iirc the deal between novell and MS was only to not sue each others customers over patent infringements in each others software (e.g. they can still sue each other).
I don't see why they would need to disclose the patents involved to make such a deal.
the thing is that MS must know it would be virtually impossible for it to win a patent fight against some of the heavyweights in the linux buisness. IBM in particular has lots of patents of thier own and i'm sure they could find a few that MS was somehow violating.
if they reveal publically what if anything the infringements are then unless they are really earth shattering things they will just be worked arround or prior art found weakening microsofts position further.
so for the moment it is most sensible for MS to just spread very general fud without giving anyone any real information.
sure but sonames are supposed to be versioned such that you can have both the old and new versions of the library installed at once if there is a change that breaks backwards compatibility. Sure library vendors fuck up sometimes but with major libraries it is pretty damn rare.
what about small buisness servers? that is servers for buisnesses that are too small to have any proper IT staff but still want somewhere central to keep thier documents. For a very small place you can use a client version of windows but duplication of user accounts (for things to work smoothly you really need the user to have an account with the same username and password on both the machine sharing and the machine they are using) and the 10 client limit (which isn't very high, especially if some people have more than one PC).
All that understood, for the other two platforms, you've got clear pathways to app development, even if certain features/are/ inaccessible without signing. right, and all that requires infrastructure to support. You need a MMU, you need a certificate and capabilities management system. you need secure inter-process communication systems and so on.
from a development perspective it is far far easier to say no third party apps than to put in place the stuff needed to protect the rest of the system from them.
one option is to use vm's, that way you can isolate troublesome apps in thier own vms running whatever old OS they are happiest on without worrying about hardware compatibility or other stuff on the system.
my understanding is that the iPhone has no proper security infrastrucuture (I suspect because it was rushed out or something). The result is like with the PSP if you can run your own code on it you can do anything to it.
sure you can run your own basic apps on your nokia symbian phone but as soon as you want more than very basic capabilities you have to get your applications signed.
I don't know what things are like in the windows mobile world but I bet there is at least some protection against user supplied apps reprogramming the radio module to unlock it.
iirc MS basically said that while lindows had won in the US they were going to keep hounding them with lawsuits in every country they did buisness in until they found somewhere where they would win.
I can't see the more legally paraniod distros accepting a change in license without the permission of the original authors of the code.
pulling legally dubious licensing crap (e.g. the xfree86 non GPL compatible license which is a problem because nearly every X app links against X libriaries and the shift of large parts of cdrtools to the GPL incompatible CDDL while the rest was still under the GPL) is a damn good way to get your project forked and lose your influence.
who knows what if any strings the money from google comes with? even if it doesn't come with too many official strings it may come with implied threats (e.g. don't make thunderbird too good or our donations will dry up).
true, however a blur is not merely doing that, a blur is at it's heart convoloution with an inpulse response. If you know (or can guess) the blur function and where it was applied then you can come up with an inverse.
on the other hand a randomly applied blur tool or a block averaging tool is going to be much much harder.
the thing is cops have a lot of power to fabricate or destory evidence. How is the court supposed to verify that the gun the cops claim was in the victims house and the bullet they claim was recovered from the crime scene really came from those places?
Interpol geeks probably ran some tests to determine approximately how much twirl was applied to the original image and then created a 24bit image slightly larger than the twirled area assigning a unique 24 bit value to each pixel and then applied the same amount of twirl. unforuntately that probablly won't work because there is almost certainly interpolation going on.
so you need to run lots of test images to try and calculate how much influence each pixel in the untwirled image has on each pixel in the twirled image.
but if you have lots of computer power at your disposal and the tool in question is scriptable (or you can bully a scriptable version out of the app vendor) then this shouldn't be too hard.
the way I would approach this is to get hold of all major photo editing packages and then do a twirl in a known location on test images. working from those twirled test images it shouldn't be too hard to work out what is being moved to where. If the packages are scriptable this is a lot easier. If not then its a lot of grunt work.
once you can reverse a twirl in a known location it then just becomes a matter of moving your twirl reversal tool arround until you get a sane looking image.
Microsoft would love to do this. The OEM deal is in the consumers and manufacturers best interest and not all that great for Microsoft. Except for perhaps reinforcing the dominance of Windows which is unlikely to be dimenshed any time soon. Microsoft would experience 2x or 3x their current revenue should this happen. I don't buy it, MS almost certainly bases the price of OEM windows (retail prices are deliberately high both because they are a low volume product and I suspect to punish those who dare to not buy windows with thier PC) on what the market will bear.
MS could easilly unbundle support from retail copies of windows if they had to.
Mind you, any bundleware vendors whose products are already cross-platform or fairly close may be interested though- and that would include anyone developing software using a licensed engine that happens to run under (say) Linux as well. have you ever looked at the pricing plans from say Epic? you pay a lot extra for each additional platform you want.
and then there is the problem of porting any customisations.
The ideal situation is where every PC vendor must sell the operating system as a paid option for the PC. you have to also make them sell the OS seperately at the same price they offer it at with the PC. Otherwise they will just price the OS option at a token ammount (traditionally £1 here in the uk) and things will continue as before.
Also, check out the "downgrade rights" - everyone's doing it nowadays. make sure you get vista buisness or ultimate OEM, full retail and retail upgrade don't include downgrade rights so if you don't get buisness or ultimate from the start your only legitimate downgrade options are to either buy an upgrade/downgrade license though a volume license agreement or buy XP retail.
also make sure you have at least one copy of XP whitebox OEM, retail or legit VLK media and key arround so you have something to use for the downgrade (if you use retail or whitebox OEM with an already used key you will have to phone activate your downgrade).
which would IMO be a good thing, it would mean that people could buy a linux machine knowing that if they needed to they could get fully legit windows later at a reasonable price.
The first release intel macs were released early last year and the development/test stations (which were basically ordinary PCs albiet with a apple programmed TPM chip) were out some time before that.
Even before that i386 darwin was publically availible and it was widely rumoured that apple had the full OS-X running on intel internally.
as you say it is purely a buisness descision. From a technicaly point of view they could release OS-X without the hardware lock any time they please it is just a matter of whether it is worth it to them.
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cats have problems of thier own though. The biggest being that some people have allergies to them and they can be a trip hazard.
iirc the deal between novell and MS was only to not sue each others customers over patent infringements in each others software (e.g. they can still sue each other).
I don't see why they would need to disclose the patents involved to make such a deal.
the thing is that MS must know it would be virtually impossible for it to win a patent fight against some of the heavyweights in the linux buisness. IBM in particular has lots of patents of thier own and i'm sure they could find a few that MS was somehow violating.
if they reveal publically what if anything the infringements are then unless they are really earth shattering things they will just be worked arround or prior art found weakening microsofts position further.
so for the moment it is most sensible for MS to just spread very general fud without giving anyone any real information.
sure but sonames are supposed to be versioned such that you can have both the old and new versions of the library installed at once if there is a change that breaks backwards compatibility. Sure library vendors fuck up sometimes but with major libraries it is pretty damn rare.
what about small buisness servers? that is servers for buisnesses that are too small to have any proper IT staff but still want somewhere central to keep thier documents. For a very small place you can use a client version of windows but duplication of user accounts (for things to work smoothly you really need the user to have an account with the same username and password on both the machine sharing and the machine they are using) and the 10 client limit (which isn't very high, especially if some people have more than one PC).
generally the trick to getting binary compatibility with linux is to build on the oldest distro you want to support.
the problem is that the computational power to do that does not exist and will probablly never exist.
All that understood, for the other two platforms, you've got clear pathways to app development, even if certain features /are/ inaccessible without signing.
right, and all that requires infrastructure to support. You need a MMU, you need a certificate and capabilities management system. you need secure inter-process communication systems and so on.
from a development perspective it is far far easier to say no third party apps than to put in place the stuff needed to protect the rest of the system from them.
any major version upgrade carries some risk.
one option is to use vm's, that way you can isolate troublesome apps in thier own vms running whatever old OS they are happiest on without worrying about hardware compatibility or other stuff on the system.
my understanding is that the iPhone has no proper security infrastrucuture (I suspect because it was rushed out or something). The result is like with the PSP if you can run your own code on it you can do anything to it.
sure you can run your own basic apps on your nokia symbian phone but as soon as you want more than very basic capabilities you have to get your applications signed.
I don't know what things are like in the windows mobile world but I bet there is at least some protection against user supplied apps reprogramming the radio module to unlock it.
iirc MS basically said that while lindows had won in the US they were going to keep hounding them with lawsuits in every country they did buisness in until they found somewhere where they would win.
I can't see the more legally paraniod distros accepting a change in license without the permission of the original authors of the code.
pulling legally dubious licensing crap (e.g. the xfree86 non GPL compatible license which is a problem because nearly every X app links against X libriaries and the shift of large parts of cdrtools to the GPL incompatible CDDL while the rest was still under the GPL) is a damn good way to get your project forked and lose your influence.
IINAD but I belive what is really in demand is O- because it is what they give patients who need blood ASAP and who are of unknown blood group.
IIRC O+ can be given to anyone with a positive blood group so if A+ or B+ runs out they can use O+ but if O+ runs out they can't use A+ or B+.
who knows what if any strings the money from google comes with? even if it doesn't come with too many official strings it may come with implied threats (e.g. don't make thunderbird too good or our donations will dry up).
true, however a blur is not merely doing that, a blur is at it's heart convoloution with an inpulse response. If you know (or can guess) the blur function and where it was applied then you can come up with an inverse.
on the other hand a randomly applied blur tool or a block averaging tool is going to be much much harder.
the thing is cops have a lot of power to fabricate or destory evidence. How is the court supposed to verify that the gun the cops claim was in the victims house and the bullet they claim was recovered from the crime scene really came from those places?
Interpol geeks probably ran some tests to determine approximately how much twirl was applied to the original image and then created a 24bit image slightly larger than the twirled area assigning a unique 24 bit value to each pixel and then applied the same amount of twirl.
unforuntately that probablly won't work because there is almost certainly interpolation going on.
so you need to run lots of test images to try and calculate how much influence each pixel in the untwirled image has on each pixel in the twirled image.
but if you have lots of computer power at your disposal and the tool in question is scriptable (or you can bully a scriptable version out of the app vendor) then this shouldn't be too hard.
almost certainly
the way I would approach this is to get hold of all major photo editing packages and then do a twirl in a known location on test images. working from those twirled test images it shouldn't be too hard to work out what is being moved to where. If the packages are scriptable this is a lot easier. If not then its a lot of grunt work.
once you can reverse a twirl in a known location it then just becomes a matter of moving your twirl reversal tool arround until you get a sane looking image.
Microsoft would love to do this. The OEM deal is in the consumers and manufacturers best interest and not all that great for Microsoft. Except for perhaps reinforcing the dominance of Windows which is unlikely to be dimenshed any time soon. Microsoft would experience 2x or 3x their current revenue should this happen.
I don't buy it, MS almost certainly bases the price of OEM windows (retail prices are deliberately high both because they are a low volume product and I suspect to punish those who dare to not buy windows with thier PC) on what the market will bear.
MS could easilly unbundle support from retail copies of windows if they had to.
my understanding is though that MS has restricted use of PAE to go beyond 4GB to the server versions of windows only
Mind you, any bundleware vendors whose products are already cross-platform or fairly close may be interested though- and that would include anyone developing software using a licensed engine that happens to run under (say) Linux as well.
have you ever looked at the pricing plans from say Epic? you pay a lot extra for each additional platform you want.
and then there is the problem of porting any customisations.
The ideal situation is where every PC vendor must sell the operating system as a paid option for the PC.
you have to also make them sell the OS seperately at the same price they offer it at with the PC. Otherwise they will just price the OS option at a token ammount (traditionally £1 here in the uk) and things will continue as before.
Also, check out the "downgrade rights" - everyone's doing it nowadays.
make sure you get vista buisness or ultimate OEM, full retail and retail upgrade don't include downgrade rights so if you don't get buisness or ultimate from the start your only legitimate downgrade options are to either buy an upgrade/downgrade license though a volume license agreement or buy XP retail.
also make sure you have at least one copy of XP whitebox OEM, retail or legit VLK media and key arround so you have something to use for the downgrade (if you use retail or whitebox OEM with an already used key you will have to phone activate your downgrade).
which would IMO be a good thing, it would mean that people could buy a linux machine knowing that if they needed to they could get fully legit windows later at a reasonable price.
The first release intel macs were released early last year and the development/test stations (which were basically ordinary PCs albiet with a apple programmed TPM chip) were out some time before that.
Even before that i386 darwin was publically availible and it was widely rumoured that apple had the full OS-X running on intel internally.
as you say it is purely a buisness descision. From a technicaly point of view they could release OS-X without the hardware lock any time they please it is just a matter of whether it is worth it to them.