How much of the x86 instruction set has patents attached to it?
You probably wouldn't see the likes of Intel suing x86 emulators running on x86 (e.g. virtual machines), but it might be a different story if people start using x86 emulators on other CPU architectures through a Java VM because that cuts into their business.
Can you do full disk encryption on the primary partition - i.e. does it have it's own bootloader yet? This would make it a nice replacement for DriveCrypt Plus Pack...
I understand what you're saying - but you have to realize that this isn't about what you do, or what I do, it's about the behavior of the overall population. If you believe that the overall population tends to follow your habits, then that is one argument. If, on the other hand, there is a growing population of freeloaders, then that's another problem.
Although I'm essentially replying to you here, I make this point more globally because I see similar responses everywhere the topic of piracy is discussed, and I think that except in very few circumstances they mask the real issue.
P.S. "Crap doesn't sell as well anymore.", agreed!
Okay, but think about the consequence of this behavior - you're consuming several forms of entertainment yet financing only one industry.
The same problem exists even if one parent company funds branches in two or more industries - nobody wants to finance a loss. The same problem even exists if you download software and pay for only what you consider the best of it, because this means that you will tend to fund only the biggest players, and startups won't have as much of a chance to break through. If we're really being honest, many people who claim they pirate to "try" software are full of it - ever hear of a demo? Demo's are a section of the game or an otherwise limited version that the distributors actually want you to try out legally, and base your purchase decision upon.
Now, believe me when I tell you that in my opinion the MPAA and RIAA are full of crap in most statements they make regarding piracy statistics. But based on the attitudes of many people I know in real life I actually believe we may end up in a situation where the populace is simply taxed at some flat rate for piracy, beyond what we have already seen for blank media in certain countries, simply because there will come a breaking point where the practice of piracy is so widespread that we'll face at least a partial collapse of certain industries. I already believe that if you ask most people about piracy today you'll simply be told that "everybody does it".
I do make an effort to pay for the software, music and movies I use. In the sense that many people I know simply download the same products you could say this makes me foolish, "wasting my money". On the other hand, when I put myself in the position of the developers, artists, and producers, I look at a real problem they're facing, no matter how inflated it may be in the industry stats presented to us by the media.
My main gripe, however, remains with the freeloaders - people who seem to see no value in any of the products they consume, or who delude themselves into believing that by simply "making a copy" they aren't "stealing" anything. Okay, so piracy is not quite the same as theft, but developers, musicians, and so forth produce works that contribute to society and culture. In that sense freeloading is most equivalent to not paying your taxes - those people who do pay are essentially funding various works from which you benefit. At some point the burden that is shifted onto the shoulders of those who do pay will become too great.
To quote myself from another site on the same topic:
Maybe nobody feels bad for Tony, but think about what will eventually happen to the genuine distributors and consequently developers. If Tony couldn't even sell pirate software any more then how will anyone sell software?
Sure, there is that old argument, "the people buying from Tony probably wouldn't have bought it retail anyway". But stop and think about what's happened here: He had a big house, fast cars, expensive holidays, rented a warehouse, employed several people - that's all money that the real developers never saw a penny of. And you have to wonder - we live in a world where the younger generation (of which I count myself part) just tends to pirate everything. It has become the common culture. Apparently these days the majority of people under 30 "wouldn't have bought it anyway" all of the time - yet look at the masses of stuff they have pirated over time.
First Tony will go out of business, followed by the software houses we know and love, if it hasn't happened already. The article ends "Overhaul your business model. Quickly.". This assumes that there will still be enough people around who will be willing to pay at all. I know many people who go out of their way to pay for nothing - be it software, music, or movies.
Basically, if you're writing commercial software, you better have an online service or technology licensing program attached to it to make decent profits.
Think about the volume of physically produced pirate media within a country compared to that shipped between countries, especially given technology improvements such as BitTorrent. Also, now you'll have two people and two dogs sniffing for CD/DVS's (and not even indiscriminately with respect to pressed vs. burnable), and presumably you still have to have another two people and two dogs checking for drugs, too.
Based on the coverage, it seems that the industry associations might be going on another press rampage. If you read the various press articles these same two dogs are moved around different countries - they've already been in Malaysia and at Stanstead, near London. I wonder if in fact the plan is just to move them to various high-traffic airports around the globe and inform the populace "there are sniffer dogs here now!".
What happens when other people can remotely influence the performance of your automobile? There may not be a case for "remote control" (one would hope), but injecting false information into the network about dangerous traffic conditions has implications for other vehicles programmed to respond to it.
I'm not an expert, but I wouldn't call a password 'intellectual property'. It's an authentication device, the electronic equivalent of a physical key. Surely they have locks on their doors in China? And surely stealing a key, or copying it without authorization and then using the copy to gain entry would be a crime?
Depending on your particular language version of Firefox 2, out of the box it will jump to various sites simply by entering keywords.
For example: wp slashdot - look up Slashdot on Wikipedia slang pwned - look up "pwned" on UrbanDictionary
Simply entering "wp" and "slang" also work because of the way the URLs are formed. As far as I know you can configure others. I haven't looked into it extensively.
I can garauntee that they don't work well in television. At least, not on me. Because, even if they're only 1 frame, I can see them at 24fps.
Sure, but what happens when you start blending images, i.e. instead of flashing a message or product image briefly on the screen, subtly adjust the existing image so that you can still perceive the message, but no flashing occurs.
Anyway, as much as I hate subliminal messaging, I would rather put up with that than have Billy Mays yelling at me to buy OxyClean, OrangeGlo, the Hercules Hook, or whatever else he's pushing. When questioned about the topic, Billy is alleged to have screamed out, "SUBLIMINAL MESSAGING: ORDER YOURS TODAY!".
If you read my post, this is exactly what I suggested. The actual point was that it requires more than simply putting "beginning and end tags" on the code, e.g. it is not automatic.
I would also ask this of CodePlay: If your compiler is automatic, why do we need to add beginning and end tags?:)
The compiler will put out code for x86, Ageia PhysX and Cell/PS3. There were three tests talked about today, CRC, Julia Ray Tracing and Matrix Multiply. All were run on 8 cores (2S Xeon 5300 CPUs) and showed 739, 789 and 660% speedups respectively.
That's great - but do the algorithms involved here naturally lend themselves to the parallelization techniques the compiler uses? Are there algorithms that are very poor choices for parallelization? For example, can you effectively parallelize a sort? Wouldn't each thread have to avoid exchanging data elements any other thread was working on, and therefore cause massive synchronization issues? A solution might be to divide the data set by the number of threads and then after each set was sorted merge them in order - but that requires more code tweaking than the summary implies. So I wonder how different this is from Open/MT?
This is perhaps the most exciting news that I've heard in the past month, if not substantially longer, with regards to the media. It actually made me sit back and think "wow..." in near disbelief.
Slashdot runs articles on the MPAA and RIAA all the time. I personally could not be happier that independent artists are going to get some mainstream airtime, and I hope it inspires a change in the way that people choose to consume content - perhaps learning the value in seeking out lesser known artists instead of spending their cash on whatever happens to be pushed through more commercialized channels.
One of the benefits of technology and the Internet is that they lessen the gap in quality of product (for lack of a better term) and exposure that can be achieved between enthusiasts and large well funded commercial entities. This is an excellent opportunity for the best of these artists to be recognized through alternate channels.
It is absolutely news for nerds. Best of luck to all those who benefit from the free airtime:)
I'd like to follow up my own submission with some further thought. Unfortunately it's either late at night here, or early in the morning, depending on how you look at it, and further thought takes some time;)
One of the other arguments that is often offered in the case for independent labels is that the music is more authentic, creative, and less 'manufactured'. However, to truly displace the RIAA we should realize that it is necessary to cater to the mass markets that they currently serve. It is difficult to instantly change the listening habits and genre preference of millions of people, therefor an effective program would rely on enough mainstream pop, rap, hip-hop, etc. music to be produced by independents and marketed in a way which reaches younger generations and begins to draw their attention from traditional RIAA artists.
Never in our history have we been so prepared and capable to tackle this problem. Modern music technology and tools in combination with the Internet helps to level the playing field, at least somewhat, such that professional sound is in reach of the amateur through virtual instruments and production software that can be purchased for only hundreds of dollars, while co-ordinated marketing across popular sites contributing to the cause could compete with major budgeting spends by big labels.
If there were enough contributors to undertake such a concerted movement it might be interesting to set up something akin to sourceforge, e.g. a "musicforge", where independent artists collaborated to produce substitutes for mainstream media and served them to Internet radio stations, at least as a beginning, to help drive the change. If mainstream music is really as formulaic as we often claim it to be, in theory reproducing it to a reasonable standard should not be impossible or even very difficult.
using the same content-protection system as commercial discs
So why bother? It's been broken for over 7 years. Unless...
The technology will require discs that are slightly different from the conventional DVD-Rs found in shops today... ahhh, this will maybe prevent ripping? Or will there be media taxes imposed? Will I need to install special drivers to burn to or read from the discs? Would such drivers, if required, govern my PC playback and 'secure' access to the discs?
When faced with the RIAA monopoly, many people propose a boycott that is unrealistic: People won't stop buying CDs, downloading from iTunes, or the like.
What needs to happen is for Internet radio stations to turn to independent labels. Consumers will buy the music they hear. If Internet radio stations commit to changing the majority of their playlist to artists on non-RIAA labels then the majority of profits will be diverted from the RIAA - they don't get per play royalties and they don't get royalties on purchases. It's a double-whammy. If you look at something like eMusic today, which doesn't carry the RIAA labels, you will quickly find that a little digging turns up more great music than you might actually expect. And it's not just Internet stations that should make the change - everyone can benefit from getting out of this monopoly stranglehold. The RIAA might eventually have to propose competitive terms to survive, artists will be better compensated, and labels which are smaller today will be able to grow faster not only because they will see a greater percentage of royalties, but because the best artists will be less drawn to the RIAA labels in the first place.
Perhaps, though, the RIAA is already starting to feel some bite, and this is why their proposed fees are so high. If you're paying 100% of your revenues to the RIAA, you aren't paying anything to the indie's.
Manufacturers should be compelled to update published MTBF specifications (and similar metrics) over time based on actual data (e.g. how many units have been [i]sold[/i] (not just shipped), how many have been returned or reported dead, and how long the diagnostic data on the drive reports it was actually working. DOA drives could be excluded.
DRM is not only imposed by mangling files, it can also be imposed by the vendor. Recently I ran across the problem of territory restrictions on Beatport. Live in the USA? Sorry! You can't purchase this music due to territory restriction. The same occurs on eMusic for certain tracks in other countries, and probably on other services.
This is DRM, but in another form (a server-side check). Online distribution should not be restricted by territory - it makes sense only in the "offline" world where I guess distributors can hold exclusive rights to distribute songs in certain geographic regions. In the online world I should be allowed to buy from any label I want. It is the job of the labels, in fact, to promote their artists. On the Internet, I am likely to buy from the label who has promoted the artist best, and so it clearly makes more sense in terms of benefiting artists to remove all territory restrictions - poor promoters won't be able to compete so well.
Slashdot Mirror
How much of the x86 instruction set has patents attached to it?
You probably wouldn't see the likes of Intel suing x86 emulators running on x86 (e.g. virtual machines), but it might be a different story if people start using x86 emulators on other CPU architectures through a Java VM because that cuts into their business.
Can you do full disk encryption on the primary partition - i.e. does it have it's own bootloader yet? This would make it a nice replacement for DriveCrypt Plus Pack...
Hey Tom,
I understand what you're saying - but you have to realize that this isn't about what you do, or what I do, it's about the behavior of the overall population. If you believe that the overall population tends to follow your habits, then that is one argument. If, on the other hand, there is a growing population of freeloaders, then that's another problem.
Although I'm essentially replying to you here, I make this point more globally because I see similar responses everywhere the topic of piracy is discussed, and I think that except in very few circumstances they mask the real issue.
P.S. "Crap doesn't sell as well anymore.", agreed!
Okay, but think about the consequence of this behavior - you're consuming several forms of entertainment yet financing only one industry.
The same problem exists even if one parent company funds branches in two or more industries - nobody wants to finance a loss. The same problem even exists if you download software and pay for only what you consider the best of it, because this means that you will tend to fund only the biggest players, and startups won't have as much of a chance to break through. If we're really being honest, many people who claim they pirate to "try" software are full of it - ever hear of a demo? Demo's are a section of the game or an otherwise limited version that the distributors actually want you to try out legally, and base your purchase decision upon.
Now, believe me when I tell you that in my opinion the MPAA and RIAA are full of crap in most statements they make regarding piracy statistics. But based on the attitudes of many people I know in real life I actually believe we may end up in a situation where the populace is simply taxed at some flat rate for piracy, beyond what we have already seen for blank media in certain countries, simply because there will come a breaking point where the practice of piracy is so widespread that we'll face at least a partial collapse of certain industries. I already believe that if you ask most people about piracy today you'll simply be told that "everybody does it".
I do make an effort to pay for the software, music and movies I use. In the sense that many people I know simply download the same products you could say this makes me foolish, "wasting my money". On the other hand, when I put myself in the position of the developers, artists, and producers, I look at a real problem they're facing, no matter how inflated it may be in the industry stats presented to us by the media.
My main gripe, however, remains with the freeloaders - people who seem to see no value in any of the products they consume, or who delude themselves into believing that by simply "making a copy" they aren't "stealing" anything. Okay, so piracy is not quite the same as theft, but developers, musicians, and so forth produce works that contribute to society and culture. In that sense freeloading is most equivalent to not paying your taxes - those people who do pay are essentially funding various works from which you benefit. At some point the burden that is shifted onto the shoulders of those who do pay will become too great.
To quote myself from another site on the same topic:
Maybe nobody feels bad for Tony, but think about what will eventually happen to the genuine distributors and consequently developers. If Tony couldn't even sell pirate software any more then how will anyone sell software?
Sure, there is that old argument, "the people buying from Tony probably wouldn't have bought it retail anyway". But stop and think about what's happened here: He had a big house, fast cars, expensive holidays, rented a warehouse, employed several people - that's all money that the real developers never saw a penny of. And you have to wonder - we live in a world where the younger generation (of which I count myself part) just tends to pirate everything. It has become the common culture. Apparently these days the majority of people under 30 "wouldn't have bought it anyway" all of the time - yet look at the masses of stuff they have pirated over time.
First Tony will go out of business, followed by the software houses we know and love, if it hasn't happened already. The article ends "Overhaul your business model. Quickly.". This assumes that there will still be enough people around who will be willing to pay at all. I know many people who go out of their way to pay for nothing - be it software, music, or movies.
Basically, if you're writing commercial software, you better have an online service or technology licensing program attached to it to make decent profits.
Think about the volume of physically produced pirate media within a country compared to that shipped between countries, especially given technology improvements such as BitTorrent. Also, now you'll have two people and two dogs sniffing for CD/DVS's (and not even indiscriminately with respect to pressed vs. burnable), and presumably you still have to have another two people and two dogs checking for drugs, too.
c ySniffing_Dogs/1147373267
BTW, this news originally came up 9-12 months ago:
http://www.betanews.com/article/MPAA_Employs_Pira
Based on the coverage, it seems that the industry associations might be going on another press rampage. If you read the various press articles these same two dogs are moved around different countries - they've already been in Malaysia and at Stanstead, near London. I wonder if in fact the plan is just to move them to various high-traffic airports around the globe and inform the populace "there are sniffer dogs here now!".
What happens when other people can remotely influence the performance of your automobile? There may not be a case for "remote control" (one would hope), but injecting false information into the network about dangerous traffic conditions has implications for other vehicles programmed to respond to it.
I'm not an expert, but I wouldn't call a password 'intellectual property'. It's an authentication device, the electronic equivalent of a physical key. Surely they have locks on their doors in China? And surely stealing a key, or copying it without authorization and then using the copy to gain entry would be a crime?
Cover the outside of a sub with them and get stealth propulsion.
Sorry for the double-post, but here's how to do it and some further examples:
t ml
http://johnbokma.com/firefox/keymarks-explained.h
It's amazing what two seconds in Google turns up.
Depending on your particular language version of Firefox 2, out of the box it will jump to various sites simply by entering keywords.
For example:
wp slashdot - look up Slashdot on Wikipedia
slang pwned - look up "pwned" on UrbanDictionary
Simply entering "wp" and "slang" also work because of the way the URLs are formed. As far as I know you can configure others. I haven't looked into it extensively.
I can garauntee that they don't work well in television. At least, not on me. Because, even if they're only 1 frame, I can see them at 24fps.
Sure, but what happens when you start blending images, i.e. instead of flashing a message or product image briefly on the screen, subtly adjust the existing image so that you can still perceive the message, but no flashing occurs.
Anyway, as much as I hate subliminal messaging, I would rather put up with that than have Billy Mays yelling at me to buy OxyClean, OrangeGlo, the Hercules Hook, or whatever else he's pushing. When questioned about the topic, Billy is alleged to have screamed out, "SUBLIMINAL MESSAGING: ORDER YOURS TODAY!".
If you read my post, this is exactly what I suggested. The actual point was that it requires more than simply putting "beginning and end tags" on the code, e.g. it is not automatic.
:)
I would also ask this of CodePlay: If your compiler is automatic, why do we need to add beginning and end tags?
Gah! "OpenMP".
The compiler will put out code for x86, Ageia PhysX and Cell/PS3. There were three tests talked about today, CRC, Julia Ray Tracing and Matrix Multiply. All were run on 8 cores (2S Xeon 5300 CPUs) and showed 739, 789 and 660% speedups respectively.
That's great - but do the algorithms involved here naturally lend themselves to the parallelization techniques the compiler uses? Are there algorithms that are very poor choices for parallelization? For example, can you effectively parallelize a sort? Wouldn't each thread have to avoid exchanging data elements any other thread was working on, and therefore cause massive synchronization issues? A solution might be to divide the data set by the number of threads and then after each set was sorted merge them in order - but that requires more code tweaking than the summary implies. So I wonder how different this is from Open/MT?
Frtprallps
is arle ot
.. the target of terrorist attacks or under threat from WMD's?
.. you could use an OLPC for $100:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/The_Children's_Machine
This is perhaps the most exciting news that I've heard in the past month, if not substantially longer, with regards to the media. It actually made me sit back and think "wow..." in near disbelief.
:)
Slashdot runs articles on the MPAA and RIAA all the time. I personally could not be happier that independent artists are going to get some mainstream airtime, and I hope it inspires a change in the way that people choose to consume content - perhaps learning the value in seeking out lesser known artists instead of spending their cash on whatever happens to be pushed through more commercialized channels.
One of the benefits of technology and the Internet is that they lessen the gap in quality of product (for lack of a better term) and exposure that can be achieved between enthusiasts and large well funded commercial entities. This is an excellent opportunity for the best of these artists to be recognized through alternate channels.
It is absolutely news for nerds. Best of luck to all those who benefit from the free airtime
I'd like to follow up my own submission with some further thought. Unfortunately it's either late at night here, or early in the morning, depending on how you look at it, and further thought takes some time ;)
:)
One of the other arguments that is often offered in the case for independent labels is that the music is more authentic, creative, and less 'manufactured'. However, to truly displace the RIAA we should realize that it is necessary to cater to the mass markets that they currently serve. It is difficult to instantly change the listening habits and genre preference of millions of people, therefor an effective program would rely on enough mainstream pop, rap, hip-hop, etc. music to be produced by independents and marketed in a way which reaches younger generations and begins to draw their attention from traditional RIAA artists.
Never in our history have we been so prepared and capable to tackle this problem. Modern music technology and tools in combination with the Internet helps to level the playing field, at least somewhat, such that professional sound is in reach of the amateur through virtual instruments and production software that can be purchased for only hundreds of dollars, while co-ordinated marketing across popular sites contributing to the cause could compete with major budgeting spends by big labels.
If there were enough contributors to undertake such a concerted movement it might be interesting to set up something akin to sourceforge, e.g. a "musicforge", where independent artists collaborated to produce substitutes for mainstream media and served them to Internet radio stations, at least as a beginning, to help drive the change. If mainstream music is really as formulaic as we often claim it to be, in theory reproducing it to a reasonable standard should not be impossible or even very difficult.
Just some thoughts
using the same content-protection system as commercial discs
... ahhh, this will maybe prevent ripping? Or will there be media taxes imposed? Will I need to install special drivers to burn to or read from the discs? Would such drivers, if required, govern my PC playback and 'secure' access to the discs?
So why bother? It's been broken for over 7 years. Unless...
The technology will require discs that are slightly different from the conventional DVD-Rs found in shops today
When faced with the RIAA monopoly, many people propose a boycott that is unrealistic: People won't stop buying CDs, downloading from iTunes, or the like.
What needs to happen is for Internet radio stations to turn to independent labels. Consumers will buy the music they hear. If Internet radio stations commit to changing the majority of their playlist to artists on non-RIAA labels then the majority of profits will be diverted from the RIAA - they don't get per play royalties and they don't get royalties on purchases. It's a double-whammy. If you look at something like eMusic today, which doesn't carry the RIAA labels, you will quickly find that a little digging turns up more great music than you might actually expect. And it's not just Internet stations that should make the change - everyone can benefit from getting out of this monopoly stranglehold. The RIAA might eventually have to propose competitive terms to survive, artists will be better compensated, and labels which are smaller today will be able to grow faster not only because they will see a greater percentage of royalties, but because the best artists will be less drawn to the RIAA labels in the first place.
Perhaps, though, the RIAA is already starting to feel some bite, and this is why their proposed fees are so high. If you're paying 100% of your revenues to the RIAA, you aren't paying anything to the indie's.
Manufacturers should be compelled to update published MTBF specifications (and similar metrics) over time based on actual data (e.g. how many units have been [i]sold[/i] (not just shipped), how many have been returned or reported dead, and how long the diagnostic data on the drive reports it was actually working. DOA drives could be excluded.
Here is some hot news for you...almost all of the inventory is going up on eBay for pennies on the dollar.*
* After rebates
DRM is not only imposed by mangling files, it can also be imposed by the vendor. Recently I ran across the problem of territory restrictions on Beatport. Live in the USA? Sorry! You can't purchase this music due to territory restriction. The same occurs on eMusic for certain tracks in other countries, and probably on other services.
This is DRM, but in another form (a server-side check). Online distribution should not be restricted by territory - it makes sense only in the "offline" world where I guess distributors can hold exclusive rights to distribute songs in certain geographic regions. In the online world I should be allowed to buy from any label I want. It is the job of the labels, in fact, to promote their artists. On the Internet, I am likely to buy from the label who has promoted the artist best, and so it clearly makes more sense in terms of benefiting artists to remove all territory restrictions - poor promoters won't be able to compete so well.