This is supposed to be done by someone who hasn't looked at the proprietary code. He has only done part of the job, and a dodgy part at that. He needs to document the hardware interface then pass his documentation to someone who can legitimately write THEIR OWN CODE, to implement the desired functionality and call the hardware.
As it stands it's straight copying, although since the license that ships with the code allows it it turns out he CAN do this, see other replies for details.
Ahh... critically important information I wasn't aware of. OK, he's safe to use the code. If I could I'd mod you up myself. This obviously makes a huge difference to his ability to release the driver.
The only analysis the guy did was figuring out what their proprietary source did instruction for instruction in a higher level language. Sure it took analysis, but the most complex analysis he had there was figuring out how the various branching calls mapped to higher level flow control calls. He didn't create anything he copied their work verbatim. He took their machine binary and mapped it directly to a higher level language. Have you heard of cleanroom reverse engineering? They do that for a reason.
If the purpose here is to subsequently study and publish information on the hardware interface then he may be on firmer ground, but that is my whole point. He cannot use this code in his own software, it flat out doesn't belong to him. It was written by someone else. Everything was written by someone else, all the function calls, the variables, the flow control, none of it is his work. It is *copied* from someone's proprietary code.
Then we at least agree on the substance of the issue, in general I was using reverse engineering as many others do (perhaps mistakenly) to describe the legally untainted cleanroom reverse engineering processes that could lead to a genuinely free version of the software.
If I take your book written in English and publish it translated in French I've violated your copyright. All this guy did was duplicate line for line the code, that is copying. The copyright holder holds those rights. He's not duplicating a procedure, he's duplicating the *copyright code*, line for line using a dissasembler and translating the duplication to C. I'm not saying you can't duplicate the functionality, but you can't copy code like this.
This is not reverse engineering, he dissassembled the code and pretty much copied/ported the result to C. I don't think this meets any cleanroom standards and the code is dangerously contaminated. To use this work you would have to get someone else to reimplement the driver without looking at this contaminated code base. That means they need to be passed a description of the hardware interface inferred from observations of how this driver works, and the code produced by dissassebling the driver needs to be tossed in the garbage can.
Who taught anyone that dissassembling someone's proprietary code and doing a line for line port then publishing the result was in any way legitimate?
Sigh, diamonds for chips have to be GROWN. You need a very large very smooth surface as the substrate for a wafer, and one problem is that natural diamonds are small and industrial diamonds are basically dust. Now there's a way to make larger diamonds through high temperature compression and seeding but that's just getting going but not 12 inch wafers of them and I don't think the crystal is perfect, and there's another promising way where diamonds are being grown through carbon deposition and they're up an impressive inch or so. I think it's important to realize that these things have to be grown under exact conditions with perfect crystaline structure to produce the flawless substrate required by deep submicron fabrication.
DeBeers? Irrelevant to this, is growing diamonds a problem for DeBeers, probably but who cares, move along there's nothing to see.
FWIW, I'd be prepared to wager that you'd make much more per carrat from a chips fabbed on a diamond substrate than you would from selling diamonds by the carrat. Although that doesn't set the price of raw materials. Fabs cost billions but most of that is in the lithography & etching, I'm sure the growth chambers and machining equipment for the diamond wafers will be pretty darned expensive too.
No he wasn't dumbass, he mentioned the power used to make the stuff, and if you know the industry then you know there's plenty of aluminium oxide to be had, it's separating the stuff that is the problem, it takes a shit load of electricity since it's basically smelted and separated once in molten form using electrolosis. This is the only real problem with aluminium production.
Nothing to do with the U.S., "Global Warming" or the Kyoto treaty? Why bother? Unfortunately since this has everything to do with local squandering of water resources, nobody is interested railing against a bunch of local farmers or thirsty populace. Why even post an eco disaster story that so obviously is not the U.S.' fault and even worse point it out in the story. You should have waited for Reuters or the BBC to do a hatchet job on the story, distort the facts, & quote some anti-U.S. bigot to spice it up & blame it all on Bush before you posted this. Come on don't you even know how junk science and ecco-bunkum are supposed to be used to advance an adgenda?
The fact is that the nebulous concept of I.P. is so pervasive that you could say the same thing about any piece of software. You could claim that Microsoft's Operating Systems contain the I.P. of thousands of companies and individuals out there and you'd be right. And of course they've lost court cases on these very issues.
Just another case of the pot calling the kettle black.
I've never heard a more ridiculous statement that "making bycicling more sustainable". Some people are just nuts, many aluminium plants are located near hydroelectric facilities (often built for that specific purpose), so the production of aluminium us perfectly sustainable too, just so long as it keeps raining.
Wow, charging for updates (bug fixes). Let's see.... it's high time they started charging for those IE updates and closed the loop on the whole nasty Netscape thing. Afterall, they've killed the competition.
Microsoft updates often include significant new products. For example I have "Windows Movie Maker" which appears to be some basic non linear editing suite.
Microsoft now has a conduit to your desktop through which it can introduce new products as windows updates, and they're nothing of the sort. They've effectively built a bundling pipeline to most desktop systems in the world. Now with the addition of charges for their "updates" it transforms into a direct P2P sales infrastructure for everything from product updates to new applications with absolutely zero competition.
This just highlights the stupidity of these analysts. They get paid to research this stuff and don't even understand the basics of what's going on. SCO has a contract dispute with IBM that is only indirectly related to Linux copyrights, the evidence w.r.t. Linux shows that SCO doesn't have a leg to stand on. Caldera distributed the offending code under GPL, actively participated in Linux kernel development, has the most bizarre and wide intrepretation of derivitive works hoping they own the fruits of all IBM's labor, and there's even clear evidence that SCO has been stealing from GPL'd projects not the other way around. In addition to all this, w.r.t. liability any Linux user is completely off the hook w.r.t. copyright liability since they're not the publisher.
Why should you be able to email the President? You can't call him, you can't pop round for a cup of tea and a chat, why should he have to read email from complete strangers on whatever pops into heir head. More importantly, why should I as a taxpayer have to fund the staff it takes to read all the email that he gets sent just so you get a cozy feeling about the democratic process?
You seem to be under the misconception that you don't need to read what he wrote carefully before criticizing. The reviewer did not think they were the same thing, he clearly says he "needed a bigger hammer".
It's a sad fact that SGI sales are embarrassingly bad. I used to work for SGI, while I was still there I knew ex-SGI employees who tried to buy machines for REAL projects and couldn't, it was just too difficult with the whole sales rep runaround. Very frustrating! Don't believe me? Call them up and tell them you want to buy an Onyx4 system. You WILL get the runaround, especially if you want a few technical details or need to discuss configuration options. They couldn't sell popcorn in a cinema lobby.
The first is the need to implement quick & dirty solutions, that's OK, sometimes software development is like that. Sometimes you stick with the quick & dirty solution way beyond it's anticipated lifetime.
Your second problem is you work for real morons and/or cyncal assholes. Don't let their bullshit phase you, remind them of their decisions and your accomplishments. If you can't take the aggro go work somewhere you're appreciated. Leave them with all that quick & dirty code to maintain and bask in their suffering with no regrets.
What's the difference between this and the XBox conceptually then? XBox is pretty much a PC, give or take the memory system.
How else would you build a console system affordably if you can't guarantee truly massive volume from the start?
Do you really expect them to put up hundreds of millions in R&D to do this all custom? What makes a console is the fact that every single system is identical to every other, it's a homogeneous platform that developers can write to, if software works on one it works on them all. It's about the critical mass and getting the titles, the console chicken & egg business is tough to enter, I wish them luck.
If they get the titles they need they'll be successful, and this is the attractive part of any console business, controlling the titles, and it's how they ALL do it. Same for Nintendo. You never saw people bitching that they couldn't program their N64, you need a cart and the carts were produced exclusively by Nintendo. Now it's CDs with authentication in hardware.
Break the business model (as some here are determined to do) and you don't get a cheap PC, you get a broken console business, ultimately they'll just go with some non standard format to stop you and drive the prices up.
When you buy one of these beasts you get it with DRM (of whatever flavor) built in. It's up front, "here's a console, it runs games published exclusively by us". Why anyone wuold buy into that relationship then gripe that they can't circumvent the DRM is beyond me. DON'T BUY IT, if you don't want it. Go buy that PC or whatever, they're nice & CHEAP these days and you don't have to waste your time hacking a console to make it work.
The FBI procedure is to get a court order and hope they can eavesdrop. I don't think it's given that teh crypto on an individual phone can be turned off or trivially defeated. Clipper died if you'll remember, so there's no key held in escrow that they can use to snoop.
It only gives spammers charged with tresspass a defense. They are not charged as such. In fact spammers are only dealt with under specific provisions of the law introduced to deal specifically with spam. If Intel had gone after this guy as a spammer the entire case would have been different, although I doubt it would have been possible given the timeframe of the alleged offence.
The DMCA applies in the USA, not Australia. And they're not on shakey legal ground when there's considerable fair use.
It's not blackmail, it's an offer to let them do it their way.
What do they hope to gain from your alleged blackmail? Exactly what they have already, it's not blackmail because they can already do what they're asking Microsoft to do. The ONLY thing they are offering Microsoft is an opportunity to avoid the illegal use that game pirates would make of their legitimate use.
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This is supposed to be done by someone who hasn't looked at the proprietary code. He has only done part of the job, and a dodgy part at that. He needs to document the hardware interface then pass his documentation to someone who can legitimately write THEIR OWN CODE, to implement the desired functionality and call the hardware.
As it stands it's straight copying, although since the license that ships with the code allows it it turns out he CAN do this, see other replies for details.
Ahh... critically important information I wasn't aware of. OK, he's safe to use the code. If I could I'd mod you up myself. This obviously makes a huge difference to his ability to release the driver.
The only analysis the guy did was figuring out what their proprietary source did instruction for instruction in a higher level language. Sure it took analysis, but the most complex analysis he had there was figuring out how the various branching calls mapped to higher level flow control calls. He didn't create anything he copied their work verbatim. He took their machine binary and mapped it directly to a higher level language. Have you heard of cleanroom reverse engineering? They do that for a reason.
If the purpose here is to subsequently study and publish information on the hardware interface then he may be on firmer ground, but that is my whole point. He cannot use this code in his own software, it flat out doesn't belong to him. It was written by someone else. Everything was written by someone else, all the function calls, the variables, the flow control, none of it is his work. It is *copied* from someone's proprietary code.
Then we at least agree on the substance of the issue, in general I was using reverse engineering as many others do (perhaps mistakenly) to describe the legally untainted cleanroom reverse engineering processes that could lead to a genuinely free version of the software.
If I take your book written in English and publish it translated in French I've violated your copyright. All this guy did was duplicate line for line the code, that is copying. The copyright holder holds those rights. He's not duplicating a procedure, he's duplicating the *copyright code*, line for line using a dissasembler and translating the duplication to C. I'm not saying you can't duplicate the functionality, but you can't copy code like this.
This is not reverse engineering, he dissassembled the code and pretty much copied/ported the result to C. I don't think this meets any cleanroom standards and the code is dangerously contaminated. To use this work you would have to get someone else to reimplement the driver without looking at this contaminated code base. That means they need to be passed a description of the hardware interface inferred from observations of how this driver works, and the code produced by dissassebling the driver needs to be tossed in the garbage can.
Who taught anyone that dissassembling someone's proprietary code and doing a line for line port then publishing the result was in any way legitimate?
Sigh, diamonds for chips have to be GROWN. You need a very large very smooth surface as the substrate for a wafer, and one problem is that natural diamonds are small and industrial diamonds are basically dust. Now there's a way to make larger diamonds through high temperature compression and seeding but that's just getting going but not 12 inch wafers of them and I don't think the crystal is perfect, and there's another promising way where diamonds are being grown through carbon deposition and they're up an impressive inch or so. I think it's important to realize that these things have to be grown under exact conditions with perfect crystaline structure to produce the flawless substrate required by deep submicron fabrication.
DeBeers? Irrelevant to this, is growing diamonds a problem for DeBeers, probably but who cares, move along there's nothing to see.
FWIW, I'd be prepared to wager that you'd make much more per carrat from a chips fabbed on a diamond substrate than you would from selling diamonds by the carrat. Although that doesn't set the price of raw materials. Fabs cost billions but most of that is in the lithography & etching, I'm sure the growth chambers and machining equipment for the diamond wafers will be pretty darned expensive too.
What idiot marked this as insightful, it's trying to be funny because utterly wrong w.r.t. statistics.
LOL, you show your own bias in your post. But at least we agree the BBC is more biased than most.
No he wasn't dumbass, he mentioned the power used to make the stuff, and if you know the industry then you know there's plenty of aluminium oxide to be had, it's separating the stuff that is the problem, it takes a shit load of electricity since it's basically smelted and separated once in molten form using electrolosis. This is the only real problem with aluminium production.
Nothing to do with the U.S., "Global Warming" or the Kyoto treaty? Why bother? Unfortunately since this has everything to do with local squandering of water resources, nobody is interested railing against a bunch of local farmers or thirsty populace. Why even post an eco disaster story that so obviously is not the U.S.' fault and even worse point it out in the story. You should have waited for Reuters or the BBC to do a hatchet job on the story, distort the facts, & quote some anti-U.S. bigot to spice it up & blame it all on Bush before you posted this. Come on don't you even know how junk science and ecco-bunkum are supposed to be used to advance an adgenda?
The fact is that the nebulous concept of I.P. is so pervasive that you could say the same thing about any piece of software. You could claim that Microsoft's Operating Systems contain the I.P. of thousands of companies and individuals out there and you'd be right. And of course they've lost court cases on these very issues.
Just another case of the pot calling the kettle black.
I've never heard a more ridiculous statement that "making bycicling more sustainable". Some people are just nuts, many aluminium plants are located near hydroelectric facilities (often built for that specific purpose), so the production of aluminium us perfectly sustainable too, just so long as it keeps raining.
Wow, charging for updates (bug fixes). Let's see.... it's high time they started charging for those IE updates and closed the loop on the whole nasty Netscape thing. Afterall, they've killed the competition.
Microsoft updates often include significant new products. For example I have "Windows Movie Maker" which appears to be some basic non linear editing suite.
Microsoft now has a conduit to your desktop through which it can introduce new products as windows updates, and they're nothing of the sort. They've effectively built a bundling pipeline to most desktop systems in the world. Now with the addition of charges for their "updates" it transforms into a direct P2P sales infrastructure for everything from product updates to new applications with absolutely zero competition.
This just highlights the stupidity of these analysts. They get paid to research this stuff and don't even understand the basics of what's going on. SCO has a contract dispute with IBM that is only indirectly related to Linux copyrights, the evidence w.r.t. Linux shows that SCO doesn't have a leg to stand on. Caldera distributed the offending code under GPL, actively participated in Linux kernel development, has the most bizarre and wide intrepretation of derivitive works hoping they own the fruits of all IBM's labor, and there's even clear evidence that SCO has been stealing from GPL'd projects not the other way around. In addition to all this, w.r.t. liability any Linux user is completely off the hook w.r.t. copyright liability since they're not the publisher.
Why should you be able to email the President? You can't call him, you can't pop round for a cup of tea and a chat, why should he have to read email from complete strangers on whatever pops into heir head. More importantly, why should I as a taxpayer have to fund the staff it takes to read all the email that he gets sent just so you get a cozy feeling about the democratic process?
You want to communicate with the President? Vote.
You seem to be under the misconception that you don't need to read what he wrote carefully before criticizing. The reviewer did not think they were the same thing, he clearly says he "needed a bigger hammer".
Feel free to develop your own rocket industry. Nobody's stopping you and the U.S. shouldn't hold itself back because you are doing jack.
It's a sad fact that SGI sales are embarrassingly bad. I used to work for SGI, while I was still there I knew ex-SGI employees who tried to buy machines for REAL projects and couldn't, it was just too difficult with the whole sales rep runaround. Very frustrating! Don't believe me? Call them up and tell them you want to buy an Onyx4 system. You WILL get the runaround, especially if you want a few technical details or need to discuss configuration options. They couldn't sell popcorn in a cinema lobby.
You have two separate issues.
The first is the need to implement quick & dirty solutions, that's OK, sometimes software development is like that. Sometimes you stick with the quick & dirty solution way beyond it's anticipated lifetime.
Your second problem is you work for real morons and/or cyncal assholes. Don't let their bullshit phase you, remind them of their decisions and your accomplishments. If you can't take the aggro go work somewhere you're appreciated. Leave them with all that quick & dirty code to maintain and bask in their suffering with no regrets.
What's the difference between this and the XBox conceptually then? XBox is pretty much a PC, give or take the memory system.
How else would you build a console system affordably if you can't guarantee truly massive volume from the start?
Do you really expect them to put up hundreds of millions in R&D to do this all custom? What makes a console is the fact that every single system is identical to every other, it's a homogeneous platform that developers can write to, if software works on one it works on them all. It's about the critical mass and getting the titles, the console chicken & egg business is tough to enter, I wish them luck.
If they get the titles they need they'll be successful, and this is the attractive part of any console business, controlling the titles, and it's how they ALL do it. Same for Nintendo. You never saw people bitching that they couldn't program their N64, you need a cart and the carts were produced exclusively by Nintendo. Now it's CDs with authentication in hardware.
Break the business model (as some here are determined to do) and you don't get a cheap PC, you get a broken console business, ultimately they'll just go with some non standard format to stop you and drive the prices up.
When you buy one of these beasts you get it with DRM (of whatever flavor) built in. It's up front, "here's a console, it runs games published exclusively by us". Why anyone wuold buy into that relationship then gripe that they can't circumvent the DRM is beyond me. DON'T BUY IT, if you don't want it. Go buy that PC or whatever, they're nice & CHEAP these days and you don't have to waste your time hacking a console to make it work.
The FBI procedure is to get a court order and hope they can eavesdrop. I don't think it's given that teh crypto on an individual phone can be turned off or trivially defeated. Clipper died if you'll remember, so there's no key held in escrow that they can use to snoop.
Why the screenshots, can't they just post some text files?
It only gives spammers charged with tresspass a defense. They are not charged as such. In fact spammers are only dealt with under specific provisions of the law introduced to deal specifically with spam. If Intel had gone after this guy as a spammer the entire case would have been different, although I doubt it would have been possible given the timeframe of the alleged offence.
The DMCA applies in the USA, not Australia. And they're not on shakey legal ground when there's considerable fair use.
It's not blackmail, it's an offer to let them do it their way.
What do they hope to gain from your alleged blackmail? Exactly what they have already, it's not blackmail because they can already do what they're asking Microsoft to do. The ONLY thing they are offering Microsoft is an opportunity to avoid the illegal use that game pirates would make of their legitimate use.
How more reasonable could they possible be?