Pretty damn hard, I'd guess. You can find discussion areas like people using TINI embedded Java card along with STA013 mp3 decoder to do it but they all seem to be characterized by an initial burst of activity and then a trailing off once enthusiasm fades away...
But go for it and post the results if you get there !
You have to go further than just not paying for them.
You have to make sure it costs them.
Go in and buy the DRM media. Then take it back and say that it doesn't work on your player. Make sure you get the store manager. Ream his ass out good. Give him techno-babble when he asks what your player is.
Its surprising no-one has put any numbers on the discussion - the Act "extended the duration of all existing and future copyrights for 20 years - just like that".
You'd have to imagine thats a gift of many many billions of dollars to the copyright holders. And while this is not a zero sum situation, someone has also suffered to some extent. That someone is the public domain, shich is us, the non-copyright holders.
I hope they win and overturn this foul legislation.
There are lots of good posts here answering your original question. Assuming you decide to go ahead and patent.
But if it all sounds too much hassle, don't just do nothing. The only thing worse than not getting the patent is someone else getting it. That way they stop you from commercializing it.
I strongly suggest, if you decide not to patent, that you at least write up the description of your idea, and post it into the public domain somehow (eg, on your web site, and get someone else to confirm they saw it there). That way no-one else can patent your idea since there is prior art covering it (yours).
Of course this means you can't stop someone else from commercializing the idea. But since you're a little guy, not an evil corporate, realistically you probably don't have the legal firepower to defend your patent anyway. So you have a better chance of commercial success by just exploiting your idea.
Both Java and C# are perfectly fine languages for the actual purpose here - learning to write computer programs. That's not the issue though.
The underlying issue is whether those students will end up as vassals of the mighty MS empire, and every product of their labours for the rest of their lives results in another ka-chink of license revenue into the big money jar, because MS owns the runtime that their labours will be deployed on.
At least with Java it's already a given that multiple production-quality free (and not free) runtimes will be available. No-one becomes Sun's vassal by learning Java.
With C# we need to trust that initiatives like Mono will one day result in a realistic alternative to the monopoly platform.
Personally I think anyone who believes MS will let that happen should be studying Astrology, not CS.
Consider the porn industry as the cockroaches of the digital world, doing a disgusting job that nonetheless many people need done for them.
Just as cockroaches are allegedly the only creatures that will survive a nuclear holocaust, can scare your sister shitless and are also capable of inspiring such terrifying creative works as "The Nest", so the porn industry might use Napster to create an immense new force that sweeps over the post-crash Internet world like a tsunami.
Napster, the perfect delivery mechanism, and Porn, the perfect content, combine to create something I just wish I knew how to invest in. Oh, I guess that would be Private Media Group !
Yeah, and the question remains - WHY even open ourselves up to this kind of risk ?
Simple analysis shows that the morons who run these shows can even screw up simple paper-based systems that have been around for eons. And we expect to wave the "magic of open source" over them and have them turn into gurus who can build an unprecedentedly secure and massive electronic system that supports arguably the most important single process in the country ??
Maybe if:
we voted every few days on some micro-issues like what the tax on gas should be for the coming month
it genuinely mattered that the results take longer than a few seconds after the booths close to come in
the current system was chronically broken
...then there would be some reasons to try and fix the process with compooter magic. Otherwise lets leave things be.
Trying to impose digital rights management through a consortium is bound to fail
If you mean that other alternatives will always be available (ignoring absurd legislation) then you're right, it will fail - but if you mean that people will reject the DRM-ized technology and shift wholesale to Linux or BSD, that ain't going to happen.
Its already been demonstrated that the bulk of the world will happily continue using the monopoly OS even after years of blue screens of death and countless security exposures trumpeted loudly. Why should they switch to a better solution just because of some (to them) obscure argument about privacy ??
Then again, when they find they can't rip their buddy's CDs maybe that will start to focus their minds...
Sun couldn't donate the license fees unless they struck a bulk deal with Thomson - they'd leave themselves wide open to someone downloading billions of copies of the JMF with the meter ticking for each one.
This does suck though, the JMF is a really nice framework, we built a servlet that played MP3s through the office stereo system using it.
The weird thing though is the disconnect here between Thomson, who claim the licensing rules have always been clear, and Sun, the sort of company who you would think would not embed someone else's IP unless they were very clear on the licensing issues. Sounds like Sun was very stupid and Thomson was very cunning.
Whine, whine...oooh, they're spying on me again !!
So whats the big difference between this and the logs of your phone calls that get tracked right now ? They even get used for good - crimes get solved, missing people's last movements can be determined, terrorists located, etc, by appropriate use of phone call records. This seems pretty much the same to me, albeit on a more detailed scale.
For frig's sake, you live in a democracy, not a perfect system but the best known to man after many centuries of trying. Don't assume that everyone in power is corrupt and that all such record keeping is evil. It might actually be useful to track down terrorist fucktards for example. You don't hear people bleating about Telcos keeping call records.
And before trotting out the lame old slashdot mantra about how people can just surf anonymously or whatever - YES ! Thats the beauty of it ! If you're clever enough to surf anonymously then do it and this needn't bother you. Its there to help catch the stupid or technically challenged criminal, not the slashdotter and certainly not Dr. Evil either.
Lets face it, for SURE he developed this while he was working as an employee under a crytal clear agreement, so all his bases are belong to them. He was dead in the wrong, whether the idea was in his head, on paper or on a CD.
He could still have got away with it though - he should have quit his job, sat in the mountains for 3 weeks or so, pretending to dream the whole thing up, and then gone back and tried to sell it to his old company. Where he went wrong was being too chicken and trying to keep his safe day job while at the same time trying to sell this to his bosses. Trying to have it both ways and finishing up losing his house as a result.
Its a lesson for anyone out there who's got a great idea. With great rewards come great risks - if you've got a $10M idea, at least have the balls to take a few weeks out, change to another day job, then declare it in your "prior inventions" at the new place, leaving your free to sell it around.
A good input device might be conductive foam, its used to package chips and prevent ESD damage. Its resistance varies as you squeeze it so it could probably be used to detect almost any weak movements with some kind of simple electronic gadgetry on it.
I guess a better answer will be provided by some else though if there is a commercially available device - this sounds like one situation where traditional slashdot do-it-your-selfery should be abandoned if there is anything already out there that works..
A true classic more from the management side is Fred Brook's "The Mythical Man-month". Its based on his experiences running some of IBM's largest software projects. Almost everything in it to do with technology is long outdated (eg, not commenting your code in order to save on storage space - and (funny, considering Y2K) he recommends not wasting space by adding code to handle leap years, instead relying on operators to correct the date !) but most of what he says is still as true now as then.
The title comes from the bogus concept that you can speed up a project by, say, a factor of 3 by throwing three more people at it. Brooks has inspired thoughts on project planning and systems architecture for real big projects. Its a great read.
As you say there are a couple of ways dictatorships use technology:
Spreading propaganda to convince the masses that they need to sacrify their liberty for security.
Spying on the masses once you've taken their liberty to make sure they continue to hold those beliefs.
The Nazis were incredibly entrepeneurial in their use of technology for both of these:
Use of the radio for direct transmission of propaganda to people's own homes
Centralized wire tapping service plugged into the main telephone exchanges and private consular lines
Hitler's election campaigning using airplanes to cover several cities in a single day
"Multi-media" spectacles such as Speer's at the Nuremberg rally
And as you say, their regime was all the more firmly embedded because the people on the whole embraced it as the only alternative to Bolshevism - Hitler's was truly a popular government.
"But I'm just a little creeped out by the idea of using Mono for anything important (business-related)"
You've hit the nail on the head - mono will be great for fiddling with but in a huge enterprise-wide deployment theres no way that it would be adopted by any IT manager who valued his job. All it does is play into Microsoft's hands ("Why yes you SHOULD use.NET, Mr. customer. Its completely open, there's even an open source version that runs on linux !").
I don't know Ximian's real agenda but it must be tempting for them to think about the old bait and switch - get people hooked on the GPL'ed mono code and then offer the same code under a "for fee" redistributable license. Its been done before.
Maybe a better scheme would be to accept the fact that there's no way a bunch of paper pushers at the patent office are ever going to be able to meaningfully separate out the genuine innovations from the absolute BS that currently gets through.
Instead, let patent applicants put up a, say, $5K bond with their application. The patent office makes no attempt to validate the patent (just as presently, you might say:) but merely publish it.
Then, if someone finds any prior art, let them forward it to the patent office to examine it. Then the patent office makes a judgement, pays the bond across to the finder, and marks the patent as cancelled. Interested parties (those suckered into paying licensing fees) get notified by email alert.
Perhaps this would generate a thriving third world industry of people frantically chopping down many of the stupid patents which currently get issued.
Before complaining that putting up $5K would stifle creativity for the small guy, consider whether the current state of affairs actually works in the little guy's behalf or not...
I venture to guess, however, that your company is somewhat smaller than Microsoft, is held together by shared enthusiasm and the exilaration of short term releases, and that you don't face many of the problems that any large company, not just the Borg, does. I would never defend the quality of MS products but anyone who has worked on large products with many existing custoemrs in a large software company like an Oracle, Microsoft or IBM will understand that it is simply impossible to only hire expert programmers whose work never needs to be checked by anyone else and who don't need any supervision.
Some of your other statements are rather sweeping. Some parts of UML - such as object modelling - are very useful indeed and can act as highly rigorous sources for a lot of code and database generation or automated access. Others (like Use cases IMHO) suck and are of little use to programmers, though more in communication with PHBs and business types.
A lot of what you say is very true for small focused teams working in their bedrooms/garages/garretts but much less so for any large software developer who sells software for money. Your "expert-driven" approach would never work at a Microsoft.
Your last point, that OSS produces better results, is probably true. Certainly its more cost-efficient. But does it produce profitable companies that make heaps of money ? Maybe you don't like the idea of that. But most of the rest of the world, including your gray-haired neighbour who plans to retire on the proceeds of his portfolio, does.
Yep, and if "valuable beyond estimation" is the definition then I guess one would have to say that anything that saved even one human life should be considered invaluable, so Enigma would be for sure. I stand (or actually, sit with my feet on the desk) corrected !
Understanding how to decode Enigma was certainly valuable, but not invaluable for a couple of reasons:
The results could not be used freely because doing so would have made it obvious to the Germans that their messages were insecure and they would have switched to a new technology - even an Enigma with a couple more rotors which would have defeated all possible decryption. They did consider this a couple of times but were always reassured by the theoretical unbreakable nature of Enigma.
What some worthy called the "friction of war" - ie even knowing what the enemy's up to doesn't mean you can kick their ass with certainty. Once the action starts things rarely go according to plan.
So person X disassembled the Archos firmware, thus getting some access to their (uncommented) source code.
Then person X wrote their own source code, aided by the information they got from looking at the Archos source code.
I'm sure you never at any time cut and pasted any of their source code into yours. But AFAIK if you did, even once, then you have crossed the line - so aren't you playing with fire a bit here if they decide to get legal with you ?
Every tiny bit was reverse engineered, disassembled and then re-written from scratch
If it was rewritten from scratch then why was it first reverse-engineered and disassembled ? Instead this sounds more like someone disassembled it then used the understanding that they gained to create a new version, which is not quite the same as "from scratch". That may be skating on thin ice as far as being legal goes.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty damn hard, I'd guess. You can find discussion areas like people using TINI embedded Java card along with STA013 mp3 decoder to do it but they all seem to be characterized by an initial burst of activity and then a trailing off once enthusiasm fades away...
But go for it and post the results if you get there !
You Are The Goat ! (or perhaps, the troll)
If you engage in criminal acts you LOSE the right to privacy. Spammers have no rights. ALL THEIR TESTICLE ARE BELONG TO US.
You have to make sure it costs them.
Go in and buy the DRM media. Then take it back and say that it doesn't work on your player. Make sure you get the store manager. Ream his ass out good. Give him techno-babble when he asks what your player is.
Get your friends to do the same at other stores.
Its surprising no-one has put any numbers on the discussion - the Act "extended the duration of all existing and future copyrights for 20 years - just like that".
You'd have to imagine thats a gift of many many billions of dollars to the copyright holders. And while this is not a zero sum situation, someone has also suffered to some extent. That someone is the public domain, shich is us, the non-copyright holders.
I hope they win and overturn this foul legislation.
But if it all sounds too much hassle, don't just do nothing. The only thing worse than not getting the patent is someone else getting it. That way they stop you from commercializing it.
I strongly suggest, if you decide not to patent, that you at least write up the description of your idea, and post it into the public domain somehow (eg, on your web site, and get someone else to confirm they saw it there). That way no-one else can patent your idea since there is prior art covering it (yours).
Of course this means you can't stop someone else from commercializing the idea. But since you're a little guy, not an evil corporate, realistically you probably don't have the legal firepower to defend your patent anyway. So you have a better chance of commercial success by just exploiting your idea.
The day they go quiet is when you should start to worry.
i agre. a reel letter wil awlysa get a mroe effetvice repsonse. if the recipeinte can read it, that si.
The underlying issue is whether those students will end up as vassals of the mighty MS empire, and every product of their labours for the rest of their lives results in another ka-chink of license revenue into the big money jar, because MS owns the runtime that their labours will be deployed on.
At least with Java it's already a given that multiple production-quality free (and not free) runtimes will be available. No-one becomes Sun's vassal by learning Java.
With C# we need to trust that initiatives like Mono will one day result in a realistic alternative to the monopoly platform.
Personally I think anyone who believes MS will let that happen should be studying Astrology, not CS.
Consider the porn industry as the cockroaches of the digital world, doing a disgusting job that nonetheless many people need done for them.
Just as cockroaches are allegedly the only creatures that will survive a nuclear holocaust, can scare your sister shitless and are also capable of inspiring such terrifying creative works as "The Nest", so the porn industry might use Napster to create an immense new force that sweeps over the post-crash Internet world like a tsunami.
Napster, the perfect delivery mechanism, and Porn, the perfect content, combine to create something I just wish I knew how to invest in. Oh, I guess that would be Private Media Group !
Yeah, and the question remains - WHY even open ourselves up to this kind of risk ?
Simple analysis shows that the morons who run these shows can even screw up simple paper-based systems that have been around for eons. And we expect to wave the "magic of open source" over them and have them turn into gurus who can build an unprecedentedly secure and massive electronic system that supports arguably the most important single process in the country ??
Maybe if:
current system has just 64K memory...
replacement system has been underway since 1996 - and 400 contractors will get the axe when its canned..
sounds like the "replacement" system might have suffered from a bit of scope creep ??
Trying to impose digital rights management through a consortium is bound to fail
If you mean that other alternatives will always be available (ignoring absurd legislation) then you're right, it will fail - but if you mean that people will reject the DRM-ized technology and shift wholesale to Linux or BSD, that ain't going to happen.
Its already been demonstrated that the bulk of the world will happily continue using the monopoly OS even after years of blue screens of death and countless security exposures trumpeted loudly. Why should they switch to a better solution just because of some (to them) obscure argument about privacy ??
Then again, when they find they can't rip their buddy's CDs maybe that will start to focus their minds...
This does suck though, the JMF is a really nice framework, we built a servlet that played MP3s through the office stereo system using it.
The weird thing though is the disconnect here between Thomson, who claim the licensing rules have always been clear, and Sun, the sort of company who you would think would not embed someone else's IP unless they were very clear on the licensing issues. Sounds like Sun was very stupid and Thomson was very cunning.
Whine, whine...oooh, they're spying on me again !!
So whats the big difference between this and the logs of your phone calls that get tracked right now ? They even get used for good - crimes get solved, missing people's last movements can be determined, terrorists located, etc, by appropriate use of phone call records. This seems pretty much the same to me, albeit on a more detailed scale.
For frig's sake, you live in a democracy, not a perfect system but the best known to man after many centuries of trying. Don't assume that everyone in power is corrupt and that all such record keeping is evil. It might actually be useful to track down terrorist fucktards for example. You don't hear people bleating about Telcos keeping call records.
And before trotting out the lame old slashdot mantra about how people can just surf anonymously or whatever - YES ! Thats the beauty of it ! If you're clever enough to surf anonymously then do it and this needn't bother you. Its there to help catch the stupid or technically challenged criminal, not the slashdotter and certainly not Dr. Evil either.
Lets face it, for SURE he developed this while he was working as an employee under a crytal clear agreement, so all his bases are belong to them. He was dead in the wrong, whether the idea was in his head, on paper or on a CD.
He could still have got away with it though - he should have quit his job, sat in the mountains for 3 weeks or so, pretending to dream the whole thing up, and then gone back and tried to sell it to his old company. Where he went wrong was being too chicken and trying to keep his safe day job while at the same time trying to sell this to his bosses. Trying to have it both ways and finishing up losing his house as a result.
Its a lesson for anyone out there who's got a great idea. With great rewards come great risks - if you've got a $10M idea, at least have the balls to take a few weeks out, change to another day job, then declare it in your "prior inventions" at the new place, leaving your free to sell it around.
A good input device might be conductive foam, its used to package chips and prevent ESD damage. Its resistance varies as you squeeze it so it could probably be used to detect almost any weak movements with some kind of simple electronic gadgetry on it.
I guess a better answer will be provided by some else though if there is a commercially available device - this sounds like one situation where traditional slashdot do-it-your-selfery should be abandoned if there is anything already out there that works..
The title comes from the bogus concept that you can speed up a project by, say, a factor of 3 by throwing three more people at it. Brooks has inspired thoughts on project planning and systems architecture for real big projects. Its a great read.
As you say there are a couple of ways dictatorships use technology:
The Nazis were incredibly entrepeneurial in their use of technology for both of these:
And as you say, their regime was all the more firmly embedded because the people on the whole embraced it as the only alternative to Bolshevism - Hitler's was truly a popular government.
You've hit the nail on the head - mono will be great for fiddling with but in a huge enterprise-wide deployment theres no way that it would be adopted by any IT manager who valued his job. All it does is play into Microsoft's hands ("Why yes you SHOULD use .NET, Mr. customer. Its completely open, there's even an open source version that runs on linux !").
I don't know Ximian's real agenda but it must be tempting for them to think about the old bait and switch - get people hooked on the GPL'ed mono code and then offer the same code under a "for fee" redistributable license. Its been done before.
Instead, let patent applicants put up a, say, $5K bond with their application. The patent office makes no attempt to validate the patent (just as presently, you might say :) but merely publish it.
Then, if someone finds any prior art, let them forward it to the patent office to examine it. Then the patent office makes a judgement, pays the bond across to the finder, and marks the patent as cancelled. Interested parties (those suckered into paying licensing fees) get notified by email alert.
Perhaps this would generate a thriving third world industry of people frantically chopping down many of the stupid patents which currently get issued.
Before complaining that putting up $5K would stifle creativity for the small guy, consider whether the current state of affairs actually works in the little guy's behalf or not...
I venture to guess, however, that your company is somewhat smaller than Microsoft, is held together by shared enthusiasm and the exilaration of short term releases, and that you don't face many of the problems that any large company, not just the Borg, does. I would never defend the quality of MS products but anyone who has worked on large products with many existing custoemrs in a large software company like an Oracle, Microsoft or IBM will understand that it is simply impossible to only hire expert programmers whose work never needs to be checked by anyone else and who don't need any supervision.
Some of your other statements are rather sweeping. Some parts of UML - such as object modelling - are very useful indeed and can act as highly rigorous sources for a lot of code and database generation or automated access. Others (like Use cases IMHO) suck and are of little use to programmers, though more in communication with PHBs and business types.
A lot of what you say is very true for small focused teams working in their bedrooms/garages/garretts but much less so for any large software developer who sells software for money. Your "expert-driven" approach would never work at a Microsoft.
Your last point, that OSS produces better results, is probably true. Certainly its more cost-efficient. But does it produce profitable companies that make heaps of money ? Maybe you don't like the idea of that. But most of the rest of the world, including your gray-haired neighbour who plans to retire on the proceeds of his portfolio, does.
Yep, and if "valuable beyond estimation" is the definition then I guess one would have to say that anything that saved even one human life should be considered invaluable, so Enigma would be for sure. I stand (or actually, sit with my feet on the desk) corrected !
Then person X wrote their own source code, aided by the information they got from looking at the Archos source code.
I'm sure you never at any time cut and pasted any of their source code into yours. But AFAIK if you did, even once, then you have crossed the line - so aren't you playing with fire a bit here if they decide to get legal with you ?
Nice job anyway :)
Every tiny bit was reverse engineered, disassembled and then re-written from scratch
If it was rewritten from scratch then why was it first reverse-engineered and disassembled ? Instead this sounds more like someone disassembled it then used the understanding that they gained to create a new version, which is not quite the same as "from scratch". That may be skating on thin ice as far as being legal goes.