Whereas in the original series we just had to take for granted that the
Cylons were the embodiment of evil, now we understand why.
We do? Huh. There was almost no effort put into telling the back-story. The short paragraph displayed on-screen at the beginning of part one was a little too brief. So the Cylons were originally created by humans to help with the colonial effort. OK, great. There's no explanation of why the Cylons turned on the humans, just an implicit assumption that this is a foregone conclusion. At least in the Matrix, the machines wanted independence but tried to coexist peacefully with humans; it was humans who started the war with the machines. In Battlestar Galactica, all we see is that the Cylons are still an evil caricature; the only difference is, with this new version of Galactica, we created our own enemy, whereas in the original Galactica, the Cylons started out as a reptilian race who eventually died out, leaving their machines behind to fight on.
Otherwise, the annoyances are minor. The cylon space fighters, apparantly just space-borne Cylons (a neat idea, really) come off kind of hoakey [sic] with their red sweeping eyes. I know, I know, the eyes are really some kind of electromagnetic pulse weapons, but it's distracting just the same.
Um, I'm not 100% positive that they established the red sweeping eye as an EMP weapon. After all, the "classic" Cylons which resembled the Cylons of the original TV series had the "eye" as well (and the classic Cylons were shown both as a museum exhibit and as sketches in a diplomatic pouch in the new miniseries).
Personally, I just assumed the sweeping eye is some sort of sensor. There was some other device shown on the underside of the Cylon space fighters that seemed to do the EMP thing. Also, there was much made of the Cylon "computer virus" that could disable any advanced computer systems the humans had. I think there was a little too much hand-waving and not enough detail, honestly.
Someone else already pointed out that this was covered on MacSlash; however, I first saw this covered a little over a month ago on Macintouch. At the time, the author's employer was not revealed. I e-mailed the author, who goes by Cricket, and basically said that I thought he was in the right, and wondered if he'd take a principled stand and leave the company.
In the e-mail response I got, he thanked me and pointed out that his employer was indeed claiming the software as competing against a planned product, but that this was a legal smoke-screen to lay claim to his code. (In the California Labor Code, it's section 2870(a)1, which provides an exception for inventions that "Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer.")
The Think Secret article linked in this Slashdot article suggests that Apple is interested in adding this functionality to their Sherlock application. I'm not sure I believe this.
If the code is preserved and actually used, and if Cricket doesn't lose his job or have bad things done to him to punish him (which some employers will do instead of outright firing someone to avoid a wrongful termination lawsuit), then I think this situation can be resolved reasonably. However, I have this sick feeling that the code is going to be shelved, and nothing will ever come of it... and if this is the case, a great application will be lost for no good reason. I have no tolerance for code or technologies being "sat upon" because some large corporation wants to keep them out of the market.
In this particular instance, this almost seems like a case of a company flexing their muscles because they can, not because they really hope to gain something out of it. Indeed, this was Cricket's belief when he e-mailed me back in October -- they had no real interest in the software, nor any plans (even general ones) related to the software.
Based on my communication with the author of Netflix Fanatic, it seems that Apple is actually claiming that they planned on adding similar functionality in the OS or one of the bundled apps at some near-future time. The Think Secret article linked to in this Slashdot article seems to bolster that -- by claiming that Apple has designs on including this functionality in Sherlock.
This is, IMHO, an overly-broad reading of 2870 (a) 1. But of course, Apple's lawyers will interpret the law as liberally and broadly as possible. A judge might not agree with their (and your) interpretation.
Apple says "Wait a minute! We paid you to give stuff like that to US!"
Guy says "Oops! You're right!" and pulls the app.
Except that I spoke to the shareware author for this app back when this started weeks ago (before Slashdot picked this up, before the Netflix Fanatic website got recently altered to omit mention of the specific laws), and the author never said, "Oops! You're right!" He pulled the application pending negotiations with his employer's legal department. At the time, I had no idea this guy was working for Apple.
Paraphrasing from the private e-mail that Cricket (the shareware app's author) gave me, he said his employer was making their claims based on 2870 (a) 1, but that this was a sham, and they had no interest other than in putting the application on a shelf and never doing anything with it. Therefore, they're in the wrong. Since the author can't afford to fight this for several reasons, justice will not prevail.
Regarding the additional compensation: bullshit. Lots of companies require contracts that give them rights to all of your IP while you under their employ. They don't have to give you a penny, either.
Except that such contracts contravene most state and federal labor laws. And, if you read the original Slashdot article, or the original web site describing the dispute (which the author of Netflix Fanatic took down recently), you'd know that Apple is probably in the wrong, as they appear to be violating California labor law. Granted, I am not a lawyer, and I don't have all the facts (and neither do you), but such broad contracts assigning all of an employee's IP to their employer are in fact illegal in many areas. That doesn't stop employers from putting such clauses into contracts, but it doesn't make them valid or enforceable either. Quite the opposite.
Stop rubber-stamping legal abuses by corporate lawyers!
Ah but there *was* a contract. It is the same contract every employer requires these days [snip] In other words, bollocks and scare tactics. The courts have ruled time and again that these agreements are not even decent toilet paper.
This is why every contract, employment or otherwise, contains standard legal boilerplate that states that if any portion of the contract is found to be unenforceable, the rest shall remain in force. Because contracts routinely include things that the law forbids. I've run into this myself with apartment leases (written by Colorado lawyers trying to get around clear provisions in Arizona's landlord-tenant laws) and at least one employment contract (when Adobe bought out my employer and tried to get us to sign new contracts, which contained many clauses that are unenforceable and in fact are outright illegal in Arizona, which is a right-to-work state).
The problem is, fighting this would cost money (legal expenses), and even if the developer of Netflix Fanatic won, he'd probably have his life made a living hell by Apple. They might not outright fire him (which would open them up to a wrongful termination lawsuit), but they could do everything short of firing him to pressure him into resigning.
So, yeah, despite Apple's PR, they're just like every other corporation out there. Not exactly news, but I'm disappointed nonetheless.
Solution 4 - Send a (short) clip as an email atachment to each senator and congressman, with a note saying that they are now, without having done anything except check their mail, violated the proposed legislation and are liable to 3 yers in jail.
Unfortunately, you apparently have not read the article. There are two new classes of felony defined by the proposed legislation. The first felony kicks in if you make a digital copy of a movie (that isn't commercially available yet) available in digital form on a computer network. That carries a maximum 3 year prison sentence. In order for the law to apply, you must (a) share the file on any computer network, and (b) the movie in question can't already be available on DVD or VHS for purchase. Once a movie becomes available for purchase in stores, the law appears to no longer apply, and the article seems to confirm this supposition. Furthermore, mere possession of a file isn't sufficient; the file has to be shared, so that you're actively contributing to infringement. However, the law doesn't specify that you have to actually be infringing the movie studio's copyright, nor does it specify that anyone had to actually download the file from you.
Of course, bills can and do get changed before they are passed into law. So this loophole might be closed up soon.
The other class of felony, which nobody seems to be talking about, carries up to a 5 year prison term, and comes into play if you bring a camcorder (or other "audiovisual recording device") into a movie theater. So if a theater owner or usher catches you with a camcorder in a movie theater, and you're recording the movie you're watching, you would be in violation of this law. This is a form of piracy that has been around for a long time, but with the advent of digital camcorders and software that makes it easy to make DVDs or DiVX files out of digital video, it's a lot easier to distribute movies pirated this way.
I have mixed feelings about this second provision. First, a 5 year prison sentence seems a bit harsh for someone who's taping a movie. In fact, it seems very excessive. Not everyone who tapes a movie intends to distribute the copy widely (or at all). On the other hand, making video copies of movies before they're available for purchase or rental, indeed while they're still in the theater, robs the studios and the makers of the film of potential revenues. Of course, there's no loss of real money, so it's hard to call it theft in the strict sense, but someone who might be inclined to go see a movie several times on the big screen might instead see it once on the big screen (or not at all), and then watch a bootleg thereafter.
(By way of contrast, it's highly unlikely that someone who pirates a song or an album would actually pay for that song or that album if the illegal copy weren't an option. Music is much more commoditized, and social attitudes toward pirating music are much more permissive than toward pirating movies. Besides which, most people seem to agree that music is overpriced. Therefore, it's much easier to dismiss RIAA claims of "lost revenue" because the reality is that you can't lose what you never had to begin with. At least with movies, there are still plenty of ordinarily honest people who would be tempted to watch a bootleg movie instead of pay for a ticket to the theater. And the bootleg is almost always inferior to the big screen experience.)
It seems, from a cursory examination, that this "copy protection" scheme relies on a behavior of Wintel PCs -- specifically, when there are multiple sessions on an audio CD, the data session gets mounted instead of the Red Book audio session.
It seems that any computer running Linux would be able to bypass this scheme easily enough, simply by force-mounting the appropriate (music) session and ripping from it. And on a Mac, multi-session CDs mount all sessions as separate disk images, so the user should be able to rip to MP3 or AAC from within iTunes. So unless the record label does something to break these CDs on Mac OS X and/or Linux, they should rip and play just fine on those platforms.
I know little more than what was in the press release announcing that Virtual PC would not work on Apple's new G5 computers. One Connectix engineer confirmed in a semi-public forum that there was a real problem, that it wasn't Microsoft spewing bullshit.
Others in this thread have mentioned that there are byte-swapping load/store instructions in the PowerPC architecture which reduce the cost of doing little-endian loads and stores. According to what I've read, Virtual PC uses a special mode available on the G3 and G4, and not available on the G5. Supposedly, it's the only Mac software to ever use this mode. Without disassembling the Virtual PC code myself and examining it carefully, I couldn't tell you what specifically got "lost" from the G5 silicon.
It's amazing the amount of skepticism that's greeted my single comment, even though this whole issue was hashed out months ago in Slashdot and on various Mac forums, right after the Virtual PC press release.
Suppose Microsoft's goal is to do exactly that: Include the Apple-version G5 in their gaming console. What better way to poke fun at Apple than to have, as a marketing strategy, "Yeah, their machines are so fast, we use their CPU's as toys".
Maybe. I don't think Microsoft would make such a left-handed compliment, however, especially since it would cast their own product in a less-than-positive light.
Especially considering that Microsoft has lofty goals for the Xbox that extend far, far beyond mere gaming applications. The Xbox is a Trojan Horse.
Dude, you're arguing with the wrong person. Notice I said "virtual little endian mode" and not "little endian mode." This is the marketing speak that I am quoting verbatim from the press release that announced Virtual PC 6.x will not work with the G5. If you want to argue the point, argue with the people who wrote the press release, or the Connectix engineers that Microsoft Borg-ishly assimilated when they bought the VPC product.
The bottom line is, there is either a missing mode, or missing instructions, from the G5 processor. Something that recent versions of Virtual PC rely upon to accelerate the emulation task on PowerPC hardware. If you want to argue the specifics, argue with the engineers who actually are writing the code. Don't yell at me because I repeated something that was in a Microsoft press release.
At least one former Connectix engineer confirmed that the problem was real, and had to do with some architectural decisions that were made for the PowerPC 970 (G5). Make of that what you will.
I have yet to see anything by IBM saying that there were changes in that behaviour in the 970.
I've seen precious little out of IBM regarding the PPC 970, period.
Regardless of what you choose to believe, the issue with Virtual PC is very real. Perhaps you take umbrage at the nomenclature for the CPU mode in question. I don't disagree that it's an idiotic PR-speak name. Regardless, there is something missing from the PowerPC 970 silicon that was in the PPC 750 (G3) and the G4 series from Motorola.
This has been discussed months ago on Slashdot. The PPC 970 isn't 100% Book-E compliant, if my memory serves correctly. It's still a PowerPC chip, but it contains some things that the other family members don't (e.g., hardware support for square root in the FPU), and omits some minor things that the other family members have.
The bottom line is, Virtual PC does not work on the G5. This problem existed before Microsoft acquired Connectix, and is trivially provable by attempting to run a recent pre-Microsoft version of Virtual PC on a G5. As I understand it, Virtual PC is the only software on the Mac that uses the little-endian hackery present in the G3 and G4 chips. That the IBM engineers responsible for the G5 chose to spend their transistor budget on other things is unsurprising.
as mentioned in Financial Times, Microsoft will likely be using their recently acquired Virtual PC software
Except that if Microsoft uses the G5 (PPC970) chip, as everyone is speculating, they'll have to tweak the Virtual PC code base to run on the G5. Why? Because the G5 silicon lacks the special "virtual little endian mode" that the Virtual PC code from Connectix relies upon for performance on the G3 and G4 chips.
Of course, a highly optimal bit of PPC assembly could be written to replace the missing mode and instructions on the G5.
Then again, Microsoft could twist IBM's arm and get them to make a custom variant of the G5 that includes this mode, and maybe chops some cache for cost conservation. I sincerely doubt that the chip IBM winds up fabbing for the next Xbox is going to be identical to the version currently shipping in Apple's G5 desktops.
Jesus never said to overthrow the government and force a welfare state on the unwilling.
And Communism (or socialism) doesn't demand the overthrow of a government or forcing a welfare state on unwilling participants. One could argue against churches enforcing tithing rules using the same logic you just applied.
Remember also to "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's"; and "There is no authority on earth which God himself has not established."
Interesting choice of scriptural quotes, considering that it's quite likely Jesus never really said either of those lines. (And please, don't give me that crap about scripture being infallible. That's a lovely fairy tale, but I live in the real world.) Most biblical scholars I've read in the last several years believe that many key portions of the New Testament (especially the "Render unto Caesar" quote, and the part where the Jews take the blame for Jesus' crucifixion) were added later by apologists trying to make Christianity palatable to a Roman-dominated world. After all, where did most Christian converts come from in the first few centuries of Christianity? If Pilate had been portrayed in any of the officially sanctioned gospels as the iron-fisted tyrant he really was, instead of an ineffectual bureaucrat who was forced to pander to an angry mob to placate them, how many Romans would have converted?
Here's a thought... how about we leave religion out of the discussions of economic theory and practice?
What defines 'right' and 'justified'? Its all objective, so the only thing you have to go by is either personal oppinion or majority, and if the majority is doing something because they think its right and justified, it becomes so.
No, it's all subjective, not objective. Wrong word, wrong thought process, wrong everything.
Different cultures have different standards for what is right and justified. All you've done is use half-baked logic to try to justify the classic "might makes right" viewpoint. That's how the Holocaust started. But then, you might very well be one of those people who thinks the Holocaust was AOK.
And although I am an American, I recognize that the Boston Tea Party was a nasty bit of civil disobedience that was more vandalism than anything else (not to mention the racist overtones of white men dressing up as aboriginals). How you can mention this event in the same breath as Rosa Parks refusing to go to the back of the bus is beyond me.
How you got modded +2 Insightful is beyond me; where are the moderators' critical thinking skills?
Just because a majority thinks it's OK to oppress a minority, such as myself (a religious minority), doesn't mean I have to be OK with their thought process. Especially if it's predicated on flawed logic and flawed morals or ethics.
DAT was a perfectly good technology. It had all of the digital benefits of CD, but it used
standard audio cassettes. Think back to 1992, if you could have gotten "CD quality" from normal audio cassttes, don't you think it would have sold like hot-cakes?
BZZT. Wrong. DAT didn't use standard audio cassettes. DCC, which stood for "Digital Compact Cassette," could play and record conventional cassette tapes, but it used special DCC tapes for digital recording. DCC used lossy digital compression, incidentally. DAT, on the other hand, uses a helical scanning head just like a VCR (which is why DAT tape is wider than cassette tape), and stores uncompressed digital audio at a slightly higher sampling rate than CD.
Both DAT and DCC were required to incorporate SCMS. So were all MiniDisc recorders. The reason DAT failed in the consumer market is largely because it was held up while SCMS was developed and implemented. Once SCMS-enabled DAT hit the market, it had become irrelevant. The fact that DAT uses a different sampling rate from audio CD further compounds the problem, because digital dubbing requires sample rate conversion.
I defy anyone to walk into a mall and find a DAT device, a Digitam [sic] Minidisc, or a host of others.
Well, DAT is mainly used in pro audio these days. (Most pro decks ignore SCMS anyway.) DAT has also found a niche in data backup.
MiniDisc is still available at Best Buy and Fry's Electronics and other retailers. Sony revived MiniDisc by giving users the ability to transfer digital music from their computers to a specially equipped portable MiniDisc recorder. Of course, with the advent of recordable CD and cheap CD-RW drives, most other digital formats simply don't stand a chance.
The exception seems to be hard drive based players. In that case, the convenience far outweighs any annoyance one might encounter from ripping one's music and then copying it to the iPod/Rio Karma/whatever.
...to the recent crap-flood of viral/Trojan e-mails bearing Microsoft's logo and purporting to be network security updates?
I'm not suggesting that the e-mails are legitimate security updates (they're not), only that maybe this recent official security update is somehow a response to this latest rash of opportunistic virii/Trojans.
The flood of bogus viral e-mail is bad enough, and thankfully my Mac is immune to Wintel viruses, but the sheer volume is affecting me by displacing legitimate e-mail in my inbox. It's put me over quota once already.
A buddy of mine is hosting a clip he re-encoded in Quicktime for those of us who don't want to use WMP or RealPlayer. The link was posted earlier on the Accelerate Your Mac website. The direct link is here.
Which is precisely why, today, SunnComm rethought its position and announced that they wouldn't go after the grad student who published the paper demonstrating how crappy their DRM is. Because they didn't want to take the risk of losing, especially since losing would defang the DMCA and seriously screw with the MPAA and RIAA's legal efforts.
Yep, I used Zephyr too. I don't recall it having notification capabilities for when the user was typing a message, because I always used the command-line tools to send zephyrgrams, and the program to send messages was a simple command line app (which supported redirection as well). However, zephyr did support notification of when certain users logged on and off of the network (or at least, it supported notification of when a given user had zephyr turned on and listening).
Incidentally, I used zephyr as far back as 1988, so it definitely predates most "modern" IM clients.
CNet ran an article about this development, and they were quick to note that other IM software from Yahoo! and AOL already implemented this feature. The article doesn't say when the patent was filed.
A related article points out that ICQ filed a patent in 1997 (granted in 2002) which covers pretty much any kind of instant messaging application on any network. Of course, there is prior art...
I was a student at MIT from 1988 to 1992. During that time, I used an instant messaging system called Zephyr, which could work either with X11 or with a text console (if run in console mode). Zephyr didn't support notification of other users when you were typing a message (since the application to compose messages and send them was command-line, and therefore run from the shell rather than as part of a monolithic IM app), but it did support notifying you when certain other users logged on, and Zephyr by default popped up separate message windows on the target user's X11 display when messages arrived. Kind of like how classic ICQ operates -- each incoming message is displayed in a separate window which has to be dismissed by the user.
I'm sure there are more prior art examples for IM and general, and this feature in specific. The big players are trying to carve up the IM landscape by making turf claims with patents. If ever there was a time to support alternative IM technologies like Jabber, now is the time, folks.
I suppose it depends on how often you open and close the sliding region on the case. I've noticed a tiny amount of drift, but not enough to be worried about. Recalibration is easy enough, and you're supposed to recalibrate the digitizer on any Palm device at regular intervals.
I've noticed that Palm has some useful features that eliminate the need to use a stylus or to open the HWR area up, like when you're looking up a contact using only the five-way navigation control. (Up-down to page through the contacts, right to hone in on a specific sequence of characters for a contact entry, press in the middle to select an entry; at that point, you can use up and down to move a single entry at a time up or down in the list, and you can use left to deselect the currently selected entry, which puts you back in "page" mode. It sounds complicated until you use it.)
The major differences between the original Graffiti HWR system and the new Graffiti 2 system are:
Graffiti 2 has more natural looking characters, several of which require 2 strokes instead of one. Graffiti 1 was all about forcing every character to be a single stroke.
To capitalize a character in Graffiti 1, you had to use a special stroke to "shift" to caps mode; to force "caps lock," you made the gesture twice. Graffiti 2 eliminates the capitalization shift stroke, instead interpreting letters drawn on the boundary between the numeric and text entry areas as capitals. I find this easier, personally.
Graffiti 2 introduces a punctuation shift (similar to the capitalization shift stroke in Graffiti 1) to make most accented characters or punctuation marks.
Graffiti 2 can be set up to allow the user to write gestures in areas other than the dedicated HWR region on the screen. At least, I'm 99% sure of this capability (since one of the Tungsten models doesn't have any handwriting area at all, instead sporting a thumb keyboard built into the unit; yet the device still supports Graffiti 2 somehow).
Graffiti 2 seems closer in many regards to the Newton's block-character recognition, and virtually identical to the HWR built into most PocketPC devices these days. After getting used to Graffiti 2, I prefer it over the original Graffiti. Maybe with time you'll learn to like it too, though it does suck to have to un-learn old muscle memory.
Slashdot Mirror
We do? Huh. There was almost no effort put into telling the back-story. The short paragraph displayed on-screen at the beginning of part one was a little too brief. So the Cylons were originally created by humans to help with the colonial effort. OK, great. There's no explanation of why the Cylons turned on the humans, just an implicit assumption that this is a foregone conclusion. At least in the Matrix, the machines wanted independence but tried to coexist peacefully with humans; it was humans who started the war with the machines. In Battlestar Galactica, all we see is that the Cylons are still an evil caricature; the only difference is, with this new version of Galactica, we created our own enemy, whereas in the original Galactica, the Cylons started out as a reptilian race who eventually died out, leaving their machines behind to fight on.
Um, I'm not 100% positive that they established the red sweeping eye as an EMP weapon. After all, the "classic" Cylons which resembled the Cylons of the original TV series had the "eye" as well (and the classic Cylons were shown both as a museum exhibit and as sketches in a diplomatic pouch in the new miniseries).
Personally, I just assumed the sweeping eye is some sort of sensor. There was some other device shown on the underside of the Cylon space fighters that seemed to do the EMP thing. Also, there was much made of the Cylon "computer virus" that could disable any advanced computer systems the humans had. I think there was a little too much hand-waving and not enough detail, honestly.
Someone else already pointed out that this was covered on MacSlash; however, I first saw this covered a little over a month ago on Macintouch. At the time, the author's employer was not revealed. I e-mailed the author, who goes by Cricket, and basically said that I thought he was in the right, and wondered if he'd take a principled stand and leave the company.
In the e-mail response I got, he thanked me and pointed out that his employer was indeed claiming the software as competing against a planned product, but that this was a legal smoke-screen to lay claim to his code. (In the California Labor Code, it's section 2870(a)1, which provides an exception for inventions that "Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer.")
The Think Secret article linked in this Slashdot article suggests that Apple is interested in adding this functionality to their Sherlock application. I'm not sure I believe this.
If the code is preserved and actually used, and if Cricket doesn't lose his job or have bad things done to him to punish him (which some employers will do instead of outright firing someone to avoid a wrongful termination lawsuit), then I think this situation can be resolved reasonably. However, I have this sick feeling that the code is going to be shelved, and nothing will ever come of it... and if this is the case, a great application will be lost for no good reason. I have no tolerance for code or technologies being "sat upon" because some large corporation wants to keep them out of the market.
In this particular instance, this almost seems like a case of a company flexing their muscles because they can, not because they really hope to gain something out of it. Indeed, this was Cricket's belief when he e-mailed me back in October -- they had no real interest in the software, nor any plans (even general ones) related to the software.
Based on my communication with the author of Netflix Fanatic, it seems that Apple is actually claiming that they planned on adding similar functionality in the OS or one of the bundled apps at some near-future time. The Think Secret article linked to in this Slashdot article seems to bolster that -- by claiming that Apple has designs on including this functionality in Sherlock.
This is, IMHO, an overly-broad reading of 2870 (a) 1. But of course, Apple's lawyers will interpret the law as liberally and broadly as possible. A judge might not agree with their (and your) interpretation.
Except that I spoke to the shareware author for this app back when this started weeks ago (before Slashdot picked this up, before the Netflix Fanatic website got recently altered to omit mention of the specific laws), and the author never said, "Oops! You're right!" He pulled the application pending negotiations with his employer's legal department. At the time, I had no idea this guy was working for Apple.
Paraphrasing from the private e-mail that Cricket (the shareware app's author) gave me, he said his employer was making their claims based on 2870 (a) 1, but that this was a sham, and they had no interest other than in putting the application on a shelf and never doing anything with it. Therefore, they're in the wrong. Since the author can't afford to fight this for several reasons, justice will not prevail.
Except that such contracts contravene most state and federal labor laws. And, if you read the original Slashdot article, or the original web site describing the dispute (which the author of Netflix Fanatic took down recently), you'd know that Apple is probably in the wrong, as they appear to be violating California labor law. Granted, I am not a lawyer, and I don't have all the facts (and neither do you), but such broad contracts assigning all of an employee's IP to their employer are in fact illegal in many areas. That doesn't stop employers from putting such clauses into contracts, but it doesn't make them valid or enforceable either. Quite the opposite.
Stop rubber-stamping legal abuses by corporate lawyers!
This is why every contract, employment or otherwise, contains standard legal boilerplate that states that if any portion of the contract is found to be unenforceable, the rest shall remain in force. Because contracts routinely include things that the law forbids. I've run into this myself with apartment leases (written by Colorado lawyers trying to get around clear provisions in Arizona's landlord-tenant laws) and at least one employment contract (when Adobe bought out my employer and tried to get us to sign new contracts, which contained many clauses that are unenforceable and in fact are outright illegal in Arizona, which is a right-to-work state).
The problem is, fighting this would cost money (legal expenses), and even if the developer of Netflix Fanatic won, he'd probably have his life made a living hell by Apple. They might not outright fire him (which would open them up to a wrongful termination lawsuit), but they could do everything short of firing him to pressure him into resigning.
So, yeah, despite Apple's PR, they're just like every other corporation out there. Not exactly news, but I'm disappointed nonetheless.
Unfortunately, you apparently have not read the article. There are two new classes of felony defined by the proposed legislation. The first felony kicks in if you make a digital copy of a movie (that isn't commercially available yet) available in digital form on a computer network. That carries a maximum 3 year prison sentence. In order for the law to apply, you must (a) share the file on any computer network, and (b) the movie in question can't already be available on DVD or VHS for purchase. Once a movie becomes available for purchase in stores, the law appears to no longer apply, and the article seems to confirm this supposition. Furthermore, mere possession of a file isn't sufficient; the file has to be shared, so that you're actively contributing to infringement. However, the law doesn't specify that you have to actually be infringing the movie studio's copyright, nor does it specify that anyone had to actually download the file from you.
Of course, bills can and do get changed before they are passed into law. So this loophole might be closed up soon.
The other class of felony, which nobody seems to be talking about, carries up to a 5 year prison term, and comes into play if you bring a camcorder (or other "audiovisual recording device") into a movie theater. So if a theater owner or usher catches you with a camcorder in a movie theater, and you're recording the movie you're watching, you would be in violation of this law. This is a form of piracy that has been around for a long time, but with the advent of digital camcorders and software that makes it easy to make DVDs or DiVX files out of digital video, it's a lot easier to distribute movies pirated this way.
I have mixed feelings about this second provision. First, a 5 year prison sentence seems a bit harsh for someone who's taping a movie. In fact, it seems very excessive. Not everyone who tapes a movie intends to distribute the copy widely (or at all). On the other hand, making video copies of movies before they're available for purchase or rental, indeed while they're still in the theater, robs the studios and the makers of the film of potential revenues. Of course, there's no loss of real money, so it's hard to call it theft in the strict sense, but someone who might be inclined to go see a movie several times on the big screen might instead see it once on the big screen (or not at all), and then watch a bootleg thereafter.
(By way of contrast, it's highly unlikely that someone who pirates a song or an album would actually pay for that song or that album if the illegal copy weren't an option. Music is much more commoditized, and social attitudes toward pirating music are much more permissive than toward pirating movies. Besides which, most people seem to agree that music is overpriced. Therefore, it's much easier to dismiss RIAA claims of "lost revenue" because the reality is that you can't lose what you never had to begin with. At least with movies, there are still plenty of ordinarily honest people who would be tempted to watch a bootleg movie instead of pay for a ticket to the theater. And the bootleg is almost always inferior to the big screen experience.)
It seems, from a cursory examination, that this "copy protection" scheme relies on a behavior of Wintel PCs -- specifically, when there are multiple sessions on an audio CD, the data session gets mounted instead of the Red Book audio session.
It seems that any computer running Linux would be able to bypass this scheme easily enough, simply by force-mounting the appropriate (music) session and ripping from it. And on a Mac, multi-session CDs mount all sessions as separate disk images, so the user should be able to rip to MP3 or AAC from within iTunes. So unless the record label does something to break these CDs on Mac OS X and/or Linux, they should rip and play just fine on those platforms.
I know little more than what was in the press release announcing that Virtual PC would not work on Apple's new G5 computers. One Connectix engineer confirmed in a semi-public forum that there was a real problem, that it wasn't Microsoft spewing bullshit.
Others in this thread have mentioned that there are byte-swapping load/store instructions in the PowerPC architecture which reduce the cost of doing little-endian loads and stores. According to what I've read, Virtual PC uses a special mode available on the G3 and G4, and not available on the G5. Supposedly, it's the only Mac software to ever use this mode. Without disassembling the Virtual PC code myself and examining it carefully, I couldn't tell you what specifically got "lost" from the G5 silicon.
It's amazing the amount of skepticism that's greeted my single comment, even though this whole issue was hashed out months ago in Slashdot and on various Mac forums, right after the Virtual PC press release.
Maybe. I don't think Microsoft would make such a left-handed compliment, however, especially since it would cast their own product in a less-than-positive light.
Especially considering that Microsoft has lofty goals for the Xbox that extend far, far beyond mere gaming applications. The Xbox is a Trojan Horse.
Dude, you're arguing with the wrong person. Notice I said "virtual little endian mode" and not "little endian mode." This is the marketing speak that I am quoting verbatim from the press release that announced Virtual PC 6.x will not work with the G5. If you want to argue the point, argue with the people who wrote the press release, or the Connectix engineers that Microsoft Borg-ishly assimilated when they bought the VPC product.
The bottom line is, there is either a missing mode, or missing instructions, from the G5 processor. Something that recent versions of Virtual PC rely upon to accelerate the emulation task on PowerPC hardware. If you want to argue the specifics, argue with the engineers who actually are writing the code. Don't yell at me because I repeated something that was in a Microsoft press release.
At least one former Connectix engineer confirmed that the problem was real, and had to do with some architectural decisions that were made for the PowerPC 970 (G5). Make of that what you will.
I've seen precious little out of IBM regarding the PPC 970, period.
Regardless of what you choose to believe, the issue with Virtual PC is very real. Perhaps you take umbrage at the nomenclature for the CPU mode in question. I don't disagree that it's an idiotic PR-speak name. Regardless, there is something missing from the PowerPC 970 silicon that was in the PPC 750 (G3) and the G4 series from Motorola.
This has been discussed months ago on Slashdot. The PPC 970 isn't 100% Book-E compliant, if my memory serves correctly. It's still a PowerPC chip, but it contains some things that the other family members don't (e.g., hardware support for square root in the FPU), and omits some minor things that the other family members have.
The bottom line is, Virtual PC does not work on the G5. This problem existed before Microsoft acquired Connectix, and is trivially provable by attempting to run a recent pre-Microsoft version of Virtual PC on a G5. As I understand it, Virtual PC is the only software on the Mac that uses the little-endian hackery present in the G3 and G4 chips. That the IBM engineers responsible for the G5 chose to spend their transistor budget on other things is unsurprising.
Except that if Microsoft uses the G5 (PPC970) chip, as everyone is speculating, they'll have to tweak the Virtual PC code base to run on the G5. Why? Because the G5 silicon lacks the special "virtual little endian mode" that the Virtual PC code from Connectix relies upon for performance on the G3 and G4 chips.
Of course, a highly optimal bit of PPC assembly could be written to replace the missing mode and instructions on the G5.
Then again, Microsoft could twist IBM's arm and get them to make a custom variant of the G5 that includes this mode, and maybe chops some cache for cost conservation. I sincerely doubt that the chip IBM winds up fabbing for the next Xbox is going to be identical to the version currently shipping in Apple's G5 desktops.
And Communism (or socialism) doesn't demand the overthrow of a government or forcing a welfare state on unwilling participants. One could argue against churches enforcing tithing rules using the same logic you just applied.
Interesting choice of scriptural quotes, considering that it's quite likely Jesus never really said either of those lines. (And please, don't give me that crap about scripture being infallible. That's a lovely fairy tale, but I live in the real world.) Most biblical scholars I've read in the last several years believe that many key portions of the New Testament (especially the "Render unto Caesar" quote, and the part where the Jews take the blame for Jesus' crucifixion) were added later by apologists trying to make Christianity palatable to a Roman-dominated world. After all, where did most Christian converts come from in the first few centuries of Christianity? If Pilate had been portrayed in any of the officially sanctioned gospels as the iron-fisted tyrant he really was, instead of an ineffectual bureaucrat who was forced to pander to an angry mob to placate them, how many Romans would have converted?
Here's a thought... how about we leave religion out of the discussions of economic theory and practice?
No, it's all subjective, not objective. Wrong word, wrong thought process, wrong everything.
Different cultures have different standards for what is right and justified. All you've done is use half-baked logic to try to justify the classic "might makes right" viewpoint. That's how the Holocaust started. But then, you might very well be one of those people who thinks the Holocaust was AOK.
And although I am an American, I recognize that the Boston Tea Party was a nasty bit of civil disobedience that was more vandalism than anything else (not to mention the racist overtones of white men dressing up as aboriginals). How you can mention this event in the same breath as Rosa Parks refusing to go to the back of the bus is beyond me.
How you got modded +2 Insightful is beyond me; where are the moderators' critical thinking skills?
Just because a majority thinks it's OK to oppress a minority, such as myself (a religious minority), doesn't mean I have to be OK with their thought process. Especially if it's predicated on flawed logic and flawed morals or ethics.
BZZT. Wrong. DAT didn't use standard audio cassettes. DCC, which stood for "Digital Compact Cassette," could play and record conventional cassette tapes, but it used special DCC tapes for digital recording. DCC used lossy digital compression, incidentally. DAT, on the other hand, uses a helical scanning head just like a VCR (which is why DAT tape is wider than cassette tape), and stores uncompressed digital audio at a slightly higher sampling rate than CD.
Both DAT and DCC were required to incorporate SCMS. So were all MiniDisc recorders. The reason DAT failed in the consumer market is largely because it was held up while SCMS was developed and implemented. Once SCMS-enabled DAT hit the market, it had become irrelevant. The fact that DAT uses a different sampling rate from audio CD further compounds the problem, because digital dubbing requires sample rate conversion.
Well, DAT is mainly used in pro audio these days. (Most pro decks ignore SCMS anyway.) DAT has also found a niche in data backup.
MiniDisc is still available at Best Buy and Fry's Electronics and other retailers. Sony revived MiniDisc by giving users the ability to transfer digital music from their computers to a specially equipped portable MiniDisc recorder. Of course, with the advent of recordable CD and cheap CD-RW drives, most other digital formats simply don't stand a chance.
The exception seems to be hard drive based players. In that case, the convenience far outweighs any annoyance one might encounter from ripping one's music and then copying it to the iPod/Rio Karma/whatever.
...to the recent crap-flood of viral/Trojan e-mails bearing Microsoft's logo and purporting to be network security updates?
I'm not suggesting that the e-mails are legitimate security updates (they're not), only that maybe this recent official security update is somehow a response to this latest rash of opportunistic virii/Trojans.
The flood of bogus viral e-mail is bad enough, and thankfully my Mac is immune to Wintel viruses, but the sheer volume is affecting me by displacing legitimate e-mail in my inbox. It's put me over quota once already.
A buddy of mine is hosting a clip he re-encoded in Quicktime for those of us who don't want to use WMP or RealPlayer. The link was posted earlier on the Accelerate Your Mac website. The direct link is here.
Which is precisely why, today, SunnComm rethought its position and announced that they wouldn't go after the grad student who published the paper demonstrating how crappy their DRM is. Because they didn't want to take the risk of losing, especially since losing would defang the DMCA and seriously screw with the MPAA and RIAA's legal efforts.
Yep, I used Zephyr too. I don't recall it having notification capabilities for when the user was typing a message, because I always used the command-line tools to send zephyrgrams, and the program to send messages was a simple command line app (which supported redirection as well). However, zephyr did support notification of when certain users logged on and off of the network (or at least, it supported notification of when a given user had zephyr turned on and listening).
Incidentally, I used zephyr as far back as 1988, so it definitely predates most "modern" IM clients.
Zephyr is much older. Zephyr dates back to at least 1988, when I was an incoming freshman at MIT. We had Zephyr back then.
CNet ran an article about this development, and they were quick to note that other IM software from Yahoo! and AOL already implemented this feature. The article doesn't say when the patent was filed.
A related article points out that ICQ filed a patent in 1997 (granted in 2002) which covers pretty much any kind of instant messaging application on any network. Of course, there is prior art...
I was a student at MIT from 1988 to 1992. During that time, I used an instant messaging system called Zephyr, which could work either with X11 or with a text console (if run in console mode). Zephyr didn't support notification of other users when you were typing a message (since the application to compose messages and send them was command-line, and therefore run from the shell rather than as part of a monolithic IM app), but it did support notifying you when certain other users logged on, and Zephyr by default popped up separate message windows on the target user's X11 display when messages arrived. Kind of like how classic ICQ operates -- each incoming message is displayed in a separate window which has to be dismissed by the user.
I'm sure there are more prior art examples for IM and general, and this feature in specific. The big players are trying to carve up the IM landscape by making turf claims with patents. If ever there was a time to support alternative IM technologies like Jabber, now is the time, folks.
I suppose it depends on how often you open and close the sliding region on the case. I've noticed a tiny amount of drift, but not enough to be worried about. Recalibration is easy enough, and you're supposed to recalibrate the digitizer on any Palm device at regular intervals.
I've noticed that Palm has some useful features that eliminate the need to use a stylus or to open the HWR area up, like when you're looking up a contact using only the five-way navigation control. (Up-down to page through the contacts, right to hone in on a specific sequence of characters for a contact entry, press in the middle to select an entry; at that point, you can use up and down to move a single entry at a time up or down in the list, and you can use left to deselect the currently selected entry, which puts you back in "page" mode. It sounds complicated until you use it.)
Graffiti 2 seems closer in many regards to the Newton's block-character recognition, and virtually identical to the HWR built into most PocketPC devices these days. After getting used to Graffiti 2, I prefer it over the original Graffiti. Maybe with time you'll learn to like it too, though it does suck to have to un-learn old muscle memory.