That doesn't seem to me what the law says. It states that the owner of a copy (which both Psystar and it's customers are, as they bought a legal copy of OSX) are explicitly allowed to copy in order tu use the program. There don't seem to be any provisions about the kind of memory (hard drive vs. RAM). Thus, there is no distinction between an "authorized" and an "unauthorized" copy, as Apple is not able to restrict the copying of the program if it is necessary to utilize it.
As always, IANAL. I'm sure Apple has lawyers which are capable of twisting this in any direction they want.
Actually I found the same problem with a house I stayed at. The roof was relatively low, and the lights were tripple-fittings, which made it worse. The heat they give off is unbearable, even compared to the gas cooker.
Downloadable games are mostly very cheap. If my past self from five years ago were able to see the kind of selection and value you could get on Steam, Wiiware, Xbox live and PSN store, I'd be amazed.
If you boycott downloads, then you're already missing out on some of the most innovative and best games in recent years.
Solid-state drives are instantly block-addressable for the entire capacity, so why would you even worry about disk fragmentation? Having said that I've never used performance SSDs, so maybe you can enlighten me.
Now this is a situation which is best left to hard drives. Blu-Ray discs have only a small multiple of space than DVDs. They're currently much more expensive than DVDs, and both a far behind the 5 cents/GB you get for hard drives these days. Then you have the added inconvenience of fiddling around with 40 discs vs. one single TB hard drive. If you want to be careful, you should also regularly check your backups for integrity, which is much easier for a single SATA hard drive.
It's actually Hannah Montana and the movie sequels which are most widely available and affordable. They're crap anfd they know it, which is why in stores you'll see every animated sequel and direct-to-video movie they released in the last ten years, but at most two movies from their "classic" collection, costing at least $20.
Why don't you just call it by its name: abusive price fixing. They threaten retail with sanctioning if they don't give back the DVDs when they say so. Then they destroy millions of perfectly good DVDs every year.
When was the last time you saw a good Disney movie (Pixar doesn't count)?
I'm guessing what you actually mean is what was the last good Disney traditional animation film, in which case you'd have to go back to the first half of the decade, before Eisner dissolved their cel-animation studios. Now that they've restarted their efforts things seem promising, and the upcoming animations "the princess and the frog" and "rapunzel" are highly anticipated, with names like Ron Clements, John Musker or Alan Menken who were crucial to some of their successes in the 90s.
the metric system is optimized for scientific work where conversions between units happen more often
No it isn't. Scientific work almost always uses scientific notation with SI base units. Prefixes are often skipped entirely.
Prefix notation is most useful for technology trade and everyday usage.
and knowing that 100 million micrograms is.1 kilograms is useful. But it doesn't work so well for common, human scale use.
What a red herring. It works perfectly well in any case. Micrograms might not be an everyday example, but looking at the nutritional information on food I can tell you e.g. the salt equivalent on your plate.
That's an expensive data plan. You also have to pay that for the iPhone. But even without a data plan, a portable computer with built-in WiFi, music player and the ability to make phone calls is incredibly useful.
I'd want one just for the purpose of taking notes, instead of using Nokia's crippled and useless POS which can't display ASCII text without screwing it up.
So what? The best selling PC model is surely a Mac, and probably was ever since the likes the commodore. Did that save them from near-extinction, neglect and abandonment in the 90s?
When I see any of these, I say to myself $1000/yr. Thats what these things cost, a vacation to Mexico!
Why? An unlocked HTC dream will set you back about $300, and even the latest and greates phones rarely are mre than $600. If you pay for an expensive data plan, then that's what you're paying for. It's the same with the iPhone. If you want to use it as a mobile computer, you can do just that.
Photographing documents is always terrible with phones because they have no variable focus. So they use a pinhole camera for infinite focus, but it fails at less than about 3 meters. I always thought that a camera specifically for scanning documents would be great on a phone. They could have two cameras, one with infinite focus and one for photographing documents up-close. You could attach an apropriate lens in front and get the same result I guess.
It's actually the big bookstores which benefit the most from price fixing. It guarantees them a high profit margin irrespective of the quality of their advive or service. This enables ludicrous profits by focusing on mass-markets, enabling them to rent huge building in the most prominent retail locations. Why would anybody bother pacing round town to smaller bookstores when the huge retailer on city square 1) has a better location 2) has a better selection 3) The prices are the same anyway
I would consider it a form of fraud. They set the rules of the game, tell you you can win, but throw you out when you play properly. Playing with a strategy requires investing time and money, so throwing out someone who's on their way to making money is unfair and extremely exploitative.
ROM = Read-Only Memory, so anything that can't be written or erased qualifies.
Flash is EEPROM or "Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory". The term ROM was used to distinguish from volatile RAM, but it isn't strict.
Flash memory is used to describe EEPROM which is block-addressable, instead of byte-addressable. That would be the case with DS cards.
Why would Nintendo store the game data in flash memory anyway?
They use whatever's cost effective. And that certainly isn't mask-rom or fuse-rom.
That would just help potential hacks to rewrite carts with other games.
Replacing memory is easy, getting code to run isn't. They could just solder in their own ROM chip if it were that simple.
But there's also the fact that most Nintendo DS carts do also have built-in flash too, in order to save games in progress. I guess the carts could be called hybrid ROM/Flash.
The types of write-permission doesn't change the underlying technology.
The most interesting DSi games have been over the download store, which seems like a good way of separating the market from standard DS games to avoid confusion.
Yeah, but it's not really surprising. The original GBA's specs leaked in 1996 and were better than the Super Nintendo, but no-one would believe it. When the PSP was released it came very close to the then-current PS2, but no-one thought it possible when they announced the system. Even playing Mario 64 on the DS seemed outlandish at the time.
I think you're vastly overestimating the homebrew market and the savviness of consumers. But most customers of DS flash-cards are challenged by copying pirated games over, let alone use homebrew software.
The cell-phone market is no different. The kids are impressed by bells and whistles. Give them a handful of internet sites they can surf and they won't worry about the locked down handset or the limited internet access.
Depends on how strict you consider the "read-only" part, but whatever is in the DS cards, it sure isn't mask-ROM or fuse-ROM. It's some type of block-addressable solid state memory, so it's likely very similar to flash.
Some discs even have full surround sound encoding.
What? That wouldn't be a standard CD then.
The compressed AACs sold on itunes sound like crap on a full-sized 5-speaker stereo.
Stop pretending that you have supernatural ability to hear algorithms which reproduce PCM streams to near-perfect precision. As it is the studios are the main culprits in screwing up sound quality on the CD master itself. If labels would use the full potential of the technology that has been available to them I'd be happy.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't seem to me what the law says.
It states that the owner of a copy (which both Psystar and it's customers are, as they bought a legal copy of OSX) are explicitly allowed to copy in order tu use the program.
There don't seem to be any provisions about the kind of memory (hard drive vs. RAM). Thus, there is no distinction between an "authorized" and an "unauthorized" copy, as Apple is not able to restrict the copying of the program if it is necessary to utilize it.
As always, IANAL. I'm sure Apple has lawyers which are capable of twisting this in any direction they want.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DesertStormDestroyedIraqiScud.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x73Z6ndtjE#t=52
Actually I found the same problem with a house I stayed at. The roof was relatively low, and the lights were tripple-fittings, which made it worse. The heat they give off is unbearable, even compared to the gas cooker.
Downloadable games are mostly very cheap. If my past self from five years ago were able to see the kind of selection and value you could get on Steam, Wiiware, Xbox live and PSN store, I'd be amazed.
If you boycott downloads, then you're already missing out on some of the most innovative and best games in recent years.
You mean this?
Solid-state drives are instantly block-addressable for the entire capacity, so why would you even worry about disk fragmentation?
Having said that I've never used performance SSDs, so maybe you can enlighten me.
D-M-C-A
nuff said.
Now this is a situation which is best left to hard drives. Blu-Ray discs have only a small multiple of space than DVDs. They're currently much more expensive than DVDs, and both a far behind the 5 cents/GB you get for hard drives these days.
Then you have the added inconvenience of fiddling around with 40 discs vs. one single TB hard drive. If you want to be careful, you should also regularly check your backups for integrity, which is much easier for a single SATA hard drive.
It's actually Hannah Montana and the movie sequels which are most widely available and affordable. They're crap anfd they know it, which is why in stores you'll see every animated sequel and direct-to-video movie they released in the last ten years, but at most two movies from their "classic" collection, costing at least $20.
Why don't you just call it by its name: abusive price fixing. They threaten retail with sanctioning if they don't give back the DVDs when they say so. Then they destroy millions of perfectly good DVDs every year.
When was the last time you saw a good Disney movie (Pixar doesn't count)?
I'm guessing what you actually mean is what was the last good Disney traditional animation film, in which case you'd have to go back to the first half of the decade, before Eisner dissolved their cel-animation studios.
Now that they've restarted their efforts things seem promising, and the upcoming animations "the princess and the frog" and "rapunzel" are highly anticipated, with names like Ron Clements, John Musker or Alan Menken who were crucial to some of their successes in the 90s.
the metric system is optimized for scientific work where conversions between units happen more often
No it isn't. Scientific work almost always uses scientific notation with SI base units. Prefixes are often skipped entirely.
Prefix notation is most useful for technology trade and everyday usage.
and knowing that 100 million micrograms is .1 kilograms is useful. But it doesn't work so well for common, human scale use.
What a red herring. It works perfectly well in any case.
Micrograms might not be an everyday example, but looking at the nutritional information on food I can tell you e.g. the salt equivalent on your plate.
That's an expensive data plan. You also have to pay that for the iPhone. But even without a data plan, a portable computer with built-in WiFi, music player and the ability to make phone calls is incredibly useful.
I'd want one just for the purpose of taking notes, instead of using Nokia's crippled and useless POS which can't display ASCII text without screwing it up.
So what? The best selling PC model is surely a Mac, and probably was ever since the likes the commodore. Did that save them from near-extinction, neglect and abandonment in the 90s?
When I see any of these, I say to myself $1000/yr. Thats what these things cost, a vacation to Mexico!
Why? An unlocked HTC dream will set you back about $300, and even the latest and greates phones rarely are mre than $600. If you pay for an expensive data plan, then that's what you're paying for.
It's the same with the iPhone.
If you want to use it as a mobile computer, you can do just that.
Photographing documents is always terrible with phones because they have no variable focus. So they use a pinhole camera for infinite focus, but it fails at less than about 3 meters.
I always thought that a camera specifically for scanning documents would be great on a phone. They could have two cameras, one with infinite focus and one for photographing documents up-close.
You could attach an apropriate lens in front and get the same result I guess.
It's actually the big bookstores which benefit the most from price fixing. It guarantees them a high profit margin irrespective of the quality of their advive or service. This enables ludicrous profits by focusing on mass-markets, enabling them to rent huge building in the most prominent retail locations. Why would anybody bother pacing round town to smaller bookstores when the huge retailer on city square
1) has a better location
2) has a better selection
3) The prices are the same anyway
I would consider it a form of fraud. They set the rules of the game, tell you you can win, but throw you out when you play properly. Playing with a strategy requires investing time and money, so throwing out someone who's on their way to making money is unfair and extremely exploitative.
ROM = Read-Only Memory, so anything that can't be written or erased qualifies.
Flash is EEPROM or "Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory". The term ROM was used to distinguish from volatile RAM, but it isn't strict.
Flash memory is used to describe EEPROM which is block-addressable, instead of byte-addressable. That would be the case with DS cards.
Why would Nintendo store the game data in flash memory anyway?
They use whatever's cost effective. And that certainly isn't mask-rom or fuse-rom.
That would just help potential hacks to rewrite carts with other games.
Replacing memory is easy, getting code to run isn't. They could just solder in their own ROM chip if it were that simple.
But there's also the fact that most Nintendo DS carts do also have built-in flash too, in order to save games in progress. I guess the carts could be called hybrid ROM/Flash.
The types of write-permission doesn't change the underlying technology.
The most interesting DSi games have been over the download store, which seems like a good way of separating the market from standard DS games to avoid confusion.
Yeah, but it's not really surprising. The original GBA's specs leaked in 1996 and were better than the Super Nintendo, but no-one would believe it. When the PSP was released it came very close to the then-current PS2, but no-one thought it possible when they announced the system. Even playing Mario 64 on the DS seemed outlandish at the time.
I think you're vastly overestimating the homebrew market and the savviness of consumers. But most customers of DS flash-cards are challenged by copying pirated games over, let alone use homebrew software.
The cell-phone market is no different. The kids are impressed by bells and whistles. Give them a handful of internet sites they can surf and they won't worry about the locked down handset or the limited internet access.
Depends on how strict you consider the "read-only" part, but whatever is in the DS cards, it sure isn't mask-ROM or fuse-ROM. It's some type of block-addressable solid state memory, so it's likely very similar to flash.
Some discs even have full surround sound encoding.
What? That wouldn't be a standard CD then.
The compressed AACs sold on itunes sound like crap on a full-sized 5-speaker stereo.
Stop pretending that you have supernatural ability to hear algorithms which reproduce PCM streams to near-perfect precision.
As it is the studios are the main culprits in screwing up sound quality on the CD master itself. If labels would use the full potential of the technology that has been available to them I'd be happy.