As has been pointed out here on/. many times before, any industry whose business model relies on controlling the channels of media distribution is now dying a death from obsolescence, thanks to ubiquitous electronic distribution.
This legal move by the networks, which obviously has no customer benefit, is clearly a sign of this malady. We are now seeing more and more suits like this as companies, desperately trying to cling to a failing business model, turn to the law to prop up their house of cards. And it is their last, best hope. The government is quite likely the only organization more resistant to change than the media industries.
Now what was the downside again? That a cop with a warrant may be able to snoop where I have been driving? I am not too worried about that.
That an NSA agent without a warrant will be able to compile a file on you in a database somewhere describing where you drove, how long you were there, who you visited, and how many times you've seen seditious Michael Moore films.
If not that, then the computer data-entry error in said database that causes you to get arrested, processed, and sent to Guantanamo without being allowed to plead your case, say goodbye to your family, or even see a lawyer or judge.
Many comparisons will likely be made of NTP and Burst.com, but Burst.com actually has useful technology, has owned the patents for over a decade, and most importantly, actually had highly regarded products that made use of the patents.
That's as may be, but they're still submarining the patents and trying to leech off of a successful consumer product.
When will the USPTO wake up and put a stop to all of this madness?
"And would anybody really want to place control of entire TLDs in the hands of one private company?"
Why not? Under this new system, TLDs would hardly be in short supply. I would argue that nobody but this site would have a claim to the.slashdot TLD. By the same token, I could claim the.msmercenary TLD and it wouldn't bother google in the least. Does anybody take up arms that one private company owns the rights to the novell.com 2LD?
The only reason there would be any kind of problem with one private company owning an entire TLD is if they were in artificially short supply (such as the current system), which is not the case when you open it up to the nearly infinite permutations of all alphabetic strings.
The difference between Vista and XP is that Vista defaults to IPv6-enabled. In an out-of-box installation of Vista, all IPv4 traffic goes through the tunneling protocol, as the grandparent suggests.
The reason is testing. When you pump out binaries for all of those platforms, do you automatically load the binary onto a box from each platform and run a full battery of tests, finding obscure platform-specific bugs? Or do you just release the source/binary and wait for somebody else who has that platform to stumble across the bug and report it to you?
Suppose Microsoft did it that way. Suppose they released all of their code, compiled for each platform without testing the binary on certain platforms. Given Microsoft's reputation on the platforms they do test, do you really want them not testing it? Didn't think so. A commercial software company has to test each and every platform that they "support". It's not cost-effective to run full batteries of tests, documentation, and product support for a platform that hardly anybody uses, so instead, Microsoft just releases software for the platforms that they think people will use.
From TFA: Any network requires some centralized control in order to function.
This statement is just plain wrong. P2P has shown that. What TFA probably means to say is "Every big network I can think of requires some centralized control"
And I think this assumption is at the core of the controversy here. If there has to be a single unique owner of something, then yes, you're going to see fighting over who that gets to be. But why does there have to be?
First of all, it's only DNS. Any TCP/IP stack that is correctly implemented can accept multiple DNS servers. It's part of the redundancy built into the system. The worst case scenario from this whole issue would be that Europe establishes its own version of ICANN, with its own root DNS servers. People will still want to communicate with eachother, so those servers will cross-pollinate entries. Some way to handle collisions will be invented - maybe you just specify an extra level of TLD to determine which root servers you use. Maybe there'll be arbitration. What I'm saying here is that the world will go on. It's only DNS.
So I guess that, aside from political blustering on both sides of the pond, I just don't see enough controversy here to warrant the media circus it's causing.
Perhaps I'm just at the wrong company, but I've never seen this. All workers here are paid based strictly on merit, skillset, and responsibility.
One thing I notice: The "programming" profession has an extremely wide range of applicable skills, from the just-out-of-college I-know-C++ entry-level programmer to the twenty-year veteran with a proven record of solving complex problems and writing solid components. Of course these two are going to have a pay disparity. And any H1B workers that have spent enough time programming in the U.S. to have attained the latter status have also spent enough time to shed their H1B status and become citizens.
Perhaps the reason that H1B's, on average, get paid less, is that, on average they fill more of the entry-level positions.
How many people are going to play with their arm extended in such a way as to allow that full motion? It works for remotes because you click the channel, you put your arm back down. When you have to play a game and hold your arm up, it gets tired, and you rest your arm on something. After that, your movement is significantly limited, and much of what was done in the elbow and lower arm is now done in the wrist.
Try the following: Rest your elbow on something, and point a remote forward. Now, move its position left and right while keeping it pointed at the screen. Your wrist moves opposite to your elbow in order to keep the control pointed the same direction. Any game that requires this kind of individual axis control is going to require wrist movement.
I have never seen a game that does not, at its core, require that a gamer performe some input maneuver or button combination over and over again. Fighting games involve complicated key chords. Racing games involve holding down the "accelerator" and turning. Platformers might have some jump+attack combo. It would take great care on the part of the software manufacturers not to create a game where the best results come from perfecting a semi-complex move and performing it over and over again -- care that most software makers haven't bothered to take in the past.
It was never the feel or shape of the controller that gave me pause. It was the idea that games might require precise motions of the wrist to become good. Obviously, that is entirely based on how the software developers decide to use the new controller, but you know the old saying "If you build it, they will come." I expect some game, somewhere, will develop a strategy where the best moves are performed by doing some repetetive twist-flick of your wrist.
Moving the controller's position isn't even that concerning. You can do that with a rigid wrist and moving the elbow/arm, though I expect somebody who is oblivious to the dangers of RSI will do it with their wrist. The part that concerned me was the "twisting" and "turning" which are inherently wrist motions.
A normal remote control is indeed better than a conventional game controller. But with a normal remote control, you just point it vaguely in the direction of the screen and push buttons. The range of motion required is far more complicated with a console controller.
Not only is the D-pad used for movement, but the Revolution controller can control movement by raising and lowering, but also by twisting, turning, and moving the controller left, right, up, down or forward and backwards
Thanks to 20 years of computer programming and gaming (both PC and many of the consoles that made Nintendo a gaming powerhouse), I get to use a trackball and ergonomic keyboard at work, per doctor's orders.
I try to imagine what I would do with a one-handed controller that required me to twist, turn, and roll my wrist in convoluted ways to play the game, and my wrist starts to hurt just thinking of it.
My first thought after looking at this new controller is that it's going to be an ergonomic nightmare.
I think it's the very last thing that a respectable country would want to do. Or, put another way, a country that punishes people for seditious behavior (or any kind of personal expression) is not a respectable country in my world.
Stories like this make me proud to be an American, and sad at the same time. Proud because the people who founded my country really got it. They believed that individual liberties must remain inviolate, or the government is a tyranny and no longer serves its people. Sad because what the U.S. has that passes for a federal government now pays only lip service at best to the ideas that those founders built.
When I first read this story, my first reaction was relief that such a thing could never happen in my country. After some thought, I'm not so sure.
Parent is insightful and funny... Funny, sure, but Insightful? More like Troll.
Honestly, there is no shortage of reasons to bash Microsoft's business practices. It's practically a national pastime in computing circles. Do we really have to take an argument that applies to 80% of the software companies out there, wrap it in specious hyperbole, and then call it Insightful?
From the moderator guidelines:
Insightful -- An Insightful statement makes you think, puts a new spin on a given story (or aspect of a story). An analogy you hadn't thought of, or a telling counterexample, are examples of Insightful comments.
I'll give credit where credit is due. Parent had a great one-liner. Wonderful use of wit! Zing! I just can't see how this comment "puts a new spin on a story" with a one line comment that basically repeats every other anti-MS sentiment in this topic.
Is Microsoft at fault for sitting on security holes when their marketing and business departments thought it was inconvenient? Probably. I wouldn't be surprised. Is there any evidence that their delay has been for those reasons, and not just because they have a giant inefficient juggernaut of a development team that takes forever to put out anything? No evidence that I've seen. "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by red tape" -- Paraphrase of Occam's Razor.
I think the question I keep asking myself about the whole Responsible Disclosure question is "What would I do in their place?" Everybody seems to be placing themselves in the position of the white-hat that has just found an exploit. What would you do on the other side? If you had just released your masterpiece and it has a security bug, would you prefer to hear the exact details of how to compromise your software from an article on slashdot? I'd be pretty horrified. I can relate to the software company's sentiments. I've been there.
I can also see the argument for full-disclosure, made very well in other comments. I can relate to the white-hat professionals, because I've been there too.
I'm not saying there aren't people out there who drag their feet rather than patch their software. What I'm saying is that they don't all work at Microsoft.
Of course, this being/., I may end up getting modded to -1: Microsoft Sympathizer. I just don't like to hear knee-jerk bias get called "Insightful".
Why bother trying to win over customers, when a $150,000 marketing budget can be so much more effective leasing 1000 CPUs to DDoS the competition for a week...;)
I can't count how many times I've googled for some OSS to do a specific task, and found what I wanted only after installing and uninstalling four programs that were buggy, slow, didn't have the features I wanted, or simply wouldn't build/install.
On the flip side, there has always been an inherent and objective rating system for the quality of non-free software -- At what price will enough people purchase it to make it worth producing?
I think perhaps I did misunderstand. The wording I quoted above seems to imply that without CC, one could distribute the book under "fair use" and get paid for it, which isn't true. One can excerpt parts under fair use, and one can review the book and publish it. These are my rights under fair use, regardless of whether the book is CC or a conventional copyright, and regardless of whether I get paid for the review or not.
Interestingly, this was Dvorak's point in his article -- that CC does nothing with regard to fair use rights, but a casual reading would suggest that CC actually restricts fair use when you're getting paid.
No one can distribute my book under "fair use" copyright law, because it wouldn't be, and certainly commercial distribution is right out.
This line seems to imply that CC somehow limits the fair use that you get under normal copyright law -- a point that Dvorak made in TFA. I thought CC operated within copyright law. Is there a basis under which CC can supersede copyright law, and place more restrictions on fair use than is already available with conventional copyrights?
Slashdot Mirror
As has been pointed out here on /. many times before, any industry whose business model relies on controlling the channels of media distribution is now dying a death from obsolescence, thanks to ubiquitous electronic distribution.
This legal move by the networks, which obviously has no customer benefit, is clearly a sign of this malady. We are now seeing more and more suits like this as companies, desperately trying to cling to a failing business model, turn to the law to prop up their house of cards. And it is their last, best hope. The government is quite likely the only organization more resistant to change than the media industries.
Dear Sony:
You need to stop pulling the trigger on that gun pointed at your foot. You've burned through the entire magazine, and it's time to reload.
... it's been available to everybody that's ever had their hands on a beta version of Vista?
Maybe I'm missing how this is news, but I saw these screenshots months ago.
Now what was the downside again? That a cop with a warrant may be able to snoop where I have been driving? I am not too worried about that.
That an NSA agent without a warrant will be able to compile a file on you in a database somewhere describing where you drove, how long you were there, who you visited, and how many times you've seen seditious Michael Moore films.
If not that, then the computer data-entry error in said database that causes you to get arrested, processed, and sent to Guantanamo without being allowed to plead your case, say goodbye to your family, or even see a lawyer or judge.
In the current Beta of Vista, the drag/drop into a console is disabled, I'm told for security reasons.
... there are days when it's actually a good thing to be among the 6% of males that are color-blind. Today is one such day.
how about using oil especially made to cool electronics instead?
How much you wanna bet that's a heck of a lot more expensive than fryer grease?
I bet it's far less expensive than the cost of replacing the components that get destroyed by using a substandard oil.
Many comparisons will likely be made of NTP and Burst.com, but Burst.com actually has useful technology, has owned the patents for over a decade, and most importantly, actually had highly regarded products that made use of the patents.
That's as may be, but they're still submarining the patents and trying to leech off of a successful consumer product.
When will the USPTO wake up and put a stop to all of this madness?
"And would anybody really want to place control of entire TLDs in the hands of one private company?"
.slashdot TLD. By the same token, I could claim the .msmercenary TLD and it wouldn't bother google in the least. Does anybody take up arms that one private company owns the rights to the novell.com 2LD?
Why not? Under this new system, TLDs would hardly be in short supply. I would argue that nobody but this site would have a claim to the
The only reason there would be any kind of problem with one private company owning an entire TLD is if they were in artificially short supply (such as the current system), which is not the case when you open it up to the nearly infinite permutations of all alphabetic strings.
The difference between Vista and XP is that Vista defaults to IPv6-enabled. In an out-of-box installation of Vista, all IPv4 traffic goes through the tunneling protocol, as the grandparent suggests.
The reason is testing. When you pump out binaries for all of those platforms, do you automatically load the binary onto a box from each platform and run a full battery of tests, finding obscure platform-specific bugs? Or do you just release the source/binary and wait for somebody else who has that platform to stumble across the bug and report it to you?
Suppose Microsoft did it that way. Suppose they released all of their code, compiled for each platform without testing the binary on certain platforms. Given Microsoft's reputation on the platforms they do test, do you really want them not testing it? Didn't think so. A commercial software company has to test each and every platform that they "support". It's not cost-effective to run full batteries of tests, documentation, and product support for a platform that hardly anybody uses, so instead, Microsoft just releases software for the platforms that they think people will use.
From TFA: Any network requires some centralized control in order to function.
This statement is just plain wrong. P2P has shown that. What TFA probably means to say is "Every big network I can think of requires some centralized control"
And I think this assumption is at the core of the controversy here. If there has to be a single unique owner of something, then yes, you're going to see fighting over who that gets to be. But why does there have to be?
First of all, it's only DNS. Any TCP/IP stack that is correctly implemented can accept multiple DNS servers. It's part of the redundancy built into the system. The worst case scenario from this whole issue would be that Europe establishes its own version of ICANN, with its own root DNS servers. People will still want to communicate with eachother, so those servers will cross-pollinate entries. Some way to handle collisions will be invented - maybe you just specify an extra level of TLD to determine which root servers you use. Maybe there'll be arbitration. What I'm saying here is that the world will go on. It's only DNS.
So I guess that, aside from political blustering on both sides of the pond, I just don't see enough controversy here to warrant the media circus it's causing.
Perhaps I'm just at the wrong company, but I've never seen this. All workers here are paid based strictly on merit, skillset, and responsibility.
One thing I notice: The "programming" profession has an extremely wide range of applicable skills, from the just-out-of-college I-know-C++ entry-level programmer to the twenty-year veteran with a proven record of solving complex problems and writing solid components. Of course these two are going to have a pay disparity. And any H1B workers that have spent enough time programming in the U.S. to have attained the latter status have also spent enough time to shed their H1B status and become citizens.
Perhaps the reason that H1B's, on average, get paid less, is that, on average they fill more of the entry-level positions.
How many people are going to play with their arm extended in such a way as to allow that full motion? It works for remotes because you click the channel, you put your arm back down. When you have to play a game and hold your arm up, it gets tired, and you rest your arm on something. After that, your movement is significantly limited, and much of what was done in the elbow and lower arm is now done in the wrist.
Try the following: Rest your elbow on something, and point a remote forward. Now, move its position left and right while keeping it pointed at the screen. Your wrist moves opposite to your elbow in order to keep the control pointed the same direction. Any game that requires this kind of individual axis control is going to require wrist movement.
I have never seen a game that does not, at its core, require that a gamer performe some input maneuver or button combination over and over again. Fighting games involve complicated key chords. Racing games involve holding down the "accelerator" and turning. Platformers might have some jump+attack combo. It would take great care on the part of the software manufacturers not to create a game where the best results come from perfecting a semi-complex move and performing it over and over again -- care that most software makers haven't bothered to take in the past.
I think you underestimate the usage of some gamers (and the requirements of some games), but point taken.
It was never the feel or shape of the controller that gave me pause. It was the idea that games might require precise motions of the wrist to become good. Obviously, that is entirely based on how the software developers decide to use the new controller, but you know the old saying "If you build it, they will come." I expect some game, somewhere, will develop a strategy where the best moves are performed by doing some repetetive twist-flick of your wrist.
Moving the controller's position isn't even that concerning. You can do that with a rigid wrist and moving the elbow/arm, though I expect somebody who is oblivious to the dangers of RSI will do it with their wrist. The part that concerned me was the "twisting" and "turning" which are inherently wrist motions.
A normal remote control is indeed better than a conventional game controller. But with a normal remote control, you just point it vaguely in the direction of the screen and push buttons. The range of motion required is far more complicated with a console controller.
From the GameInformer article:
Not only is the D-pad used for movement, but the Revolution controller can control movement by raising and lowering, but also by twisting, turning, and moving the controller left, right, up, down or forward and backwards
Thanks to 20 years of computer programming and gaming (both PC and many of the consoles that made Nintendo a gaming powerhouse), I get to use a trackball and ergonomic keyboard at work, per doctor's orders.
I try to imagine what I would do with a one-handed controller that required me to twist, turn, and roll my wrist in convoluted ways to play the game, and my wrist starts to hurt just thinking of it.
My first thought after looking at this new controller is that it's going to be an ergonomic nightmare.
And then your mod went away because you posted to the thread...
I think it's the very last thing that a respectable country would want to do. Or, put another way, a country that punishes people for seditious behavior (or any kind of personal expression) is not a respectable country in my world.
Stories like this make me proud to be an American, and sad at the same time. Proud because the people who founded my country really got it. They believed that individual liberties must remain inviolate, or the government is a tyranny and no longer serves its people. Sad because what the U.S. has that passes for a federal government now pays only lip service at best to the ideas that those founders built.
When I first read this story, my first reaction was relief that such a thing could never happen in my country. After some thought, I'm not so sure.
Parent is insightful and funny... Funny, sure, but Insightful? More like Troll.
/., I may end up getting modded to -1: Microsoft Sympathizer. I just don't like to hear knee-jerk bias get called "Insightful".
Honestly, there is no shortage of reasons to bash Microsoft's business practices. It's practically a national pastime in computing circles. Do we really have to take an argument that applies to 80% of the software companies out there, wrap it in specious hyperbole, and then call it Insightful?
From the moderator guidelines:
Insightful -- An Insightful statement makes you think, puts a new spin on a given story (or aspect of a story). An analogy you hadn't thought of, or a telling counterexample, are examples of Insightful comments.
I'll give credit where credit is due. Parent had a great one-liner. Wonderful use of wit! Zing! I just can't see how this comment "puts a new spin on a story" with a one line comment that basically repeats every other anti-MS sentiment in this topic.
Is Microsoft at fault for sitting on security holes when their marketing and business departments thought it was inconvenient? Probably. I wouldn't be surprised. Is there any evidence that their delay has been for those reasons, and not just because they have a giant inefficient juggernaut of a development team that takes forever to put out anything? No evidence that I've seen. "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by red tape" -- Paraphrase of Occam's Razor.
I think the question I keep asking myself about the whole Responsible Disclosure question is "What would I do in their place?" Everybody seems to be placing themselves in the position of the white-hat that has just found an exploit. What would you do on the other side? If you had just released your masterpiece and it has a security bug, would you prefer to hear the exact details of how to compromise your software from an article on slashdot? I'd be pretty horrified. I can relate to the software company's sentiments. I've been there.
I can also see the argument for full-disclosure, made very well in other comments. I can relate to the white-hat professionals, because I've been there too.
I'm not saying there aren't people out there who drag their feet rather than patch their software. What I'm saying is that they don't all work at Microsoft.
Of course, this being
Why bother trying to win over customers, when a $150,000 marketing budget can be so much more effective leasing 1000 CPUs to DDoS the competition for a week... ;)
I can't count how many times I've googled for some OSS to do a specific task, and found what I wanted only after installing and uninstalling four programs that were buggy, slow, didn't have the features I wanted, or simply wouldn't build/install.
On the flip side, there has always been an inherent and objective rating system for the quality of non-free software -- At what price will enough people purchase it to make it worth producing?
I think perhaps I did misunderstand. The wording I quoted above seems to imply that without CC, one could distribute the book under "fair use" and get paid for it, which isn't true. One can excerpt parts under fair use, and one can review the book and publish it. These are my rights under fair use, regardless of whether the book is CC or a conventional copyright, and regardless of whether I get paid for the review or not.
Interestingly, this was Dvorak's point in his article -- that CC does nothing with regard to fair use rights, but a casual reading would suggest that CC actually restricts fair use when you're getting paid.
No one can distribute my book under "fair use" copyright law, because it wouldn't be, and certainly commercial distribution is right out.
This line seems to imply that CC somehow limits the fair use that you get under normal copyright law -- a point that Dvorak made in TFA. I thought CC operated within copyright law. Is there a basis under which CC can supersede copyright law, and place more restrictions on fair use than is already available with conventional copyrights?
Or am I just reading this wrong?