Hard drive makers have, for some considerable time, have meant 10**9 (1,000,000,000) when referring to a gigabyte. They always so declare in their literature. I have some old IBM Deskstar drives with exactly this clarification.
However, the various SI prefixes -- kilo, mega, giga, exa, and others -- were overloaded by the computer industry to refer to powers of two ("kilo" = 2**10, "mega" = 2**20, "giga" = 2**30) which were "pretty close" to their SI counterparts.
This has actually caused some confusion as computer people speaking of "kilo" this and "mega" that have worked with scientists who have always used the traditional SI meanings. These differences in interpretation can mean your chemical process doesn't work, the patient dies, you miss Jupiter, etc.
To help redress this problem, a new set of prefixes have been coined to refer to powers of two. These new prefixes have seen uneven but increasing adoption in the industry (if you have a recent Ubuntu/Debian release, run the command ifconfig -- the byte counts have the new prefixes).
So, the hard drive makers have been using the SI meanings for "giga" and, in case there was any confusion, explicitly printed in their literature, "One gigabyte is equal to 1000000000 bytes."
So, at first reaction, I think Seagate got screwed here. This makes me wonder if there aren't other layers of nuance that came out in court, but are lost in these stories.
Are we talking about "real" IT policies which further a tangible goal -- such as don't download your personal email to the company machine? Or are we talking about stupid, lame-brained policies -- such as, you're allowed only two network drops in your cube, and posession of an Ethernet hub/switch is grounds for disciplinary action?
I'm not running Ubuntu, but I am running Debian unstable. So I checked with hdparm -a. Slashdot's lame(ness) filter prevents me from posting the complete output, but here are some highlights:
I've heard consistent praise for HalfLife 2 and the various spin-offs. I used to play TeamFortress Classic from the original HalfLife quite a lot. Valve seem to consistently do excellent work.
But there is no f*cking way I'm infecting my machine with Steam. Period.
So I don't get to enjoy the games, and Valve leaves money on the table. Sounds like a bad deal all around.
They've been pursuing that Holy Grail for at least 15 years. Maybe the generation of consoles following the current one will be the set that's visually rich enough and fast enough that anything beyond it falls into the realm of diminishing returns.
"Thank you for your correspondence dated 17 May 2001, 22 January 2002, 8 July 2004, 14 March 2006, and 19 September 2007, requesting that the Federal Bureau of Investigation enforce existing wire fraud statutes with at least the same vigor with which we enforce non-violent drug posession statutes. Upon review, we regret to inform you that your requests to date were not of the form required by this authority.
"Please re-submit your request according to the traditionally established procedure. The most recent edition of this procedure may be obtained from the office of Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK). Your request may be filed at any Republican party field office. Please enclose with your request a cashier's check made payable to the Republican National Committee in the sum of no less than fifteen million (15,000,000) US dollars or equivalent sum in easily-convertible currency excepting Euros. Please do not enclose cash.
"We pride ourselves on providing our customers the best and most convenient law enforcement service possible, and look forward to receiving your request."
I will take that bet. Shall we say a six-pack of winner's choice of beer?
NVidia have been stalwart protectors of their hardware designs, mostly due to historical accident. A few of the principals at NVidia used to work at Sun, where they designed the GX graphics chip. As it turns out, a version of SunOS was released with a header file describing the chip's registers. Using that -- and a logic analyzer -- a company called Weitek successfully created a functional clone of the chip that was good enough such that Sun's own drivers worked on it. This stuck in the craw of the Sun guys, and evidently vowed no such thing would happen again.
Another historical accident was that NVidia did, in fact, have a few source code releases way back. And every time they did, so it seemed, they got hit a few weeks later with a patent infringement lawsuit, usually from SGI. NVidia solved this latter problem largely through the expedient of buying SGI.
So, no, I don't think they're going to do it, and certainly not within six months. And yes, I would be perfectly tickled to be wrong about that.
No market for them anymore. They don't make as good television.
Schwab
A Long-Standing Illusion
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Copy protection systems have been around a lot longer than the recent crop of Defective Recorded Media would suggest.
There's only one copy protection system I know of that hasn't been (meaningfully) cracked, and that's MediaCipher, created by Motorola for the cable TV crowd. Ironically, it was one of the first ones ever created. (Of course, it helps that the boxes implementing MediaCipher are only rented -- never sold -- to end-users.)
Copy protection next showed up in a major way for computer games, most notably for the Apple ][ computer. This fetish briefly spread into applications software as well as games, until the users thundered, "No Fscking Way." It took about four to six years for this to shake out.
Despite the fact that there is no conclusive evidence that copy protection has any meaningful impact on sales, anti-copying measures are still used extensively, but by no means universally, throughout the games industry. In particular, Unreal Tournament's initial anti-copying measures are little more than perfunctory, and are later dropped entirely.
Near as I can determine, copy protection advocates claim as axiomatic that unsanctioned copying will depress sales to livlihood-threatening levels. They cleave to this axiom with a fervor usually associated with religious fundamentalists. However, every time this axiom is honestly examined, mitigating or even entirely contradictory evidence is discovered. Yet the myth persists.
It's not the technology we need to combat (since Turing proved it can never work). It's the defective thinking.
Uh, no. MetroPCS adamantly refuses to connect handsets they haven't sold you themselves. "Compatibility issues," they (falsely) claim. This was their policy four months ago. It's dimly possible they've changed it since then, but I kinda doubt it.
Okay, let's work this out. The State of Indiana is allowing the dumping of toxic crap into Lake Michigan in exchange for creating 80 jobs. Let's assume each created job has the unrealistically generous salary of $100K/year. Indiana's income tax rate is 3.4% flat. So that's $3400/year per worker, or $272K new tax revenue for the 80 jobs. The numbers get somewhat better if you take sales tax revenue into account (6%), but that's harder to quantify. Let's be generous and assume all the remaining after-tax dollars are spent in Indiana. So that's 100000 minus 3400 (state tax) minus 25000 (Fed tax and FICA) == 71600. 6% of that is $4296, times 80 is $343680. So the total new revenue to the state is a highly optimistic $615680 per year.
If you're lucky, that gets you maybe ten new police officers. And something tells me it's going to cost more than $615K to clean up the crap being spilled in lake each year. Hell, the legal fees fighting off the complaints from Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan -- the other three states that share the lake -- could easily be ten times that.
All in all, a dumbass move that makes absolutely no sense for the state whatsoever. I wonder who got bribed, and with how much?
Boy, I can tell you're not a lawyer. Unless it's been ajudicated in a court of law, it doesn't count.
Snark for snark: "Boy, I can tell you're not a programmer."
There is the small issue of common understandings, standards, and practices in the community. It has never been adjudicated that holding a door open for someone else is polite. Nevertheless, it is commonly held to be so by members of the community. In other words, the imprimatur of the legal profession is not required for the community to form valid standards and practices for itself.
Likewise, an interface description in a header file is commonly held by practitioners of the art to not constitute code per se (since it is merely descriptive, not functional), and to not constitute copyrightable or patentable material. It may be protectible by trade secret but, if it was published under the GPL, secrecy is clearly not the author's aim.
Now you may produce a laywer who could effectively argue otherwise. But you almost certainly won't find an engineer to do so. This is because the engineer understands first-hand what's going on, whereas the lawyer has a shaky second-hand understanding, and is trying to shoe-horn that understanding into the copyright and patent frameworks, which have already been shown to not fit at all well. This is why, when a lawyer claims that a lawsuit could be brought based on the inclusion of an openly published API header file, the engineer wants to throttle the lawyer for, in the engineer's view, making shit up.
One is that Google is planning on "taking sides" on the issue, and is letting their New Friends know that Google stands ready to help them get their message out, and undermine Moore's.
The other is that Google, as a money-making concern, knows that the medical industry and big pharma will want to put a contrasting opinion out there in opposition to Moore's, and are going to spend enormous amounts of money to do it, so why shouldn't Google get some of that money?
Personally, I think it's the latter. In this sense, Google is acting as an arms merchant, not taking sides, but more than willing to sell weapons to anyone willing to pay an honest price for them. It's a rather cheesy ethical dodge, not looked upon highly by many people, but a valid one nonetheless.
Nowadays I still give CDs as gifts. But I don't buy two of it. I buy one, make a copy for myself, and give the original media as the gift.
Ardent readers of my writings (both of you) will know that I am no great friend of existing copyright laws, that copying is an inevitability of advancing technology, and believe the regime should re-engineered and replaced with a system that preserves reputations rather than proscribes copying and/or who can manufacture things.
...But even so, I still think what you're doing is really, really cheesy.
I am also familiar with High Tech High Bayshore. Different parents may have formed different points of view based on their standpoint, but I believe TrinSF relates a generally accurate portrayal of the last four years there.
Quite sad to watch the whole thing happen, really. Especially during its final two years.
The "revolution" that is sought (at least within the United States; the rest of the world has a functional cell phone market) would be to take away the wireless carriers' control over software on the handset.
Ask any Verizon subscriber how "easy" it is to move address book contacts in and out of the handset. Or music. Or videos. Or any other kind of data.
There are only two effective ways to break this control. One is legislative. (You can stop giggling now.) The other is for a handset maker to create a handset so powerful and compelling that people fall all over themselves to try and get one, and then for the maker to stand firm and refuse to give control of the handset to the carriers. Eventually, market pressure will force at least one carrier to cave in and take the phone as sold, after which, all the carriers will follow suit.
Apple has an opportunity to help this happen, but it's not clear if they're interested in that outcome.
It sounds like they were doing more than selling unsanctioned copies -- they were selling counterfeit copies. In other words, the sellers were misrepresenting the provenance of the goods.
That's fraud. And I support police actions against fraud. If the RIAA and MPAA would confine their attention to combating counterfeiting and other acts of fraud, they'd have a hell of a lot more public sympathy.
Anyone can contribute to the blog, but if you want your posts to have formatting, hyperlinks, non-Latin characters, and paragraph breaks, you need to become an official licensed Sony developer and sign an NDA.
People with longer memories may recall that Brown's Ferry had a massive fire a couple decades ago that burned in the wire racks underneath the reactor control room, very nearly destroying the staff's ability to control the reactor at all. It became a cause celebre among the anti-nuclear crowd alongside Three Mile Island.
At least their reactor failed to "off" this time...
Slashdot Mirror
However, the various SI prefixes -- kilo, mega, giga, exa, and others -- were overloaded by the computer industry to refer to powers of two ("kilo" = 2**10, "mega" = 2**20, "giga" = 2**30) which were "pretty close" to their SI counterparts.
This has actually caused some confusion as computer people speaking of "kilo" this and "mega" that have worked with scientists who have always used the traditional SI meanings. These differences in interpretation can mean your chemical process doesn't work, the patient dies, you miss Jupiter, etc.
To help redress this problem, a new set of prefixes have been coined to refer to powers of two. These new prefixes have seen uneven but increasing adoption in the industry (if you have a recent Ubuntu/Debian release, run the command ifconfig -- the byte counts have the new prefixes).
So, the hard drive makers have been using the SI meanings for "giga" and, in case there was any confusion, explicitly printed in their literature, "One gigabyte is equal to 1000000000 bytes."
So, at first reaction, I think Seagate got screwed here. This makes me wonder if there aren't other layers of nuance that came out in court, but are lost in these stories.
Schwab
Schwab
This laptop is six months old. I'm inclined to worry...
Schwab
But there is no f*cking way I'm infecting my machine with Steam. Period.
So I don't get to enjoy the games, and Valve leaves money on the table. Sounds like a bad deal all around.
*grump*,
Schwab
They've been pursuing that Holy Grail for at least 15 years. Maybe the generation of consoles following the current one will be the set that's visually rich enough and fast enough that anything beyond it falls into the realm of diminishing returns.
Schwab
No, I'm not kidding -- nine external hosts. Who let that happen? Have they caught him yet?
Schwab
"Thank you for your correspondence dated 17 May 2001, 22 January 2002, 8 July 2004, 14 March 2006, and 19 September 2007, requesting that the Federal Bureau of Investigation enforce existing wire fraud statutes with at least the same vigor with which we enforce non-violent drug posession statutes. Upon review, we regret to inform you that your requests to date were not of the form required by this authority.
"Please re-submit your request according to the traditionally established procedure. The most recent edition of this procedure may be obtained from the office of Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK). Your request may be filed at any Republican party field office. Please enclose with your request a cashier's check made payable to the Republican National Committee in the sum of no less than fifteen million (15,000,000) US dollars or equivalent sum in easily-convertible currency excepting Euros. Please do not enclose cash.
"We pride ourselves on providing our customers the best and most convenient law enforcement service possible, and look forward to receiving your request."
NVidia have been stalwart protectors of their hardware designs, mostly due to historical accident. A few of the principals at NVidia used to work at Sun, where they designed the GX graphics chip. As it turns out, a version of SunOS was released with a header file describing the chip's registers. Using that -- and a logic analyzer -- a company called Weitek successfully created a functional clone of the chip that was good enough such that Sun's own drivers worked on it. This stuck in the craw of the Sun guys, and evidently vowed no such thing would happen again.
Another historical accident was that NVidia did, in fact, have a few source code releases way back. And every time they did, so it seemed, they got hit a few weeks later with a patent infringement lawsuit, usually from SGI. NVidia solved this latter problem largely through the expedient of buying SGI.
So, no, I don't think they're going to do it, and certainly not within six months. And yes, I would be perfectly tickled to be wrong about that.
Schwab
Schwab
No market for them anymore. They don't make as good television.
Schwab
There's only one copy protection system I know of that hasn't been (meaningfully) cracked, and that's MediaCipher, created by Motorola for the cable TV crowd. Ironically, it was one of the first ones ever created. (Of course, it helps that the boxes implementing MediaCipher are only rented -- never sold -- to end-users.)
Copy protection next showed up in a major way for computer games, most notably for the Apple ][ computer. This fetish briefly spread into applications software as well as games, until the users thundered, "No Fscking Way." It took about four to six years for this to shake out.
Despite the fact that there is no conclusive evidence that copy protection has any meaningful impact on sales, anti-copying measures are still used extensively, but by no means universally, throughout the games industry. In particular, Unreal Tournament's initial anti-copying measures are little more than perfunctory, and are later dropped entirely.
Near as I can determine, copy protection advocates claim as axiomatic that unsanctioned copying will depress sales to livlihood-threatening levels. They cleave to this axiom with a fervor usually associated with religious fundamentalists. However, every time this axiom is honestly examined, mitigating or even entirely contradictory evidence is discovered. Yet the myth persists.
It's not the technology we need to combat (since Turing proved it can never work). It's the defective thinking.
Schwab
"We spit on your doorstep! Ptui!!"
Schwab
If you're lucky, that gets you maybe ten new police officers. And something tells me it's going to cost more than $615K to clean up the crap being spilled in lake each year. Hell, the legal fees fighting off the complaints from Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan -- the other three states that share the lake -- could easily be ten times that.
All in all, a dumbass move that makes absolutely no sense for the state whatsoever. I wonder who got bribed, and with how much?
Schwab
There is the small issue of common understandings, standards, and practices in the community. It has never been adjudicated that holding a door open for someone else is polite. Nevertheless, it is commonly held to be so by members of the community. In other words, the imprimatur of the legal profession is not required for the community to form valid standards and practices for itself.
Likewise, an interface description in a header file is commonly held by practitioners of the art to not constitute code per se (since it is merely descriptive, not functional), and to not constitute copyrightable or patentable material. It may be protectible by trade secret but, if it was published under the GPL, secrecy is clearly not the author's aim.
Now you may produce a laywer who could effectively argue otherwise. But you almost certainly won't find an engineer to do so. This is because the engineer understands first-hand what's going on, whereas the lawyer has a shaky second-hand understanding, and is trying to shoe-horn that understanding into the copyright and patent frameworks, which have already been shown to not fit at all well. This is why, when a lawyer claims that a lawsuit could be brought based on the inclusion of an openly published API header file, the engineer wants to throttle the lawyer for, in the engineer's view, making shit up.
Schwab
One is that Google is planning on "taking sides" on the issue, and is letting their New Friends know that Google stands ready to help them get their message out, and undermine Moore's.
The other is that Google, as a money-making concern, knows that the medical industry and big pharma will want to put a contrasting opinion out there in opposition to Moore's, and are going to spend enormous amounts of money to do it, so why shouldn't Google get some of that money?
Personally, I think it's the latter. In this sense, Google is acting as an arms merchant, not taking sides, but more than willing to sell weapons to anyone willing to pay an honest price for them. It's a rather cheesy ethical dodge, not looked upon highly by many people, but a valid one nonetheless.
Schwab
Ardent readers of my writings (both of you) will know that I am no great friend of existing copyright laws, that copying is an inevitability of advancing technology, and believe the regime should re-engineered and replaced with a system that preserves reputations rather than proscribes copying and/or who can manufacture things.
...But even so, I still think what you're doing is really, really cheesy.
Schwab
Quite sad to watch the whole thing happen, really. Especially during its final two years.
Schwab
Ask any Verizon subscriber how "easy" it is to move address book contacts in and out of the handset. Or music. Or videos. Or any other kind of data.
There are only two effective ways to break this control. One is legislative. (You can stop giggling now.) The other is for a handset maker to create a handset so powerful and compelling that people fall all over themselves to try and get one, and then for the maker to stand firm and refuse to give control of the handset to the carriers. Eventually, market pressure will force at least one carrier to cave in and take the phone as sold, after which, all the carriers will follow suit.
Apple has an opportunity to help this happen, but it's not clear if they're interested in that outcome.
Schwab
That's fraud. And I support police actions against fraud. If the RIAA and MPAA would confine their attention to combating counterfeiting and other acts of fraud, they'd have a hell of a lot more public sympathy.
Schwab
</snark>,
Schwab
Schwab
At least their reactor failed to "off" this time...
Schwab
Schwab
A Coder's Guide to Coffee
Original Kuro5hin article, with subsequent commentary.
Schwab