Are there any Open Source projects thinking about DRM? I dont know how it would work but it must be possible.
No, it is impossible. The Church Turing thesis makes it impossible to do software DRM, and even hardware is tough. You can have a Universal Turing Machines, or you can have DRM. Not both.
If you want ideas, check out http://mediagora.com for how to solve this withouth DRM.
I've put detailed proposals for a way to use the net to get musicians and other creative eople paid, and to encourage rather than attack sharing here
I'd love to hear your thoughts on them.
mediAgora defines a fair, workable market model that works with the new realities of digital media, instead of fighting them.
Principles: * Creators should be credited and rewarded for their work. * Works can be incorporated into new creative works. * When they are, all source works should be credited and rewarded. * Customers should pay a known price. * Successful promotion of work should be rewarded too. * Individuals can play multiple roles - Creator, Promoter, Customer * Prices and sales figures should be open * Relationships are based on trust and reputation * Copy protection destroys value
According to the Merc: Pavni Diwanji made a small fortune starting and selling a tech company for $120 million during the boom years. Then she had a child.
Now she's going back to work -- to start a new company. But this time, she's doing it at one of the most depressing times in Silicon Valley technology start-up history.
I have described a marketplace for media at mediagora.com. In particular, I propose that anyone can make an edited derivativce work, as long as the customers for it buy the original at full price.
I don't think you understand what Rendezvous does very well at all. It does not allow remote execution of code; it enables you to advertise and discover services on the network.
This means you don't need to know IP addresses and well known ports, or run port scanners to discover services. If your machine doesn't want to be found by Rendezvous, don't advertise your services with it.
One key thing that makes it smarter than UDDI and the like is that it is service-centric, not device-centric. You don't have to find a machine and try to open special ports to see if it has a webserver or SLP printer or SMTP relay or whatever, instead, you ask for a service that you already know the protocol for, and you find out if any devices that implement it are available.
Did you read mediagora.com? The model described there is careful to provide an economic incentive for someone who creates a sale, however they do it. Anyone who pays for a song can gain a promotion fee by getting someone else to buy it - the more sales they generate, (directly or indirectly), the higher the fee they get per sale. The sharers can choose between giving it away illegally, or getting paid for making sales.
The problem is not copying, the problem is paying the creators for their work.
Historically, some companies have tried to solve this problem using various techniques (publishing, advances, royalty payments, advertising-supported broadcasting, pledge drives). All of these are predicated on economies of scale for large runs, and high costs of entry for competitors.
When a new technology comes along that changes these economics, it is time to look for a new model to solve the underlying problem, not construct a technical and legislative framework to restore the old barriers.
The problem is not copying, the problem is paying the creators for their work.
Historically, some companies have tried to solve this problem using various techniques (publishing, advances, royalty payments, advertising-supported broadcasting, pledge drives). All of these are predicated on economies of scale for large runs, and high costs of entry for competitors.
When a new technology comes along that changes these economics, it is time to look fora new model to solve the underlying problem, not construct a technical and legislative framework to restore the old barriers.
Same price point, same features, but fits in your pocket.
Who would pay $1000 for a VCR-sized box when a pocket-sized one costs $300/400/500?
Mine's plugged into the hifi through the Aux input, and plugged inot the car vaiaan FM transmitter. Otherwise, its in my pocket wiht headphones attached.
My original post was somewhat tongue in cheek, but the method outlined there does work. Find something interesting to say, and tell people who find it interesting about it so they link to it. The secret is to maintain a weblog, and have friends with weblogs that are highly linked-to as well. How do you make such friends? By reading their work and commenting on it intelligently, and by writing things that they find interesting enough to point to as well.
As for the 'living through your kid' bit, I made that page because Andrew asked me to - he's a bit bored of it now, but I'm sure he'll come back to it. My own weblog ranks fairly well too - try searching for 'mame roms'...
My 7-year-old son Andrew has top placement for his name and first and third placement for 'funniest stories', not to mention a Googlewhack for Google horklump
How did he do that? Here's the explanation - far shorter and clearer than that article.
I got fed up with hearing industry types whine about not wanting to come up with a new business model, so I did it for them - mediAgora
mediAgora defines rules for a market in digital media so Creators get credited and paid for their work, and Customers choose to pay a fair price.
Why is this needed? Because the media marketplace is riven by conflict between companies that profit from scarcity of physical goods and access, and those who assume that because works are easy to copy they need not be paid for. In either case, the creators lose out.
mediAgora is GPL-like, as a work sold through it can be incorporated in other works under the same terms - if you use my music as a background to your video, your customers should pay me the price I set for that music, as well as paying you your price for the video. This avoids the endless rights haggling that hinders so many productions.
mediAgora rewards you when you promote a work in a way that leads to a sale. Share new music or movies with your friends, and when they buy their copies, you get a cut. Creators don't see their royalties disappear in unaudited promotion fees - payment is strictly by results.
We all create - free speech and a free market can get us paid.
Howard Greenstein thinks Janis's idea will only work with DRM, and puts up an outline of requirements for an Open Source DRM implementation.
The trouble with DRM is that it is trying to solve the wrong problem. The problem is not people copying digital works, it is creators not being paid. We don't need 'Digital Rights Management', we need 'Digital Payment Encouragement'. If I liked three letter acronyms, I'd call it DPE, but I prefer mangled classical phrases with internal capitalisation, so I call it 'mediAgora'.
Let's take this point by point.
1. Enables purchasing, anonymously.
OK so far.
2. Contains or works with business rules that allow the content owner to designate a package of rights, including "fair use" rights. How would this be done? Allow users to certify that the current play/viewing/use is a 'fair use' one. (Oh, you're saying, people will just abuse this. Fine. They're already doing it. Come up with a better idea. That's the intent of this writing...)
Now this is silly. How does this work? Every time you try to copy it you get an EULA-style popup accusing you of being a thief and asking you to assert that you aren't? What purpose does this serve? Is it just to annoy me and encourage me to hack the message out?
3. Enables resale or transfer of rights 4. Enables copying to some devices for one fee, copying to additional devices for another, etc.
These don't take any enabling - they are possible by default. It is attempting to disable them that makes DRM systems annoying, offensive and value destroying
5. Makes sure money flows back to the correct parties, lowers friction.
This should be number 1, not number 5. I agree absolutely, but I think that you need to think through who the correct parties are. By rewarding those who copy the work in a way that leads to a sale, you align their incentives with the Creators of the work. Being able to be paid for Promoting like this does imply giving up anonymity to the extent that payments can be tracked.
6. Is open so people who wish know how the system works, can correct and improve it. It can work on whatever platforms can attract dev resources.
Good idea.
7. Is STABLE - the protocols and formats can't change all the time because keys are written into hardware.
Where did that come from? The protocols needn't change but I expect formats to continue to evolve; as long as they have a way of attaching a short metadata reference to an ID, I think mediAgora can work with any format. By being based on consent and trust rather than coercion and restriction, the technical prerequisites are far more relaxed, and unlike a 'lock it up' DRM model, you don't need to be able to repudiate the whole thing and abandon the content when it is (inevitably) compromised.
When you get spam, you forward it to a special email address, which aggregates it and keeps your address. When there are enough copies to justify a case, the lawyers track down the spammer and file a class action, using whichever spam laws apply. They disperse the damages back via PayPal, keeping a percentage themselves.
In the 1982 House Hearing on Home Recording of Copyrighted Works Jack Valenti said: I know of no technological device at this time that would bar taping in the home and if it did exist, it would only be a matter of days before the Japanese manufacturers would have an override piece of equipment on their machine and you would start from ground zero again.
Young children are fantastically good at learning languages by example, but often not good at predicate logic or deductive reasoning, which takes a lot of training. (As an aside, the book Reading Reflex applies this insight to teaching reading - instead of teaching deductive rules parrot fashion, it groups different representations of the same sound and gets the children to work through them until they derive an unconscious model that way).
The best 'programming' exercise with small children is the 'I am a robot' game. You play their robot slave, and do what you are told, but very literally, and in small stages, with 'error messages' returned in a robot voice. Just getting you to walk from the sofa to the bedroom can take ages and they love it. They naturally want to be the simple-minded robot too (just make sure they don't get too attached to it, or they may end up working in telephone support).
I've seen a huge amount of 'educational' software - I used to work in the CD-ROM business, and I buy up remaindered CD's from Marshalls for my 2 boys and watch how they use them. Most of them are dross, with the same few ideas (Pelmanism, missing words etc.) recycled with a different character or brand attached. Some have genuine insight, and I can see them learning to reason using them. Here are a selection:
Logical Journey of the Zoombinis is a wonderful introduction to deductive logic through a compelling game. It was designed with this in mind and my boys have been playing this since they were 3, and are still enjoying it now at 5 and 7 (as do I).
The Pajama Sam series of adventures from Humongous are good at teaching the global/local focus, but one that is great fun and teaches valuable debugging skills is Pajama Sam's SockWorks which features a long series of machines that have socks in them that you have to get into the right coloured baskets. As you can also build your own puzzles, the idea of solvable and unsolvable problems naturally comes up.
Zap! is another great game that teaches by stealth. You have to help 3 wisecracking cartoon charcters to fix their electrical, optical and audio-visual gadgets to get their show on the road. It manages to include a compelte circuit simulator, an optical workbench simulator and sound environment simulator, and still be lots of fun for Kindergarten children.
To teach programming concepts without writing textual code, Cocoa is perfect (if you have a Mac). It is a tool that enables you to create 2d video games by drawing the characters and defining what happens when they encounter each other by example. Andrew has made about 65 games with this, some original, some homages to TV programs or his brother's films.
Finally, if you want a comprehensible textual language, use Runtime Revolution, whose language Transcript is based on the old Apple HyperCard language, and as such has completely human-readable programs. This is what I plan to get Andrew into next. (republished from my blog, May 12th 2002)
Stephen Fry would be the perfect Dr Who. Think about it; he's tall, erudite and if you ever heard his Professer Trefusis on Radio 4 you'd know what I mean.
7 cents per hundred wouldbe fine if they could offer a sensible service like the old my.mp3.com, or a request show, but they can't.
Here are the terms of the licence, which have lots of vague clauses about DRM type stuff that look as if they were deliberately written to be only settleable in court at great cost: (v) the transmitting entity cooperates to prevent, to the extent feasible without imposing substantial costs or burdens, a transmission recipient or any other person or entity from automatically scanning the transmitting entity's transmissions alone or together with transmissions by other transmitting entities in order to select a particular sound recording to be transmitted to the transmission recipient, except that the requirement of this clause shall not apply to a satellite digital audio service that is in operation, or that is licensed by the Federal Communications Commission, on or before July 31, 1998; Is this an Anti-TiVo clause?
(vi) the transmitting entity takes no affirmative steps to cause or induce the making of a phonorecord by the transmission recipient, and if the technology used by the transmitting entity enables the transmitting entity to limit the making by the transmission recipient of phonorecords of the transmission directly in a digital format, the transmitting entity sets such technology to limit such making of phonorecords to the extent permitted by such technology;
viii) the transmitting entity accommodates and does not interfere with the transmission of technical measures that are widely used by sound recording copyright owners to identify or protect copyrighted works, and that are technically feasible of being transmitted by the transmitting entity without imposing substantial costs on the transmitting entity or resulting in perceptible aural or visual degradation of the digital signal, except that the requirement of this clause shall not apply to a satellite digital audio service that is in operation, or that is licensed under the authority of the Federal Communications Commission, on or before July 31, 1998, to the extent that such service has designed, developed, or made commitments to procure equipment or technology that is not compatible with such technical measures before such technical measures are widely adopted by sound recording copyright owners; The logic of record companies of paying thousands to get airplay on the radio, but trying extract thousands for wireplay on the net escapes me still. (cross-posted from my weblog)
As I said when I submitted this story in vain this morning at 6am, the phrases 'Mickey Mouse Copy Protection' and 'Mickey Mouse Computer' need to enter the language in this context - as in 'Do you want a Mickey Mouse computer that stops you making music?'
We were writing about general principles, and illustrating them with C. RAII has the same issues regarding allocation as we discuss in the article, moved up one layer of abstraction - you still need to make sure that all the objects you create (explicitly or implictly) are deleted in the error case.
Fortunately, you can tell a programmer's personality type by the code they write - it is all explained in this paper by Kevin Marks & Maf Vosburgh
There are various types of programmers around. We've certainly worked with a wide selection. Over the years, we've come to realize that programmers can be divided into various "personality types". You don't stay the same personality-type your whole life though -- as you develop and learn, your approach to programming changes and that change is visible in your code. We're going to look at various functions and how programmers with different personalities would write them.
MacHack attendees have normally been around the block a few times. That means they have learnt various things, like when you're going around the block, it helps to watch where you're going, and be driving a tank. We know that a function has important responsibilities. It needs to check every error code, keep track of every byte it allocates, and that function needs to know how to cope with anything that happens, cleaning up perfectly after itself and returning an error code which explains what went wrong. But in order to write code like this you have to have made mistakes and learned from them. We know we have...
Slashdot Mirror
Are there any Open Source projects thinking about DRM? I dont know how it would work but it must be possible.
No, it is impossible. The Church Turing thesis makes it impossible to do software DRM, and even hardware is tough. You can have a Universal Turing Machines, or you can have DRM. Not both.
If you want ideas, check out http://mediagora.com for how to solve this withouth DRM.
I've put detailed proposals for a way to use the net to get musicians and other creative eople paid, and to encourage rather than attack sharing here
I'd love to hear your thoughts on them.
mediAgora defines a fair, workable market model that works with the new realities of digital media, instead of fighting them.
Principles:
* Creators should be credited and rewarded for their work.
* Works can be incorporated into new creative works.
* When they are, all source works should be credited and rewarded.
* Customers should pay a known price.
* Successful promotion of work should be rewarded too.
* Individuals can play multiple roles - Creator, Promoter, Customer
* Prices and sales figures should be open
* Relationships are based on trust and reputation
* Copy protection destroys value
According to the Merc:
Pavni Diwanji made a small fortune starting and selling a tech company for $120 million during the boom years. Then she had a child.
Now she's going back to work -- to start a new company. But this time, she's doing it at one of the most depressing times in Silicon Valley technology start-up history.
This chap managed to play back Baird's 1927 recordings (which is more than Baird ever did)
(Baird did some of his initial experiments in the Park in my hometown in England - there was a plaque on the building)
And nutcase Britons are still at it
Here's a gadget to convert modern TV to 30-line Baird
I have described a marketplace for media at mediagora.com. In particular, I propose that anyone can make an edited derivativce work, as long as the customers for it buy the original at full price.
more detaisl here
I don't think you understand what Rendezvous does very well at all. It does not allow remote execution of code; it enables you to advertise and discover services on the network.
This means you don't need to know IP addresses and well known ports, or run port scanners to discover services. If your machine doesn't want to be found by Rendezvous, don't advertise your services with it.
One key thing that makes it smarter than UDDI and the like is that it is service-centric, not device-centric. You don't have to find a machine and try to open special ports to see if it has a webserver or SLP printer or SMTP relay or whatever, instead, you ask for a service that you already know the protocol for, and you find out if any devices that implement it are available.
Did you read mediagora.com? The model described there is careful to provide an economic incentive for someone who creates a sale, however they do it. Anyone who pays for a song can gain a promotion fee by getting someone else to buy it - the more sales they generate, (directly or indirectly), the higher the fee they get per sale.
The sharers can choose between giving it away illegally, or getting paid for making sales.
The problem is not copying, the problem is paying the creators for their work.
Historically, some companies have tried to solve this problem using various techniques (publishing, advances, royalty payments, advertising-supported broadcasting, pledge drives). All of these are predicated on economies of scale for large runs, and high costs of entry for competitors.
When a new technology comes along that changes these economics, it is time to look for a new model to solve the underlying problem, not construct a technical and legislative framework to restore the old barriers.
You start from the wrong premise.
The problem is not copying, the problem is paying the creators for their work.
Historically, some companies have tried to solve this problem using various techniques (publishing, advances, royalty payments, advertising-supported broadcasting, pledge drives). All of these are predicated on economies of scale for large runs, and high costs of entry for competitors.
When a new technology comes along that changes these economics, it is time to look fora new model to solve the underlying problem, not construct a technical and legislative framework to restore the old barriers.
iPod.
Same price point, same features, but fits in your pocket.
Who would pay $1000 for a VCR-sized box when a pocket-sized one costs $300/400/500?
Mine's plugged into the hifi through the Aux input, and plugged inot the car vaiaan FM transmitter. Otherwise, its in my pocket wiht headphones attached.
My original post was somewhat tongue in cheek, but the method outlined there does work. Find something interesting to say, and tell people who find it interesting about it so they link to it. The secret is to maintain a weblog, and have friends with weblogs that are highly linked-to as well. How do you make such friends? By reading their work and commenting on it intelligently, and by writing things that they find interesting enough to point to as well.
As for the 'living through your kid' bit, I made that page because Andrew asked me to - he's a bit bored of it now, but I'm sure he'll come back to it. My own weblog ranks fairly well too - try searching for 'mame roms'...
My 7-year-old son Andrew has top placement for his name and first and third placement for 'funniest stories', not to mention a Googlewhack for Google horklump
How did he do that? Here's the explanation - far shorter and clearer than that article.
I got fed up with hearing industry types whine about not wanting to come up with a new business model, so I did it for them - mediAgora
mediAgora defines rules for a market in digital media so Creators get credited and paid for their work, and Customers choose to pay a fair price.
Why is this needed? Because the media marketplace is riven by conflict between companies that profit from scarcity of physical goods and access, and those who assume that because works are easy to copy they need not be paid for. In either case, the creators lose out.
mediAgora is GPL-like, as a work sold through it can be incorporated in other works under the same terms - if you use my music as a background to your video, your customers should pay me the price I set for that music, as well as paying you your price for the video. This avoids the endless rights haggling that hinders so many productions.
mediAgora rewards you when you promote a work in a way that leads to a sale. Share new music or movies with your friends, and when they buy their copies, you get a cut. Creators don't see their royalties disappear in unaudited promotion fees - payment is strictly by results.
We all create - free speech and a free market can get us paid.
We were just discussing this on the mediAgora weblog:
Howard Greenstein thinks Janis's idea will only work with DRM, and puts up an outline of requirements for an Open Source DRM implementation.
The trouble with DRM is that it is trying to solve the wrong problem. The problem is not people copying digital works, it is creators not being paid.
We don't need 'Digital Rights Management', we need 'Digital Payment Encouragement'. If I liked three letter acronyms, I'd call it DPE, but I prefer mangled classical phrases with internal capitalisation, so I call it 'mediAgora'.
Let's take this point by point.
1. Enables purchasing, anonymously.
OK so far.
2. Contains or works with business rules that allow the content owner to designate a package of rights, including "fair use" rights. How would this be done? Allow users to certify that the current play/viewing/use is a 'fair use' one. (Oh, you're saying, people will just abuse this. Fine. They're already doing it. Come up with a better idea. That's the intent of this writing...)
Now this is silly. How does this work? Every time you try to copy it you get an EULA-style popup accusing you of being a thief and asking you to assert that you aren't? What purpose does this serve? Is it just to annoy me and encourage me to hack the message out?
3. Enables resale or transfer of rights
4. Enables copying to some devices for one fee, copying to additional devices for another, etc.
These don't take any enabling - they are possible by default. It is attempting to disable them that makes DRM systems annoying, offensive and value destroying
5. Makes sure money flows back to the correct parties, lowers friction.
This should be number 1, not number 5. I agree absolutely, but I think that you need to think through who the correct parties are. By rewarding those who copy the work in a way that leads to a sale, you align their incentives with the Creators of the work. Being able to be paid for Promoting like this does imply giving up anonymity to the extent that payments can be tracked.
6. Is open so people who wish know how the system works, can correct and improve it. It can work on whatever platforms can attract dev resources.
Good idea.
7. Is STABLE - the protocols and formats can't change all the time because keys are written into hardware.
Where did that come from? The protocols needn't change but I expect formats to continue to evolve; as long as they have a way of attaching a short metadata reference to an ID, I think mediAgora can work with any format. By being based on consent and trust rather than coercion and restriction, the technical prerequisites are far more relaxed, and unlike a 'lock it up' DRM model, you don't need to be able to repudiate the whole thing and abandon the content when it is (inevitably) compromised.
Not much uptake on my anti-spam plan, so here's another:
Combine Vipul's Razor with lawsuits against spammers
When you get spam, you forward it to a special email address, which aggregates it and keeps your address. When there are enough copies to justify a case, the lawyers track down the spammer and file a class action, using whichever spam laws apply. They disperse the damages back via PayPal, keeping a percentage themselves.
republished from my weblog
In the 1982 House Hearing on Home Recording of Copyrighted Works Jack Valenti said:
I know of no technological device at this time that would bar taping in the home and if it did exist, it would only be a matter of days before the Japanese manufacturers would have an override piece of equipment on their machine and you would start from ground zero again.
So why is he trying to force such a thing now?
I've spent the last year thinking about this, and I have come up wiht one that will work. It is calledmediAgora
Young children are fantastically good at learning languages by example, but often not good at predicate logic or deductive reasoning, which takes a lot of training. (As an aside, the book Reading Reflex applies this insight to teaching reading - instead of teaching deductive rules parrot fashion, it groups different representations of the same sound and gets the children to work through them until they derive an unconscious model that way).
The best 'programming' exercise with small children is the 'I am a robot' game. You play their robot slave, and do what you are told, but very literally, and in small stages, with 'error messages' returned in a robot voice. Just getting you to walk from the sofa to the bedroom can take ages and they love it. They naturally want to be the simple-minded robot too (just make sure they don't get too attached to it, or they may end up working in telephone support).
I've seen a huge amount of 'educational' software - I used to work in the CD-ROM business, and I buy up remaindered CD's from Marshalls for my 2 boys and watch how they use them. Most of them are dross, with the same few ideas (Pelmanism, missing words etc.) recycled with a different character or brand attached. Some have genuine insight, and I can see them learning to reason using them. Here are a selection:
Logical Journey of the Zoombinis is a wonderful introduction to deductive logic through a compelling game. It was designed with this in mind and my boys have been playing this since they were 3, and are still enjoying it now at 5 and 7 (as do I).
The Pajama Sam series of adventures from Humongous are good at teaching the global/local focus, but one that is great fun and teaches valuable debugging skills is Pajama Sam's SockWorks which features a long series of machines that have socks in them that you have to get into the right coloured baskets. As you can also build your own puzzles, the idea of solvable and unsolvable problems naturally comes up.
Zap! is another great game that teaches by stealth. You have to help 3 wisecracking cartoon charcters to fix their electrical, optical and audio-visual gadgets to get their show on the road. It manages to include a compelte circuit simulator, an optical workbench simulator and sound environment simulator, and still be lots of fun for Kindergarten children.
To teach programming concepts without writing textual code, Cocoa is perfect (if you have a Mac). It is a tool that enables you to create 2d video games by drawing the characters and defining what happens when they encounter each other by example. Andrew has made about 65 games with this, some original, some homages to TV programs or his brother's films.
Finally, if you want a comprehensible textual language, use Runtime Revolution, whose language Transcript is based on the old Apple HyperCard language, and as such has completely human-readable programs. This is what I plan to get Andrew into next.
(republished from my blog, May 12th 2002)
Stephen Fry would be the perfect Dr Who. Think about it; he's tall, erudite and if you ever heard his Professer Trefusis on Radio 4 you'd know what I mean.
And I'd suggest Anna Friel as his assistant
7 cents per hundred wouldbe fine if they could offer a sensible service like the old my.mp3.com, or a request show, but they can't.
Here are the terms of the licence, which have lots of vague clauses about DRM type stuff that look as if they were deliberately written to be only settleable in court at great cost:
(v) the transmitting entity cooperates to prevent, to the extent feasible without imposing substantial costs or burdens, a transmission recipient or any other person or entity from automatically scanning the transmitting entity's transmissions alone or together with transmissions by other transmitting entities in order to select a particular sound recording to be transmitted to the transmission recipient, except that the requirement of this clause shall not apply to a satellite digital audio service that is in operation, or that is licensed by the Federal Communications Commission, on or before July 31, 1998;
Is this an Anti-TiVo clause?
(vi) the transmitting entity takes no affirmative steps to cause or induce the making of a phonorecord by the transmission recipient, and if the technology used by the transmitting entity enables the transmitting entity to limit the making by the transmission recipient of phonorecords of the transmission directly in a digital format, the transmitting entity sets such technology to limit such making of phonorecords to the extent permitted by such technology;
viii) the transmitting entity accommodates and does not interfere with the transmission of technical measures that are widely used by sound recording copyright owners to identify or protect copyrighted works, and that are technically feasible of being transmitted by the transmitting entity without imposing substantial costs on the transmitting entity or resulting in perceptible aural or visual degradation of the digital signal, except that the requirement of this clause shall not apply to a satellite digital audio service that is in operation, or that is licensed under the authority of the Federal Communications Commission, on or before July 31, 1998, to the extent that such service has designed, developed, or made commitments to procure equipment or technology that is not compatible with such technical measures before such technical measures are widely adopted by sound recording copyright owners;
The logic of record companies of paying thousands to get airplay on the radio, but trying extract thousands for wireplay on the net escapes me still.
(cross-posted from my weblog)
As I said when I submitted this story in vain this morning at 6am, the phrases 'Mickey Mouse Copy Protection' and 'Mickey Mouse Computer' need to enter the language in this context - as in 'Do you want a Mickey Mouse computer that stops you making music?'
"Television? the word is half Latin and half Greek. No good will come of it" - CP Scott, Editor of the Manchester Guardian
We were writing about general principles, and illustrating them with C. RAII has the same issues regarding allocation as we discuss in the article, moved up one layer of abstraction - you still need to make sure that all the objects you create (explicitly or implictly) are deleted in the error case.
Fortunately, you can tell a programmer's personality type by the code they write - it is all explained in this paper by Kevin Marks & Maf Vosburgh
There are various types of programmers around. We've certainly worked with a wide selection. Over the years, we've come to realize that programmers can be divided into various "personality types". You don't stay the same personality-type your whole life though -- as you develop and learn, your approach to programming changes and that change is visible in your code. We're going to look at various functions and how programmers with different personalities would write them.
MacHack attendees have normally been around the block a few times. That means they have learnt various things, like when you're going around the block, it helps to watch where you're going, and be driving a tank. We know that a function has important responsibilities. It needs to check every error code, keep track of every byte it allocates, and that function needs to know how to cope with anything that happens, cleaning up perfectly after itself and returning an error code which explains what went wrong. But in order to write code like this you have to have made mistakes and learned from them. We know we have...
That ahs the exact opposite effect for me. How odd.