Turbo Pascal was the first programming language I ever learned. I still have some of the code I wrote with Turbo Pascal and later Delphi (plus some stuff I wrote in *cough*VB*cough*). I still use Delphi (version 7, not that.NET framework crap) for a couple of things. (although I am now a C/C++ programmer for the most part)
It is sad to see what has happened to the once great company that practically invented the modern PC IDE and development environment. If the borland-corel merger had gone ahead, I think we could have seen some GREAT stuff come out.
Borland C++ died because of 2 things: 1.Microsofts C/C++ compiler became better than Borlands and 2.Microsoft (when windows NT and windows 95 came out at least) had the best integration with all the windows features.
Why dont they just mothball the space shuttle and get everything to ISS on Soviet Soyuz capsules and on conventional rockets (e.g. Titan, Delta, whatever the soviets have)?
IANA biochemist but from reading the article, it seems as though this is a synthetic re-creation of a chemical that appears in the body naturally (is it a direct copy or just something that looks the same to the viruses?)
Assuming this is true (and its not just a chemical that happens to have the same proprties as this body chemical), its not something that should be patentable. Patenting a specific method for extracting, producing, cloning or otherwise manufacturing the chemical would be ok but no-one should ever be able to patent a chemical, compound or gene sequence that is produced nautrally by the human body.
HIV only infects the white blood cells. So, you kill off all the free aids viruses and existing infected cells using existing drugs then you killk off the cells where it is "hidden" using new drugs. Then you let nature take its course and produce new white blood cells (with no aids left, the new cells cant become infected)
Most normal Motorola phones (like the E378i I have) use something called a Neptune as the main processor (its an ARM with a DSP inside I believe) with a custom motorola operating system (known as p2k in the moto modding community because of the p2k.sys driver used to access it). The Motorola Linux phones use a platform called EZX. This consists of a Neptune processor like in a normal p2k phone with a (presumably different) version of the p2k operating system running on it to handle the network side (i.e. actually talking to the cell tower) and then an Intel ARM chip running a modified version of MontaVista Linux for the rest of the phone software. They are using a modified version of the BLOB bootloader and a 2.4.x Kernel. The userland is made up of various normal utillities (e.g. glibc, gnu fileutils etc) plus a (aparently hevily modified) version of qtEmbedded and a pile of motorola specific stuff.
Motorola HAVE released a kernel source tree for the EZX phones. And people have reported getting it to compile and run on their phones. Whether its complete, up-to-date or accurate I dont know.
Motorola are under no obligation to provide any SDK for these phones. The only thing they need to do is to release the source code for any components under licences that require them to do so (e.g. BLOB, kernel, glibc etc). So far, other than the kernel release, they have not done so. Several requests have been sent to motorola requesting the source code to those comonents but so far, no code has been forthcomming.
Motorola are under no obligations to share the source code, SDKs, docs, headers etc to the motorola specific stuff on the phone (unless its some how derived from GPL code that is). They are also not under any obligation to share any code to things like qtEmbedded (they probobly have a commercial licence from trolltech for that).
There are reports of a "leaked" SDK for EZX phones but I dont know much about it (using it would probobly be a violation of copyright anyway so its probobly best not to)
The most promising work is going on at www.openezx.org. People there are trying to make replacements for the motorola propriatory kernel modules and software bits as well as trying to reverse engineer the propriatory libraries motorola have used as well as trying to get motorola to release the code required under GPL (having the motorola version of BLOB in particular would be nice since it could lead to a better way to modify things on the phone without some of the hacks that are required now)
Thanks to the OpenEZX project for most of the information contained here.
There are several reasons why Motorola might not want people inside these linux phones. For example: 1.DRM. Allowing people inside could allow access to the secret key of the phone that is used to decrypt protected content. 2.Featureset. Motorola might want to sell a phone with in it. This camera & chip might be physically capable of recording video but Motorola might decide to disable the feature on a particular phone for whatever reason (which might include wanting to sell a higher end phone with video enabled) 3.Carriers. For example, Verizon might want Motorola to disable the abillity to access camera pictures except by sending them in an (expensive for the customer) MMS (either to another phone or to the verizon PIX system). If you can get into the phone, you can access the camera pictures. 4.Radio, phone functionality and FCC. There may be things that it is possible to do through linux that would have a negative impact on the phone/network/radio functionality of the phone or that could risk the FCC certification of the phone. and 5.Viruses and the like. Motorola might be worried that allowing linux apps on the phone might cause problems when people who dont know what they are doing put stuff on the phone that e.g. sends the contents of their phonebook to some scam site.
As the OP said, its digital. It only requires one copy to be ripped then its broken for all time.
The question I have is, does implementing all this DRM (more specifically, restrictions on what cable boxes and cablecards can do with the output once its decrypted, the DRM on the actual cable signals does serve a valid purpose) achieve the stated goal of making people pay for their content instead of downloading it off BT?
Its not the manufacturers that want this, its the media corps. I am sure that if the manufacturers could make it possible to record anything and send the resulting video file to any other device you like, they would do that.
But the big media corps are worried about people spreading HD-TV content online (never mind that any digitally copied HD-TV content stored with enough quality to preserve any advantage that HD-TV content has over content recorded through existing analog channels like S-Video and Composite would be too big to up/download through most consumer broadband links) so they feal they need to "protect" it with ever more layers of "DRM".
I suspect what will happen is that people will crack HDCP, HD-DVD/Blu-Ray/CableCard/whatever other DRM the companies invent and not tell anyone about it. Then they will use their cracks to post stuff on P2P It will go through the same channels that "DVD Screeners" leaked from production companies, awards judges and such go through. And the same channels that result in the latest games being available on p2p days after release, fully cracked and working. And, just like the DVD screeners and games, the people behind it all doing the actual cracking, capturing and such will remain hidden from view going through a network of couriers and private sites that only a few know about in order to get the stuff out to the masses.
Firstly, there are some companies that are installing their own DSLAMs and therefore can offer whatever they like. Also, even if you are on a Telstra DSLAM, you can still find ISPs that do much better than Tel$tra for ISP service thanks to a competitive market.
This suggests to me that it would be a great market move for cingular, AT&T, T-Mobile or someone else to invest in getting a network as good as verizon without having the crappy phones (with the crappy vzw UI and the money-grabbing disabled features)
They screw the customer, they force you to use BREW, they disable bluetooth, they force you to buy ringtones through them, they force you to use the crappy verizon UI, you cant even transfer pictures taken with the phone camera unless you pay them.
Why are they still in business? Why do people put up with all this crap instead of finding a better provider?
What about all those people running linux servers out there with colocation or hosting providers (including some pretty big setups from some pretty big companies)? Or will they need to run signed binaries of Apache, mod_ssl, kernel etc?
The answer is to get experts in the field involved in examining patents before they are "rubber stamped". If people that knew what they were talking about technically (and preferablly leaglly too) were involved in deciding if a patent was valid or not, we wouldnt see so many crappy patents. Enough people would be required to look at it such that people wouldnt be able to say "no, its not valid" because they have a vested interest in being able to use that stuff and not pay for it (also, a simple "no" wouldnt suffice, actual links to prior art or whatever else would need to be presented)
Also, introduce a clause in the rules that says that if a patent is found invalid (either in the initial investigation or later on by a court), the patent holder has to pay up to the PTO.
The idea of "you have to demonstrate your patent somehow" (e.g. for a patent on something like an encryption algorithim, you have to demonstrate working code for it) would also help.
The difference is that people who know what they are talking about both legally and techically have said that the MPEG patents are valid (no idea if they have been tested in court or not though) but those same people (including the pubpat people) say that the JPEG patent in question is not valid.
Also, a lot more people have been sued for violating (or made to pay licence fees for) the MPEG patents than have been for this JPEG patent
Slashdot Mirror
Borlands BGI wasnt very fast.
But it WAS usable on pretty much all the PC graphics cards that were available back then.
Turbo Pascal was the first programming language I ever learned. .NET framework crap) for a couple of things. (although I am now a C/C++ programmer for the most part)
I still have some of the code I wrote with Turbo Pascal and later Delphi (plus some stuff I wrote in *cough*VB*cough*). I still use Delphi (version 7, not that
It is sad to see what has happened to the once great company that practically invented the modern PC IDE and development environment. If the borland-corel merger had gone ahead, I think we could have seen some GREAT stuff come out.
Borland C++ died because of 2 things:
1.Microsofts C/C++ compiler became better than Borlands
and 2.Microsoft (when windows NT and windows 95 came out at least) had the best integration with all the windows features.
Why dont they just mothball the space shuttle and get everything to ISS on Soviet Soyuz capsules and on conventional rockets (e.g. Titan, Delta, whatever the soviets have)?
IANA biochemist but from reading the article, it seems as though this is a synthetic re-creation of a chemical that appears in the body naturally (is it a direct copy or just something that looks the same to the viruses?)
Assuming this is true (and its not just a chemical that happens to have the same proprties as this body chemical), its not something that should be patentable. Patenting a specific method for extracting, producing, cloning or otherwise manufacturing the chemical would be ok but no-one should ever be able to patent a chemical, compound or gene sequence that is produced nautrally by the human body.
HIV only infects the white blood cells.
So, you kill off all the free aids viruses and existing infected cells using existing drugs then you killk off the cells where it is "hidden" using new drugs. Then you let nature take its course and produce new white blood cells (with no aids left, the new cells cant become infected)
Most normal Motorola phones (like the E378i I have) use something called a Neptune as the main processor (its an ARM with a DSP inside I believe) with a custom motorola operating system (known as p2k in the moto modding community because of the p2k.sys driver used to access it).
The Motorola Linux phones use a platform called EZX. This consists of a Neptune processor like in a normal p2k phone with a (presumably different) version of the p2k operating system running on it to handle the network side (i.e. actually talking to the cell tower) and then an Intel ARM chip running a modified version of MontaVista Linux for the rest of the phone software.
They are using a modified version of the BLOB bootloader and a 2.4.x Kernel.
The userland is made up of various normal utillities (e.g. glibc, gnu fileutils etc) plus a (aparently hevily modified) version of qtEmbedded and a pile of motorola specific stuff.
Motorola HAVE released a kernel source tree for the EZX phones. And people have reported getting it to compile and run on their phones. Whether its complete, up-to-date or accurate I dont know.
Motorola are under no obligation to provide any SDK for these phones.
The only thing they need to do is to release the source code for any components under licences that require them to do so (e.g. BLOB, kernel, glibc etc). So far, other than the kernel release, they have not done so.
Several requests have been sent to motorola requesting the source code to those comonents but so far, no code has been forthcomming.
Motorola are under no obligations to share the source code, SDKs, docs, headers etc to the motorola specific stuff on the phone (unless its some how derived from GPL code that is). They are also not under any obligation to share any code to things like qtEmbedded (they probobly have a commercial licence from trolltech for that).
There are reports of a "leaked" SDK for EZX phones but I dont know much about it (using it would probobly be a violation of copyright anyway so its probobly best not to)
The most promising work is going on at www.openezx.org. People there are trying to make replacements for the motorola propriatory kernel modules and software bits as well as trying to reverse engineer the propriatory libraries motorola have used as well as trying to get motorola to release the code required under GPL (having the motorola version of BLOB in particular would be nice since it could lead to a better way to modify things on the phone without some of the hacks that are required now)
Thanks to the OpenEZX project for most of the information contained here.
There are several reasons why Motorola might not want people inside these linux phones. For example:
1.DRM. Allowing people inside could allow access to the secret key of the phone that is used to decrypt protected content.
2.Featureset. Motorola might want to sell a phone with in it. This camera & chip might be physically capable of recording video but Motorola might decide to disable the feature on a particular phone for whatever reason (which might include wanting to sell a higher end phone with video enabled)
3.Carriers. For example, Verizon might want Motorola to disable the abillity to access camera pictures except by sending them in an (expensive for the customer) MMS (either to another phone or to the verizon PIX system). If you can get into the phone, you can access the camera pictures.
4.Radio, phone functionality and FCC. There may be things that it is possible to do through linux that would have a negative impact on the phone/network/radio functionality of the phone or that could risk the FCC certification of the phone.
and 5.Viruses and the like. Motorola might be worried that allowing linux apps on the phone might cause problems when people who dont know what they are doing put stuff on the phone that e.g. sends the contents of their phonebook to some scam site.
As the OP said, its digital. It only requires one copy to be ripped then its broken for all time.
The question I have is, does implementing all this DRM (more specifically, restrictions on what cable boxes and cablecards can do with the output once its decrypted, the DRM on the actual cable signals does serve a valid purpose) achieve the stated goal of making people pay for their content instead of downloading it off BT?
Its not the manufacturers that want this, its the media corps.
I am sure that if the manufacturers could make it possible to record anything and send the resulting video file to any other device you like, they would do that.
But the big media corps are worried about people spreading HD-TV content online (never mind that any digitally copied HD-TV content stored with enough quality to preserve any advantage that HD-TV content has over content recorded through existing analog channels like S-Video and Composite would be too big to up/download through most consumer broadband links) so they feal they need to "protect" it with ever more layers of "DRM".
I suspect what will happen is that people will crack HDCP, HD-DVD/Blu-Ray/CableCard/whatever other DRM the companies invent and not tell anyone about it.
Then they will use their cracks to post stuff on P2P
It will go through the same channels that "DVD Screeners" leaked from production companies, awards judges and such go through. And the same channels that result in the latest games being available on p2p days after release, fully cracked and working. And, just like the DVD screeners and games, the people behind it all doing the actual cracking, capturing and such will remain hidden from view going through a network of couriers and private sites that only a few know about in order to get the stuff out to the masses.
But is the data on the firewire links and on the firewire drive encrypted?
Better yet, put "other" and select something fictional such as Klingon or something :)
And tell all your friends to do the same.
If enough people switched to someone else (or threatened to), verizon would have to back down.
But what would Google do about the last mile?
AMNET for one has their own DSLAMs.
IINET also has their own.
As do several others.
Firstly, there are some companies that are installing their own DSLAMs and therefore can offer whatever they like.
Also, even if you are on a Telstra DSLAM, you can still find ISPs that do much better than Tel$tra for ISP service thanks to a competitive market.
This suggests to me that it would be a great market move for cingular, AT&T, T-Mobile or someone else to invest in getting a network as good as verizon without having the crappy phones (with the crappy vzw UI and the money-grabbing disabled features)
They screw the customer, they force you to use BREW, they disable bluetooth, they force you to buy ringtones through them, they force you to use the crappy verizon UI, you cant even transfer pictures taken with the phone camera unless you pay them.
Why are they still in business? Why do people put up with all this crap instead of finding a better provider?
In the other case, it is probobly possible to build a new rom file (using the GPL'd code), unsolder the existing rom and replace it with a new one.
But with trusted computing, you cant replace the code at all without the key you dont have.
Someone should write a software program that looks like the AOL software but works with any normal ISP account.
So, geeks etc could show their AOL-using family members this new software that is "exactly like AOL only cheaper".
What about all those people running linux servers out there with colocation or hosting providers (including some pretty big setups from some pretty big companies)?
Or will they need to run signed binaries of Apache, mod_ssl, kernel etc?
The answer is to get experts in the field involved in examining patents before they are "rubber stamped".
If people that knew what they were talking about technically (and preferablly leaglly too) were involved in deciding if a patent was valid or not, we wouldnt see so many crappy patents. Enough people would be required to look at it such that people wouldnt be able to say "no, its not valid" because they have a vested interest in being able to use that stuff and not pay for it (also, a simple "no" wouldnt suffice, actual links to prior art or whatever else would need to be presented)
Also, introduce a clause in the rules that says that if a patent is found invalid (either in the initial investigation or later on by a court), the patent holder has to pay up to the PTO.
The idea of "you have to demonstrate your patent somehow" (e.g. for a patent on something like an encryption algorithim, you have to demonstrate working code for it) would also help.
The difference is that people who know what they are talking about both legally and techically have said that the MPEG patents are valid (no idea if they have been tested in court or not though) but those same people (including the pubpat people) say that the JPEG patent in question is not valid.
Also, a lot more people have been sued for violating (or made to pay licence fees for) the MPEG patents than have been for this JPEG patent
It (or a modified version of it) would be great for teaching physics principles like gravity, balistics and stuff.