Actually, the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent DRM protections. So, for example, you may have the legal right to playback a Sony CD on your PC, but Sony can still press charges against you if you find a way around their DRM in order to do so.
As an example, there is nothing in the law that would prevent you from creating a converter box that would allow you to watch a Blu-Ray DVD on an old RCA television. But if that Blu-Ray player outputs in HDCP, the manufacturer can impose criminal penalties upon you for bypassing their DRM (HDCP only allows specific displays to show movies).
Call me crazy, but doesn't the copyright on an audiobook involve the performance aspect of it, as well as licensing the sale of said derivative work? Reading the words out loud would not then fall under copyright domain unless said copy was being burned (and potentially resold).
This was the same functional arguement used by the RIAA to claim that making a copy of a CD for usage in your car was illegal, except that in that case an actual copy was being made. The consumer is shifting media through an automated process for personal use.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but audiobook rights are a creation of contract law, not inherent in copyright law. In this case the authors guild is trying to apply contracts on the consumer where the consumer signed none.
If you need to charge more for the rights to your works, charge more for the rights to your works. Don't try to re-sell your works twice to an already dwindling market.
Actually, no. An employee's first responsibility is to the law. Their second responsibility is to follow corporate policy. Their *third* responsibility is to follow their supervisor's requests.
In this case, their supervisor's request violated both the first and second responsibilities, which both have priority. There were proper policies in place at the company which would have allowed the supervisor access they needed without compromising security.
This is especially true in financial or IT sections of a company, where corporate policy is specifically structured to deny access to corporate resources, thereby preventing misusage.
What company do you work at, so that we can avoid it?
I think you completely fail to understand something very specific about server administration: You don't own the boxes. Your employer does... It's not the job of an administrator to decide who does and doesn't have access any more than it is the job of a security guard to decide who has the privilege of entering the building. You are the implementor of the policy, not the creator of the policy.
I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that SF policy about city network-wide passwords limits their sharing to select groups of people. Terry Childs, apparently, refused to share passwords with people who didn't meet that policy requirement.
It's a quetion of where legitimate authority comes from. If authority comes from "above", then whenever anyone above him in the org chart asks him for anything he should jump immediately. However, if authority comes from following the installed procedures and policies of the system, you may find yourself in a location where you have to deny your own boss certain things he asks for because it wouldn't fit proper security procedures. As Terry Childs was working for a public entity, and in a security capacity, it seems like procedural authority should take precedence here.
Plane-carryable voip system Tiny network sniffer SSL based VPN gateway Remote roomba controller Mud-in-a-box
This reminds me a bit of apple's airport extreme. Tiny, versitile, Multi-function wall wart. Apple's, of course is quite limited in what it can do. Does anyone know if airport extreme is hacked to run custom software yet?
The sooner this dies, the sooner we can get back to receicing public opinion, and not state-sponsored opinion.
State sponsored opinion doesn't have to post profits. In an environment without strong independent media (or at least media out to prove the state wrong), there isn't the necessary strong counterbalance to keep the state from becoming a monopoly on information. For-profit media at least *can* do things like send separate reporters to Iraq, which is difficult for Sunday bloggers to do.
They're just chemicals. If they ever did achieve momentary entanglement, chances are that there would be no way of detecting or knowing such a thing had actually occurred. In the grand scheme of things, one person may register as having seen a tiny, dim flash of light that is identical to the tiny, dim flash of light that the other one saw.
I believe that grandparent's point is not about stock value, but position in market. They've officially lost the battle for search engines, their phone OS is third best, their last desktop OS couldn't convince people to upgrade, office 2007 is controversial and their lock on text formats is crumbling, and aside from the video game division they've been wholly unable to get any momentum going in new markets.
Personally, I'm looking forward to desktop file sharing and synchronization, as it will mean I can stop running all these FTP servers everywhere. This move seems to imply that they're letting go of the idea of being a media company, and instead focusing on the actual revenue parts of their organization. Good for them.
Let's say the 17 U1 servers cost 2,500 each. And let's say that selling them now would gain 1,250 each. That's 21,250 dollars available there.
Now let's say that Moore's Law continues to hold. And that you need the additional capacity when the economy makes a miraculous turnaround in 2 years. By that time, it should cost you less than 21,250 to get the same capacity back. And you would be doing it in half of the number of servers, which implies a space and power savings.
In that case, it is downright advantageous to sell now, buy back later. It all depends upon when you think you will need the capacity again. Too soon, and you will pay through the nose for selling. Too far away, and not selling now saddles you with old hardware.
Other options ---
If you're set on keeping them, I see only a few other options. One would be to see if any established small-to-medium sized businesses would like to lease the capacity of your servers. Perhaps those companies who sell time on private servers on video games could use them when the next one releases. Web hosting is probably a bust, but I wouldn't be surprised if a local university would be interested in leasing the iron for better rates than your garage pays. There is also cpushare.com and other cloud computing projects, but it doesn't seem like they're paying out at all.
Personally, I still manually deny Photoshop CS2 access to the internet through the firewall in Vista. Unless they have significantly changed their software between CS2 and 4, I believe the point remains valid.
Also, I personally feel that allowing software vendors to insert themselves into a firewall exceptions list is a good thing. I can't tell you the number of clients that I've had who suddenly had a key piece of software stop working because one day they randomly clicked "deny" when prompted. Of course, this puts the big software vendors on unequal footing with smaller ones who may be unable to acquire such access, but in the grand scheme of things the less a computer user needs to know to work successfully, the better.
Of course the sound card degredation makes me want to throw a chair at Balmer. But hey, that's why creative professionals all use macs, right?
On the one hand, I totally agree that the government needs to do a better job of planning its finances than it has in the past 8 years.
On the other hand, if your household income dropped precipitously on a temporary basis, isn't that time to dip into savings to get by? It's a lot more expensive to lose a car now and attempt to regain one later than it is to simply try to hold on to it through dipping into resources.
We're currently planning on investing a whopping 2 trillion dollars to try and recover our economic footing. Assuming that is amortized over 4 years, that's actually *less* additional debt per year than the federal deficit under Bush Jr.
City-wide local sales tax was implemented because it is easy to track that sort of thing in meatspace. Why not do it on a block-by-block basis? Because it isn't practical.
In the larger world of the internet, city by city taxes just isn't practical. Mandate this, and move on.
So, all in all, this just MIGHT help their local economy.
Helping local economies is about finding efficiencies and creating value where there wasn't previously. If cleaning people's computers ultimately saved them more time than the cost offset, then cleaning people's machines would help the local economy. My suspicion is that it would ultimately just be a drain... a tax on the uneducated that pays out to Best Buy.
You're simplifying a complex question. If you give players an unbalanced sword in an RPG, they will abuse it horribly even though it reduces their enjoyment of the game. The player's goal is never to have fun, the player's goal is to reach the end of the level / beat the boss / save the world / whatever. Enjoyment is actually a side effect of achieving that goal.
Your goal, as a game designer then, is to establish a goal in your player's minds, then create the most entertaining impediments possible to them reaching that goal. Establish that fun, get good reviews, build up good word of mouth, and get sales. Throwing in a +20 sword of ultimate doomyness to a level 1 player would simply remove the impediments, allowing the player to reach their goal faster but without the side-effect of actually having fun.
In the game the grandparent posted about, the player can switch between levels at will. This leads me to believe that players aren't interested in progression, persay, but comprehension of the solution. That's good... They're hooked on the mechanic itself. If the grandparent can help them get through the comprehension phase, they might have a winner.
Jefferson, if you're interested, shoot me a mail. games [at] chriscanfield [dot] net. I'd enjoy chatting a bit about your game.
As a game designer, 30 seconds actually does sound like a long time to be unable to make even interim progress towards a goal. I personally try to make sure that people aren't stuck for more than 15 seconds without being able to make some perceived progress, though I work on very different types of games.
If people are abusing hints, perhaps there could be a pre-visualization system, or some other way of helping players understand the consequences of complex interactions? Maybe when you click a piece, the spots that piece cannot take are dimmed out? Also perhaps your visual presentation could be improved / altered somehow to make the piece positions and colors more comprehensible. The green, blue, and yellow you have chosen are way to close to eachother in hue and saturation, and the all important beams across the board are thin and blend together. And perhaps the level design just needs to start simpler and build up towards super hard, training the player more thoroughly in what they might need to be successful. Heck, I got stuck on level Fun 3 for about 3 minutes, and I'm a heavy puzzler. I'm playing through the fun levels now, and it feels like I just jumped into most other games' medium or hard.
If you are married to the tips system (and it sounds like it is implemented already anyway) there are ways that such a thing can not break gameplay. EA's sudoku had a meta-scoring system, where level completed contributed to an overall constantly-growing score. However, they also implemented two cheat systems to get players unstuck. If the players asked for a hint, their final score plummetted, but at least they weren't totally blocked. You can also offer one tip per level / ten levels / hour / etc. Or otherwise time-limit it.
Essentially, it sounds like your players are simply getting stuck and frustrated. The simple answer to what to do, is shuffle your difficulty curve to embed core concepts into your players earlier, and adjust your presentation design and artwork to help the player with their task.
It's a good thing the Author's Guild has such a strong hand in this environment. While book sales are flying high and readership is hitting all-time records, they deserve extra compensation. And if that slows down adoption of an entirely new fledgeling distribution medium, that is just giving them valuable time to hash out their rights relationship and spread the wealth....Wait, who are these guys again?
The Wikipedia entry is already corrected, whereas the old media outlets are fixed on the page and will be wrong forever. This really shouldn't be an article about how Wikipedia destroys information, but how clueless old media can't keep up with this new world of dynamic information.
Are you referring to the period in the 20's and 30's where news was mostly tabloid muckraking? Or the 50's when news was essentially government propoganda?
The only real primary authoratative source for a person's name would be a birth certificate or passport, neither of which are public documents. Beyond that, you have their word, and the word of people who should be in the know. Newspapers who cover that beat should be in the know.
In short, Wikipedia *is* the internet, or at least a reflection of it. It is a collection of articles written by anybody interested about any subject, and that is what makes it useful. It is in essence a collection of nearly 3 million ever-evolving essays. Reducing that to "authoratative sources only" would destroy its utility and make it, well, like so many other undersized and ignored information aggregators online.
Also, "Encyclopedic grade writing" has always been pretty terrible. My relatives still have some Britannicas from 1986 in her house, and you wouldn't believe the raw obviousness of some of the mistakes in them, even judging by the knowledge of the time. Encyclopedias have always been freshmen essays into complicated subjects they do not know enough about. The advantage of wikipedia, while no more authoratative, is that hundreds of people with direct experience can correct and expand the articles, whereas traditional encyclopedias are written by staff writers with limited knowledge and stay wrong forever.
Gmail still supports pop3 and IMAP for offline usage. That means finding a different client, of course. But these days the client is largely irrelevant.
I don't know anyone who doesn't get their mail in at least two devices.
Always remember that a bit of job training is in there too. Your artists *need* extensive Photoshop experience. Same with Maya, 3ds max, protools, etc. And asking non-techies to switch from MS office is like convincing 70-year-olds to drive on the other side of the street.
E-mail is a perfect place to start the transition, especially if nobody uses meeting requests. But go one piece at a time, and realize that people in academia are frequently motivated by things other than money.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent DRM protections. So, for example, you may have the legal right to playback a Sony CD on your PC, but Sony can still press charges against you if you find a way around their DRM in order to do so.
As an example, there is nothing in the law that would prevent you from creating a converter box that would allow you to watch a Blu-Ray DVD on an old RCA television. But if that Blu-Ray player outputs in HDCP, the manufacturer can impose criminal penalties upon you for bypassing their DRM (HDCP only allows specific displays to show movies).
Call me crazy, but doesn't the copyright on an audiobook involve the performance aspect of it, as well as licensing the sale of said derivative work? Reading the words out loud would not then fall under copyright domain unless said copy was being burned (and potentially resold).
This was the same functional arguement used by the RIAA to claim that making a copy of a CD for usage in your car was illegal, except that in that case an actual copy was being made. The consumer is shifting media through an automated process for personal use.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but audiobook rights are a creation of contract law, not inherent in copyright law. In this case the authors guild is trying to apply contracts on the consumer where the consumer signed none.
If you need to charge more for the rights to your works, charge more for the rights to your works. Don't try to re-sell your works twice to an already dwindling market.
Does this mean screen readers are copyright violation machines? Damn those freeloading blind people!
Actually, no. An employee's first responsibility is to the law. Their second responsibility is to follow corporate policy. Their *third* responsibility is to follow their supervisor's requests.
In this case, their supervisor's request violated both the first and second responsibilities, which both have priority. There were proper policies in place at the company which would have allowed the supervisor access they needed without compromising security.
This is especially true in financial or IT sections of a company, where corporate policy is specifically structured to deny access to corporate resources, thereby preventing misusage.
What company do you work at, so that we can avoid it?
I think you completely fail to understand something very specific about server administration: You don't own the boxes. Your employer does... It's not the job of an administrator to decide who does and doesn't have access any more than it is the job of a security guard to decide who has the privilege of entering the building. You are the implementor of the policy, not the creator of the policy.
I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that SF policy about city network-wide passwords limits their sharing to select groups of people. Terry Childs, apparently, refused to share passwords with people who didn't meet that policy requirement.
It's a quetion of where legitimate authority comes from. If authority comes from "above", then whenever anyone above him in the org chart asks him for anything he should jump immediately. However, if authority comes from following the installed procedures and policies of the system, you may find yourself in a location where you have to deny your own boss certain things he asks for because it wouldn't fit proper security procedures. As Terry Childs was working for a public entity, and in a security capacity, it seems like procedural authority should take precedence here.
Other ideas:
Plane-carryable voip system
Tiny network sniffer
SSL based VPN gateway
Remote roomba controller
Mud-in-a-box
This reminds me a bit of apple's airport extreme. Tiny, versitile, Multi-function wall wart. Apple's, of course is quite limited in what it can do. Does anyone know if airport extreme is hacked to run custom software yet?
The sooner this dies, the sooner we can get back to receicing public opinion, and not state-sponsored opinion.
State sponsored opinion doesn't have to post profits. In an environment without strong independent media (or at least media out to prove the state wrong), there isn't the necessary strong counterbalance to keep the state from becoming a monopoly on information. For-profit media at least *can* do things like send separate reporters to Iraq, which is difficult for Sunday bloggers to do.
Remember kids: It's OK to lie as long as you don't charge more for it.
They're just chemicals. If they ever did achieve momentary entanglement, chances are that there would be no way of detecting or knowing such a thing had actually occurred. In the grand scheme of things, one person may register as having seen a tiny, dim flash of light that is identical to the tiny, dim flash of light that the other one saw.
I believe that grandparent's point is not about stock value, but position in market. They've officially lost the battle for search engines, their phone OS is third best, their last desktop OS couldn't convince people to upgrade, office 2007 is controversial and their lock on text formats is crumbling, and aside from the video game division they've been wholly unable to get any momentum going in new markets.
Personally, I'm looking forward to desktop file sharing and synchronization, as it will mean I can stop running all these FTP servers everywhere. This move seems to imply that they're letting go of the idea of being a media company, and instead focusing on the actual revenue parts of their organization. Good for them.
Have you thought about just selling the servers?
Let's say the 17 U1 servers cost 2,500 each. And let's say that selling them now would gain 1,250 each. That's 21,250 dollars available there.
Now let's say that Moore's Law continues to hold. And that you need the additional capacity when the economy makes a miraculous turnaround in 2 years. By that time, it should cost you less than 21,250 to get the same capacity back. And you would be doing it in half of the number of servers, which implies a space and power savings.
In that case, it is downright advantageous to sell now, buy back later. It all depends upon when you think you will need the capacity again. Too soon, and you will pay through the nose for selling. Too far away, and not selling now saddles you with old hardware.
Other options ---
If you're set on keeping them, I see only a few other options. One would be to see if any established small-to-medium sized businesses would like to lease the capacity of your servers. Perhaps those companies who sell time on private servers on video games could use them when the next one releases. Web hosting is probably a bust, but I wouldn't be surprised if a local university would be interested in leasing the iron for better rates than your garage pays. There is also cpushare.com and other cloud computing projects, but it doesn't seem like they're paying out at all.
Personally, I still manually deny Photoshop CS2 access to the internet through the firewall in Vista. Unless they have significantly changed their software between CS2 and 4, I believe the point remains valid.
Also, I personally feel that allowing software vendors to insert themselves into a firewall exceptions list is a good thing. I can't tell you the number of clients that I've had who suddenly had a key piece of software stop working because one day they randomly clicked "deny" when prompted. Of course, this puts the big software vendors on unequal footing with smaller ones who may be unable to acquire such access, but in the grand scheme of things the less a computer user needs to know to work successfully, the better.
Of course the sound card degredation makes me want to throw a chair at Balmer. But hey, that's why creative professionals all use macs, right?
On the one hand, I totally agree that the government needs to do a better job of planning its finances than it has in the past 8 years.
On the other hand, if your household income dropped precipitously on a temporary basis, isn't that time to dip into savings to get by? It's a lot more expensive to lose a car now and attempt to regain one later than it is to simply try to hold on to it through dipping into resources.
We're currently planning on investing a whopping 2 trillion dollars to try and recover our economic footing. Assuming that is amortized over 4 years, that's actually *less* additional debt per year than the federal deficit under Bush Jr.
City-wide local sales tax was implemented because it is easy to track that sort of thing in meatspace. Why not do it on a block-by-block basis? Because it isn't practical.
In the larger world of the internet, city by city taxes just isn't practical. Mandate this, and move on.
So, all in all, this just MIGHT help their local economy.
Helping local economies is about finding efficiencies and creating value where there wasn't previously. If cleaning people's computers ultimately saved them more time than the cost offset, then cleaning people's machines would help the local economy. My suspicion is that it would ultimately just be a drain... a tax on the uneducated that pays out to Best Buy.
You're simplifying a complex question. If you give players an unbalanced sword in an RPG, they will abuse it horribly even though it reduces their enjoyment of the game. The player's goal is never to have fun, the player's goal is to reach the end of the level / beat the boss / save the world / whatever. Enjoyment is actually a side effect of achieving that goal.
Your goal, as a game designer then, is to establish a goal in your player's minds, then create the most entertaining impediments possible to them reaching that goal. Establish that fun, get good reviews, build up good word of mouth, and get sales. Throwing in a +20 sword of ultimate doomyness to a level 1 player would simply remove the impediments, allowing the player to reach their goal faster but without the side-effect of actually having fun.
In the game the grandparent posted about, the player can switch between levels at will. This leads me to believe that players aren't interested in progression, persay, but comprehension of the solution. That's good... They're hooked on the mechanic itself. If the grandparent can help them get through the comprehension phase, they might have a winner.
Jefferson, if you're interested, shoot me a mail. games [at] chriscanfield [dot] net. I'd enjoy chatting a bit about your game.
I assume this is the game they are referring to?
As a game designer, 30 seconds actually does sound like a long time to be unable to make even interim progress towards a goal. I personally try to make sure that people aren't stuck for more than 15 seconds without being able to make some perceived progress, though I work on very different types of games.
If people are abusing hints, perhaps there could be a pre-visualization system, or some other way of helping players understand the consequences of complex interactions? Maybe when you click a piece, the spots that piece cannot take are dimmed out? Also perhaps your visual presentation could be improved / altered somehow to make the piece positions and colors more comprehensible. The green, blue, and yellow you have chosen are way to close to eachother in hue and saturation, and the all important beams across the board are thin and blend together. And perhaps the level design just needs to start simpler and build up towards super hard, training the player more thoroughly in what they might need to be successful. Heck, I got stuck on level Fun 3 for about 3 minutes, and I'm a heavy puzzler. I'm playing through the fun levels now, and it feels like I just jumped into most other games' medium or hard.
If you are married to the tips system (and it sounds like it is implemented already anyway) there are ways that such a thing can not break gameplay. EA's sudoku had a meta-scoring system, where level completed contributed to an overall constantly-growing score. However, they also implemented two cheat systems to get players unstuck. If the players asked for a hint, their final score plummetted, but at least they weren't totally blocked. You can also offer one tip per level / ten levels / hour / etc. Or otherwise time-limit it.
Essentially, it sounds like your players are simply getting stuck and frustrated. The simple answer to what to do, is shuffle your difficulty curve to embed core concepts into your players earlier, and adjust your presentation design and artwork to help the player with their task.
It's a good thing the Author's Guild has such a strong hand in this environment. While book sales are flying high and readership is hitting all-time records, they deserve extra compensation. And if that slows down adoption of an entirely new fledgeling distribution medium, that is just giving them valuable time to hash out their rights relationship and spread the wealth. ...Wait, who are these guys again?
The Wikipedia entry is already corrected, whereas the old media outlets are fixed on the page and will be wrong forever. This really shouldn't be an article about how Wikipedia destroys information, but how clueless old media can't keep up with this new world of dynamic information.
Are you referring to the period in the 20's and 30's where news was mostly tabloid muckraking? Or the 50's when news was essentially government propoganda?
The only real primary authoratative source for a person's name would be a birth certificate or passport, neither of which are public documents. Beyond that, you have their word, and the word of people who should be in the know. Newspapers who cover that beat should be in the know.
Wikipedia has articles on Slush Puppies, obscure 80's videogames, and The Star Trek Experience. The standards of research need to vary quite a bit simply because A: many of their topics are obscure or under-researched, B: most fall outside the scope of scholarly journals, and C: attempt to explain pop-culture phenomenon before they have bubbled up through the literature, like Naked Hiking. Their information policy needs to encompass heavily researched topics like Salmonella, pop culture icons like Tony the Tiger, information compendiums like lists of generic terms based on active trademarks, and truly obscure / trivial subjects like the person who visits Poe's grave every year.
In short, Wikipedia *is* the internet, or at least a reflection of it. It is a collection of articles written by anybody interested about any subject, and that is what makes it useful. It is in essence a collection of nearly 3 million ever-evolving essays. Reducing that to "authoratative sources only" would destroy its utility and make it, well, like so many other undersized and ignored information aggregators online.
Also, "Encyclopedic grade writing" has always been pretty terrible. My relatives still have some Britannicas from 1986 in her house, and you wouldn't believe the raw obviousness of some of the mistakes in them, even judging by the knowledge of the time. Encyclopedias have always been freshmen essays into complicated subjects they do not know enough about. The advantage of wikipedia, while no more authoratative, is that hundreds of people with direct experience can correct and expand the articles, whereas traditional encyclopedias are written by staff writers with limited knowledge and stay wrong forever.
So, then, a phone that works within 100 feet of a known base station.
That still doesn't turn it into an iPhone. That turns it into a tethered phone which won't help you out when you get lost driving.
Rural copper layout for POTS was legendarily subsidized. Unfortunately, we didn't get the same guarantees for rural broadband.
Gmail still supports pop3 and IMAP for offline usage. That means finding a different client, of course. But these days the client is largely irrelevant.
I don't know anyone who doesn't get their mail in at least two devices.
Always remember that a bit of job training is in there too. Your artists *need* extensive Photoshop experience. Same with Maya, 3ds max, protools, etc. And asking non-techies to switch from MS office is like convincing 70-year-olds to drive on the other side of the street.
E-mail is a perfect place to start the transition, especially if nobody uses meeting requests. But go one piece at a time, and realize that people in academia are frequently motivated by things other than money.