Eula's basically come under a form of contract law, "we will let you have this, if you abide by x, y and z" the big problem is establishing if there was a 'meeting of the minds' in such a contract.
If the contract is overly lop-sided or the details are illegal (example you can say, 'you will own your first born child') doesn't necessarily mean the courts will uphold it when they sue you for not abiding by the terms, it's quite probable in those circumstances for the contract to be voided.
I'm not against modding your Wii/iPod/PC or whatever, but I don't pretend that it is protected by law.
In my country (Australia) so long as it is not solely for removing copy protection (if it adds other useful functionality like homebrew and/or region unlocking) it is perfectly legal to modify any console any way you like.
But the idea that individuals have some unassailable god-given right to modify software because they possess it is a rather foolish and naive idea.
If you own it (and in this case it being a single instance not copied of "it") you can modify it. Unless of course you have a signed legally binding contract saying you can't.
Cars being a perfect example, when you purchase a vehicle the manufacturer still owns the designs and trademarks of the vehicle, but you are free to modify it without their consent. I fail to see why people consider software any different from this... perhaps it is because it is so easily copied, granted you would be unable to make a backup of this software, or redistribute it at all. But I'm sure for your own personal use that wouldn't bother most people.
You rarely ever buy (obtain full rights) to software for obvious reasons.
Of course you don't get full rights, but you still obtain a full legal copy of the software... this is the basic thing of copyright, to limit the copying of things.. nothing else... trying to pull licensing shit is relatively new.
Again, you can refuse to recognize intellectual property,
I dislike the term intellectual property, as what we HAVE are copyrights, trademarks and patents, and using that term makes people confused and believe whatever you want them to. I recognize these things, but you seem to have taken the bait hook line and sinker from them... spoiler, companies will try get away with things and make claims that they have no legal right to if it is to their advantage, nothing new.
Modifying software is nothing like annotating a book. Also, books don't have EULAs.
Eula's are very rarely tested for a reason, they can claim lots of things that basically aren't even legal, some of it can be enforcable, but the majority usually isn't.
Is this site getting increasingly retarded, or am I just growing old enough to find teenage gamers tiresome?
For the record, I am not a teenager, hell I don't even have a single pirated item on any of my computers, but you sir seem to basically seem to believe anything the big companies say is legal.. which seems more questionable, if you do not question things and look into it yourself, and have independent thought, how will you ever know if people are lying to you?
you're also licensing software that makes that device work.
No.. you are purchasing a copy of the software with the hardware, you cannot create new copies because of copyright law, but this is not licensing.
By your logic, if you had a book you would be unable to scribble notes in it and modifying it's pages because that would be 'infringing it's license' eula's are shaky things to rely on in court, and blizzard even went so far as to successfully determine that copying WoW into ram is copyright infringement than try to rely on their eula possibly having it invalidated. Besides, most consoles don't even have eula's they are plug and play no bullshit (at least the wii is).
well... apple did a lot less things to piss people off five years ago, while the ipod was a success they weren't actively trying to kill anything and everything that could interact with it by any means possible like they are now.
The only thing left still relatively 'free' in the sense you can do what you like with it is the mac computers, almost everything else they touch these days tends to have a horrible taint to it of 'you will not do what we do not want you to do'
While I'm a linux user there was once upon a time I'd buy mac hardware just because of the build quality, but with recent shenanigans I just can't justify it... the perception of them has changed in the last five years, but for good reasons. (depending on your qualification of 'good') Almost everything they sell is in a walled garden, to protect you from *gasp* running something useful.
while it's a very sysadmin like example, my last phone purchase was precisely about that. The nokia n95, the iphone had been released and jailbroken already, but I didn't get it.. why? because I wanted to be able to do what I want with my phone without having to dick around with it. Putty port already existed, as did an xmpp client, and I was set.
So I haven't developed for the phone, yet the ability to do what I want with it was a compelling enough reason to decide what kind of device I was getting.
Even the gpl wouldn't be harmed much by reduction of duration of copyright. Taken from 100 years down to 15... hell the very first beta of the linux kernel would just be public domain as of a couple years ago.
The problem with copyright as it is now is not that it exists... it's that the sheer duration has raped the public domain for a hundred years nearly. No new works can be derived from the inspiration of others that have been long since forgotten.. or copyright suits could emerge.
and the gun lobby who never get a significant vote.
This is unfortunate, the shooter's party's policies are rather nice, everyone assumes you have to be a gun nut to support them.. but all they really want is the government to butt out of what people like to do in their recreational lives.
You are confusing users with developers. Very few users are developers.
You don't need to be a developer to enjoy the programs others have written for free.. I don't have to have written for example inkscape in order to want to use it on what I have for free. non-developers jailbreak iphones too.... to use what they want on their phone, not necessarily develop on it.
They make little to no money (and even lose money often) on the hardware itself. They make money because each title sold pays a license fee. It also indicates how well the owners like their gaming experience over all.
The wii was making profit on the hardware from day one, they only just now lowered the retail price three years after it's initial release.. they have been making lots off hardware alone
Quit whining and user test. The "I'm l33t because I can use the command line" crowd should just shut up. The sysadmins whose ego is wrapped up in being able to edit config files with "vi" need to grow up.
Has it occurred to you that in the context of myself liking the CLI that *gasp* I AM the user. I have as much right to like the way I'm successfully doing things as any other.
Some of us really don't give a shit if linux gets bigger and filled with noobs, so long as it suits our needs... which it does.
Take someone fully new to computers and have them learn Linux or Windows and chances are they will figure out Linux faster.
Bullshit. Prove it.
I've given linux computers to many young/elderly people. The young ones that have used windows before pick up linux in a matter of seconds. The old ones that have never used a computer before take about five minutes of hand holding while they get their head around this internet business (yes technologically they'd been living under a rock).
Ironically, those that don't know what it is tend to be like "You have a towering monolith in your room, but where are the monkeys?" (2001: a space odyssey reference)
A fully decked out system can use 5760 watts (24 amps at 240v) or so it says on the back power panel which has a couple 25 amp iec connectors on the back. the 5500 system by itself wouldn't use anything near that though, about 1600 watts. There is plenty of remaining space in the rack for other things however, the backplane only uses 1/4 the rack.
Does it run 24 hours/day (as the high availability options would suggest)?
Alas, it currently is not in running order, I am short a few parts which I have found on the internet for reasonable prices refurbished however shipping is a bitch. The items are quality but large and heavy and I don't reside in the US where most of them were made. When purchased I do intend on buying quite a few spares though:)
The restoration of it to working order is a side-project of mine, the 5500 system itself is just old enough that it is not cost-effective to run it for computational items power wise, but when in running order I will occasionally fire it up to assist in some tasks, but not often. Primarily the high availability and somewhat unique architecture is what I have it for. Any "mission critical" items I have will run on it, since if they mean that much to me it will justify the power expenses.
To be honest I kind of wanted an SGI Onyx 3800, but because this machine was in non-functioning order and sun no longer support them, I basically got it for free. I just had to organize transport to get it to my house. the rack was 2 inches wider than my door, took some effort to get in:)
I am however looking at mounting some 1u compute nodes in the remaining space.
Why are you burning all that power all day? I'm hoping for an answer like: "I'm modeling a quantum electrodynamic system at 100 hours of processing per microsecond."
I'd hate to disappoint, but the most geeky of my uses would have to be verilog simulation (for cpu design). Finite element analysis for the structural integrity of some... items.. i'm working on. Finally I do on occasion do 3d rendering.. it takes as much cpu time as you can feed it, always:)
Of course this will soon likely be run on the linux cluster I'm installing in another quarter of the space the rack has free. For the moment I just have a four node cluster of c2 duos for these purposes that double as desktops for the rest of the family.
What will a home user do with an 80 core, 1TB RAM sysetm? Ray tracing? Protein folding? Local weather prediction? All things really high on the list for personal computers.
I'm not sure about you, but my most immediate thought would be to simulate an extremely complex neural network, likely easily using over half the ram on that task. Combine that with coding an infrastructure for it to learn patterns well from a source of input like a webcam, and hilarity ensues.
If it could get to be of about the intellect of a small bird that would be awesome, but even if it is a spectacular failure and nothing valuable is produced, it would be awesome:)
As someone who has a whole Sun Enterprise 5500 rack in his room, There is indeed a great difference between server class hardware and commodity gear, where shall we start.
Multiple power supplies, varied in number depending on your load out but hot swappable and configured as such that 1-2 of them can die before your system goes down. Along with diagnostic interface and usually visible indicators going 'part failure, replace asap'.
Same with cpus, hot swappable cpu/memory boards are a must, so long as a single cpu remains functioning the system should still run albeit at a lower capacity.
While I've already mentioned psu redundancy, the AC power outlets it uses would usually have redundancy also, with two separate connections to different circuits or ups etc.
Anyway, no commodity hardware does this, only high end, high availability stuff has this, and you will pay through the nose for it. If this octane has these features, it is very cheap for what it is.
7 year old girls and 70 year old grandparents are not average joes, they're extremes, meaning they are people who need nothing more than write some text, check e-mail, visit websites and draw some flowers in Gimp (or MSPaint).
How many non-IT or non-technical people do you know that need more than an office suite, web browser, email client, photo viewer/editor and an instant messenger client if they don't play games?
For most peoples home usage, that's about all I see being used. Hell I've made my own cross compilers from scratch for different architecture cpu's, and even my 'typical' usage is mostly those things (minus the graphic bits)
Linux enthusiasts, 1993: "It sucks for the Average Joe, but wait till next year"
Linux enthusiasts, 2009: "It sucks for the Average Joe, but wait till next year"
Depends on your definition of average Joe, their usage and what they want to do, I'd wajor that the overwhelming majority of average people would do just fine with linux that was already set up for them for their needs.
My little sisters have been using linux since they were 7, and they aren't even into computers, grandparents who had never touched a computer till they were 70 are using it just fine also
But if by 'average joe' you mean 'gamer' then yes, it sucks.
Had failing hardware like that before, windows wouldn't even boot before dying, linux booted, I checked dmesg and it was like "wtfux sanity check failing: Danger will robinson, arms flailing wildly" quite a bit before it actually kernel panic'd.
actually, you may want to look into SI prefixes, exa is 1000 times peta, so what is being said is it takes 1e15 operations to compute 1e18 bytes of data.
So... when I write technical doc in ASCII for instance it can get quite messy
If you are in a technical field, and you are used to technical things, you are a prime candidate for the use of LaTeX. Plain text with a tiny amount of mark up, it really is worth learning.
Sounds a lot like Linux elitism...wait, Ubuntu is *worse* because it's easier to use?
I don't get why people think ubuntu is so much easier to use.. really, pretty much all modern popular linux distro's are nearly identical.
Hell the only reason I tried it and spread it to others when it first started was because of their shipit program sending me about 50 sets of cds.
Moreso, you'll find a great deal larger portion of the idiots are ubuntu users, which normally wouldn't be a problem, I mean who cares who uses what right?
The problem lies in when the idiots and former windows users influence and effectively remove useful functionality that they just don't get. Prime example being the ctrl+alt+backspace zap command in X11, extremely useful in very rare situations.. now it's off by default so if you come to a situation that needs it on a system, you can't use it.. and chances are you can't enable it at that point.
The problem is when developers listen to the idiots
The law hates jurors in the first place - all those non-professionals who evaluate things in terms of right and wrong and not on the pure bases of compliance with appropriate legal loopholes.
Problem is, the people who usually go to jury duty are those who aren't smart enough to get out of it. A few would willingly do it for their own moral reasons, but they are a minority and are quickly dismissed from cases for thinking too logically about it.
This leaves you between a rock and a hard place with a bunch of idiots, usually
Slashdot Mirror
Eula's basically come under a form of contract law, "we will let you have this, if you abide by x, y and z" the big problem is establishing if there was a 'meeting of the minds' in such a contract.
If the contract is overly lop-sided or the details are illegal (example you can say, 'you will own your first born child') doesn't necessarily mean the courts will uphold it when they sue you for not abiding by the terms, it's quite probable in those circumstances for the contract to be voided.
I'm not against modding your Wii/iPod/PC or whatever, but I don't pretend that it is protected by law.
In my country (Australia) so long as it is not solely for removing copy protection (if it adds other useful functionality like homebrew and/or region unlocking) it is perfectly legal to modify any console any way you like.
But the idea that individuals have some unassailable god-given right to modify software because they possess it is a rather foolish and naive idea.
If you own it (and in this case it being a single instance not copied of "it") you can modify it. Unless of course you have a signed legally binding contract saying you can't.
Cars being a perfect example, when you purchase a vehicle the manufacturer still owns the designs and trademarks of the vehicle, but you are free to modify it without their consent. I fail to see why people consider software any different from this... perhaps it is because it is so easily copied, granted you would be unable to make a backup of this software, or redistribute it at all. But I'm sure for your own personal use that wouldn't bother most people.
You rarely ever buy (obtain full rights) to software for obvious reasons.
Of course you don't get full rights, but you still obtain a full legal copy of the software... this is the basic thing of copyright, to limit the copying of things.. nothing else... trying to pull licensing shit is relatively new.
Again, you can refuse to recognize intellectual property,
I dislike the term intellectual property, as what we HAVE are copyrights, trademarks and patents, and using that term makes people confused and believe whatever you want them to. I recognize these things, but you seem to have taken the bait hook line and sinker from them... spoiler, companies will try get away with things and make claims that they have no legal right to if it is to their advantage, nothing new.
Modifying software is nothing like annotating a book. Also, books don't have EULAs.
Eula's are very rarely tested for a reason, they can claim lots of things that basically aren't even legal, some of it can be enforcable, but the majority usually isn't.
Is this site getting increasingly retarded, or am I just growing old enough to find teenage gamers tiresome?
For the record, I am not a teenager, hell I don't even have a single pirated item on any of my computers, but you sir seem to basically seem to believe anything the big companies say is legal.. which seems more questionable, if you do not question things and look into it yourself, and have independent thought, how will you ever know if people are lying to you?
you're also licensing software that makes that device work.
No.. you are purchasing a copy of the software with the hardware, you cannot create new copies because of copyright law, but this is not licensing.
By your logic, if you had a book you would be unable to scribble notes in it and modifying it's pages because that would be 'infringing it's license' eula's are shaky things to rely on in court, and blizzard even went so far as to successfully determine that copying WoW into ram is copyright infringement than try to rely on their eula possibly having it invalidated. Besides, most consoles don't even have eula's they are plug and play no bullshit (at least the wii is).
Kyocera 6950DN network printer with 64mb ram, upgradable as such that you can stick a regular 512mb stick of ram in it also, does a3 size paper too.
Excellent print quality, toner is cheap but you get what you pay for, looking $3k plus for one, I have one sitting here :)
well... apple did a lot less things to piss people off five years ago, while the ipod was a success they weren't actively trying to kill anything and everything that could interact with it by any means possible like they are now.
The only thing left still relatively 'free' in the sense you can do what you like with it is the mac computers, almost everything else they touch these days tends to have a horrible taint to it of 'you will not do what we do not want you to do'
While I'm a linux user there was once upon a time I'd buy mac hardware just because of the build quality, but with recent shenanigans I just can't justify it... the perception of them has changed in the last five years, but for good reasons. (depending on your qualification of 'good') Almost everything they sell is in a walled garden, to protect you from *gasp* running something useful.
while it's a very sysadmin like example, my last phone purchase was precisely about that. The nokia n95, the iphone had been released and jailbroken already, but I didn't get it.. why? because I wanted to be able to do what I want with my phone without having to dick around with it. Putty port already existed, as did an xmpp client, and I was set.
So I haven't developed for the phone, yet the ability to do what I want with it was a compelling enough reason to decide what kind of device I was getting.
Even the gpl wouldn't be harmed much by reduction of duration of copyright. Taken from 100 years down to 15... hell the very first beta of the linux kernel would just be public domain as of a couple years ago.
The problem with copyright as it is now is not that it exists... it's that the sheer duration has raped the public domain for a hundred years nearly. No new works can be derived from the inspiration of others that have been long since forgotten.. or copyright suits could emerge.
and the gun lobby who never get a significant vote.
This is unfortunate, the shooter's party's policies are rather nice, everyone assumes you have to be a gun nut to support them.. but all they really want is the government to butt out of what people like to do in their recreational lives.
You are confusing users with developers. Very few users are developers.
You don't need to be a developer to enjoy the programs others have written for free.. I don't have to have written for example inkscape in order to want to use it on what I have for free. non-developers jailbreak iphones too.... to use what they want on their phone, not necessarily develop on it.
They make little to no money (and even lose money often) on the hardware itself. They make money because each title sold pays a license fee. It also indicates how well the owners like their gaming experience over all.
The wii was making profit on the hardware from day one, they only just now lowered the retail price three years after it's initial release.. they have been making lots off hardware alone
Quit whining and user test. The "I'm l33t because I can use the command line" crowd should just shut up. The sysadmins whose ego is wrapped up in being able to edit config files with "vi" need to grow up.
Has it occurred to you that in the context of myself liking the CLI that *gasp* I AM the user. I have as much right to like the way I'm successfully doing things as any other.
Some of us really don't give a shit if linux gets bigger and filled with noobs, so long as it suits our needs... which it does.
Take someone fully new to computers and have them learn Linux or Windows and chances are they will figure out Linux faster. Bullshit. Prove it.
I've given linux computers to many young/elderly people. The young ones that have used windows before pick up linux in a matter of seconds. The old ones that have never used a computer before take about five minutes of hand holding while they get their head around this internet business (yes technologically they'd been living under a rock).
Ironically, those that don't know what it is tend to be like "You have a towering monolith in your room, but where are the monkeys?" (2001: a space odyssey reference)
How much power does it consume?
A fully decked out system can use 5760 watts (24 amps at 240v) or so it says on the back power panel which has a couple 25 amp iec connectors on the back. the 5500 system by itself wouldn't use anything near that though, about 1600 watts. There is plenty of remaining space in the rack for other things however, the backplane only uses 1/4 the rack.
Does it run 24 hours/day (as the high availability options would suggest)?
Alas, it currently is not in running order, I am short a few parts which I have found on the internet for reasonable prices refurbished however shipping is a bitch. The items are quality but large and heavy and I don't reside in the US where most of them were made. When purchased I do intend on buying quite a few spares though :)
The restoration of it to working order is a side-project of mine, the 5500 system itself is just old enough that it is not cost-effective to run it for computational items power wise, but when in running order I will occasionally fire it up to assist in some tasks, but not often. Primarily the high availability and somewhat unique architecture is what I have it for. Any "mission critical" items I have will run on it, since if they mean that much to me it will justify the power expenses.
To be honest I kind of wanted an SGI Onyx 3800, but because this machine was in non-functioning order and sun no longer support them, I basically got it for free. I just had to organize transport to get it to my house. the rack was 2 inches wider than my door, took some effort to get in :)
I am however looking at mounting some 1u compute nodes in the remaining space.
Why are you burning all that power all day? I'm hoping for an answer like: "I'm modeling a quantum electrodynamic system at 100 hours of processing per microsecond."
I'd hate to disappoint, but the most geeky of my uses would have to be verilog simulation (for cpu design). Finite element analysis for the structural integrity of some... items.. i'm working on. Finally I do on occasion do 3d rendering.. it takes as much cpu time as you can feed it, always :)
Of course this will soon likely be run on the linux cluster I'm installing in another quarter of the space the rack has free. For the moment I just have a four node cluster of c2 duos for these purposes that double as desktops for the rest of the family.
What will a home user do with an 80 core, 1TB RAM sysetm? Ray tracing? Protein folding? Local weather prediction? All things really high on the list for personal computers.
I'm not sure about you, but my most immediate thought would be to simulate an extremely complex neural network, likely easily using over half the ram on that task. Combine that with coding an infrastructure for it to learn patterns well from a source of input like a webcam, and hilarity ensues.
If it could get to be of about the intellect of a small bird that would be awesome, but even if it is a spectacular failure and nothing valuable is produced, it would be awesome :)
As someone who has a whole Sun Enterprise 5500 rack in his room, There is indeed a great difference between server class hardware and commodity gear, where shall we start.
Multiple power supplies, varied in number depending on your load out but hot swappable and configured as such that 1-2 of them can die before your system goes down. Along with diagnostic interface and usually visible indicators going 'part failure, replace asap'.
Same with cpus, hot swappable cpu/memory boards are a must, so long as a single cpu remains functioning the system should still run albeit at a lower capacity.
While I've already mentioned psu redundancy, the AC power outlets it uses would usually have redundancy also, with two separate connections to different circuits or ups etc.
Anyway, no commodity hardware does this, only high end, high availability stuff has this, and you will pay through the nose for it. If this octane has these features, it is very cheap for what it is.
more hardware support and more functional tasks with scope creep means larger code base. nothing to see here, move along.
7 year old girls and 70 year old grandparents are not average joes, they're extremes, meaning they are people who need nothing more than write some text, check e-mail, visit websites and draw some flowers in Gimp (or MSPaint).
How many non-IT or non-technical people do you know that need more than an office suite, web browser, email client, photo viewer/editor and an instant messenger client if they don't play games?
For most peoples home usage, that's about all I see being used. Hell I've made my own cross compilers from scratch for different architecture cpu's, and even my 'typical' usage is mostly those things (minus the graphic bits)
Linux enthusiasts, 1993: "It sucks for the Average Joe, but wait till next year" Linux enthusiasts, 2009: "It sucks for the Average Joe, but wait till next year"
Depends on your definition of average Joe, their usage and what they want to do, I'd wajor that the overwhelming majority of average people would do just fine with linux that was already set up for them for their needs.
My little sisters have been using linux since they were 7, and they aren't even into computers, grandparents who had never touched a computer till they were 70 are using it just fine also
But if by 'average joe' you mean 'gamer' then yes, it sucks.
Had failing hardware like that before, windows wouldn't even boot before dying, linux booted, I checked dmesg and it was like "wtfux sanity check failing: Danger will robinson, arms flailing wildly" quite a bit before it actually kernel panic'd.
actually, you may want to look into SI prefixes, exa is 1000 times peta, so what is being said is it takes 1e15 operations to compute 1e18 bytes of data.
That does sound just a bit unreasonable
So ... when I write technical doc in ASCII for instance it can get quite messy
If you are in a technical field, and you are used to technical things, you are a prime candidate for the use of LaTeX. Plain text with a tiny amount of mark up, it really is worth learning.
They should never, under any circumstances, be indoctrinated into any belief.
Children are like sponges, it can be hard to do that sometimes
Sounds a lot like Linux elitism...wait, Ubuntu is *worse* because it's easier to use?
I don't get why people think ubuntu is so much easier to use.. really, pretty much all modern popular linux distro's are nearly identical.
Hell the only reason I tried it and spread it to others when it first started was because of their shipit program sending me about 50 sets of cds.
Moreso, you'll find a great deal larger portion of the idiots are ubuntu users, which normally wouldn't be a problem, I mean who cares who uses what right?
The problem lies in when the idiots and former windows users influence and effectively remove useful functionality that they just don't get. Prime example being the ctrl+alt+backspace zap command in X11, extremely useful in very rare situations.. now it's off by default so if you come to a situation that needs it on a system, you can't use it.. and chances are you can't enable it at that point.
The problem is when developers listen to the idiots
The law hates jurors in the first place - all those non-professionals who evaluate things in terms of right and wrong and not on the pure bases of compliance with appropriate legal loopholes.
Problem is, the people who usually go to jury duty are those who aren't smart enough to get out of it. A few would willingly do it for their own moral reasons, but they are a minority and are quickly dismissed from cases for thinking too logically about it.
This leaves you between a rock and a hard place with a bunch of idiots, usually