rats - too many layers of metal to see what's really on there:-) but that's life for modern chips - Now days with 4-5 layers of metal we put the power on the top thicker layers which occludes the core that we're used to seeing in pretty die photos. This also makes microprobing during debug a royal pain:-(
This is just a minor nitpick, but the marginal cost will not move to zero, but to the per unit license fee that Rambus Inc. charges.
True - but as I understand it the issues have been more to do with volume up to this point
What I really don't understand is why Intel hasn't cut its losses on this. From an uninformed observer's perspective
I think that long-term Intel probably wants to move the memory controller onboard for all but high end MP systems - one advantage that RamBus drams have today is that they allow more concurrency in the dram system - in particular more 'open banks' (ie sense amps with cached data) and more concurrent RAS cycles in the array. Making use of this sort of stuff is very difficult for a memory controller which necessarily sees transactions serially over a (relatively slow [compared with rambus speeds or cpu clocks]) slot1 bus. With CPU clock speeds getting faster and memory not the CPU architects are in a bind - they are spending big on things to make up for the slow memory latency (not memory transfer rate - read latency is the first order effect here that's the killer) like big caches. But their wonderfull superscalar and/or VLIW CPUs are stuck talking to a potentially fast memory system through a slow serial pipe.
The concurrency in the multi-bank architectures in the memory system can really only be used effectively directly from the CPU where the concurrency from the CPU architecture is directly expressed. My guess is that long term the Intel designers would like to pull the RamBus controller onto the CPU die so that they can attack their latency problems.
For the record there's another way this can work too - RamBus is narrow - you can toss 2-4 of them onto a die (if you can afford the area and power costs) where you can only afford the pins for a 64 or 128-bit bus. You don't have to run the RamBuses in lock step - instead you interleave the shit out of them (4-way for 4 interfaces - every 4th cache line from a different bus) this aagain allows you to increase your concurrency - at the expense of the customer having to stuff all 2/44 buses identically (2/4 simms at a time).
Having said all this I think that competing technologies are trying to push at the multi concurrently active bank thing too. I think that Rambus just started evangelizing that first.
OK - first up disclosure - I'm a chip designer and I have done a number of RamBus based designs over the years.... but I've never worked for RamBus or Intel etc etc
Reading the article my take on it is that the problem is in the device that does the SDRAM to RamBus conversion (ie it's a channel adaptor that lets them mix and match rams types) - and the problem only occurs when you use ECC.
I can think of 2 reasons this might happen - either they got the ECC logic wrong (probably likely), or there's a noise problem on the sdram side when they drive 72 data pins [for ecc] rather than the usual 64 (less likely). Either way it isn't a RamBus problem.
There's a lot of noise made about the various merits of memory types - my personal take on it is that it's mostly a wash, RamBus drams do have some advantages - but for main memory systems they are more in the future (and revolve around how many chips it takes to make a minimum memory sized system as memory continues to move down the memory density curve - M$ may of course make this moot). Their main disadvantage is cost - and it's rather a chicken and egg sort of thing - if people use them a lot the marginal cost of RDRAMS will probably go close to 0 - but if people don;t use them in volume because they cost more that won't happen. Remember in the core of a RDRAM is the same core that's in an SDRAM it's just the interface circuitry to the pads that's different.
Here is an article about the people working on the 'DNA gene chip' (really a sort of build-it-yourself open-source sequencing robot) - they are dealing with a lot of the 'patent everything in sight and sue' mentality we're having to deal with in te computer industry.
The main difference is that it's getting in the way of us making a living while in their case it's getting in the way of them doing basic research - like finding the cure for fatal diseases....
For this to work the display driver will need to know the 'secret' keys (in order to program them into the hardware - or at the very least it will have to know how to program something magic into the hardware).
One of the main reasons for the DeCSS fuss is because there are no Linux DVD drivers - primarily I beleive because you can't do this 'I've got a secret I'm not telling you' sort of thing in open source.
If this piece of rampent stupidity comes to pass we wont be seeing and OS X drivers for these display chips because to do so would be to provide the software that sets up the keys in the hardware. To get around this would require each chip to have its own programmed in unique key which is NOT a cheap prospect.
I beleive this is nothing more than CSS for broadcast video - I'd guess that keys are probably going to get distributed to set-top boxes by broadcast and you wont be able to view any HDTV unless you have the key-of-the-day/hour/minute for your hardware (will TiVo stop working after an N minute delay:-)
For those of us looking at stuff on the 'net keys will come from some centralized location (like the MPAA) and Big Brother will indeed be watching.
This is going to cost a lot in silicon, if the silicon mixes traditional stuff with encrypted stuff in the same frame buffer it's going to cost a lot more (at the very least one bit per pixel - more if you allow overlapping windows because the monitor wont see all the stream and will have to be able to decode every pixel on it's own). In the long run WE are going to be paying for all this infrastructure in the form of more costly display hardware
I think that these announcements are probably red herrings intended to keep the press happy - "look we're doing something..."... from the description on last night's news these were hacked machines which had been used as part of a tribe-attack - the report I heard really didn't explain well that these people were victims too.
Even more disgusting was hearing the TV news quoting antionline as to where the crackers are located....:-( I guess some people are making money from this
Mentioned on/. a few months back that allows ANY Mac to act as a Tribe-like client - Appole announced a fix but you can bet that it didn't get applied to 90% of the machines that loaded MacOS9... rumor also has it that other people who got their TCP stacks from the same source Apple did (I heard HP? - but beware 3rd hand rumors) have had this bug for a lot longer - Apple was a pretty late adopter
Personally I'm just waiting for the Windows virus that infects, announces itself to it's master, then lays dormant untill required.....("what do you mean 'every PC on every @home net in the world is pinging us...'") - it's an obvious way to get a Tribe-style resource that's an order of magnitude or two greater than you can get by hacking a bunch-of Linux/Unix systems
I suspect there's a wonderfull grey area here.... for example contrast the following:
Fred announces "isn't it crazy they're selling frizmos on EBay for $10M" on SlashDot... the/. hordes go over to check it out.... EBay goes down
Fred gets pissed at EBay for some reason, and announces "isn't it crazy they're selling frizmos on EBay for $10M" on SlashDot... the/. hordes go over to check it out.... EBay goes down
One is an indirect DOS attack on EBay, the other is just a 'normal' net traffic peak - how do you tell? do you care? (if you're EBay you may actually welcome the interest)
create a solution containing R/DNA encoding all possible keys - 2**56 molecules given that 1 Mole is ~6x10**23 (~6*2**76) molecules we're going to need 2**-20 moles of solution - probably you need a lot of reduncdancy so maybe 2**-10 moles - each base pair is going to have a molecular weight of say 600 and we need 56 of them to encode the key - plus we'll probably need a working space of 56*32*1000 base pairs (a number pulled from the top of my head) plus an answer of 56 base pairs - this gives a weight of ~1kg (plus it's solution say 2kg, added RNA etc to actually perform the functions are going to be many kg extra) quite reasonable - a 64-bit key with more rounds is going to require something that's in the tonne range:-)
come up with a process where the N rounds of key expansion required for rc56 occur by somehow matching RNA to an existing strand of R/DNA and extending it with the intermediate result (normally stored in a temp location for RC5) - this is the hard part since the operations involve addition I have no idea how these get done in a test tube
continue applying these operations growing the molecules untill they're the length that corresponds to the required number of rounds
introduce another RNA that matches molecules of the required length with a tag on the end that corresponds to the known text we're looking for - this molecule detatches the original key and raises it's hand ("here we are!")
you detect all the molecules that passed and run their found keys against the algorithm (the current rc5 algorithm has a small number of have false positives - a chemical reaction is probably going to have a number of ba positives too)
well there you are - time to go out and buy that test-tube (and nano-assembler).... or for the 64-bit keys maybe an unused resovoir....
Because he's patenting a particular IMPLEMENTATION of a mathematical function, not the function itself - one that has some usefull attributes that might make it a better one to use if you happen to want to put it into silicon.
There used to be a simple way to make this sort of distinction - many years back you used to have to produce a working model of your invention and submit it along with the patent - the patent office eventually discontinued this practice (I think I heard they couldn't afford the ballooning warehouse space:-).
Of course if you have a working model of chip it's pretty hard for a patent examiner to actually look at and judge how it works (probably another reason why it's no longer feasible to require working models).
I should add.... being able to patent this stuff is all very well but how do you enforce it? say I was going to use his new idea in my next cool chip (I'm not - we're just supposing here).... would I tell him? my (hypothetical) boss (not my real one who is above reproach) might frown on that.... instead we might use his idea and pay him when and if he asks for it (people certainly did this with the stupid xor cursor patent that made everyone's life a misery a while back)..... because how would he ever know? we're doing something with IDCT - that much is obvious but unless he can get access to the RTL source for our chip (unlikely) , or reverse engineer the gates (really really hard) the actual algorithmic details of what I've implemented are not at all obvious from the outside - in this case it might be possible to prove from a detailed error analysis of the resulting pixels (but in that case maybe I'd through in some pseudo-random lsbs on the data just to fog that up).
What I'm really trying to say here is that it's easy to patent small ideas - but often hard to tell when your patent is being violated. Conversly it's hard to patent big ideas (because it's hard to think up something that's truely revolutionary) - but easy to track down violators. So maybe there is some little justice in the patent world:-)
I don't know about prior art in this particular case but I'm a chip designer and have done a lot of work in the video processing area - this could well be a breakthrough in DCT work although these days gates spent on DCTs are not that big a deal compared with say area spent on line buffers for filters etc.
Actually I think that this is exactly the sort of thing that should be patentable - he's not patenting the IDCT per-se - he's patenting a particular implementation of it.
This is exactly like patenting a better machine for (say) canning food rather than patenting the concept of canning food, or a new way to sell canned food. This is what the patent system was set up to do.
Having said all that I personally believe that it's become way too easy to patent little stuff, I firmly believe that patents as they were a hundred years ago were a worthwhile concept - I hold a number of patents on my work over the years - none of them come close to the patents that were granted to Edison - back then people patented 'big ideas' not all the little things that we invent day to day to get our work done.
Over the years my various employers have encourage me to patent lots of stuff I've invented - but frankly I'm only really proud of one of those inventions - and much prouder of other stuff I've done (whole chips, big software systems etc) that in themselves are not patentable.
One person reverse engineers it in a country where that's legal (really already been done) and writes up the algorithm in as much detail as possible on a web page (but without the source).
Someone else in the US who can arguably deny that they haven't seen the DeCSS source (or any other source) writes an implementation from that description. There's a lot of legal and practical history behind these sort of techniques
Doing it open source - with a CVS tree of the development process as a record would be an added bonus (though best not to tell the DVD lawyers what you are doing 'till you're done).
Better yet - competing teams producing different implementations (who's going to offer the bounty for the best performing implementation:-)
As far as keys are concerned - if they're really trivially crackable without secret knowledge.... ship the cracker with with the source - run it as part of the installation process on the end-user's box
For those who didn't watch this unfold what happened about 5 years ago was some ex-scientologists created alt.religion.scientology and started talking about their (often horrific) experiences while in the cult.
Scientology has it's own gaggle of pet lawyers (there's actually scripture explaining why it's a good thing to sue people into the ground)... one of them decided to rmgroup the newsgroup.... instantly people started shouting all over the net about censorship and what had once been a pretty quiet newsgroup swelled with lots of free-speech computer people anxious to find out out what was up....
About the same time this went down an anonymous person posted OT3 (the secret scientology 'scritpure' about how we're all haunted by murdered space aliens and why you have to give them 100,000s of $$ to get exorcised) to the newsgroup. Dennis Erlich (who's ISP got news from Netcom) responded to this posting with a post that quoted the original post along with an annotation to the effect 'yup this is the real thing'.
The scientologists showed up with US marshalls at Dennis's house a little while later and took away all his computers, backup disks etc etc - under the same laws they use to get counterfieted jeans and pulled him, his ISP and Netcom into court. Netcom settled early on to get out from under the case - in the end (years later) Dennis did too and the scientologists PAID HIM
This was the opening round in the ongoing scientology vs. the net range war which is still going on (check out www.xenu.net for more info
I bet there are two flavors of emulators - one that does an instruction by instruction emulation of an ISA and one that recompiles into the native ISA on the fly (one of the patents last year pointed to how they would handle the fall-back from the 2nd to the first in the case of exceptions)
Writing an emulator won't be easy - writing a well performing emulator (suite) will be very hard.
This is a great explanation of the process - I'd add a couple of extra things:
look out for dilution - how many more shares will your company need to sell to get the investment required to get to the point where it's self sustaining (or goes public)? if they keep printing shares over and above the original pool your percentage of the whole will drop (on the other hand you will probably continue to be paid as a result)
taxes - usually you have 2 choices - either pay for the stock up front when you are granted it (but before it vests - it goes into escrow in the mean time) or pay for it the day you exercise your options (usually this is also when you sell the stock - companies often allow you to do a 'cashless' exercise where the stock gets sold, they get paid at the option price [and often take out taxes too] and you get the difference) - the big advantage of the first one is that you can lock in long term capital gains (ie lower taxes) on the investment while in the second case you probably have to pay as income at your top marginal rate, the downside is that you have to put real $$ away into an investment you're already putting your life into (but then if you are a founder you're probably paying 1c/share anyway) - but if the company tanks you can write off the investment loss
wow - look at the defendants.... including 2 2600 sites including "Emanual Goldstein" - I bet they were chosen very explicitly by the lawyers to get someone in to court who could be demonized as a "bad hacker" both in court and in the press.
every time they go after someone X set up a mirror.... "in support of X"....all over the world, in as many different jurisdictions as possible... once they realise they are making things worse by suing people thay'll have to think twice.
If they come after your mirror - shut it down - make a big stink - remember there are an awfull lot more of us than them (DVD lawyers) - we're angry - and they get paid a lot by the hour.
The parallels between this case and the Scientology vs. the net cases (see www.xenu.net) are amazing.... who's going to be the first person to have the source read into the record in the Swdish parliament? or have it published in the LA Times classifieds?
It's very hard to force a large group of people to keep a secret - esp. if they don't want to
PS: the MPAA page is full of broken links to the legal documents - does anyone have a copy they can web?
"This is a case of theft. The posting of the de-encryption formula is no different than making and then distributing unauthorized keys to a department store. The keys have no real purpose except to circumvent the locks that stand between the thief and the goods he or she targets."
You're right - what bozos... in this case the 'keys' are available to the public - you can walk down to your local computer or electronics store and BUY a set (in the form of a DVD player) - they stand between the OWNER of a DVD disk and their enjoyment of the content contained therin
IBM's fab's have been agressivly looking for outside business in the past few years. They have a number of things going for them in this instance:
IBM has an x86 license thereby providing patent protection to a potential x86 clone (or in this case emulator)
coppper - they pioneered it - by now it's probably not much of a premium
they are pretty much on the cutting edge for process
On the downside they probably can't compete on price as well with the Taiwanese or Koreans, and a company
Of course TM could be doing the chipless-fab business model where they don't build or sell the chips - just design them and sell the software to make them run
The RIAA wants to turn a battle for artists' rights (that's right; I'm on the artists'-- my-- side) into a piracy story. It is not in their interests for artists to have any freedom.
Think about it - a recoding artist is in exactly the same position as a small programmer - needs to distribute the result of his or her craft - but worries about being ripped of.
In the past they depended on a distributor to get their work out to their customers - now they have the net - they don't need the distributor provided they can get enough cusatomer mind-share - and they can reduce the price of their product enourmously if there's no distributor/retailer taking a cut.
The problem we all face - "how can we help the artists/programmers/writers/... the people who create the bits - make a reasonable living off of their work?".
The media distribution industry is toast - they just don't know it yet - and they aren't going to go away without a fight - they have a lot of lawyers and a lot of money in the bank..... they just aren't required any more -if we can find a way to get money to the people who make the bits we can strangle them from both ends.
Slashdot Mirror
rats - too many layers of metal to see what's really on there :-) but that's life for modern chips - Now days with 4-5 layers of metal we put the power on the top thicker layers which occludes the core that we're used to seeing in pretty die photos. This also makes microprobing during debug a royal pain :-(
True - but as I understand it the issues have been more to do with volume up to this point
What I really don't understand is why Intel hasn't cut its losses on this. From an uninformed observer's perspective
I think that long-term Intel probably wants to move the memory controller onboard for all but high end MP systems - one advantage that RamBus drams have today is that they allow more concurrency in the dram system - in particular more 'open banks' (ie sense amps with cached data) and more concurrent RAS cycles in the array. Making use of this sort of stuff is very difficult for a memory controller which necessarily sees transactions serially over a (relatively slow [compared with rambus speeds or cpu clocks]) slot1 bus. With CPU clock speeds getting faster and memory not the CPU architects are in a bind - they are spending big on things to make up for the slow memory latency (not memory transfer rate - read latency is the first order effect here that's the killer) like big caches. But their wonderfull superscalar and/or VLIW CPUs are stuck talking to a potentially fast memory system through a slow serial pipe.
The concurrency in the multi-bank architectures in the memory system can really only be used effectively directly from the CPU where the concurrency from the CPU architecture is directly expressed. My guess is that long term the Intel designers would like to pull the RamBus controller onto the CPU die so that they can attack their latency problems.
For the record there's another way this can work too - RamBus is narrow - you can toss 2-4 of them onto a die (if you can afford the area and power costs) where you can only afford the pins for a 64 or 128-bit bus. You don't have to run the RamBuses in lock step - instead you interleave the shit out of them (4-way for 4 interfaces - every 4th cache line from a different bus) this aagain allows you to increase your concurrency - at the expense of the customer having to stuff all 2/44 buses identically (2/4 simms at a time).
Having said all this I think that competing technologies are trying to push at the multi concurrently active bank thing too. I think that Rambus just started evangelizing that first.
Reading the article my take on it is that the problem is in the device that does the SDRAM to RamBus conversion (ie it's a channel adaptor that lets them mix and match rams types) - and the problem only occurs when you use ECC.
I can think of 2 reasons this might happen - either they got the ECC logic wrong (probably likely), or there's a noise problem on the sdram side when they drive 72 data pins [for ecc] rather than the usual 64 (less likely). Either way it isn't a RamBus problem.
There's a lot of noise made about the various merits of memory types - my personal take on it is that it's mostly a wash, RamBus drams do have some advantages - but for main memory systems they are more in the future (and revolve around how many chips it takes to make a minimum memory sized system as memory continues to move down the memory density curve - M$ may of course make this moot). Their main disadvantage is cost - and it's rather a chicken and egg sort of thing - if people use them a lot the marginal cost of RDRAMS will probably go close to 0 - but if people don;t use them in volume because they cost more that won't happen. Remember in the core of a RDRAM is the same core that's in an SDRAM it's just the interface circuitry to the pads that's different.
The main difference is that it's getting in the way of us making a living while in their case it's getting in the way of them doing basic research - like finding the cure for fatal diseases ....
One of the main reasons for the DeCSS fuss is because there are no Linux DVD drivers - primarily I beleive because you can't do this 'I've got a secret I'm not telling you' sort of thing in open source.
If this piece of rampent stupidity comes to pass we wont be seeing and OS X drivers for these display chips because to do so would be to provide the software that sets up the keys in the hardware. To get around this would require each chip to have its own programmed in unique key which is NOT a cheap prospect.
I beleive this is nothing more than CSS for broadcast video - I'd guess that keys are probably going to get distributed to set-top boxes by broadcast and you wont be able to view any HDTV unless you have the key-of-the-day/hour/minute for your hardware (will TiVo stop working after an N minute delay :-)
For those of us looking at stuff on the 'net keys will come from some centralized location (like the MPAA) and Big Brother will indeed be watching.
This is going to cost a lot in silicon, if the silicon mixes traditional stuff with encrypted stuff in the same frame buffer it's going to cost a lot more (at the very least one bit per pixel - more if you allow overlapping windows because the monitor wont see all the stream and will have to be able to decode every pixel on it's own). In the long run WE are going to be paying for all this infrastructure in the form of more costly display hardware
Well not quite true - read this recent press release desribing the 3D hardware being used in the latest VAIO laptop ....
Even more disgusting was hearing the TV news quoting antionline as to where the crackers are located .... :-( I guess some people are making money from this
Anyone else notice that AOL is buying Time Warner who are one of the people pushing the MPAA down our throats .....
Personally I'm just waiting for the Windows virus that infects, announces itself to it's master, then lays dormant untill required .....("what do you mean 'every PC on every @home net in the world is pinging us ...'") - it's an obvious way to get a Tribe-style resource that's an order of magnitude or two greater than you can get by hacking a bunch-of Linux/Unix systems
- Fred announces "isn't it crazy they're selling frizmos on EBay for $10M" on SlashDot
... the /. hordes go over to check it out .... EBay goes down - Fred gets pissed at EBay for some reason, and announces "isn't it crazy they're selling frizmos on EBay for $10M" on SlashDot
... the /. hordes go over to check it out .... EBay goes down
One is an indirect DOS attack on EBay, the other is just a 'normal' net traffic peak - how do you tell? do you care? (if you're EBay you may actually welcome the interest)Well as I see it you need to do this:
- create a solution containing R/DNA encoding all possible keys - 2**56 molecules given that 1 Mole is ~6x10**23 (~6*2**76) molecules we're going to need 2**-20 moles of solution - probably you need a lot of reduncdancy so maybe 2**-10 moles - each base pair is going to have a molecular weight of say 600 and we need 56 of them to encode the key - plus we'll probably need a working space of 56*32*1000 base pairs (a number pulled from the top of my head) plus an answer of 56 base pairs - this gives a weight of ~1kg (plus it's solution say 2kg, added RNA etc to actually perform the functions are going to be many kg extra) quite reasonable - a 64-bit key with more rounds is going to require something that's in the tonne range
:-) - come up with a process where the N rounds of key expansion required for rc56 occur by somehow matching RNA to an existing strand of R/DNA and extending it with the intermediate result (normally stored in a temp location for RC5) - this is the hard part since the operations involve addition I have no idea how these get done in a test tube
- continue applying these operations growing the molecules untill they're the length that corresponds to the required number of rounds
- introduce another RNA that matches molecules of the required length with a tag on the end that corresponds to the known text we're looking for - this molecule detatches the original key and raises it's hand ("here we are!")
- you detect all the molecules that passed and run their found keys against the algorithm (the current rc5 algorithm has a small number of have false positives - a chemical reaction is probably going to have a number of ba positives too)
well there you are - time to go out and buy that test-tube (and nano-assembler)There used to be a simple way to make this sort of distinction - many years back you used to have to produce a working model of your invention and submit it along with the patent - the patent office eventually discontinued this practice (I think I heard they couldn't afford the ballooning warehouse space :-).
Of course if you have a working model of chip it's pretty hard for a patent examiner to actually look at and judge how it works (probably another reason why it's no longer feasible to require working models).
What I'm really trying to say here is that it's easy to patent small ideas - but often hard to tell when your patent is being violated. Conversly it's hard to patent big ideas (because it's hard to think up something that's truely revolutionary) - but easy to track down violators. So maybe there is some little justice in the patent world :-)
Actually I think that this is exactly the sort of thing that should be patentable - he's not patenting the IDCT per-se - he's patenting a particular implementation of it.
This is exactly like patenting a better machine for (say) canning food rather than patenting the concept of canning food, or a new way to sell canned food. This is what the patent system was set up to do.
Having said all that I personally believe that it's become way too easy to patent little stuff, I firmly believe that patents as they were a hundred years ago were a worthwhile concept - I hold a number of patents on my work over the years - none of them come close to the patents that were granted to Edison - back then people patented 'big ideas' not all the little things that we invent day to day to get our work done.
Over the years my various employers have encourage me to patent lots of stuff I've invented - but frankly I'm only really proud of one of those inventions - and much prouder of other stuff I've done (whole chips, big software systems etc) that in themselves are not patentable.
Someone else in the US who can arguably deny that they haven't seen the DeCSS source (or any other source) writes an implementation from that description. There's a lot of legal and practical history behind these sort of techniques
Doing it open source - with a CVS tree of the development process as a record would be an added bonus (though best not to tell the DVD lawyers what you are doing 'till you're done).
Better yet - competing teams producing different implementations (who's going to offer the bounty for the best performing implementation :-)
As far as keys are concerned - if they're really trivially crackable without secret knowledge .... ship the cracker with with the source - run it as part of the installation process on the end-user's box
and that burned-blood stench when you frag someone ....
Scientology has it's own gaggle of pet lawyers (there's actually scripture explaining why it's a good thing to sue people into the ground)... one of them decided to rmgroup the newsgroup .... instantly people started shouting all over the net about censorship and what had once been a pretty quiet newsgroup swelled with lots of free-speech computer people anxious to find out out what was up ....
About the same time this went down an anonymous person posted OT3 (the secret scientology 'scritpure' about how we're all haunted by murdered space aliens and why you have to give them 100,000s of $$ to get exorcised) to the newsgroup. Dennis Erlich (who's ISP got news from Netcom) responded to this posting with a post that quoted the original post along with an annotation to the effect 'yup this is the real thing'.
The scientologists showed up with US marshalls at Dennis's house a little while later and took away all his computers, backup disks etc etc - under the same laws they use to get counterfieted jeans and pulled him, his ISP and Netcom into court. Netcom settled early on to get out from under the case - in the end (years later) Dennis did too and the scientologists PAID HIM
This was the opening round in the ongoing scientology vs. the net range war which is still going on (check out www.xenu.net for more info
Writing an emulator won't be easy - writing a well performing emulator (suite) will be very hard.
is this true in ALL countries?
If they come after your mirror - shut it down - make a big stink - remember there are an awfull lot more of us than them (DVD lawyers) - we're angry - and they get paid a lot by the hour.
The parallels between this case and the Scientology vs. the net cases (see www.xenu.net) are amazing .... who's going to be the first person to have the source read into the record in the Swdish parliament? or have it published in the LA Times classifieds?
It's very hard to force a large group of people to keep a secret - esp. if they don't want to
PS: the MPAA page is full of broken links to the legal documents - does anyone have a copy they can web?
You're right - what bozos ... in this case the 'keys' are available to the public - you can walk down to your local computer or electronics store and BUY a set (in the form of a DVD player) - they stand between the OWNER of a DVD disk and their enjoyment of the content contained therin
- IBM has an x86 license thereby providing patent protection to a potential x86 clone (or in this case emulator)
- coppper - they pioneered it - by now it's probably not much of a premium
- they are pretty much on the cutting edge for process
On the downside they probably can't compete on price as well with the Taiwanese or Koreans, and a companyOf course TM could be doing the chipless-fab business model where they don't build or sell the chips - just design them and sell the software to make them run
Think about it - a recoding artist is in exactly the same position as a small programmer - needs to distribute the result of his or her craft - but worries about being ripped of.
In the past they depended on a distributor to get their work out to their customers - now they have the net - they don't need the distributor provided they can get enough cusatomer mind-share - and they can reduce the price of their product enourmously if there's no distributor/retailer taking a cut.
The problem we all face - "how can we help the artists/programmers/writers/... the people who create the bits - make a reasonable living off of their work?".
The media distribution industry is toast - they just don't know it yet - and they aren't going to go away without a fight - they have a lot of lawyers and a lot of money in the bank ..... they just aren't required any more -if we can find a way to get money to the people who make the bits we can strangle them from both ends.