I've never been too surprised at the evil antics and methods of the RIAA, because their total miscomprehension of the link between music and society is a breeding ground for misguided money-grabbing. From an evil, totally inward-looking worldview stems an equally evil, vampiric legal MO.
What has susprised me however is that the RIAA lawyers have not been utterly disowned by the rest of the legal profession. It is precisely their kind of behaviour that has caused the status of lawyers to plummet from respected professionals to something really appalling that I don't even want to name here. I'm sure that you've felt that taint/stigma yourself too, despite all your great work in recent years --- you cannot be happy that professional "colleagues" at the RIAA are doing what they are doing.
So why is there no movement in legal circles to lance that particularly nasty infection in the body legal? It's not the only example of lawyers losing their sense of proportion, but it has to be one of the most putrid and hateful, and certainly the one with the highest profile.
Aren't the RIAA lawyers subject to any ethical, moral or social standards at all? Doesn't the profession have any standards of conduct of its own, beyond mere adherence to the letter of the law? Does nothing else matter? Am I the only person to find the lack of professional censure of RIAA lawyers nothing short of incredible? Lots of questions. I wish I knew the answer.
The marketting divisions of Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony seem to be exceedingly blinkered when it comes to home games production on their consoles. It worked for the Amiga, which because of direct support from Commodore (docs and tools) saw the emergence of a huge and extremely buoyant community with legions of Amiga supporters worldwide. And that's only one example.
There is really no reason for NOT supporting private developers, because every console that is purchased will also lead to commercial games sales as well, it's totally inevitable. Some people have suggested that the manufacturers are afraid of competition from the amateur sector, but that is just totally unsubstantiated. After all, all those years of game development and millions spent in asset production cannot easily be rivalled at home.
While there will always be some people who simply cannot afford commercial games, in general the existence of a successful amateur sector would be *additional* to the success of commercial products, and it wouldn't replace them. The argument that the console manufacturers want their cut from licensing games doesn't stand up either, because they will continue to get their cut from those commercial games. If the sectors are additive, then that income is not reduced.
Of course, if the multi-million dollar games are so crap that people prefer the amateur products instead, then there would indeed be an effect, but that's not likely to happen in the general case. Even if the commercial investments are highly inefficient and tied to games with poor/boring gameplay, they still provide *gloss* at least, and so people will still buy them.
I put it down to the truism that "marketting is clueless", as always. Which is a big pity here.
>> You know, I heard in some countries, they can tap the phones if they get a court order, even though the privacy policy of the people talking says otherwise.
You're referring to wiretaps placed on specific individuals. This is very different.
Here this judge has ruled that the equivalent of wiretaps be placed on all customers of this company, regardless of their standing, oblivious to all issues of privacy, and at the behest of another corporation rather than a government agency. It is quite without precedent.
But this ruling won't stand for long, is my guess.
Every company wishing to undermine its competitors could demand that they implement similar internal monitoring to ensure that there is no infringement of their copyrights. For example, Microsoft could demand that all fileserver transactions in named large corporations be monitored and their logs be made available to MS in support of suits for infringement of Windows and Office copyrights.
In that direction lies madness, even worse than the current one. It's so grossly anti-competitive and so utterly dismissive of privacy considerations that it'll get overturned pretty quickly, I would guess.
In fact, that judge is going to get severly panned for a whole raft of reasons brought out in this thread. His ruling really verges on the incompetent. Or of course, it could be much worse than simple incompetence --- this does smell a bit of corruption, not necessarily driven by MPAA dollars but by old-boy network handshakes with their lawyers.
Pretty grim all 'round, even by the US's rapidly collapsing standards.
While it's undoubtedly true that some developers will be alienated by GPLv3, I don't think that it matters in the longer term, because *all* free and open source software contributes to the building of the GPL'd community pyramid, in one way or another.
In the long run, the boundaries between code written under different FOSS licenses tend to get fuzzy, because all the best ideas from old software (and code, where allowed) tend to make a new appearance in software created under the latest license. It's just the way people work. Very few want to take a political stand by adding a feature into an old licensed version of a package only, and disallowing forward migration.
If you like, GPLv3 represents more than just a specific instance of the GPL licence. Once it is released, it will become the generic GPL for the new front line of free software development, and for most people the "v3" label won't matter. And if important non-GPLv3 software (Linux kernel excluded) contains anti-migrationary constraints, then it will be rewritten within the GPLv3-supporting community if enough people want it. It's inevitable.
The kernel seems to be in a different category, but as far as applications are concerned, I really don't think that a degree of alienation among some developers will matter much at all.
The "Laws of Physics" are not the "Laws of Reality" herself. We have no means of determining what the latter might be in any fundamental sense, because all our probes are indirect and based on nothing more than observation and measurement. We can't "read the source code" of reality. All we can do is observe the behaviour of reality on a case-by-case basis.
More precisely, the "Laws of Physics" are the mathematics of the currently-best theoretical models in Physics. Those models vary all the time, and so it's no surprise that our "Laws of Physics" vary all the time too. Needless to say, the laws of reality don't change at all, as far as we know. I hope that explains it.
The "Laws of Physics" are just a human device. The next generation of physics models are absolutely certain to go beyond current ones, and if they're good models then our "Laws of Physics" will have become more powerful and we'll be able to harness even more out of reality.
And that's why warp drives seem "magical" at this time, yet cannot be ruled out as our "Laws of Physics" evolve further and further. We've only been at this game for a few hundred years --- it would be the height of folly to say that something is impossible over the next million.
With new physics models come new capabilities, and time and again we will be doing things that were impossible by our previous "Laws of Physics". A great future lies ahead.:-)
- Copyright protects specific implementations, not ideas.
- Patents protect specific ideas, not implementations, and those ideas are PUBLISHED, openly.
Consequently, you are making ZERO sense when you say that reverse engineering comes into play for patents. There is nothing to reverse engineer --- the patented ideas are revealed openly, as a mandatory part of the patenting process.
It should be pretty obvious from the above that reverse engineering can only ever apply to specific implementations, and those must necessarily be closed-source otherwise you can read the code directly rather than have to reverse engineer it.
So, is reverse engineering relevant to music? Well lawyers will of course argue about it until the cows come home, because they profit from uncertainty and conflict. But from a technical standpoint, figuring out the notes of a song is no different conceptually to figuring out how a program works from its binary executable alone.
Logically then, yes, reverse engineering is highly applicable to music.
However, whether you can convince the moronic judges, lawyers and politicians who make the laws which cover that is extremely doubtful, as logic is not their strong point and it is in conflict with the lucrative "support" they get from the music industry lobbiests.
We never voted for those cameras in the UK, they were installed by default, without public agreement.
All the major UK parties have "Law and Order" as a plank of their manifestos, so it's not as if we ever had a choice of any kind that would allow even an implicit anti-surveillance vote to be made. What's more, not voting at all will always return one of these parties to power given the way that the voting system is rigged, so democracy is really just a figment of the imagination here in that respect.
And just try challanging it... you'd be begging for being tagged with a label of "terrorist" or "anarchist" here, favourite words of those in Parliament, and of course happily supported by the media.
I'm not sure where all this is leading, but a civil war in a few decades' time wouldn't surprise me at all. It won't be labelled as civil unrest though... it'll be branded "terrorist action", guaranteed.
As a CEO, you have to arse-lick those with power and money, stomp down on your peers, exploit your employees, treat your customers with contempt, view non-customers as potential wallets to be plundered, and generally hate any concept of community.
The idealism of youth does not in general embrace any of the above memes.
The sad thing about those two kids is that, in just a few short years, all the above will seem natural.
The CPU manufacturers seem to be focussed quite well on keeping their CPUs and motherboard chipsets within reasonable power limits, and this latest announcement by AMD is very promising. The situation is not quite so rosy in the 3D graphics chipset arena, as the review of the Radeon HD 2900 XT a few days ago highlighted... The Tech Report had to upgrade their PC's PSU to 750W to achieve stability.
That's "not good", to put it mildly. If you extrapolate the power consumptions of graphics cards over the last decade or more into the future, it rapidly takes us into the realms of impossibility, except for those interested in Freon cooling and running their own power station in the back garden.
Something's got to change, and it has to be rather fundamental. Just decreasing die feature sizes has held back the rate of power consumption increases considerably, but that regular improvement is already factored in to this very bad upward curve we're on. We need something as dramatic as the change from MOS to CMOS was back in the day, which dropped consumption by orders of magnitude. If something like that doesn't happen, we're in big trouble.
AMD's work on decreasing power consumption is great (and so is Intel's), but please focus your ex-ATI team's efforts on reducing the power guzzling on *graphics*. That's where the major problem for the future lies at the moment.
Although everyone loves Google at the present time, it's still always puzzled me that people aren't working on a distributed search mechanism that could potentially be far more capable and powerful than Google.
After all, individual sites are far better placed to index their resources than a generic crawler can ever be, for a number of reasons. They have far more efficient access to their local data for starters, and are able to do the indexing instantaneously as things change. Individual sites are also able to apply semantic information since they know what their sites are actually about, whereas a generic engine cannot possibly know.
The sheer power available in a distributed search system would also be massively beyond anything that even the mighty Google could ever supply, for all the usual reasons associated with distribution and distributed computation.
Once you recurse more than a few levels down a parallel distributed search tree, the available processing power and bandwidth just go totally astronomic. What's more, simply limiting the degree of query recursion would allow you to tailor your desired results/time behaviour, and since the intelligent tagging at each site would contain hugely more semantic information than currently, you could direct your searches far more effectively too.
And it wouldn't be slower ether, because the distributed indexes are easily gathered by caching aggregators, and competition would no doubt provide plenty of those.
I know that several distributed search efforts do exist, but the point here is that they have virtually zero takeup, largely because of the dominance of Google and the general state of happiness with centralized search technology. While centralization works more or less OK for now, distribution has the potential to provide a vastly superior search system in ALL respects.
At the present time, the problems that AMD inherited when it bought ATI don't really matter greatly (except as a perception), because only enthusiasts buy graphics cards that cost as much as a basic PC. It's not the volume market.
However, unless AMD sorts all this out over the next couple of years, they are in for a huge amount of very costly trouble, and it may be terminal to their future in the desktop market. The problems ahead lie in the area of CPU-GPU integration.
We are told that AMD purchased ATI because they needed graphics expertise for a projected future in which scalar and vector processing is merged in an extremely parallel multi-core processor architecture. It's easy to see the reasoning here, as tight integration would decrease communication latencies and power consumption simultaneously. The benefits of tight integration are likely to be collosal, and AMD knows this from their success with hypertransport.
Unfortunately, such tight integration also means that ATI's remarkable incompetence at producing even half-decent drivers will bring AMD down badly, unless something is done about it. And short of firing the whole ex-ATI driver team, it's hard to see how to resolve this issue. You can't resolve it by trying to educate bad software engineers, that's for sure.
"Will we remain human?" isn't really an interesting question, because we will always consider "human" whatever happens to be accepted as normal at the time.
Today we don't regard a person with breast implants or metal+plastic hip replacements as anything other than human, and this trend will continue as replacement technology improves and our rather crappy protein organs get upgraded bit by bit.
A far better question though is... "Can we afford not to upgrade?", once a particular replacement has become very popular and widely accepted and inexpensive. Because to say "No" to upgrades on the basis of some rather retro urge to remain "natural" is a recipe for being left behind.
Do that for long enough and you've destined your family for extinction.
I enjoyed this talk very much. It was more than just a statement of Van Jacobson's thoughts on data dissemination. It showed his analysis of the relationship between infrastructure and application across two generations of networking, and it pointed out very nicely why it's time now for phase 3: we've moved our usage goalposts compared to when the IP network was designed. Great stuff, and I agree completely.
The article submitter didn't seem to "get" what Van Jacobson was saying though, as the talk had almost nothing to do with broadcasting or multicasting. Indeed, Van Jacobson actually pointed out why multicasting and broadcasting were inappropriate in most situations in this new world (they carry implicit time sync), so only use them as accelerators on LANs or in other special cases. The slightly wrong article description may have misdirected some of the posts here since not everybody reads TFA, and even fewer sit through an extended talk. It wasn't about broadcast or multicast at all, except in passing.:-)
Maybe it'll help to summarize his thrust briefly.
What he said was that the network underneath doesn't actually matter, and that the wires and fibre underneath don't actually matter either -- TCP/IP has abstracted away from them. However, the client-server model on which TCP/IP is based is no longer strictly relevant either, because it is founded on a somewhat obsolete concept, the "conversation". The vast bulk of our Internet traffic is no longer "conversations", but "data dissemination" (the migration of identified data objects from place to place), and actual conversations are just a special case of that.
Data dissemination is utterly different to conversation as a communications paradigm, and that's what he's getting at. Fully identified, self-validating items of data as discrete entities are really where our focus needs to be, and how they get to us is rather immaterial, or abstracted away. *Where* they come from (ie. the actual server to which we connect) is quite immaterial too --- getting it from a passing plane would be as good as from a known server, when you can rely on data identity. Furthermore, if the data items were fully self-descriptive then many of the current problems like spam would go away as well. What's more, the nodes of the network would be able to work more intelligently too (and hence efficiently), if they were aware of data identity rather than just treat everything as a conversation.
That's a very brief summary and can't hope to do the talk justice. Go listen! He's dead right.:-)
A cornerstone of documentation in the Unix/Linux/*BSD world is the man page, a very concise and targetted form of documentation that programmers and sysadmins in particular find extremely convenient, especially for documenting library functions and commandline tools.
Unfortunately many FOSS projects don't provide man pages, not even a single one to document the commandline options of an application for example.
This is where newcomers to FOSS technical documentation could make a wonderful contribution. Just take any existing READMEs etc, or run an app with -h or --help or whatever it takes to find out how it's used (perhaps read the sourcefile headers, even if you're not a coder), and make a corresponding man page. That would be totally wonderful, and much appreciated by many.
What's more, there are many tools available to help you along the way. One good place to start is with perldoc/perlpod and the POD format (which are not tied to Perl at all even though they came from that community). These very handily allow you to generate both man pages and HTML equivalents extremely easily, as well as LaTeX format for high quality output and publishing.
As should be apparent, the best documentation system allow you to generate multiple different forms of output from a single input, and man pages + HTML should be the very least that is acceptable to you. (HTML-only documentation is pretty useless in many situations.) Be sure to check out the man2html suite too, which is very handy.
The Doxygen suite is very powerful as well, but automatically extracted man pages are no substitute for the real thing written by a competent technical author. That's where you come in.
It's great to hear of new people wishing to help with FOSS documentation, and man pages are a key element of the overall picture and an easy place to start as well. They really are the bedrock upon which much of FOSS is based, and deserve attention.
Perhaps people here are not acquainted with the product engineering process.
Engineers take *every* component of a product into account during design, including the types of solder to be used and the methods of soldering to be employed.
Indeed, they may select higher quality solder in order to reduce the requirements and hence the cost of other parts, or they may specify lower quality solder in the knowledge that the rest of the components on their bill of materials can still be assembled to spec and will still work together reliably for the normal lifetime of the product.
In this particular case, either Apple engineers did not consider the effect of their design on the solder joint in question (it should probably have been a far more substantial joint), or they did not specify the right type of solder given the requirements of their design, or else the subcontractors who made the unit used a type of solder different to that specified by Apple. (In the latter case this would be an Apple testing/QA problem, since you *ALWAYS* check what your subcontractors are doing, no exception. If you value your brand name, that is.)
So whichever way you look at it, this is entirely Apple's fault. Design and/or testing engineers get paid for doing a good design and/or testing job, and in this case they haven't. Get the message to them, and they'll fix it --- engineers are always happy to fix problems, on principle.
As for Steve Jobs and Apple Customer Services.. the less said the better.
Our cultural history has so often placed taboos on sex that we're not able to think clearly about this issue, it seems.
Sex is a primary human function and drive, and to brush it under the carpet on an extended space mission would be the height of irresponsibility. Even worse would be to let cultural dogmatists decide on what should be done about sex on the basis of their preconceived smalltown agendas. This is a medical matter, and needs to be handled on a medical basis, professionally.
The human body has many natural needs and functions which, if not addressed, make it go downhill, and eventually become impaired and disfunctional. We don't make healthy eating optional for astronauts, nor do we make physical exercise optional for our long-term space dwellers, because to do so would have a negative effect on their health. The same needs to apply to sex, for exactly the same reasons.
Astronauts on long trips need to have their sexual indicators and requirements quantified and addressed as fully as any other medical parameters, and as professionally. This is absolutely not an area for cultural mindlock and petty embarrassment. The success of a mission and the health and lives of people in an integrated system are at stake, and to ignore a central function of the human body would be the height of folly, and disaster in the making if it is suppressed.
To make it perfectly clear and not beat around the bush, all members of a long-voyage space team need to be aware and fully supportive of the need for regular sexual activity among the crew, just as they are about physical exercise, and in most cases this implies participation for the sake of team health. If their earth-side taboos are so strong that they are not entirely comfortable with this, then they are the wrong material for extended missions.
The practical arrangements for this are a somewhat separate issue, and there are many alternative possibilities. But the key matter here is acceptance of the principle that sex must be handled as a natural medical function of a healthy astronaut, because without this we are destined for some very bad pathological events ahead.
Yes, I know that this suggestion will cause many a giggle and wink. But this is an important matter, and we need to think beyond the shackles of our ancient cultural silliness.
A key is not a copyrightable work, EVER
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Censoring a Number
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>> How can so short a sequence be suject to copyright?
A key cannot be copyrighted under any circumstances, whatever its length.
The reason for this is that, in all western jurisdictions, copyright can be vested only in copyrightable works, which are defined as original works of authorship. A machine-generated random number can never, under any circumstances, be an original work of authorship. Its very randomness precludes it --- it clearly has not been "authored" under prevailing interpretations of the word.
The length of an item does however have some small relevance, although only in the sense of precluding application of copyright even further. The shorter the key, the less it can claim to be unique, and thus even the claim of originality falters.
I stopped listening to commercial music over a decade ago when it started to deliver crap instead of actual music. And I'm not the only one.
If you have a problem with DRM or with copyrights or with the RIAA or with the cost of music, it's your choice: you choose to listen to crap, and crap with strings attached is what you get.
There is 100 times as much music out there as is delivered by the mainstream western labels. Go find it, and enjoy. And when you choose to pay for something that you think is really terrific, you will be rewarding musicians, not shareholders.
You're certainly right. But if you aim your insights a little deeper, it can change your perspective a bit.
If copyright on virtual goods has the purpose of promoting and hence increasing the production of such goods as a benefit to society, then virtual goods deserve the protection of copyright only if lack of such protection results in a significant decrease in availability of such goods.
But the problem for the copyright lobby is that copyright doesn't have any such effect.
There is no shortage of people creating content and wishing to give it worldwide exposure. And using the argument of "poor quality" is churlish, and hugely biased, because even when true, that fact is self-correcting.
The only real effect that the removal of copyright protection would have is on the wallet of vested interests in the West. Well tough, that's not a valid reason from a world community standpoint.
And that brings us back to the title of your post: "Copyright is not a FREE market issue". Freedom is meaningless unless applied to everyone --- if only one party is free, then there is no freedom. The West doesn't understand that, at all.
Adding these two points together can only yield one logical conclusion: copyright is INIMICAL to free markets. Or to put it another way, it is a protectionist's concept, and entirely contrary to explosive production in the modern world.
The world is turning into something out of a low-budget SciFi episode, a planet overrun by procedural paper pushers defining the physical world by legal statute. Sadly, it's not fiction, and we have no heroes to save the day.
The vast majority of good legal decisions are either "obvious" to anyone moderately sane (eg. dealing with an observed killing), or else they're shrouded in complexity that makes no single outcome fully just.
The first type needs nothing more than recourse to a "Fair Witness" (Heinlein's term, but there's some of it in the Jedi concept too, minus fighting), a person whose reputation is based on objectivity and fairness and plain commonsense -- no need for technicalities and legal dickering to come into it at all, by the definition of "obvious". A societal judge without court and with only one Law, simple fairness.
And the second type is handled equally well by the roll of a die --- after all, no single outcome is just. And dice do have the benefit of statistical fairness, which is more than can be said for the legal process where alleged "fairness" depends on your ability to afford good legal representation.
There is something fundamentally flawed in a system where years of arguing are considered to somehow yield justice, as if the cost didn't matter and the time lost meant nothing. Even if all costs were met uniformly out of the public purse, this still would not address the sheer deep freeze that legal proceedings place on society. Time is our most precious commodity, yet as this example showed, this is totally unappreciated in law.
Be that as it may, the current situation is nothing short of appalling, and getting steadily worse. We need a sort of French Revolution to lop off the heads of this new legal aristocracy, but I don't see that happenning --- we're stuck with this mess for the forseeable future, or at least as long as we're tied to this planet. Woes.
When you sow the message that the path to gleaming limos and the high life is through thug culture and pimping out your women, and not through intellectual pursuits or even good old-fashioned productivity and invention, then that's the kind of youngsters you breed. And the effect on the nation's future in advanced technology is then 100% predictable.
Cool high tech doesn't appear by magic out of nowhere. You have to be highly educated (or at least self-taught and highly motivated) to work at the advancing edge of technology, and that requires a large amount of skill and deep interest in the topic. The message delivered by the telly is that those things are extremely uncool, unhip, and frankly "really dull, man".
But it's a free country, right? So people can broadcast whatever they want, even messages that are contrary to our self-interest?
Sure. But eventually you lose that precious freedom if you forget that real wealth (not just money) comes from progress and invention, because you'll end up in servitude to those nations that understand that you have to safeguard your future freedoms too, not just your current-day ones. And that means making education and technology and being intelligent cool in the public eye.
There is a solution, and it's compatible with our current concepts of daily freedom. We need special interest group and lobbying corporations and a whole raft of think tanks to be giving the message of "tech and education is damn cool, and very profitable" to media, business, politicians, the to blessed public too, alongside the output of MTV and the RIAA delivering the message of self-destruction.
It *is* possible. But it will require some effort on our part.
Patents provide the low-hanging fruit in this area, but the actual problem goes much deeper.
As we all know here, software patents are wholly inappropriate in software, as they undermine the very basis of computing. But as long as companies are free to engage lawyers to litigate as a business plan, no amount of patent reform will fix this issue, because lawyers can literally create a case out of nothing. And they do so regularly, as we've seen in hundreds of examples recently.
The problem lies in part with lawyers (basically for being pricks without any moral standing, and happily taking money for their services regardless of purpose), and in part with judges and the judicial system as a whole, for not applying massive penalties to lawyers who use law merely to underpin a company business plan. Judges need to see through the purpose of a suit, and stomp heavily on lawsuits being used purely as a means of financial gain. The reason we've got into this mess is largely because lawyers benefit from all litigation, and judges have no interest in stopping that.
A complete ban on software patents would at least place that low-hanging fruit out of reach, but it won't solve the greater problem faced by corporate America, which is that it is at the mercy of a huge tier of parasites wearing suits, whose whole idea of worthwhile activity is to prevent worthwhile activity by others. Lawsuits are being used as an anti-competitive weapon by every man and his dog now, and that's the key problem here.
>> "We are not going to change our strategy because of one lousy quarter."
Without the benefit of insider knowledge, that statement wasn't hugely informative. There are so many changes afoot that it's almost impossible to forecast anything at all concerning the CPU companies at the present time.
The acquisition of ATI really complicated things, not only for share speculators but from a tech standpoint too. And while it doesn't necessarily mean that Intel will hitch up with nVidia (it seems not, given that the GMA965/X3000 competes with nVidia's lower-end offering), it does mean that both of those companies will have to respond very strongly to whatever develops from the joining of AMD and ATI. This whole area will become even more hectic than usual I think, once we start to see the fruits of the acquisition.
One of the things that will undoubtedly be on many Linux user's minds is whether the legendary disinterest of ATI in properly supporting Linux will change for the better. Once Microsoft shed nVidia in favor of ATI on going from Xbox 1 to Xbox 360, the likelihood of any such improvement plummetted drastically for obvious reasons, but the influence of AMD could of course be the exact opposite, since AMD can't afford to alienate the Linux market, one imagines.
But while we can hope that AMD will have a positive effect on ATI's attitude towards the FOSS community, what if the opposite happens, and by being tightly coupled to GPU hardware, AMD's CPUs start to lose the openness that has been traditional among CPU manufacturers until now? It's certainly a possibility, and a matter of enormous concern.
Which brings me back to the quote from TFA. It would really help AMD I think if the company removed some of the uncertainty or ambiguity in its position w.r.to FOSS as a result of the ATI thing. "No change" is a rather meaningless statement when their CPU and GPU divisions have diametrically opposite tendencies.
If you read Harrison's words carefully, they have a very direct interpretation:
I fully support the notion of game development at home using powerful tools available to anyone.... [cut]
Now having said all that, we still have to protect the investment and intellectual property rights of the industry so we will always seek the best ways to secure and protect our devices from piracy and unauthorized hacking that damages the business.
This reads exactly as follows, both in form and logically (I'm not joking):
I know that the right thing to do would be to support the home game developer... but our I.P./media lawyers prevent us from doing the right thing.
And since we know that this is exactly what's happening at Sony, it seems quite likely that that's what he meant. Of course, since he's a marketting/PR monkey he's far more likely to be simply talking total bollocks for effect. Nevertheless, his words happen to accurately reflect what is going on at Sony, so perhaps he intended to imply this very thing in a way that wouldn't land him in hot water in the company.
>> Pardon me, but "throwing it over the wall" is not even remotely accurate. While I wouldn't characterize our effort as being 100% fully-collaborative yet, we're working in that direction. We have frequent releases, an active mailing list, and have incorporated a number of patches submitted by the community.
Indeed, it's still early days, and as I see it, you're making reasonable progress.
Although you're receiving some criticism for still being at the stage of "throw code over the wall" (no matter how frequent your tarballs), you're certainly heading in the right direction towards a full LL+community collaborative SL client, it seems. I hope.:-)
However, as far as your server code is concerned, the remarks about "throw over the wall" *WILL* apply, and for good reason, because you will abandon that server code in due course, by choice. The reason is that it's actually as dead as the dodo, even though it's still limping along on the grid, currently. It has no future.
The reason is simple: LL's current design model for powering objects in the grid is completely non-scalable for mobile objects, and most importantly, for the players themselves and their prim-laden accessories. When players go to events, they leave their home sim's CPU power behind them, idling away, while the event site's CPU is glowing red hot and unable to support any event beyond an extended family gathering. It's a classic case of static CPU resource mapping trying to address a dynamic CPU requirement problem.
To make matters worse, it's not only CPU power that is mapped statically in the grid, but storage as well. This has totally ludicrous consequences, such as the price of land being incredibly high despite the fact that storage costs are near-zero and plummetting all the time. Fortunately that can be changed using one of many network storage solutions, but it's just one more problem that arises from the original static resource design approach.
Crucially, Philip Rosedale has agreed that this non-scalability issue is a matter of concern, on his blog.
And since there is no possible transition path between the current static server-side model and a dynamic one that would place computing power where it is needed on the fly, LL will abandon the current server code -- it has to. In fact, the devs are probably already working on a replacement, since Philip knew about this 2 years ago. And nobody has ever criticized him for his inability to look ahead. He's a true visionary.
So, "throw it over the wall" will certainly be correct... for the current server code anyway, simply because the grid's static resource mapping has no future whatsoever.
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I've never been too surprised at the evil antics and methods of the RIAA, because their total miscomprehension of the link between music and society is a breeding ground for misguided money-grabbing. From an evil, totally inward-looking worldview stems an equally evil, vampiric legal MO.
What has susprised me however is that the RIAA lawyers have not been utterly disowned by the rest of the legal profession. It is precisely their kind of behaviour that has caused the status of lawyers to plummet from respected professionals to something really appalling that I don't even want to name here. I'm sure that you've felt that taint/stigma yourself too, despite all your great work in recent years --- you cannot be happy that professional "colleagues" at the RIAA are doing what they are doing.
So why is there no movement in legal circles to lance that particularly nasty infection in the body legal? It's not the only example of lawyers losing their sense of proportion, but it has to be one of the most putrid and hateful, and certainly the one with the highest profile.
Aren't the RIAA lawyers subject to any ethical, moral or social standards at all? Doesn't the profession have any standards of conduct of its own, beyond mere adherence to the letter of the law? Does nothing else matter? Am I the only person to find the lack of professional censure of RIAA lawyers nothing short of incredible? Lots of questions. I wish I knew the answer.
The marketting divisions of Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony seem to be exceedingly blinkered when it comes to home games production on their consoles. It worked for the Amiga, which because of direct support from Commodore (docs and tools) saw the emergence of a huge and extremely buoyant community with legions of Amiga supporters worldwide. And that's only one example.
There is really no reason for NOT supporting private developers, because every console that is purchased will also lead to commercial games sales as well, it's totally inevitable. Some people have suggested that the manufacturers are afraid of competition from the amateur sector, but that is just totally unsubstantiated. After all, all those years of game development and millions spent in asset production cannot easily be rivalled at home.
While there will always be some people who simply cannot afford commercial games, in general the existence of a successful amateur sector would be *additional* to the success of commercial products, and it wouldn't replace them. The argument that the console manufacturers want their cut from licensing games doesn't stand up either, because they will continue to get their cut from those commercial games. If the sectors are additive, then that income is not reduced.
Of course, if the multi-million dollar games are so crap that people prefer the amateur products instead, then there would indeed be an effect, but that's not likely to happen in the general case. Even if the commercial investments are highly inefficient and tied to games with poor/boring gameplay, they still provide *gloss* at least, and so people will still buy them.
I put it down to the truism that "marketting is clueless", as always. Which is a big pity here.
>> You know, I heard in some countries, they can tap the phones if they get a court order, even though the privacy policy of the people talking says otherwise.
You're referring to wiretaps placed on specific individuals. This is very different.
Here this judge has ruled that the equivalent of wiretaps be placed on all customers of this company, regardless of their standing, oblivious to all issues of privacy, and at the behest of another corporation rather than a government agency. It is quite without precedent.
But this ruling won't stand for long, is my guess.
Every company wishing to undermine its competitors could demand that they implement similar internal monitoring to ensure that there is no infringement of their copyrights. For example, Microsoft could demand that all fileserver transactions in named large corporations be monitored and their logs be made available to MS in support of suits for infringement of Windows and Office copyrights.
In that direction lies madness, even worse than the current one. It's so grossly anti-competitive and so utterly dismissive of privacy considerations that it'll get overturned pretty quickly, I would guess.
In fact, that judge is going to get severly panned for a whole raft of reasons brought out in this thread. His ruling really verges on the incompetent. Or of course, it could be much worse than simple incompetence --- this does smell a bit of corruption, not necessarily driven by MPAA dollars but by old-boy network handshakes with their lawyers.
Pretty grim all 'round, even by the US's rapidly collapsing standards.
While it's undoubtedly true that some developers will be alienated by GPLv3, I don't think that it matters in the longer term, because *all* free and open source software contributes to the building of the GPL'd community pyramid, in one way or another.
In the long run, the boundaries between code written under different FOSS licenses tend to get fuzzy, because all the best ideas from old software (and code, where allowed) tend to make a new appearance in software created under the latest license. It's just the way people work. Very few want to take a political stand by adding a feature into an old licensed version of a package only, and disallowing forward migration.
If you like, GPLv3 represents more than just a specific instance of the GPL licence. Once it is released, it will become the generic GPL for the new front line of free software development, and for most people the "v3" label won't matter. And if important non-GPLv3 software (Linux kernel excluded) contains anti-migrationary constraints, then it will be rewritten within the GPLv3-supporting community if enough people want it. It's inevitable.
The kernel seems to be in a different category, but as far as applications are concerned, I really don't think that a degree of alienation among some developers will matter much at all.
The "Laws of Physics" are not the "Laws of Reality" herself. We have no means of determining what the latter might be in any fundamental sense, because all our probes are indirect and based on nothing more than observation and measurement. We can't "read the source code" of reality. All we can do is observe the behaviour of reality on a case-by-case basis.
:-)
More precisely, the "Laws of Physics" are the mathematics of the currently-best theoretical models in Physics. Those models vary all the time, and so it's no surprise that our "Laws of Physics" vary all the time too. Needless to say, the laws of reality don't change at all, as far as we know. I hope that explains it.
The "Laws of Physics" are just a human device. The next generation of physics models are absolutely certain to go beyond current ones, and if they're good models then our "Laws of Physics" will have become more powerful and we'll be able to harness even more out of reality.
And that's why warp drives seem "magical" at this time, yet cannot be ruled out as our "Laws of Physics" evolve further and further. We've only been at this game for a few hundred years --- it would be the height of folly to say that something is impossible over the next million.
With new physics models come new capabilities, and time and again we will be doing things that were impossible by our previous "Laws of Physics". A great future lies ahead.
Repeat after me:
- Copyright protects specific implementations, not ideas.
- Patents protect specific ideas, not implementations, and those ideas are PUBLISHED, openly.
Consequently, you are making ZERO sense when you say that reverse engineering comes into play for patents. There is nothing to reverse engineer --- the patented ideas are revealed openly, as a mandatory part of the patenting process.
It should be pretty obvious from the above that reverse engineering can only ever apply to specific implementations, and those must necessarily be closed-source otherwise you can read the code directly rather than have to reverse engineer it.
So, is reverse engineering relevant to music? Well lawyers will of course argue about it until the cows come home, because they profit from uncertainty and conflict. But from a technical standpoint, figuring out the notes of a song is no different conceptually to figuring out how a program works from its binary executable alone.
Logically then, yes, reverse engineering is highly applicable to music.
However, whether you can convince the moronic judges, lawyers and politicians who make the laws which cover that is extremely doubtful, as logic is not their strong point and it is in conflict with the lucrative "support" they get from the music industry lobbiests.
We never voted for those cameras in the UK, they were installed by default, without public agreement.
... you'd be begging for being tagged with a label of "terrorist" or "anarchist" here, favourite words of those in Parliament, and of course happily supported by the media.
... it'll be branded "terrorist action", guaranteed.
All the major UK parties have "Law and Order" as a plank of their manifestos, so it's not as if we ever had a choice of any kind that would allow even an implicit anti-surveillance vote to be made. What's more, not voting at all will always return one of these parties to power given the way that the voting system is rigged, so democracy is really just a figment of the imagination here in that respect.
And just try challanging it
I'm not sure where all this is leading, but a civil war in a few decades' time wouldn't surprise me at all. It won't be labelled as civil unrest though
As a CEO, you have to arse-lick those with power and money, stomp down on your peers, exploit your employees, treat your customers with contempt, view non-customers as potential wallets to be plundered, and generally hate any concept of community.
The idealism of youth does not in general embrace any of the above memes.
The sad thing about those two kids is that, in just a few short years, all the above will seem natural.
The CPU manufacturers seem to be focussed quite well on keeping their CPUs and motherboard chipsets within reasonable power limits, and this latest announcement by AMD is very promising. The situation is not quite so rosy in the 3D graphics chipset arena, as the review of the Radeon HD 2900 XT a few days ago highlighted ... The Tech Report had to upgrade their PC's PSU to 750W to achieve stability.
That's "not good", to put it mildly. If you extrapolate the power consumptions of graphics cards over the last decade or more into the future, it rapidly takes us into the realms of impossibility, except for those interested in Freon cooling and running their own power station in the back garden.
Something's got to change, and it has to be rather fundamental. Just decreasing die feature sizes has held back the rate of power consumption increases considerably, but that regular improvement is already factored in to this very bad upward curve we're on. We need something as dramatic as the change from MOS to CMOS was back in the day, which dropped consumption by orders of magnitude. If something like that doesn't happen, we're in big trouble.
AMD's work on decreasing power consumption is great (and so is Intel's), but please focus your ex-ATI team's efforts on reducing the power guzzling on *graphics*. That's where the major problem for the future lies at the moment.
Although everyone loves Google at the present time, it's still always puzzled me that people aren't working on a distributed search mechanism that could potentially be far more capable and powerful than Google.
After all, individual sites are far better placed to index their resources than a generic crawler can ever be, for a number of reasons. They have far more efficient access to their local data for starters, and are able to do the indexing instantaneously as things change. Individual sites are also able to apply semantic information since they know what their sites are actually about, whereas a generic engine cannot possibly know.
The sheer power available in a distributed search system would also be massively beyond anything that even the mighty Google could ever supply, for all the usual reasons associated with distribution and distributed computation.
Once you recurse more than a few levels down a parallel distributed search tree, the available processing power and bandwidth just go totally astronomic. What's more, simply limiting the degree of query recursion would allow you to tailor your desired results/time behaviour, and since the intelligent tagging at each site would contain hugely more semantic information than currently, you could direct your searches far more effectively too.
And it wouldn't be slower ether, because the distributed indexes are easily gathered by caching aggregators, and competition would no doubt provide plenty of those.
I know that several distributed search efforts do exist, but the point here is that they have virtually zero takeup, largely because of the dominance of Google and the general state of happiness with centralized search technology. While centralization works more or less OK for now, distribution has the potential to provide a vastly superior search system in ALL respects.
We really should be looking at it more seriously.
At the present time, the problems that AMD inherited when it bought ATI don't really matter greatly (except as a perception), because only enthusiasts buy graphics cards that cost as much as a basic PC. It's not the volume market.
However, unless AMD sorts all this out over the next couple of years, they are in for a huge amount of very costly trouble, and it may be terminal to their future in the desktop market. The problems ahead lie in the area of CPU-GPU integration.
We are told that AMD purchased ATI because they needed graphics expertise for a projected future in which scalar and vector processing is merged in an extremely parallel multi-core processor architecture. It's easy to see the reasoning here, as tight integration would decrease communication latencies and power consumption simultaneously. The benefits of tight integration are likely to be collosal, and AMD knows this from their success with hypertransport.
Unfortunately, such tight integration also means that ATI's remarkable incompetence at producing even half-decent drivers will bring AMD down badly, unless something is done about it. And short of firing the whole ex-ATI driver team, it's hard to see how to resolve this issue. You can't resolve it by trying to educate bad software engineers, that's for sure.
AMD have quite a problem on their hands.
"Will we remain human?" isn't really an interesting question, because we will always consider "human" whatever happens to be accepted as normal at the time.
... "Can we afford not to upgrade?", once a particular replacement has become very popular and widely accepted and inexpensive. Because to say "No" to upgrades on the basis of some rather retro urge to remain "natural" is a recipe for being left behind.
Today we don't regard a person with breast implants or metal+plastic hip replacements as anything other than human, and this trend will continue as replacement technology improves and our rather crappy protein organs get upgraded bit by bit.
A far better question though is
Do that for long enough and you've destined your family for extinction.
I enjoyed this talk very much. It was more than just a statement of Van Jacobson's thoughts on data dissemination. It showed his analysis of the relationship between infrastructure and application across two generations of networking, and it pointed out very nicely why it's time now for phase 3: we've moved our usage goalposts compared to when the IP network was designed. Great stuff, and I agree completely.
:-)
:-)
The article submitter didn't seem to "get" what Van Jacobson was saying though, as the talk had almost nothing to do with broadcasting or multicasting. Indeed, Van Jacobson actually pointed out why multicasting and broadcasting were inappropriate in most situations in this new world (they carry implicit time sync), so only use them as accelerators on LANs or in other special cases. The slightly wrong article description may have misdirected some of the posts here since not everybody reads TFA, and even fewer sit through an extended talk. It wasn't about broadcast or multicast at all, except in passing.
Maybe it'll help to summarize his thrust briefly.
What he said was that the network underneath doesn't actually matter, and that the wires and fibre underneath don't actually matter either -- TCP/IP has abstracted away from them. However, the client-server model on which TCP/IP is based is no longer strictly relevant either, because it is founded on a somewhat obsolete concept, the "conversation". The vast bulk of our Internet traffic is no longer "conversations", but "data dissemination" (the migration of identified data objects from place to place), and actual conversations are just a special case of that.
Data dissemination is utterly different to conversation as a communications paradigm, and that's what he's getting at. Fully identified, self-validating items of data as discrete entities are really where our focus needs to be, and how they get to us is rather immaterial, or abstracted away. *Where* they come from (ie. the actual server to which we connect) is quite immaterial too --- getting it from a passing plane would be as good as from a known server, when you can rely on data identity. Furthermore, if the data items were fully self-descriptive then many of the current problems like spam would go away as well. What's more, the nodes of the network would be able to work more intelligently too (and hence efficiently), if they were aware of data identity rather than just treat everything as a conversation.
That's a very brief summary and can't hope to do the talk justice. Go listen! He's dead right.
A cornerstone of documentation in the Unix/Linux/*BSD world is the man page, a very concise and targetted form of documentation that programmers and sysadmins in particular find extremely convenient, especially for documenting library functions and commandline tools.
Unfortunately many FOSS projects don't provide man pages, not even a single one to document the commandline options of an application for example.
This is where newcomers to FOSS technical documentation could make a wonderful contribution. Just take any existing READMEs etc, or run an app with -h or --help or whatever it takes to find out how it's used (perhaps read the sourcefile headers, even if you're not a coder), and make a corresponding man page. That would be totally wonderful, and much appreciated by many.
What's more, there are many tools available to help you along the way. One good place to start is with perldoc/perlpod and the POD format (which are not tied to Perl at all even though they came from that community). These very handily allow you to generate both man pages and HTML equivalents extremely easily, as well as LaTeX format for high quality output and publishing.
As should be apparent, the best documentation system allow you to generate multiple different forms of output from a single input, and man pages + HTML should be the very least that is acceptable to you. (HTML-only documentation is pretty useless in many situations.) Be sure to check out the man2html suite too, which is very handy.
The Doxygen suite is very powerful as well, but automatically extracted man pages are no substitute for the real thing written by a competent technical author. That's where you come in.
It's great to hear of new people wishing to help with FOSS documentation, and man pages are a key element of the overall picture and an easy place to start as well. They really are the bedrock upon which much of FOSS is based, and deserve attention.
Perhaps people here are not acquainted with the product engineering process.
.. the less said the better.
Engineers take *every* component of a product into account during design, including the types of solder to be used and the methods of soldering to be employed.
Indeed, they may select higher quality solder in order to reduce the requirements and hence the cost of other parts, or they may specify lower quality solder in the knowledge that the rest of the components on their bill of materials can still be assembled to spec and will still work together reliably for the normal lifetime of the product.
In this particular case, either Apple engineers did not consider the effect of their design on the solder joint in question (it should probably have been a far more substantial joint), or they did not specify the right type of solder given the requirements of their design, or else the subcontractors who made the unit used a type of solder different to that specified by Apple. (In the latter case this would be an Apple testing/QA problem, since you *ALWAYS* check what your subcontractors are doing, no exception. If you value your brand name, that is.)
So whichever way you look at it, this is entirely Apple's fault. Design and/or testing engineers get paid for doing a good design and/or testing job, and in this case they haven't. Get the message to them, and they'll fix it --- engineers are always happy to fix problems, on principle.
As for Steve Jobs and Apple Customer Services
There's a problem. Get it fixed.
Our cultural history has so often placed taboos on sex that we're not able to think clearly about this issue, it seems.
Sex is a primary human function and drive, and to brush it under the carpet on an extended space mission would be the height of irresponsibility. Even worse would be to let cultural dogmatists decide on what should be done about sex on the basis of their preconceived smalltown agendas. This is a medical matter, and needs to be handled on a medical basis, professionally.
The human body has many natural needs and functions which, if not addressed, make it go downhill, and eventually become impaired and disfunctional. We don't make healthy eating optional for astronauts, nor do we make physical exercise optional for our long-term space dwellers, because to do so would have a negative effect on their health. The same needs to apply to sex, for exactly the same reasons.
Astronauts on long trips need to have their sexual indicators and requirements quantified and addressed as fully as any other medical parameters, and as professionally. This is absolutely not an area for cultural mindlock and petty embarrassment. The success of a mission and the health and lives of people in an integrated system are at stake, and to ignore a central function of the human body would be the height of folly, and disaster in the making if it is suppressed.
To make it perfectly clear and not beat around the bush, all members of a long-voyage space team need to be aware and fully supportive of the need for regular sexual activity among the crew, just as they are about physical exercise, and in most cases this implies participation for the sake of team health. If their earth-side taboos are so strong that they are not entirely comfortable with this, then they are the wrong material for extended missions.
The practical arrangements for this are a somewhat separate issue, and there are many alternative possibilities. But the key matter here is acceptance of the principle that sex must be handled as a natural medical function of a healthy astronaut, because without this we are destined for some very bad pathological events ahead.
Yes, I know that this suggestion will cause many a giggle and wink. But this is an important matter, and we need to think beyond the shackles of our ancient cultural silliness.
>> How can so short a sequence be suject to copyright?
A key cannot be copyrighted under any circumstances, whatever its length.
The reason for this is that, in all western jurisdictions, copyright can be vested only in copyrightable works, which are defined as original works of authorship. A machine-generated random number can never, under any circumstances, be an original work of authorship. Its very randomness precludes it --- it clearly has not been "authored" under prevailing interpretations of the word.
The length of an item does however have some small relevance, although only in the sense of precluding application of copyright even further. The shorter the key, the less it can claim to be unique, and thus even the claim of originality falters.
I stopped listening to commercial music over a decade ago when it started to deliver crap instead of actual music. And I'm not the only one.
If you have a problem with DRM or with copyrights or with the RIAA or with the cost of music, it's your choice: you choose to listen to crap, and crap with strings attached is what you get.
There is 100 times as much music out there as is delivered by the mainstream western labels. Go find it, and enjoy. And when you choose to pay for something that you think is really terrific, you will be rewarding musicians, not shareholders.
It's your choice. You know how to Google.
Copyright is not a free market issue
You're certainly right. But if you aim your insights a little deeper, it can change your perspective a bit.
If copyright on virtual goods has the purpose of promoting and hence increasing the production of such goods as a benefit to society, then virtual goods deserve the protection of copyright only if lack of such protection results in a significant decrease in availability of such goods.
But the problem for the copyright lobby is that copyright doesn't have any such effect.
There is no shortage of people creating content and wishing to give it worldwide exposure. And using the argument of "poor quality" is churlish, and hugely biased, because even when true, that fact is self-correcting.
The only real effect that the removal of copyright protection would have is on the wallet of vested interests in the West. Well tough, that's not a valid reason from a world community standpoint.
And that brings us back to the title of your post: "Copyright is not a FREE market issue". Freedom is meaningless unless applied to everyone --- if only one party is free, then there is no freedom. The West doesn't understand that, at all.
Adding these two points together can only yield one logical conclusion: copyright is INIMICAL to free markets. Or to put it another way, it is a protectionist's concept, and entirely contrary to explosive production in the modern world.
The world is turning into something out of a low-budget SciFi episode, a planet overrun by procedural paper pushers defining the physical world by legal statute. Sadly, it's not fiction, and we have no heroes to save the day.
The vast majority of good legal decisions are either "obvious" to anyone moderately sane (eg. dealing with an observed killing), or else they're shrouded in complexity that makes no single outcome fully just.
The first type needs nothing more than recourse to a "Fair Witness" (Heinlein's term, but there's some of it in the Jedi concept too, minus fighting), a person whose reputation is based on objectivity and fairness and plain commonsense -- no need for technicalities and legal dickering to come into it at all, by the definition of "obvious". A societal judge without court and with only one Law, simple fairness.
And the second type is handled equally well by the roll of a die --- after all, no single outcome is just. And dice do have the benefit of statistical fairness, which is more than can be said for the legal process where alleged "fairness" depends on your ability to afford good legal representation.
There is something fundamentally flawed in a system where years of arguing are considered to somehow yield justice, as if the cost didn't matter and the time lost meant nothing. Even if all costs were met uniformly out of the public purse, this still would not address the sheer deep freeze that legal proceedings place on society. Time is our most precious commodity, yet as this example showed, this is totally unappreciated in law.
Be that as it may, the current situation is nothing short of appalling, and getting steadily worse. We need a sort of French Revolution to lop off the heads of this new legal aristocracy, but I don't see that happenning --- we're stuck with this mess for the forseeable future, or at least as long as we're tied to this planet. Woes.
You harvest what you sow.
When you sow the message that the path to gleaming limos and the high life is through thug culture and pimping out your women, and not through intellectual pursuits or even good old-fashioned productivity and invention, then that's the kind of youngsters you breed. And the effect on the nation's future in advanced technology is then 100% predictable.
Cool high tech doesn't appear by magic out of nowhere. You have to be highly educated (or at least self-taught and highly motivated) to work at the advancing edge of technology, and that requires a large amount of skill and deep interest in the topic. The message delivered by the telly is that those things are extremely uncool, unhip, and frankly "really dull, man".
But it's a free country, right? So people can broadcast whatever they want, even messages that are contrary to our self-interest?
Sure. But eventually you lose that precious freedom if you forget that real wealth (not just money) comes from progress and invention, because you'll end up in servitude to those nations that understand that you have to safeguard your future freedoms too, not just your current-day ones. And that means making education and technology and being intelligent cool in the public eye.
There is a solution, and it's compatible with our current concepts of daily freedom. We need special interest group and lobbying corporations and a whole raft of think tanks to be giving the message of "tech and education is damn cool, and very profitable" to media, business, politicians, the to blessed public too, alongside the output of MTV and the RIAA delivering the message of self-destruction.
It *is* possible. But it will require some effort on our part.
Patents provide the low-hanging fruit in this area, but the actual problem goes much deeper.
As we all know here, software patents are wholly inappropriate in software, as they undermine the very basis of computing. But as long as companies are free to engage lawyers to litigate as a business plan, no amount of patent reform will fix this issue, because lawyers can literally create a case out of nothing. And they do so regularly, as we've seen in hundreds of examples recently.
The problem lies in part with lawyers (basically for being pricks without any moral standing, and happily taking money for their services regardless of purpose), and in part with judges and the judicial system as a whole, for not applying massive penalties to lawyers who use law merely to underpin a company business plan. Judges need to see through the purpose of a suit, and stomp heavily on lawsuits being used purely as a means of financial gain. The reason we've got into this mess is largely because lawyers benefit from all litigation, and judges have no interest in stopping that.
A complete ban on software patents would at least place that low-hanging fruit out of reach, but it won't solve the greater problem faced by corporate America, which is that it is at the mercy of a huge tier of parasites wearing suits, whose whole idea of worthwhile activity is to prevent worthwhile activity by others. Lawsuits are being used as an anti-competitive weapon by every man and his dog now, and that's the key problem here.
>> "We are not going to change our strategy because of one lousy quarter."
Without the benefit of insider knowledge, that statement wasn't hugely informative. There are so many changes afoot that it's almost impossible to forecast anything at all concerning the CPU companies at the present time.
The acquisition of ATI really complicated things, not only for share speculators but from a tech standpoint too. And while it doesn't necessarily mean that Intel will hitch up with nVidia (it seems not, given that the GMA965/X3000 competes with nVidia's lower-end offering), it does mean that both of those companies will have to respond very strongly to whatever develops from the joining of AMD and ATI. This whole area will become even more hectic than usual I think, once we start to see the fruits of the acquisition.
One of the things that will undoubtedly be on many Linux user's minds is whether the legendary disinterest of ATI in properly supporting Linux will change for the better. Once Microsoft shed nVidia in favor of ATI on going from Xbox 1 to Xbox 360, the likelihood of any such improvement plummetted drastically for obvious reasons, but the influence of AMD could of course be the exact opposite, since AMD can't afford to alienate the Linux market, one imagines.
But while we can hope that AMD will have a positive effect on ATI's attitude towards the FOSS community, what if the opposite happens, and by being tightly coupled to GPU hardware, AMD's CPUs start to lose the openness that has been traditional among CPU manufacturers until now? It's certainly a possibility, and a matter of enormous concern.
Which brings me back to the quote from TFA. It would really help AMD I think if the company removed some of the uncertainty or ambiguity in its position w.r.to FOSS as a result of the ATI thing. "No change" is a rather meaningless statement when their CPU and GPU divisions have diametrically opposite tendencies.
This reads exactly as follows, both in form and logically (I'm not joking):
And since we know that this is exactly what's happening at Sony, it seems quite likely that that's what he meant. Of course, since he's a marketting/PR monkey he's far more likely to be simply talking total bollocks for effect. Nevertheless, his words happen to accurately reflect what is going on at Sony, so perhaps he intended to imply this very thing in a way that wouldn't land him in hot water in the company.
>> Pardon me, but "throwing it over the wall" is not even remotely accurate. While I wouldn't characterize our effort as being 100% fully-collaborative yet, we're working in that direction. We have frequent releases, an active mailing list, and have incorporated a number of patches submitted by the community.
:-)
... for the current server code anyway, simply because the grid's static resource mapping has no future whatsoever.
Indeed, it's still early days, and as I see it, you're making reasonable progress.
Although you're receiving some criticism for still being at the stage of "throw code over the wall" (no matter how frequent your tarballs), you're certainly heading in the right direction towards a full LL+community collaborative SL client, it seems. I hope.
However, as far as your server code is concerned, the remarks about "throw over the wall" *WILL* apply, and for good reason, because you will abandon that server code in due course, by choice. The reason is that it's actually as dead as the dodo, even though it's still limping along on the grid, currently. It has no future.
The reason is simple: LL's current design model for powering objects in the grid is completely non-scalable for mobile objects, and most importantly, for the players themselves and their prim-laden accessories. When players go to events, they leave their home sim's CPU power behind them, idling away, while the event site's CPU is glowing red hot and unable to support any event beyond an extended family gathering. It's a classic case of static CPU resource mapping trying to address a dynamic CPU requirement problem.
To make matters worse, it's not only CPU power that is mapped statically in the grid, but storage as well. This has totally ludicrous consequences, such as the price of land being incredibly high despite the fact that storage costs are near-zero and plummetting all the time. Fortunately that can be changed using one of many network storage solutions, but it's just one more problem that arises from the original static resource design approach.
Crucially, Philip Rosedale has agreed that this non-scalability issue is a matter of concern, on his blog.
And since there is no possible transition path between the current static server-side model and a dynamic one that would place computing power where it is needed on the fly, LL will abandon the current server code -- it has to. In fact, the devs are probably already working on a replacement, since Philip knew about this 2 years ago. And nobody has ever criticized him for his inability to look ahead. He's a true visionary.
So, "throw it over the wall" will certainly be correct