And what if we chose a different place to use as an analogy, as it seems obvious that certain locations can have worse repercussions...
What if you broke into a blood bank?
You can bet your arse that the mere indication that you had unauthorised and unfettered access to a blood bank would have costly repercussions for that organisation - full audits, physical checks and tests, and that's if they don't simply junk all the blood you had access to...
Compromised servers are no longer trustworthy - cleaning up after even a "benign" hacker can be costly.
You are more than able to bring your own case, accept the risks of doing so, and reap whatever you get Apple to settle for.
Those legal costs might very well take a big bite out of whatever you get. And if you lose, you will still have legal costs to cover - thems be the risks.
They could do that anyway, every laser and inkjet printer has a unique signature in the way it prints, with the spacing of dots, dirt and unintended marks left on the paper - it's an inherent part of the character of each printer, but needs skill and time to interpret.
I recall watching a UK police documentary about fraud over a decade ago, where they IDed the exact printer some fraudulent documents were printed on, proving their suspect was linked to the case. The evidence stood up in court too.
If such a revolution were to happen, I highly doubt the perpetrators are going to wait to build a body of evidence against you before they stick you in the deepest dungeon they can find.
It didn't take much for the "victors" in the Libyan conflict to start emptying towns of opposition tribes members after all... just some UN air and logistics support.
No, what BusyBox were doing was relying on the termination clause in the GPLv2 - which does not grant you a new license to distribute if you violate it but come back into compliance...
BusyBox were using that little "oversight" to force compliance on third party code before they would grant a new distribution license - otherwise, the party would have no standing at all to distribute BusyBox even after coming back into compliance without BusyBoxes explicit agreement.
It wasn't restitution or redress, it was the fact that the violator completely lost all rights to distribute and would have to find an alternative that BusyBox were using to force compliance on code they had no control over.
Being unable to distribute BusyBox is, in a lot of cases, a fairly significant issue - there is currently no alternative, so you had to bow to BusyBoxes demands to get a new distribution license. Try and continue to distribute, and its trivial to prove that you were doing so without a license.
Actually, the entire thread is about control - not just API and source level control, its about ultimate control of your own product. If you are coding to a closed third party API, then you are not in control, and a similar argument can be made regarding third party open source projects and their licenses.
BusyBox enjoy a position where they can force compliance on third party code, code they have no control over - and I'm sorry but compliance of the linux kernel license is down to linux kernel contributors and not third parties. If the linux kernel contributors are lax about enforcing their license, what right does BusyBox have to enforce it in their stead? Thats like my neighbour enforcing trespass restrictions on my front lawn because I'm not.
If the linux kernel contributors are fine with people not being in strict adherence with the license, then its quite frankly none of BusyBoxes business to do it instead.
And so the Sony employee was creating a situation where BusyBox had no power. Excellent.
Let's not forget that it's was the original unions that wanted cottage industries to continue, with the poor practices, the child labour and terrible conditions included - or do you conveniently forget about the acts of destruction gangs of workers carried out against new dangled technologies? The engines destroyed in shipping, the factories burned to the ground (to the point where in England factories started to be built with no flammable material in the structure at all), farming machines destroyed in the night (to the point where farmers were told that they should leave the machines out in the open at night, otherwise they would lose their barns and homes as well).
If you open your eyes enough, both sides have a terrible history.
Oh wait, didn't a Sony employee recently get run out of Slashdotville because they no longer wanted to rely on BusyBox and intended to replace it with something they could control? I distictly remember a lot of derision about his plans...
That's what I did with a restaurants self-ordering system recently - two iPads, a pinned web app and a secure fixed case which covered all buttons. Not yet had an issue.
I have been of the opinion that the "Arab Spring" has been a bit of a damp squib - Egypt is still rioting, the President left and the military took over, Tunisia elected an Islamist party, Libya has descended into much the same (the "winners" are taking actions against the "losers", to the point where they have forcibly emptied entire towns which supported Gadaffi and will not allow the former occupants to return, creating a large migrant internal refuge crisis which didn't exist before).
It certainly doesn't look like it would be the big thing everyone hoped it would be.
I make a comment further down in reply to someone else, but largely its through sales of goods in markets, or other services - I was buying vouchers in denominations as small as 500 Shillings in Uganda, which is about the equivalent of 15 British pence, or 10 cents. And that would do for a 10 minute call.
Charging is done at roadside stalls, usually either off of a mains supply where there is one (and where the person with the phone isn't connected to that supply), petrol generator or just by a kid or two sat all day turning a hand crank. You saw several of these at each roadside trading point, nothing more than a shanty shack with hand painted advertising.
There certainly is money exchanged in rural villages, and these people travel for hours just to make the equivalent of a dollar or two through selling bananas or pineapples. You have to go really rural for money to disappear altogether - I did a lot of traveling in Uganda and we never came across a village which didn't have some form of money transaction going on.
Because they already have uses for it - take my Uganda example, everyone already has a mobile phone (pre-paid - MTN usually) and its routine to see booths in major trading places with signs saying "mobile phone and battery charging available here" (usually done by generator or hand cranking - yup, young kids sat down all day cranking a handle to generate electricity).
Mobile phones allow for easy communication, which means you can accomplish trading easier - ring around to see which trading station has few bananas that morning so you can go there and make a little more money.
Electric lights allow for a much better, constant light source than fires or candles - which means work can carry on in homes later in the evening, more income for the family.
I really think most people don't understand these sorts of cultures until they visit the places - I certainly didn't three weeks ago, and my trip really changed my perspective.
In the UK you could have a pre-pay meter installed on request, and also if the electricity company deems you to be a bad risk (refusal to pay debts etc), and has been this way ever since I can remember (I remember my gran having to stick 50p coins into her meter when I was 4 or 5 - a good 30 years ago).
I just spent two weeks in Uganda, at a rural hospital in Kisiizi - there is no link to the national grid, so they generate their own electricity off of a waterfall that they have (really impressive).
With the excess that they generate, they sell to surrounding villages - the way that they get paid is that each building they link to the Kisiizi grid they also install what is basically a pay-as-you-use black box, as simple as you like. The locals buy pre-paid vouchers from authorised sellers, and they text the code to a number (basically everyone in Uganda, poor or not, has a mobile phone - landlines are extremely hard to find) and their box gets credited with the value.
It has really helped the villages surrounding Kisiizi, as while Uganda has a rural electrification project (again using pre-payment), its very very slow moving (I visited dozens of villages that were no more than 30 minutes off of major highways, and none of them have mains electricity). Fraud and theft of electricity has found to be very small, in general those in the villages are honest and pay their dues.
As an example to my point, the 2008 spectrum auctions raised nearly $20Billion for the US Treasury - definitely not getting the public spectrum for free...
The billions of dollars paid in frequency licenses by these companies insinuate that they are most certainly not using the public spectrum free of charge.
Again, as well they should - they are not beholden to test extensions and optimisations on third party chips, only their own. If its not their chip, then they cannot be 100% sure that the maker of said chip has implemented everything correctly and they should be disabled.
I still do not see an actual issue here, just a perceived issue thats being pushed by those who really want to find a problem with Intel.
Because there is no such thing as a "standard x86 extension listing" - Intel test the optimisations for all CPUs they target, so do you expect Intel to have to also test competitors chips or do you expect them to just hope everything works fine on an Athlon as well? No, the correct thing to do is assume nothing works.
Actually I would disagree with you - Intel isnt required to know the features of non-Intel chips as well as it's own, so is perfectly within it's rights to not apply any optimisations to such chips.
From earlier discussions on this topic, that's all Intel were doing - they weren't going out of their way to gimp non-Intel chip, they were just treating it as an unknown and the chips performance would suffer as a result. Make the chip masquerade as a known entity and it would be treated as that known entity.
Which is perfectly acceptable in my mind - Intel isn't required to have the knowledge of competitors chips that it obviously must have of it's own.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. Let's take everyone at face value and trust their entire word.
Doesn't that sound a little ridiculous to you?
What he says his motives were, and what his motives actually were are two different things. Just because he claims X doesn't make X true.
And what if we chose a different place to use as an analogy, as it seems obvious that certain locations can have worse repercussions...
What if you broke into a blood bank?
You can bet your arse that the mere indication that you had unauthorised and unfettered access to a blood bank would have costly repercussions for that organisation - full audits, physical checks and tests, and that's if they don't simply junk all the blood you had access to...
Compromised servers are no longer trustworthy - cleaning up after even a "benign" hacker can be costly.
You are more than able to bring your own case, accept the risks of doing so, and reap whatever you get Apple to settle for.
Those legal costs might very well take a big bite out of whatever you get. And if you lose, you will still have legal costs to cover - thems be the risks.
They could do that anyway, every laser and inkjet printer has a unique signature in the way it prints, with the spacing of dots, dirt and unintended marks left on the paper - it's an inherent part of the character of each printer, but needs skill and time to interpret.
I recall watching a UK police documentary about fraud over a decade ago, where they IDed the exact printer some fraudulent documents were printed on, proving their suspect was linked to the case. The evidence stood up in court too.
If such a revolution were to happen, I highly doubt the perpetrators are going to wait to build a body of evidence against you before they stick you in the deepest dungeon they can find.
It didn't take much for the "victors" in the Libyan conflict to start emptying towns of opposition tribes members after all... just some UN air and logistics support.
No, what BusyBox were doing was relying on the termination clause in the GPLv2 - which does not grant you a new license to distribute if you violate it but come back into compliance...
BusyBox were using that little "oversight" to force compliance on third party code before they would grant a new distribution license - otherwise, the party would have no standing at all to distribute BusyBox even after coming back into compliance without BusyBoxes explicit agreement.
It wasn't restitution or redress, it was the fact that the violator completely lost all rights to distribute and would have to find an alternative that BusyBox were using to force compliance on code they had no control over.
Being unable to distribute BusyBox is, in a lot of cases, a fairly significant issue - there is currently no alternative, so you had to bow to BusyBoxes demands to get a new distribution license. Try and continue to distribute, and its trivial to prove that you were doing so without a license.
The luddites were not the only people doing these things...
And how is a trade union not a political movement?
Actually, the entire thread is about control - not just API and source level control, its about ultimate control of your own product. If you are coding to a closed third party API, then you are not in control, and a similar argument can be made regarding third party open source projects and their licenses.
BusyBox enjoy a position where they can force compliance on third party code, code they have no control over - and I'm sorry but compliance of the linux kernel license is down to linux kernel contributors and not third parties. If the linux kernel contributors are lax about enforcing their license, what right does BusyBox have to enforce it in their stead? Thats like my neighbour enforcing trespass restrictions on my front lawn because I'm not.
If the linux kernel contributors are fine with people not being in strict adherence with the license, then its quite frankly none of BusyBoxes business to do it instead.
And so the Sony employee was creating a situation where BusyBox had no power. Excellent.
So yes, it was something they could control, and not fall under the control of someone else.
My point precisely.
Let's not forget that it's was the original unions that wanted cottage industries to continue, with the poor practices, the child labour and terrible conditions included - or do you conveniently forget about the acts of destruction gangs of workers carried out against new dangled technologies? The engines destroyed in shipping, the factories burned to the ground (to the point where in England factories started to be built with no flammable material in the structure at all), farming machines destroyed in the night (to the point where farmers were told that they should leave the machines out in the open at night, otherwise they would lose their barns and homes as well).
If you open your eyes enough, both sides have a terrible history.
Then don't use their offerings.
Oh wait, didn't a Sony employee recently get run out of Slashdotville because they no longer wanted to rely on BusyBox and intended to replace it with something they could control? I distictly remember a lot of derision about his plans...
That's what I did with a restaurants self-ordering system recently - two iPads, a pinned web app and a secure fixed case which covered all buttons. Not yet had an issue.
I have been of the opinion that the "Arab Spring" has been a bit of a damp squib - Egypt is still rioting, the President left and the military took over, Tunisia elected an Islamist party, Libya has descended into much the same (the "winners" are taking actions against the "losers", to the point where they have forcibly emptied entire towns which supported Gadaffi and will not allow the former occupants to return, creating a large migrant internal refuge crisis which didn't exist before).
It certainly doesn't look like it would be the big thing everyone hoped it would be.
Yup, certainly seems to be working in the USA...
Read my other posts on the subject - my view fresh from Uganda, which while certainly it has developed parts, definitely has undeveloped rural areas.
I make a comment further down in reply to someone else, but largely its through sales of goods in markets, or other services - I was buying vouchers in denominations as small as 500 Shillings in Uganda, which is about the equivalent of 15 British pence, or 10 cents. And that would do for a 10 minute call.
Charging is done at roadside stalls, usually either off of a mains supply where there is one (and where the person with the phone isn't connected to that supply), petrol generator or just by a kid or two sat all day turning a hand crank. You saw several of these at each roadside trading point, nothing more than a shanty shack with hand painted advertising.
There certainly is money exchanged in rural villages, and these people travel for hours just to make the equivalent of a dollar or two through selling bananas or pineapples. You have to go really rural for money to disappear altogether - I did a lot of traveling in Uganda and we never came across a village which didn't have some form of money transaction going on.
Because they already have uses for it - take my Uganda example, everyone already has a mobile phone (pre-paid - MTN usually) and its routine to see booths in major trading places with signs saying "mobile phone and battery charging available here" (usually done by generator or hand cranking - yup, young kids sat down all day cranking a handle to generate electricity).
Mobile phones allow for easy communication, which means you can accomplish trading easier - ring around to see which trading station has few bananas that morning so you can go there and make a little more money.
Electric lights allow for a much better, constant light source than fires or candles - which means work can carry on in homes later in the evening, more income for the family.
I really think most people don't understand these sorts of cultures until they visit the places - I certainly didn't three weeks ago, and my trip really changed my perspective.
In the UK you could have a pre-pay meter installed on request, and also if the electricity company deems you to be a bad risk (refusal to pay debts etc), and has been this way ever since I can remember (I remember my gran having to stick 50p coins into her meter when I was 4 or 5 - a good 30 years ago).
I just spent two weeks in Uganda, at a rural hospital in Kisiizi - there is no link to the national grid, so they generate their own electricity off of a waterfall that they have (really impressive).
With the excess that they generate, they sell to surrounding villages - the way that they get paid is that each building they link to the Kisiizi grid they also install what is basically a pay-as-you-use black box, as simple as you like. The locals buy pre-paid vouchers from authorised sellers, and they text the code to a number (basically everyone in Uganda, poor or not, has a mobile phone - landlines are extremely hard to find) and their box gets credited with the value.
It has really helped the villages surrounding Kisiizi, as while Uganda has a rural electrification project (again using pre-payment), its very very slow moving (I visited dozens of villages that were no more than 30 minutes off of major highways, and none of them have mains electricity). Fraud and theft of electricity has found to be very small, in general those in the villages are honest and pay their dues.
As an example to my point, the 2008 spectrum auctions raised nearly $20Billion for the US Treasury - definitely not getting the public spectrum for free...
The billions of dollars paid in frequency licenses by these companies insinuate that they are most certainly not using the public spectrum free of charge.
Again, as well they should - they are not beholden to test extensions and optimisations on third party chips, only their own. If its not their chip, then they cannot be 100% sure that the maker of said chip has implemented everything correctly and they should be disabled.
I still do not see an actual issue here, just a perceived issue thats being pushed by those who really want to find a problem with Intel.
Because there is no such thing as a "standard x86 extension listing" - Intel test the optimisations for all CPUs they target, so do you expect Intel to have to also test competitors chips or do you expect them to just hope everything works fine on an Athlon as well? No, the correct thing to do is assume nothing works.
AMD can always release their own compiler...
Actually I would disagree with you - Intel isnt required to know the features of non-Intel chips as well as it's own, so is perfectly within it's rights to not apply any optimisations to such chips.
From earlier discussions on this topic, that's all Intel were doing - they weren't going out of their way to gimp non-Intel chip, they were just treating it as an unknown and the chips performance would suffer as a result. Make the chip masquerade as a known entity and it would be treated as that known entity.
Which is perfectly acceptable in my mind - Intel isn't required to have the knowledge of competitors chips that it obviously must have of it's own.
There is one earmarked fir north Wales, but the majority are at existing sites in Engand.