IMO prior art doesn't go far enough, if two people independently invent something within a short time window then IMO there was nothing particularlly inovative about the first one.
I believe there are a LOT of "inventions" that are the result of the obvious soloutions to a new problem or the obvious uses of new technology.
well there is the fact that the cost of maintining a large custom patchset against an ever changing codebase developed by people with no consideration of your code can be quite high.
and the fact that favor with the devs is valuable, they can provide you with far better support than those who are just support drones and favor with them can also give you influence over the general direction of the project.
I am sure that the GPL gets some people to contribute that wouldn't otherwise but I am also sure it stops some people using the code completely (whether due to fear of the GPL, unwillingness to release other source that will be used in the same app or license compatibility issues). Which is more significant is pretty much impossible to determine.
How do you work out how much a violation of something like the GPL is worth? For something like QT it is easy trolltech will just quote thier normal sale price for propietry licenses and they will have evidence that they really have customers who think it is worth that. On the other hand if the author has never sold a propietry license before it is going to be much harder for them to show that the damages figure they give is reasonable.
I thought you HAD to buy the phone with a contract for ATNT? Can you buy the phone without getting/paying for phone service? Afaict you buy the iPhone first and then sign up for the phone contract later but you can crack the iPhone without ever signing it up for use on AT&Ts network.
If you hacked the SIM then you'd be on a different network right? How are they going to push an update to you on another network? not nessacerally, you might have hacked it to use abroad without paying roaming costs and yet stuck with AT&T at home.
Apple knows as well as we do that blindly (e.g. without doing checksums first) applying a binary diff is likely to break modded phones. If they go ahead and do it anyway then it is a clear indication that they want to (or are being pushed to by ma bell) brick modded phones.
If you don't keep your phone updated, then you run a much greater security risk. Kinda like running Windows XP with no security patches applied. Really want to run that risk??? If the alternative is having my device bricked then yes.
It's not £200 though, nearer £50 Windows XP retail (not OEM, not upgrade) from the supplier I usually use is £159.05 for home and £227.53 for pro. So £200 was in the right ballpark.
Right now MS basically says "buy windows with your PC or pay a penalty price for it later". This means that unless you are very sure a machine will never be used to run windows you are stupid to buy it without windows. Even at whitebox OEM prices (which are widely belived to be considerablly higher than what the big brand OEMs pay) retail is nearly THREE TIMES the cost of OEM.
Of course some people bend the rules and buy whitebox OEM copies without buying a machine alongside them or use an upgrade copy without a valid license to upgrade from. as a home user I am happy to do this but as a buisness I would be very dubious.
If unbundling was properly enforced then everyone would pay the same for windows regardless of whether they bought it at the same time as thier PC or later. How much it would cost them is up to MS but my guess is it would be more than the current cost of whitebox OEM but less than the current cost of retail. Suppliers could advertise linux and yet provide thier customers with the safety net of being able to go back to windows at a price no higher than what they would have paid for the machine with windows bundled.
Segmenting the market nearly always works in the interests of the supplier and against the interests of the customer.
when will other media download site learn the same (painful) lesson that you ignore the iPod only at your own peril? When will the rest of the major record companies learn that by requiring DRM on online sales they have essentially handed apple a virtual monopoly on online music sale? (iirc a couple have but most haven't)
A service trying to compete with iTunes can't offer ipod compatible DRM music without apples cooperation and they can't offer non DRM music without the record companies cooperation. This means that thier selection of major label iPod compatible music will be worse than the iTunes music store.
Just what is it about the iTunes Store that's so hard to grasp? Put up a store that sells a huge selection of music at half-decent prices with halfway-tolerable DRM, and the world beats a path to your door. You are missing a crucial factor. Apple is the only supplier that can sell DRM encumbered music that works with the worlds most popular portable music player. They also sell the only portable music player that works with the worlds most popular online music store.
The net result is that once someone has bought into ipod+itunes they are basically locked into it.
I think the most important question is what would mass adoption of solar power due to our power grid. Non-solar generated electricity would go through the roof, for starters - causing the adoption rate to increase - again causing rates on non-solar energy to increase - until at some point the power companies wouldn't be able to afford to operate their grids anymore. Why is this a bad thing? if the costs of a grid outweigh the benifits why keep it.
What may have to happen is the grids may need to change thier pricing structure drastically. Right now most home users pay a flat rate regardless of time of day and some even get net metering. That just isn't going to be workable in a cogeneration dominated environment, instead I think they would have to go over to a time of day based pricing with electricity being very cheap when there is a surplus and very expensive at times that solar can't cover.
Why is it we care about unbundling again? The way it is right now if you buy a PC from a big brand (which is often a good idea for low end systems because they tend to be able to use thier big buying power to secure half decent components while being no more expensive than the shit cheap whitebox vendors use) you will probablly get windows bundled. Yes dell is offering a few of thier PCs OS-less or with ubuntu and sometimes at a slightly cheaper price than with windows but IMO this is too little too late.
Worse if you buy a machine without windows and later decide you need it you then have to pay about three times the price even a whitebox vendor would have paid (assuming you don't bend the rules and buy a whitebox OEM copy seperately or use an upgrade copy without having anything to upgrade from).
The net result of theese two factors is that MS gets paid for most big brand PCs even if those PCs end up not running windows and there is little if any financial incentive not to get windows when you buy your PC.
That would happen in the short term but MS must have set the price of OEM windows where they set it for a reason. If Windows adds £200 to the price of any PC purchase then the market for low end machines with something else is going to get a whole lot bigger.
and that you would have to be able to buy the same computer without one. For it to really be effective you would also have to be able to buy the OS seperately at the same price as it would cost bought with the computer. Otherwise manufacturers would just list the OS at a token cost (say £1) and continue as before.
Agreed, I bet if you could buy a cheap PC like machine that could run OS-X legitimately (yes I know there are cracks but there are issues with using them both legal and practical), had reasonable but not excessive specs and didn't have a built in monitor then sales of the mac pro would be hurt big time.
one apple supplied utility to set up the partitioning and provide instructions, one whitebox OEM windows XP SP2 CD to install windows and one CD burnt by the above utility to install all the drivers for the fancy stuff.
If apple can make it this easy to install windows without using an apple supplied windows CD I don't see why others can't.
even though they all had a site license and re-formatted the disk first thing. Did you actually check the license, all the information I have seen on microsofts site and heared from reputable local sources says that MS volume licences for windows are upgrade/downgrade only.
And do you expect OEMs to buy Windows with retail price? Volume discount ring any bells?:) There is nothing wrong with volume discount.
What there is IMO a problem with is selling copies at extreme discount (the price difference between whitebox OEM and full retail here in the uk is a factor of three and it is rumoured that big brand OEMs get an even bigger discount) on condition that they only be resold with a new PC and in the past even forcing vendors to buy a license for every PC they sell regardless of whether they actually ship it with windows. Now lots of people do bend/break this rule but for the average consumer or for a corp that is paranoid about being absoloutely legit it means that buying a machine without windows and deciding you need it later is a costly mistake.
Just patents. They got all their code worth reusing from BSD anyway. I call BS.
What microsoft has that is of value is the original and de-facto standard implementation of the windows API. Yes there are reimplementation attempts but they will forever be playing catch-up and plauged by bugs.
For example, the fully loaded plane must go at full throttle on the runway up to the no return line, and slam on the brakes. Sounds pretty easy to fake to me, just reconfigure the controls so that what is full throttle during the test is a lower power than real full throttle.
IMO it all depends on how the system is advertised. If it isn't affordable to provide unlimited service at a given speed then you shouldn't advertise your service as such. You should be upfront about exactly what you consider acceptable.
There are ways of shaping traffic without discriminating about services, for example giving priority in the queues to the customers that have been using the least traffic in the last 5 minuites or so.
but I do think vigilante measures are going too far
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IMO prior art doesn't go far enough, if two people independently invent something within a short time window then IMO there was nothing particularlly inovative about the first one.
I believe there are a LOT of "inventions" that are the result of the obvious soloutions to a new problem or the obvious uses of new technology.
well there is the fact that the cost of maintining a large custom patchset against an ever changing codebase developed by people with no consideration of your code can be quite high.
and the fact that favor with the devs is valuable, they can provide you with far better support than those who are just support drones and favor with them can also give you influence over the general direction of the project.
I am sure that the GPL gets some people to contribute that wouldn't otherwise but I am also sure it stops some people using the code completely (whether due to fear of the GPL, unwillingness to release other source that will be used in the same app or license compatibility issues). Which is more significant is pretty much impossible to determine.
How do you work out how much a violation of something like the GPL is worth? For something like QT it is easy trolltech will just quote thier normal sale price for propietry licenses and they will have evidence that they really have customers who think it is worth that. On the other hand if the author has never sold a propietry license before it is going to be much harder for them to show that the damages figure they give is reasonable.
I thought you HAD to buy the phone with a contract for ATNT? Can you buy the phone without getting/paying for phone service?
Afaict you buy the iPhone first and then sign up for the phone contract later but you can crack the iPhone without ever signing it up for use on AT&Ts network.
what exactly does genuine advantage do if you fail anyway?
Out of interest do you have any idea what the rules are on recording interstate calls in the USA?
If you hacked the SIM then you'd be on a different network right? How are they going to push an update to you on another network?
not nessacerally, you might have hacked it to use abroad without paying roaming costs and yet stuck with AT&T at home.
Apple knows as well as we do that blindly (e.g. without doing checksums first) applying a binary diff is likely to break modded phones. If they go ahead and do it anyway then it is a clear indication that they want to (or are being pushed to by ma bell) brick modded phones.
If you don't keep your phone updated, then you run a much greater security risk. Kinda like running Windows XP with no security patches applied. Really want to run that risk???
If the alternative is having my device bricked then yes.
I don't think they have ever gone as far as bricking but IIRC they do permanently block modchipped XBOXes from XBOX live
It's not £200 though, nearer £50
Windows XP retail (not OEM, not upgrade) from the supplier I usually use is £159.05 for home and £227.53 for pro. So £200 was in the right ballpark.
Right now MS basically says "buy windows with your PC or pay a penalty price for it later". This means that unless you are very sure a machine will never be used to run windows you are stupid to buy it without windows. Even at whitebox OEM prices (which are widely belived to be considerablly higher than what the big brand OEMs pay) retail is nearly THREE TIMES the cost of OEM.
Of course some people bend the rules and buy whitebox OEM copies without buying a machine alongside them or use an upgrade copy without a valid license to upgrade from. as a home user I am happy to do this but as a buisness I would be very dubious.
If unbundling was properly enforced then everyone would pay the same for windows regardless of whether they bought it at the same time as thier PC or later. How much it would cost them is up to MS but my guess is it would be more than the current cost of whitebox OEM but less than the current cost of retail. Suppliers could advertise linux and yet provide thier customers with the safety net of being able to go back to windows at a price no higher than what they would have paid for the machine with windows bundled.
Segmenting the market nearly always works in the interests of the supplier and against the interests of the customer.
when will other media download site learn the same (painful) lesson that you ignore the iPod only at your own peril?
When will the rest of the major record companies learn that by requiring DRM on online sales they have essentially handed apple a virtual monopoly on online music sale? (iirc a couple have but most haven't)
A service trying to compete with iTunes can't offer ipod compatible DRM music without apples cooperation and they can't offer non DRM music without the record companies cooperation. This means that thier selection of major label iPod compatible music will be worse than the iTunes music store.
Just what is it about the iTunes Store that's so hard to grasp? Put up a store that sells a huge selection of music at half-decent prices with halfway-tolerable DRM, and the world beats a path to your door.
You are missing a crucial factor. Apple is the only supplier that can sell DRM encumbered music that works with the worlds most popular portable music player. They also sell the only portable music player that works with the worlds most popular online music store.
The net result is that once someone has bought into ipod+itunes they are basically locked into it.
I think the most important question is what would mass adoption of solar power due to our power grid. Non-solar generated electricity would go through the roof, for starters - causing the adoption rate to increase - again causing rates on non-solar energy to increase - until at some point the power companies wouldn't be able to afford to operate their grids anymore.
Why is this a bad thing? if the costs of a grid outweigh the benifits why keep it.
What may have to happen is the grids may need to change thier pricing structure drastically. Right now most home users pay a flat rate regardless of time of day and some even get net metering. That just isn't going to be workable in a cogeneration dominated environment, instead I think they would have to go over to a time of day based pricing with electricity being very cheap when there is a surplus and very expensive at times that solar can't cover.
Why is it we care about unbundling again?
The way it is right now if you buy a PC from a big brand (which is often a good idea for low end systems because they tend to be able to use thier big buying power to secure half decent components while being no more expensive than the shit cheap whitebox vendors use) you will probablly get windows bundled. Yes dell is offering a few of thier PCs OS-less or with ubuntu and sometimes at a slightly cheaper price than with windows but IMO this is too little too late.
Worse if you buy a machine without windows and later decide you need it you then have to pay about three times the price even a whitebox vendor would have paid (assuming you don't bend the rules and buy a whitebox OEM copy seperately or use an upgrade copy without having anything to upgrade from).
The net result of theese two factors is that MS gets paid for most big brand PCs even if those PCs end up not running windows and there is little if any financial incentive not to get windows when you buy your PC.
That would happen in the short term but MS must have set the price of OEM windows where they set it for a reason. If Windows adds £200 to the price of any PC purchase then the market for low end machines with something else is going to get a whole lot bigger.
and that you would have to be able to buy the same computer without one.
For it to really be effective you would also have to be able to buy the OS seperately at the same price as it would cost bought with the computer. Otherwise manufacturers would just list the OS at a token cost (say £1) and continue as before.
Agreed, I bet if you could buy a cheap PC like machine that could run OS-X legitimately (yes I know there are cracks but there are issues with using them both legal and practical), had reasonable but not excessive specs and didn't have a built in monitor then sales of the mac pro would be hurt big time.
Ever tried installing windows XP on a mac?
one apple supplied utility to set up the partitioning and provide instructions, one whitebox OEM windows XP SP2 CD to install windows and one CD burnt by the above utility to install all the drivers for the fancy stuff.
If apple can make it this easy to install windows without using an apple supplied windows CD I don't see why others can't.
even though they all had a site license and re-formatted the disk first thing.
Did you actually check the license, all the information I have seen on microsofts site and heared from reputable local sources says that MS volume licences for windows are upgrade/downgrade only.
And do you expect OEMs to buy Windows with retail price? Volume discount ring any bells? :)
There is nothing wrong with volume discount.
What there is IMO a problem with is selling copies at extreme discount (the price difference between whitebox OEM and full retail here in the uk is a factor of three and it is rumoured that big brand OEMs get an even bigger discount) on condition that they only be resold with a new PC and in the past even forcing vendors to buy a license for every PC they sell regardless of whether they actually ship it with windows. Now lots of people do bend/break this rule but for the average consumer or for a corp that is paranoid about being absoloutely legit it means that buying a machine without windows and deciding you need it later is a costly mistake.
Just patents. They got all their code worth reusing from BSD anyway.
I call BS.
What microsoft has that is of value is the original and de-facto standard implementation of the windows API. Yes there are reimplementation attempts but they will forever be playing catch-up and plauged by bugs.
ok found it http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEdrv.mspx seems you have to specify /PAE in boot.ini
For example, the fully loaded plane must go at full throttle on the runway up to the no return line, and slam on the brakes.
Sounds pretty easy to fake to me, just reconfigure the controls so that what is full throttle during the test is a lower power than real full throttle.
IMO it all depends on how the system is advertised. If it isn't affordable to provide unlimited service at a given speed then you shouldn't advertise your service as such. You should be upfront about exactly what you consider acceptable.
There are ways of shaping traffic without discriminating about services, for example giving priority in the queues to the customers that have been using the least traffic in the last 5 minuites or so.
but I do think vigilante measures are going too far