Yup, that's the #1 reason I've bought a total of only 2-3 books for my Nook (and almost never touch it any more) - paperbacks are cheaper, which is utterly stupid given the significantly lower cost to produce!
Unless they've changed it, at least B&N's DRM is fairly benign. It is what one person described as "social DRM" - There are no limits on number of devices with a particular ebook installed - the only limitation is that the encryption key is derived from your full name and your credit card number.
Badly, I may add - which is why B&N's DRM is one of the easiest to break.
B&N is the one who locked the Nook Tablet's bootloader, tivoizing it. Not Amazon.
I love how the article points out how easily hackable the Nook Touch was while ignoring the fact that B&N has made a major move towards lockdown with the Tablet - locked bootloader, plus it is partitioned so you can only use 1GB of the storage for sideloaded content. The rest is "B&N Content" only.
I didn't say it was impossible - just that it was a LOT harder than the AC made it out to be. Nereus is NOT a hobbyist project - it was made by one of the top oceanographic research institutions on the planet, and if you look at it, is a hell of a lot more than an Arduino on the end of a fiber optic cable.
No, a ROV that works at shallow depths is easy. One that will work with the pressures sustained at the depths this thing is lying at is a WHOLE other story.
For example, at these kinds of pressures, the epoxy will crush, which will crush the battery. Similarly, any cameras are likely to have their optics destroyed by pressure differentials unless specifically designed for deepwater operation.
Looks like they've only done this once with the original Froyo/Gingerbread Tab series.
They've moved (as mentioned in some threads on the subject) to signed-but-not-locked bootloaders (Including later software updates for the Tabs based on what I can read.)
Samsung's current strategy is to verify the signature of any kernel flashed in download (Odin) mode. If the kernel is not a signed Samsung release, the bootloader increments a "custom binary count" counter and pops up a warning screen until you flash an official kernel.
I think it's a valid compromise - Use the current state (and history) to affect warranty support, but allow people to do with their devices what they want.
So far I have never heard of a person being denied a store return due to having a nonzero CBC, as long as they flashed back to official firmware prior to returning.
It's been possible to get a code-free Technician license for almost two decades.
However, it likely has much more appeal now that you can get on the international HF bands without a code test. (Code-free Tech only had access to VHF/UHF and above)
The only cases of updates enforcing any sort of "lockdown" that I know of is disabling nvflash mode on the Tab 10.1 (Odin mode still works fine for flashing) and implementing the "custom binary count" counter on their phones. Samsung is, if anything, very developer-friendly.
Man I just couldn't resist jumping on the bozomoron who claimed that Google was being GPL-noncompliant and asked for him to provide even a single example.
Especially since sometimes RVers will camp in one place for an extended period - many such places give discounts for long-term residents (because they're guaranteed to have that spot full.)
There are RV spots in the town park next to where I live - there are people that basically live there all summer, and then go down to Florida in the winter.
That seems to be the biggest attraction - a premium RV is cheaper than even a house in this area, AND you can move the "house" when the weather sucks.
"posted the fixed jar files for all ROM developers to use." No, that's not for all ROM developers to use, that's only useful for ROM developers using the EXACT same base ROM that the NoCIQ mod was developed for.
It is utterly useless to anyone trying to remove CIQ from a ROM with a different base even for the same device, let alone someone trying to remove CIQ from a different device.
Now if they just had a high-level list saying "These are the jar files normally affected, these are the smali files normally affected within the.jar, and these are the function calls to look for in those files", it would be a LOT easier to port the NoCIQ mods to other devices.
Similar to what I did with mods to Settings.apk to allow NFC to work on the SGH-I777 - On IRC, it took me one sentence that two ROM devs had no trouble implementing: "Search for NfcAdapter in WirelessSettings.smali, and delete the second occurrence of removePreference after that" - no need for anyone to find the original Settings.apk of my modified one to diff against.
We've been fortunate in the SGH-I777 community - most of us came from the Infuse community, where nearly everyone worked together because there were few of us and the device was a massive fucking annoyance. As a result there's a lot of coordination and cooperation on IRC. Developers that choose not to coordinate/cooperate often find themselves unable to keep up - such as one guy that took almost a week to release sources for his kernel, and when he did so, just did an initial commit of his current source tree. Meets the letter but not the spirit of the GPL...
The problem is you have a lot of oldschool ROM cooks from the WinMo days, colliding with the open-source crowd, such as the Cyanogenmod team, and in my experience most of the better kernel hackers are the ones that post full git commit histories because they have nothing to hide AND believe in peer review. A lot of kernels are barely GPL-compliant (e.g. no source for betas, when source drops it's a megatarball) and when I read the threads for those, I see that whoever it is seems to have broken all sorts of things in the pursuit of ShinyUselessFeature that everyone asks for despite it not really being that useful and having major potential negative side effects.
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
on
Occupy Flash?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I think the worst was when some moron came up with "Occupy Tibet"... Um, being occupied is PRECISELY the problem they have.
Unfortunately I can't rant on the guy's Facebook page without "liking" the stupidity...
It is also possible, with a LOT of work, to remove CIQ's hooks from the system using baksmali/smali (basically, a disassembler/assembler for Java).
Unfortunately, the developers on XDA who put forth NoCIQ mods seem to be considering this their "special sauce" to set themselves apart and get some donations - when asked where to look for hooks on a device they don't support, you get nothing but silence. No guides, even high-level ones oriented towards developers.
Because it only has an opt-out option in the original software as delivered to the carriers/manufacturers.
By the time it gets into your hands, it is more invasive and the opt-out option has been removed. In fact, the software is fairly aggressively hidden from the user so it becomes difficult to even know about it.
Identify - not too hard, the linked articles have a good number of ways.
Remove - that's a LOT harder. It's got hooks all over the system, so often removing the libraries causes everything to start crashing. As time progresses, CIQ implementations become more and more invasive, to the point where on recent leaks for the Samsung Infuse 4G, it appears that they even modified wpa_supplicant with CIQ hooks! (I don't have the logcat with me now - but it's obvious that CIQ is trying to phone home when I try to associate with my access point. This may be why wifi fails on that leak if you're running without a SIM card.)
Google has always complied with the GPL - but people are misinformed and think that the GPL applies to significantly more of Android than it does.
The kernel is, of course, GPL, and nearly every device manufacturer has been good about releasing kernel sources. (Some more than others, HTC needed a bit of "encouragement", Chinese manufacturers like Huawei and ZTE are awful.)
A few other components are also GPL, but most of the Android platform is Apache licensed.
You aren't forced to waste disk space/download on GNOME.
That's it.
Also, the Unity mess only affected those using GNOME Ubuntu. Kubuntu 11.10 just seems to be 11.04 with more polish.
The only thing I don't like is that somehow, I have no clue how, calibre became my default PDF reader in Firefox, despite Okular being the default in every Settings dialog I can find - wtf?
Hell it can't even play H.264 Main/High profile video at 720p. The Mali-400 has no problem with this.
(I own a Tegra2 device and an Exynos device with a Mali-400 - in almost any workload, the Exynos utterly dominates the Tegra2 despite the CPU only being clocked 20% higher.)
And what part of "Assuming that they don't lock the bootloader this time around, what will this new device be like with CM9?" didn't you understand?
What makes you think that the same major improvements from stock that were possible for the original Nook won't be possible for this new device?
It is utterly and completely stupid to bash this device for not having things that were added by a third-party firmware to its predecessor, without clear and conclusive evidence that the same modifications will NOT be possible on the new device. Do you have such evidence? What is it? Where is it?
Because you can search through their online inventory and read it from a couch in the cafe, instead of wandering around to find it. Also, I'm fairly certain you could read stuff that was available online but not available in your local store.
My Eee 100HA is very well built, so is my Asus G51vx.
The only reason I went for a Samsung Tab 10.1 instead of a Transformer is because third-party charging cables for the Asus didn't exist yet, and official charging cables were insanely expensive AND out of stock everywhere. I was NOT going to buy a device that could become semi-permanently unusable just by losing one stupid cable.
Yeah, the 10.1 also has a proprietary connector, but at least it is one shared with the original 7" tabs and hence was readily available.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, that's the #1 reason I've bought a total of only 2-3 books for my Nook (and almost never touch it any more) - paperbacks are cheaper, which is utterly stupid given the significantly lower cost to produce!
Unless they've changed it, at least B&N's DRM is fairly benign. It is what one person described as "social DRM" - There are no limits on number of devices with a particular ebook installed - the only limitation is that the encryption key is derived from your full name and your credit card number.
Badly, I may add - which is why B&N's DRM is one of the easiest to break.
Netflix's SD on Android is just plain "meh".
Netflix HD is pointless - I have yet to see a single item of HD content.
They don't need to gain back supporters.
The kinds of people who care about a source code release don't care about remote book wiping because their primary goal is likely CM7/CM9.
Amazon needs to do NOTHING to win these people over, since B&N drove them away with the Nook Tablet (locked bootloader).
Intrusive DRM?
B&N is the one who locked the Nook Tablet's bootloader, tivoizing it. Not Amazon.
I love how the article points out how easily hackable the Nook Touch was while ignoring the fact that B&N has made a major move towards lockdown with the Tablet - locked bootloader, plus it is partitioned so you can only use 1GB of the storage for sideloaded content. The rest is "B&N Content" only.
I didn't say it was impossible - just that it was a LOT harder than the AC made it out to be. Nereus is NOT a hobbyist project - it was made by one of the top oceanographic research institutions on the planet, and if you look at it, is a hell of a lot more than an Arduino on the end of a fiber optic cable.
No, a ROV that works at shallow depths is easy. One that will work with the pressures sustained at the depths this thing is lying at is a WHOLE other story.
For example, at these kinds of pressures, the epoxy will crush, which will crush the battery. Similarly, any cameras are likely to have their optics destroyed by pressure differentials unless specifically designed for deepwater operation.
Looks like they've only done this once with the original Froyo/Gingerbread Tab series.
They've moved (as mentioned in some threads on the subject) to signed-but-not-locked bootloaders (Including later software updates for the Tabs based on what I can read.)
Samsung's current strategy is to verify the signature of any kernel flashed in download (Odin) mode. If the kernel is not a signed Samsung release, the bootloader increments a "custom binary count" counter and pops up a warning screen until you flash an official kernel.
I think it's a valid compromise - Use the current state (and history) to affect warranty support, but allow people to do with their devices what they want.
So far I have never heard of a person being denied a store return due to having a nonzero CBC, as long as they flashed back to official firmware prior to returning.
It's been possible to get a code-free Technician license for almost two decades.
However, it likely has much more appeal now that you can get on the international HF bands without a code test. (Code-free Tech only had access to VHF/UHF and above)
What Samsung update are you talking about?
The only cases of updates enforcing any sort of "lockdown" that I know of is disabling nvflash mode on the Tab 10.1 (Odin mode still works fine for flashing) and implementing the "custom binary count" counter on their phones. Samsung is, if anything, very developer-friendly.
Man I just couldn't resist jumping on the bozomoron who claimed that Google was being GPL-noncompliant and asked for him to provide even a single example.
Especially since sometimes RVers will camp in one place for an extended period - many such places give discounts for long-term residents (because they're guaranteed to have that spot full.)
There are RV spots in the town park next to where I live - there are people that basically live there all summer, and then go down to Florida in the winter.
That seems to be the biggest attraction - a premium RV is cheaper than even a house in this area, AND you can move the "house" when the weather sucks.
"posted the fixed jar files for all ROM developers to use."
No, that's not for all ROM developers to use, that's only useful for ROM developers using the EXACT same base ROM that the NoCIQ mod was developed for.
It is utterly useless to anyone trying to remove CIQ from a ROM with a different base even for the same device, let alone someone trying to remove CIQ from a different device.
Now if they just had a high-level list saying "These are the jar files normally affected, these are the smali files normally affected within the .jar, and these are the function calls to look for in those files", it would be a LOT easier to port the NoCIQ mods to other devices.
Similar to what I did with mods to Settings.apk to allow NFC to work on the SGH-I777 - On IRC, it took me one sentence that two ROM devs had no trouble implementing:
"Search for NfcAdapter in WirelessSettings.smali, and delete the second occurrence of removePreference after that" - no need for anyone to find the original Settings.apk of my modified one to diff against.
And yeah, the power menu mod is a bitch - it fails frequently. I wasn't able to do it until gtg465x's commit at https://github.com/gtg465x/unnamed_rom/commit/1911cf0561bd278e86f1d238b272417b57d0b230 (As do many mods that involve adding something - removal mods are USUALLY easier.)
We've been fortunate in the SGH-I777 community - most of us came from the Infuse community, where nearly everyone worked together because there were few of us and the device was a massive fucking annoyance. As a result there's a lot of coordination and cooperation on IRC. Developers that choose not to coordinate/cooperate often find themselves unable to keep up - such as one guy that took almost a week to release sources for his kernel, and when he did so, just did an initial commit of his current source tree. Meets the letter but not the spirit of the GPL...
The problem is you have a lot of oldschool ROM cooks from the WinMo days, colliding with the open-source crowd, such as the Cyanogenmod team, and in my experience most of the better kernel hackers are the ones that post full git commit histories because they have nothing to hide AND believe in peer review. A lot of kernels are barely GPL-compliant (e.g. no source for betas, when source drops it's a megatarball) and when I read the threads for those, I see that whoever it is seems to have broken all sorts of things in the pursuit of ShinyUselessFeature that everyone asks for despite it not really being that useful and having major potential negative side effects.
I think the worst was when some moron came up with "Occupy Tibet"... Um, being occupied is PRECISELY the problem they have.
Unfortunately I can't rant on the guy's Facebook page without "liking" the stupidity...
1/2 - Go to XDA. If the phone has CIQ, people there will know.
Cyanogenmod does not have CIQ in the first place.
It is also possible, with a LOT of work, to remove CIQ's hooks from the system using baksmali/smali (basically, a disassembler/assembler for Java).
Unfortunately, the developers on XDA who put forth NoCIQ mods seem to be considering this their "special sauce" to set themselves apart and get some donations - when asked where to look for hooks on a device they don't support, you get nothing but silence. No guides, even high-level ones oriented towards developers.
Because it only has an opt-out option in the original software as delivered to the carriers/manufacturers.
By the time it gets into your hands, it is more invasive and the opt-out option has been removed. In fact, the software is fairly aggressively hidden from the user so it becomes difficult to even know about it.
Identify - not too hard, the linked articles have a good number of ways.
Remove - that's a LOT harder. It's got hooks all over the system, so often removing the libraries causes everything to start crashing. As time progresses, CIQ implementations become more and more invasive, to the point where on recent leaks for the Samsung Infuse 4G, it appears that they even modified wpa_supplicant with CIQ hooks! (I don't have the logcat with me now - but it's obvious that CIQ is trying to phone home when I try to associate with my access point. This may be why wifi fails on that leak if you're running without a SIM card.)
Google has always complied with the GPL - but people are misinformed and think that the GPL applies to significantly more of Android than it does.
The kernel is, of course, GPL, and nearly every device manufacturer has been good about releasing kernel sources. (Some more than others, HTC needed a bit of "encouragement", Chinese manufacturers like Huawei and ZTE are awful.)
A few other components are also GPL, but most of the Android platform is Apache licensed.
You aren't forced to waste disk space/download on GNOME.
That's it.
Also, the Unity mess only affected those using GNOME Ubuntu. Kubuntu 11.10 just seems to be 11.04 with more polish.
The only thing I don't like is that somehow, I have no clue how, calibre became my default PDF reader in Firefox, despite Okular being the default in every Settings dialog I can find - wtf?
That makes me even more tempted to buy it...
The Tegra 2's GPU is NOT that hot.
Hell it can't even play H.264 Main/High profile video at 720p. The Mali-400 has no problem with this.
(I own a Tegra2 device and an Exynos device with a Mali-400 - in almost any workload, the Exynos utterly dominates the Tegra2 despite the CPU only being clocked 20% higher.)
And what part of "Assuming that they don't lock the bootloader this time around, what will this new device be like with CM9?" didn't you understand?
What makes you think that the same major improvements from stock that were possible for the original Nook won't be possible for this new device?
It is utterly and completely stupid to bash this device for not having things that were added by a third-party firmware to its predecessor, without clear and conclusive evidence that the same modifications will NOT be possible on the new device. Do you have such evidence? What is it? Where is it?
Because you can search through their online inventory and read it from a couch in the cafe, instead of wandering around to find it. Also, I'm fairly certain you could read stuff that was available online but not available in your local store.
My Eee 100HA is very well built, so is my Asus G51vx.
The only reason I went for a Samsung Tab 10.1 instead of a Transformer is because third-party charging cables for the Asus didn't exist yet, and official charging cables were insanely expensive AND out of stock everywhere. I was NOT going to buy a device that could become semi-permanently unusable just by losing one stupid cable.
Yeah, the 10.1 also has a proprietary connector, but at least it is one shared with the original 7" tabs and hence was readily available.