And in the meanwhile, in Switzerland, politicians have passed the first step for making a law targeting all games that "require cruel acts of violence against humans and humanlike creatures for in-game success”. The objective of this law is to make it forbidden to produce, advertise, import, sell or distribute such games. It seems, however, that this is not the final vote, and there is a real possibility that public outrage, from gamers as well as games companies, could bring the politicians to back down on this, and simply make it forbidden in the law to sell 18-rated PEGI games to minors.
Not all movie projectors work the same way: depending on the projector, a frame will be displayed one, two or three times before changing to the next frame. See the shutter description in the relevant article for more information.
It's the ICE in Germany and the Shinkansen in Japan that never reach beyond 300 km/h. The ICE models used in Germany are specified up to 330 km/h, but there is no track with that specification in the country: the only place where they run at 320 km/h is when they run in France on the Paris - Frankfurt line, where they need to run at the same speed as the other TGV trains.
Android is a Linux system without any doubt. What it is not is GNU/Linux, and this is a situation where the distinction between both things is really useful.
The relevant law, the "Code de la Propriété intellectuelle", governs all the exceptions to the author's rights. The default state is that the author retains all rights to his work, and any use of this work needs his authorization. Then the law adds a significant list of exemptions, which builds a system that functions in a way similar to the "Fair Use" system. But the relevant article describing the exceptions is more detailed than the fair use provisions. (Original article of the law, if you read French)
The provision the closest to what Google is doing is number 8 for the article (L122-5 of the CPI), which allows global reproduction for conservation and study by patrons for research or private use, but only if that service is provided by a library open to the public, a museum or an archival service, and the resulting work is only available on dedicated consultation terminals within the building, and only if this does not provide commercial or economic advantage to the entity providing the service. It does not state, however, that no compensation is required, only that the author may not prevent this to be done with works that have been divulged to the public.
But since Google doesn't qualify for this exemption, it means that the copies were unlawful. The only thing in question in this judgment is how much of a prejudice to the authors the use Google made was, and there the ruling is much more debatable.
And in France at least, there is an unspoken understanding between the press and the government. You don't say anything to embarrass government officials, and you get to keep your job.
And that's why a satiric journal or TV show like "Le Canard Enchaîné" or "Les Guignols de l'Info" could never exist in France. </sarcasm>
Much of the AVE network was payed by European cohesion funds - it is also the case for the highway network of the country. From 1993 to 2003, Spain was the largest recipient of those funds, with 16 billion euros obtained on the period. The rule was simple: for one euro provided by the Spanish government, one euro was provided by the cohesion funds. So the Spanish network may pay for itself, but it is easier if you only pay half the price for it.
And a counter example for this is the Japanese network. All those Shinkansen lines have not been payed by the companies that run the trains: the lines were payed by the original Japanese National Railways, which were split in 1987 between the regional JR companies of today, and a national infrastructure company which was supposed to reimburse the debt, including construction. The final result is that the construction debt has been finally completely absorbed by the Japanese state along with other debts from the JNR, for the ludicrous value of 280 billion dollars !
Online distribution, like Steam, is only feasible with large transfer pipes.
Clients do not want to wait to get their games, and when you have 10 GB of data to download (as it was the case for the Orange Box), it is only practical with a high-speed broadband connection.
Given all advantages of online distribution for game producers (prevents resale, lower distributor margin compared to physical sale, no need to manage inventory, etc.), it is easy to understand that they want a favorable environment for it.
I belive that they skipped the 64-bits address to be able to fit the 48-bit MAC (Level 2) address inside the IP (Level 3/4) address, and thus avoiding the need for the router to use ARP to find the MAC address corresponding to a local IP address.
I agree that the mobile phone can be locked with an operator; but this is not a part of the standard, and the widely distributed unlocking tools prove that it can be undone. The converse, however, does not exist in GSM and exists in CDMA - you expressly can move your account from phone to phone with the SIM card without any operator intervention, whereas you cannot do so between CDMA operators, and I don't expect it to happen anytime in the future, because that feature is completely opposed to the lock-in capabilities that the CDMA operators love.
Regarding feature disabling, there are two different reasons: the first one is clearly trying to force clients to use the operators network, and it sucks. The second one is that for some features, whether it's bluetooth or MP3 ringtones, they might have been disabled as a cost-cutting method. Bluetooth usually is present as a separate chipset in the mobile phone, with a software stack bought by the manufacturer with per-device royalties. Removing the hardware and software can remove a few dollars from the final price, and the operator will buy a crippled version because it is less expensive than the full-fledged distribution version. This also applies for many audio & video codecs, for which you need to add the patent licenses as well...
Anyway, look around, it's very easy to find completely unlocked GSM mobile phones. However, it's true that without the operator subvention, the price is suddenly not so attractive...
Sprint uses CDMA too, and it doesn't pull any of the crap that we hear about Verizon.
But the only reason why they CAN do it is CDMA. You cannot do it with GSM, because the only device directly related to the operator is the SIM card, and not the mobile phone itself. Consumer lock-in is designed into Qualcomm's technology, whereas GSM may have been conceived by various companies with various means and various goals, but enabling competition was a basic principle of the system.
"But wait," you say, "they can get a digital cable box and keep the older TV!" Well, sure, but then we get to hear about how the cable company is bleeding it's customers dry by charging for equipment. I call horseshit on this one. Cable companies charge an average $7.50 monthly lease fee for the box that costs them $300 upfront, plus maintenance and repair. In "only" 40 months of maintenance free operation of that box, the cable company breaks even. Yeah...that's certainly not what I would call milking the customer.
Your numbers are wrong. A zapper box for broadcast digital TV is well below $50 in retail, and that's including the margin for way too many middlemen. Except the operation frequency range, and a more complex encoding on broadcast compared to cable, there's virtually no difference with a cable zapper box. As a mass buyer, the cable operator can get much better deals than retail, so yes, the cable operator is most probably milking its clients if it says it cannot provide a zapper box for its consumers with an old TV for $3 a month.
The resulting product is fundamentally different from a TiVo.
While on TiVo, there is no way to change any part of the code without the signing key, in the proposed solution it is possible for the user to change the whole open-source system with an other one, as required by the GPLv3 license. As such, there is much more freedom for the user to tinker with its own system.
But for the manufacturer, it has the distinct advantages that some parts of the system can be isolated from the open subsystem, in a much more stable way, both legally and technically, than in a closed-source driver. Thus, it is possible to implement DRM, software subject to type conformance, or safety-critical tasks without risking corruption from the open system, whatever this system does. And contrary to the current solution, this does not require additional hardware.
The author claims that manufacturers can ensure that while the Linux part respects the GPLv3 constraints, and can be modified by the user as required by the license, it is possible for the manufacturer to protect their own part that lives in another VM on the hypervisor, and thus is not a derivative from the GPL code.
For an embedded manufacturer, it is interesting because it protects what the manufacturer considers to be important, or even simply some code it bought from a third party, while it allows skilled hobbyists to improve the product on the open-source side. The difference with the current situation (for example OpenMoko phones) is that the closed software can run on the same processor as the open software, without the need for an additional chip that increases the cost of the product.
The problem the FCC (and every other emission regulation body) has with open source and software radio is that it will be trivial to modify a device using these methods to emit at an arbitrarily high power level over a restricted wavelength, or using a band without using the proper medium access control. If this happened, the wavelength would be pretty much unusable for all other users until the FCC tracks down the emitter, and shuts him down.
That's why today, most radio-enabled devices, and especially mobile phones, have to pass type conformance to be commercialized in a geographic area. In the current state of things, if the radio software can be changed by the user, the type conformance cannot be awarded. Software radio makes things worse, because it is harder to justify that a component cannot emit at a given frequency, if changing the software in this component would allow switching emission frequencies at will.
To learn system programming, it is a bad deal compared to
a microcontroller with an emulator, or even a refurbished GBA
with a flash card:
Interrupt handling - Check
With only 15 interrupts lines, cascaded into 2 8-lines banks,
the IBM PC is quite limited, and you still have the trouble to
handle the cascaded handlers.
Instruction timing-based optimization - Check
But if the 8086 processor understands a subset of the complete
assembly language from the current PC, the timings constraints
are completely different: the cost of an instruction for a 8086
accessing directly the main memory completely changes as soon
as you have cache, which is essential for modern computers.
And with the mess that x86 assembly is, I'd prefer dabbling with
ARM assembly instead.
Drawing lines by directly altering video memory - Check
OK - but it is not alone on that segment.
Disk and memory data structures - Check
Disk structures ? The cylinder/head/track abstraction that
come with the floppy disks is compulsory on old IBM PCs. The
LBA method is much more straightforward. No one should need
to learn a complex, obsolete abstraction that doesn't even
correspond to the reality anymore.
And in complement to that, it is impossible to debug from the
outside. With embedded platforms, you can write the code with your
PC, test it in an simulator, and then test it on the platform with
an In-Circuit Emulator to check for bugs. You can't do that on an
old IBM PC.
When UPS cancelled their order of the freighter model, the total number of orders for the A380 freight dropped to zero, meaning that more passenger models must be sold to recoup the loss...
This also means that Airbus can suspend any additional development concerning freighter models, which will be in itself an economy measure on the program. Instead, it can concentrate on delivering its current clients for the passenger version.
Since the problem for now with the A380 is producing them as fast as possible, to fill up the current orders, it is not really time to worry about future sales. When you have sold all your production for the next 5 years, and you have a hard time meeting the deadlines, you can understand that your clients don't really wish to commit to buy new models until the situation has settled down.
If you ditch C in favour of a language that does the length checking for you then you will sacrifice speed and compactness since it will be checking _everything_.
It should be possible to have both, and some languages have been designed with this in mind. It is the case for Ada, where string manipulation includes bound checking in the language by default, but it is possible to remove the related verifications with compilation options.
But then, the security trade off is still present - you have to choose which code is optimized, and which code is secure. But hopefully, this should at least avoid implementation bugs in the secure code.
In Belgium it's 70 after the auther has died, now you try and explain that to me
It is the same for all countries in the European Union, including the United Kingdom. And every country that ratified the Berne treaty grants at least 50 years after the death of the author. However, this only cover the author's copyright. It does not cover the actual performance, which is covered by separate rights, which are shorter.
This means that the performers that did not write their own songs, and whose performance has been recorded a long time ago, will not earn any revenue if anyone uses those recordings. The only ones earning money will be the authors, if their rights are still valid. For many classical music pieces, this means that there are now available recordings that are fully free of any copyright.
Much of the operating system (meaning the kernel plus system utilities) is GNU software, many of which existed as mature software well before the Linux kernel came about
The kernel is GPL software, but there is no GNU software in it as far as I know. And there are Linux systems where the implementation of the UNIX userland system tools do not come from GNU either, for example the case of embedded systems using BusyBox.
Since a big problem in the GPLv3 debate covers the actual practices of companies that develop embedded systems, this is really relevant: In embedded systems, size is an important parameter, and the GNU userspace tools are not optimized in that direction. This means that those systems may be Linux systems, but not GNU/Linux systems.
They're not "suing anyone they don't like", they're defending copyrighted material or protecting trademarks- and they are famous for doing so, since long before Jobs was re-hired. Shockingly they HAVE to, or said copyright/trademarks are diluted.
You're mistaken. Here, it is only coyrighted material, there is no trademark case involved. And copyright is different from trademarks, because you don't lose your copyright if you don't protect it correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
And in the meanwhile, in Switzerland, politicians have passed the first step for making a law targeting all games that "require cruel acts of violence against humans and humanlike creatures for in-game success”. The objective of this law is to make it forbidden to produce, advertise, import, sell or distribute such games. It seems, however, that this is not the final vote, and there is a real possibility that public outrage, from gamers as well as games companies, could bring the politicians to back down on this, and simply make it forbidden in the law to sell 18-rated PEGI games to minors.
Strangely enough, Milk is in the top 3 movies in San Francisco in every area except the Castro. Try explaining that one if you can.
Compared to other areas, the residents bought the disk, so they don't need to rent it as much?
Not all movie projectors work the same way: depending on the projector, a frame will be displayed one, two or three times before changing to the next frame. See the shutter description in the relevant article for more information.
It's the ICE in Germany and the Shinkansen in Japan that never reach beyond 300 km/h. The ICE models used in Germany are specified up to 330 km/h, but there is no track with that specification in the country: the only place where they run at 320 km/h is when they run in France on the Paris - Frankfurt line, where they need to run at the same speed as the other TGV trains.
Android is a Linux system without any doubt. What it is not is GNU/Linux, and this is a situation where the distinction between both things is really useful.
There is no "Fair Use" in French law.
The relevant law, the "Code de la Propriété intellectuelle", governs all the exceptions to the author's rights. The default state is that the author retains all rights to his work, and any use of this work needs his authorization. Then the law adds a significant list of exemptions, which builds a system that functions in a way similar to the "Fair Use" system. But the relevant article describing the exceptions is more detailed than the fair use provisions. (Original article of the law, if you read French)
The provision the closest to what Google is doing is number 8 for the article (L122-5 of the CPI), which allows global reproduction for conservation and study by patrons for research or private use, but only if that service is provided by a library open to the public, a museum or an archival service, and the resulting work is only available on dedicated consultation terminals within the building, and only if this does not provide commercial or economic advantage to the entity providing the service. It does not state, however, that no compensation is required, only that the author may not prevent this to be done with works that have been divulged to the public.
But since Google doesn't qualify for this exemption, it means that the copies were unlawful. The only thing in question in this judgment is how much of a prejudice to the authors the use Google made was, and there the ruling is much more debatable.
And in France at least, there is an unspoken understanding between the press and the government. You don't say anything to embarrass government officials, and you get to keep your job.
And that's why a satiric journal or TV show like "Le Canard Enchaîné" or "Les Guignols de l'Info" could never exist in France. </sarcasm>
For reading only, there is a lite version. It works on a 128x160 screen, and it's even more selective than browsing at +5.
Much of the AVE network was payed by European cohesion funds - it is also the case for the highway network of the country. From 1993 to 2003, Spain was the largest recipient of those funds, with 16 billion euros obtained on the period. The rule was simple: for one euro provided by the Spanish government, one euro was provided by the cohesion funds. So the Spanish network may pay for itself, but it is easier if you only pay half the price for it.
And a counter example for this is the Japanese network. All those Shinkansen lines have not been payed by the companies that run the trains: the lines were payed by the original Japanese National Railways, which were split in 1987 between the regional JR companies of today, and a national infrastructure company which was supposed to reimburse the debt, including construction. The final result is that the construction debt has been finally completely absorbed by the Japanese state along with other debts from the JNR, for the ludicrous value of 280 billion dollars !
Online distribution, like Steam, is only feasible with large transfer pipes.
Clients do not want to wait to get their games, and when you have 10 GB of data to download (as it was the case for the Orange Box), it is only practical with a high-speed broadband connection.
Given all advantages of online distribution for game producers (prevents resale, lower distributor margin compared to physical sale, no need to manage inventory, etc.), it is easy to understand that they want a favorable environment for it.
I belive that they skipped the 64-bits address to be able to fit the 48-bit MAC (Level 2) address inside the IP (Level 3/4) address, and thus avoiding the need for the router to use ARP to find the MAC address corresponding to a local IP address.
I agree that the mobile phone can be locked with an operator; but this is not a part of the standard, and the widely distributed unlocking tools prove that it can be undone. The converse, however, does not exist in GSM and exists in CDMA - you expressly can move your account from phone to phone with the SIM card without any operator intervention, whereas you cannot do so between CDMA operators, and I don't expect it to happen anytime in the future, because that feature is completely opposed to the lock-in capabilities that the CDMA operators love.
Regarding feature disabling, there are two different reasons: the first one is clearly trying to force clients to use the operators network, and it sucks. The second one is that for some features, whether it's bluetooth or MP3 ringtones, they might have been disabled as a cost-cutting method. Bluetooth usually is present as a separate chipset in the mobile phone, with a software stack bought by the manufacturer with per-device royalties. Removing the hardware and software can remove a few dollars from the final price, and the operator will buy a crippled version because it is less expensive than the full-fledged distribution version. This also applies for many audio & video codecs, for which you need to add the patent licenses as well...
Anyway, look around, it's very easy to find completely unlocked GSM mobile phones. However, it's true that without the operator subvention, the price is suddenly not so attractive...
Sprint uses CDMA too, and it doesn't pull any of the crap that we hear about Verizon.
But the only reason why they CAN do it is CDMA. You cannot do it with GSM, because the only device directly related to the operator is the SIM card, and not the mobile phone itself. Consumer lock-in is designed into Qualcomm's technology, whereas GSM may have been conceived by various companies with various means and various goals, but enabling competition was a basic principle of the system.
"But wait," you say, "they can get a digital cable box and keep the older TV!" Well, sure, but then we get to hear about how the cable company is bleeding it's customers dry by charging for equipment. I call horseshit on this one. Cable companies charge an average $7.50 monthly lease fee for the box that costs them $300 upfront, plus maintenance and repair. In "only" 40 months of maintenance free operation of that box, the cable company breaks even. Yeah...that's certainly not what I would call milking the customer.
Your numbers are wrong.
A zapper box for broadcast digital TV is well below $50 in retail, and that's including the margin for way too many middlemen. Except the operation frequency range, and a more complex encoding on broadcast compared to cable, there's virtually no difference with a cable zapper box. As a mass buyer, the cable operator can get much better deals than retail, so yes, the cable operator is most probably milking its clients if it says it cannot provide a zapper box for its consumers with an old TV for $3 a month.
The first chapter is avalable online to get a taste of the book (and the language).
The resulting product is fundamentally different from a TiVo.
While on TiVo, there is no way to change any part of the code without the signing key, in the proposed solution it is possible for the user to change the whole open-source system with an other one, as required by the GPLv3 license. As such, there is much more freedom for the user to tinker with its own system.
But for the manufacturer, it has the distinct advantages that some parts of the system can be isolated from the open subsystem, in a much more stable way, both legally and technically, than in a closed-source driver. Thus, it is possible to implement DRM, software subject to type conformance, or safety-critical tasks without risking corruption from the open system, whatever this system does. And contrary to the current solution, this does not require additional hardware.
The author claims that manufacturers can ensure that while the Linux part respects the GPLv3 constraints, and can be modified by the user as required by the license, it is possible for the manufacturer to protect their own part that lives in another VM on the hypervisor, and thus is not a derivative from the GPL code.
For an embedded manufacturer, it is interesting because it protects what the manufacturer considers to be important, or even simply some code it bought from a third party, while it allows skilled hobbyists to improve the product on the open-source side. The difference with the current situation (for example OpenMoko phones) is that the closed software can run on the same processor as the open software, without the need for an additional chip that increases the cost of the product.
The problem the FCC (and every other emission regulation body) has with open source and software radio is that it will be trivial to modify a device using these methods to emit at an arbitrarily high power level over a restricted wavelength, or using a band without using the proper medium access control. If this happened, the wavelength would be pretty much unusable for all other users until the FCC tracks down the emitter, and shuts him down.
That's why today, most radio-enabled devices, and especially mobile phones, have to pass type conformance to be commercialized in a geographic area. In the current state of things, if the radio software can be changed by the user, the type conformance cannot be awarded. Software radio makes things worse, because it is harder to justify that a component cannot emit at a given frequency, if changing the software in this component would allow switching emission frequencies at will.
To learn system programming, it is a bad deal compared to a microcontroller with an emulator, or even a refurbished GBA with a flash card:
With only 15 interrupts lines, cascaded into 2 8-lines banks, the IBM PC is quite limited, and you still have the trouble to handle the cascaded handlers.
But if the 8086 processor understands a subset of the complete assembly language from the current PC, the timings constraints are completely different: the cost of an instruction for a 8086 accessing directly the main memory completely changes as soon as you have cache, which is essential for modern computers. And with the mess that x86 assembly is, I'd prefer dabbling with ARM assembly instead.
OK - but it is not alone on that segment.
Disk structures ? The cylinder/head/track abstraction that come with the floppy disks is compulsory on old IBM PCs. The LBA method is much more straightforward. No one should need to learn a complex, obsolete abstraction that doesn't even correspond to the reality anymore.
When UPS cancelled their order of the freighter model, the total number of orders for the A380 freight dropped to zero, meaning that more passenger models must be sold to recoup the loss...
This also means that Airbus can suspend any additional development concerning freighter models, which will be in itself an economy measure on the program. Instead, it can concentrate on delivering its current clients for the passenger version.
Since the problem for now with the A380 is producing them as fast as possible, to fill up the current orders, it is not really time to worry about future sales. When you have sold all your production for the next 5 years, and you have a hard time meeting the deadlines, you can understand that your clients don't really wish to commit to buy new models until the situation has settled down.
Louis Vuitton makes handbags in the same Malaysian factories that the knockoffs come from.
You're wrong.
A simple search returns this article, which states that Vuitton handbags are produced either in France or Spain.
If you ditch C in favour of a language that does the length checking for you then you will sacrifice speed and compactness since it will be checking _everything_.
It should be possible to have both, and some languages have been designed with this in mind. It is the case for Ada, where string manipulation includes bound checking in the language by default, but it is possible to remove the related verifications with compilation options.
But then, the security trade off is still present - you have to choose which code is optimized, and which code is secure. But hopefully, this should at least avoid implementation bugs in the secure code.
In Belgium it's 70 after the auther has died, now you try and explain that to me
It is the same for all countries in the European Union, including the United Kingdom. And every country that ratified the Berne treaty grants at least 50 years after the death of the author. However, this only cover the author's copyright. It does not cover the actual performance, which is covered by separate rights, which are shorter.
This means that the performers that did not write their own songs, and whose performance has been recorded a long time ago, will not earn any revenue if anyone uses those recordings. The only ones earning money will be the authors, if their rights are still valid. For many classical music pieces, this means that there are now available recordings that are fully free of any copyright.
Much of the operating system (meaning the kernel plus system utilities) is GNU software, many of which existed as mature software well before the Linux kernel came about
The kernel is GPL software, but there is no GNU software in it as far as I know. And there are Linux systems where the implementation of the UNIX userland system tools do not come from GNU either, for example the case of embedded systems using BusyBox.
Since a big problem in the GPLv3 debate covers the actual practices of companies that develop embedded systems, this is really relevant: In embedded systems, size is an important parameter, and the GNU userspace tools are not optimized in that direction. This means that those systems may be Linux systems, but not GNU/Linux systems.
They're not "suing anyone they don't like", they're defending copyrighted material or protecting trademarks- and they are famous for doing so, since long before Jobs was re-hired. Shockingly they HAVE to, or said copyright/trademarks are diluted.
You're mistaken. Here, it is only coyrighted material, there is no trademark case involved. And copyright is different from trademarks, because you don't lose your copyright if you don't protect it correctly.