though Mr Cheo said software tools are available for download that can track who is using a network and what they are doing on it.
Yeah, it's called your router's software.
My old 802.11b wireless router died a few years back. I didn't have a laptop at the time, but my girlfriend did. It was literally 6 months before we noticed that her laptop wasn't connecting to our router, but rather a unsecured wireless router in the building. It was just automatically connecting to what's available.
This is not "stealing" network access, or "breaking in" to your house. This is a device, available for everyone nearby, which is constantly broadcasting packets saying quite literally "Hey, I'm here! Does anyone want to connect to me?" Your computer then says "Hey, I'm a laptop. This is my network card identification. Can I get on your network?" The router then says "Sure, hop on. I'll route your packets."
This is not someone coming to your house and attaching alligator clips to your phone line. This is YOUR router, working in YOUR stead, behaving exactly as YOU have configured it to. This is like a secretary whom you've told to let anyone into your building. If you can't be bothered to train the secretary in the simplest of fashions (and putting a password on a network isn't exactly rocket science), you shouldn't envoke the police when you find they have let random people into the building.
If you can't spend the ten fucking minutes to put a password on your network, you shouldn't waste the judicial system's time when people access it.
I can't believe I've developed far enough to defend police officers, but quite frankly most of the interactions I've had with police officers have been positive. You don't decide to risk your life in service of other people for crappy pay without having a modicrum of decency about you. And I say that having had a police gun pulled on me in the past. They've all been professional, courteous within reason, and goal-oriented. No, I've never gotten into a fistfight with one, and I assume that if I started behaving badly they would be more emotional about the situations. But so far the interactions I've had with police officers have been positive.
Maybe it's that I've lived mostly in cities where cops can't afford to sit around giving speeding tickets all day, but they've by and large been good people. That may just be my experience, though.
Most of those best seller games are in the area of several 100 thousand to several million units sold.
100k sales per million dollars of development is about the threshold between a failure and a passably bad sales number in the console realm. If your next-gen titles are absorbing 10 million dollar development budgets (which they easily can), you're looking at needing 1 million sales to not be taking a bath. The PS3 may have software sales numbers like that on a few titles by early 2007. We'll have to see if the lack of competing titles offsets the lack of installed userbase early on. Ironically, this would be a good time to make shovelware for the PS3.
It will be difficult to justify those budgets on the install base of any one next-gen system. Right now with an installed userbase of over 80 million, the PS2 is still looking very attractive.
It's interesting that computer UI is so far behind gaming in this respect. For years we've been facing the problem of how to make the same sound effect, played over and over again, not be grating.
The solution gaming has come up with is quite simple: re-record the same sound, and play back one of many variations. Sometimes these are complex changes, like the sound of a sword swinging and hitting many types of different material. Sometimes the changes are completely subtle, like how a game may have 10 different sounds for a footstep, yet all of them sound almost exactly the same. And sometimes the sound is just pitch-shifted slightly: this is the tactic when you're RAM limited.
I'm just kind of surprised that this isn't supported on the OS level by Windows yet. Considering the amount being invested in the sound development of the OS, and what goes into each and every application, it should be easy to have a WAV wrapper which is really 5 or 6 recordings of the same basic sound. Add in a modulation parameter for slightly randomized variable playback speeds, and you have an interface audio schema that will never get grating, with far less than 18 months required.
The comparison you want to make is that the Dreamcast also sold out 300,000 units on it's first day, and look how well that did. It was the fastest launching console of all time until the PS2, yet it still tanked.
if you do not vote, you forfeit all right to complain about anything your government does until november 2008 (by which time, you will have learned your lesson and will vote, right?)
Please explain the logic of this. I hear this argument used every election and no one's bothered justifying it. Please back this statement up with a reason.
You have two options to change the system... Drifting overall political opinion with your vote, like a giant ouija board, or guns. Guns are generally the nuclear option, because you don't want other people to go changing the system through guns.
Voting is how you register your opinion. You're given options that are "closer to this" or "closer to that." Once an opinion becomes heavily voted on, the system recalibrates and that once radical notion becomes mainstream. Women's suffraging was once radical, but became normal. If you want a more radical notion, like sex change operations covered under universal health care, push the system in that direction. Do it successfully enough for long enough, and it gets there.
Microsoft: I can't believe you fell for the oldest trick in the book. What a goof. What's with you man? Come on. You know what? No, here let me give your music back to you.
Microsoft: Oh, look. You fell for that, too. I can't believe it man.
Microsoft: So, now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.
Not to be too pedantic, but this sounds like a really bad idea. You're basically at the mercy of companies to decide whether or not they want to prosecute you. It's a crapshoot as to whether you get a sensible, intelligent person on the other end of the line, or you spend tens of thousands of dollars on a lawyer. Even the hint of personal gain is enough for people to shout blackmail, and is definitely enough to bring a team of lawyers down on your family.
It was serendipitous independent research, right? So you're not losing any money on the deal. Totally annonymously submit the research to one of the programmers on their staff. Tell them to take full credit for the find and drive the fixing process. Sit back comfortable in the knowledge that you did the right thing for the world, and you're not going to be found guilty of millions of dollars of damages in our completely messed up legal system.
Or sell the security vulnerability to a Russian Hacker. Quite frankly, that's a lot safer than telling the company about it.
2 monitors. About 15 open windows, many of which are tabbed internally. Usually I have 5 txt / config files open in one app, and 7-10 tabs in Opera.
Opera (browser), Crimson Editor (text), Two e-mail applications, Perforce (version control), an internal development application, usually three copies of Word, one of Excel, a calculator, a copy of the game, a controlling window for said game, something playing music, Photoshop, Palm Desktop, Skype, Trillian. Sometimes add in Illustrator, sometimes add in VC++, sometimes CuBase or Audacity.
It is NOT the government's responsibility to insure I don't buy products from companies that have bad policies. It is mine. I don't need, nor want, the government to get involved whatsoever. Most governments tend to fuck up anything they get involved in.
Unfortunately, it is the government that is giving these foolish restrictions the force of law. If you bypass their rules, you're subject to the force of law whether or not what you're doing is morally correct and within your rights.
HTML at the moment is solid, robust, and gets the job done. As it has evolved it has gained additional features and power at each step, including CSS integration, better javascripting, DHTML, etc, thus leading at every step to a better end-user experience.
XHTML for all practical purposes, is HTML but with more errors. With XHTML, you get the power of being told that you have to put an end tag on all
tags. And, umm, not a lot else. The benefits of switching to XHTML are mostly theoretical.
The W3C needs to break the focus on validation, and get back to trying to work with developers and users to get what THEY want into specifications. It sounds like they realized that XHTML will not overtake HTML any time soon, and that they need to provide some sort of reason or reasons to make that change.
Stated reasons for Sony's continued dominance, and others who have held said reasons.
The Brand:
The Playstation is synonymous with gaming... Just like "Playing Nintendo" or "Playing Atari."
Microsoft (somewhat) Squandered its Lead
Microsoft has had a year of the market to themselves, and hasn't produced any killer titles. Except Dead Rising. And Geometry Wars. You can probably count Oblivion in there too. And people seem to be playing a lot of Uno for some reason. But overall MS has had an OK but not shocking first year out... Like Sega did with the Genesis and Nintendo did with the NES and Game Boy. Let's not forget Sony's lackluster first years with the Playstation 1 and 2.
Japan is Ripe for the Taking
The Xbox line is largely a failure in Japan. Someone could swoop right in and take a huge chunk of that... Like NEC did with the PC Engine, or Sega did with the Sega CD and Saturn. Or, quite simply, the Nintendo DS appears to be doing, especially with weeks when the top 10 selling games in Japan were all on the DS.
Blu-ray Will Matter
Having more storage space is always good. We've been bumping up against storage limitations on DVD disks for years now. Having a bigger storage area will really help improve the quality of games available for the system... Like NEC's Turbo Graphx CD add-on, or the extra roomy cartridges on the Neo Geo. Or, for that matter, how Nintendo got trounced by the Playstation 1.
Free Online
Everyone likes free, right? And on the PS3, online features will be free! All of the online features that, umm, any developer may happen to want to design, code up, and financially support. And the developers have all the freedom they want! Trust us, it will be xboxishtastic maybe. Nobody wanted to code up any achievements system in the first generation of titles, but, you know, Free!...Free like Playstation 2 online. Or like how PC games have free online.
Note: I don't think that Sony is doomed, or MS is great, or Nintendo is innovative. Necessarily. But I do think the best tactic is to wait for a few months after all three systems are on the table to commit to one.
This is exactly the sort of thing that small claims court was setup to handle. For claims under 2,000 dollars ish (varies by state / conditions) and a 15 dollar filing fee, you can bring a case against someone without a lawyer. This will involve a letter sent by certified mail to the registrar. You then both bring your cases before a judge and argue them in plain english.
If you have a site with a higher value, you may exceed the maximum damages limit. At that point you'd need a real lawyer and a full legal case. But if this is just a piddly personal site, drag their asses to small claims. It's far more accessible, far more affordable, and is intended to deal with situations just like this. Anyone at your local courthouse should be able to help you find and fill out the requisite forms, and the process from there.
Re:More like "thank god we didn't get them"
on
Consoles M.I.A.
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The MSX was a legendary system. We would have been well served by having that on the market. It would have beaten the pants off of a lot of what was on the market at the time. The Wonderswan would have been nice competition to the Game Boy, especially once they both went color.
On the other hand, I'm surprised there wasn't any mention of the SuperGrafx. Powerful little system from NEC, now super rare, with some of the best arcade ports of the time.
Also, the GP2X would be nice to hear about, as it isn't too late to bring that one to the US.
Unfortunately, that was the attitude that brought down the gaming industry in 84.
As anyone who has worked in the industry can tell you, gaming guides are always a cynical afterthought. Ever wonder why they're frequently encased in impenetrable plastic wrap before you buy them?
I didn't mean protecting legally defined stolen research. I was using the term a bit loosely to refer to reverse-engineering a competitor's product to do the same thing... using their research without conducting your own, if you will.
"Hey, why are Nike's shoes so soft? Wow, they're full of air. Their air pocket takes the shape of successive tubes of 1 cm diameter running the length of the shoe plus a 3mm thick membrane around the edge. Let's do that." Now, granted, Nike probably has / had a design patent on that as well, but you get the point.
SGI is most definitely legally entitled to sue. What they are not entitled to is a patent on blood, sweat, and tears rather than originality. If multiple companies come to the same solution to a problem at the same time, the solution is probably obvious to someone skilled in the arts.
The system is a bit broken at the moment. The patent office is underfunded for their mandate, which means they let things through assuming the court will sort things out. The courts assume that the patent office did a thorough job, making it difficult to challenge bogus patents. Anyone who works in IT has come across these, and quite a few of us have these. Unfortunately, you're legally bound to your shareholders to take all of these seriously, no matter how frivilous or stupid they are (the patents, not the shareholders).
Hence, we have patent warfare. And patent death throes. And we waste lots of resources defending and countersuing instead of getting on about the business of making IT better.
A once great company behaving like a patent troll is still a patent troll.
A patent is intended to be a device to protect non-obvious research and innovation from being stolen so that you can reap the rewards in your product line. In this case, the research was not stolen, as ATI thought of it too. And SGI no longer has a product line to protect.
They're suing ATI because they have no way left to make money. Period. They're not protecting their own product line or income stream, as they have neither. They're not even protecting their own research, as ATI developed this independently. They're just in their death throes, and are suing.
Remember, patent mutually assured destruction doesn't work if one company no longer has a product line to destroy. Dying companies have a habit of taking others with them.
Exactly. One person hacking one encrypted file to playback where they want is not news.
But one person allowing all music purchased online to be protected and played back on all hardware, at a company-by-company basis, IS news. And it's not just the online service. Don't like the iPod but have a lot of iTunes songs? Just go and buy the new iTunes compatible Creative Zen.
Jon, theoretically, has made the defacto closed platform into an open standard that anyone can play with. Heck, you could now wrap Ogg Vorbis files in Apple's encryption, if one were so inclined.
Selling it to customers they didn't know the intent of was enough. The interoperability clause isn't worth using as toilet paper, because in practise it doesn't work as a defense.
Except that DVDXcopy was selling to the end consumer, who was probably going to use it to make illegal backups. DVDJon's system, however, is going to be sold to hardware manufacturers to allow them to play Fairplay files, and to content owners to allow them to encode Fairplay files. The end user will never get their hands on this (in any way more substantial than the ways that DVD Jon has already made available).
This is exactly the limited circumstance the interoperability clause was put in place to protect. Most other people have weak interoperability cases, but this one is quite strong.
The point being that this only serves to help illuminate, in the minds of lawmakers, how feeble the current DRM schemes and laws really are, whether the work is ultimately found illegal or not.
That may have been true 10 years ago when the DVD standard was proposed. Things are getting harder. Take the Xbox 360, for example. After a full year of hacking, so far people have not managed to get unsigned executables to run without hardware modifications. And with the compelling online service tied to unmodified hardware, the proposition becomes even less attractive.
Sure, you can run backups on the 360, though that firmware hole is being plugged. But you can expect with every successive generation, hardware in general will get harder and harder to hack, until it is linux-like in its imperviousness.
In other words, demand and protect your rights under the law. Because given enough time you won't be able to do it through hacks.
Slashdot Mirror
though Mr Cheo said software tools are available for download that can track who is using a network and what they are doing on it.
Yeah, it's called your router's software.
My old 802.11b wireless router died a few years back. I didn't have a laptop at the time, but my girlfriend did. It was literally 6 months before we noticed that her laptop wasn't connecting to our router, but rather a unsecured wireless router in the building. It was just automatically connecting to what's available.
This is not "stealing" network access, or "breaking in" to your house. This is a device, available for everyone nearby, which is constantly broadcasting packets saying quite literally "Hey, I'm here! Does anyone want to connect to me?" Your computer then says "Hey, I'm a laptop. This is my network card identification. Can I get on your network?" The router then says "Sure, hop on. I'll route your packets."
This is not someone coming to your house and attaching alligator clips to your phone line. This is YOUR router, working in YOUR stead, behaving exactly as YOU have configured it to. This is like a secretary whom you've told to let anyone into your building. If you can't be bothered to train the secretary in the simplest of fashions (and putting a password on a network isn't exactly rocket science), you shouldn't envoke the police when you find they have let random people into the building.
If you can't spend the ten fucking minutes to put a password on your network, you shouldn't waste the judicial system's time when people access it.
I can't believe I've developed far enough to defend police officers, but quite frankly most of the interactions I've had with police officers have been positive. You don't decide to risk your life in service of other people for crappy pay without having a modicrum of decency about you. And I say that having had a police gun pulled on me in the past. They've all been professional, courteous within reason, and goal-oriented. No, I've never gotten into a fistfight with one, and I assume that if I started behaving badly they would be more emotional about the situations. But so far the interactions I've had with police officers have been positive.
Maybe it's that I've lived mostly in cities where cops can't afford to sit around giving speeding tickets all day, but they've by and large been good people. That may just be my experience, though.
First it was your Hotmail ID. Then your Passport ID. Now it's your Windows Live ID.
Stop renaming stuff! It's hard enough keeping track of all of these marginally useful services already.
Most of those best seller games are in the area of several 100 thousand to several million units sold.
100k sales per million dollars of development is about the threshold between a failure and a passably bad sales number in the console realm. If your next-gen titles are absorbing 10 million dollar development budgets (which they easily can), you're looking at needing 1 million sales to not be taking a bath. The PS3 may have software sales numbers like that on a few titles by early 2007. We'll have to see if the lack of competing titles offsets the lack of installed userbase early on. Ironically, this would be a good time to make shovelware for the PS3.
It will be difficult to justify those budgets on the install base of any one next-gen system. Right now with an installed userbase of over 80 million, the PS2 is still looking very attractive.
It's interesting that computer UI is so far behind gaming in this respect. For years we've been facing the problem of how to make the same sound effect, played over and over again, not be grating.
The solution gaming has come up with is quite simple: re-record the same sound, and play back one of many variations. Sometimes these are complex changes, like the sound of a sword swinging and hitting many types of different material. Sometimes the changes are completely subtle, like how a game may have 10 different sounds for a footstep, yet all of them sound almost exactly the same. And sometimes the sound is just pitch-shifted slightly: this is the tactic when you're RAM limited.
I'm just kind of surprised that this isn't supported on the OS level by Windows yet. Considering the amount being invested in the sound development of the OS, and what goes into each and every application, it should be easy to have a WAV wrapper which is really 5 or 6 recordings of the same basic sound. Add in a modulation parameter for slightly randomized variable playback speeds, and you have an interface audio schema that will never get grating, with far less than 18 months required.
There are famous terrorist groups in Ireland, Japan, France, the former Soviet republics, and India which aren't muslim.
In the UK, you're statistically more likely to be killed by one of them than a Muslim terrorist.
You've clearly never been charged with a DWB (Driving While Black).
The Super Nintendo did rather well, actually.
The comparison you want to make is that the Dreamcast also sold out 300,000 units on it's first day, and look how well that did. It was the fastest launching console of all time until the PS2, yet it still tanked.
The cops don't just go searching random computers hoping they'll stumble on some terrorist then they can arrest them.
No, not random computers. Computers of minorities and people whom they don't like.
if you do not vote, you forfeit all right to complain about anything your government does until november 2008 (by which time, you will have learned your lesson and will vote, right?)
Please explain the logic of this. I hear this argument used every election and no one's bothered justifying it. Please back this statement up with a reason.
You have two options to change the system... Drifting overall political opinion with your vote, like a giant ouija board, or guns. Guns are generally the nuclear option, because you don't want other people to go changing the system through guns.
Voting is how you register your opinion. You're given options that are "closer to this" or "closer to that." Once an opinion becomes heavily voted on, the system recalibrates and that once radical notion becomes mainstream. Women's suffraging was once radical, but became normal. If you want a more radical notion, like sex change operations covered under universal health care, push the system in that direction. Do it successfully enough for long enough, and it gets there.
(Because if it's not a close race, you can pretty much tell who's going to win based on the exit polls and unofficial results anyway.)
Not anymore!
Microsoft: I can't believe you fell for the oldest trick in the book. What a goof. What's with you man? Come on. You know what? No, here let me give your music back to you.
Microsoft: Oh, look. You fell for that, too. I can't believe it man.
Microsoft: So, now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.
Not to be too pedantic, but this sounds like a really bad idea. You're basically at the mercy of companies to decide whether or not they want to prosecute you. It's a crapshoot as to whether you get a sensible, intelligent person on the other end of the line, or you spend tens of thousands of dollars on a lawyer. Even the hint of personal gain is enough for people to shout blackmail, and is definitely enough to bring a team of lawyers down on your family.
It was serendipitous independent research, right? So you're not losing any money on the deal. Totally annonymously submit the research to one of the programmers on their staff. Tell them to take full credit for the find and drive the fixing process. Sit back comfortable in the knowledge that you did the right thing for the world, and you're not going to be found guilty of millions of dollars of damages in our completely messed up legal system.
Or sell the security vulnerability to a Russian Hacker. Quite frankly, that's a lot safer than telling the company about it.
2 monitors. About 15 open windows, many of which are tabbed internally. Usually I have 5 txt / config files open in one app, and 7-10 tabs in Opera.
Opera (browser), Crimson Editor (text), Two e-mail applications, Perforce (version control), an internal development application, usually three copies of Word, one of Excel, a calculator, a copy of the game, a controlling window for said game, something playing music, Photoshop, Palm Desktop, Skype, Trillian. Sometimes add in Illustrator, sometimes add in VC++, sometimes CuBase or Audacity.
It is NOT the government's responsibility to insure I don't buy products from companies that have bad policies. It is mine. I don't need, nor want, the government to get involved whatsoever. Most governments tend to fuck up anything they get involved in.
Unfortunately, it is the government that is giving these foolish restrictions the force of law. If you bypass their rules, you're subject to the force of law whether or not what you're doing is morally correct and within your rights.
HTML at the moment is solid, robust, and gets the job done. As it has evolved it has gained additional features and power at each step, including CSS integration, better javascripting, DHTML, etc, thus leading at every step to a better end-user experience.
XHTML for all practical purposes, is HTML but with more errors. With XHTML, you get the power of being told that you have to put an end tag on all
tags. And, umm, not a lot else. The benefits of switching to XHTML are mostly theoretical.
The W3C needs to break the focus on validation, and get back to trying to work with developers and users to get what THEY want into specifications. It sounds like they realized that XHTML will not overtake HTML any time soon, and that they need to provide some sort of reason or reasons to make that change.
Stated reasons for Sony's continued dominance, and others who have held said reasons.
...Free like Playstation 2 online. Or like how PC games have free online.
The Brand:
The Playstation is synonymous with gaming... Just like "Playing Nintendo" or "Playing Atari."
Microsoft (somewhat) Squandered its Lead
Microsoft has had a year of the market to themselves, and hasn't produced any killer titles. Except Dead Rising. And Geometry Wars. You can probably count Oblivion in there too. And people seem to be playing a lot of Uno for some reason. But overall MS has had an OK but not shocking first year out... Like Sega did with the Genesis and Nintendo did with the NES and Game Boy. Let's not forget Sony's lackluster first years with the Playstation 1 and 2.
Japan is Ripe for the Taking
The Xbox line is largely a failure in Japan. Someone could swoop right in and take a huge chunk of that... Like NEC did with the PC Engine, or Sega did with the Sega CD and Saturn. Or, quite simply, the Nintendo DS appears to be doing, especially with weeks when the top 10 selling games in Japan were all on the DS.
Blu-ray Will Matter
Having more storage space is always good. We've been bumping up against storage limitations on DVD disks for years now. Having a bigger storage area will really help improve the quality of games available for the system... Like NEC's Turbo Graphx CD add-on, or the extra roomy cartridges on the Neo Geo. Or, for that matter, how Nintendo got trounced by the Playstation 1.
Free Online
Everyone likes free, right? And on the PS3, online features will be free! All of the online features that, umm, any developer may happen to want to design, code up, and financially support. And the developers have all the freedom they want! Trust us, it will be xboxishtastic maybe. Nobody wanted to code up any achievements system in the first generation of titles, but, you know, Free!
Note: I don't think that Sony is doomed, or MS is great, or Nintendo is innovative. Necessarily. But I do think the best tactic is to wait for a few months after all three systems are on the table to commit to one.
This is exactly the sort of thing that small claims court was setup to handle. For claims under 2,000 dollars ish (varies by state / conditions) and a 15 dollar filing fee, you can bring a case against someone without a lawyer. This will involve a letter sent by certified mail to the registrar. You then both bring your cases before a judge and argue them in plain english.
If you have a site with a higher value, you may exceed the maximum damages limit. At that point you'd need a real lawyer and a full legal case. But if this is just a piddly personal site, drag their asses to small claims. It's far more accessible, far more affordable, and is intended to deal with situations just like this. Anyone at your local courthouse should be able to help you find and fill out the requisite forms, and the process from there.
The MSX was a legendary system. We would have been well served by having that on the market. It would have beaten the pants off of a lot of what was on the market at the time. The Wonderswan would have been nice competition to the Game Boy, especially once they both went color.
On the other hand, I'm surprised there wasn't any mention of the SuperGrafx. Powerful little system from NEC, now super rare, with some of the best arcade ports of the time.
Also, the GP2X would be nice to hear about, as it isn't too late to bring that one to the US.
Unfortunately, that was the attitude that brought down the gaming industry in 84.
As anyone who has worked in the industry can tell you, gaming guides are always a cynical afterthought. Ever wonder why they're frequently encased in impenetrable plastic wrap before you buy them?
I didn't mean protecting legally defined stolen research. I was using the term a bit loosely to refer to reverse-engineering a competitor's product to do the same thing... using their research without conducting your own, if you will.
"Hey, why are Nike's shoes so soft? Wow, they're full of air. Their air pocket takes the shape of successive tubes of 1 cm diameter running the length of the shoe plus a 3mm thick membrane around the edge. Let's do that." Now, granted, Nike probably has / had a design patent on that as well, but you get the point.
SGI is most definitely legally entitled to sue. What they are not entitled to is a patent on blood, sweat, and tears rather than originality. If multiple companies come to the same solution to a problem at the same time, the solution is probably obvious to someone skilled in the arts.
The system is a bit broken at the moment. The patent office is underfunded for their mandate, which means they let things through assuming the court will sort things out. The courts assume that the patent office did a thorough job, making it difficult to challenge bogus patents. Anyone who works in IT has come across these, and quite a few of us have these. Unfortunately, you're legally bound to your shareholders to take all of these seriously, no matter how frivilous or stupid they are (the patents, not the shareholders).
Hence, we have patent warfare. And patent death throes. And we waste lots of resources defending and countersuing instead of getting on about the business of making IT better.
A once great company behaving like a patent troll is still a patent troll.
A patent is intended to be a device to protect non-obvious research and innovation from being stolen so that you can reap the rewards in your product line. In this case, the research was not stolen, as ATI thought of it too. And SGI no longer has a product line to protect.
They're suing ATI because they have no way left to make money. Period. They're not protecting their own product line or income stream, as they have neither. They're not even protecting their own research, as ATI developed this independently. They're just in their death throes, and are suing.
Remember, patent mutually assured destruction doesn't work if one company no longer has a product line to destroy. Dying companies have a habit of taking others with them.
Exactly. One person hacking one encrypted file to playback where they want is not news.
But one person allowing all music purchased online to be protected and played back on all hardware, at a company-by-company basis, IS news. And it's not just the online service. Don't like the iPod but have a lot of iTunes songs? Just go and buy the new iTunes compatible Creative Zen.
Jon, theoretically, has made the defacto closed platform into an open standard that anyone can play with. Heck, you could now wrap Ogg Vorbis files in Apple's encryption, if one were so inclined.
Selling it to customers they didn't know the intent of was enough. The interoperability clause isn't worth using as toilet paper, because in practise it doesn't work as a defense.
Except that DVDXcopy was selling to the end consumer, who was probably going to use it to make illegal backups. DVDJon's system, however, is going to be sold to hardware manufacturers to allow them to play Fairplay files, and to content owners to allow them to encode Fairplay files. The end user will never get their hands on this (in any way more substantial than the ways that DVD Jon has already made available).
This is exactly the limited circumstance the interoperability clause was put in place to protect. Most other people have weak interoperability cases, but this one is quite strong.
The point being that this only serves to help illuminate, in the minds of lawmakers, how feeble the current DRM schemes and laws really are, whether the work is ultimately found illegal or not.
That may have been true 10 years ago when the DVD standard was proposed. Things are getting harder. Take the Xbox 360, for example. After a full year of hacking, so far people have not managed to get unsigned executables to run without hardware modifications. And with the compelling online service tied to unmodified hardware, the proposition becomes even less attractive.
Sure, you can run backups on the 360, though that firmware hole is being plugged. But you can expect with every successive generation, hardware in general will get harder and harder to hack, until it is linux-like in its imperviousness.
In other words, demand and protect your rights under the law. Because given enough time you won't be able to do it through hacks.