they used to require a working model. I think they should return to this requirement
And how would you verify that the working model actually implements what is claimed? For example I could patent my new compression algorithm accompanied by 100,000 lines of heavily commented code, test suites etc. Could you establish if my new algorithm is actually in there? If part of it is present, is that ok? Could you tell?
I cant figure out what any logical person could have against outsourcing.
I fail to understand why any company would put contact with their own customers into another organisation's hands. They are your customers, and are your asset. The goal is better serve them, to better understand them, and to get more of them.
Other things matter a lot less. A company would be silly to grow its own coffee, or make its own furniture or do its own landscaping and gardening(*). Those can be 'outsourced' and 'offshored' since they don't really matter that much. But your customers?
However all of this is good news for the rest of us in the industry. It opens new opportunities for us to listen to customers and take them away from the big companies who seem to hate them, and we will be on top of what the customer needs actually are, and the best new products to come out with.
(*) The obvious exception is companies that are actually in those businesses. Silicon Valley realised the importance of "eating your own dogfood", as should everyone else.
I have no objection, to companies that do want to outsource and offshore. They can legally do stupid things. I do think that at the governmental level there should be some constraints in place. If a company isn't allowed to make stuff here by poisoning the environment, using child labour, or treating their employees as slaves, why should they be able to so in other countries. To a certain extent that is up to other countries to decide. I think the simplest solution is to impose a tax on imported goods and services that is based on the difference between how the foreign country treats its employee and citizen rights, as well as its environment.
I think you will find that all the DRM nonsense did exist on DAT long before Napster/Kazaa. The RIAA had long signalled that they believed all customers were thieves. Look at blank "Music" CDs vs "Data" CDs, the taxes on blank tapes and attempts at other media in order to recover money from "pirating". The only reason there was no "protection" on audio CDs was because they couldn't think of a way to do it without breaking compatibility with standard players. Even that hasn't stopped them in recent years.
What Napster and Kazaa showed is that people wanted to buy music online, but the music industry refused to sell online. In the absence of any way to preview music, buy music online (especially back catalog/less popular stuff not available in retail stores), people did the second best thing which is stole.
I think many honest people considered it a form of "fair use" to listen to music beforehand, and when the music industry (whose primary purpose is to sell music) provided no way to give them money for music, just took what they wanted.
and if I can download it off bit torrent, why would I want to pay for it?
Some of us do have the notion that that is stealing, and actually do make an effort to pay for what we watch and play.
Actually I think if the music/film industry had treated people well, instead of treating everyone like a thief just because some are thieves, then there would be little need for DRM and people would play nice. (The vast majority of people are fundamentally honest).
actually didnt ms skip the number 4 in version numbers for dos?
Nope, they shipped version 4.0 twice. The second version of 4.0 didn't really offer anything over 3.3 (and was really buggy), so most people just skipped from 3.3 to 5.0 (I still have the manuals:-)
Since we are playing nostalgia, I should also mention that I used MS-Windows 1.0 once. I was really impressed that it had a Paint program, and went to save my work of art. In those days, standard file dialogs didn't exist (you had to wait till Windows 3.1 for them). It brought up a dialog with a textfield asking for the filename. I started typing, and then wondered how long a name it would let me enter. The answer is that it let me enter a really really long name - I mashed the keyboard until I got bored. I click OK, and the screen froze and the hard disk light blinked every 5 seconds or so. I eventually rebooted the machine to discover most of the root directory entries had gone. Ah, the joys of buffer overflows! A quick session with Norton Disk Doctor got them back. I didn't touch Windows 1 again, but was an avid user of Windows 286, and then 3.0 and onwards once Windows became more mainstream.
Yes, MS-DOS 4.0 actually did do proper multi-tasking. It was paid for by a bunch of European computer companies, including Apricot (any Brits remember them?) and ICL (RIP). For reasons I don't know, it was withdrawn, and Microsoft later came out with 3.3, and then 4.0 (totally unrelated to the first 4.0).
I did once have a copy of the multi-tasking 4.0 but didn't do anything with it. It would have been interesting.
bear in mind--you'll be stuck with a US QWERTY keyboard
As another Brit, that is fantastic. I like the logical layout of {semi-,}colon and the {single,double}-quotes on the US keyboard. I always go out of my way to get US keyboards wherever possible!
As I said in a previous comment, the best reference are the aviation magazines. Sadly few put all the stories online.
Most places want to move to free airspace, rather than pre-designated corridors. To do so requires better knowledge of where the planes are, and where they are going (this is way more than just TCAS). They also want to improve precision of approaches to runways (where a few meters matters a lot).
An obvious component of such a system is something like GPS but with greater accuracy. Europe, Russia and others have been using this as one reason to deploy their own systems. Read the press for what the US has been doing.
(Note I am not saying that the US is doing anything illegal or immoral, just that it is trying to ensure everyone uses its system.)
Yes (it has two s' - Glonass). My point wasn't that other sources (Europe, Russia) have their own, but that the US has been very proactive in trying to prevent widespread use of them. The aviation press has a lot of information about this.
I have no issue with the US campaigning to prevent widespread use of the other systems, but I am not going to turn around and thank the US for being so magnanimous when in fact they are advancing their own agenda.
The US has gone to great lengths to try and stop Europe and Russia from deploying their own systems. They have never explicitly stated the reasons, but most observers come up with defense and control. I'll thank the US the day they stop trying to prevent others from deploying their own systems.
but I am saying that if you keep buying new ones, the cycle won't end
Ok, so I can upgrade to Linux if I don't buy any hardware or software or create any documents for a few years:-)
Yes, I should have put Windows in the title of the message. Unfortunately I don't think Linux games are going to remain fair rights usage prevention free. Whatever bizarre logic the gaming companies use to justify doing it on Windows also applies to any other platform. I suspect that up until now most games have had a porter pay an up front fee to the game developer. Consequently the developer doesn't really lose any money no matter what happens. Once developers start supporting Linux directly they will start doing stupid things.
I don't actually remotely understand your argument. The topic of the article is about getting people to move to Linux and realising that many have an existing investment in Windows games. Now I quite agreee about fair rights prevention (aka copy protection) being a bad thing etc, but that doesn't take away the fact that people have these already.
Emulating a CDrom is not as easy as you make out. For trivial data ones it is. However for the more complicated ones that contain multiple sessions, sub channel data and other stuff you need to emulate at a deep level. That is what Daemon-Tools on Windows does, and what cdemu is trying to do on Linux.
Migrating to Linux if you are prepared to throw away every document, piece of software and hardware is easy. For those who are not prepared to throw away everything, life is a lot harder. This article is about games. My observations are about copy protection and cd emulation and how they are a barrier for *me* and possibly others.
Ok, well the games I like playing are Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, Caesar, Zeus, Microsoft Flight Simulator and a few others. You are welcome to tell me that I cannot be a Linux user under any circumstances if I like those games. That "crutch" you refer to is what would enable me to be a Linux user.
On Windows I only use CloneCD and Daemon-Tools (cd cloner and virtual CD driver respectively). Note that I don't pirate software, I just hate going through the pain of swapping CDs all the time. (I started this stuff after buying my third copy of AOE2 because the discs got scratched and couldn't be used).
However Linux doesn't have virtualised CDs (loop mounting an ISO only works for disks that aren't fair use prevented^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H copy protected. If I am not prepared to play stupid CD swapping games on Windows, I sure as hell ain't going to do it on Linux. I am aware of cdemu.sf.net but it doesn't support much (yet).
The next step is assuming that the games will even run...
While reputations of an IP address are a good starting point, systems will ultimately need to take into account way more than that, including the email address From and To. For example my address from my ISP is pretty reliable, but one that has never sent a message before isn't. My ISP address but from a webmail provider in Kenya is not reliable (as would a Kenyan from my ISP).
My emails to the mailing lists of open source projects I founded have high reputation. My ones on the art of Persian rug making in the 2nd century have low reputation. Reputation in one area affects another.
I keep forgetting to mention eBay. It can be seen as a testbed. The fundamental problem of spam is dealing with a communication between two random people. Is that email from someone/somewhere you have not dealt with before spam or not?
eBay has to solve exactly the same problem but instead of communication it is enabling a transaction. They delete accounts based on abuse (just like RBLs, spamcop etc) but at the end of the day, just as in real life, the thing that works is reputation.
It isn't really addressing what I am talking about. For example, is Amazon a spammer? The answer to that depends on reputation, which can change person to person. (To me they are as I cancelled my account a few years ago due to the privacy shenanigans. To my housemate they are fine.)
At the moment spammers don't have to be particularly good. They don't really masquerade as anything but as spammers. But what would happen if an online store similar to Amazon had totally legit business, but also tried to sell you Viagra? These are the grey areas.
You can already see it in Google searches where you get those results that look like something useful but aren't. Then there are "news" web sites which are just trying to sell you something, but it isn't too overt.
For everyone legit, reputation matters. To a certain extent the process of branding is about building reputation. If you had reputation based feedback about mail and sites (reputatation of the people reporting repuation etc) you can make a better judgement. Sites that don't take much action against their users or others pretending to be them will lose reputation. Sites that have users who send contentless or annoying email will lose reputation.
And if you suddenly come up with a new domain name, you will find it just as hard as in the real world. Reputation is one of those things that has to be earned.
The only thing that will work in the end is some sort of distributed reputation management system. To a certain extent that is what RBLs do, except they are on or off. SpamAssassin does offer shades of grey to the RBLs (differening weights to each one).
To a certain extent this is what we already do in real life. We 'judge a book by its cover' as a first pass (for example people will often walk past a beggar in the street completely ignoring them) and then include other factors. How polite they appear, where they are from, recommendations from friends etc
All other mechanisms suffer from a determined spammer being able to get around them as the article pointed out. Any mechanism that prevents some spammers makes things more lucrative for the rest.
That sounds like a "Verizon-certified" thingy. Similar to the Nintendo Seal on old NES games.
Brew applications are written in C/C++. The reason for the testing/certification is because they can trivially cause all sorts of damage (remember you can make pointers to anything and trash anything - you don't get an industrial strength operating system in the phone with applications and data suitably protected). Additionally the Brew programming environment is crap. For example the way you find out free space on the EFS (embedded file system) is to write a file, fill up the filesystem, and see how big the file got! [This actually also causes some models to panic, reboot, panic on an infinite cycle]
Contrast with J2ME which uses a defined virtual machine which can be proven to be safe.
A way for consumers to know if what they are getting meets some quality standard.
The "quality standard" is it not crashing the phone. The vast majority of the games are pure unadulterated crap. For example there is a XXX game (you know the big action film with Vin Diesel in it). After several screens of copyrights and license agreements, you end up with a clone of Pole Position (that ancient Atari game where you move a blob between parallel blobs that are supposed to be a road going off into the distance). And it is REALLY REALLY bad. In fact most of the games look like they took an entire afternoon to write.
Qualcomm and Verizon will lose this game. People expect much more, and will vote with their money. Here is by far the best explanation of just how dismal it is.
Or maybe Nintendo will really bank heavily on the quirky game design via toys like gameboy DS or whatever.
Actually it is about time that Nintendo did some toys. I bought a GameCube. I got hooked on DDR at a friends house, and had to get a PS/2 to play it. I also got an EyeToy (great party game especially if drunk:-) I haven't seen any games for the Cube that use other peripherals (guns, pads, cameras etc)
I thought it would be great having a watch that tells the temperature. So I bought a Casio that does. Only on detailed reading of the manual did I discover the flaw. The temperature sensor is in the watch and the watch is on your arm, so it basically tells you the temperature of your arm. (You can take the watch off and wait 30 mins to get the temperature of wherever you put it, but what exactly is the point?)
About the only thing it tells me is wether my arm was above or inside the covers while sleeping (it records the temperature every hour).
The watches that tell you your altitude are even more useless. They actually just measure the air pressure. So the way you use them is that you tell the watch what your altitude is, and then it tells you what the alititude is.
Re:"Google kicks a$$ at search results" Really?
on
Yahoo! Research Labs
·
· Score: 1
Just as a good example of this, a friend posted in a blog that they hired snowblades at a resort they went skiiing at. The first question in my mind "what the heck is a snowblade?"
I eventually gave up trying to find the answer using Google. I did find 10,000 places to buy them but it wasn't actually obvious what they were, how big they are, if you put both feet on one, or had one on each foot etc.
AllTheWeb actually had a few links on the front page where I managed to figure out the answer.
You can actually download the Brew SDK from the Qualcomm developer site. However all the legal nonsense you have to agree to before getting the SDK precludes doing what you described.
Slashdot Mirror
And how would you verify that the working model actually implements what is claimed? For example I could patent my new compression algorithm accompanied by 100,000 lines of heavily commented code, test suites etc. Could you establish if my new algorithm is actually in there? If part of it is present, is that ok? Could you tell?
I fail to understand why any company would put contact with their own customers into another organisation's hands. They are your customers, and are your asset. The goal is better serve them, to better understand them, and to get more of them.
Other things matter a lot less. A company would be silly to grow its own coffee, or make its own furniture or do its own landscaping and gardening(*). Those can be 'outsourced' and 'offshored' since they don't really matter that much. But your customers?
However all of this is good news for the rest of us in the industry. It opens new opportunities for us to listen to customers and take them away from the big companies who seem to hate them, and we will be on top of what the customer needs actually are, and the best new products to come out with.
(*) The obvious exception is companies that are actually in those businesses. Silicon Valley realised the importance of "eating your own dogfood", as should everyone else.
Here are some good articles on the subject:
I have no objection, to companies that do want to outsource and offshore. They can legally do stupid things. I do think that at the governmental level there should be some constraints in place. If a company isn't allowed to make stuff here by poisoning the environment, using child labour, or treating their employees as slaves, why should they be able to so in other countries. To a certain extent that is up to other countries to decide. I think the simplest solution is to impose a tax on imported goods and services that is based on the difference between how the foreign country treats its employee and citizen rights, as well as its environment.
I think you will find that all the DRM nonsense did exist on DAT long before Napster/Kazaa. The RIAA had long signalled that they believed all customers were thieves. Look at blank "Music" CDs vs "Data" CDs, the taxes on blank tapes and attempts at other media in order to recover money from "pirating". The only reason there was no "protection" on audio CDs was because they couldn't think of a way to do it without breaking compatibility with standard players. Even that hasn't stopped them in recent years.
What Napster and Kazaa showed is that people wanted to buy music online, but the music industry refused to sell online. In the absence of any way to preview music, buy music online (especially back catalog/less popular stuff not available in retail stores), people did the second best thing which is stole.
I think many honest people considered it a form of "fair use" to listen to music beforehand, and when the music industry (whose primary purpose is to sell music) provided no way to give them money for music, just took what they wanted.
Some of us do have the notion that that is stealing, and actually do make an effort to pay for what we watch and play.
Actually I think if the music/film industry had treated people well, instead of treating everyone like a thief just because some are thieves, then there would be little need for DRM and people would play nice. (The vast majority of people are fundamentally honest).
Nope, they shipped version 4.0 twice. The second version of 4.0 didn't really offer anything over 3.3 (and was really buggy), so most people just skipped from 3.3 to 5.0 (I still have the manuals :-)
You can see the timeline at the bottom of http://www.maxframe.com/HISZMSD.HTM. There is also a timeline at http://www.nukesoft.co.uk/msdos/dosversions.htm
Since we are playing nostalgia, I should also mention that I used MS-Windows 1.0 once. I was really impressed that it had a Paint program, and went to save my work of art. In those days, standard file dialogs didn't exist (you had to wait till Windows 3.1 for them). It brought up a dialog with a textfield asking for the filename. I started typing, and then wondered how long a name it would let me enter. The answer is that it let me enter a really really long name - I mashed the keyboard until I got bored. I click OK, and the screen froze and the hard disk light blinked every 5 seconds or so. I eventually rebooted the machine to discover most of the root directory entries had gone. Ah, the joys of buffer overflows! A quick session with Norton Disk Doctor got them back. I didn't touch Windows 1 again, but was an avid user of Windows 286, and then 3.0 and onwards once Windows became more mainstream.
Yes, MS-DOS 4.0 actually did do proper multi-tasking. It was paid for by a bunch of European computer companies, including Apricot (any Brits remember them?) and ICL (RIP). For reasons I don't know, it was withdrawn, and Microsoft later came out with 3.3, and then 4.0 (totally unrelated to the first 4.0).
I did once have a copy of the multi-tasking 4.0 but didn't do anything with it. It would have been interesting.
Yup. In the last 4 years I have only used a UK keyboard for about 2 hours (on a laptop). Most of the stupid key layout had faded from my memory :-)
As I said in a previous comment, the best reference are the aviation magazines. Sadly few put all the stories online.
Most places want to move to free airspace, rather than pre-designated corridors. To do so requires better knowledge of where the planes are, and where they are going (this is way more than just TCAS). They also want to improve precision of approaches to runways (where a few meters matters a lot).
An obvious component of such a system is something like GPS but with greater accuracy. Europe, Russia and others have been using this as one reason to deploy their own systems. Read the press for what the US has been doing.
(Note I am not saying that the US is doing anything illegal or immoral, just that it is trying to ensure everyone uses its system.)
Yes (it has two s' - Glonass). My point wasn't that other sources (Europe, Russia) have their own, but that the US has been very proactive in trying to prevent widespread use of them. The aviation press has a lot of information about this.
I have no issue with the US campaigning to prevent widespread use of the other systems, but I am not going to turn around and thank the US for being so magnanimous when in fact they are advancing their own agenda.
The US has gone to great lengths to try and stop Europe and Russia from deploying their own systems. They have never explicitly stated the reasons, but most observers come up with defense and control. I'll thank the US the day they stop trying to prevent others from deploying their own systems.
Ok, so I can upgrade to Linux if I don't buy any hardware or software or create any documents for a few years :-)
Yes, I should have put Windows in the title of the message. Unfortunately I don't think Linux games are going to remain fair rights usage prevention free. Whatever bizarre logic the gaming companies use to justify doing it on Windows also applies to any other platform. I suspect that up until now most games have had a porter pay an up front fee to the game developer. Consequently the developer doesn't really lose any money no matter what happens. Once developers start supporting Linux directly they will start doing stupid things.
I don't actually remotely understand your argument. The topic of the article is about getting people to move to Linux and realising that many have an existing investment in Windows games. Now I quite agreee about fair rights prevention (aka copy protection) being a bad thing etc, but that doesn't take away the fact that people have these already.
Emulating a CDrom is not as easy as you make out. For trivial data ones it is. However for the more complicated ones that contain multiple sessions, sub channel data and other stuff you need to emulate at a deep level. That is what Daemon-Tools on Windows does, and what cdemu is trying to do on Linux.
Migrating to Linux if you are prepared to throw away every document, piece of software and hardware is easy. For those who are not prepared to throw away everything, life is a lot harder. This article is about games. My observations are about copy protection and cd emulation and how they are a barrier for *me* and possibly others.
Ok, well the games I like playing are Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, Caesar, Zeus, Microsoft Flight Simulator and a few others. You are welcome to tell me that I cannot be a Linux user under any circumstances if I like those games. That "crutch" you refer to is what would enable me to be a Linux user.
On Windows I only use CloneCD and Daemon-Tools (cd cloner and virtual CD driver respectively). Note that I don't pirate software, I just hate going through the pain of swapping CDs all the time. (I started this stuff after buying my third copy of AOE2 because the discs got scratched and couldn't be used).
However Linux doesn't have virtualised CDs (loop mounting an ISO only works for disks that aren't fair use prevented^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H copy protected. If I am not prepared to play stupid CD swapping games on Windows, I sure as hell ain't going to do it on Linux. I am aware of cdemu.sf.net but it doesn't support much (yet).
The next step is assuming that the games will even run ...
While reputations of an IP address are a good starting point, systems will ultimately need to take into account way more than that, including the email address From and To. For example my address from my ISP is pretty reliable, but one that has never sent a message before isn't. My ISP address but from a webmail provider in Kenya is not reliable (as would a Kenyan from my ISP).
My emails to the mailing lists of open source projects I founded have high reputation. My ones on the art of Persian rug making in the 2nd century have low reputation. Reputation in one area affects another.
I keep forgetting to mention eBay. It can be seen as a testbed. The fundamental problem of spam is dealing with a communication between two random people. Is that email from someone/somewhere you have not dealt with before spam or not?
eBay has to solve exactly the same problem but instead of communication it is enabling a transaction. They delete accounts based on abuse (just like RBLs, spamcop etc) but at the end of the day, just as in real life, the thing that works is reputation.
It isn't really addressing what I am talking about. For example, is Amazon a spammer? The answer to that depends on reputation, which can change person to person. (To me they are as I cancelled my account a few years ago due to the privacy shenanigans. To my housemate they are fine.)
At the moment spammers don't have to be particularly good. They don't really masquerade as anything but as spammers. But what would happen if an online store similar to Amazon had totally legit business, but also tried to sell you Viagra? These are the grey areas.
You can already see it in Google searches where you get those results that look like something useful but aren't. Then there are "news" web sites which are just trying to sell you something, but it isn't too overt.
For everyone legit, reputation matters. To a certain extent the process of branding is about building reputation. If you had reputation based feedback about mail and sites (reputatation of the people reporting repuation etc) you can make a better judgement. Sites that don't take much action against their users or others pretending to be them will lose reputation. Sites that have users who send contentless or annoying email will lose reputation.
And if you suddenly come up with a new domain name, you will find it just as hard as in the real world. Reputation is one of those things that has to be earned.
The only thing that will work in the end is some sort of distributed reputation management system. To a certain extent that is what RBLs do, except they are on or off. SpamAssassin does offer shades of grey to the RBLs (differening weights to each one).
To a certain extent this is what we already do in real life. We 'judge a book by its cover' as a first pass (for example people will often walk past a beggar in the street completely ignoring them) and then include other factors. How polite they appear, where they are from, recommendations from friends etc
All other mechanisms suffer from a determined spammer being able to get around them as the article pointed out. Any mechanism that prevents some spammers makes things more lucrative for the rest.
Brew applications are written in C/C++. The reason for the testing/certification is because they can trivially cause all sorts of damage (remember you can make pointers to anything and trash anything - you don't get an industrial strength operating system in the phone with applications and data suitably protected). Additionally the Brew programming environment is crap. For example the way you find out free space on the EFS (embedded file system) is to write a file, fill up the filesystem, and see how big the file got! [This actually also causes some models to panic, reboot, panic on an infinite cycle] Contrast with J2ME which uses a defined virtual machine which can be proven to be safe.
The "quality standard" is it not crashing the phone. The vast majority of the games are pure unadulterated crap. For example there is a XXX game (you know the big action film with Vin Diesel in it). After several screens of copyrights and license agreements, you end up with a clone of Pole Position (that ancient Atari game where you move a blob between parallel blobs that are supposed to be a road going off into the distance). And it is REALLY REALLY bad. In fact most of the games look like they took an entire afternoon to write.
Qualcomm and Verizon will lose this game. People expect much more, and will vote with their money. Here is by far the best explanation of just how dismal it is.
Actually it is about time that Nintendo did some toys. I bought a GameCube. I got hooked on DDR at a friends house, and had to get a PS/2 to play it. I also got an EyeToy (great party game especially if drunk :-) I haven't seen any games for the Cube that use other peripherals (guns, pads, cameras etc)
Become a seed for as many torrents as you can.
I thought it would be great having a watch that tells the temperature. So I bought a Casio that does. Only on detailed reading of the manual did I discover the flaw. The temperature sensor is in the watch and the watch is on your arm, so it basically tells you the temperature of your arm. (You can take the watch off and wait 30 mins to get the temperature of wherever you put it, but what exactly is the point?)
About the only thing it tells me is wether my arm was above or inside the covers while sleeping (it records the temperature every hour).
The watches that tell you your altitude are even more useless. They actually just measure the air pressure. So the way you use them is that you tell the watch what your altitude is, and then it tells you what the alititude is.
Just as a good example of this, a friend posted in a blog that they hired snowblades at a resort they went skiiing at. The first question in my mind "what the heck is a snowblade?"
I eventually gave up trying to find the answer using Google. I did find 10,000 places to buy them but it wasn't actually obvious what they were, how big they are, if you put both feet on one, or had one on each foot etc.
AllTheWeb actually had a few links on the front page where I managed to figure out the answer.
You can actually download the Brew SDK from the Qualcomm developer site. However all the legal nonsense you have to agree to before getting the SDK precludes doing what you described.