SCOs case against IBM seems to concern a transfer of technology (RCU etc.) that SCO seems to think belongs to them by a cause in a contract, even though SCO did not develop any of this code. Hence why SCO has to ask IBM for the code.
Why does the term "possession is 99% of the law" come to mind for this case?
Just one minor thing.
IIRC (IANAL) SLAPP stands for Spurious Lawsuit against Protesting People. Its a lawsuit launched (usually) by a large corp aginst some protesting group on frivouls grounds to make them shut up, or to bankrupt them with legal fees. I believe its illegal in several places.
The 60fps is the average maximum that most of us can see. Considering that this is twice what movies are shown at,(actually its a bit more complicated, some theaters project each frame twice to reduce flicker) and just under the refresh rate for most monitors, I dont think this is a problem. The only time I have heard this being a problem in computer games was with quick turns and other high speed events.
I was wondering when some game maker was going to decided to cap the fps rate and concentrate on other things. We are close to the point where the computers we play these games on will all be able to exceed the 60 fps limit. (thank you Mr. Moore) By not having to draw more frames then 99% of the pop can see, the game can focus on gameplay, and as a side effect, eliminate slowdowns affecting the # of fps outputted, say when everyone in the room gets fragged by someone suiciding with a big grenade. Hopefully by seperating the drawig routines from the world model, better gameplay can result. By doing this, certain 'cheats' can be implemented, such as lowering resolution durring high speed turns or objects speeding by at high speed. The old burred fence post trick. Your eye cannot see any details on the fence post as wou wiz by it at 60 mph, so why bother drawing all the details on it. A similar trick was used in
Who Framed Rager Rabbit.
in the scene where Bob Hoskins character was driving the cartoon car, and turned a 90 degree corner quickly. This was done by splicing two pieces of film together, and then hand drawing a approximation of Mr. Hoskins in for the few frames that were impossible to film in real life. The human eye would have detected the few frames that he has missing if they hadn't done this, but cannot detect the replacement of a live human by an animated figure for this short ammount of time.
As I said before, it was only a matter of time before someone did this as drawing something people cannot see is a wast of resources. The next limit I can see would be the number of polys displayed, more or less for the same reason, putting any more on the screen would be wasted because no one could see them. I cannot make a guess about when this will happen, but we will probably be talking about it within 10 years.
Ack. I had the same problem. I tosted Windows XP, and after I reinstalled, couldnt connect tot the internet. I phone my ISPs tech support, and after geting routed through the sales department (A friend that formally worked there said that management had decided that tech support should be a cost recovery unit!) told me to turn off the software firewall and try again. Of course it didn't work, so they told me to reinstall everything and hung up. I later sorted out the real problem (A driver issue) but forgot to turn on the firewall when I reconnected. Bang, in first minute after I had loged on I had a wlcha pop-up (while I was downloading windows update no less)
Now I have a hardware firewall as well as a better anti-virus scanner for windozs. And before you say it, I already had Linux on my other partition.
Umm. IANAL but the law is a bit more complicated then that. Being derived from English Common Law, there are a lot of strange laws dealing with property. If I recall correctly, there is a law that says something like "you may not prevent someone from derviving pleasure (fair use) from their property." As I said, wierd and probably a couple of hundred years old, but still as relevent today as when it was first written.
Also, the DRM may violate sections of the Illegal restrctions of trade laws. As well, when you make a copy, what are you coping?, the digital file that contains the DRM protected audio file, or the music? Copying could imply a change in media and format.
Although Canadians are allowed to make copies, distribution is still illegal. These guys found a legal way to distribute, and they may make a profit by giving the consumer what they want for a price they are willing to pay.
Ah yes, the Eglish place names cause havoc with the filters. I imagine the people living in Middlesex, Essex, etc have a real problem as well. This even applys to other places in the English speaking world. Growing up in Canada, I lived near a village called Sexsmith (named after a real person, don't ask.)
Ah yes, the old divide and conquer routine that microsoft used back when it had compition in the PC market. The problem with you analysis is that microsoft is not the bigest dog in the market. Even with 42 Bil to loose you can't win if your competitor continually outsells you and is making a profit in the process. As for increasing market share, you always get increadable results when you start from zero. When Nintendo cut the GCN price, its market share increased (dramatically) and if Sony does the same, then they could probably expect the same result, without loosing a lot of money. This is because Sony has continually stramlined its production of the console and the startup cost have already been absorbed, whereas because microsoft used off the shelf components, the costs were already about as low as they could get, and they still lost money selling the console at $400 US. This was annother point you failed to consider.
Microsoft intended for the XBox to be an entry vector for a home entertainment system that they would introduce later, one with an integrated gaming console, and media playback capabilities. Unfortuanaly both you and microsoft failed to consisder that Sony has also thought of this idea and is already implementing it as the PSX, which unlike microsofts proposed system does not include DRM.
In conclusion, microsoft is figting against another business model: Give the consumer what they want, and make a profit doing so. I am constantly amazed that more companys dont see the verture of this simple model and instead try things like suing the end user or getting a law changed so as to deny consumers the right to choose.
If you were doing this type of comparison, why would you stop at just the code that SGI contributed? SGI is probably only saying this for legal reasons, ie. they dont want to be responsible for vetting others code, especially if the comparison process doesn't hold up in court. Linus has probably been 'unofficially' told of these finding and is keeping quiet. Hmm, I wonder if this was the reason for Linus's "SCO is on crack" outburst
So SCO could still potentially be right in saying that IBM submitted a lot of Unix code into Linux.
Doubtful. SCO's claim seem to deal with a really wierd interpretation of the derived rights clause in the UNIX contract. SCO seem to believe that if some type of technology (eg. XFS) was added into a licenced derivitive on UNIX V, then that technology belongs to SCO.
Hmmm, using this logic (which SCO appears to be using), then even if SCO did say what code was infringing, and it was removed from Linux, then that new work would be considered a derived work as well and subject to the $699 Licencing fee. Oh Joy;-)
SCOs business plan seems to be "If it ever so much as looked at/like Unix, then you owe us money"
Plus, Japanese developers have no concept of how to not offend western media (I'm sorry, SEGA, a game that lets kids join a gang and spray paint anything in sight while running from the law is just not a very good idea, no matter how good it could be if you'd just fixed a few usability issues).
Umm, your saying a non violent GTA type game would violate western sensibilities? The possiblilities for sarcasm here are endless here, but I will leave that as an execerise for the readers imagination.
After GTA, The media may even praise it a non-violent game like this.
However SCOs rights may or may not have been violated, SCO has no right to violate the rights of all the honest contributors to the Linux kernel. Their right to compensation comes from the legal system, not by stealing back. "Some of you (OSS developers) took our code and illegally licenced/distrbuted it, now we'll take yours and do the same!"
SCO seems to believe that its derivitive ownership rights override the GPL, sort of a type of viral ownership, where (they believe) anything that has ever touched the Unix core is theirs. Now we all know that this won't stand up in court, but it looks good on paper, and has been effective in scattering FUD to the managerial types who were beginning to embrace Open Source software.
To me this is beginning to look like a carefully constructed scam. Part FUD machine, part pump and dump scheme, complete with its own fall guy. I noticed that just about all the executives in SCO but Mr. McBride are selling their stocks like crazy. Coincidence, I think not.
Re:Well...Ok...900 pages...
on
Quicksilver
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· Score: 1
Actually yes, there is a map on London in the back cover, hi-lighting the parts destroyed in the great fire, and a map of Europe in the front cover. There are also quite a few family trees, and acording to a list of illustrations, a copy of one of Newtons drawings somewhere in the text (although I didn't see it when I was flipping through it)
Re:So looking forward to this...
on
Quicksilver
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· Score: 1
I noticed that under the "Books also by this Author" at the beginning of Quicksilver that The Big U was not mentioned. I know that neal didn't like his first attempt at writing, but I didn't think it was that bad... Ok it was bad with some good parts, but at least it didn't have those long rambling parts like Cryptonomicon (the intercepted letter written on the laptop for one, and the Wisdom tooth part as well)
I got my copy Friday, amazingly enough the day after I got the email notification that it had been shipped.
Hmmm, two Canadian dates on this tour. This could be intresting as Intelectual property laws are very different in Canada, especially in regard to derived works. There was a case not so long ago where a resturant sued a former chef for using a receipe he had developed while working at that resturant at his next job. The court sided with the chef.
SCO will have to be careful on what they say as they could land themselves in quite a bit of hot water by citing laws that have no effect outside the states. I encourage the LUGs in Toronto and Vancouver to prepare well and try to catch SCO slip ups.
sigh, TO is too far for a day trip and its on a Tuesday.
I wouldn't put too much faith in the rumour.... CA games are available here in.au too.
Its not a rumour, it happened to a friend of mine who was el'Presedente of a University gaming club at the time. She ordered a few games on-line because the local gaming store didn't have those particular ones, and she thought that she could save a little money by ordering directly from the source.
Needless to say, we have very little respect for Canadian Customs (who have been known to seize books at the border that were published in Canada!)
I agree, the CA games are for the most part quite good, although I have run across a few where the rules didn't quite work. Mind you, the games are so cheap that if you do manage to get a dud, you won't feel bad about it.
Also, for those of you outside the States, I have hear of these games being stopped at customs due to the companys unique name, not for the contents. This is odd because I can buy these games at my local gaming shop here in Canada.
I can't see anything in the article specifically saying that the PS3 will support PS1 games, just a claim for backwards compatability for PS2 games.
PS3insider also does not think that the PS3 will support PS1 games. Mind you, with the ammount of power the PS3 is suppost to have, then emulating a PS1 should be trivial.
This does sound a lot like the Cell, but less advanced. I wonder if this an old project that just came to light recently or something. Looking at the project it looks like a grid computer on a chip, so in that way it is a bit more advanced then the Cell. They probably just came to the same realizations as Sony did when trying to design a next gen chip, that single core chips were a bottleneck and came to a similar conclusion that multiple cores were a better solution.
As a programmer, I have been in many situations where I did not even think of a contingency until a user did something that no one was suppose to do and the app blew up. The last major bugs I had to fix in my project were not found by QA, but by a poorly trained user who didn't know that you shouldn't do something, or did something completely different to how they were suppose to complete a task.
What I am trying to say here is that developers will never be able to see all possibilities and will be blind to entire classes of problems until they are pointed out. Conversely, virus writers will not be able to find all the possible holes in a program at a single time and will often only exploit a handful of holes per attack.
In conclusion, security evolves by analyzing past attacks and reacting to plug the hole so it cannot be used again. Like bacteria and anti-bodies, this process can be very efficient over the long run, even if we have to suffer through epidemics every once in a while.
But from what I can tell, SCO argues if one of THEIR files (or some of their files) touches Linux, then Linux is essentially theirs, especially because Linux apparently benefitted from the code they "own."
OK, Im not a lawyer, but wouldn't the contract provisions that say this fall under Anti-trust / Monopoly / Illegal restriction of trade laws both in the US and in other countries?
If this is true, then even if SCO wins, they loose.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does the term "possession is 99% of the law" come to mind for this case?
Just one minor thing. IIRC (IANAL) SLAPP stands for Spurious Lawsuit against Protesting People. Its a lawsuit launched (usually) by a large corp aginst some protesting group on frivouls grounds to make them shut up, or to bankrupt them with legal fees. I believe its illegal in several places.
Ahh, isn't the american legal system grand.
I was wondering when some game maker was going to decided to cap the fps rate and concentrate on other things. We are close to the point where the computers we play these games on will all be able to exceed the 60 fps limit. (thank you Mr. Moore) By not having to draw more frames then 99% of the pop can see, the game can focus on gameplay, and as a side effect, eliminate slowdowns affecting the # of fps outputted, say when everyone in the room gets fragged by someone suiciding with a big grenade. Hopefully by seperating the drawig routines from the world model, better gameplay can result. By doing this, certain 'cheats' can be implemented, such as lowering resolution durring high speed turns or objects speeding by at high speed. The old burred fence post trick. Your eye cannot see any details on the fence post as wou wiz by it at 60 mph, so why bother drawing all the details on it. A similar trick was used in
- Who Framed Rager Rabbit.
in the scene where Bob Hoskins character was driving the cartoon car, and turned a 90 degree corner quickly. This was done by splicing two pieces of film together, and then hand drawing a approximation of Mr. Hoskins in for the few frames that were impossible to film in real life. The human eye would have detected the few frames that he has missing if they hadn't done this, but cannot detect the replacement of a live human by an animated figure for this short ammount of time.As I said before, it was only a matter of time before someone did this as drawing something people cannot see is a wast of resources. The next limit I can see would be the number of polys displayed, more or less for the same reason, putting any more on the screen would be wasted because no one could see them. I cannot make a guess about when this will happen, but we will probably be talking about it within 10 years.
Now I have a hardware firewall as well as a better anti-virus scanner for windozs. And before you say it, I already had Linux on my other partition.
Umm. IANAL but the law is a bit more complicated then that. Being derived from English Common Law, there are a lot of strange laws dealing with property. If I recall correctly, there is a law that says something like "you may not prevent someone from derviving pleasure (fair use) from their property." As I said, wierd and probably a couple of hundred years old, but still as relevent today as when it was first written.
Also, the DRM may violate sections of the Illegal restrctions of trade laws. As well, when you make a copy, what are you coping?, the digital file that contains the DRM protected audio file, or the music? Copying could imply a change in media and format.
Although Canadians are allowed to make copies, distribution is still illegal. These guys found a legal way to distribute, and they may make a profit by giving the consumer what they want for a price they are willing to pay.
Ah yes, the Eglish place names cause havoc with the filters. I imagine the people living in Middlesex, Essex, etc have a real problem as well. This even applys to other places in the English speaking world. Growing up in Canada, I lived near a village called Sexsmith (named after a real person, don't ask.)
Microsoft intended for the XBox to be an entry vector for a home entertainment system that they would introduce later, one with an integrated gaming console, and media playback capabilities. Unfortuanaly both you and microsoft failed to consisder that Sony has also thought of this idea and is already implementing it as the PSX, which unlike microsofts proposed system does not include DRM.
In conclusion, microsoft is figting against another business model: Give the consumer what they want, and make a profit doing so. I am constantly amazed that more companys dont see the verture of this simple model and instead try things like suing the end user or getting a law changed so as to deny consumers the right to choose.
So SCO could still potentially be right in saying that IBM submitted a lot of Unix code into Linux.
Doubtful. SCO's claim seem to deal with a really wierd interpretation of the derived rights clause in the UNIX contract. SCO seem to believe that if some type of technology (eg. XFS) was added into a licenced derivitive on UNIX V, then that technology belongs to SCO.
SCOs business plan seems to be "If it ever so much as looked at/like Unix, then you owe us money"
Umm, your saying a non violent GTA type game would violate western sensibilities? The possiblilities for sarcasm here are endless here, but I will leave that as an execerise for the readers imagination.
After GTA, The media may even praise it a non-violent game like this.
SCO seems to believe that its derivitive ownership rights override the GPL, sort of a type of viral ownership, where (they believe) anything that has ever touched the Unix core is theirs. Now we all know that this won't stand up in court, but it looks good on paper, and has been effective in scattering FUD to the managerial types who were beginning to embrace Open Source software.
To me this is beginning to look like a carefully constructed scam. Part FUD machine, part pump and dump scheme, complete with its own fall guy. I noticed that just about all the executives in SCO but Mr. McBride are selling their stocks like crazy. Coincidence, I think not.
Actually yes, there is a map on London in the back cover, hi-lighting the parts destroyed in the great fire, and a map of Europe in the front cover. There are also quite a few family trees, and acording to a list of illustrations, a copy of one of Newtons drawings somewhere in the text (although I didn't see it when I was flipping through it)
I got my copy Friday, amazingly enough the day after I got the email notification that it had been shipped.
SCO will have to be careful on what they say as they could land themselves in quite a bit of hot water by citing laws that have no effect outside the states. I encourage the LUGs in Toronto and Vancouver to prepare well and try to catch SCO slip ups.
sigh, TO is too far for a day trip and its on a Tuesday.
Its not a rumour, it happened to a friend of mine who was el'Presedente of a University gaming club at the time. She ordered a few games on-line because the local gaming store didn't have those particular ones, and she thought that she could save a little money by ordering directly from the source.
Needless to say, we have very little respect for Canadian Customs (who have been known to seize books at the border that were published in Canada!)
Also, for those of you outside the States, I have hear of these games being stopped at customs due to the companys unique name, not for the contents. This is odd because I can buy these games at my local gaming shop here in Canada.
Catan is pronounced Katan.
Lots of good pics under the more photos link at the bottom of the page of some of the other teams projects.
PS3insider also does not think that the PS3 will support PS1 games. Mind you, with the ammount of power the PS3 is suppost to have, then emulating a PS1 should be trivial.
This does sound a lot like the Cell, but less advanced. I wonder if this an old project that just came to light recently or something. Looking at the project it looks like a grid computer on a chip, so in that way it is a bit more advanced then the Cell. They probably just came to the same realizations as Sony did when trying to design a next gen chip, that single core chips were a bottleneck and came to a similar conclusion that multiple cores were a better solution.
I wonder how many units this acounted for. Then again maybe this acounted for some of these units as well. Buy Bush a PlayStation 2
What I am trying to say here is that developers will never be able to see all possibilities and will be blind to entire classes of problems until they are pointed out. Conversely, virus writers will not be able to find all the possible holes in a program at a single time and will often only exploit a handful of holes per attack.
In conclusion, security evolves by analyzing past attacks and reacting to plug the hole so it cannot be used again. Like bacteria and anti-bodies, this process can be very efficient over the long run, even if we have to suffer through epidemics every once in a while.
OK, Im not a lawyer, but wouldn't the contract provisions that say this fall under Anti-trust / Monopoly / Illegal restriction of trade laws both in the US and in other countries?
If this is true, then even if SCO wins, they loose.