1.to get a patent, you should be required to demonstrate what you are trying to patent (i.e. a prototype, working model or failing that complete blueprints). In the case of software patents, you would need to demonstrate working code for whatever it is (e.g. if its a compression algorithim, you would need to demonstrate an implementation that can compress/uncompress data)
This would eliminate a fair chunk of the "overbroad" patents that can be twisted to apply to many different things.
2.Do more to find Prior Art (and make it easier for anyone to submit prior art for an existing patent to get it invalidated). Also, have bigger penalties for patents that get invalidated by prior art (something sliding so big companies get hit much harder than backyard inventors)
3.give the USPTO more money so that they can do their job properly and remove the system where its finantially benifical to them to pass a patent vs failing it.
Together these 3 should get rid of most of the stupid patents...
Here in australia, many DVD players (including the one I just bought) are region free out of the box. It might say "region 4" but it is definatly region free:)
ok, that is something I was not aware of:) Firstly, does the free ATI driver support a card (well enough to play Quake III) you can buy new from ATI right now? And secondly, is there any support for the "free" driver (running on the aformentioned current ATI Card) from ATI (e.g. specs or whatever else)?
i.e. can you run Quake III using an ATI card/GPU that is still being maufactured by ATI along with totally free drivers where all the info used to produce the bits of code used to get Quake III to run has been provided by ATI.
I would like to see someone compile a list of all cases where it is possible to use a given piece of hardware (e.g. WiFi card) using only 100% Open Source code for all the stuff that executes on the host CPU (closed firmware that executes on a microcontroler or CPU on the card itself is OK as long as the licence for said firmware is good enough to enable it to be packaged with said Open Source drivers).
Drivers that only exist because someone reverse engineered the hardware and there is absolutly no company support for them dont count.
Let me know when I can build a machine to play the (soon to be open source) Quake III using only hardware that meets this criteria.
The "open" ATI drivers dont really count since they (AFAIK) dont support the latest cards and dont do 3D in any way that is good enough for Quake III.
If someone can show me a way to play Quake III on linux using 100% open source code (or 100% open source code except for the Q3 binary itself since thats not open yet), feel free. But everything I have seen and read sugests that what I ask is not possible.
If it was that simple to write a DirectX layer (not to mention a layer for all the other windows-sepecific API calls made by a typical windows game such as thread calls, file calls etc), the WINE guys would have done it by now and I would be playing C&C Renegade, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and all my other windows stuff with it:)
Why dont they just do what they do here in australia with Aussie Rules matches. If the game is not a sellout, it is played as a delayed telecast in the local market. It works here and we get to see all home games for the 2 local teams (here in perth)
As someone who has not only been around before the first release of Hyrule Magic and knows the author but has even added code to it myself (at least I think they are still using my code) I must say that Hyrule Magic is one of the 2 best editors for any ROM that I have ever seen/used. The other one is Lunar Magic, an editor for the SNES classic Super Mario World.
If you like zelda and editing, Hyrule Magic is a serious tool. And if you like zelda, play the excellent Zelda 3 Challenge hack when it is released.
I wont link to the actual Hyrule MAgic site since it seems to be suffering bandwidth/hosting issues and the last thing that they need right now is a slashdotting:)
It would definatly be illegal to sell this game in australia if it was refused classification.
In fact, I think there was some trouble back when GTA III came out because they released it before it had an OFLC rating, the OFLC gave it an RC rating so they had to recall stuff from shelves and remove the offensive content.
Personally, I dont think that ANY video game should be banned unless it specifically encourages people to do illegal acts (e.g. how the whole aim of Manhunt is to kill innocent civillians for no reason)
They have this great fancy dynamic lighting engine with all these cool effects...
But they make the whole game so DARK that you cant even SEE their engine at work.
The origonal doom was good because some areas were dark but mostly it was light with outdoor areas, rooms full of brightly lit computer gear, even the pools of acid were brightly lit.
I dont know if its related but I do know that several things with the word "ninja" in it (most notably the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Ninja Gaiden) had the word "ninja" removed in some places for some wierd reason.
Its the same people that protest about kids who prey (to whatever god their faith believes in) whilst at school.
I dont think its that these people are "anti-religion" per se (although some might be) but that they dont want religion in places where their family will be directly exposed to it (especially without warning) Just like there are people who dont think other things (e.g. violence, nudity etc) should be around in places without warning.
They DO censor some things across the board. And some things are OK but only in Mature rated games or something.
For example, they probobly DO still censor religious symbols in games (especially those rated "Everyone") because despite the so-called "tolerance" in the US, there are still a lot of people who would complain (and rightly so in some cases) about religious symbols in a video game with no warnings that they are there.
When it works, it works great. Its how they handle problems that is the problem.
Here in australia, I can log into my online banking and transfer money directly to any australian bank account with any other bank. If banks worldwide got together and made that possible for the entire world (just think of all the Bank Fees they would be able to charge for the privilage) it would put an end to crap like Paycrud.
The first company to come up with a graphics card good enough to play the games I play (e.g. Halo/Halo CE, Tron 2.0, C&C Renegade, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3D) AND which has windows drivers good enough for the aformentioned games (Open Source would be nice but I
suspect you cant do that on windows because you need to sign NDAs to get at some of the OpenGL/Direct3D hooks/devkits) AND which has Open Source linux drivers good enough for WINE and whatever else will get my $ (especially if it can do all that nice programmable shader stuff in OpenGL on both linux and windows so I can have a play with it)
As for issues relating to development (i.e. the issue with not being able to make an ASIC due to costs), just find a DSP or some other kind of CPU which is geared for the math involved in doing this stuf (there must be a CPU thats fast enough, cheap enough and has the right features somewhere) and then write the whole card as (closed source) firmware for this CPU. Then, there would be a defined (and open) interface to this firmware.
but all those "better" solutions relied on either external speakers or output to a TV or monitor with a speaker in it. Which is no good for a server (where extra speakers are a hassle)
Cracking ANY dongle protected program is dead simple if you can get hold of the program itself and the matching dongle. Depending on the dongle brand, there are even automated programs that can just read the data from the dongle and unwrap the program no problems. Or emulators that can "emulate" the dongle (again using data read from it)
The sooner games companies (and others) realize that all this "Copy Protection" crap is never going to work for the PC as it is today, the better.
Although if you really wanted pretty much foolproof copy protection, here is how it could be done (certainly for a console): All games for/code on the console would have all program code encrypted with RSA or something similar. The encryption keys would be the usual secret/public keypair (with only a very few people having the secret part, remember the XBOX RSA signing key is not yet public). With some kind of RSA chip on the motherboard (containing the public part of the key internally), every instruction passing through to the CPU could be decrypted (I dont know exactly how fesable real-time decoding of RSA or something similar would be, even with a RSA chip on the board. If real-time decryption is not fesable at the processor speeds involved, another option is to have the RSA chip but have each block of code decvrypted all at once into main RAM before it runs. Modifying the RSA keychip to make it look for another public key is not fesable. And, as long as the private key stays secret, it should quite effectivly prevent the running of illegitimate code. Combine this with hardware/code to make sure that games can only run from legitimate masters and not from burnt disks (perhaps make the drive unable to read any form of burnt disks whatsoever) and it should be difficult to crack unless someone finds a vulnerability in RSA (and if that happens, things would happen that are a LOT more serious than a few geeks playing pirate copies of some game a few days before it raches stores:)
Or if encryption is too difficult/slow, you could just do what the current xbox does except move the RSA code into a seperate ASIC so you can sign the BIOS with RSA too (with the signature hash for the BIOS being inside the RSA chip or something)
Oh and also to prevent hacking, make it so that getting at the RSA chip or the BIOS without causing lots of damage is impossible.
The other option is to do what Nintendo did with the GameCube and invent a new media format that nothing except the GameCube can ever read. Seen any ways to copy, download and play GameCube games lately?:)
Slashdot Mirror
1.to get a patent, you should be required to demonstrate what you are trying to patent (i.e. a prototype, working model or failing that complete blueprints). In the case of software patents, you would need to demonstrate working code for whatever it is (e.g. if its a compression algorithim, you would need to demonstrate an implementation that can compress/uncompress data)
This would eliminate a fair chunk of the "overbroad" patents that can be twisted to apply to many different things.
2.Do more to find Prior Art (and make it easier for anyone to submit prior art for an existing patent to get it invalidated). Also, have bigger penalties for patents that get invalidated by prior art (something sliding so big companies get hit much harder than backyard inventors)
3.give the USPTO more money so that they can do their job properly and remove the system where its finantially benifical to them to pass a patent vs failing it.
Together these 3 should get rid of most of the stupid patents...
Here in australia, many DVD players (including the one I just bought) are region free out of the box. :)
It might say "region 4" but it is definatly region free
ok, that is something I was not aware of :)
Firstly, does the free ATI driver support a card (well enough to play Quake III) you can buy new from ATI right now?
And secondly, is there any support for the "free" driver (running on the aformentioned current ATI Card) from ATI (e.g. specs or whatever else)?
i.e. can you run Quake III using an ATI card/GPU that is still being maufactured by ATI along with totally free drivers where all the info used to produce the bits of code used to get Quake III to run has been provided by ATI.
I would like to see someone compile a list of all cases where it is possible to use a given piece of hardware (e.g. WiFi card) using only 100% Open Source code for all the stuff that executes on the host CPU (closed firmware that executes on a microcontroler or CPU on the card itself is OK as long as the licence for said firmware is good enough to enable it to be packaged with said Open Source drivers).
Drivers that only exist because someone reverse engineered the hardware and there is absolutly no company support for them dont count.
Let me know when I can build a machine to play the (soon to be open source) Quake III using only hardware that meets this criteria.
The "open" ATI drivers dont really count since they (AFAIK) dont support the latest cards and dont do 3D in any way that is good enough for Quake III.
If someone can show me a way to play Quake III on linux using 100% open source code (or 100% open source code except for the Q3 binary itself since thats not open yet), feel free.
But everything I have seen and read sugests that what I ask is not possible.
If it was that simple to write a DirectX layer (not to mention a layer for all the other windows-sepecific API calls made by a typical windows game such as thread calls, file calls etc), the WINE guys would have done it by now and I would be playing C&C Renegade, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and all my other windows stuff with it :)
Why dont they just do what they do here in australia with Aussie Rules matches.
If the game is not a sellout, it is played as a delayed telecast in the local market.
It works here and we get to see all home games for the 2 local teams (here in perth)
aah, so its more like the WOW layer windows NT uses to run 16 bit apps...
I dont know for sure but I think that the windows layer in OS/2 was basicly something like WINE (in that it translated windows calls into OS/2 calls)
As someone who has not only been around before the first release of Hyrule Magic and knows the author but has even added code to it myself (at least I think they are still using my code) I must say that Hyrule Magic is one of the 2 best editors for any ROM that I have ever seen/used.
:)
The other one is Lunar Magic, an editor for the SNES classic Super Mario World.
If you like zelda and editing, Hyrule Magic is a serious tool.
And if you like zelda, play the excellent Zelda 3 Challenge hack when it is released.
I wont link to the actual Hyrule MAgic site since it seems to be suffering bandwidth/hosting issues and the last thing that they need right now is a slashdotting
If this really IS fibre-to-the-home, I would assume that the special router is one designed to hook up to the fibre link.
It would definatly be illegal to sell this game in australia if it was refused classification.
In fact, I think there was some trouble back when GTA III came out because they released it before it had an OFLC rating, the OFLC gave it an RC rating so they had to recall stuff from shelves and remove the offensive content.
Personally, I dont think that ANY video game should be banned unless it specifically encourages people to do illegal acts (e.g. how the whole aim of Manhunt is to kill innocent civillians for no reason)
They have this great fancy dynamic lighting engine with all these cool effects...
But they make the whole game so DARK that you cant even SEE their engine at work.
The origonal doom was good because some areas were dark but mostly it was light with outdoor areas, rooms full of brightly lit computer gear, even the pools of acid were brightly lit.
I dont know if its related but I do know that several things with the word "ninja" in it (most notably the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Ninja Gaiden) had the word "ninja" removed in some places for some wierd reason.
What reason would Apache have to do anything with Sender-ID?
Sendmail perhaps but not apache...
Its the same people that protest about kids who prey (to whatever god their faith believes in) whilst at school.
I dont think its that these people are "anti-religion" per se (although some might be) but that they dont want religion in places where their family will be directly exposed to it (especially without warning)
Just like there are people who dont think other things (e.g. violence, nudity etc) should be around in places without warning.
They DO censor some things across the board.
And some things are OK but only in Mature rated games or something.
For example, they probobly DO still censor religious symbols in games (especially those rated "Everyone") because despite the so-called "tolerance" in the US, there are still a lot of people who would complain (and rightly so in some cases) about religious symbols in a video game with no warnings that they are there.
When it works, it works great.
Its how they handle problems that is the problem.
Here in australia, I can log into my online banking and transfer money directly to any australian bank account with any other bank.
If banks worldwide got together and made that possible for the entire world (just think of all the Bank Fees they would be able to charge for the privilage) it would put an end to crap like Paycrud.
Actually, the Gameboy Advance is more like a portable NES or SNES than a spectrum :)
Heck, I wouldnt be surprised if there is a ZX Spectrum EMULATOR for the GBA...
Just what exactly was the 65816 actually USED in?
I know it was used in the Apple IIGS I think but was that the only thing to use it?
The first company to come up with a graphics card good enough to play the games I play (e.g. Halo/Halo CE, Tron 2.0, C&C Renegade, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3D) AND which has windows drivers good enough for the aformentioned games (Open Source would be nice but I
suspect you cant do that on windows because you need to sign NDAs to get at some of the OpenGL/Direct3D hooks/devkits) AND which has Open Source linux drivers good enough for WINE and whatever else will get my $ (especially if it can do all that nice programmable shader stuff in OpenGL on both linux and windows so I can have a play with it)
As for issues relating to development (i.e. the issue with not being able to make an ASIC due to costs), just find a DSP or some other kind of CPU which is geared for the math involved in doing this stuf (there must be a CPU thats fast enough, cheap enough and has the right features somewhere) and then write the whole card as (closed source) firmware for this CPU. Then, there would be a defined (and open) interface to this firmware.
but all those "better" solutions relied on either external speakers or output to a TV or monitor with a speaker in it.
Which is no good for a server (where extra speakers are a hassle)
They have a Sony only store in the perth CBD (australia) too.
Cracking ANY dongle protected program is dead simple if you can get hold of the program itself and the matching dongle.
:)
:)
Depending on the dongle brand, there are even automated programs that can just read the data from the dongle and unwrap the program no problems.
Or emulators that can "emulate" the dongle (again using data read from it)
The sooner games companies (and others) realize that all this "Copy Protection" crap is never going to work for the PC as it is today, the better.
Although if you really wanted pretty much foolproof copy protection, here is how it could be done (certainly for a console):
All games for/code on the console would have all program code encrypted with RSA or something similar. The encryption keys would be the usual secret/public keypair (with only a very few people having the secret part, remember the XBOX RSA signing key is not yet public).
With some kind of RSA chip on the motherboard (containing the public part of the key internally), every instruction passing through to the CPU could be decrypted (I dont know exactly how fesable real-time decoding of RSA or something similar would be, even with a RSA chip on the board. If real-time decryption is not fesable at the processor speeds involved, another option is to have the RSA chip but have each block of code decvrypted all at once into main RAM before it runs.
Modifying the RSA keychip to make it look for another public key is not fesable. And, as long as the private key stays secret, it should quite effectivly prevent the running of illegitimate code.
Combine this with hardware/code to make sure that games can only run from legitimate masters and not from burnt disks (perhaps make the drive unable to read any form of burnt disks whatsoever) and it should be difficult to crack unless someone finds a vulnerability in RSA (and if that happens, things would happen that are a LOT more serious than a few geeks playing pirate copies of some game a few days before it raches stores
Or if encryption is too difficult/slow, you could just do what the current xbox does except move the RSA code into a seperate ASIC so you can sign the BIOS with RSA too (with the signature hash for the BIOS being inside the RSA chip or something)
Oh and also to prevent hacking, make it so that getting at the RSA chip or the BIOS without causing lots of damage is impossible.
The other option is to do what Nintendo did with the GameCube and invent a new media format that nothing except the GameCube can ever read. Seen any ways to copy, download and play GameCube games lately?
The definition of VOIP that should be adopted is any service that lets you call up people on the regular PSTN phone network and lets them call up you.
So, something like MSN/AIM/etc voice chat doesnt count because its totally IP based and cant connect to the PSTN.
Aparently, XPSP2 (including the new IE) was recompiled with the latest visual studio and with all the options turned on to better catch issues.