So, you're paying attention to one movie (Star Trek: First Contact) but ignoring an episode of another series (Star Trek: Voyager, "Relativity"; just to let people who don't realize it, Seven and the future "Federation" state that the Federation (not the Terran Empire or some alternate timeline) came into being because of the Borg; there's also a passing reference to the Borg being present during the time of Cochran's flight in "Year of Hell" (Seven knew that Phoenix was the name of Cochran's ship)). So, the whole basis for Enterprise's "cold war" isn't at all based on a movie, unless you care to only pay attention to some of the "canon" of Star Trek.
Maybe use dsp proxy or something? I would guess you could use it to redirect all '/dev/dsp' sound to the right sound card by per-user LD_PRELOADs. Admittedly, though, I've never actually ever make a system of redirecting/dev/dsp requests to the proper speaker, but I would think it relatively trivial for someone to implement.
Just to let you know, there were comparatively a ton of PCs from the mid-1970s on. And invariably, the reason that IBM's version stuck was a combination of cheaper hardware (because of clones) and the fact that most developers never wrote apps for every single architecture that existed. It's this surplus of software in the beginning in comparison to other archs that really helped recursively propagate the IBM compatible PC (software leads to more users (mostly geeks at that point) leads to more software..). Even today with a virtual machine available to write all code to to run on varied archs, the majority of code is written for one arch and one OS because it allows accessing OS features and is generally "easier" to write and is faster (okay, hypothetically faster given how JITs have overcome most the limitations of having an intermediary language).
Now as for your points, #3 ignores that in both Windows and Linux, it's possible to trace through the driver and the the actual hardware for any function you use. Admittedly, it's not as easy and requires more, but it's not like through software accessing the hardware H&L engine through a closed driver somehow not "light up" the hardware any more than an open driver, so the hardware end is only vaguely made more of a mystery if one is trying to clone the hardware.
As for the second point, good drivers generally come about because of a combination of good engineers and good hardware. If the hardware is the cause, no amount of driver hints from the competition will help. On the other hand, if it's a quality of engineer problem, it's very unlikely that the ATI engineers would be capable of properly understand NVidia's source to actually use it in their driver. (It's at this point, I would like to state that my two points are obviously over-generalizations, and I don't know the fully story of why ATI's drivers have through my own experience been rather crappy. For this reason, I hope to not offend any ATI engineer who's not responsible for this fact.)
So, if those two points are invalid, the only thing open source drivers mean is even better drivers (since nvidia driver bugs can actually be found and traced by the kernel developers, which has been a big nagging point for people) and more customers (since there are actual hold-outs using the few open source ATI drivers because they either technically (for bug reporting purposes) or morally object to using closed drivers). I'm sure that NVidia is aware of this, and I would guess that it very likely they would love to give Torvalds or others access to the source to offer better support which only increases their reputation and sales. Of course, I could be completely wrong, but that's how it all looks to me.
Okay, I'll take a stab at it. The bedrock of capitalism is simply a market system based on private ownership. Now, most people want to extend that into monopolistic control to maximize their own profit in self-serving interest, but at the same time consumers generally tend to want a lot of competitors that can offer substitutes that give them greater value.
But, the fact is that if IBM hadn't "goofed" and created a mostly open system, it's likely that either another more open system would have succeeded even though it had a lot of obvious fault or no system would have succeeded and the information age wouldn't be near the point it is. Why? Because a more open system allows for programmers, both hobbyist and capitalist, to more easily develop software for the system. This barrier to entry would mean less software overall which would directly decrease the demand for computers. At the same time, monopolistic control would keep prices high, fixing the quality sold at a smaller rate than it is today thanks to the vast number of clones.
So, it's unlikely IBM would have a better market share or sell more products. They might, still, be making more profit due to monopolistic pricing. It does seem unlikely for this to be the case, however, when various other architectures would have likely succeeded in IBM's place and relegated IBM computers into dinosaurs like the Amiga (no offense to the Amiga intended).
As for NVidia, there's at least two principle reasons why they might wish their drivers closed. The first is by closing the drivers they have stronger control over rebranding cards at different price points without modifying hardware which might increase sales without hurting sales on the higher priced cards. The second is NVidia has cross-licensed a variety of patents which probably puts them in the position of not having the authority to license said patentable idea under the GPL.
Without number two, number one could be fixed with creative hardware locking mechanisms. The total cost of such hardware locking would be minimal in comparison to the boosted sales of all the likely free porting and driver work done by volunteers on the NVidia driver. The fact is, NVidia is a hardware company so it is in their best interest to commoditize all software for their hardware to be run on. Open sourcing their driver, if possible, would very likely have this effect (it's hard to argue that it could have the reverse effect, at least).
The claim that trade secrets would somehow be revealed by open sourcing their driver is possible, but I would guess is unlikely as the majority of NVidia's actual trade secrets would be in *hardware*. All a driver is supposed to be is a standard interface for the OS, and if there are tasks beyond this in the driver NVidia would almost certainly advantage by sticking it in hardware as well. It's for this reason I assume NVidia's driver license policy is the main fault for them not open sourcing their driver.
The largest irony is that typing the URL in yourself *DOESN'T SOLVE ANYTHING*.
The same person who would not notice that a URL has a %01 in the link and that's a sign of something bad will be just as quick to type *IN* a URL that has a %01 in the link. So, www.microsoft.com%01@foo.bar will still look right to the user.
The problem is two fold. One, people are used to links changing in the address bar, so it shortening doesn't surprise them. The second is fundamentally, you're telling the user to type in links under the assumption they'd notice something suspicious, but in reality that only helps the actually aware people notice the %01 in the link. The majority of the users are still left in the dark, and the only real thing typing in urls all day will do is slow down their browsing and maybe make them not use the internet anymore because it's not worth it to them to spend so much time typing in difficult to type urls (just look at the url in your address bar right now). This ignores how many sites will break if you have to type in urls because they do hidden mumbo-jumbo to function while still remaining on the main page url.
The fact is, Microsoft's work around is to teach all users about suspicious urls because of a bug in IE (admittedly, without the bug people might still not notice the %01@foo.bar and would still be in trouble, though that could be resolved by display foo.bar with user www.microsoft.com, and that I'd think people would notice). It seems that's Microsoft's way of admitting it's easier for them to expect the world to change for them than to change their own browser. And that's the biggest lesson to learn, since if it's that difficult to fix a display bug, I can only imagine how many security or privacy violating bugs exist which they virtually can't fix.
It falls in the same area as GM making an exact copy of the Toyota Prius, and calling it a Prius.
A more apt comparison would be GM making the first SUV and then other companies making their own take of SUVs. There's nothing stopping an emulation from outdoing its predecessor. And making a clone isn't innovation, but making an SUV while innovation isn't particularly novel. The GBA could be called a mixture of the SNES and GB, really. It's new. And anyone who wants to make their own version that runs on the same fuel (aka games) has to minimally clone the behavior of the original.
To act like begetting behavior in hardware somehow makes it worthy of protection isn't sound. Of the budget Nintendo spent on the GBA, I would say more of Nintendo's prestige (ie, marketing) and general quality (ie, not making shoddy products) had a role in making the GBA a success than new developments. Or can you name me truly unique things about the GBA vs any other console?
And finally, if you make a nice big sandwich and I make a copy of it, it doesn't mean you can't eat your sandwich. It just means that less people are dependent on you for making that sandwich and one more person (me) can enjoy without worry of you dying tomorrow and taking the recipe to your grave. With patents, that's not a worry thanks to its openness, but to act like another person making the same sandwich as you by buying and taking apart your sandwich or by studying it through outside observation to make one's own should somehow be stopped because you made the sandwich first has the far reaching implication of making every new genre a patentable field which would ruin the progress of arts and sciences.
First off, the patent itself that Nintendo has is for various techniques to help in emulating a GBA on an underpowered handheld. So, Nintendo doesn't actually have a patent on all GBA emulators.
Now, with that out of the way, why should Nintendo have such a patent? Nothing in Nintendo's patent looks novel. There's already tons of emulators written to operate on underpowered systems. Most the x86 emulators on the Mac dynamically recompile x86 instructions to PPC (or 68k for the older ones). Ideas such as frame skipping or taking advantage of arch specific speed-ups isn't new. The concept and its points aren't new.
But, lets take it a step further, and go to your question about whether Nintendo should be allowed to patent the GBA entirely. If you know much about the GBA, you'd see that the only really new part about the GBA over say the GB is the BIOS, having timers, and having DMAs. More colors and various sprite modes are pretty natural extensions to the GB as a progression into better colors. Timers and DMAs while new to the GB line, aren't particullary ingenious to have on a video console. So the only thing left is the BIOS, but the BIOS is a software work and is copyrighted. There's nothing in the BIOS that's worthy of patent.
So, there doesn't seem to be any reason to go about allowing Nintendo to patent the GBA any more than it would have been to let IBM patent the PS/2 when it came out with its better sound and gfx. If you believe that every time someone comes along and slaps a few components together to make a system they have a right to patent it, then OEMs would end up patenting out every conceivable combination of hardware to lockout competitors.
As far as I'm concerned, Nintendo has no inherent right to being the sole makers of GBAs, be it in hardware or software. So long as someone makes clones of all the copyrighted material, why shouldn't they be able to compete too? Maybe if Nintendo does something novel enough to warrent locking out competitors for *20 years*, then I'll go along with you.
In the US, you can sue anyone for anything. So, the only thing you can do to stop being sued over released software is to not release software. I'd go a step further; it's possible someone could steal and distribute your software and you'd be sued over it, so you really can't make software if you don't want to be sued over it. It's still the case that actual damages (ignoring lawyer fees, which is probably the biggest hit), assuming you lost, would only be relative to the cost of the sale unless it was intentional damage.
Microsoft releases their fixes free of charge, just like a dealer service recall on an automobile.
There's two flaws with your analogy up to this point. For one, the number of actual problems in Windows releases are hundreds to thousands of times as common as any car I've ever heard of. If a car were to actually have a frequency of 5 new exploitable problems per month, customers would be demanding by the second month to get a replacement product without nearly as many problems. The fact that consumers don't do this is because of the second major flaw in your analogy: Microsoft doesn't recall Windows software.
A large part of why dealers recall automobiles is because it's not expected of a consumer to have enough know-how to fix a problem, even if it's relatively minor. In fact, simply mailing out the parts for the consumer to fix the automobile would be many times less expensive. At the same time, it's a huge burden. However, by silently (okay, auto-update in XP is less silent) releasing tons of patch, most consumers aren't even *aware* there's a problem. Do you daily or weekly check the manufacturer's website for every good you have bought to check for new do-it-yourself patches for defects in said good?
There's obviously an undue burden being laid upon the average computer user to be patching so many bugs, yet most computer users either are unaware that there are so many problems or they've been lead to believe that there's no real solution. If there were lemon laws, I can imagine them covering the whole system so that when grandma figures out that Windows is really unstable, they can go back to the computer seller and get their money back to buy a Mac or a Linux based PC or whatever other OS is available (it's an unreasonable burden on the consumer to return the engine of a car and try to find a replacement if the engine keeps having problems; the car was sold as a whole and should be returnable as a whole; though, I would say this shouldn't preclude allowing the technically minded to return just the software, since the consumer *might* know what they're doing returning just the engine).
What's the problem here? You can eliminate 95% of these vaunerabilities by simply *not running without a firewall* and *not running unneeded services* which is (GASP) something you'd do on Linux as well.
For starters, Linux doesn't *need* a firewall. As has been stated by others, firewalls can lead to a false sense of security especially when it involves notebooks from outside connect within a firewall's borders. The second point is, it might be true that not running unneeded services might make you "safer", but the truth is that you're *paying* to use those services. It's comparable to including a radio with a car and it being frequently enough the case that you can exploit the radio to dump the oil that you advise people to stop using the radio. If the radio is broken or likely to be broken, it needs to be fixed. The paranoid's way shouldn't be demanded of *every* consumer.
Linux is just as [vulnerable] if it's sitting open and unprotected on a network with 500 services running as root. Would you do that? No. So why do you do it with a Windows box?
Right, Linux is just as vulnerable if you leave it unprotected by both allowing exploitable programs to be ran and allowing an avenue for said programs to be compromised. The actual count of services or uid of the service might not be relevant based on the exploit. And disregarding any actual point-for-point comparisons of Windows vs Linux exploits, you're right that any good, paranoid technical user wouldn't do it. But, for the regular user services *shouldn't* be exploitable. Of course, there's always room for the user to shoot themselves in the foot by allowing something stupidly, but then that's comparable to putting sugar in the gas tank. Preventive care on what-ifs are the job of an administrator, and unless you believe Windows should be only sold to administrators (I would probably a
Assuming it *was* legal, if someone cleaned in a swastika or a racial slur, you could remove it by *cleaning* it off. In fact, if it were legal, there'd be an even stronger motive to keep clean public buildings so offensive messages couldn't be scrawled into them legally. I don't know about you, but for those who want public property to look nice, keeping it legal is a good thing.
Re:need an article to tell me retrogaming was hot
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Retro Gaming Gets Hot
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Just to correct your math (since it's quite wonkey), recall that Nintendo reports in *bits*, not bytes. The largest NES game was 8Mb (ie, 1MB). The GBA has a 256Mb (ie, 32MB) address space for carts. There's nothing stopping Nintendo from making larger carts, of course, if they included some bank switching logic onto a cart. At 32MB, you can fit about 1/5th of all NES games that exist (that's about 620 games with an average size of ~2Mb (256KB)). When you factor in how easily Nintendo could be selling the whole NES collection onto one cart and sell it for $30 but instead is releasing them all on $20 carts, you realize that Nintendo is in it for the money. Is that surprising for a company?
A CD contains music, so if there's a program in the OS or on the CD that pops up a dialog, the CD and related software is a trojan. The only way to *not* be a trojan is if the CD is clearly marked as not being a CD but instead being some DRM-infested music. Adding on any data tracks actually no long makes it an audio CD. It's a shame that EMI isn't being slammed for false advertising and running unauthorized code.
NetBSD is free. FreeBSD is free. OpenBSD is free. All of those free, though not Free (from RMS's definition of freedom without the ability to limit freedom of). So, it's something at least for the Linux fan boys, just like when someone chooses OpenBSD the OpenBSD fan boys are happy. This stems from the assumption that such a choice is based on more than just cost given how many free choices there are. I wouldn't be so presumptive, since for a stable (in the context of non-changing) server any of the BSDs would work just as well.
Doesn't Ticketmaster effectively do the same thing? Why should it be any more legal for them to buy up tickets and set a price? They have a contract? Every time you sell a ticket, it's a contract. A ticket is a seat. If they don't want people to be scalping tickets, then they shouldn't sell lots of tickets to the same person. The stupidity is that there's nothing stopping a place from doing *exactly* what the scalper does, since it's the same idea that airlines use for tickets. If a scalper is willing to take the risk and a company is fine with decreasing risk by large ticket sales to a buyer (which in some ways implies scalping), it's their choice. And then people can boycott such companies and their scalper *cough*Ticketmaster/Airlines*cough* because they don't like feeling cheated (notice feeling cheated is a question of moral fairness, not law).
Like how it's suspicious for someone to plead the fifth, so you should arrest him for crimes he's not required to admit to. The whole *point* of the fourth and fifth amendment is so the government can't make up some excuse to question and search anyone they please. When it's only the burden of being a suspect, you make a suspect out of everyone. And what's more suspicious than not answering "reasonable" questions? If the government wants to know my name, they're either going to have to volunteerly get it out of me or ask someone who knows me who's willing to state it. It's clearly not something they have any right to compulsory get out of me.
Are you forgetting the case where an officer sat down and ate lunch while a woman was screaming for help as she was being raped, and the officer was cleared of any wrongdoing because the police are there to "protect the people" not any particular person? So, there's no real guarantee the police will show up and actually catch the intruder, let alone do it before you're dead.
Linux has been more widely ported than an other OS in history.
Sorry, NetBSD clearly beats out Linux for this title (and I won't begin to claim that NetBSD is the most ported OS, though it does seem probable). The fact that gcc's supported arch list is shrinking doesn't help Linux to continue to work on more archs (though I think Linux is still designed to compile on the 2.x line, not the 3.x where all the shrinking occurred).
I believe he was meaning the owner of the computer, not the copyright. Ie, Microsoft would have to have written consent of you, the computer owner, to do auto-update. Worms which are only resident, would nicely fall outside of this scope of law (though them being illegal for other reasons...). Though I can see company1 getting written permission that was very general, then sleazy company2 buying company1 and installing software on all of company1's old customers' computers.
As for your suggestion, a lot of current spyware "asks" to be installed in the EULA, but people barely read it. Beside this, simply *asking* doesn't mean the software is required to respect your answer (which is at least one complaint people were having with the thing).
"The EULA's power stems from how a computer works. Because a computers' processor has registers, it must copy the cd over and over and read/write it in order to play the CD."
First, that's not true. There's nothing stopping CD drives to stream sound directly to the speakers (hey, look, there's a headphone plug on my CD drive...; okay, my DVD+-RW drive doesn't have one).
Second, even if the above *were* true, it's nothing. Why? Because to view a page of a book, you have to shine light on it which means there's a copy "suspended" in the air by photons. Even with brail, your fingers would be temporarily deformed into a copy of the text you read. So, there's no reasonable way that temporary copy doesn't occur regardless of the work. All this discussion about temporary copies and acting like a computer is somehow "magical" is stupid.
By buying a copy of a copyrighted work, you have a fundamental right to use said work. That's what First Sale Doctrine is about (and please realize, First Sale Doctrine is an inherent part of copyright, not something written up that can be taken away; it doesn't make any logical sense to allow for a copyright owner to copyright a work, sell copies, then make it impossible for someone to actually *use* the copies; doing so fundamental goes against the idea of "promoting the progress of the arts and sciences" as it's impossible to advance the arts or sciences if you can't access a work, so the idea the people would give an author exclusive rights to such a work is ridiculous).
While you're right the press release is trumpeting the results of the report, the numbers don't pan out to 0.35. Adware is spyware, though a relatively benign form. Michael Moncur obviously would like to only include the total system monitors and the trojans. If you include adware, the figure goes up to ~5.38 such programs per Earthlink scanned computer. I wonder if that includes email viruses or worms. It seems clear to me that spyware is any software that spies on a user and sends that information to a 3rd party. Though by that definition, Windows Media Player is spyware.
No, but then the DMCRA is a horrible bandaid. The problem with the DMCA isn't just that it makes what was once legal an illegal act or how it makes ISPs coupable for the actions of their users if they're responsive enough to 3rd party threats. It's that there's no real *reason* for it. If copyright infringement is already illegal, there's no need for the DMCA as all it does is create yet another law that can be perversed by lawyers. And making ISPs responsible for blocking content is insane, since ISPs are a common carrier. If a 3rd party wants to stop infringement in the virtual world, they need to go through the same channels as the real world: the courts. Do I even begin to complain about how the NET act is unconstitutional because it can result in governmental punishment which is clearly against the 1st amendment (3rd party punishment through civil suits might be against the 1st amendment too, since the government is the enforcer, but putting people in jail for *spreading ideas* is ridiculous, let alone fiddling with said ideas the "wrong" way).
Okay, so we should be riled up over MS using the quote. We should be riled up that a) the law exists and b) MS is using. Maybe Brazil has a more responsive political system where it will be fixed instead of years of not change in blatantly bad laws (*cough*DMCA,NET,etc*cough*).
Actually, MS reported $10.15bn (10.15 billion dollars) operating income for last year Computer Weekly Article. From their operating statement, you can see they do show about a 2-to-1 earning ratio. Though my understanding is that a large portion of that ~$10bn "cost" to run MS is actually all the enterprises that aren't making a profit. As I recall, 3 out of the 5 departments in MS are operating with a loss (the two who are making money are Windows and Office). So, it's possible to invest a lot of money into other enterprises to deflate one's apparent net income to stretch out the stock expectations so you can reach new markets so investors don't dump ship when there's not "continuous" growth.
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Books are made out of dead trees (paper). Or has your book been walking around on your table, lately?
So, you're paying attention to one movie (Star Trek: First Contact) but ignoring an episode of another series (Star Trek: Voyager, "Relativity"; just to let people who don't realize it, Seven and the future "Federation" state that the Federation (not the Terran Empire or some alternate timeline) came into being because of the Borg; there's also a passing reference to the Borg being present during the time of Cochran's flight in "Year of Hell" (Seven knew that Phoenix was the name of Cochran's ship)). So, the whole basis for Enterprise's "cold war" isn't at all based on a movie, unless you care to only pay attention to some of the "canon" of Star Trek.
Maybe use dsp proxy or something? I would guess you could use it to redirect all '/dev/dsp' sound to the right sound card by per-user LD_PRELOADs. Admittedly, though, I've never actually ever make a system of redirecting /dev/dsp requests to the proper speaker, but I would think it relatively trivial for someone to implement.
So, when Solaris 3.0 is out, they name it Solaris 3 because that number wasn't taken yet?
Just to let you know, there were comparatively a ton of PCs from the mid-1970s on. And invariably, the reason that IBM's version stuck was a combination of cheaper hardware (because of clones) and the fact that most developers never wrote apps for every single architecture that existed. It's this surplus of software in the beginning in comparison to other archs that really helped recursively propagate the IBM compatible PC (software leads to more users (mostly geeks at that point) leads to more software..). Even today with a virtual machine available to write all code to to run on varied archs, the majority of code is written for one arch and one OS because it allows accessing OS features and is generally "easier" to write and is faster (okay, hypothetically faster given how JITs have overcome most the limitations of having an intermediary language).
Now as for your points, #3 ignores that in both Windows and Linux, it's possible to trace through the driver and the the actual hardware for any function you use. Admittedly, it's not as easy and requires more, but it's not like through software accessing the hardware H&L engine through a closed driver somehow not "light up" the hardware any more than an open driver, so the hardware end is only vaguely made more of a mystery if one is trying to clone the hardware.
As for the second point, good drivers generally come about because of a combination of good engineers and good hardware. If the hardware is the cause, no amount of driver hints from the competition will help. On the other hand, if it's a quality of engineer problem, it's very unlikely that the ATI engineers would be capable of properly understand NVidia's source to actually use it in their driver. (It's at this point, I would like to state that my two points are obviously over-generalizations, and I don't know the fully story of why ATI's drivers have through my own experience been rather crappy. For this reason, I hope to not offend any ATI engineer who's not responsible for this fact.)
So, if those two points are invalid, the only thing open source drivers mean is even better drivers (since nvidia driver bugs can actually be found and traced by the kernel developers, which has been a big nagging point for people) and more customers (since there are actual hold-outs using the few open source ATI drivers because they either technically (for bug reporting purposes) or morally object to using closed drivers). I'm sure that NVidia is aware of this, and I would guess that it very likely they would love to give Torvalds or others access to the source to offer better support which only increases their reputation and sales. Of course, I could be completely wrong, but that's how it all looks to me.
Okay, I'll take a stab at it. The bedrock of capitalism is simply a market system based on private ownership. Now, most people want to extend that into monopolistic control to maximize their own profit in self-serving interest, but at the same time consumers generally tend to want a lot of competitors that can offer substitutes that give them greater value.
But, the fact is that if IBM hadn't "goofed" and created a mostly open system, it's likely that either another more open system would have succeeded even though it had a lot of obvious fault or no system would have succeeded and the information age wouldn't be near the point it is. Why? Because a more open system allows for programmers, both hobbyist and capitalist, to more easily develop software for the system. This barrier to entry would mean less software overall which would directly decrease the demand for computers. At the same time, monopolistic control would keep prices high, fixing the quality sold at a smaller rate than it is today thanks to the vast number of clones.
So, it's unlikely IBM would have a better market share or sell more products. They might, still, be making more profit due to monopolistic pricing. It does seem unlikely for this to be the case, however, when various other architectures would have likely succeeded in IBM's place and relegated IBM computers into dinosaurs like the Amiga (no offense to the Amiga intended).
As for NVidia, there's at least two principle reasons why they might wish their drivers closed. The first is by closing the drivers they have stronger control over rebranding cards at different price points without modifying hardware which might increase sales without hurting sales on the higher priced cards. The second is NVidia has cross-licensed a variety of patents which probably puts them in the position of not having the authority to license said patentable idea under the GPL.
Without number two, number one could be fixed with creative hardware locking mechanisms. The total cost of such hardware locking would be minimal in comparison to the boosted sales of all the likely free porting and driver work done by volunteers on the NVidia driver. The fact is, NVidia is a hardware company so it is in their best interest to commoditize all software for their hardware to be run on. Open sourcing their driver, if possible, would very likely have this effect (it's hard to argue that it could have the reverse effect, at least).
The claim that trade secrets would somehow be revealed by open sourcing their driver is possible, but I would guess is unlikely as the majority of NVidia's actual trade secrets would be in *hardware*. All a driver is supposed to be is a standard interface for the OS, and if there are tasks beyond this in the driver NVidia would almost certainly advantage by sticking it in hardware as well. It's for this reason I assume NVidia's driver license policy is the main fault for them not open sourcing their driver.
The largest irony is that typing the URL in yourself *DOESN'T SOLVE ANYTHING*.
The same person who would not notice that a URL has a %01 in the link and that's a sign of something bad will be just as quick to type *IN* a URL that has a %01 in the link. So, www.microsoft.com%01@foo.bar will still look right to the user.
The problem is two fold. One, people are used to links changing in the address bar, so it shortening doesn't surprise them. The second is fundamentally, you're telling the user to type in links under the assumption they'd notice something suspicious, but in reality that only helps the actually aware people notice the %01 in the link. The majority of the users are still left in the dark, and the only real thing typing in urls all day will do is slow down their browsing and maybe make them not use the internet anymore because it's not worth it to them to spend so much time typing in difficult to type urls (just look at the url in your address bar right now). This ignores how many sites will break if you have to type in urls because they do hidden mumbo-jumbo to function while still remaining on the main page url.
The fact is, Microsoft's work around is to teach all users about suspicious urls because of a bug in IE (admittedly, without the bug people might still not notice the %01@foo.bar and would still be in trouble, though that could be resolved by display foo.bar with user www.microsoft.com, and that I'd think people would notice). It seems that's Microsoft's way of admitting it's easier for them to expect the world to change for them than to change their own browser. And that's the biggest lesson to learn, since if it's that difficult to fix a display bug, I can only imagine how many security or privacy violating bugs exist which they virtually can't fix.
It falls in the same area as GM making an exact copy of the Toyota Prius, and calling it a Prius.
A more apt comparison would be GM making the first SUV and then other companies making their own take of SUVs. There's nothing stopping an emulation from outdoing its predecessor. And making a clone isn't innovation, but making an SUV while innovation isn't particularly novel. The GBA could be called a mixture of the SNES and GB, really. It's new. And anyone who wants to make their own version that runs on the same fuel (aka games) has to minimally clone the behavior of the original.
To act like begetting behavior in hardware somehow makes it worthy of protection isn't sound. Of the budget Nintendo spent on the GBA, I would say more of Nintendo's prestige (ie, marketing) and general quality (ie, not making shoddy products) had a role in making the GBA a success than new developments. Or can you name me truly unique things about the GBA vs any other console?
And finally, if you make a nice big sandwich and I make a copy of it, it doesn't mean you can't eat your sandwich. It just means that less people are dependent on you for making that sandwich and one more person (me) can enjoy without worry of you dying tomorrow and taking the recipe to your grave. With patents, that's not a worry thanks to its openness, but to act like another person making the same sandwich as you by buying and taking apart your sandwich or by studying it through outside observation to make one's own should somehow be stopped because you made the sandwich first has the far reaching implication of making every new genre a patentable field which would ruin the progress of arts and sciences.
First off, the patent itself that Nintendo has is for various techniques to help in emulating a GBA on an underpowered handheld. So, Nintendo doesn't actually have a patent on all GBA emulators.
Now, with that out of the way, why should Nintendo have such a patent? Nothing in Nintendo's patent looks novel. There's already tons of emulators written to operate on underpowered systems. Most the x86 emulators on the Mac dynamically recompile x86 instructions to PPC (or 68k for the older ones). Ideas such as frame skipping or taking advantage of arch specific speed-ups isn't new. The concept and its points aren't new.
But, lets take it a step further, and go to your question about whether Nintendo should be allowed to patent the GBA entirely. If you know much about the GBA, you'd see that the only really new part about the GBA over say the GB is the BIOS, having timers, and having DMAs. More colors and various sprite modes are pretty natural extensions to the GB as a progression into better colors. Timers and DMAs while new to the GB line, aren't particullary ingenious to have on a video console. So the only thing left is the BIOS, but the BIOS is a software work and is copyrighted. There's nothing in the BIOS that's worthy of patent.
So, there doesn't seem to be any reason to go about allowing Nintendo to patent the GBA any more than it would have been to let IBM patent the PS/2 when it came out with its better sound and gfx. If you believe that every time someone comes along and slaps a few components together to make a system they have a right to patent it, then OEMs would end up patenting out every conceivable combination of hardware to lockout competitors.
As far as I'm concerned, Nintendo has no inherent right to being the sole makers of GBAs, be it in hardware or software. So long as someone makes clones of all the copyrighted material, why shouldn't they be able to compete too? Maybe if Nintendo does something novel enough to warrent locking out competitors for *20 years*, then I'll go along with you.
In the US, you can sue anyone for anything. So, the only thing you can do to stop being sued over released software is to not release software. I'd go a step further; it's possible someone could steal and distribute your software and you'd be sued over it, so you really can't make software if you don't want to be sued over it. It's still the case that actual damages (ignoring lawyer fees, which is probably the biggest hit), assuming you lost, would only be relative to the cost of the sale unless it was intentional damage.
Microsoft releases their fixes free of charge, just like a dealer service recall on an automobile.
There's two flaws with your analogy up to this point. For one, the number of actual problems in Windows releases are hundreds to thousands of times as common as any car I've ever heard of. If a car were to actually have a frequency of 5 new exploitable problems per month, customers would be demanding by the second month to get a replacement product without nearly as many problems. The fact that consumers don't do this is because of the second major flaw in your analogy: Microsoft doesn't recall Windows software.
A large part of why dealers recall automobiles is because it's not expected of a consumer to have enough know-how to fix a problem, even if it's relatively minor. In fact, simply mailing out the parts for the consumer to fix the automobile would be many times less expensive. At the same time, it's a huge burden. However, by silently (okay, auto-update in XP is less silent) releasing tons of patch, most consumers aren't even *aware* there's a problem. Do you daily or weekly check the manufacturer's website for every good you have bought to check for new do-it-yourself patches for defects in said good?
There's obviously an undue burden being laid upon the average computer user to be patching so many bugs, yet most computer users either are unaware that there are so many problems or they've been lead to believe that there's no real solution. If there were lemon laws, I can imagine them covering the whole system so that when grandma figures out that Windows is really unstable, they can go back to the computer seller and get their money back to buy a Mac or a Linux based PC or whatever other OS is available (it's an unreasonable burden on the consumer to return the engine of a car and try to find a replacement if the engine keeps having problems; the car was sold as a whole and should be returnable as a whole; though, I would say this shouldn't preclude allowing the technically minded to return just the software, since the consumer *might* know what they're doing returning just the engine).
What's the problem here? You can eliminate 95% of these vaunerabilities by simply *not running without a firewall* and *not running unneeded services* which is (GASP) something you'd do on Linux as well.
For starters, Linux doesn't *need* a firewall. As has been stated by others, firewalls can lead to a false sense of security especially when it involves notebooks from outside connect within a firewall's borders. The second point is, it might be true that not running unneeded services might make you "safer", but the truth is that you're *paying* to use those services. It's comparable to including a radio with a car and it being frequently enough the case that you can exploit the radio to dump the oil that you advise people to stop using the radio. If the radio is broken or likely to be broken, it needs to be fixed. The paranoid's way shouldn't be demanded of *every* consumer.
Linux is just as [vulnerable] if it's sitting open and unprotected on a network with 500 services running as root. Would you do that? No. So why do you do it with a Windows box?
Right, Linux is just as vulnerable if you leave it unprotected by both allowing exploitable programs to be ran and allowing an avenue for said programs to be compromised. The actual count of services or uid of the service might not be relevant based on the exploit. And disregarding any actual point-for-point comparisons of Windows vs Linux exploits, you're right that any good, paranoid technical user wouldn't do it. But, for the regular user services *shouldn't* be exploitable. Of course, there's always room for the user to shoot themselves in the foot by allowing something stupidly, but then that's comparable to putting sugar in the gas tank. Preventive care on what-ifs are the job of an administrator, and unless you believe Windows should be only sold to administrators (I would probably a
Assuming it *was* legal, if someone cleaned in a swastika or a racial slur, you could remove it by *cleaning* it off. In fact, if it were legal, there'd be an even stronger motive to keep clean public buildings so offensive messages couldn't be scrawled into them legally. I don't know about you, but for those who want public property to look nice, keeping it legal is a good thing.
Just to correct your math (since it's quite wonkey), recall that Nintendo reports in *bits*, not bytes. The largest NES game was 8Mb (ie, 1MB). The GBA has a 256Mb (ie, 32MB) address space for carts. There's nothing stopping Nintendo from making larger carts, of course, if they included some bank switching logic onto a cart. At 32MB, you can fit about 1/5th of all NES games that exist (that's about 620 games with an average size of ~2Mb (256KB)). When you factor in how easily Nintendo could be selling the whole NES collection onto one cart and sell it for $30 but instead is releasing them all on $20 carts, you realize that Nintendo is in it for the money. Is that surprising for a company?
A CD contains music, so if there's a program in the OS or on the CD that pops up a dialog, the CD and related software is a trojan. The only way to *not* be a trojan is if the CD is clearly marked as not being a CD but instead being some DRM-infested music. Adding on any data tracks actually no long makes it an audio CD. It's a shame that EMI isn't being slammed for false advertising and running unauthorized code.
NetBSD is free. FreeBSD is free. OpenBSD is free. All of those free, though not Free (from RMS's definition of freedom without the ability to limit freedom of). So, it's something at least for the Linux fan boys, just like when someone chooses OpenBSD the OpenBSD fan boys are happy. This stems from the assumption that such a choice is based on more than just cost given how many free choices there are. I wouldn't be so presumptive, since for a stable (in the context of non-changing) server any of the BSDs would work just as well.
Doesn't Ticketmaster effectively do the same thing? Why should it be any more legal for them to buy up tickets and set a price? They have a contract? Every time you sell a ticket, it's a contract. A ticket is a seat. If they don't want people to be scalping tickets, then they shouldn't sell lots of tickets to the same person. The stupidity is that there's nothing stopping a place from doing *exactly* what the scalper does, since it's the same idea that airlines use for tickets. If a scalper is willing to take the risk and a company is fine with decreasing risk by large ticket sales to a buyer (which in some ways implies scalping), it's their choice. And then people can boycott such companies and their scalper *cough*Ticketmaster/Airlines*cough* because they don't like feeling cheated (notice feeling cheated is a question of moral fairness, not law).
Like how it's suspicious for someone to plead the fifth, so you should arrest him for crimes he's not required to admit to. The whole *point* of the fourth and fifth amendment is so the government can't make up some excuse to question and search anyone they please. When it's only the burden of being a suspect, you make a suspect out of everyone. And what's more suspicious than not answering "reasonable" questions? If the government wants to know my name, they're either going to have to volunteerly get it out of me or ask someone who knows me who's willing to state it. It's clearly not something they have any right to compulsory get out of me.
Are you forgetting the case where an officer sat down and ate lunch while a woman was screaming for help as she was being raped, and the officer was cleared of any wrongdoing because the police are there to "protect the people" not any particular person? So, there's no real guarantee the police will show up and actually catch the intruder, let alone do it before you're dead.
Linux has been more widely ported than an other OS in history.
Sorry, NetBSD clearly beats out Linux for this title (and I won't begin to claim that NetBSD is the most ported OS, though it does seem probable). The fact that gcc's supported arch list is shrinking doesn't help Linux to continue to work on more archs (though I think Linux is still designed to compile on the 2.x line, not the 3.x where all the shrinking occurred).
I believe he was meaning the owner of the computer, not the copyright. Ie, Microsoft would have to have written consent of you, the computer owner, to do auto-update. Worms which are only resident, would nicely fall outside of this scope of law (though them being illegal for other reasons...). Though I can see company1 getting written permission that was very general, then sleazy company2 buying company1 and installing software on all of company1's old customers' computers.
As for your suggestion, a lot of current spyware "asks" to be installed in the EULA, but people barely read it. Beside this, simply *asking* doesn't mean the software is required to respect your answer (which is at least one complaint people were having with the thing).
"The EULA's power stems from how a computer works. Because a computers' processor has registers, it must copy the cd over and over and read/write it in order to play the CD."
First, that's not true. There's nothing stopping CD drives to stream sound directly to the speakers (hey, look, there's a headphone plug on my CD drive...; okay, my DVD+-RW drive doesn't have one).
Second, even if the above *were* true, it's nothing. Why? Because to view a page of a book, you have to shine light on it which means there's a copy "suspended" in the air by photons. Even with brail, your fingers would be temporarily deformed into a copy of the text you read. So, there's no reasonable way that temporary copy doesn't occur regardless of the work. All this discussion about temporary copies and acting like a computer is somehow "magical" is stupid.
By buying a copy of a copyrighted work, you have a fundamental right to use said work. That's what First Sale Doctrine is about (and please realize, First Sale Doctrine is an inherent part of copyright, not something written up that can be taken away; it doesn't make any logical sense to allow for a copyright owner to copyright a work, sell copies, then make it impossible for someone to actually *use* the copies; doing so fundamental goes against the idea of "promoting the progress of the arts and sciences" as it's impossible to advance the arts or sciences if you can't access a work, so the idea the people would give an author exclusive rights to such a work is ridiculous).
While you're right the press release is trumpeting the results of the report, the numbers don't pan out to 0.35. Adware is spyware, though a relatively benign form. Michael Moncur obviously would like to only include the total system monitors and the trojans. If you include adware, the figure goes up to ~5.38 such programs per Earthlink scanned computer. I wonder if that includes email viruses or worms. It seems clear to me that spyware is any software that spies on a user and sends that information to a 3rd party. Though by that definition, Windows Media Player is spyware.
No, but then the DMCRA is a horrible bandaid. The problem with the DMCA isn't just that it makes what was once legal an illegal act or how it makes ISPs coupable for the actions of their users if they're responsive enough to 3rd party threats. It's that there's no real *reason* for it. If copyright infringement is already illegal, there's no need for the DMCA as all it does is create yet another law that can be perversed by lawyers. And making ISPs responsible for blocking content is insane, since ISPs are a common carrier. If a 3rd party wants to stop infringement in the virtual world, they need to go through the same channels as the real world: the courts. Do I even begin to complain about how the NET act is unconstitutional because it can result in governmental punishment which is clearly against the 1st amendment (3rd party punishment through civil suits might be against the 1st amendment too, since the government is the enforcer, but putting people in jail for *spreading ideas* is ridiculous, let alone fiddling with said ideas the "wrong" way).
Okay, so we should be riled up over MS using the quote. We should be riled up that a) the law exists and b) MS is using. Maybe Brazil has a more responsive political system where it will be fixed instead of years of not change in blatantly bad laws (*cough*DMCA,NET,etc*cough*).
Actually, MS reported $10.15bn (10.15 billion dollars) operating income for last year Computer Weekly Article. From their operating statement, you can see they do show about a 2-to-1 earning ratio. Though my understanding is that a large portion of that ~$10bn "cost" to run MS is actually all the enterprises that aren't making a profit. As I recall, 3 out of the 5 departments in MS are operating with a loss (the two who are making money are Windows and Office). So, it's possible to invest a lot of money into other enterprises to deflate one's apparent net income to stretch out the stock expectations so you can reach new markets so investors don't dump ship when there's not "continuous" growth.