The creators of the first non-IBM PC BIOS had one team decompiling/inspecting/reverse engineering the code and writing up documents describing how it worked.
Almost right. Decompiling wasn't necessary as the full x86 assembly source code for the BIOS was listed in the technical reference manual that was available to anyone for quite some time, and the comments were very complete so there wasn't any real work needed to figure out how it worked - it was just a matter of the Phoenix team writing up a functional spec that someone else would write code to.
We're in total agreement that Blizzard is completely overstepping their bounds, and WoWGlider wouldn't even exist if there was actually more real gameplay in WoW instead of having to rely so much on mindless grinding for character progression. Interestingly, as I read the EULA it's a violation for me to use my Logitech G11 keyboard, as it effectively gives me an additional 54 keys and provides the ability to generate single-key macros far beyond what the native WoW interface provides, thus allowing me to "...MODIFY OR HACK THE GAME INTERFACE, ENVIRONMENT, AND/OR EXPERIENCE IN ANY WAY NOT EXPRESSLY AUTHORIZED BY BLIZZARD..." (yes, they use caps there). It also seems that it'd be against the EULA for me to have Wireshark/Ethereal up when I was playing (I occasionally play a bit during the wait for code to compile), as that allows me to "...intercept, emulate or redirect the communication protocols used by Blizzard in any way, including without limitation through protocol emulation, tunneling, packet sniffing, modifying or adding components to the Game, use of a utility program or any other techniques now known or hereafter developed, for any purpose..."
Blizzard needs to understand that the machines WoW runs on, *don't* belong to them.
Uhh, if the code was written from guessed at specs I don't see how it could be good quality
Seemed to work well in the 1980's for a one-man shop called Grey Matter Response when they introduced a software mod with additional memory for the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer that got it to do stuff that Yamaha had claimed the synth was not capable of. Not long after that, Yamaha was flying the guy to Japan so their engineers could pick his brain.
please dont post the link to that stupid wiki again there is not enough information there to write a driver
Yet somehow the bcm43xx coders were able to use that information to build their own driver, and without the benefit of being able to look at the source of someone else's working implementation. Hmm.
Oh give me a break - no one was "lynched". If you think so, please quote the relevant lines from Michael's posts. The fact remains that the GPL'd code should never have been in the BSD repository without permission, and when called on it the BSD folks got their panties in a twist even after Michael offered a means to resolve the situation in a manner that would benefit the BSD project.
And *none* of the discussion thus far explains how the BSD people thought they could implement the driver using the GPL'd code as a jumping-off point without turning it into a derivative work.
it's an issue of a certain amount of code in an as yet non-working driver being too derivative of a copyrighted product
This is true, but there was nothing keeping the BSD guys from using the functional (and public) spec that Buesch's team used to guarantee a clean implementation for *their* driver. They'd have totally avoided polluting their own codebase and removed all doubt as to the legitimacy of the BSD driver. By using the GPL'd code to get a jump on the process, they introduced the possibility that the driver might then have been considered a derivative work, with all the potential headaches that go along with that. There's just no justification for putting the GPL'd code in the public repository without permission simply because of the licensing issues. It's not difficult to set up a private repo on a local box and work from that for initial development until your code is ready to go to the public repo if you you can't live without using the GPL'd stuff for development, but you absolutely shouldn't be distributing anything you do that contains GPL'd stuff if you're not willing to abide by the license.
Which is exactly why Buesch and the other folks working on the GPL driver did it the way they did - have one team reverse-engineer the existing Windows driver and write a complete functional spec, and have another unrelated team write a totally new Linux driver to that spec.
Still doesn't explain what you thought sucked about the A1200. The A1200's clock speed was set at 14.28 MHz for a very specific reason, one that would allow it to run circles around the Mac II when performing graphically-intensive tasks.
a few apps bite it on an emergency hotfix, and people act like this is a big deal.
In my case, it was a bit more serious than "a few apps bite it". On my work machine, Windows was stuck in a boot-bluescreen-reboot loop and was totally unable to start, even into safe mode. It wasn't until I booted ERD Commander and rolled off the 925902 hotfix that the machine would cooperate. Interestingly, the Windows event log was unable to even give me the hotfix number - I had to get that from ERD.
Windows should be more robust than to fail in such a manner, but it sounds to me like the root problem was that the guys at Realtek have shown once again that they still apparently can't write decent code.
You'll be hearing from my attorney then, as I have already patented a substantially similar system that also includes a novel "preview" button designed to be clicked immediately after entering text, and is present largely to instill feelings of regret and inadequacy in the user when the aforementioned "submit" button is used without doing so.
Under the federal rules, before the defendant has answered, a plaintiff can withdraw its case "without prejudice".
I'm a bit confused - it seems to my non-lawyer self that it might have been more advantageous for the defense to have formally answered and thus committed the RIAA to a losing battle rather than what seemed to be (justified) taunts regarding the weakness of their case. Certainly it would have cost the defendant more up-front to continue the case, but I'd imagine those fees would ultimately be paid by the RIAA. Was there a legal obligation for Mr. Ledford to have responded as he did, perhaps because he had a duty to point out the improper venue or other technicalities, or was it just an attempt to get the case settled ASAP to save time and money for everyone?
...Wal*Mart is literally the largest retailer that has ever existed in the known universe, and no longer being able to sell to them is not good for business.
The only think I buy at WalMart with any semblance of regularity is ammunition when I decide that I want to go shooting and don't have much on-hand. It's usually early in the morning, so there are fewer customers there, and I know I can go straight to the one area, pick and pay, and walk right out.
Unless they're out of the Winchester White Box 100-round boxes in.45ACP, which always seems to be the case whenever I'm there. Ammo is one of those things that I find to be more convenient to buy online, even though it's a bit more expensive with shipping.
I've walked out of stores where I might have a purchase because it's not possible to get all the information about a product from the shop floor, and shop assistants are rarely knowledgeable about their products or my needs.
That's a big one for me too - I don't feel like paying a premium when I'm the one that has to do all the legwork of researching an item because no one at the B&M can tell me anything about it.
It's actually "Recording Industry Association of America, Inc.". It's a privately held not-for-profit corporation based in New York. No way to tell for sure, but one would assume the vast majority of shares (if not all of them) are held by the member companies.
It you take pride in your skills and want to refine them, lear one assembly diealect. I would advide MC68000, but that is not in wide use today.
For that, you could just download and use an Amiga emulator. The Amiga-specific includes and libraries are a bit more difficult to come by, but the documentation is usually pretty cheap on eBay and it's certainly a great toy to play with.:-D
Knowing assembly is also helpful when you happen upon a compiler bug. I've had a couple of occasions where I've found bugs in MSVC-generated code that were causing problems in perfectly good C++ that I'd never have found otherwise.
680x0 assembly was similar in that respect - the register set was very orthogonal, and the chip in general was a blast to code for. Oh, and no segmentation either.;-)
As others posters here have said, this is an example of the system working appropriately. The system is fine. In fact, it's working great in this example, because the RIAA is terrified of having this argued in front of a jury of ordinary people, who will almost certainly identify them as the abusers they are, and find against them.
Which in turn is why more and more corporations refuse to do business with average people unless they're willing to sign their right to a jury trial away and subject any disagreements to binding arbitration. It's pretty damn hard nowadays to get a credit card or buy a car without having to submit to such a ridiculous demand.
Slashdot Mirror
The creators of the first non-IBM PC BIOS had one team decompiling/inspecting/reverse engineering the code and writing up documents describing how it worked.
Almost right. Decompiling wasn't necessary as the full x86 assembly source code for the BIOS was listed in the technical reference manual that was available to anyone for quite some time, and the comments were very complete so there wasn't any real work needed to figure out how it worked - it was just a matter of the Phoenix team writing up a functional spec that someone else would write code to.
We're in total agreement that Blizzard is completely overstepping their bounds, and WoWGlider wouldn't even exist if there was actually more real gameplay in WoW instead of having to rely so much on mindless grinding for character progression. Interestingly, as I read the EULA it's a violation for me to use my Logitech G11 keyboard, as it effectively gives me an additional 54 keys and provides the ability to generate single-key macros far beyond what the native WoW interface provides, thus allowing me to "...MODIFY OR HACK THE GAME INTERFACE, ENVIRONMENT, AND/OR EXPERIENCE IN ANY WAY NOT EXPRESSLY AUTHORIZED BY BLIZZARD..." (yes, they use caps there). It also seems that it'd be against the EULA for me to have Wireshark/Ethereal up when I was playing (I occasionally play a bit during the wait for code to compile), as that allows me to "...intercept, emulate or redirect the communication protocols used by Blizzard in any way, including without limitation through protocol emulation, tunneling, packet sniffing, modifying or adding components to the Game, use of a utility program or any other techniques now known or hereafter developed, for any purpose..."
Blizzard needs to understand that the machines WoW runs on, *don't* belong to them.
Yeah, those guys need to be sure to have a crowbar handy at all times when working on the system. Those damn headcrabs can get the tiniest spaces...
Uhh, if the code was written from guessed at specs I don't see how it could be good quality
Seemed to work well in the 1980's for a one-man shop called Grey Matter Response when they introduced a software mod with additional memory for the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer that got it to do stuff that Yamaha had claimed the synth was not capable of. Not long after that, Yamaha was flying the guy to Japan so their engineers could pick his brain.
please dont post the link to that stupid wiki again there is not enough information there to write a driver
Yet somehow the bcm43xx coders were able to use that information to build their own driver, and without the benefit of being able to look at the source of someone else's working implementation. Hmm.
Oh give me a break - no one was "lynched". If you think so, please quote the relevant lines from Michael's posts. The fact remains that the GPL'd code should never have been in the BSD repository without permission, and when called on it the BSD folks got their panties in a twist even after Michael offered a means to resolve the situation in a manner that would benefit the BSD project.
And *none* of the discussion thus far explains how the BSD people thought they could implement the driver using the GPL'd code as a jumping-off point without turning it into a derivative work.
I actually have a DSM-IV here on my bookshelf, so you can borrow mine. I'm not qualified to use it myself. :-D
It would be nothing but a disaster for GPL and non-GPL users if programmers could no longer read and learn from GPL'd code.
I agree with that statement 100%. One can read and learn from someone else's code without committing it to a public repository, though.
it's an issue of a certain amount of code in an as yet non-working driver being too derivative of a copyrighted product
This is true, but there was nothing keeping the BSD guys from using the functional (and public) spec that Buesch's team used to guarantee a clean implementation for *their* driver. They'd have totally avoided polluting their own codebase and removed all doubt as to the legitimacy of the BSD driver. By using the GPL'd code to get a jump on the process, they introduced the possibility that the driver might then have been considered a derivative work, with all the potential headaches that go along with that. There's just no justification for putting the GPL'd code in the public repository without permission simply because of the licensing issues. It's not difficult to set up a private repo on a local box and work from that for initial development until your code is ready to go to the public repo if you you can't live without using the GPL'd stuff for development, but you absolutely shouldn't be distributing anything you do that contains GPL'd stuff if you're not willing to abide by the license.
Which is exactly why Buesch and the other folks working on the GPL driver did it the way they did - have one team reverse-engineer the existing Windows driver and write a complete functional spec, and have another unrelated team write a totally new Linux driver to that spec.
aargh - 14.32 MHz. It's late. :-)
That's should have been Mac II
Still doesn't explain what you thought sucked about the A1200. The A1200's clock speed was set at 14.28 MHz for a very specific reason, one that would allow it to run circles around the Mac II when performing graphically-intensive tasks.
a few apps bite it on an emergency hotfix, and people act like this is a big deal.
In my case, it was a bit more serious than "a few apps bite it". On my work machine, Windows was stuck in a boot-bluescreen-reboot loop and was totally unable to start, even into safe mode. It wasn't until I booted ERD Commander and rolled off the 925902 hotfix that the machine would cooperate. Interestingly, the Windows event log was unable to even give me the hotfix number - I had to get that from ERD.
Windows should be more robust than to fail in such a manner, but it sounds to me like the root problem was that the guys at Realtek have shown once again that they still apparently can't write decent code.
You'll be hearing from my attorney then, as I have already patented a substantially similar system that also includes a novel "preview" button designed to be clicked immediately after entering text, and is present largely to instill feelings of regret and inadequacy in the user when the aforementioned "submit" button is used without doing so.
Thanks for the insight.
Under the federal rules, before the defendant has answered, a plaintiff can withdraw its case "without prejudice".
I'm a bit confused - it seems to my non-lawyer self that it might have been more advantageous for the defense to have formally answered and thus committed the RIAA to a losing battle rather than what seemed to be (justified) taunts regarding the weakness of their case. Certainly it would have cost the defendant more up-front to continue the case, but I'd imagine those fees would ultimately be paid by the RIAA. Was there a legal obligation for Mr. Ledford to have responded as he did, perhaps because he had a duty to point out the improper venue or other technicalities, or was it just an attempt to get the case settled ASAP to save time and money for everyone?
...Wal*Mart is literally the largest retailer that has ever existed in the known universe, and no longer being able to sell to them is not good for business.
Not always.
The only think I buy at WalMart with any semblance of regularity is ammunition when I decide that I want to go shooting and don't have much on-hand. It's usually early in the morning, so there are fewer customers there, and I know I can go straight to the one area, pick and pay, and walk right out.
.45ACP, which always seems to be the case whenever I'm there. Ammo is one of those things that I find to be more convenient to buy online, even though it's a bit more expensive with shipping.
Unless they're out of the Winchester White Box 100-round boxes in
I've walked out of stores where I might have a purchase because it's not possible to get all the information about a product from the shop floor, and shop assistants are rarely knowledgeable about their products or my needs.
That's a big one for me too - I don't feel like paying a premium when I'm the one that has to do all the legwork of researching an item because no one at the B&M can tell me anything about it.
Dude, we gotta start hanging out. ;-)
It's actually "Recording Industry Association of America, Inc.". It's a privately held not-for-profit corporation based in New York. No way to tell for sure, but one would assume the vast majority of shares (if not all of them) are held by the member companies.
It you take pride in your skills and want to refine them, lear one assembly diealect. I would advide MC68000, but that is not in wide use today.
:-D
For that, you could just download and use an Amiga emulator. The Amiga-specific includes and libraries are a bit more difficult to come by, but the documentation is usually pretty cheap on eBay and it's certainly a great toy to play with.
Knowing assembly is also helpful when you happen upon a compiler bug. I've had a couple of occasions where I've found bugs in MSVC-generated code that were causing problems in perfectly good C++ that I'd never have found otherwise.
680x0 assembly was similar in that respect - the register set was very orthogonal, and the chip in general was a blast to code for. Oh, and no segmentation either. ;-)
As others posters here have said, this is an example of the system working appropriately. The system is fine. In fact, it's working great in this example, because the RIAA is terrified of having this argued in front of a jury of ordinary people, who will almost certainly identify them as the abusers they are, and find against them.
Which in turn is why more and more corporations refuse to do business with average people unless they're willing to sign their right to a jury trial away and subject any disagreements to binding arbitration. It's pretty damn hard nowadays to get a credit card or buy a car without having to submit to such a ridiculous demand.
buy enough stock in viacom to control their interests -- gotta' be cheaper than paying $1b
Not possible - Sumner Redstone owns an overwhelming majority of the stock, and he ain't sellin'.