What I've been told is that is has to do with patents. Let's say that Microsoft holds a patent on... a scheduling algorithm. Microsoft's software is instructions that tell your computer how to do that. If you allow your computer to follow that algorithm you're using the method described in the patent and Microsoft could sue you to make you stop. The EULA is, among other things, a license to use their patents under certain conditions.
It is very counter-intuitive if you think about software as a product that you buy, but then again, the same thing applies to things like video game consoles as well.
I can't say I particularly like it, but hey, what the fuck ya gonna do, 'eh?
1. Generate a lot of random bits at install time. Enough that there is a lower chance of collision than with a BIOS dump. This will be less than the number of bits in the BIOS image. Probably 32 or 64 measly bits would be plenty. 2. Save these bits somewhere (in a file on the hard drive, or if more secrecy is desired they could be scattered in designated sections of multiple data files or within the executable image). 3. Recover these bits and send them as the unique identifier.
It's not hard to come up with a better probably-unique identifier than a BIOS dump.
Actually, I think that QoS is a simpler solution than those two options. Only if you set "net neutrality" on the general Internet as an absolute necessity are those options the simplest way.
In terms of net neutrality, I do believe that a situation where content providers (canonically, Google) have to pay ISPs for fast connections is absurd. But that doesn't change the fact that QoS can be a useful tool to make best use of the available resources.
An ideal solution might give users different choices of bandwidth limits and latency guarantees. A system where client software could request a certain level of low-latency service, but a given user has a limit for low-latency data per hour. Users could set up different programs to request different levels of service, and when they run out they just get bumped to the next-best tier. That would take a bit of effort as well, though.
I grew up in the state of Illinois. In Illinois it is illegal for car dealerships to be open on Sundays.
This is not the case for other businesses. Most businesses in Illinois are open on Sunday; of course, they don't have to be open any day, and some business owners choose to keep their stores closed on Sunday.
But car dealerships must stay closed. I've been told that the dealerships all got together and asked the state legislature to pass a law enforcing this. Why would they ask for a law restricting their behavior? Probably because they wanted Sundays off, and knew that if other dealers opened on Sunday they'd have to open as well to stay competitive. If the law was removed and a single dealership in an area opened on Sunday it would only be a matter of time before they all opened. So the net result of the law is bad for working consumers looking to buy cars, who now have only one day out of their weekend to do it.
Tech companies' support of this law is exactly the same. They want to be protected against companies that would gladly do things that they don't want to do. But the net result of the law from the perspective of the government passing it, less choices for censoring governments, is probably a net positive for people in those countries (at least as our government sees it). It won't work totally; in fact, it might wind up like Illinois' ban on fireworks sales, leading to giant fireworks stores right across the Indiana and Wisconsin borders, totally outside the state's legislative arm.
1. The people that want HD-gaming certainly have "ravenous desire" for it, but lots of them don't have any money, or have other priorities ahead of buying good enough HD sets that it makes a difference from all the way back on the couch. Lots of people don't have room for a big TV or "home theatre system"; lots of young people, even the ones that do have money, live in apartments and move a lot, and don't want to buy tons of big stuff that would get in the way if they moved; even if HD prices come down the physical size of a TV big enough that HD matters from the couch will get in the way. Apartment dwellers also have to watch the volume on their stereos. How many people do you know that drool over great entertainment systems? How many do you know that actually have them? There's always going to be a big gap there.
2. Speaking of that couch thing, you can play computer games at HD resolutions and actually be close enough to the screen to see the detail without having a gargantuan TV. The comparitively small size of a PC, monitor and headphones is hard to beat among people that don't have a giant TV room to sprawl out in.
3. There are a few people with "ravenous desire" and many, many more that don't care at all. They don't care about HD gaming or HD movies. A vast majority of the people I know fall in this category, and while I don't doubt that there are people out there that care, there are enough that don't to keep DVDs on shelves for years. The hardcore might move on to downloads before HD disk formats ever truly take hold.
x86 Linux can sort-of do everything Windows can. Some caveats:
1. There might be performance hits because of design differences between the OSes. The simplest example is a performance problem with Cygwin (a Unix compatibility layer for Windows): forking processes on Unix is a fairly lightweight task these days, light enough that it's used to create multithreaded applications. On WinNT there is no fork() and creating processes is very expensive; there's kernel support for multithreaded applications but the mechanism is totally different. Because process creation is so slow, fork() in Cygwin is very slow. So if you run, say, Apache under Cygwin you'll get awful performance (as I understand it Apache 1.3 performed badly under Windows for this reason and Apache 2 is much better).
2. HDCP. Trusted Computing.
3. Windows software that requires access to hardware that Linux doesn't have drivers for isn't going to work very well. Most hardware is pretty well generalized, but there some practical cases where lack of driver support could get in the way.
Furthermore, AFAIK there's nothing really stopping anyone from writing a WINE-like program for emulating Mac apps; in fact, since OS X is a Unix it would probably be easier. There just isn't much interest; I'd guess that's just because there's not much Mac software that people want to run on other Unixes/Windows/VMS/Plan 9/EROS/etc.
Sure, the world does not stop existing. That doesn't mean I should care if people think I'm an asshole. If people think I'm an asshole when I'm alive this could conceivably cause me problems. Once I'm dead, well, if I was an asshole (or a porn fiend, as seems to be the center of this discussion) then people might as well know the truth, right?
Yes, the limit is howmuch they can do with out financial backing. Yup, it sucks, however this is the real world.
What the latest action shows, however, is that they have legitimate pressure from both sides. They need corporate money to be what they want to be, but without the support of the community and developers they won't have an audience and thus won't be worth sponsoring anyway. The community voice checks the corporate voice, and tells Slamdance that they'll have to take a harder line with the sponsors if they want to matter. Slamdance has to listen to both groups.
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, which as far as suburbs go, are better than those of the valley. Why? Because they surround Chicago, which is a real city. Instead of masses of people driving in essentially random directions to work every day, a truly significant portion of the rush-hour traffic is relieved by commuter rail going downtown. Why does that matter? Because it means you don't have fucking 8-lane surface streets every half mile or so. The only roads that actually go anywhere in the valley are wide, busy streets with narrow sidewalks. It's a very hard place to find decent running routes, and as a runner, that's really important to me. Running through the snow beats the hell out of standing waiting for a light at the San Tomas Expressway. But it's more than just running; in the valley you just don't see people out walking, just people inside cars. It's really disturbing, distancing, anti-social.
The bay area offers many fine areas to take weekend trips. Day-to-day I'd really rather live in a real city.
At any rate, if the tech industry in the valley started to seriously decline there wouldn't be much left in the valley (think Flint, MI after the GM plant closing; the valley is not tied to one company but it depends on one industry). Just a bunch of expensive houses that nobody could afford. Chicago has seen the rise and fall of many industries within its borders and yet every time an industry has fallen the city has not declined. New York, also, though I've never really been there... I don't know so much about the cities on the west coast, though I'd probably find lots of them much more appealing than the valley (including San Francisco, which is not really tied to the valley in the way that many cities are meaningfully tied to their surrounding areas... how many people live in Sunnyvale and work in San Francisco?).
Apple is located in Cupertino, CA, in the middle of Silicon Valley. It is not a "good location". Silicon Valley is endless, boring, ugly suburban sprawl. You'd hope that it would at least be cheap to live in such a crappy place, but it's not, cost of living is very high. I know because that's where I am living right now, and I'm moving as soon as my lease is up. I don't know if you've ever lived here or not, but I think lots of people just think that it must be cool to live in California where you're near the ocean and it never snows...
And if I don't want to take the risk of blowing a bunch of money investing in a format that might become obsolete, then I won't buy any Blu-Ray stuff. I think a lot of people are in that boat. Enforcing a format war rather than allowing convergeance is probably hurting Blu-Ray sales as well as HD-DVD.
I guess if sales of both players remain very low, the players stay really expensive, and Sony can get enough PS3s out the door the PS3 could be the deciding factor. I guess I think that all of the companies involved would be doing better, at least in the short term, if they cooperated on one format instead of fighting, and now all of them face the risk of failure, possibly even the failure of both formats.
You can do what you want unless you're violating some specific law. My understanding is that in the US at least copyright (which would automatically belong to Apple) doesn't cover situations of even extremely similar design like this one. That's what the Taiwanese court decision was, right, that the design was different enough that it wasn't covered by Apple's copyright? So unless there's a specific patent or trademark that they're using without permission then they're probably OK.
Because there's an opportunity for the format to not be ugly, so that the engineers can get as much done with less work and spend the rest of the time doing something that's really useful instead of duplicating their futile efforts. Or they might just kick off early and sip margaritas on the beach for all I care.
No, actually, I think you'd find it takes the skill of many people, good timing, and luck to be successful in business, even if you could break very many laws. Creating and sustaining a business for many years is hard. Not very many businesses make it.
Well most attended bags are being attended to by annoying people as well, for what it's worth.
Cell phone converstations frequently distract me wherever I am, because typically callers talk louder than they would to a real person at close range. If calls were allowed in an airplane about half the passengers would be on their phones the whole flight and it would be even louder on the airplane than in the terminal.
I personally feel we should do to cell phone users what we do to smokers these days: set up designated "cell phone" zones and otherwise ban cell calls in most buildings. But, then again, that's my bias as one of the few people left in the US without a cell phone.
A rootkit isn't what you use to get root. It's what you use to keep root once you've got it. Typically a major component of keeping root is making sure that the people that don't want you to have root don't know you have it.
I agree with this sentiment entirely, but the friendly folk pushing HDCP don't. I think you have to jump through some hoops during the driver development process to load development drivers, and I might actually have to learn what they are soon enough.
I remember that story a while ago here about how new licenses for Vista IIRC let users run the copy under emulation as long as they didn't use any media features. It made me laugh. Except that you actually could enforce that with Trusted Computing if I understand it correctly.
I wish I hadn't used all my mod points earlier today, because that's an interesting post... it would be interesting to set up a programming environment with a binary format and specialized editor, though on second thought it might not work so well. ASCII text is very flexible and almost universally understood across different platforms. It's hard to imagine a non-text based paradigm for developing full programs that's as flexible, though there are certainly examples such as resource editors for GUI creation where graphical tools make life easier. Maybe non-text based programming would be good for rapid development. HyperCard largely used non-text interfaces for development, and the overall organization was certainly not based on text.
A "compiled" or specially crafted binary version of HTML/XML might work nicely, and could potentially save bandwith; lots of web pages are sent gzipped, but a specialized binary format should be able to get the size down even more.
I thought this might be cool, so I checked it out. It worked perfectly in Firefox under GNU/Linux. It has a few little glitches in terms of navigation but overall seems to work pretty well technically. I couldn't find a way to zoom out on the overhead map, but I'm sure I just missed it somewhere. And there was lots of latency that confused things. But those are all pretty minor glitches.
The problem is that I can't understand how this would ever be useful, even if it was technically perfect. I use map and satellite image sites all the time, but I just lost interest with this. 3d models of the buildings and streets of a city, downloaded to your computer and browsable in a GTA-like way would be way cooler in my opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
What I've been told is that is has to do with patents. Let's say that Microsoft holds a patent on... a scheduling algorithm. Microsoft's software is instructions that tell your computer how to do that. If you allow your computer to follow that algorithm you're using the method described in the patent and Microsoft could sue you to make you stop. The EULA is, among other things, a license to use their patents under certain conditions.
It is very counter-intuitive if you think about software as a product that you buy, but then again, the same thing applies to things like video game consoles as well.
I can't say I particularly like it, but hey, what the fuck ya gonna do, 'eh?
1. Generate a lot of random bits at install time. Enough that there is a lower chance of collision than with a BIOS dump. This will be less than the number of bits in the BIOS image. Probably 32 or 64 measly bits would be plenty.
2. Save these bits somewhere (in a file on the hard drive, or if more secrecy is desired they could be scattered in designated sections of multiple data files or within the executable image).
3. Recover these bits and send them as the unique identifier.
It's not hard to come up with a better probably-unique identifier than a BIOS dump.
Actually, I think that QoS is a simpler solution than those two options. Only if you set "net neutrality" on the general Internet as an absolute necessity are those options the simplest way.
In terms of net neutrality, I do believe that a situation where content providers (canonically, Google) have to pay ISPs for fast connections is absurd. But that doesn't change the fact that QoS can be a useful tool to make best use of the available resources.
An ideal solution might give users different choices of bandwidth limits and latency guarantees. A system where client software could request a certain level of low-latency service, but a given user has a limit for low-latency data per hour. Users could set up different programs to request different levels of service, and when they run out they just get bumped to the next-best tier. That would take a bit of effort as well, though.
I grew up in the state of Illinois. In Illinois it is illegal for car dealerships to be open on Sundays.
This is not the case for other businesses. Most businesses in Illinois are open on Sunday; of course, they don't have to be open any day, and some business owners choose to keep their stores closed on Sunday.
But car dealerships must stay closed. I've been told that the dealerships all got together and asked the state legislature to pass a law enforcing this. Why would they ask for a law restricting their behavior? Probably because they wanted Sundays off, and knew that if other dealers opened on Sunday they'd have to open as well to stay competitive. If the law was removed and a single dealership in an area opened on Sunday it would only be a matter of time before they all opened. So the net result of the law is bad for working consumers looking to buy cars, who now have only one day out of their weekend to do it.
Tech companies' support of this law is exactly the same. They want to be protected against companies that would gladly do things that they don't want to do. But the net result of the law from the perspective of the government passing it, less choices for censoring governments, is probably a net positive for people in those countries (at least as our government sees it). It won't work totally; in fact, it might wind up like Illinois' ban on fireworks sales, leading to giant fireworks stores right across the Indiana and Wisconsin borders, totally outside the state's legislative arm.
Better minesweeper, 'eh? Can it play with triangular tiles (like xbomb)?
Engineering and science aren't the only intelligent activities that you can do on Teh Webs.
If it allows perfect reproduction then why is it there in the first place?
1. The people that want HD-gaming certainly have "ravenous desire" for it, but lots of them don't have any money, or have other priorities ahead of buying good enough HD sets that it makes a difference from all the way back on the couch. Lots of people don't have room for a big TV or "home theatre system"; lots of young people, even the ones that do have money, live in apartments and move a lot, and don't want to buy tons of big stuff that would get in the way if they moved; even if HD prices come down the physical size of a TV big enough that HD matters from the couch will get in the way. Apartment dwellers also have to watch the volume on their stereos. How many people do you know that drool over great entertainment systems? How many do you know that actually have them? There's always going to be a big gap there.
2. Speaking of that couch thing, you can play computer games at HD resolutions and actually be close enough to the screen to see the detail without having a gargantuan TV. The comparitively small size of a PC, monitor and headphones is hard to beat among people that don't have a giant TV room to sprawl out in.
3. There are a few people with "ravenous desire" and many, many more that don't care at all. They don't care about HD gaming or HD movies. A vast majority of the people I know fall in this category, and while I don't doubt that there are people out there that care, there are enough that don't to keep DVDs on shelves for years. The hardcore might move on to downloads before HD disk formats ever truly take hold.
x86 Linux can sort-of do everything Windows can. Some caveats:
1. There might be performance hits because of design differences between the OSes. The simplest example is a performance problem with Cygwin (a Unix compatibility layer for Windows): forking processes on Unix is a fairly lightweight task these days, light enough that it's used to create multithreaded applications. On WinNT there is no fork() and creating processes is very expensive; there's kernel support for multithreaded applications but the mechanism is totally different. Because process creation is so slow, fork() in Cygwin is very slow. So if you run, say, Apache under Cygwin you'll get awful performance (as I understand it Apache 1.3 performed badly under Windows for this reason and Apache 2 is much better).
2. HDCP. Trusted Computing.
3. Windows software that requires access to hardware that Linux doesn't have drivers for isn't going to work very well. Most hardware is pretty well generalized, but there some practical cases where lack of driver support could get in the way.
Furthermore, AFAIK there's nothing really stopping anyone from writing a WINE-like program for emulating Mac apps; in fact, since OS X is a Unix it would probably be easier. There just isn't much interest; I'd guess that's just because there's not much Mac software that people want to run on other Unixes/Windows/VMS/Plan 9/EROS/etc.
Sure, the world does not stop existing. That doesn't mean I should care if people think I'm an asshole. If people think I'm an asshole when I'm alive this could conceivably cause me problems. Once I'm dead, well, if I was an asshole (or a porn fiend, as seems to be the center of this discussion) then people might as well know the truth, right?
Yes, the limit is howmuch they can do with out financial backing. Yup, it sucks, however this is the real world. What the latest action shows, however, is that they have legitimate pressure from both sides. They need corporate money to be what they want to be, but without the support of the community and developers they won't have an audience and thus won't be worth sponsoring anyway. The community voice checks the corporate voice, and tells Slamdance that they'll have to take a harder line with the sponsors if they want to matter. Slamdance has to listen to both groups.
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, which as far as suburbs go, are better than those of the valley. Why? Because they surround Chicago, which is a real city. Instead of masses of people driving in essentially random directions to work every day, a truly significant portion of the rush-hour traffic is relieved by commuter rail going downtown. Why does that matter? Because it means you don't have fucking 8-lane surface streets every half mile or so. The only roads that actually go anywhere in the valley are wide, busy streets with narrow sidewalks. It's a very hard place to find decent running routes, and as a runner, that's really important to me. Running through the snow beats the hell out of standing waiting for a light at the San Tomas Expressway. But it's more than just running; in the valley you just don't see people out walking, just people inside cars. It's really disturbing, distancing, anti-social.
The bay area offers many fine areas to take weekend trips. Day-to-day I'd really rather live in a real city.
At any rate, if the tech industry in the valley started to seriously decline there wouldn't be much left in the valley (think Flint, MI after the GM plant closing; the valley is not tied to one company but it depends on one industry). Just a bunch of expensive houses that nobody could afford. Chicago has seen the rise and fall of many industries within its borders and yet every time an industry has fallen the city has not declined. New York, also, though I've never really been there... I don't know so much about the cities on the west coast, though I'd probably find lots of them much more appealing than the valley (including San Francisco, which is not really tied to the valley in the way that many cities are meaningfully tied to their surrounding areas... how many people live in Sunnyvale and work in San Francisco?).
Good location?
Apple is located in Cupertino, CA, in the middle of Silicon Valley. It is not a "good location". Silicon Valley is endless, boring, ugly suburban sprawl. You'd hope that it would at least be cheap to live in such a crappy place, but it's not, cost of living is very high. I know because that's where I am living right now, and I'm moving as soon as my lease is up. I don't know if you've ever lived here or not, but I think lots of people just think that it must be cool to live in California where you're near the ocean and it never snows...
Again: remarkably poor planning (not to mention financial discipline).
And if I don't want to take the risk of blowing a bunch of money investing in a format that might become obsolete, then I won't buy any Blu-Ray stuff. I think a lot of people are in that boat. Enforcing a format war rather than allowing convergeance is probably hurting Blu-Ray sales as well as HD-DVD.
I guess if sales of both players remain very low, the players stay really expensive, and Sony can get enough PS3s out the door the PS3 could be the deciding factor. I guess I think that all of the companies involved would be doing better, at least in the short term, if they cooperated on one format instead of fighting, and now all of them face the risk of failure, possibly even the failure of both formats.
You can do what you want unless you're violating some specific law. My understanding is that in the US at least copyright (which would automatically belong to Apple) doesn't cover situations of even extremely similar design like this one. That's what the Taiwanese court decision was, right, that the design was different enough that it wasn't covered by Apple's copyright? So unless there's a specific patent or trademark that they're using without permission then they're probably OK.
Because there's an opportunity for the format to not be ugly, so that the engineers can get as much done with less work and spend the rest of the time doing something that's really useful instead of duplicating their futile efforts. Or they might just kick off early and sip margaritas on the beach for all I care.
No, actually, I think you'd find it takes the skill of many people, good timing, and luck to be successful in business, even if you could break very many laws. Creating and sustaining a business for many years is hard. Not very many businesses make it.
Well most attended bags are being attended to by annoying people as well, for what it's worth.
Cell phone converstations frequently distract me wherever I am, because typically callers talk louder than they would to a real person at close range. If calls were allowed in an airplane about half the passengers would be on their phones the whole flight and it would be even louder on the airplane than in the terminal.
I personally feel we should do to cell phone users what we do to smokers these days: set up designated "cell phone" zones and otherwise ban cell calls in most buildings. But, then again, that's my bias as one of the few people left in the US without a cell phone.
A rootkit isn't what you use to get root. It's what you use to keep root once you've got it. Typically a major component of keeping root is making sure that the people that don't want you to have root don't know you have it.
I agree with this sentiment entirely, but the friendly folk pushing HDCP don't. I think you have to jump through some hoops during the driver development process to load development drivers, and I might actually have to learn what they are soon enough.
I remember that story a while ago here about how new licenses for Vista IIRC let users run the copy under emulation as long as they didn't use any media features. It made me laugh. Except that you actually could enforce that with Trusted Computing if I understand it correctly.
n/t
I wish I hadn't used all my mod points earlier today, because that's an interesting post... it would be interesting to set up a programming environment with a binary format and specialized editor, though on second thought it might not work so well. ASCII text is very flexible and almost universally understood across different platforms. It's hard to imagine a non-text based paradigm for developing full programs that's as flexible, though there are certainly examples such as resource editors for GUI creation where graphical tools make life easier. Maybe non-text based programming would be good for rapid development. HyperCard largely used non-text interfaces for development, and the overall organization was certainly not based on text.
A "compiled" or specially crafted binary version of HTML/XML might work nicely, and could potentially save bandwith; lots of web pages are sent gzipped, but a specialized binary format should be able to get the size down even more.
I thought this might be cool, so I checked it out. It worked perfectly in Firefox under GNU/Linux. It has a few little glitches in terms of navigation but overall seems to work pretty well technically. I couldn't find a way to zoom out on the overhead map, but I'm sure I just missed it somewhere. And there was lots of latency that confused things. But those are all pretty minor glitches.
The problem is that I can't understand how this would ever be useful, even if it was technically perfect. I use map and satellite image sites all the time, but I just lost interest with this. 3d models of the buildings and streets of a city, downloaded to your computer and browsable in a GTA-like way would be way cooler in my opinion.
A private company can ban you from having certain things on your person when you enter their property.
Lots of places ban cameras.
Lots of places ban guns.