First, making a company give competitors trade secrets in immoral.
Sure, it isn't nice. But then again the goal of sanctions isn't to be nice but to remedy the problem. MS was found to be in violation of antitrust law, and forcing MS to document interfaces so that competitors can more efficiently make interoperatible software was seen as the most efficient remedy.
Dell, HP and Fred-down-the-road can bundle whatever applications they like.
Fred-down-the-road can, but big OEMs like Dell and HP usually have bulk windows license agreements that have lots of restrictions on what they can bundle or modify (e.g., can't bundle Firefox and set it as default browser).
Every time this has come up lately someone has to chime in and say that it's impossible. Makes me crazy.
Perhaps that is because some of us have tried.
802.11a/b/g was simply not designed for MANs. You can do a decent installation at an airport or your local Starbucks so that people can check their mail and browse the web. Smarter access points can mitigate this somewhat, and you can also get some way by carpet bombing the area with access points. But using a/b/g to saturate a large area with stable bandwidth is very difficult, you will have deadspots and interference spots.
For always on fat pipe you need cables, at least until you get cognitive radio gear.
Since a normal temperature of functionning is written in the specifications of the hip
I can't find any written instructions on my hip. Which is another piece of circumstantial evidence of my theory that my parents bought me from a chinese clone factory.;-)
The article is seriously confused, as it doesn't properly distinguish between players (iPod and Sony Hi-MD devices), digital music formats (AAC, MP3, wav) and digital storage (flash, HDD and Hi-MD).
Hi-MD as a more wide spread digital storage format would be good, but most of his other points (no on-device editing of song titles, no recording) depends on the features of the player and not on the music format or digital storage format.
Its easy to suggest solutions to problems you don't understand. Patents are for the general public because they are vested to the public after a term of years. Otherwise, the idea might have never been released. This is the tradeoff, you disclose your novel idea to the public, and you get a limited monopoly on the idea. Its not unreasonable at all, especially if you spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing the idea.
Unlike some of those that have commented in this thread, I am not categorically against patents. I do however think that the public's part of the bargain has become too small for some categories of patents - especially with regards to business processes and pure software. 17 years of monopoly on commercial exploitation of an idea seems a bit absurd when the idea in question should be rather obvious to a practitioner in that particular field. The number of examples of 'patently silly' patents out there suggests that the obviousness test is way too low in too many cases, and I also think certain types of patents should have a shorter term of protection.
Not to mention that patents are written for lawyers and not for practitioners - the LZW patent is of little use to a programmer that wants to understand how the LZW compression algorithm works. One usable reform would be to require the patent to contain a description of the invention that is actually usable for a practitioner in that field.
The EMusic approach would be severely slash sales for hugely popular groups like U2 though, for whom enlarging the audience is no longer an issue.
True. I expect that the final market once everything settles down will have a lot fewer huge sales peaks, but a thicker tail. Which might end the era of large record companies if they continue to depend on big sellers to turn a profit.
Intel had to license its chips to TWO outside sources, AMD and Harris.
I knew there were other sources for Intel 808x/'286 CPUs, but I thought Intel was only buying manufacturing capacity and not giving them full licenses. Thanks for setting me straight.
Memorex buys Beijing 'Chung Brand' USB stick and sells it labelled as made by Memorex. Fred Bloggs buys Beijing 'Chung Brand' USB stick and sells it labelled as made by Memorex.
1. The person who buys Fred Bloggs stick is being deceived, because it's not Memorex. 2. But then so is the person who buys Memorex because it's really 'Chung Brand'.
From what I've been told, it doesn't work quite like that. That the sticks come from the same factory does not mean that they have the same quality.
1) Memorex does a contract with 'Chung Mfg. Co', asking them to produce USB sticks according to certain specs (quality, price, etc). Checking that the sticks are of sufficient quality is either done by 'Chung Mfg. Co' according to the contract, or by Memorex after purchase. The important thing is - Memorex is guaranteeing the quality by putting their name on them, and know that they can't sell low grade goods without damaging the brand value.
2) 'Chung Mfg. Co' sells surplus sticks to the general market. These might be just the same quality as those sold to Memorex, lower quality that can't be sold to Memorex or straight off the production line with no quality check (the general/grey market probably pays less than Memorex, so 'Chung Mfg. Co' is likely to cut costs somehow, perhaps by doing less testing or using lower grade raw materials). When buying one of these in the store - whether 'no-name' or mislabelled as Memorex - noone is guaranteeing the quality.
You also have:
3) 'Less known company' buys surplus sticks cheap from 'Chung Mfg. Co', does their own quality testing (probably less than Memorex, to keep costs down) and sell them as 'Less known brand' USB sticks.
4) 'Well known company' does the same as (3), but instead of selling the sticks under the 'Well known brand' label, they sell them under the 'Less known subsidiary of well known company brand' label.
AMD, along with Siemens and other fabs, had under-the-table agreements with Intel to produce 8088, 80286 and 80386 processors. When Intel came out with the 486, they had built enough fab capacity to tell their partners to get lost.
IBM wanted a second source so they made made Intel license the design to AMD as a requirement for IBM to choose the x86 for the IBM PC. (Makes you wonder what would have happened if they had chosen the MC68000 instead).
Intel cancelled the license with the '386, lawsuit and settlement between AMD and Intel, AMD produced x86 clones of their own design starting with the Am386.
What licenses and agreements Intel had with NEC, NatSemi, Siemens, Cyrix and others I don't know. Would love it if you have any information about that, though.
(And agreed, the AMD/Intel x86 story is not at all the same as counterfeit merchandise)
Sometimes the factories in third-world-factories that produce the "legit" products also produce those "fake" things. Is there something like this in computer electronics manufacture ?
[/grandparentquote]
Depends on what your definition of "fake" is. It is well known that manufacturers of, say, memory chips producing under contract/license for known brands sell surplus and not-tested-to-make-sure-the-chips-are-within-spec stock to the grey market. Which is ok, as long as there is no contract/license agreements barring the factory from doing so and the memory chips sold in this manner aren't passed off as "known brand" chips.
Rebadging does happen, but whether it is done by the factory or by people buying surplus is a different matter.
Intel gave AMD all necessary Information to produce the Intel 80386 Microprocessor in the early 80's then the 486. As intel could make the CPU fast enough for the Demand and outsource to AMD to manufacture them.
AMD started selling the exactly identical chip as Intel (they had the blueprints afterall and were by authorised by Intel to produce them.:)
Suddenly there was Intel 486 Processor versus AMD 486 processor same processor but AMD was undercutting Intel on price.
Enter Pentium haha AMD you cant copy our name any more since it is Trademarked
The Intel/AMD story is a bit different. When IBM put together the IBM PC they had to rush to get it out the door to compete with the myriad of personal computers that were showing up on the market. Instead of taking the traditional route of designing everything in-house, they did something that at the time was very unusual for IBM. They went outside IBM to pick the components to build the machine, including the 8088 from Intel.
IBM was then a powerhouse, and Intel was in comparison small fry. IBM did not want to depend on a single source for the components used in the IBM PC, so in order for Intel to get the contract they had to license the x86 to a second source - AMD.
AMD was at first a second source producer of Intel designed x86 CPUs (8086, 8088, Am286). Intel considered the licence only valid up to the 80286, so they cancelled the agreement in 1986 and lawsuit(s?) ensued. AMD kinda sorta won, and starting with the Am386 in 1991 they have designed and manufactured their own x86 compatible CPUs.
Comparing Pentiums and CD manufacturing are, I think, comparing apples and oranges. Intel both owns the manufacturing plant and sells the chip.
Most - if not all - large record companies contract out the production of CDs. The income of a CD manufacturing company is based on the price agreed in their contract with the record company, not by the pricetag on the CD when the record company sells it to Amazon. And a CD manufacturing company probably can't raise their price much to cover the added expense of tuning a new production line because other companies will then be cheaper and they'll lose the contract. So yeah, they can lose money by pressing CDs at $0.125[1] instead of at $0.1 even if the retail price in the shop is $20.
[1] I do not have inside information on what the real costs are, but you get the idea. The manufacture company and the company making money on selling the product are not the same. Same deal with lots of tech products manufactured in Asia, clothes made in 3rd world sweatshops, etc.
While there are a lot of problems with the DMCA, I don't see how it can be used to suppress publishing of benchmarks.
I know that some software EULAs have contained a 'do not benchmark' clause, but whether such a restriction would stand up in court is, as far as I know, not been tested yet.
Do you expect the AV companies to buy and test music CDs for malware before this broke out (not in hindsight!).
According to F-Secure's blog, they had received tips that Sony CDs might contain a rootkit at least a month before Mark broke the story.
"We didn't go public with the info right away as we were worried with the implications (especially with the info on how virus writers can use this to hide files which have names starting with "$sys$"). So we were in the middle of discussions with Sony BMG and First 4 Internet when Mark broke the news on Monday."
Sony purchased the rootkit from another company which may have some valid reason for making these.
First 4 Internet made the XCP DRM system, rootkit and all. Their business model is to develop and sell DRM products to the music industry. So the programmers at F4I must have been deaf and blind in order not to know that the rootkit would be distributed on 'audio' CDs.
I was wondering what happens if you just disable autoplay. Does it let you have regular access to the CD?
Don't have the CD so I can't verify it.
However, if the description of how the DRM works is correct then it is a dual session CD (blue book? CD Plus?). The first session is a standard redbook audio CD, while the second session is a data session. The entire protection depends on the DRM software on the data session being installed. If you disable autorun you should be able to rip the redbook portion just as you can with any regular audio CD.
See that part about "the SOFTWARE will reside on YOUR COMPUTER until removed or deleted"?
How is this any different than the EULAs that spyware / adware companies use? "Decent" adware does at the very least provide an accessible uninstall option.
"until removed or deleted" would lead the average user to expect that it would show up as an item in control panel "add/remove software". Instead it is a shoddily written rootkit / CD filter driver that is known to cause problems. If you had done a search for "aries.sys" before Fsecure/Sysinternals broke the story, you'd find lots of forum posts wondering how it got installed on their system and why it is causing bluescreens. Fsecure has mentioned that inserting the CD "spectacularely broke Windows Vista", XP Media Center seems to be badly hit, too.
Aries.sys registers itself as a service by the name of "network control manager". The other parts of XCP also use confusing or misleading names, making it difficult to discover where the files came from. To any seasoned system admin, these are typical clues that would lead one to think it is rootkit'ed malware or adware.
So, lack of proper disclosure (a line in an EULA should not be enough, by that standard a lot of adware / spyware would also be ok), a regular user is completely unable to understand the consequences of installing XCP. No accessible uninstall option (unless you consider running a rootkit scanner, identifying the files as coming from First4Internet, discovering that it was installed through a Sony CD, finding the right place on Sony's website to request the uninstaller, registering with ZIP, email and phone number, being called back by a Sony representative and then sent the uninstaller through email as accessible). Not to mention that bluescreens happens, and due to XCP installing itself as safemode drivers you pretty much have to do a complete Windows reinstall if you get problems.
mduell has already quoted the Jargon file explaining Eternal September, so I won't repeat it.
What I was refering to was the effect of Eternal September. That is, that the influx of (to use a derogatory term) 'clueless newbies', spammers, etc can have a devastating effect on the signal to noise ratio in useful communities like Usenet groups, IRC channels and Web forums. The result often being that the most valuable members of the community gives up and leaves.
its been dead along with most other once-helpful chat channels for a time
I've seen the dreaded Eternal September effect too, both on IRC and Usenet. There are still high quality channels on IRC, but they are usually invite only so unless you are already part of the community they can be hard to gain access to.
Slashdot Mirror
So dark matter is IDSPISPOPD and IDBEHOLDI. Question is, is it IDDQD?
First, making a company give competitors trade secrets in immoral.
Sure, it isn't nice. But then again the goal of sanctions isn't to be nice but to remedy the problem. MS was found to be in violation of antitrust law, and forcing MS to document interfaces so that competitors can more efficiently make interoperatible software was seen as the most efficient remedy.
Dell, HP and Fred-down-the-road can bundle whatever applications they like.
Fred-down-the-road can, but big OEMs like Dell and HP usually have bulk windows license agreements that have lots of restrictions on what they can bundle or modify (e.g., can't bundle Firefox and set it as default browser).
It is at times like these that I regret forgetting the password to my first /. account. :)
So you're saying the idea will fly?
Yeah, but not for long.
STP stops bridging loops. For IP routing loops we have TTL.
Every time this has come up lately someone has to chime in and say that it's impossible. Makes me crazy.
Perhaps that is because some of us have tried.
802.11a/b/g was simply not designed for MANs. You can do a decent installation at an airport or your local Starbucks so that people can check their mail and browse the web. Smarter access points can mitigate this somewhat, and you can also get some way by carpet bombing the area with access points. But using a/b/g to saturate a large area with stable bandwidth is very difficult, you will have deadspots and interference spots.
For always on fat pipe you need cables, at least until you get cognitive radio gear.
Since a normal temperature of functionning is written in the specifications of the hip
;-)
I can't find any written instructions on my hip. Which is another piece of circumstantial evidence of my theory that my parents bought me from a chinese clone factory.
The article is seriously confused, as it doesn't properly distinguish between players (iPod and Sony Hi-MD devices), digital music formats (AAC, MP3, wav) and digital storage (flash, HDD and Hi-MD).
Hi-MD as a more wide spread digital storage format would be good, but most of his other points (no on-device editing of song titles, no recording) depends on the features of the player and not on the music format or digital storage format.
Its easy to suggest solutions to problems you don't understand. Patents are for the general public because they are vested to the public after a term of years. Otherwise, the idea might have never been released. This is the tradeoff, you disclose your novel idea to the public, and you get a limited monopoly on the idea. Its not unreasonable at all, especially if you spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing the idea.
Unlike some of those that have commented in this thread, I am not categorically against patents. I do however think that the public's part of the bargain has become too small for some categories of patents - especially with regards to business processes and pure software. 17 years of monopoly on commercial exploitation of an idea seems a bit absurd when the idea in question should be rather obvious to a practitioner in that particular field. The number of examples of 'patently silly' patents out there suggests that the obviousness test is way too low in too many cases, and I also think certain types of patents should have a shorter term of protection.
Not to mention that patents are written for lawyers and not for practitioners - the LZW patent is of little use to a programmer that wants to understand how the LZW compression algorithm works. One usable reform would be to require the patent to contain a description of the invention that is actually usable for a practitioner in that field.
The EMusic approach would be severely slash sales for hugely popular groups like U2 though, for whom enlarging the audience is no longer an issue.
True. I expect that the final market once everything settles down will have a lot fewer huge sales peaks, but a thicker tail. Which might end the era of large record companies if they continue to depend on big sellers to turn a profit.
I don't really see this as a bad outcome, though.
Intel had to license its chips to TWO outside sources, AMD and Harris.
I knew there were other sources for Intel 808x/'286 CPUs, but I thought Intel was only buying manufacturing capacity and not giving them full licenses. Thanks for setting me straight.
Memorex buys Beijing 'Chung Brand' USB stick and sells it labelled as made by Memorex.
Fred Bloggs buys Beijing 'Chung Brand' USB stick and sells it labelled as made by Memorex.
1. The person who buys Fred Bloggs stick is being deceived, because it's not Memorex.
2. But then so is the person who buys Memorex because it's really 'Chung Brand'.
From what I've been told, it doesn't work quite like that. That the sticks come from the same factory does not mean that they have the same quality.
1) Memorex does a contract with 'Chung Mfg. Co', asking them to produce USB sticks according to certain specs (quality, price, etc). Checking that the sticks are of sufficient quality is either done by 'Chung Mfg. Co' according to the contract, or by Memorex after purchase. The important thing is - Memorex is guaranteeing the quality by putting their name on them, and know that they can't sell low grade goods without damaging the brand value.
2) 'Chung Mfg. Co' sells surplus sticks to the general market. These might be just the same quality as those sold to Memorex, lower quality that can't be sold to Memorex or straight off the production line with no quality check (the general/grey market probably pays less than Memorex, so 'Chung Mfg. Co' is likely to cut costs somehow, perhaps by doing less testing or using lower grade raw materials). When buying one of these in the store - whether 'no-name' or mislabelled as Memorex - noone is guaranteeing the quality.
You also have:
3) 'Less known company' buys surplus sticks cheap from 'Chung Mfg. Co', does their own quality testing (probably less than Memorex, to keep costs down) and sell them as 'Less known brand' USB sticks.
4) 'Well known company' does the same as (3), but instead of selling the sticks under the 'Well known brand' label, they sell them under the 'Less known subsidiary of well known company brand' label.
IBM wanted a second source so they made made Intel license the design to AMD as a requirement for IBM to choose the x86 for the IBM PC. (Makes you wonder what would have happened if they had chosen the MC68000 instead).
Intel cancelled the license with the '386, lawsuit and settlement between AMD and Intel, AMD produced x86 clones of their own design starting with the Am386.
What licenses and agreements Intel had with NEC, NatSemi, Siemens, Cyrix and others I don't know. Would love it if you have any information about that, though.
(And agreed, the AMD/Intel x86 story is not at all the same as counterfeit merchandise)
Depends on what your definition of "fake" is. It is well known that manufacturers of, say, memory chips producing under contract/license for known brands sell surplus and not-tested-to-make-sure-the-chips-are-within-spec stock to the grey market. Which is ok, as long as there is no contract/license agreements barring the factory from doing so and the memory chips sold in this manner aren't passed off as "known brand" chips.
Rebadging does happen, but whether it is done by the factory or by people buying surplus is a different matter.
The Intel/AMD story is a bit different. When IBM put together the IBM PC they had to rush to get it out the door to compete with the myriad of personal computers that were showing up on the market. Instead of taking the traditional route of designing everything in-house, they did something that at the time was very unusual for IBM. They went outside IBM to pick the components to build the machine, including the 8088 from Intel.
IBM was then a powerhouse, and Intel was in comparison small fry. IBM did not want to depend on a single source for the components used in the IBM PC, so in order for Intel to get the contract they had to license the x86 to a second source - AMD.
AMD was at first a second source producer of Intel designed x86 CPUs (8086, 8088, Am286). Intel considered the licence only valid up to the 80286, so they cancelled the agreement in 1986 and lawsuit(s?) ensued. AMD kinda sorta won, and starting with the Am386 in 1991 they have designed and manufactured their own x86 compatible CPUs.
Oh? Why not?
Comparing Pentiums and CD manufacturing are, I think, comparing apples and oranges. Intel both owns the manufacturing plant and sells the chip.
Most - if not all - large record companies contract out the production of CDs. The income of a CD manufacturing company is based on the price agreed in their contract with the record company, not by the pricetag on the CD when the record company sells it to Amazon. And a CD manufacturing company probably can't raise their price much to cover the added expense of tuning a new production line because other companies will then be cheaper and they'll lose the contract. So yeah, they can lose money by pressing CDs at $0.125[1] instead of at $0.1 even if the retail price in the shop is $20.
[1] I do not have inside information on what the real costs are, but you get the idea. The manufacture company and the company making money on selling the product are not the same. Same deal with lots of tech products manufactured in Asia, clothes made in 3rd world sweatshops, etc.
While there are a lot of problems with the DMCA, I don't see how it can be used to suppress publishing of benchmarks.
I know that some software EULAs have contained a 'do not benchmark' clause, but whether such a restriction would stand up in court is, as far as I know, not been tested yet.
It, is just, you. ;-)
Which would leave only little more then a dent in the universe.
;-)
A mostly harmless ford in the river of time, surely.
Do you expect the AV companies to buy and test music CDs for malware before this broke out (not in hindsight!).
According to F-Secure's blog, they had received tips that Sony CDs might contain a rootkit at least a month before Mark broke the story.
"We didn't go public with the info right away as we were worried with the implications (especially with the info on how virus writers can use this to hide files which have names starting with "$sys$"). So we were in the middle of discussions with Sony BMG and First 4 Internet when Mark broke the news on Monday."
Sony purchased the rootkit from another company which may have some valid reason for making these.
First 4 Internet made the XCP DRM system, rootkit and all. Their business model is to develop and sell DRM products to the music industry. So the programmers at F4I must have been deaf and blind in order not to know that the rootkit would be distributed on 'audio' CDs.
I was wondering what happens if you just disable autoplay. Does it let you have regular access to the CD?
Don't have the CD so I can't verify it.
However, if the description of how the DRM works is correct then it is a dual session CD (blue book? CD Plus?). The first session is a standard redbook audio CD, while the second session is a data session. The entire protection depends on the DRM software on the data session being installed. If you disable autorun you should be able to rip the redbook portion just as you can with any regular audio CD.
See that part about "the SOFTWARE will reside on YOUR COMPUTER until removed or deleted"?
How is this any different than the EULAs that spyware / adware companies use? "Decent" adware does at the very least provide an accessible uninstall option.
"until removed or deleted" would lead the average user to expect that it would show up as an item in control panel "add/remove software". Instead it is a shoddily written rootkit / CD filter driver that is known to cause problems. If you had done a search for "aries.sys" before Fsecure/Sysinternals broke the story, you'd find lots of forum posts wondering how it got installed on their system and why it is causing bluescreens. Fsecure has mentioned that inserting the CD "spectacularely broke Windows Vista", XP Media Center seems to be badly hit, too.
Aries.sys registers itself as a service by the name of "network control manager". The other parts of XCP also use confusing or misleading names, making it difficult to discover where the files came from. To any seasoned system admin, these are typical clues that would lead one to think it is rootkit'ed malware or adware.
So, lack of proper disclosure (a line in an EULA should not be enough, by that standard a lot of adware / spyware would also be ok), a regular user is completely unable to understand the consequences of installing XCP. No accessible uninstall option (unless you consider running a rootkit scanner, identifying the files as coming from First4Internet, discovering that it was installed through a Sony CD, finding the right place on Sony's website to request the uninstaller, registering with ZIP, email and phone number, being called back by a Sony representative and then sent the uninstaller through email as accessible). Not to mention that bluescreens happens, and due to XCP installing itself as safemode drivers you pretty much have to do a complete Windows reinstall if you get problems.
This is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
What is the dreaded eternal September effect?
mduell has already quoted the Jargon file explaining Eternal September, so I won't repeat it.
What I was refering to was the effect of Eternal September. That is, that the influx of (to use a derogatory term) 'clueless newbies', spammers, etc can have a devastating effect on the signal to noise ratio in useful communities like Usenet groups, IRC channels and Web forums. The result often being that the most valuable members of the community gives up and leaves.
its been dead along with most other once-helpful chat channels for a time
I've seen the dreaded Eternal September effect too, both on IRC and Usenet. There are still high quality channels on IRC, but they are usually invite only so unless you are already part of the community they can be hard to gain access to.