Before CPU's came along, this sort of thing used to be done with BBD (Bucket Bridge Delay) circuits, replaying the sampled sound 180 degrees out of phase. Of course, this only worked with single-frequency tones and the BBD had to be clocked at just the right correct frequency. Cancelling white noise (ie: fan whoosh) is a somewhat more difficult problem.
A number of "professional" aircraft pilot communications headsets have had active-cancelling (as in the article) built into earpieces (as opposed to the microphones) for several years, so as to reduce engine noise and pilot stress.
Car buffs here might even remember that VW had a Concept Car in the nineties which had an (I think) Bose-powered active-cancelling system in the cabin, the purpose being to cancel road noise and engine bay noise so you could replace it with sound samples of your favourite sports cars: Ferrari's, Porsche's, etc. Not sure it ever took off, though.;)
In terms of computer graphics lingo, MORPH was developed by the special effects gurus at Lucasfilm in 1986/7 for the 1988 release of the Ron Howard film, Willow.
I think they even talked of how the word was developed in the making-of documentary.
Kodak does have: Patent number 5,412,427 "Electronic camera utilizing image compression feedback for improved color processing" issued May 2, 1995: Patent 5,412,427
SCO wants to subpoena 7200 witnesses. Holy Christ. How, when, why? That many witnesses? Tell me there'd be some sort of expedited process to get the questions SCO is seeking answered -- that seems ludicrous, especially in light of the fact that SCO has repeatedly altered its complaints.
That's not how I read it. The directive actually says:
6. SCO seeks the proper identification of approximately 7,200 potential witness [typo in original PDF] identified by IBM. IBM in its memoranda suggested that the parties might be able to reach some sort of an agreement as to the most important prospective trial witnesses and then IBM would provide the full contact information for these individuals. The Court orders IBM to properly identify a representative sample of the potential witnesses that is to include a 1000 of the most important prospective trial witnesses as agreed upon by SCO and IBM. Following the product of this information, the Court will consider the need for the proper identification of additional witnesses.
To me this says that IBM has 7,200 witnesses it wants to subpoena and the Court is directing IBM to share this list with SCO and that SCO and IBM are to sit down together to make a 1,000-long shortlist of the most important ones (this should be interesting) and then IBM is to give that shortlist to the Court.
When I studied IT in the 90's (that'd be 1990's, I'm not *that* old) one of my subjects was Computer Architecture, studying different computer systems, processor architectures (CISC/RISC, ring stacks, etc) and support hardware down to the register and inter-connects level and beyond.
All of the practical work in this course was done in assembly language to ensure that we grasped the guts of the particular item. While it was mostly x86 and under messy-DOS (one of our assignments was to write an INT33 mouse driver) we got to play on other stuff too like Zilogs and Motorola 68x's in various boxes.
This was one of my favourite courses since I'd been assembly programming long before I went to Uni and wasn't panicking like some of my classmates.:)
I think everyone in IT should have done something like this (it seems a lot the up-and-comings think "assembly" has something to do with IKEA) as it gives you a really good understanding of what's going on behind the scenes and a view to conserve system resources and be more successful at debugging other than saying "Crap, it doesn't work! Can you help me?"
A modernized version of this course could even have a hardware project component with PIC's and STAMP's being so cheap and readily available nowaydays.
I expect it has to do with recording Dates of Birth and such.
Even 1904's a little optimistic, though, because I'm sure there are enough geeks out there with living parents or grandparents who were born before then.
In this case though it may also have some significance to one of the original Apple engineers.:)
Its epoch is midnight 01-Jan-1904 and it uses an unsigned 32-bit integer to count seconds since then. That means it will run out at 06:28:15 09-Feb-2040.
But, I'm sure Apple will have released a new Newton by then!:P
(I don't suppose anyone's ported the Rosetta writing recognition system to other PDA's, just in case?)
"One example of an HTML application at work in Windows is the "Add or Remove Programs" feature in the control panel."
Yes, which requires IE, which is one of my bugbears with this approach.
If you do somehow remove IE's claws from your system, it means you'll no longer be able to use the UI to uninstall Apps, games and powertoys from your system. Of course, anyone fluent in the Registry could trawl the Uninstall keys to remove stuff manually (or write a replacement app to do it).
"Obviously the article writer is an amateur and knows nothing about how Windows or NTFS work... which makes me suspect he is not qualified to do his job."
Just because someone asks a question doesn't automatically make them an amateur or unqualified. Would you rather have someone screw-over a server farm because they were too afraid to ask a question?
In the context of Backup as opposed to Duplication, I think the author's reference to a crippled filesystem is alluding to the fact that the Windows keeps a number of files locked open with exclusive access. As a result these files can't be opened by a backup program for archiving. This isn't really a filesystem problem though, it's a process semantics problem.
In the case of Windows 2000/XP/2003 platforms the list of files locked open with exclusive access starts only with the pagefile(s) and the System/Logged-on-User Registry hives. A number of programs and services like Miscrosoft SQL Server do the same thing as well (database.dat and.log files in this case).
To get around this, you either spend megabucks on things like "Agents" for Cheyenne ARCserve or you do offline backups with disk imaging software.
For system duplication (using identical hardware) as opposed to backups, we setup a "master system" which is not a doman member and image it with Ghost Enterprise. After duplicating to the target systems we then use SIDchanger to change the target's SID, rename it and join a domain. Of course, we're still paying megabucks to MS for licenses.
So now we have a technology to remotely disable a truck. But the actual problem is not the truck - the danger is the load on the trailer that the truck is hauling.
Unless this technology allows you to detect the specific trailer (or trailers in the case of B-Doubles and road trains) attached to the truck, and for law enforcement to search the system for a specific trailer_id to see which truck it is attached to, hooking-up a different truck to the dangerous load will render the system useless.
Even tracking the trailers as well would not stop someone transferring the dangerous load to a different trailer. Detecting this event might be achieved by matching correlating GPS coordinates of parked units over a period of several minutes or more.
Perhaps in conjunction with this a "stun gun" for trucks would be more helpful. Police armed with such a device would be able to stop a runaway or fleeing truck in its tracks regardless of what load it may be carrying.
Get real. Could you imagine the Violation-of-Privacy advocates going completely berko if any OS vendor actually had to detect and enforce this? *Especially* MS!
Having read the.PDF paper and then skimmed the/. comments it would seem few people have taken the time to actually read (or understand) the paper before commenting on it. Hats-off to those who have.
What is the essence of this watermarking technique?: - For embedding copyright information into individual.class files, as opposed to signing.cab's for whole Java apps/applets. - It modifies compiled Java bytecode, shuffling eight bytecode operators in targeted "dummy" class methods. The shuffling is able to encode only three bits per operation, so watermarks need to be short or dummy methods need to be large. - It relies on the watermarked dummy method(s) appearing in stolen (decompiled/recompiled).class, which is achieved by pretending to call the dummy method(s) from other methods using always-false logic constructs.
What are its downfalls?: - The technique is specific to Java. Forget about using it for other languages which output platform-specific machine code binaries, although it might be possible to modify it for use in.NET and other bytecode environments. - If an intelligent thief (or smart optimizing compiler) is able to detect the always-false condition used to shield the dummy method(s) the watermark(s) will be removed. - The larger your watermark, the larger you need to make your dummy method(s), or you need to embed more of them. The larger you make your dummy methods, the more obvious it will be that there's something strange about them. - Optimizing compilers could still destroy the modified operators used to form the watermarks.
The paper also claims it protected more.class files from decompile/recompile attacks than *I* feel it should have: five of the ten.class files crashed their test decompiler (Mocha), thereby "protecting" their watermarks. If someone is keen to re-source your.class file, particularly if there's money to be made, I'm fairly certain they'd try another decompiler instead of giving-up on just one crash. I suspect that these five.class files could be decompiled by another utility, so the question of their watermark protection remains unanswered. Potentially this could cause up to 18 (instead of 3) of their 23 watermarks actually being defeated. This is entirely feasible, since only 3 of the 8 watermarks fully tested survived (the other 15 being in the five.class files which crashed Mocha).
How does this technique benefit GPL? I'm not sure that it would. Even if the above problems were fixed: - To submit "source code" for your protected.class, you'd have to compile it, watermark it, decompile it and then post the decompiled version. Not very pretty and what about comments? I suppose you could have a Perl script reinsert comments from the original source, or copy-and-paste the watermarked dummy methods back in. - It's really designed to embed personal/corporate copyrights into code, protecting the IP of the submitter not the GPL community. I suppose the GPL community could design a community-wide watermark policy, but then that would become public knowledge and so thieves would be aware of its existence and be inclined to search harder to remove it.
For those on a budget and would be using Radio Controllers with PPM modulation, or feel like creating PPM modulated signals out the parallel port (or with a bit of PIC magic), Schulze electronic speed controllers would be a good candidate.
Granted, they're not as intelligent since they don't have programmable serial ports and such, but they do allow you a much greater range of battery and motor choice. Schulze also make sensor and sensorless brushless motor controllers, their latest capable of delivering 180 amps!
Why are people saying "this is the first software Apple has written for Windows?" I've read this in two iTMS reviews now. Lest we forget that QuickTime (Player and QTML/VRML plug-ins, etc.) has been around on Windows for ages. I've been a registered QuickTime user since version 3.
Considering what QuickTime Player has to do I've found it to be surprisingly stable, although Player has several not-nice issues which Apple has never gotten around to fixing. Two of which are: - Pressing Ctrl+F to play a movie full-screen gives you a dialog with a drop-down list containing: "Normal", "Double", "Half", "Full Screen", and "Current" as selections, "Normal" being the default. This drop-down isn't focused either so you've either got to tab around or use the mouse to select "Full Screen" before clicking the Play button or pressing Enter to get things happening. This is brain-dead UI to my way of thinking - you've already got Ctrl+0, Ctrl+1 and Ctrl+2 to play movies at Half, Normal and Double resolutions, so at least make "Full Screen" the default selection so you can just press Enter to play! - The movie(-to-AVI) Export option only allows you to choose from a limited set of QuickTime-specific CODECs: "BMP" (Raw frames), "Cinepak", "DV-PAL", "DV-NTSC", "Indeo 4.4" and "None" (another raw frames). QT6 added DVPRO CODECs as well. Forget about all the other CODECs a user may have installed on their system that could be used. I'm sure Apple could stand to take a lesson in this regard from other video software like VirtualDub.
As a paying user I've raised these really-simple-to-fix concerns with Apple before, still with no action on their part.
The QuickTime "BMP" and "None" CODECs both have real bugs in that they don't pad rows out to DWORD boundaries. This means that any movies you export with a (width mod 4) of 1, 2 or 3 will suffer tearing when played back in any software except QuickTime Player. (Try this at home kids with the 190x240 Sample.mov that gets installed with QuickTime.) Apple has also been notified of this, again with no response.
I hear you saying, "Big deal! What has this got to do with iTMS?"
Nothing, except that it shows Apple consistently treats Windows users, even paying ones, as second-class citizens. This is perhaps understandable considering their prime business is selling hardware and software to high-margin Mac users, but if they are truly interested in market penetration of iTMS into the Windows world then they will need to act a little more responsively to issues with their Windows client softwares.
Will the games industry go down the route of the razor manufacturers where consoles are almost given away with the games?
Hate to break it to you, but manufacturers have been selling consoles at a loss for a long time now. Their business models rely on profits in software sales to recoup their hardware development and manufacturing costs.
Besides the initial financial risk to the console manufacturer, this model causes tremendous stress to the software development companies as the manufacturer negotiates harsher deals to allow themselves a greater profit margin. With the costs of development systems going up with each new platform release, not to mention contractual obligations, console software development is not an easy market to get into. This isn't likely to improve either.
The only possibility of this situation improving is manufacturers driving-up the retail prices of consoles far enough to recover costs on inital sale - but then they price themselves out of the market. This isn't likely to happen.
With games coming into new devices, such as mobile phones, at least there's opportunity for development companies to grow into areas other than the console market.
This article seems to have such a pro-Mac stance that I didn't bother reading past the first couple of paragraphs. It's OS/wars all over again.
Granted it's been a few years since I was a Level 1 Tech for Apple Resellers, but let's not forget that for many years Macintosh (and specifically Mac-OS) reigned supreme as the simplest platform for which to write viruses. And virus writers certainly took advantage of it.
Why? Because every time you inserted a floppy or CD, or mounted a new hard disk or Syquest cartidge, the OS went behind the scenes to load CODE resources from the disk to allow the display custom dialogs (passwords, etc), change desktop settings, layout, etc. The user didn't have to take any action to open files or folders.
It didn't take virus writers long to figure out this point of entry, and with no concept of permissions or anti-trust built into the OS, the malicious code had full control of the system.
Few days went by where I didn't have to low-level format someone's hard disk and inform them that, yes, working backups are a Good Thing to have.
Yes we have a few of those VP's around here too, me thinks.:)
I'm not sure there ever will be a 100% solution to be honest. When it comes to phone-home methods, 80/20 is still a lot better than nothing... you're always going to have people running "illegal" software on computers that are rarely or never connected to the Internet because they installed it from floppy, CD-ROM, etc.
Maybe this was what M$ was trying to acheive with ASP (Application Service Providers as opposed to Active Server Pages) and Pay-Per-Use software in recent times - the software just won't work without 'net connectivity and some form of license validation.
I'm right there with you, right up to the IP blocks.
I can see what you're trying to achieve, but how many corporations have one and only one IP block? A lot fewer than those with multiple blocks, and certainly fewer than those who don't actually own their block(s) but lease it(them) from larger corporations. This kind of restriction would just make licence management more difficult and expensive for the software vendor, giving them yet another excuse to bump up buy prices.
If we were to make an example of Microsoft as a vendor, corporations are often paying per-seat licences backed-up with monthly internal audits given to M$ (I work for one of them). M$ could achieve a goal similar to your IP blocks by keeping a list of unique (source) MAC addresses against each licence key whenever software looks for patches, say through Windows Critical Update. This tally can be checked against the licence fees coming in from the corporation with a polite "please explain" being sent to them in electronic form (along with the list of MACs for backtracking) in the event of excess tallies. The corporation should be able to come back with "we don't own these MACs" at which point M$ can disable automatic updates for those addresses.
Using MACs instead of IP blocks (or addresses) has the added benefit of working for corporate notebooks roaming networks (people working between several offices), but could complicate issues on Terminal Servers. Suggestions anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
... just a new application.
;)
Before CPU's came along, this sort of thing used to be done with BBD (Bucket Bridge Delay) circuits, replaying the sampled sound 180 degrees out of phase. Of course, this only worked with single-frequency tones and the BBD had to be clocked at just the right correct frequency. Cancelling white noise (ie: fan whoosh) is a somewhat more difficult problem.
A number of "professional" aircraft pilot communications headsets have had active-cancelling (as in the article) built into earpieces (as opposed to the microphones) for several years, so as to reduce engine noise and pilot stress.
Car buffs here might even remember that VW had a Concept Car in the nineties which had an (I think) Bose-powered active-cancelling system in the cabin, the purpose being to cancel road noise and engine bay noise so you could replace it with sound samples of your favourite sports cars: Ferrari's, Porsche's, etc. Not sure it ever took off, though.
In terms of computer graphics lingo, MORPH was developed by the special effects gurus at Lucasfilm in 1986/7 for the 1988 release of the Ron Howard film, Willow.
I think they even talked of how the word was developed in the making-of documentary.
Oh, and: Patent number 5,016,107 "Electronic still camera utilizing image compression and digital storage" May 14, 1991:
Patent 5,016,107
oops
Somebody's probably answered this already, but...
Kodak does have: Patent number 5,412,427 "Electronic camera utilizing image compression feedback for improved color processing" issued May 2, 1995:
Patent 5,412,427
Hardly.
:)
When I studied IT in the 90's (that'd be 1990's, I'm not *that* old) one of my subjects was Computer Architecture, studying different computer systems, processor architectures (CISC/RISC, ring stacks, etc) and support hardware down to the register and inter-connects level and beyond.
All of the practical work in this course was done in assembly language to ensure that we grasped the guts of the particular item. While it was mostly x86 and under messy-DOS (one of our assignments was to write an INT33 mouse driver) we got to play on other stuff too like Zilogs and Motorola 68x's in various boxes.
This was one of my favourite courses since I'd been assembly programming long before I went to Uni and wasn't panicking like some of my classmates.
I think everyone in IT should have done something like this (it seems a lot the up-and-comings think "assembly" has something to do with IKEA) as it gives you a really good understanding of what's going on behind the scenes and a view to conserve system resources and be more successful at debugging other than saying "Crap, it doesn't work! Can you help me?"
A modernized version of this course could even have a hardware project component with PIC's and STAMP's being so cheap and readily available nowaydays.
... my cell phone? No way.
:P
I can't live without toilet paper.
I expect it has to do with recording Dates of Birth and such.
:)
Even 1904's a little optimistic, though, because I'm sure there are enough geeks out there with living parents or grandparents who were born before then.
In this case though it may also have some significance to one of the original Apple engineers.
Its epoch is midnight 01-Jan-1904 and it uses an unsigned 32-bit integer to count seconds since then. That means it will run out at 06:28:15 09-Feb-2040.
:P
But, I'm sure Apple will have released a new Newton by then!
(I don't suppose anyone's ported the Rosetta writing recognition system to other PDA's, just in case?)
From the article:
Yes, which requires IE, which is one of my bugbears with this approach.
If you do somehow remove IE's claws from your system, it means you'll no longer be able to use the UI to uninstall Apps, games and powertoys from your system. Of course, anyone fluent in the Registry could trawl the Uninstall keys to remove stuff manually (or write a replacement app to do it).
"Obviously the article writer is an amateur and knows nothing about how Windows or NTFS work... which makes me suspect he is not qualified to do his job."
Just because someone asks a question doesn't automatically make them an amateur or unqualified. Would you rather have someone screw-over a server farm because they were too afraid to ask a question?
In the context of Backup as opposed to Duplication, I think the author's reference to a crippled filesystem is alluding to the fact that the Windows keeps a number of files locked open with exclusive access. As a result these files can't be opened by a backup program for archiving. This isn't really a filesystem problem though, it's a process semantics problem.
In the case of Windows 2000/XP/2003 platforms the list of files locked open with exclusive access starts only with the pagefile(s) and the System/Logged-on-User Registry hives. A number of programs and services like Miscrosoft SQL Server do the same thing as well (database .dat and .log files in this case).
To get around this, you either spend megabucks on things like "Agents" for Cheyenne ARCserve or you do offline backups with disk imaging software.
For system duplication (using identical hardware) as opposed to backups, we setup a "master system" which is not a doman member and image it with Ghost Enterprise. After duplicating to the target systems we then use SIDchanger to change the target's SID, rename it and join a domain. Of course, we're still paying megabucks to MS for licenses.
> 6. pascal sucks
>again...enaugh said
Yup, that's like saying I won't use C++ or C# because it looks like ISO-C and that sucks.
When it comes to selling stuff, my old man always says "there's a lot more people with 5 bob in their pocket than 5 quid."
I like Delphi, but having to spend $1,500+ to buy it means I tend to skip versions nowadays.
I remember buying Turbo Pascal for about $90.
Perhaps Borland would sell a lot more copies of Delphi and Kylix if it was $150 instead of $1,500.
So now we have a technology to remotely disable a truck. But the actual problem is not the truck - the danger is the load on the trailer that the truck is hauling.
Unless this technology allows you to detect the specific trailer (or trailers in the case of B-Doubles and road trains) attached to the truck, and for law enforcement to search the system for a specific trailer_id to see which truck it is attached to, hooking-up a different truck to the dangerous load will render the system useless.
Even tracking the trailers as well would not stop someone transferring the dangerous load to a different trailer. Detecting this event might be achieved by matching correlating GPS coordinates of parked units over a period of several minutes or more.
Perhaps in conjunction with this a "stun gun" for trucks would be more helpful. Police armed with such a device would be able to stop a runaway or fleeing truck in its tracks regardless of what load it may be carrying.
Claim 18 is just wrong.
I can see now why Patent Lawyers get paid the big bucks. Though they obviously still can't afford proofreaders.
Yes, and once SCO loses the case in court and gets bankrupted due to massive legal damages it will be a much more attractive acquisition to IBM. :)
Get real. Could you imagine the Violation-of-Privacy advocates going completely berko if any OS vendor actually had to detect and enforce this? *Especially* MS!
Having read the .PDF paper and then skimmed the /. comments it would seem few people have taken the time to actually read (or understand) the paper before commenting on it. Hats-off to those who have.
.class files, as opposed to signing .cab's for whole Java apps/applets. .class, which is achieved by pretending to call the dummy method(s) from other methods using always-false logic constructs.
.NET and other bytecode environments.
.class files from decompile/recompile attacks than *I* feel it should have: five of the ten .class files crashed their test decompiler (Mocha), thereby "protecting" their watermarks. If someone is keen to re-source your .class file, particularly if there's money to be made, I'm fairly certain they'd try another decompiler instead of giving-up on just one crash. I suspect that these five .class files could be decompiled by another utility, so the question of their watermark protection remains unanswered. Potentially this could cause up to 18 (instead of 3) of their 23 watermarks actually being defeated. This is entirely feasible, since only 3 of the 8 watermarks fully tested survived (the other 15 being in the five .class files which crashed Mocha).
.class, you'd have to compile it, watermark it, decompile it and then post the decompiled version. Not very pretty and what about comments? I suppose you could have a Perl script reinsert comments from the original source, or copy-and-paste the watermarked dummy methods back in.
What is the essence of this watermarking technique?:
- For embedding copyright information into individual
- It modifies compiled Java bytecode, shuffling eight bytecode operators in targeted "dummy" class methods. The shuffling is able to encode only three bits per operation, so watermarks need to be short or dummy methods need to be large.
- It relies on the watermarked dummy method(s) appearing in stolen (decompiled/recompiled)
What are its downfalls?:
- The technique is specific to Java. Forget about using it for other languages which output platform-specific machine code binaries, although it might be possible to modify it for use in
- If an intelligent thief (or smart optimizing compiler) is able to detect the always-false condition used to shield the dummy method(s) the watermark(s) will be removed.
- The larger your watermark, the larger you need to make your dummy method(s), or you need to embed more of them. The larger you make your dummy methods, the more obvious it will be that there's something strange about them.
- Optimizing compilers could still destroy the modified operators used to form the watermarks.
The paper also claims it protected more
How does this technique benefit GPL? I'm not sure that it would. Even if the above problems were fixed:
- To submit "source code" for your protected
- It's really designed to embed personal/corporate copyrights into code, protecting the IP of the submitter not the GPL community. I suppose the GPL community could design a community-wide watermark policy, but then that would become public knowledge and so thieves would be aware of its existence and be inclined to search harder to remove it.
Mind you, it is pretty fancy. :)
For those on a budget and would be using Radio Controllers with PPM modulation, or feel like creating PPM modulated signals out the parallel port (or with a bit of PIC magic), Schulze electronic speed controllers would be a good candidate.
Granted, they're not as intelligent since they don't have programmable serial ports and such, but they do allow you a much greater range of battery and motor choice. Schulze also make sensor and sensorless brushless motor controllers, their latest capable of delivering 180 amps!
Why are people saying "this is the first software Apple has written for Windows?" I've read this in two iTMS reviews now. Lest we forget that QuickTime (Player and QTML/VRML plug-ins, etc.) has been around on Windows for ages. I've been a registered QuickTime user since version 3.
Considering what QuickTime Player has to do I've found it to be surprisingly stable, although Player has several not-nice issues which Apple has never gotten around to fixing. Two of which are:
- Pressing Ctrl+F to play a movie full-screen gives you a dialog with a drop-down list containing: "Normal", "Double", "Half", "Full Screen", and "Current" as selections, "Normal" being the default. This drop-down isn't focused either so you've either got to tab around or use the mouse to select "Full Screen" before clicking the Play button or pressing Enter to get things happening. This is brain-dead UI to my way of thinking - you've already got Ctrl+0, Ctrl+1 and Ctrl+2 to play movies at Half, Normal and Double resolutions, so at least make "Full Screen" the default selection so you can just press Enter to play!
- The movie(-to-AVI) Export option only allows you to choose from a limited set of QuickTime-specific CODECs: "BMP" (Raw frames), "Cinepak", "DV-PAL", "DV-NTSC", "Indeo 4.4" and "None" (another raw frames). QT6 added DVPRO CODECs as well. Forget about all the other CODECs a user may have installed on their system that could be used. I'm sure Apple could stand to take a lesson in this regard from other video software like VirtualDub.
As a paying user I've raised these really-simple-to-fix concerns with Apple before, still with no action on their part.
The QuickTime "BMP" and "None" CODECs both have real bugs in that they don't pad rows out to DWORD boundaries. This means that any movies you export with a (width mod 4) of 1, 2 or 3 will suffer tearing when played back in any software except QuickTime Player. (Try this at home kids with the 190x240 Sample.mov that gets installed with QuickTime.) Apple has also been notified of this, again with no response.
I hear you saying, "Big deal! What has this got to do with iTMS?"
Nothing, except that it shows Apple consistently treats Windows users, even paying ones, as second-class citizens. This is perhaps understandable considering their prime business is selling hardware and software to high-margin Mac users, but if they are truly interested in market penetration of iTMS into the Windows world then they will need to act a little more responsively to issues with their Windows client softwares.
Don't you think it's interesting that we're always finding ways to destroy things before we figure out how to preserve them?
DX-CDm Manual CD Destruction Device
Will the games industry go down the route of the razor manufacturers where consoles are almost given away with the games?
Hate to break it to you, but manufacturers have been selling consoles at a loss for a long time now. Their business models rely on profits in software sales to recoup their hardware development and manufacturing costs.
Besides the initial financial risk to the console manufacturer, this model causes tremendous stress to the software development companies as the manufacturer negotiates harsher deals to allow themselves a greater profit margin. With the costs of development systems going up with each new platform release, not to mention contractual obligations, console software development is not an easy market to get into. This isn't likely to improve either.
The only possibility of this situation improving is manufacturers driving-up the retail prices of consoles far enough to recover costs on inital sale - but then they price themselves out of the market. This isn't likely to happen.
With games coming into new devices, such as mobile phones, at least there's opportunity for development companies to grow into areas other than the console market.
This article seems to have such a pro-Mac stance that I didn't bother reading past the first couple of paragraphs. It's OS/wars all over again.
Granted it's been a few years since I was a Level 1 Tech for Apple Resellers, but let's not forget that for many years Macintosh (and specifically Mac-OS) reigned supreme as the simplest platform for which to write viruses. And virus writers certainly took advantage of it.
Why? Because every time you inserted a floppy or CD, or mounted a new hard disk or Syquest cartidge, the OS went behind the scenes to load CODE resources from the disk to allow the display custom dialogs (passwords, etc), change desktop settings, layout, etc. The user didn't have to take any action to open files or folders.
It didn't take virus writers long to figure out this point of entry, and with no concept of permissions or anti-trust built into the OS, the malicious code had full control of the system.
Few days went by where I didn't have to low-level format someone's hard disk and inform them that, yes, working backups are a Good Thing to have.
Yes we have a few of those VP's around here too, me thinks. :)
I'm not sure there ever will be a 100% solution to be honest. When it comes to phone-home methods, 80/20 is still a lot better than nothing... you're always going to have people running "illegal" software on computers that are rarely or never connected to the Internet because they installed it from floppy, CD-ROM, etc.
Maybe this was what M$ was trying to acheive with ASP (Application Service Providers as opposed to Active Server Pages) and Pay-Per-Use software in recent times - the software just won't work without 'net connectivity and some form of license validation.
I'm right there with you, right up to the IP blocks.
I can see what you're trying to achieve, but how many corporations have one and only one IP block? A lot fewer than those with multiple blocks, and certainly fewer than those who don't actually own their block(s) but lease it(them) from larger corporations. This kind of restriction would just make licence management more difficult and expensive for the software vendor, giving them yet another excuse to bump up buy prices.
If we were to make an example of Microsoft as a vendor, corporations are often paying per-seat licences backed-up with monthly internal audits given to M$ (I work for one of them). M$ could achieve a goal similar to your IP blocks by keeping a list of unique (source) MAC addresses against each licence key whenever software looks for patches, say through Windows Critical Update. This tally can be checked against the licence fees coming in from the corporation with a polite "please explain" being sent to them in electronic form (along with the list of MACs for backtracking) in the event of excess tallies. The corporation should be able to come back with "we don't own these MACs" at which point M$ can disable automatic updates for those addresses.
Using MACs instead of IP blocks (or addresses) has the added benefit of working for corporate notebooks roaming networks (people working between several offices), but could complicate issues on Terminal Servers. Suggestions anyone?