The Lexmark case is really difficult to apply, because in that question the only purpose of the software in question was to restrict access; it served no purpose but to activate the hardware. That was the basis of the judgement: since the software was necessary to make the cartridge function, it was not copyrightable and duplicating it was not a "circumvention." Since there are other ways to make Pystar's hardware functional (eg. install Windows or Linux on it) that argument doesn't apply in this case.
Likewise, once you buy a disc containing OS X, you have access to all the code stored on that disc. The access control is your purchase of the disc, not the interaction between the disc an an Apple-branded computer.
Which is all well and good for the boxed copy that Pystar ships, but not for the cracked copy that they preinstall. Legally, the included shrink-wrapped copy and the on-disk cracked copy are two separate issues.
Apple can say those copies are "meant" for whatever they want, but according to 17 USC 117, you don't need to listen to them. You can buy the software, reject the license, and install it using your statutory rights instead of anything granted to you by Apple.
...all it requires is that you throw out 12 USC 1201.
...that the courts will see cracking Apple's DRM as "functional changes to get the software properly running." In fact, I think there's a fairly recent addition to copyright laws that explicitly prevents that.
They should care -- they pay for that. Macs don't show up by accident -- they show up because Apple pays for them to show up. When you buy a Mac, part of what you pay goes for Apple to buy product placements.
Just FWIW, the last time I checked Apple had the largest product placement budget of any computer maker I could find. At least at that time, HP had something like 10 times the computer sales, but less than one third the product placement budget. Source, please.
As far as I can tell, Apple's product placement "budget" consists largely of making flashy-looking hardware that style-conscious Hollywood set designers want to use. They officially deny paying anything for placement.
(I have heard that they give away freebies, though. Supposedly that's how the Macintosh Plus got into the Scotty scene in Star Trek IV)
Why are we so hell-bent on breaking down society that we can't have people just use and pay for a transit system?
"We" aren't. Most people don't understand the attack involved, are too lazy to learn about it, and are honest (or fearful of prosecution) enough that they wouldn't exploit it even if they could.
What people are upset about is that the transit authority tried to suppress the students from announcing that the emperor had no clothes. If you want to go out naked, fine, but don't get sue-happy when someone calls you on it. Either put some clothes on, or shut up and strut it.
I find working from a command line to be the most efficient way to get things done, which is in opposition to most of the world.It often is the most efficient way to get things done. But I doubt even you would say that using the command line for, say, file management, is more natural and understandable to than dragging icons around with a mouse. Even an illiterate use could understand what is going on there.
(This is not to suggest that a mouse-icon interface is the ultimate form of file-management UI, but it is useful as a point of comparison)
I don't really think it's possible to quantify "usability" when to most people it's best rendered as "similarity to Microsoft products." Well, consistency is certainly a part of usability. If it's possible to just recreate what Microsoft (or whatever industry leader you can expect users to be familiar with) has done, then absolutely you should not re-invent the wheel. Unless you're sure can build a kick-ass wheel.
For less-well-defined domains, (e.g. totally new classes of software) it is certainly possible (though not easy) to quantifiably measure usability. Most of it involves counting clicks/keypresses, timing testers with a stopwatch in a lab, and surveying users. This requires face-to-face interaction and money, which is where most FOSS projects come up short.
You get them home and they may work, and they may continue to work. If they do, you might have got a good deal, but there is absolutely no guarantee that they will work, nor that they will continue to work in the future. In contrast, DRM-free goods are guaranteed to work for as long as you want them to. In contrast, DRM-free goods are guaranteed to work for as long as you want them to.
If anything, you get a better after-sale guarantee with a DRM'ed product, because they're produced by companies that want you to keep doing business with them (eg. iTunes, Windows Genuine Advanage.) Most DRM-free products (eg. CDs, Linux) come with no guarantee of any effort at continued functionality.
Sure, a skilled or educated user/hacker can use and extend unrestricted products without restrictions, but that's far from a guarantee. That's a user exercising his rights and skills.
Innovation is 90% efficiency solar panels or 100 MPG cars . No, that's not innovation, that's implementation. Being able to say, "Mine goes to 11!" is a nice feat, but it's nothing new.
On the other hand, taking an existing, underutilized or unattractive technology out of the lab (say, microprocessor-based computers...or Unix...or multi-touch interfaces) and turning it into something simple that Joe Schmoe can take look at and say, "Hey, I could use that!" is innovation. It's not the same degree of innovation as the conception of the first microprocessor, or Unix, or multitouch interface, but finding the first practical function for a geeky technology is far beyond what most engineers or product designers do.
Life is too short to do something you don't love for a living.
You know, you're right.
Incidentally, I'm looking for a job that includes reading scifi books, drinking diet soda, and driving sports cars. I don't have any code to show you, but to demonstrate my qualifications, I'd be happy to offer commentary on the books I've read, show you the mountain of empty cans in my recycle bin, and get the state to verify my clean driving record.
For example, Google Maps (and Street View) allows you to get a direct url for exactly the area you're viewing at the moment. I can give you, for example, a direct link to a street level view of a museum in Chicago or a park in Atlanta or the Golden Gate Bridge. Even though you got to them by searching, panning, and scrolling.
Most apps don't bother letting you pass these sorts of parameters in, which is unfortunate. But it's certainly possible to encode all of this in a URL (and even, potentially, publish an API so that other services can deep link into them) if the developer has enough foresight. Few do.
Yes, indeed, why would you fax, sign, and fax when you can skip all of that and scan, save, atach, email, print, sign, scan, save, attach, and email? What kind of dinosaur would use such an old technology when new technology is available that can replace it, with only a few more steps!
(Yes, I'm aware that there are a hundred and one ways to streamline the exchange of electronic documents. The problem is most of them are just as expensive and less reliable than an analog fax machine using copper wire.)
The countries that use fax machines are the ones that do the most business. The US, yes, and Japan and the UK. Partly because business is slow to change, but mostly because the replacements are harder to use and more trouble prone.
That $200 or so you'd pay is probably close to the realistic guideline of cost+profit for providing service to you, given that you will likely use your phone within a given region more often than not.
Which almost makes sense, except that they're charging you $200 not to provide service. It's a "termination" fee, not an "activation" fee (which they also charge you when you establish service.)
I have a Mac, and I do web development. Previously, I used Firefox, with the User Agent Switcher, Venkman, Firebug, and Adblock. I considered these plugins indespensible.
Since the release of Safari 3, I use that, with SafariBlock. Why?
- Safari's Web Inspector makes Firebug, Venkman, and the DOM Inspector look like crude hacks. - Safari's Develop menu has over a dozen popular UA strings pre-populated. It would take half an hour to look them all up and enter them into User Agent Switcher. - SafariBlock is not quite as versatile as Adblock Plus, but it accepts the same filterset subscriptions and works pretty seamlessly. - Safari feels faster (and is faster, when comparing released versions, at benchmarks.) - Release versions of Safari tend to be at least as standards-compliant, and frequently moreso, than released versions of FFx. - For the above two reasons, pretty much everone (Nokia, Adobe, Google, GNOME-Epiphany, etc.) looking for a browser engine recently has chosen WebKit over Gecko.
Your needs may vary, but in my case, all the add-ons in the world only serve to make Firefox look like a bloated, kludged-together shadow of Safari.
DOE, which does the US nuclear weapons simulations, is probably the largest single buyer of capability-class supercomputers, but still a small fraction of the total. Even within DOE, only a large minority of systems are dedicated to Nuke simulation. Sandia, livermore, and Los Alimos all have 2-3 large nuclear simulation machines each. (or will admit it publicly) Large systems at Pacific Northwest, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkely and Argonne are used for open science research.
I suspect that the NSA buys more supercomputing iron than the DOE, but it's impossible to prove that, of course.
An OLPC, a throwaway off of Craigslist that you throw Ubuntu on...it doesn't have to be fancy, so long as it has an 802.11* card. It'd cost maybe US$200, and it'd have a dozen uses. Hotspots are easier to find than public terminals anyway.
Almost as if they had just... evolved to cope with the massive doses of radiation they cop every day.
The tricky thing about evolution is, only the survivors survive it.
Naturally, some sub-population will survive and, lacking competition, thrive. Most humans, though, would consider it unacceptable to eliminate, say, the 50% of a population that is most susceptible to radiation (or heart disease, or any other condition) even if the surviving population was stronger and better adapted as a result.
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The Lexmark case is really difficult to apply, because in that question the only purpose of the software in question was to restrict access; it served no purpose but to activate the hardware. That was the basis of the judgement: since the software was necessary to make the cartridge function, it was not copyrightable and duplicating it was not a "circumvention." Since there are other ways to make Pystar's hardware functional (eg. install Windows or Linux on it) that argument doesn't apply in this case.
Likewise, once you buy a disc containing OS X, you have access to all the code stored on that disc. The access control is your purchase of the disc, not the interaction between the disc an an Apple-branded computer.
Which is all well and good for the boxed copy that Pystar ships, but not for the cracked copy that they preinstall. Legally, the included shrink-wrapped copy and the on-disk cracked copy are two separate issues.
...that the courts will see cracking Apple's DRM as "functional changes to get the software properly running." In fact, I think there's a fairly recent addition to copyright laws that explicitly prevents that.
Sorry, my cat brushed the keyboard as I was hitting submit. The actual link is:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinvestor/industry/2007-03-08-apple-marketing_N.htm
They should care -- they pay for that. Macs don't show up by accident -- they show up because Apple pays for them to show up. When you buy a Mac, part of what you pay goes for Apple to buy product placements.
Just FWIW, the last time I checked Apple had the largest product placement budget of any computer maker I could find. At least at that time, HP had something like 10 times the computer sales, but less than one third the product placement budget.
Source, please.
As far as I can tell, Apple's product placement "budget" consists largely of making flashy-looking hardware that style-conscious Hollywood set designers want to use. They officially deny paying anything for placement.
(I have heard that they give away freebies, though. Supposedly that's how the Macintosh Plus got into the Scotty scene in Star Trek IV)
Why are we so hell-bent on breaking down society that we can't have people just use and pay for a transit system?
"We" aren't. Most people don't understand the attack involved, are too lazy to learn about it, and are honest (or fearful of prosecution) enough that they wouldn't exploit it even if they could.
What people are upset about is that the transit authority tried to suppress the students from announcing that the emperor had no clothes. If you want to go out naked, fine, but don't get sue-happy when someone calls you on it. Either put some clothes on, or shut up and strut it.
whineymacfanboy@gmail.com
Unhealthy obsession.
I find working from a command line to be the most efficient way to get things done, which is in opposition to most of the world.It often is the most efficient way to get things done. But I doubt even you would say that using the command line for, say, file management, is more natural and understandable to than dragging icons around with a mouse. Even an illiterate use could understand what is going on there.
(This is not to suggest that a mouse-icon interface is the ultimate form of file-management UI, but it is useful as a point of comparison)
I don't really think it's possible to quantify "usability" when to most people it's best rendered as "similarity to Microsoft products."
Well, consistency is certainly a part of usability. If it's possible to just recreate what Microsoft (or whatever industry leader you can expect users to be familiar with) has done, then absolutely you should not re-invent the wheel. Unless you're sure can build a kick-ass wheel.
For less-well-defined domains, (e.g. totally new classes of software) it is certainly possible (though not easy) to quantifiably measure usability. Most of it involves counting clicks/keypresses, timing testers with a stopwatch in a lab, and surveying users. This requires face-to-face interaction and money, which is where most FOSS projects come up short.
You get them home and they may work, and they may continue to work. If they do, you might have got a good deal, but there is absolutely no guarantee that they will work, nor that they will continue to work in the future. In contrast, DRM-free goods are guaranteed to work for as long as you want them to. In contrast, DRM-free goods are guaranteed to work for as long as you want them to.
If anything, you get a better after-sale guarantee with a DRM'ed product, because they're produced by companies that want you to keep doing business with them (eg. iTunes, Windows Genuine Advanage.) Most DRM-free products (eg. CDs, Linux) come with no guarantee of any effort at continued functionality.
Sure, a skilled or educated user/hacker can use and extend unrestricted products without restrictions, but that's far from a guarantee. That's a user exercising his rights and skills.
Innovation is 90% efficiency solar panels or 100 MPG cars .
No, that's not innovation, that's implementation. Being able to say, "Mine goes to 11!" is a nice feat, but it's nothing new.
On the other hand, taking an existing, underutilized or unattractive technology out of the lab (say, microprocessor-based computers...or Unix...or multi-touch interfaces) and turning it into something simple that Joe Schmoe can take look at and say, "Hey, I could use that!" is innovation. It's not the same degree of innovation as the conception of the first microprocessor, or Unix, or multitouch interface, but finding the first practical function for a geeky technology is far beyond what most engineers or product designers do.
And I agree with that in principle, but there's an RFC that dictates this sort of thing.
You know, you're right.
Incidentally, I'm looking for a job that includes reading scifi books, drinking diet soda, and driving sports cars. I don't have any code to show you, but to demonstrate my qualifications, I'd be happy to offer commentary on the books I've read, show you the mountain of empty cans in my recycle bin, and get the state to verify my clean driving record.
to do web applications.
For example, Google Maps (and Street View) allows you to get a direct url for exactly the area you're viewing at the moment. I can give you, for example, a direct link to a street level view of a museum in Chicago or a park in Atlanta or the Golden Gate Bridge. Even though you got to them by searching, panning, and scrolling.
Most apps don't bother letting you pass these sorts of parameters in, which is unfortunate. But it's certainly possible to encode all of this in a URL (and even, potentially, publish an API so that other services can deep link into them) if the developer has enough foresight. Few do.
...what it would be like if Apple came up with a benchmark for web browsers? They'd do some kind of splashy announcement. Geeks would question its relevance in the real world. Soon they'd do some new tests and proclaim that the competition now performs better on those same tests anyway. Eventually, the rabid Apple phanbois will claim that the next release will bury the competition.
Apple. So predictable.
...does the military realize that the only popular use of the prefix "cyber-" to mean "internet-related" is "cybersex?"
Is this really the association they're going for?
Yes, indeed, why would you fax, sign, and fax when you can skip all of that and scan, save, atach, email, print, sign, scan, save, attach, and email? What kind of dinosaur would use such an old technology when new technology is available that can replace it, with only a few more steps!
(Yes, I'm aware that there are a hundred and one ways to streamline the exchange of electronic documents. The problem is most of them are just as expensive and less reliable than an analog fax machine using copper wire.)
The countries that use fax machines are the ones that do the most business. The US, yes, and Japan and the UK. Partly because business is slow to change, but mostly because the replacements are harder to use and more trouble prone.
Which almost makes sense, except that they're charging you $200 not to provide service. It's a "termination" fee, not an "activation" fee (which they also charge you when you establish service.)
I have a Mac, and I do web development. Previously, I used Firefox, with the User Agent Switcher, Venkman, Firebug, and Adblock. I considered these plugins indespensible.
Since the release of Safari 3, I use that, with SafariBlock. Why?
- Safari's Web Inspector makes Firebug, Venkman, and the DOM Inspector look like crude hacks.
- Safari's Develop menu has over a dozen popular UA strings pre-populated. It would take half an hour to look them all up and enter them into User Agent Switcher.
- SafariBlock is not quite as versatile as Adblock Plus, but it accepts the same filterset subscriptions and works pretty seamlessly.
- Safari feels faster (and is faster, when comparing released versions, at benchmarks.)
- Release versions of Safari tend to be at least as standards-compliant, and frequently moreso, than released versions of FFx.
- For the above two reasons, pretty much everone (Nokia, Adobe, Google, GNOME-Epiphany, etc.) looking for a browser engine recently has chosen WebKit over Gecko.
Your needs may vary, but in my case, all the add-ons in the world only serve to make Firefox look like a bloated, kludged-together shadow of Safari.
Dyslexia is a language impairment. It has nothing to do with visual perception. It is not, as was once thought, "seeing letters backward.)
...that is, 10 degrees Celsius above absolute zero.
That's almost as bad. What you meant to say was, "-263.15 degrees Celsius."
Newsflash to Haeleth:
1. We know.
2. We don't care.
3. We have a sense of humor about it.
...when clone manufacturers, despite paying huge royalty payments to Apple for the OS, nearly drove it out of business.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone#Official_Macintosh_clone_program
DOE, which does the US nuclear weapons simulations, is probably the largest single buyer of capability-class supercomputers, but still a small fraction of the total. Even within DOE, only a large minority of systems are dedicated to Nuke simulation. Sandia, livermore, and Los Alimos all have 2-3 large nuclear simulation machines each. (or will admit it publicly) Large systems at Pacific Northwest, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkely and Argonne are used for open science research.
I suspect that the NSA buys more supercomputing iron than the DOE, but it's impossible to prove that, of course.
An OLPC, a throwaway off of Craigslist that you throw Ubuntu on...it doesn't have to be fancy, so long as it has an 802.11* card. It'd cost maybe US$200, and it'd have a dozen uses. Hotspots are easier to find than public terminals anyway.
Almost as if they had just... evolved to cope with the massive doses of radiation they cop every day.
The tricky thing about evolution is, only the survivors survive it.
Naturally, some sub-population will survive and, lacking competition, thrive. Most humans, though, would consider it unacceptable to eliminate, say, the 50% of a population that is most susceptible to radiation (or heart disease, or any other condition) even if the surviving population was stronger and better adapted as a result.