The big-time piracy problem is still people making highly legitimate looking, but pirated copies of the software, down to even the hologram in some instances. If you bought a counterfeit copy of XP, Office XP, etc. you'd not have a sanctioned copy with support privileges, etc. Microsoft is NOT obligated to provide you updates/fixes (and technically, it's also that way for security fixes...) for your counterfeit copy if you've bought one in good faith. Sure, you can use the software because you obtained it in good faith per copyright law, etc. but don't be insisting that you've got a legitimate copy and don't need to be buying it again to get the support you thought you had obtained with the pirated copy you ended up with in the first place.
They can claim they can refuse service to anyone, but the Common Carrier status can be revoked with any one refusal that isn't backed by some law. In other words, they can refuse you service if you're trying to ship fireworks through them, but I don't think they can actually refuse you service because they find you annoying and don't want to provide you service- which is why they typically don't do that sort of thing.
What is happening here is that they're doing the "we don't like you, so we're not shipping your stuff" thing in the form of a blocked IP address. That would be sufficient if someone pressed the issue to sue them over anything that might have slipped by them that would normally get them in trouble if it weren't for the Common Carrier status they possess.
It may be their property, but so long as they possess common carrier status, they can't do that- they're limited in what they can/can't do. In exchange, they get protection from prosecution for tons of things that their customers do. If they don't have this protection, they end up being held actionable for anything that might be illegal or criminal done on their service- because if they filter or prevent ONE thing, they must handle ALL of them.
If they wish to keep that protection of Common Carrier status (which works in most civilized countries...), they can't do that no matter what you might hold to be true about it being their service and wires...
I can't stand people botching the deliveries- something about my being a perfectionist, I guess.
As for being a pompous arse, perhaps I am one- but your posting anonymously in reply is apt. At least I post with my identity out for everyone to see- you see fit to hide behind a mask.
Unfortunately, the language we write and speak is NOT "American" (Alhough it IS the American dialect of the language in question...). As such, since we're not saying, "The American dialect of English" here, you really need to capitalize English, since it's a proper noun that is given to the language in question.
Besides, it NEVER hurts to learn about the heritage of one's country- and England DID have a big part of it all the same.
You punctuated it wrong. It should have been with an ellipsis (e.g., "...") in the front of the sentence fragment you're adding to the whole lot.
Somehow, it's always less funny when you mess up your delivery in the same manner as the person you're making fun of. Now, one wonders if you'd have picked the right word to use in the context of the grandparent quote you're making fun of, in light of this...
People said the same damn things about PATRIOT in the first place and about DMCA, etc.
This law should NEVER have been suggested, voted upon, etc. as it's completely in violation of the Constitution which gives the Government it's authority to pass laws in the first place.
I thought that Peltiers, except for the thin-film variety, had a COP that was less than 1. Simply put the things take about 1.5-2 times the juice they're pumping. This is due to Joule Heating losses, etc. in the bulk semiconductor materials they're using.
Which would be what you've got with POTS- they keep these huge-assed banks of batteries at the CO to power the landline phones for days without AC power to run them. They tried to accomplish this with ADSL services so they could make that leap without major re-work (I know, they attempted to make a low enough power consumption single chip solution at TI- they never could quite make it...)- the problem is that ADSL speeds weren't enough and they couldn't do the power thing (the chip drew about 100-200ma too much from what I understand...) so they went ahead with fiber and are putting the batteries out at the premises. PoE's kind of silly, when you think about it- how is the signal getting into the neighborhood? Fiber. How is fiber going to carry power with the levels of optical and electrical tech we have these days? Now, if they could have made the leap with the copper loops with something like Ethernet over phone lines (which they have, but it doesn't work in all locations because of what they've done over the years to the loops...) they probably could have managed the jump with no probs. In fact, I'm surprised they went the fiber route- it's not much better than the long-haul Ethernet over POTS loops, but it doesn't give them the ability to meet the emergency services requirements.
They've flooded the market with the damn things. However, there IS hope. Several of the smaller players are already going over to Linux, being fed up with MS charging what they charge on the machines and not having anything more stable than they have to begin with. It's just going to take time (Hell, those self-check-out kiosks in the stores lately use Windows XP, not even embedded XP- I know, the silly thing crashed in the middle of my checking out over at Wal-Mart and they rebooted it in front of me, like it wasn't anything at all (Like it was commonplace...)) and more people being bit hard by the damn stuff MS has been jamming down their throats.
Considering that both sides happen to HAVE them and just not use them... I know for a fact that the Russians had some rather ugly, in violation of the Rules, ammo- there was a bunch of ammo that got over here by accident through ammo sales from Russia for SKS and AKM rifles, intended for hunting. The damned things were steel core, hollow point rounds designed to penetrate body armor.
You had it right, and had me agreeing with you right on up to the point you called it "stealing". Copyright Infringement is just that- infringement. It's not theft as defined in legal circles as you're not depriving the parties involved of anything execpt potential profits. If I infringe on somebody's Copyrights, the Work in question is still there and they're not deprived of it's use. The value of the Copyright may be diminished, but overall, they can still sell copies until they're blue in the face. If I steal something from you, you are deprived of it's usage.
If you're going to discuss this, please, please, please use the proper terms instead of the mis-used concepts the media companies have used to frame this discussion- they're dead wrong and they're relying on the "tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth..." principle to dupe you into thinking that it's the same thing.
The DVD CCA, the people who license out the magic keys, etc. for region coding and CSS unpacking, claimed that it was a trade secret during their trial. Their lawyers were stupid enough to submit decss.c as evidence in the trial- which abrogated the trade secret status themselves...
For someone who was using breach of contract and trade secret violation claims to stifle and suppress a program to allow region coding to be unlocked- it was the stupidest thing to do. All court submissions are public domain unless the Judge orders them sealed- and Judges typically don't seal things unless they have a very good reason; and screwing yourself up like that isn't one of them.
They (Intel) shouldn't be expected to make a main compiler for AMD's CPU's, no. But that's NOT what AMD's contending. What AMD's contending is that Intel's compiler isn't just optimized for Intel CPUs, it's de-optimized for AMD CPUs- as in, it picks the worst possible instructions for code when it knows that an AMD is being executed against. Technically, it shouldn't care about what CPU so long as the same runs x86 architechture CPU- it should be peak speed, etc. on a P3 or P4 or whatever Intel CPU, but shouldn't be running utterly crippled on other brands of the same architechture. What is happening with the Intel C++ compiler is that they're picking 8-bit instructions and the like in as many cases as they can get away with. This means you're doing memory copies in the form of byte copies instead of word copies, etc. That is a degredation of performance on the order of 20-75% (or more!) for those sets of instructions and I can guarantee that if they're doing 8-bit stuff (And this has been confirmed by alternate sources, by the way...), it explains why it's NOT happy on an AMD64 machine- 8-bit would choke the CPU hard because it eschews the 8-bit modes to accomplish 64-bitness... I've encountered some drivers for Windows XP in some of my porting work that BARFED on my AMD64 machine (the only machine I typically run XP on since it's my reference machine for Linux game porting, etc...)- when it was installed on an Intel machine and an VIA machine, it ran just fine.
Considering that the code is picking the worst possible mode (8-bit) for things in it's runtime lib, etc. it's not that it's "optimized" for Intel, it's de-optimized for AMD machines. Not acceptable. And, before you say anything to try to play apologist here for Intel, I will point out that they DO know that their compiler is doing this, they've been handed superior code that rocks on all x86 platforms, is 50% faster and is somewhat smaller and a hell of a lot simpler- with the understanding that they were welcome to the code with no rights reserved on it to improve the compiler. They weren't interested in fixing the situation save to improve Pentium 2/3 performance.
I have a PROBLEM with this attitude and action. To be honest, everyone should.
The moment it was put to PAPER it was considered published. You know, for all the talk about being more enlightened up in Canada when it comes to this sort of stupidity, this ranks right on up there with the top ten right at the moment.
Especially the menion of Ovonyx- apparently, they may well be finally commercializing Ovshinski's toy in something other than rewriteable CD's and DVD's. Not that Stanford Ovshinski's discovery is anything but amazing- it's just that it's taken them over three decades (They'd discovered this tech in the 60's and developed the first ORAM, or Ovonic RAM, back in the early 70's.) just to see the real fruits thereof and to have part of the big boys to take long enough to take them seriously. Can't wait to see their uber-Flash finally take off and to see some of Ovshinski's other brain children to leave the nest- there's some pretty impressive things that he's come up with using amorphous materials tech... This includes rechargeables using fuel cell tech (!) and amorphous solar cells that produce more juice than just about anything else (save the nanotech ones which are in the same power class...) and make solar a viable possibility for power generation.
Now, having said all of this, PRAMFS isn't a response to this tech, per se, because of the company in question (Embedded systems have something resembling this sort of thing in many cases, using battery backed RAM disks, etc...)- but it's NICE to know that they have something akin to this in hand in development because if they DO release the OVRAM product idea in it's current incarnation, we'll have a leg up and be able to hit the ground running with Linux using something like this out the gate.
When Spybot Search and Destroy did a much more thorough job on the machines I've worked on cleaning up (I don't generally use Windows, so I don't typically need S-A-D...)- I kinda quit using AdAware altogether. It just doesn't do the job the same way as other solutions.
Not that your article isn't funny (it is...), but it's sad that it got modded funny instead of "insightful"- because it's much more insightful than funny. Ah well, what do I know, right?
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The big-time piracy problem is still people making highly legitimate looking, but pirated copies of the software, down to even the hologram in some instances. If you bought a counterfeit copy of XP, Office XP, etc. you'd not have a sanctioned copy with support privileges, etc. Microsoft is NOT obligated to provide you updates/fixes (and technically, it's also that way for security fixes...) for your counterfeit copy if you've bought one in good faith. Sure, you can use the software because you obtained it in good faith per copyright law, etc. but don't be insisting that you've got a legitimate copy and don't need to be buying it again to get the support you thought you had obtained with the pirated copy you ended up with in the first place.
They can claim they can refuse service to anyone, but the Common Carrier status can be revoked with any one refusal that isn't backed by some law. In other words, they can refuse you service if you're trying to ship fireworks through them, but I don't think they can actually refuse you service because they find you annoying and don't want to provide you service- which is why they typically don't do that sort of thing.
What is happening here is that they're doing the "we don't like you, so we're not shipping your stuff" thing in the form of a blocked IP address. That would be sufficient if someone pressed the issue to sue them over anything that might have slipped by them that would normally get them in trouble if it weren't for the Common Carrier status they possess.
BZZZT!
Nice try, thank you for playing.
It may be their property, but so long as they possess common carrier status, they can't do that- they're limited in what they can/can't do. In exchange, they get protection from prosecution for tons of things that their customers do. If they don't have this protection, they end up being held actionable for anything that might be illegal or criminal done on their service- because if they filter or prevent ONE thing, they must handle ALL of them.
If they wish to keep that protection of Common Carrier status (which works in most civilized countries...), they can't do that no matter what you might hold to be true about it being their service and wires...
It might be bad form, but it's not purely improper English as was the parent post. But then, I was picking on different things, now wasn't I?
Like I said, I don't hide behind a false front. If I wanted to, I would and few would be able to figure out whom I was on these web-boards.
Well, at least YOU got it right...
I can't stand people botching the deliveries- something about my being a perfectionist, I guess.
As for being a pompous arse, perhaps I am one- but your posting anonymously in reply is apt. At least I post with my identity out for everyone to see- you see fit to hide behind a mask.
There's elements on the Moon that are in relative abundance compared to the Earth. Stuff that would be worthwhile to mine off of it.
The Helium-3 is worth it alone, let alone the Titanium and Rare Earth Elements present there...
Unfortunately, the language we write and speak is NOT "American" (Alhough it IS the American dialect of the language in question...). As such, since we're not saying, "The American dialect of English" here, you really need to capitalize English, since it's a proper noun that is given to the language in question.
Besides, it NEVER hurts to learn about the heritage of one's country- and England DID have a big part of it all the same.
You punctuated it wrong. It should have been with an ellipsis (e.g., "...") in the front of the sentence fragment you're adding to the whole lot.
Somehow, it's always less funny when you mess up your delivery in the same manner as the person you're making fun of. Now, one wonders if you'd have picked the right word to use in the context of the grandparent quote you're making fun of, in light of this...
And XP == eXtortion Plan...
People said the same damn things about PATRIOT in the first place and about DMCA, etc.
This law should NEVER have been suggested, voted upon, etc. as it's completely in violation of the Constitution which gives the Government it's authority to pass laws in the first place.
I thought that Peltiers, except for the thin-film variety, had a COP that was less than 1. Simply put the things take about 1.5-2 times the juice they're pumping. This is due to Joule Heating losses, etc. in the bulk semiconductor materials they're using.
Which would be what you've got with POTS- they keep these huge-assed banks of batteries at the CO to power the landline phones for days without AC power to run them. They tried to accomplish this with ADSL services so they could make that leap without major re-work (I know, they attempted to make a low enough power consumption single chip solution at TI- they never could quite make it...)- the problem is that ADSL speeds weren't enough and they couldn't do the power thing (the chip drew about 100-200ma too much from what I understand...) so they went ahead with fiber and are putting the batteries out at the premises. PoE's kind of silly, when you think about it- how is the signal getting into the neighborhood? Fiber. How is fiber going to carry power with the levels of optical and electrical tech we have these days? Now, if they could have made the leap with the copper loops with something like Ethernet over phone lines (which they have, but it doesn't work in all locations because of what they've done over the years to the loops...) they probably could have managed the jump with no probs. In fact, I'm surprised they went the fiber route- it's not much better than the long-haul Ethernet over POTS loops, but it doesn't give them the ability to meet the emergency services requirements.
They've flooded the market with the damn things. However, there IS hope. Several of the smaller players are already going over to Linux, being fed up with MS charging what they charge on the machines and not having anything more stable than they have to begin with. It's just going to take time (Hell, those self-check-out kiosks in the stores lately use Windows XP, not even embedded XP- I know, the silly thing crashed in the middle of my checking out over at Wal-Mart and they rebooted it in front of me, like it wasn't anything at all (Like it was commonplace...)) and more people being bit hard by the damn stuff MS has been jamming down their throats.
...much, much better than the likely to be DRM'ed stuff anyhow.
Let 'em keep their shite. DRMing this stuff is like locking excrement in a double-locked nuke-proof safe.
Considering that both sides happen to HAVE them and just not use them... I know for a fact that the Russians had some rather ugly, in violation of the Rules, ammo- there was a bunch of ammo that got over here by accident through ammo sales from Russia for SKS and AKM rifles, intended for hunting. The damned things were steel core, hollow point rounds designed to penetrate body armor.
You had it right, and had me agreeing with you right on up to the point you called it "stealing". Copyright Infringement is just that- infringement. It's not theft as defined in legal circles as you're not depriving the parties involved of anything execpt potential profits. If I infringe on somebody's Copyrights, the Work in question is still there and they're not deprived of it's use. The value of the Copyright may be diminished, but overall, they can still sell copies until they're blue in the face. If I steal something from you, you are deprived of it's usage.
If you're going to discuss this, please, please, please use the proper terms instead of the mis-used concepts the media companies have used to frame this discussion- they're dead wrong and they're relying on the "tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth..." principle to dupe you into thinking that it's the same thing.
After all, you might catch something from 'em as they seem to be willing to fuck everyone else other than themselves...
The DVD CCA, the people who license out the magic keys, etc. for region coding and CSS unpacking, claimed that it was a trade secret during their trial. Their lawyers were stupid enough to submit decss.c as evidence in the trial- which abrogated the trade secret status themselves...
For someone who was using breach of contract and trade secret violation claims to stifle and suppress a program to allow region coding to be unlocked- it was the stupidest thing to do. All court submissions are public domain unless the Judge orders them sealed- and Judges typically don't seal things unless they have a very good reason; and screwing yourself up like that isn't one of them.
They (Intel) shouldn't be expected to make a main compiler for AMD's CPU's, no. But that's NOT what AMD's contending. What AMD's contending is that Intel's compiler isn't just optimized for Intel CPUs, it's de-optimized for AMD CPUs- as in, it picks the worst possible instructions for code when it knows that an AMD is being executed against. Technically, it shouldn't care about what CPU so long as the same runs x86 architechture CPU- it should be peak speed, etc. on a P3 or P4 or whatever Intel CPU, but shouldn't be running utterly crippled on other brands of the same architechture. What is happening with the Intel C++ compiler is that they're picking 8-bit instructions and the like in as many cases as they can get away with. This means you're doing memory copies in the form of byte copies instead of word copies, etc. That is a degredation of performance on the order of 20-75% (or more!) for those sets of instructions and I can guarantee that if they're doing 8-bit stuff (And this has been confirmed by alternate sources, by the way...), it explains why it's NOT happy on an AMD64 machine- 8-bit would choke the CPU hard because it eschews the 8-bit modes to accomplish 64-bitness... I've encountered some drivers for Windows XP in some of my porting work that BARFED on my AMD64 machine (the only machine I typically run XP on since it's my reference machine for Linux game porting, etc...)- when it was installed on an Intel machine and an VIA machine, it ran just fine.
Considering that the code is picking the worst possible mode (8-bit) for things in it's runtime lib, etc. it's not that it's "optimized" for Intel, it's de-optimized for AMD machines. Not acceptable. And, before you say anything to try to play apologist here for Intel, I will point out that they DO know that their compiler is doing this, they've been handed superior code that rocks on all x86 platforms, is 50% faster and is somewhat smaller and a hell of a lot simpler- with the understanding that they were welcome to the code with no rights reserved on it to improve the compiler. They weren't interested in fixing the situation save to improve Pentium 2/3 performance.
I have a PROBLEM with this attitude and action. To be honest, everyone should.
The moment it was put to PAPER it was considered published. You know, for all the talk about being more enlightened up in Canada when it comes to this sort of stupidity, this ranks right on up there with the top ten right at the moment.
Especially the menion of Ovonyx- apparently, they may well be finally commercializing Ovshinski's toy in something other than rewriteable CD's and DVD's. Not that Stanford Ovshinski's discovery is anything but amazing- it's just that it's taken them over three decades (They'd discovered this tech in the 60's and developed the first ORAM, or Ovonic RAM, back in the early 70's.) just to see the real fruits thereof and to have part of the big boys to take long enough to take them seriously. Can't wait to see their uber-Flash finally take off and to see some of Ovshinski's other brain children to leave the nest- there's some pretty impressive things that he's come up with using amorphous materials tech... This includes rechargeables using fuel cell tech (!) and amorphous solar cells that produce more juice than just about anything else (save the nanotech ones which are in the same power class...) and make solar a viable possibility for power generation.
Now, having said all of this, PRAMFS isn't a response to this tech, per se, because of the company in question (Embedded systems have something resembling this sort of thing in many cases, using battery backed RAM disks, etc...)- but it's NICE to know that they have something akin to this in hand in development because if they DO release the OVRAM product idea in it's current incarnation, we'll have a leg up and be able to hit the ground running with Linux using something like this out the gate.
When Spybot Search and Destroy did a much more thorough job on the machines I've worked on cleaning up (I don't generally use Windows, so I don't typically need S-A-D...)- I kinda quit using AdAware altogether. It just doesn't do the job the same way as other solutions.
Not that your article isn't funny (it is...), but it's sad that it got modded funny instead of "insightful"- because it's much more insightful than funny. Ah well, what do I know, right?