into the corner of a desk, thusly crushing the screen? Ever put it in your bookbag and then plop the bag down on the floor? I've broken the touch-sensitive surface of my IIIxe at least twice in the years I've had it, and although it's easy to replace, it's still a hassle. I got a bumper case for it, but it's a pain to take out to dock...
Anyway does anybody really think a bunch of school kids (given some of them are tech-saavy, but...) are going to be able to keep their expensive (it's still more than a bottom of the line TI graphing calculator) PDA's in one piece? I think that has always been part of the argument against giving students laptops too.
I think it's fine and dandy to have a centralized system where a kid can go to a computer in the library and see when his homework is due and look at notes from class, but anything else is just fodder for either breakage or game-playing.
KPMG scans monthly? That's fine, except that the script kiddies scan your networks several times a day for cracks, especially if your site has been successfully defaced before.
While some security scanning service is probably a good thing, but it seems that some intelligent administrating and software choices (hint hint) would be a lot better at preventing problems...
A proper background for my 500-display infinite reality supercomputer!
It's not possible to hibernate a single process.
During thawing, to restore the process's memory structure, one would have to do one of two things: Either put the process *exactly* where it was before in system memory, which may not be possible because other programs (perhaps even the OS?) are running in that memory space now.
The other option is to reallocate new memory for the process, and then go through and fix every pointer in the process to point to new memory locations. I will remind you that this is not possible, because processes can do very strange things with pointers and it's not possible to keep track of all of them from the object code side.
Now, if the process could hibernate itself... well that's the same as hitting Save, and Exit in any program.
So the only problem here is that programs that take weeks and/or months to compute stuff need to be written in such a way that you can save every once in a while, so when the power DOES go out, you don't lose that much of what you've processed.
In my opinion OS-level hibernation (which already exists for many windows versions, and seems like it should exist for those big mainframes) coupled with some smart programming (no intractable problems here) would put a thorough end to these shenanigans with losing months of processing time just because the power went out 5 minutes before it finished.
I think that any mode of copy protection is rather flawed. Take audio: Let's say you can no longer rip music straight off of a CD. Well, you can always play the CD and just record the sound that comes out with your sound card. Certainly this is somewhat slower and degrades the quality a little, but it's hard to notice unless you're an audiophile, in which case you won't be using mp3 anyway.
When it comes to capturing TV for example, if you get a TV card, the process of viewing and the process of capturing (it seems to me) are identical no matter what you do. Even if the software that comes with the tv card won't let you record, something will. Even if you have to read from the frame buffer of your video card to get the picture and plug your sound card into itself to get the sound, both of these are still options.
Since I live in a dorm room, my only TV is in fact my computer, and I've been recording shows into divx'd avi's for quite a while now, and I can't complain about the quality at all.
So basically even though it may be more inconvenient to record some signals, it will always be possible, so I don't think there's a reason to make a big fuss about it...
I think that pictures on buttons is a great idea because given that I know what they mean, I can fit more of them in a small portion of the screen than text-labelled buttons.
I think it's silly to try to come up with a single easy way to use something that has such an expansive functionality. If there's some newbie user who needs large labelled buttons to get around, that's fine. And the concept of a 'start' button isn't that bad either. Consider -- if you have only seen people use a lawnmower kind of from a distance, you would never know what exactly you're stupposed to do get it started without reading the manual. So what's wrong with making people learn their way around a start button?
Furthermore, I think that if you don't want to deal with hard drives, you don't have to. If you anchor all your directory trees on the desktop or in 'my documents' or whatever, there won't ever even be a mention of a hard drive icon.
Think about the My Computer icon -- if you don't want to know what's inside it, why would you ever open it up? I think the current paradigm works just fine, if you want to completely ignore the underlying implementation.
On the other hand, all those things are there in case you don't want to screw around with things you know to be an abstraction.
And there's always cygwin bash in case you wanna navigate around that way.
The article we're talking about seems to be sitting at home with a cigarette and a short length of tubing.
The separation between "program" and "input to a program" is not well-defined by any means, which is the distinction the australians are trying to make on this. Consider -- photoshop is a "program", right? Well no it's not because it's just input to a "program" that does different things depending on what bits are in some file. Even an OS is not a program because the program itself is implemented in hardware.
This next one is a stretch, but one might say that hardware is a program that is executed by reality.
So in the end, I believe that there should not be a distinction made between any type of intellectual property, whether it be "input" (aka film that gets displayed) or a "program" (aka film that displays itself on a screen via an executable or something)
As far as EU law, I don't think anybody is preventing you from making a backup of your movie by sticking the "out" of your DVD player into the "in" of your DVD recorder...
What abour aero-smashing?
I guess what I mean is how difficult would it be to build a craft capable of smashing directly into Mars's atmosphere (perpendicular to suface normal) and slowing down that way? I mean certainly the heat stress would be tremendous, but certainly there's solutions to that...
So the plan is that it smashes down in there, then once it realizes it's slow enough, it can deploy a series of parachutes to slow it down even further...
But if it's optional, then what's the point?
An airline is just another "company" providing a "good service", isn't it? Are we going to have exceptions to this rule? So anything controlled by the FAA gets special treatment... But what about the FDA or the FCC? Those are govt organizations as well, in charge of a major aspect of our public lives, right? Will they be entitled to exceptions to this "optional" rule as well?
Making it optional is not a good idea.
Manufacturing a fake license, I imagine, is simply a task of manipulating the appearance of one piece of plastic.
Faking an identity, on the other hand, which is tied to a fingerprint (or palm print.. why not?)AND a retinal scan are two different things. One would have to bribe an awful lot of people to get this done.
On the other hand, it is also possible to fake a fingerprint with some interesting use of rubber. An eye would be more difficult to fake, especially if one had to have both eyes scanned and matched. You can't just take your eyes out, put in glass ones (with a picture of somebody else's retina painted on the back) without losing your own sight, at least in the near future.
The only problem is if you're required to get a retinal scan if you go on the bus/subway or to drive your car, or even to walk into a store...
In general, I'd like for there to be a pretty foolproof system of personal identification, but the paranoia factor (the govt busting you just because you take the subway to a shady part of town once or twice a week?) is pretty strong...
An optional ID isn't optional if a company requires you to have one to use their services. And it seems like an airline (for example) would require you to have one if you wanted to fly. Or a car rental agency to rent. Or a bank to hold your money.
I don't get why you're so concerned about the govt being able to track your movements with an ID card anyway -- face identification software will be doing this job in a few years anyway...
it's the JDE, not the JRE.
wait uhm, that's not it either...
Dude, I meant the JDK.
Got my acronyms wrong...
I contributed a little javadoc-related chunk to the JRE (environment for Java development under emacs), and the author promptly put it into the next release. I think at least half of that project is minor contributions from people who want to have something their way, make it, and then decide to submit it...
During the breakup of Yugoslavia, a lot of people got news from TV, but many others turned to the original sources on the Internet. Besides, I don't get what you mean by interactive -- simply because somebody had a webcam aimed at the whole thing doesn't mean they could participate somehow. So I think interactive is the wrong word.
I don't understand why this guy, being able to pull off these attacks, didn't do all of this shit from a cybercafe in the middle of NYC where nobody can ever trace you, or like a terminal at the public library.
But 8 months in juvy is gonna be rough. He ought to be in high school learning shit -- this kid's life is pretty much screwed now because if he ever had a chance to get into a good college, it's gone now. Plus, motivation is gonna be a problem...
No matter how much your life sucks, there's no reason to explode any buildings that belong to the more fortunate guy.
I think it's distasteful to make excuses for terrorism, no matter who is responsible.
I don't understand why the second plane wasn't shot down. The US air force ought to have a crapload of fighters that it can deploy to new york within about 10 minutes. They must have detected the second plane on radar... So why wasn't it shot down over some water or a big field or something? Clearly it would have been bad if the 2nd plane were loaded with people, but when you make the decision -- either a planeful of people or a planeful AND an unknown number when the plane crashes into the middle of NYC...
Now, I guess, the USA is gonna have SAM sites all over the place...
The record companies can argue that you can still do all of the above -- hear a song someplace, but then isntead of downloading it, you can just go to the record store and listen in there. AFAIK, lots of record stores have things where you can listen to a CD before you buy it. So if you decide it's good, you can buy it, and if you decide it sucks, you can get something else. By restricting your ability to get mp3's, the record company isn't really restricting your ability to pre-evaluate some music.
Now clearly, gnutella searches are a lot more convenient than driving all the way to that store in town that lets you listen to stuff befor eyou buy it, but when it comes down to it, you haven't really lost any abilities.
Even amazon.com lets you preview tracks sometimes...
So the record companies will just say "Well we havne't really taken anyting away from you, so shut up".