He's right, unfortunately; we're used to seeing a lot of this question come up to Ghiblink (Nausicaa.net team).
Buena Vista Japan is responsible for all the Ghibli DVD releases there, and they/are/ all Region 2. That said, the legit Region 2 DVD from BVJ/is/ already released, and/does/ have English subtitles; if you have a regionless player (or DVD-ROM drive), you can still play it subtitled.:)
I.e., it probably breaks some laws, but as long as you ARE keeping it encrypted and locked away, a) they're not going to find you, and b) it's not a public trading site so I doubt anyone would bother enforcing it.
From what I read in that article, they're only going after the public file trader sorts. I.e. folks who are on Gnutella or Grokster or WinMX all day long sharing material which the copyright holder has paid them to protect, or who have that material up on various websites or are posting the material to newsgroups, etc.
From a legal standpoint, though, he's right; swimming pools that aren't fenced-in, the owner is responsible if a child wanders in and drowns. This has been upheld in court before, I believe, though IANAL. (My father is, though.) From that standpoint, I can see some of the logic. I.e., it's not the poster's opinion that he'd be liable for his non-fenced-in pool, it's the opinion the courts have repeatedly upheld.
As for the rape analogy, I'm not even touching that. It's too close to something I find that I still haven't dealt with.
Leigh Brackett's hand is clearly visible in Empire Strikes Back, yes. Just go read some of her other work (she was also an SF/Fantasy author herself, and has a lot of work published from the 40's and 50's, as well as being a mystery author) and you can see the same sort of wit and twists that she brought to Empire.
I have spent time on both sides of the 'piracy' conflict...and I've seen all sorts of justifications.
"Information wants to be free" (which I agree with, but I don't think of games as 'information' in the same sense), "I wouldn't have bought it anyway" (then why are you using it?), "It was a neat technical challenge to crack", and so on. Which was your reason?
When I was in school, I downloaded games (on my blazingly fast 14.4k modem!) and played them, and I didn't really see much wrong with it at the time. After all, I figured, I was just a broke high-school girl anyway; it wasn't like I was going to buy the games if I didn't download them...right?
Then I got into actually working to get around protections; not to distribute anything, but because 'code-wheels' and other irritations annoyed me, and I thought it was an interesting programming challenge....and then I got out of piracy, and finished up school, and a little while later I ended up in the video game industry. And I got a really fast reality check. Y'know what? Yes, a lot of the game publishing companies can make Microsoft look like a happy-fuzzy neighborhood store. It's all well and good to say that piracy screws over the publisher...but in reality, it screws over the developer.
The short example is, imagine that under a specific deal, on every copy of a game sold the publisher gives maybe $10 to the developer. Now let's say the publisher gave them $1 million in funding to develop the game (not all that uncommon for multi-year titles). Maybe they have to pay back $750k of that. So the $10 the developer gets goes towards paying that back until they've met that goal. So in this example, $750k / $10 = 75,000 copies of the game sold before the developer sees a profit.
A lot of games barely make that...developers end up in hock to the publisher, and become more and more entwined legally. It's why so many developers end up being bought up by publishers or else going under. And then gamers lament that games get cancelled (when a publisher won't fund anymore), etc. I can't speak for application companies, because the games industry was my main experience from the 'other side' of piracy...but piracy/does/ directly hurt games companies, believe me. Even better is when the pirates call the tech support lines (which the games companies are usually paying for, too) and want tech support for the game. Sometimes even before the game is in stores! So you not only have the lost revenue, but you have them putting a drain on the paid tech support lines.:(
At the time of the AOL/Time Warner merger, however, MSN only had a handful of/active/ IM users (as opposed to just Passport logins -- i.e. MSN.com, Hotmail.com, etc.), which is how they usually count membership, and Yahoo likewise. (Yahoo and MSN's membership is hard to accurately count because they list/all/ Yahoo or Passport members as IM users, even if the people never use the IM; AOL counts all AOL members as AIM users as well, but unlike the others if you're an AOL user you/are/ an AIM user since it's built into the software.)
This is, as I understand it, why the FCC was unhappy about the AIM/ICQ merger.
Yes, Microsoft have actually been very supportive of the Trillian software effort. (Which faintly boggles the mind.) Yahoo hasn't tried any antagonizing tactics that I've heard about (though their servers/protocol are badly-behaved enough that sometimes you don't NEED to block). Even ICQ, which is also owned by AOL, hasn't blocked Trillian.
The thing is, AIM and ICQ are by far the two biggest IM networks, and AIM is larger than ICQ by a fair amount (especially since ICQ has lost users to AIM and MSN as the client becomes more and more bloated). When AOL bought ICQ and already owned AIM, there were a lot of concerns about them getting a monopoly on instant messaging. Especially as AOL has spoken about merging ICQ and AIM into one network; they already are moving closer and closer together and using the same login servers.
When AOL and Time Warner wanted to merge, they were told to make their instant messaging network open to interoperability. AOL agreed to do this, and laid down a timeline of what they planned to do with AIM/ICQ. Among those things was 'real time video chat for broadband links'. So the FCC said 'great, fine, you have to have your servers interoperable before you hit that milestone.' AOL agreed, and then cheerily decided not to aim for that milestone.
Now, they've continued to claim that projects like Trillian 'put their users at risk' because unauthorized software connecting to the AIM networks could be hacking to steal user information. (If you can get AOL user information over the AIM protocol, I'd say they have some more serious problems than Trillian and EveryBuddy.) Or to 'spam' people (which is ironic, because ICQ - which they don't care about clients connecting to - has far more spam than I've ever seen on AIM).
So, yes...it's their servers, and their protocol. But on the other hand, they've deliberately snubbed the FCC decision, and their justifications for kicking third-party software off are fairly weak. (Ironically, I actually wouldn't object if they just came out and said 'well, we want to keep a monopoly on IM, and these are our servers'. Claiming that EveryBuddy, Jabber, Fire and Trillian are written by 'hackers' who want to compromise the AOL network to gain user information -- when they say the 'user information' being gained is by having this software trick the user into entering their password -- is just unethical spin-doctoring.)
Actually, some modifications to cars/are/ forbidden. This is why we have a term 'street-legal' for cars. But even engines aside, let's say someone went and put an older, Freon-powered air conditioner in a car. That's illegal, as far as I know; boom, they go to jail.
Admittedly, I'm not a lawyer, so I might be wrong. But as someone who wrote video games for a living for three years, I also suspect Sony's main beef was the pirated games and they just tossed in the mod chip bit for extra 'oomph'.
The exploit on AIM is in the 'launch game' functionality. Trillian does not yet support this feature, and both a) reports that it does not, and b) discards/ignores that message type if it is sent anyway. So at least from this exploit, Trillian is safe.
As far as I know, ALL the AIM clones are safe; I don't believe any of them implement the game-launch request message type, and even if they do most probably check for buffer overflow before randomly executing code.;)
There's a discussion about it on the Trillian web-forums.
Actually, on the team I'm on, we have a workspace (a large open room with multiple computers), and we have our own private offices.
While we work, we work in the workspace. We sit paired at one of the dev stations; it doesn't matter which, since we keep their configurations fairly standard. Between tasks - and our boss encourages frequent breaks between tasks, to keep people from burning out - we go back to our own offices, where we have our own computers (customized however we like).
That's when we get to read Slashdot, or do e-mail, or whatever. After we're done break, we go back to the workspace, pair up again (often with a different partner), and continue working.
Nor do we 'share one salary'. The pay is pretty good, especially since this method has made our team the most productive in the company (we're the only one using XP... we're also the only one who have met all our deadlines despite having harsher deadlines than the other teams).
Being the 'golden children' who meet all their release dates means there's bonus pay for the team to go around, too.;)
Uhm... to be fair, beta versions of Win 2000 didn't always run multimedia stuff right either. Not because they were trying to squash it, but because... well, it's a beta of an operating system.:)
Even if the final releases of XP do have that problem... I suspect within a couple weeks, you'll see versions of Audiograbber and all the other tools people love gain WinXP support.
After all, there are still 9x packages which don't run on Win2000. That's not due to evilness... Microsoft actually did make a compatibility upgrade and apparently backwards compatibility and a better compatibility mode/is/ one of the major focus points of WinXP.
But it is hard to make major changes to an operating system (after all, the average consumer wants more than just a few tweaks or bugfixes if they plan to upgrade) and provide complete backwards compatibility support without a few hitches.
This isn't to say I think Microsoft is doing the right thing; I think they're being idiots. The existing third-party MP3 codecs will still work fine... I would imagine you can use the Fraunhoffer codec, get an MP3-encoded WAV file, and then use a RIFF stripper to pull the RIFF blocks out, creating a normal MP3 stream.
Voila.:)
Re:There's a lot more to eXtreem than pairs...
on
"Extreme" Programming
·
· Score: 1
My observation XP really only works effectively when the team was built to use XP from the beginning, like the team I am on. Trying to convert an existing team or process would be a nightmare!
For what it's worth, I'm part of a team doing software design and development in an XP environment. In my experience so far, it has worked extremely well. That's not to say that XP doesn't have its flaws, but I've worked software engineering in XP and 'traditional' environments.
For example:
XP's testing philosophy is good. Instead of just writing code and hoping it works, you have to conceive what you want, and write a test for it. THEN you write your code... go back and change the test afterwards if you have to. All these tests are kept around in a test suite and are part of the process. Before you commit any changes, you have to make sure all the tests still work. This way, you learn quickly if you broke something else.
Pair programming really does let errors be found faster. My experience has been that four eyes looking at code are better than two. It's like a smaller version of Linus Torvalds' philosophy that 'given enough eyes any bug is shallow'.
Iteration/Story/Task Methology Works. Take a hypothetical messaging client (not a project I'm working on, but the XP team I'm on is under NDA). Chopping an overall revision cycle (iteration) up into larger features ('Make project work with newsservers') called stories, and then smaller tasks within a story ('Add NNTP protocol', 'Add NNTP security/login handler', 'Add NNTP cancel ability') really does work. If a task will take more than one pairing session, it should probably be broken up into smaller tasks. Then you can just walk over to your board, pull down one of the tasks, and get to work.
Programmers Remain Sane. We make a point that between tasks, we take a break. We leave our common workspace (where all our pairing stations are) and go back to our own offices to read e-mail, browse the web, make phonecalls, whatever. Then we come back and switch partners around and keep going. This actually is more relaxing than just being locked away in a cubicle coding all day.
Faster feedback. Every time we commit a change, a build is automatically kicked off. Our 'customers' (in my case right now, other departments internal to the company) can pull down any of the builds for a day and try them out. If something breaks, we hear about it (BOY do we hear about it!) within an hour or two, since their timeline/deadline depends on our code doing what they need! Moreover, if a build breaks, we all get e-mailed. And if the test suite fails, it treats the build as broken. Believe me, it encourages keeping the code working!
Now, there are flaws, too. Obviously, there are people who just won't be able to work in pairs. Our team was assembled from the beginning by hiring people with the input of the entire team. ("Could you see yourself pairing with this person? Do you feel they'll fit in on the team?") As a result, we have a fairly coherent and competent group. Trying to convert existing teams to XP could present problems, though.
And it does take a little while to get used to pairing. We use pairing stations with two keyboards and two mice, and try to trade off who is 'driving' every so often. Keeps both people awake/aware and focused on the code.
XP isn't for everyone, no. It isn't for every project. But in my experience, having done stuff from database to video game to compiler work, this XP team is tackling some of the most difficult code I've worked with but also making far faster progress. We share our knowledge, we each learn various areas of the code and improve our expertise, and we almost never break a build.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I should have been clearer; I'm not disputing that at all. The 'he' in 'he is right' was you, Microlith. :)
He's right, unfortunately; we're used to seeing a lot of this question come up to Ghiblink (Nausicaa.net team).
/are/ all Region 2. That said, the legit Region 2 DVD from BVJ /is/ already released, and /does/ have English subtitles; if you have a regionless player (or DVD-ROM drive), you can still play it subtitled. :)
Buena Vista Japan is responsible for all the Ghibli DVD releases there, and they
We only care about people direct-linking to our media/pictures/etc. Deep-linking to actual pages is fine. ;)
(Rachel Blackman, Nausicaa.net sysadmin)
IANAL, but I think it's a grey area.
I.e., it probably breaks some laws, but as long as you ARE keeping it encrypted and locked away, a) they're not going to find you, and b) it's not a public trading site so I doubt anyone would bother enforcing it.
From what I read in that article, they're only going after the public file trader sorts. I.e. folks who are on Gnutella or Grokster or WinMX all day long sharing material which the copyright holder has paid them to protect, or who have that material up on various websites or are posting the material to newsgroups, etc.
Again, though, IANAL.
From a legal standpoint, though, he's right; swimming pools that aren't fenced-in, the owner is responsible if a child wanders in and drowns. This has been upheld in court before, I believe, though IANAL. (My father is, though.) From that standpoint, I can see some of the logic. I.e., it's not the poster's opinion that he'd be liable for his non-fenced-in pool, it's the opinion the courts have repeatedly upheld.
As for the rape analogy, I'm not even touching that. It's too close to something I find that I still haven't dealt with.
Leigh Brackett's hand is clearly visible in Empire Strikes Back, yes. Just go read some of her other work (she was also an SF/Fantasy author herself, and has a lot of work published from the 40's and 50's, as well as being a mystery author) and you can see the same sort of wit and twists that she brought to Empire.
I have spent time on both sides of the 'piracy' conflict...and I've seen all sorts of justifications.
...and then I got out of piracy, and finished up school, and a little while later I ended up in the video game industry. And I got a really fast reality check. Y'know what? Yes, a lot of the game publishing companies can make Microsoft look like a happy-fuzzy neighborhood store. It's all well and good to say that piracy screws over the publisher...but in reality, it screws over the developer.
/does/ directly hurt games companies, believe me. Even better is when the pirates call the tech support lines (which the games companies are usually paying for, too) and want tech support for the game. Sometimes even before the game is in stores! So you not only have the lost revenue, but you have them putting a drain on the paid tech support lines. :(
"Information wants to be free" (which I agree with, but I don't think of games as 'information' in the same sense), "I wouldn't have bought it anyway" (then why are you using it?), "It was a neat technical challenge to crack", and so on. Which was your reason?
When I was in school, I downloaded games (on my blazingly fast 14.4k modem!) and played them, and I didn't really see much wrong with it at the time. After all, I figured, I was just a broke high-school girl anyway; it wasn't like I was going to buy the games if I didn't download them...right?
Then I got into actually working to get around protections; not to distribute anything, but because 'code-wheels' and other irritations annoyed me, and I thought it was an interesting programming challenge.
The short example is, imagine that under a specific deal, on every copy of a game sold the publisher gives maybe $10 to the developer. Now let's say the publisher gave them $1 million in funding to develop the game (not all that uncommon for multi-year titles). Maybe they have to pay back $750k of that. So the $10 the developer gets goes towards paying that back until they've met that goal. So in this example, $750k / $10 = 75,000 copies of the game sold before the developer sees a profit.
A lot of games barely make that...developers end up in hock to the publisher, and become more and more entwined legally. It's why so many developers end up being bought up by publishers or else going under. And then gamers lament that games get cancelled (when a publisher won't fund anymore), etc. I can't speak for application companies, because the games industry was my main experience from the 'other side' of piracy...but piracy
My bad, then. :)
/active/ IM users (as opposed to just Passport logins -- i.e. MSN.com, Hotmail.com, etc.), which is how they usually count membership, and Yahoo likewise. (Yahoo and MSN's membership is hard to accurately count because they list /all/ Yahoo or Passport members as IM users, even if the people never use the IM; AOL counts all AOL members as AIM users as well, but unlike the others if you're an AOL user you /are/ an AIM user since it's built into the software.)
At the time of the AOL/Time Warner merger, however, MSN only had a handful of
This is, as I understand it, why the FCC was unhappy about the AIM/ICQ merger.
Yes, Microsoft have actually been very supportive of the Trillian software effort. (Which faintly boggles the mind.) Yahoo hasn't tried any antagonizing tactics that I've heard about (though their servers/protocol are badly-behaved enough that sometimes you don't NEED to block). Even ICQ, which is also owned by AOL, hasn't blocked Trillian.
The thing is, AIM and ICQ are by far the two biggest IM networks, and AIM is larger than ICQ by a fair amount (especially since ICQ has lost users to AIM and MSN as the client becomes more and more bloated). When AOL bought ICQ and already owned AIM, there were a lot of concerns about them getting a monopoly on instant messaging. Especially as AOL has spoken about merging ICQ and AIM into one network; they already are moving closer and closer together and using the same login servers.
When AOL and Time Warner wanted to merge, they were told to make their instant messaging network open to interoperability. AOL agreed to do this, and laid down a timeline of what they planned to do with AIM/ICQ. Among those things was 'real time video chat for broadband links'. So the FCC said 'great, fine, you have to have your servers interoperable before you hit that milestone.' AOL agreed, and then cheerily decided not to aim for that milestone.
Now, they've continued to claim that projects like Trillian 'put their users at risk' because unauthorized software connecting to the AIM networks could be hacking to steal user information. (If you can get AOL user information over the AIM protocol, I'd say they have some more serious problems than Trillian and EveryBuddy.) Or to 'spam' people (which is ironic, because ICQ - which they don't care about clients connecting to - has far more spam than I've ever seen on AIM).
So, yes...it's their servers, and their protocol. But on the other hand, they've deliberately snubbed the FCC decision, and their justifications for kicking third-party software off are fairly weak. (Ironically, I actually wouldn't object if they just came out and said 'well, we want to keep a monopoly on IM, and these are our servers'. Claiming that EveryBuddy, Jabber, Fire and Trillian are written by 'hackers' who want to compromise the AOL network to gain user information -- when they say the 'user information' being gained is by having this software trick the user into entering their password -- is just unethical spin-doctoring.)
Actually, some modifications to cars /are/ forbidden. This is why we have a term 'street-legal' for cars. But even engines aside, let's say someone went and put an older, Freon-powered air conditioner in a car. That's illegal, as far as I know; boom, they go to jail.
Admittedly, I'm not a lawyer, so I might be wrong. But as someone who wrote video games for a living for three years, I also suspect Sony's main beef was the pirated games and they just tossed in the mod chip bit for extra 'oomph'.
The exploit on AIM is in the 'launch game' functionality. Trillian does not yet support this feature, and both a) reports that it does not, and b) discards/ignores that message type if it is sent anyway. So at least from this exploit, Trillian is safe.
;)
As far as I know, ALL the AIM clones are safe; I don't believe any of them implement the game-launch request message type, and even if they do most probably check for buffer overflow before randomly executing code.
There's a discussion about it on the Trillian web-forums.
While we work, we work in the workspace. We sit paired at one of the dev stations; it doesn't matter which, since we keep their configurations fairly standard. Between tasks - and our boss encourages frequent breaks between tasks, to keep people from burning out - we go back to our own offices, where we have our own computers (customized however we like).
That's when we get to read Slashdot, or do e-mail, or whatever. After we're done break, we go back to the workspace, pair up again (often with a different partner), and continue working.
Nor do we 'share one salary'. The pay is pretty good, especially since this method has made our team the most productive in the company (we're the only one using XP... we're also the only one who have met all our deadlines despite having harsher deadlines than the other teams).
Being the 'golden children' who meet all their release dates means there's bonus pay for the team to go around, too. ;)
Even if the final releases of XP do have that problem... I suspect within a couple weeks, you'll see versions of Audiograbber and all the other tools people love gain WinXP support.
After all, there are still 9x packages which don't run on Win2000. That's not due to evilness... Microsoft actually did make a compatibility upgrade and apparently backwards compatibility and a better compatibility mode /is/ one of the major focus points of WinXP.
But it is hard to make major changes to an operating system (after all, the average consumer wants more than just a few tweaks or bugfixes if they plan to upgrade) and provide complete backwards compatibility support without a few hitches.
This isn't to say I think Microsoft is doing the right thing; I think they're being idiots. The existing third-party MP3 codecs will still work fine... I would imagine you can use the Fraunhoffer codec, get an MP3-encoded WAV file, and then use a RIFF stripper to pull the RIFF blocks out, creating a normal MP3 stream.
Voila. :)
My observation XP really only works effectively when the team was built to use XP from the beginning, like the team I am on. Trying to convert an existing team or process would be a nightmare!
For example:
- XP's testing philosophy is good. Instead of just writing code and hoping it works, you have to conceive what you want, and write a test for it. THEN you write your code... go back and change the test afterwards if you have to. All these tests are kept around in a test suite and are part of the process. Before you commit any changes, you have to make sure all the tests still work. This way, you learn quickly if you broke something else.
- Pair programming really does let errors be found faster. My experience has been that four eyes looking at code are better than two. It's like a smaller version of Linus Torvalds' philosophy that 'given enough eyes any bug is shallow'.
- Iteration/Story/Task Methology Works. Take a hypothetical messaging client (not a project I'm working on, but the XP team I'm on is under NDA). Chopping an overall revision cycle (iteration) up into larger features ('Make project work with newsservers') called stories, and then smaller tasks within a story ('Add NNTP protocol', 'Add NNTP security/login handler', 'Add NNTP cancel ability') really does work. If a task will take more than one pairing session, it should probably be broken up into smaller tasks. Then you can just walk over to your board, pull down one of the tasks, and get to work.
- Programmers Remain Sane. We make a point that between tasks, we take a break. We leave our common workspace (where all our pairing stations are) and go back to our own offices to read e-mail, browse the web, make phonecalls, whatever. Then we come back and switch partners around and keep going. This actually is more relaxing than just being locked away in a cubicle coding all day.
- Faster feedback. Every time we commit a change, a build is automatically kicked off. Our 'customers' (in my case right now, other departments internal to the company) can pull down any of the builds for a day and try them out. If something breaks, we hear about it (BOY do we hear about it!) within an hour or two, since their timeline/deadline depends on our code doing what they need! Moreover, if a build breaks, we all get e-mailed. And if the test suite fails, it treats the build as broken. Believe me, it encourages keeping the code working!
Now, there are flaws, too. Obviously, there are people who just won't be able to work in pairs. Our team was assembled from the beginning by hiring people with the input of the entire team. ("Could you see yourself pairing with this person? Do you feel they'll fit in on the team?") As a result, we have a fairly coherent and competent group. Trying to convert existing teams to XP could present problems, though.And it does take a little while to get used to pairing. We use pairing stations with two keyboards and two mice, and try to trade off who is 'driving' every so often. Keeps both people awake/aware and focused on the code.
XP isn't for everyone, no. It isn't for every project. But in my experience, having done stuff from database to video game to compiler work, this XP team is tackling some of the most difficult code I've worked with but also making far faster progress. We share our knowledge, we each learn various areas of the code and improve our expertise, and we almost never break a build.
If it works for you, use it! :)
--Rachel