You do not need to see the source code to the BeOS kernel to write drivers for it. In fact, our device driver API is dirt simple. You can read about it here.
Which graphics card did you get that BeOS doesn't support?
Writing graphics drivers is really icky business. Even when you do have documentation, it is frequently cryptic, and missing important bits. Even docs from Intel, which are about the finest I've seen anywhere, often omit small details (like the formula for calculating the coefficients for the pixel clock PLL).
Don't have documentation? Congratulations, you're SOL, and reduced to disassembling the BIOS ROM, or picking through the source code contributed to the XFree86 Project. And if you think having XFree86 source code makes driver writing cake, you may care to have a look at the v3.3.6 code for the NVidia GeForce, or the v4.0 code for the SMI Lynx (which has whacking great bugs in it). Or best yet, the code for the NeoMagic laptop chips. (Note that this is no slam against the XFree86 guys; I'm just pointing it out that it's not a panacea.)
There's tens of thousands of Linux contributors. There's only 100 or so people at Be, who really are dancing as fast as they can.
Once upon a time, I fell in love with the Amiga computer. I bought one as quickly as I could, and was happily hacking on it for years. I thought it was a really neat system, and it died.
Roughly parallel to that, I got to work on CDTV, which was a "consumerized" version of an Amiga 500, intended to directly compete with Philip's CDI. I helped create what is still probably one of the best CD audio players ever done for a "home" gaming/multimedia system. I though it was a really neat system, and it died.
After that, I was fortunate enough to be invited by RJ Mical and Dave Needle to join NTG (New Technologies Group) who were working on what was to become the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer. It was based on the ARM-60, had ass-kicking graphics and sound capabilities, and a nice tiny OS that owed much of its heritage to the Amiga. I thought it was a really neat system, and it died.
Undeterred, we went on to design M2, the 64-bit follow-on to the 3DO Multiplayer. This thing had a 3D chip that did 32-bit rendering and outperformed 3Dfx's PC offerings at the time. It was also slated to have two 66MHz PowerPC 602 chips running the show. I thought it was going to be a really neat system, and it died.
I now work for Be, Incorporated... And I think it's a really neat system.
I have a teensy little Celeron box (running FreeBSD 4.0) I've been planning on putting live on my SDSL connection for months. The idea was to get my own domain, with local Web and email service under my own control, and then shop my connectivity.
To date, I haven't put the machine on the air. The reason I haven't done it is because, frankly, I don't know how to properly secure it. Sure, I could turn it on and hope for the best, but I don't want to be put in the class of "idiot sysadmins" because I'm not an idiot. In fact, it's because I'm not an idiot that I haven't put the box on the air yet. I want to do the work properly so I don't ruin someone else's day.
Taking solely the issue of securing a mailserver, I have a copy of the whacking great O'Reilly book on 'sendmail', which I have read almost cover to cover. I sort of grok the sendmail.cf syntax, but even with the 'm4' macros to generate the stuff for you, 'sendmail' is still a bitch to configure properly. And besides the relaying issues, there's also the cutesey 'sendmail' features, such as command piping, remotely directing mail to particular files, etc. Do I knock those out as well? What are the tradeoffs?
And then once I get 'sendmail' configured, then I get to worry about not fscking up the Apache config and opening myself up to who-knows-what vulnerabilities.
I'd also like to remotely administer the thing, which means setting up, learning, and understanding 'ssh'. Oh, yeah, the box may also need to function as a firewall; how do I set that without killing my ability to play Quake/Half-Life/Unreal Tournament/Diablo-II? Do I use simple filters? IPChains? Something else? What are the tradeoffs?
I'm not a dunce; I can understand this stuff. What I lack is the time to go hunting down the discrete resources, and the knowledge of how they all interrelate. And there doesn't appear to be a central resource (at least, not that I've found).
I'm trying to be a good netizen. But saying, "SECURE YOUR FSCKING MAILSERVER," suggests that being a good netizen is much easier than it really is, which can be misleading to the people wishing to wade out into our pond.
Schwab
Re:How About A User's EULA?
on
EULA In Games
·
· Score: 2
I tried to do something along these lines by creating a license that would forbid people from sending me spam. I was informed by an experienced attorney that what I drafted wouldn't stand up, since there was no "consideration" involved. Frankly, I couldn't see how offering the right to send me mail was qualitatively different from offering the right to use a piece of software I'd just purchased. Since IANAL, I dropped the subject.
If nothing else, writing it was cathartic...
Schwab
My Email to the Author
on
EULA In Games
·
· Score: 4
The following is an email I sent to Bruce Rolston, the author of the article.
______________________________________________
Shrinkwrap license "agreements" are a hot-button issue for me, so I
was disappointed when I read your article, "Look Before You Click" (linked
to by Slashdot).
I wrote an editorial putting the case against such "agreements" over
four years ago, which was published in MicroTimes. The text is on my Web
site:
I have two primary objections to license "agreements" as currently
practiced.
First are the terms of the "agreements" themselves. Those which are
not a redundant statement of existing law I find to be completely without
any ethical foundation whatsoever. In particular, I most strenuously object
to anti-reverse-engineering clauses. Indeed, you make reference to these
clauses in your article:
The third promise every game obtains from the user is that they will not
try to reverse engineer or modify the product in any way using the program
they've received. Keeping this protection is at the core of what
differentiates owning the software from licensing it. If software
companies ever had to transfer ownership of their work when they sell it,
it would be impossible to prevent people from taking it apart and figuring
out how it ticks. [... ]
That's correct. I argue that it should be impossible to prevent
people taking apart their software, at least within the scope of mass-market
software that is sold over-the-counter.
The software industry spends billions every year on research and
development. But as large as this sum is, billions more are invested by
auto manufacturers in the development of new cars. When finally released
for sale, auto manufacturers routinely purchase the products of their
competitors, take them apart bolt by bolt, and figure out how they were
designed and built. And they use the knowledge gained from this to improve
their own products.
The auto industry doesn't have a problem with this practice. I
therefore fail to see why the software industry has any business objecting
to the very same practice.
You also cite the writings of Microsoft's legal department:
They argued that most people have no interest in looking under the hood of
their software. But software publishers who sold their product outright
would have to assume that some people would, and raise the price for
everyone accordingly in order to be confident of recouping their
investment.
Frankly, I'm surprised that you re-printed this; it is devoid of
logic, or even common sense.
There is no logical path between taking apart your software and
software prices rising, any more than there is a path between opening the
hood of your car and car prices rising. Indeed, the argument can be made
that allowing people to take apart their software will drive prices lower,
since people will more readily be able to analyze and identify jewels from
junk, thereby lowering the price of junk
(#include <gratuitous_microsoft_bash.h>).
Furthermore, the fact that most people have no interest in opening
the hood of their software -- or their car -- in no way justifies
obstructing people who do. Humans are naturally curious; they are going to
take stuff apart and figure out how it works. It is an unalterable fact of
the marketplace. Tune your business model accordingly.
My second primary objection to EULAs is the mechanism by which these
so-called "contracts" are put in force. In short, any vendor anywhere can
place any restriction on you they wish, without reasonable prior notice, and
bind you to it using the most tenuous forms of assent.
Frankly, I should not have to take a contract attorney with me every
time I go shopping at Fry's. The mechanism used by these "agreements" is
fundamentally unethical, and wide open to egregious abuse:
There is no restriction on terms. The vendor can declare anything
they want,
There is no adaquate notice given to the consumer that an onerous,
binding contract is being formed,
There is no adaquate notice of the terms of the contract,
The contract attempts to alter the terms of the transaction after
the fact,
Assent to these contracts is established by the most tenuous --
almost unconscious -- acts.
If shrinkwrap "agreements" are enforceable, then what is to prevent
retail sales of any item being replaced by "licenses?" Consider what
would happen if Sears started selling their hammers only under "license:"
You see two hammers on the wall. One is the Craftsman Personal
Hammer; the other is the Enterprise Edition Hammer. The Personal Hammer
comes with a "license" forbidding you from using the hammer to build objects
intended for sale, or Sears will sue you. The Enterprise Hammer "license"
allows you to build object for sale, provided you kick back to Sears 1% of
the gross sale price. The Personal Hammer costs $30.00; the Enterprise
Edition Hammer costs $500.00. As far as the hammers themselves are
concerned, in all material respects, they are identical.
Would you tolerate this? Would you take Sears' "contracts"
seriously, especially if there were no record of you actually signing it?
What if your minor child bought you the hammer as a gift? Whom does the
"contract" bind?
"Well," I hear you say, "I'll just buy one from Home Depot."
Surprise, surprise, they just changed all their hammers over to the same
scheme last week. Further investigation reveals that you can no longer buy
a hammer any more; you can only "license" them.
Relying on the doctrine of unconscionability is also a non-starter.
Litigating a contract dispute is ruinously expensive, even if you're in
the right.
The idea is worse than ridiculous, it is dangerous. The
opportunity for abusing consumers is monumental. It is in fact already
happening. DVD CCA is suing Jon Johansen (a foreign national) for his work
on DeCSS, the DVD descrambling code; the suit is predicated on Johansen's
alleged violation of Xing Software's "license" forbidding
reverse-engineering. Mattel managed to arm-twist an out-of-court settlement
out of Eddy L. O. Jansson and Matthew Skala for developing and publishing a
program that decrypts the blocklist of CyberPatrol, a censorware package;
the attendant "license" forbids reverse-engineering.
This method of forming contracts is grossly unethical, and should
not be allowed to stand. It is for this reason that I do not, and have
never, taken license "agreements" seriously.
There are many other points in the article I could raise, but this
is already too long. At the very least, I hope, in part two of your
article, you will give time to the opposing viewpoint. My sincerent thanks
for your time.
How long a list would you like? What's bad about this is:
Censorware vendors are misrepresenting the capabilities of their products. They claim it does something which it does not. They claim it doesn't unfairly block material when clearly it does.
It is installed on firewalls and other up-stream systems such that the end-user doesn't get a say about the level of blocking. This is almost never appropriate, and sure to bite you in the butt in unforseeable and inopportune ways.
If you attempt to point out the flaws in their products, the censorware vendors will attempt to sue you for violation of some imaginary intellectual "property" (trade secrets), or for violating the license "agreement". Even if you prevail in court, you're still out thousands of dollars in legal fees defending against what is nothing more than an act of harassment.
Censorware blocklists belie a socio-political agenda, almost always closely allied with extremist religious factions. Sites discussing secular humanism, gay/lesbian issues, family planning/birth control, or any of the other extremist's hot-button issues are summarily blocked, and then they deceive you about the reason they're blocked. (Particularly incriminating of their lack of intellectual honesty is how they consistently block sites critical of their own product.)
There is no conclusive evidence that uncontrolled access to Internet content -- or, indeed, any kind of content -- is going to irreversibly "damage" anyone. Thus, the fundamental assumption that censorware is needed at all may well be flawed.
I'm not interested in denying people the right to make a choice about whether to install censorware or not. Individuals can make whatever choice they want about whatever level of brokenness they're willing to live with. But in order to make that choice intelligently, they need to be truthfully informed of what this stuff really does. So far, that's not happening to the degree it needs to.
The work environment described reminds me less of Orwell's world and more of Victorian England as described by Charles Dickens. Work conditions are extremely harsh, and everyone is treated as, and expected to work like, an automaton. The squeaky wheel doesn't get greased, it gets replaced. The only sense of loyalty breeds from fear.
There's got to be a better way for out-sourced support firms to draw up their contracts; an economic formula to foster problem solving rather than call churn.
I think you've just hit upon the ideal setting for Blackadder 5. I can just imagine Hugh Laurie as quasi-Bill Gates, bungling his Blackadder-coached anti-trust deposition before Justice Department officials. "Oh, no, I didn't write that, the computer did!"
Yesterday, one of my office colleagues passed around a copy of a 15M MPEG video shot by an amateur videographer of the PS2 launch in Paris, France. (Perhaps another kind Slashdotter will post the original link?) I found I was actually disturbed by what I saw.
The camera was positioned on a balcony high above the main floor where the unveiling took place. A kiosk in the middle of the floor was covered by a two-story-tall phallic mylar curtain. High-tech lighting effects splattered over the curtain and the crowd. A half-dozen or so Sony salesdroids were manning the kiosk, preparing to hand out units to lucky buyers. Surrounding the kiosk were a solid ring of red-shirted security personnel, and surrounding them were easily over a thousand people on the main floor.
As the MPEG opens, the curtain begins its rise. My ears were hammered by the volume of the cheering crowd. As the curtain clears the top of the kiosk, one of the Sony people in the lower right portion of the picture takes a PS2 box from the kiosk and moves to hand it over a security person to one of the dozens of hands stabbing out for it. A dimple forms in the security ring, heading towards the Sony guy...
Moments later, the entire ring collapses like wet tissue paper, and the kiosk is engulfed. Screams of terrified women emanate from the mass, which has abandoned all pretense of civilization. The security people are now helplessly trapped in the crowd itself, and the Sony people have climbed up on the kiosk, giving themselves a bit of safety on higher ground.
The camera zooms in, and we begin to see details of the throng. It looks like a study in fluid dynamics as pressure waves move through the packed mass of people. As the camera slowly pans around, we see a Sony guy pull a woman from the crowd to safety on the kiosk (someone pin a medal on that guy). A French voice booms out impotently over the PA system pleading for calm. One red shirted security guy remains near the kiosk trying to keep the four or five people immediately near him from getting too close; it's not clear if he can see over their heads to see what a job he's got. Meanwhile, the Sony guys continue to hand out PS2 units to the insane crowd.
While all this is going on, the moron running the high-tech light show doesn't turn it off and go to normal lighting. So along with all the pushing, shoving, yelling, and terrified screaming, the crowd continues to be bombarded with panning spots and flashing strobes, adding to the already disorienting environment. I have no idea if anyone was seriously injured.
From the behavior of the crowd, you'd swear there was a food shortage going on. But it wasn't a critical resource that was in short supply, it was a fscking game machine. And, from all reports so far, not even a very good game machine. I found it disturbing to watch, to see that so many people could go so bonkers and inflict such harm on each other over something so unimportant.
Re:Great in principle, unimpressive in practice
on
Embracing Insanity
·
· Score: 4
"No matter what your position or point of view, you can always find a pithy quote to support it."
-- Me
So what would you suggest instead of Linux or FreeBSD?
Not so long ago, I would have suggested an updated version of the Amiga OS. I still think simplicity and modularity are the way to go, something Amiga had in spades, and Linux still lacks. However, even saying the word "Amiga" gets people groaning or giggling.
There's a lot to reocommend BeOS. It's quite modern and innovative, but I don't see the breadth of Open Source projects for it as I do for Linux.
I think the reason Linux "won" the Open Source mindshare wars is because, though it's kinda ugly when compared to Windoze^H^Hws, UNIX is powerful. Out of the box, UNIX lets you:
Write and build software,
Write and typeset documentation,
Process and analyze massive amounts of text,
Process and analyze numeric data,
Create and maintain databases,
Use the system at the most abstract levels, or examine every detail down to the bit,
Launch and maintain useful services like mail, NetNews, and Web serving,
Integrate almost any of these applications arbitrarily using little more than pipes.
In short, UNIX lets you get started on whatever you want to do faster than anything else. It's a rapid prototyping environment at all levels. This is why I think it's such a success, since it rewards experimentation so quickly and consistently.
So, if you want something other than UNIX to "win" mindshare, it must enable rewarding hacking right away, so that people will want to hack on it more.
But all this ended because a few thought the rules didn't apply to them.
Nice attempt at mis-direction. Yes, you're correct: The i-Opener is going away because a few people thought the rules didn't apply to them. The few people involved are Netpliance management. The rules they thought didn't apply to them are:
Items purchased in a retail venue become the purchaser's property, to do with as they please.
So-called license "agreements" are nothing of the kind. They are an invalid form of contract, and a massively unethical business practice. As a person may buy a washing machine from Sears and use it as part of a sculpture (contrary to the intentions of the manufacturer), so may they also buy a computer at Best Buy and use it in any manner they wish.
The razor/razor blade model only works when the cost of the razor is epsilon compared to the profit margin on blades.
What is the cost of a typical razor? What is the cost of a typical pack of razor blades? The reality is that the cost of the razor will usually be recovered after the sale of three or four (at most) packs of blades. Netpliance's cost differential was way out of whack. When you're looking at two to three years of uninterrupted service revenue to recover the cost of one unit, you've got a big imbalance.
When confronted with a choice between a single-purpose device for $X, and an expandable general purpose device for $(1.3 * X), more consumers will choose the general-purpose device.
Full-on PCs are dirt cheap. You can get a nicely capable PC for about $700 these days. You're not locked in to any ISP. You're not locked in to any particular browser (though Micros~1 makes it hard for you to switch). You can play real games, not cheeseball Java- and Flash-based rot. And your data is your data. If the ISP goes down, you can still compose email and do other things. The cost/benefit ratio of an Internet Appliance just doesn't measure up to a full PC.
Netpliance thought these rules didn't apply to them. They were wrong. Any failure of their business can be laid squarely at the door of Netpliance's management. The Open Source and hacking communities had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Schwab
Re:Correcting the failure of software copyright
on
Embracing Insanity
·
· Score: 3
Ah, yes, but are you forgetting that Apple took people to court over issues of "look and feel?" The overt "expression" of a program is now copyrightable (or at least litigatable). The Free Software Foundation was formed partly in response to Apple's inexcusable lawsuits.
Atari (back was it was owned by -- surprise, surprise -- Warner Communications) was a "pioneer" in this thinking; that the overt expression of software could be proprietary. Atari had purchased from Namco the home gaming rights to PacMan; rights which, prior to that point, never existed ("Hi, we're going to invent a new form of property out of thin air and then sue you for 'stealing' it"). Atari then went after boatloads of PacMan clones (nearly all of which were running on platforms Atari refused to support), the best known being the Apple-][ clone by HAL Labs.
Sierra OnLine did score a court victory when Atari lost its suit against them over JawBreaker, but Sierra later caved in to their demands when Atari threatened to clone Sierra's entire product line (an empty threat, IMHO; Atari's software offerings back then were mediocre, at best, with very rare, if conspicuous, exceptions).
So, I regret to say that, as the rulebook is currently written, the KDE and GIMP guys do in fact have something to fear. Yes, the public outcry would be massive if Micros~1 or Adobe tried to quash these projects but, given attention spans these days, the impact to their revenues -- the only thing that really matters to them -- would be negligible.
One of the arguments brought to bear in favor of voting for "third" political party candidates is that, in hotly contested elections where the votes for a third party are greater than the difference between the two major parties, then the winning major party candidate must reconsider their platform.
The argument goes something like this: If X and Y are the major party candidates, with Z as a third party candidate, and the voting goes as follows:
48% X
47% Y
5% Z
Then the winner X is politically compelled to consider adopting some of the planks of Z's platform. Had X chosen to address the Z party's concerns, those 5% of votes may well have gone to X instead, and the outcome would have been more decisive. Likewise, in the next election, the Y party will also have to consider the Z party's platform to try and get some of those 5% for itself.
Well, it looks like this election is going to give us exactly that situation. It's not going to be a popular or an electoral landslide. Anything but, in fact. The numbers so far show Bush and Gore within 100K popular votes of each other, with Nader picking up some 1M votes. So, if the theory is correct, both the Democrats and Republicans will pay lip service to, if not adopt, some of Nader's/the Green Party's platform.
Hands up, everyone who thinks that's actually going to happen. (Cynical Leo suspects that Bush, if he wins, will try to declare a, "geographical landslide.")
I worked for 3DO when this product was developed. The idea was to tap into the PC gamer market which (it was thought) was more willing to pay >$400 for a gaming peripheral. Unfortunately, as conceived by the executive staff at 3DO, the idea was a non-starter.
Here are the bone-headed moves Sega needs to avoid to increase their chances of success:
Don't require the user to install a particular CD-ROM drive.
The 3DO at that time only had drivers for a particular bug-ridden 2X CD-ROM drive from Matsushita. Fortunately for Creative, this was the same drive they were already offering. Customers who didn't already own this drive either had to buy one or were SOL.
Don't misrepresent the features the add-on board offers.
Though the claim was never made outright, the PR for the 3DO Blaster hinted very strongly that the Blaster would offer its services to the PC, like any other PC peripheral. That is to say, 3CO/Creative left the impression that the 3DO Blaster would accelerate your PC games. This was not true (nor, as best I recall, was it ever intended to be). The 3DO Blaster card was a world unto itself; all it "shared" was your PC display, CD-ROM drive, and power supply.
Allow programs/data to be loaded from the PC's hard drive/memory.
3DO was intensely paranoid about "piracy", but for different reasons. 3DO executives saw the Multiplayer machine (we called it Opera) as their "property" and, in order to execute code on their "property", you had to sign a manufacturing/licensing agreement whereby you paid $3/disc (later raised to $6). This was ostensibly the licensing fee for the operating system (Portfolio) we provided. But what if you loaded in all your own code and/or data, such that nothing running in Opera's memory was copyrighted by 3DO (so you didn't have to pay them a fee for it)? 3DO was intensely paranoid this would happen, and went to extraordinary technical lengths to make certain that not one single byte of data entering the machine hadn't been paid for. Thus, the only way data entered the 3DO was through the CD-ROM drive off a licensed 3DO disc. Period. All other channels were sealed off. Thus the 3DO Blaster offered nothing over a stand-alone unit, except more complicated PC configuration. (It originally shipped for Windoze 3.1; I don't know if it ever got updated for Windoze 95.)
All in all, though it gave us some practice dealing with the PC architecture, I felt the project was a waste of resources. Of course, 3DO was wasting a lot of resources back then, but that's another flame entirely.
Disclaimer: I am a former 3DO employee, with a total tenure of 4.5 years, laid off in one of their countless "reorganizations" (though, to their credit, they were nicer to me about it than they were to almost everyone else). I felt, and still feel, betrayed by the executive staff's failure to capitalize on what we had created by the blood, sweat, tears, and love we had poured into those machines.
I have nothing against interpreted languages per se. I cut my teeth on BASIC about 25 years ago, and I think they're great for lots of stuff.
But the accuracy of the result is massively dependent on the implementation and performance of the JavaScript interpreter, the Web browser, the OS, and the machine itself. As an example, I'm writing this message on my 166MHz Pentium laptop, in Netscape 4.73 running Debian Linux 2.2 (potato). Realistically, it'll take a couple hundred milliseconds for the browser/JavaScript to react at all to my mouse clicks, just because the software layers through which the measurements are being performed are so darned thick. So the scores people are posting are highly dependent on their system configuration.
The reflex testing page is written in JavaScript. Gimme a break. JavaScript is a slow, interpreted language found inside slow, bloated Web browsers. The measurements this program offers are highly suspect.
Let's work it out:
JavaScript thunks out to OS to get current time, converts to internal format and stores it,
JavaScript thunks out to Web browser (which thunks out to the OS) to repaint the current page with a new background color (this takes a long time),
User clicks mouse, mouse driver generates a signal,
OS captures signal and builds an event packet,
Windowing system further interprets event packet, assigns target window/pane/button, sends to application,
Web browser receives event, where it rattles around for a while figuring out what to do with it,
Web browser calls back into the OS to render the button in the depressed state,
Web browser invokes JavaScript function handling that button,
JavaScript thunks back out to the OS again to get the current time,
Calculates the "delay" and presents the results.
Question: Which bit of this sequence involves high-performance, low-latency software components? If you said the mouse driver, and OS and windowing system event dispatchers, you're right. Everything else is dog-slow.
I wouldn't trust this thing to be accurate to finer than 80 milliseconds or so.
As it was explained to me in civics class, a popular vote for the President was considered and rejected when the Constitution was framed. The Electoral College was instituted as a bulwark against the people electing a demogogue. (Fat load of good it did when Reagan showed up.) Originally, the President was elected by the State legislatures, not by popular vote; in such a system, an Electoral College makes more sense.
These days, getting Congress to alter the election mechanism has about as much chance as getting them to stop Gerrymandering their districts.
It is interesting that www.thinkgeek.com... just proudly gave away three of these heavily Macromediaized Panasonic Showstoppers, [... ]
Careful. There's a big difference between Macromedia and Macrovision. Macromedia is the publisher of Flash and the Dreamweaver Web editor; Macrovision makes video copy protection systems.
There are some activities for which a "specialized" controller is nearly indispensible.
I have a SpaceORB 360, which is basically a joystick with 6 axes (three translation axes and three rotation axes). It's in the shape of a sphere which you grab and twist (gently) to move around. It also has six buttons. It shows up as a DirectInput device under Windoze, and there's support for it in the Linux joystick driver suite. (Sadly, SpaceTec/Labtec no longer make the controller. They show up on eBay from time to time.)
Now, as a game playing controller, its use is limited. You can't whip around as quickly as you can with a mouse, nor can you aim as accurately. However, as a spectator camera controller, it kicks extreme ass. In fact, when John Carmack announced he was taking parametric joystick control out of Quake-3, I was very disappointed, since it meant it was now much more difficult to record good demos off a live server. I even created a page of ORB demos to make my argument but, alas, parametric control was still lost.
The point is: Keyboard and mouse is good for a lot, but for some work, specialized controllers are just amazing.
Surely you must admit the law is not on Wesley's side. Unless, perhaps, he was a journalist, [... ] Still, noone should doubt where the law stands. (Firmly on the side of those with the money).
I have to wonder, why does someone have to be a Designated Journalist before one is "allowed" to investigate things of interest to oneself?
This guy wanted to find out why @Home service -- a service he is paying for -- sucks. So did a lot of other people who were in the same boat. So he does some digging around, finds a sympathetic soul at @Home willing to spill a few beans. He then publishes his findings.
Tell me: What, ethically, is wrong with this? You may argue that the documents were company confidential, and the company should be able to prevent their disclosure. But where, in concrete legal terms, is the line on actionable disclosure?
Let's say someone uncovers internal documents of a certain ISP revealing they have an official policy of "losing" account cancellation requests, thereby continuing to bill customers' credit cards. This is clearly information that is material to the ISP's competetive advantage. Should it be treated as a trade secret? Should be the ISP be able to silence its disclosure?
"But that practice is flagrantly illegal!" you cry. Okay, how about something more nebulous: Based on studies that most people give up after 10 minutes, the ISP (confidentially) establishes a policy mandating a minimum 15 minute wait on hold for tech support. They also use caller-ID to immediately identify the caller, look up their account and, based on previous call frequency or experience, weight their calling priority. This is clearly a practice that is grievously disrespectful to their customers, but it's not illegal. Should this information remain confidential? Should the ISP be able to prevent its disclosure?
Ethically, I see little wrong with what Wesley did. Its revelation is merely embarrassing to @Home, nothing more.
I don't really want to know what someone's going to do with that "raw material" and the "putting things together in a creative way" part if you don't mind. I haven't had dinner yet...
Well, one extremely obvious application would be to decompose the images into component parts (faces, hair, arms, legs, etc.), then cobble up a "screen blanker" that morphs each part independently. That is, the face would morph to another face; the left arm would morph to another left arm, etc.
Not only would this make an interesting piece of eye candy, it would also serve as a subtle social critique on pr0n in general (i.e. the people in the photos are stripped of their individuality and humanity, reduced to a set of interchangeable parts).
Well, if that's how you're going to define "profit," then yes, we all live in an ocean of unlimited wealth, free for the asking.
But just consuming stuff tends to get kind of one-dimensional and boring after a while. The important next question is, "What can you do with it?" By which I mean, can you take all that raw material and put it together in new, creative ways?
The value is not in the artifact, but in the imagination.
Incorrect. Reverse-engineering is, and always has been, a legitimate form of study and exploration.
The R&D investment by the high-tech industry is easily dwarfed by that of the automobile industry. Yet the auto industry has little problem with people opening the hoods of their cars and mucking around. Yes, it voids the warranty, but Detroit does not labor under the illusion that such exploration by their customers is "theft".
You have to consider that the products they ship are intended to be "black boxes" and may contain trade secrets, which are legally protected.
Trade secrets are a really dubious form of intellectual "property". The onus of proof is on the party claiming trade secret protection. Without going into nauseating details, trade secret protection can vanish once the secret is independently discovered by lawful means. In nearly all cases, reverse-engineering falls within lawful means, especially when taking apart systems available on the open market.
With reference to "black box" systems, it is especially those systems that need to be taken apart and inspected, or else how will you know they are good products? How will you know, for example, that they aren't selling your privacy down the river (CueCat, anyone?)?
Do you want your company's trade secrets disclosed? Not really. That's why reverse engineering is not a good thing.
"Disclosure" is a very different thing from "independent discovery," the latter being what we're talking about here.
BTW, if your company is relying on secrecy for its market advantage ("security by obscurity") rather than its ability to execute and deliver excellent products, you're ultimately hosed no matter what.
Slashdot Mirror
You do not need to see the source code to the BeOS kernel to write drivers for it. In fact, our device driver API is dirt simple. You can read about it here.
In fact, you can find programming documentation for all of BeOS on the Web site.
Schwab
Which graphics card did you get that BeOS doesn't support?
Writing graphics drivers is really icky business. Even when you do have documentation, it is frequently cryptic, and missing important bits. Even docs from Intel, which are about the finest I've seen anywhere, often omit small details (like the formula for calculating the coefficients for the pixel clock PLL).
Don't have documentation? Congratulations, you're SOL, and reduced to disassembling the BIOS ROM, or picking through the source code contributed to the XFree86 Project. And if you think having XFree86 source code makes driver writing cake, you may care to have a look at the v3.3.6 code for the NVidia GeForce, or the v4.0 code for the SMI Lynx (which has whacking great bugs in it). Or best yet, the code for the NeoMagic laptop chips. (Note that this is no slam against the XFree86 guys; I'm just pointing it out that it's not a panacea.)
There's tens of thousands of Linux contributors. There's only 100 or so people at Be, who really are dancing as fast as they can.
Schwab
You think you've got it bad...
Once upon a time, I fell in love with the Amiga computer. I bought one as quickly as I could, and was happily hacking on it for years. I thought it was a really neat system, and it died.
Roughly parallel to that, I got to work on CDTV, which was a "consumerized" version of an Amiga 500, intended to directly compete with Philip's CDI. I helped create what is still probably one of the best CD audio players ever done for a "home" gaming/multimedia system. I though it was a really neat system, and it died.
After that, I was fortunate enough to be invited by RJ Mical and Dave Needle to join NTG (New Technologies Group) who were working on what was to become the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer. It was based on the ARM-60, had ass-kicking graphics and sound capabilities, and a nice tiny OS that owed much of its heritage to the Amiga. I thought it was a really neat system, and it died.
Undeterred, we went on to design M2, the 64-bit follow-on to the 3DO Multiplayer. This thing had a 3D chip that did 32-bit rendering and outperformed 3Dfx's PC offerings at the time. It was also slated to have two 66MHz PowerPC 602 chips running the show. I thought it was going to be a really neat system, and it died.
I now work for Be, Incorporated... And I think it's a really neat system.
Schwab
Got any suggestions on just how to do that?
I have a teensy little Celeron box (running FreeBSD 4.0) I've been planning on putting live on my SDSL connection for months. The idea was to get my own domain, with local Web and email service under my own control, and then shop my connectivity.
To date, I haven't put the machine on the air. The reason I haven't done it is because, frankly, I don't know how to properly secure it. Sure, I could turn it on and hope for the best, but I don't want to be put in the class of "idiot sysadmins" because I'm not an idiot. In fact, it's because I'm not an idiot that I haven't put the box on the air yet. I want to do the work properly so I don't ruin someone else's day.
Taking solely the issue of securing a mailserver, I have a copy of the whacking great O'Reilly book on 'sendmail', which I have read almost cover to cover. I sort of grok the sendmail.cf syntax, but even with the 'm4' macros to generate the stuff for you, 'sendmail' is still a bitch to configure properly. And besides the relaying issues, there's also the cutesey 'sendmail' features, such as command piping, remotely directing mail to particular files, etc. Do I knock those out as well? What are the tradeoffs?
And then once I get 'sendmail' configured, then I get to worry about not fscking up the Apache config and opening myself up to who-knows-what vulnerabilities.
I'd also like to remotely administer the thing, which means setting up, learning, and understanding 'ssh'. Oh, yeah, the box may also need to function as a firewall; how do I set that without killing my ability to play Quake/Half-Life/Unreal Tournament/Diablo-II? Do I use simple filters? IPChains? Something else? What are the tradeoffs?
I'm not a dunce; I can understand this stuff. What I lack is the time to go hunting down the discrete resources, and the knowledge of how they all interrelate. And there doesn't appear to be a central resource (at least, not that I've found).
I'm trying to be a good netizen. But saying, "SECURE YOUR FSCKING MAILSERVER," suggests that being a good netizen is much easier than it really is, which can be misleading to the people wishing to wade out into our pond.
Schwab
I tried to do something along these lines by creating a license that would forbid people from sending me spam. I was informed by an experienced attorney that what I drafted wouldn't stand up, since there was no "consideration" involved. Frankly, I couldn't see how offering the right to send me mail was qualitatively different from offering the right to use a piece of software I'd just purchased. Since IANAL, I dropped the subject.
If nothing else, writing it was cathartic...
Schwab
The following is an email I sent to Bruce Rolston, the author of the article.
______________________________________________
Shrinkwrap license "agreements" are a hot-button issue for me, so I was disappointed when I read your article, "Look Before You Click" (linked to by Slashdot).
I wrote an editorial putting the case against such "agreements" over four years ago, which was published in MicroTimes. The text is on my Web site:
http://www.best.com/~ewhac/belarfnq/shrinkwrap.htm l
I have two primary objections to license "agreements" as currently practiced.
First are the terms of the "agreements" themselves. Those which are not a redundant statement of existing law I find to be completely without any ethical foundation whatsoever. In particular, I most strenuously object to anti-reverse-engineering clauses. Indeed, you make reference to these clauses in your article:
That's correct. I argue that it should be impossible to prevent people taking apart their software, at least within the scope of mass-market software that is sold over-the-counter.
The software industry spends billions every year on research and development. But as large as this sum is, billions more are invested by auto manufacturers in the development of new cars. When finally released for sale, auto manufacturers routinely purchase the products of their competitors, take them apart bolt by bolt, and figure out how they were designed and built. And they use the knowledge gained from this to improve their own products.
The auto industry doesn't have a problem with this practice. I therefore fail to see why the software industry has any business objecting to the very same practice.
You also cite the writings of Microsoft's legal department:
Frankly, I'm surprised that you re-printed this; it is devoid of logic, or even common sense.
There is no logical path between taking apart your software and software prices rising, any more than there is a path between opening the hood of your car and car prices rising. Indeed, the argument can be made that allowing people to take apart their software will drive prices lower, since people will more readily be able to analyze and identify jewels from junk, thereby lowering the price of junk (#include <gratuitous_microsoft_bash.h>).
Furthermore, the fact that most people have no interest in opening the hood of their software -- or their car -- in no way justifies obstructing people who do. Humans are naturally curious; they are going to take stuff apart and figure out how it works. It is an unalterable fact of the marketplace. Tune your business model accordingly.
My second primary objection to EULAs is the mechanism by which these so-called "contracts" are put in force. In short, any vendor anywhere can place any restriction on you they wish, without reasonable prior notice, and bind you to it using the most tenuous forms of assent.
Frankly, I should not have to take a contract attorney with me every time I go shopping at Fry's. The mechanism used by these "agreements" is fundamentally unethical, and wide open to egregious abuse:
If shrinkwrap "agreements" are enforceable, then what is to prevent retail sales of any item being replaced by "licenses?" Consider what would happen if Sears started selling their hammers only under "license:"
You see two hammers on the wall. One is the Craftsman Personal Hammer; the other is the Enterprise Edition Hammer. The Personal Hammer comes with a "license" forbidding you from using the hammer to build objects intended for sale, or Sears will sue you. The Enterprise Hammer "license" allows you to build object for sale, provided you kick back to Sears 1% of the gross sale price. The Personal Hammer costs $30.00; the Enterprise Edition Hammer costs $500.00. As far as the hammers themselves are concerned, in all material respects, they are identical.
Would you tolerate this? Would you take Sears' "contracts" seriously, especially if there were no record of you actually signing it? What if your minor child bought you the hammer as a gift? Whom does the "contract" bind?
"Well," I hear you say, "I'll just buy one from Home Depot." Surprise, surprise, they just changed all their hammers over to the same scheme last week. Further investigation reveals that you can no longer buy a hammer any more; you can only "license" them.
Relying on the doctrine of unconscionability is also a non-starter. Litigating a contract dispute is ruinously expensive, even if you're in the right.
The idea is worse than ridiculous, it is dangerous. The opportunity for abusing consumers is monumental. It is in fact already happening. DVD CCA is suing Jon Johansen (a foreign national) for his work on DeCSS, the DVD descrambling code; the suit is predicated on Johansen's alleged violation of Xing Software's "license" forbidding reverse-engineering. Mattel managed to arm-twist an out-of-court settlement out of Eddy L. O. Jansson and Matthew Skala for developing and publishing a program that decrypts the blocklist of CyberPatrol, a censorware package; the attendant "license" forbids reverse-engineering.
This method of forming contracts is grossly unethical, and should not be allowed to stand. It is for this reason that I do not, and have never, taken license "agreements" seriously.
There are many other points in the article I could raise, but this is already too long. At the very least, I hope, in part two of your article, you will give time to the opposing viewpoint. My sincerent thanks for your time.
Schwab
How long a list would you like? What's bad about this is:
I'm not interested in denying people the right to make a choice about whether to install censorware or not. Individuals can make whatever choice they want about whatever level of brokenness they're willing to live with. But in order to make that choice intelligently, they need to be truthfully informed of what this stuff really does. So far, that's not happening to the degree it needs to.
Schwab
The work environment described reminds me less of Orwell's world and more of Victorian England as described by Charles Dickens. Work conditions are extremely harsh, and everyone is treated as, and expected to work like, an automaton. The squeaky wheel doesn't get greased, it gets replaced. The only sense of loyalty breeds from fear.
There's got to be a better way for out-sourced support firms to draw up their contracts; an economic formula to foster problem solving rather than call churn.
Schwab
I think you've just hit upon the ideal setting for Blackadder 5. I can just imagine Hugh Laurie as quasi-Bill Gates, bungling his Blackadder-coached anti-trust deposition before Justice Department officials. "Oh, no, I didn't write that, the computer did!"
Schwab
Yesterday, one of my office colleagues passed around a copy of a 15M MPEG video shot by an amateur videographer of the PS2 launch in Paris, France. (Perhaps another kind Slashdotter will post the original link?) I found I was actually disturbed by what I saw.
The camera was positioned on a balcony high above the main floor where the unveiling took place. A kiosk in the middle of the floor was covered by a two-story-tall phallic mylar curtain. High-tech lighting effects splattered over the curtain and the crowd. A half-dozen or so Sony salesdroids were manning the kiosk, preparing to hand out units to lucky buyers. Surrounding the kiosk were a solid ring of red-shirted security personnel, and surrounding them were easily over a thousand people on the main floor.
As the MPEG opens, the curtain begins its rise. My ears were hammered by the volume of the cheering crowd. As the curtain clears the top of the kiosk, one of the Sony people in the lower right portion of the picture takes a PS2 box from the kiosk and moves to hand it over a security person to one of the dozens of hands stabbing out for it. A dimple forms in the security ring, heading towards the Sony guy...
Moments later, the entire ring collapses like wet tissue paper, and the kiosk is engulfed. Screams of terrified women emanate from the mass, which has abandoned all pretense of civilization. The security people are now helplessly trapped in the crowd itself, and the Sony people have climbed up on the kiosk, giving themselves a bit of safety on higher ground.
The camera zooms in, and we begin to see details of the throng. It looks like a study in fluid dynamics as pressure waves move through the packed mass of people. As the camera slowly pans around, we see a Sony guy pull a woman from the crowd to safety on the kiosk (someone pin a medal on that guy). A French voice booms out impotently over the PA system pleading for calm. One red shirted security guy remains near the kiosk trying to keep the four or five people immediately near him from getting too close; it's not clear if he can see over their heads to see what a job he's got. Meanwhile, the Sony guys continue to hand out PS2 units to the insane crowd.
While all this is going on, the moron running the high-tech light show doesn't turn it off and go to normal lighting. So along with all the pushing, shoving, yelling, and terrified screaming, the crowd continues to be bombarded with panning spots and flashing strobes, adding to the already disorienting environment. I have no idea if anyone was seriously injured.
From the behavior of the crowd, you'd swear there was a food shortage going on. But it wasn't a critical resource that was in short supply, it was a fscking game machine. And, from all reports so far, not even a very good game machine. I found it disturbing to watch, to see that so many people could go so bonkers and inflict such harm on each other over something so unimportant.
Schwab
Here ya go... :-)
Schwab
So what would you suggest instead of Linux or FreeBSD?
Not so long ago, I would have suggested an updated version of the Amiga OS. I still think simplicity and modularity are the way to go, something Amiga had in spades, and Linux still lacks. However, even saying the word "Amiga" gets people groaning or giggling.
There's a lot to reocommend BeOS. It's quite modern and innovative, but I don't see the breadth of Open Source projects for it as I do for Linux.
I think the reason Linux "won" the Open Source mindshare wars is because, though it's kinda ugly when compared to Windoze^H^Hws, UNIX is powerful . Out of the box, UNIX lets you:
In short, UNIX lets you get started on whatever you want to do faster than anything else. It's a rapid prototyping environment at all levels. This is why I think it's such a success, since it rewards experimentation so quickly and consistently.
So, if you want something other than UNIX to "win" mindshare, it must enable rewarding hacking right away, so that people will want to hack on it more.
IMHO, of course...
Schwab
Nice attempt at mis-direction. Yes, you're correct: The i-Opener is going away because a few people thought the rules didn't apply to them. The few people involved are Netpliance management. The rules they thought didn't apply to them are:
So-called license "agreements" are nothing of the kind. They are an invalid form of contract, and a massively unethical business practice. As a person may buy a washing machine from Sears and use it as part of a sculpture (contrary to the intentions of the manufacturer), so may they also buy a computer at Best Buy and use it in any manner they wish.
What is the cost of a typical razor? What is the cost of a typical pack of razor blades? The reality is that the cost of the razor will usually be recovered after the sale of three or four (at most) packs of blades. Netpliance's cost differential was way out of whack. When you're looking at two to three years of uninterrupted service revenue to recover the cost of one unit, you've got a big imbalance.
Full-on PCs are dirt cheap. You can get a nicely capable PC for about $700 these days. You're not locked in to any ISP. You're not locked in to any particular browser (though Micros~1 makes it hard for you to switch). You can play real games, not cheeseball Java- and Flash-based rot. And your data is your data. If the ISP goes down, you can still compose email and do other things. The cost/benefit ratio of an Internet Appliance just doesn't measure up to a full PC.
Netpliance thought these rules didn't apply to them. They were wrong. Any failure of their business can be laid squarely at the door of Netpliance's management. The Open Source and hacking communities had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Schwab
Ah, yes, but are you forgetting that Apple took people to court over issues of "look and feel?" The overt "expression" of a program is now copyrightable (or at least litigatable). The Free Software Foundation was formed partly in response to Apple's inexcusable lawsuits.
Atari (back was it was owned by -- surprise, surprise -- Warner Communications) was a "pioneer" in this thinking; that the overt expression of software could be proprietary. Atari had purchased from Namco the home gaming rights to PacMan; rights which, prior to that point, never existed ("Hi, we're going to invent a new form of property out of thin air and then sue you for 'stealing' it"). Atari then went after boatloads of PacMan clones (nearly all of which were running on platforms Atari refused to support), the best known being the Apple-][ clone by HAL Labs.
Sierra OnLine did score a court victory when Atari lost its suit against them over JawBreaker, but Sierra later caved in to their demands when Atari threatened to clone Sierra's entire product line (an empty threat, IMHO; Atari's software offerings back then were mediocre, at best, with very rare, if conspicuous, exceptions).
So, I regret to say that, as the rulebook is currently written, the KDE and GIMP guys do in fact have something to fear. Yes, the public outcry would be massive if Micros~1 or Adobe tried to quash these projects but, given attention spans these days, the impact to their revenues -- the only thing that really matters to them -- would be negligible.
Schwab
(In a bitter mood.)
One of the arguments brought to bear in favor of voting for "third" political party candidates is that, in hotly contested elections where the votes for a third party are greater than the difference between the two major parties, then the winning major party candidate must reconsider their platform.
The argument goes something like this: If X and Y are the major party candidates, with Z as a third party candidate, and the voting goes as follows:
- 48% X
- 47% Y
- 5% Z
Then the winner X is politically compelled to consider adopting some of the planks of Z's platform. Had X chosen to address the Z party's concerns, those 5% of votes may well have gone to X instead, and the outcome would have been more decisive. Likewise, in the next election, the Y party will also have to consider the Z party's platform to try and get some of those 5% for itself.Well, it looks like this election is going to give us exactly that situation. It's not going to be a popular or an electoral landslide. Anything but, in fact. The numbers so far show Bush and Gore within 100K popular votes of each other, with Nader picking up some 1M votes. So, if the theory is correct, both the Democrats and Republicans will pay lip service to, if not adopt, some of Nader's/the Green Party's platform.
Hands up, everyone who thinks that's actually going to happen. (Cynical Leo suspects that Bush, if he wins, will try to declare a, "geographical landslide.")
Schwab
I worked for 3DO when this product was developed. The idea was to tap into the PC gamer market which (it was thought) was more willing to pay >$400 for a gaming peripheral. Unfortunately, as conceived by the executive staff at 3DO, the idea was a non-starter.
Here are the bone-headed moves Sega needs to avoid to increase their chances of success:
The 3DO at that time only had drivers for a particular bug-ridden 2X CD-ROM drive from Matsushita. Fortunately for Creative, this was the same drive they were already offering. Customers who didn't already own this drive either had to buy one or were SOL.
Though the claim was never made outright, the PR for the 3DO Blaster hinted very strongly that the Blaster would offer its services to the PC, like any other PC peripheral. That is to say, 3CO/Creative left the impression that the 3DO Blaster would accelerate your PC games. This was not true (nor, as best I recall, was it ever intended to be). The 3DO Blaster card was a world unto itself; all it "shared" was your PC display, CD-ROM drive, and power supply.
3DO was intensely paranoid about "piracy", but for different reasons. 3DO executives saw the Multiplayer machine (we called it Opera) as their "property" and, in order to execute code on their "property", you had to sign a manufacturing/licensing agreement whereby you paid $3/disc (later raised to $6). This was ostensibly the licensing fee for the operating system (Portfolio) we provided. But what if you loaded in all your own code and/or data, such that nothing running in Opera's memory was copyrighted by 3DO (so you didn't have to pay them a fee for it)? 3DO was intensely paranoid this would happen, and went to extraordinary technical lengths to make certain that not one single byte of data entering the machine hadn't been paid for. Thus, the only way data entered the 3DO was through the CD-ROM drive off a licensed 3DO disc. Period. All other channels were sealed off. Thus the 3DO Blaster offered nothing over a stand-alone unit, except more complicated PC configuration. (It originally shipped for Windoze 3.1; I don't know if it ever got updated for Windoze 95.)
All in all, though it gave us some practice dealing with the PC architecture, I felt the project was a waste of resources. Of course, 3DO was wasting a lot of resources back then, but that's another flame entirely.
Disclaimer: I am a former 3DO employee, with a total tenure of 4.5 years, laid off in one of their countless "reorganizations" (though, to their credit, they were nicer to me about it than they were to almost everyone else). I felt, and still feel, betrayed by the executive staff's failure to capitalize on what we had created by the blood, sweat, tears, and love we had poured into those machines.
Schwab
Oh, heavens no.
I have nothing against interpreted languages per se. I cut my teeth on BASIC about 25 years ago, and I think they're great for lots of stuff.
But the accuracy of the result is massively dependent on the implementation and performance of the JavaScript interpreter, the Web browser, the OS, and the machine itself. As an example, I'm writing this message on my 166MHz Pentium laptop, in Netscape 4.73 running Debian Linux 2.2 (potato). Realistically, it'll take a couple hundred milliseconds for the browser/JavaScript to react at all to my mouse clicks, just because the software layers through which the measurements are being performed are so darned thick. So the scores people are posting are highly dependent on their system configuration.
Schwab
The reflex testing page is written in JavaScript. Gimme a break. JavaScript is a slow, interpreted language found inside slow, bloated Web browsers. The measurements this program offers are highly suspect.
Let's work it out:
Question: Which bit of this sequence involves high-performance, low-latency software components? If you said the mouse driver, and OS and windowing system event dispatchers, you're right. Everything else is dog-slow.
I wouldn't trust this thing to be accurate to finer than 80 milliseconds or so.
Schwab
As it was explained to me in civics class, a popular vote for the President was considered and rejected when the Constitution was framed. The Electoral College was instituted as a bulwark against the people electing a demogogue. (Fat load of good it did when Reagan showed up.) Originally, the President was elected by the State legislatures, not by popular vote; in such a system, an Electoral College makes more sense.
These days, getting Congress to alter the election mechanism has about as much chance as getting them to stop Gerrymandering their districts.
Schwab
Careful. There's a big difference between Macromedia and Macrovision. Macromedia is the publisher of Flash and the Dreamweaver Web editor; Macrovision makes video copy protection systems.
Schwab
There are some activities for which a "specialized" controller is nearly indispensible.
I have a SpaceORB 360, which is basically a joystick with 6 axes (three translation axes and three rotation axes). It's in the shape of a sphere which you grab and twist (gently) to move around. It also has six buttons. It shows up as a DirectInput device under Windoze, and there's support for it in the Linux joystick driver suite. (Sadly, SpaceTec/Labtec no longer make the controller. They show up on eBay from time to time.)
Now, as a game playing controller, its use is limited. You can't whip around as quickly as you can with a mouse, nor can you aim as accurately. However, as a spectator camera controller, it kicks extreme ass. In fact, when John Carmack announced he was taking parametric joystick control out of Quake-3, I was very disappointed, since it meant it was now much more difficult to record good demos off a live server. I even created a page of ORB demos to make my argument but, alas, parametric control was still lost.
The point is: Keyboard and mouse is good for a lot, but for some work, specialized controllers are just amazing.
Schwab
I have to wonder, why does someone have to be a Designated Journalist before one is "allowed" to investigate things of interest to oneself?
This guy wanted to find out why @Home service -- a service he is paying for -- sucks. So did a lot of other people who were in the same boat. So he does some digging around, finds a sympathetic soul at @Home willing to spill a few beans. He then publishes his findings.
Tell me: What, ethically, is wrong with this? You may argue that the documents were company confidential, and the company should be able to prevent their disclosure. But where, in concrete legal terms, is the line on actionable disclosure?
Let's say someone uncovers internal documents of a certain ISP revealing they have an official policy of "losing" account cancellation requests, thereby continuing to bill customers' credit cards. This is clearly information that is material to the ISP's competetive advantage. Should it be treated as a trade secret? Should be the ISP be able to silence its disclosure?
"But that practice is flagrantly illegal!" you cry. Okay, how about something more nebulous: Based on studies that most people give up after 10 minutes, the ISP (confidentially) establishes a policy mandating a minimum 15 minute wait on hold for tech support. They also use caller-ID to immediately identify the caller, look up their account and, based on previous call frequency or experience, weight their calling priority. This is clearly a practice that is grievously disrespectful to their customers, but it's not illegal. Should this information remain confidential? Should the ISP be able to prevent its disclosure?
Ethically, I see little wrong with what Wesley did. Its revelation is merely embarrassing to @Home, nothing more.
Schwab
Well, one extremely obvious application would be to decompose the images into component parts (faces, hair, arms, legs, etc.), then cobble up a "screen blanker" that morphs each part independently. That is, the face would morph to another face; the left arm would morph to another left arm, etc.
Not only would this make an interesting piece of eye candy, it would also serve as a subtle social critique on pr0n in general (i.e. the people in the photos are stripped of their individuality and humanity, reduced to a set of interchangeable parts).
Schwab
Well, if that's how you're going to define "profit," then yes, we all live in an ocean of unlimited wealth, free for the asking.
But just consuming stuff tends to get kind of one-dimensional and boring after a while. The important next question is, "What can you do with it?" By which I mean, can you take all that raw material and put it together in new, creative ways?
The value is not in the artifact, but in the imagination.
Schwab
Incorrect. Reverse-engineering is, and always has been, a legitimate form of study and exploration.
The R&D investment by the high-tech industry is easily dwarfed by that of the automobile industry. Yet the auto industry has little problem with people opening the hoods of their cars and mucking around. Yes, it voids the warranty, but Detroit does not labor under the illusion that such exploration by their customers is "theft".
Trade secrets are a really dubious form of intellectual "property". The onus of proof is on the party claiming trade secret protection. Without going into nauseating details, trade secret protection can vanish once the secret is independently discovered by lawful means. In nearly all cases, reverse-engineering falls within lawful means, especially when taking apart systems available on the open market.
With reference to "black box" systems, it is especially those systems that need to be taken apart and inspected, or else how will you know they are good products? How will you know, for example, that they aren't selling your privacy down the river (CueCat, anyone?)?
"Disclosure" is a very different thing from "independent discovery," the latter being what we're talking about here.
BTW, if your company is relying on secrecy for its market advantage ("security by obscurity") rather than its ability to execute and deliver excellent products, you're ultimately hosed no matter what.
Schwab