I have been following this issue for some time now and cannot really avoid the feeling that the issue isn't really in reverse engineering the BK protocols. Real issue lies in the management of the servers and ownership of the server. What other intentions could an open source implementation of BK have other than access their hosted servers?
In my view the service (whatever it is) is owned and regulated by the company or individual who provides the service. In this case the service was free, and everyone was happy about it. Open source client would destroy this control over the service and enable users to access the service without agreeing to the terms of the service. I cannot imagine how any company would allow this kind of behaviour to happen.
What I have understood is that Linus is against reverse engineering something that sole purpose is to circumvent control mechanisms of this kind of hosted service. Maybe it is not illegal as such but it is not morally correct either as the service provider should have control over their service. One could argue it actually is an intrusion to their server and accessing data without permission.
Anyway comparison to SAMBA is a bit odd as the servers SAMBA was ment to access were mostly maintained people whose sole purpose was to share the data with all legal users. There was not one company maintaining gigantic share containing all the shared data in the world.
If I understood correctly the account is not transferable according to the terms of use. Moreover according to the submitter Blizzard said there will be enough unchangeable traces of personal information left in connection with the account that the original buyer would be able to take over the account later on.
So best solution really is to cancel/suspend the old key and create a new one, even if that new key would require monthly charge right from the beginning.
Basic problem is that games cannot be developed incrementally like web browsers. If I release a game and it's not finished odds are very low that someone else would get excited and help me in finishing it. In some other areas a program with limited functionality can provide useful application to many, especially if its free -> save several $100.
Another big obstacle is resources, good games needs good artists and good sound designers. Open source developers rarely have social groups large enough to include like minded artists, 3d designers, musicians and game designers.
Of course certain type of games can be open source and I would really like to see some kind of expanding/gradually improving game that is totally open ended. Kind of like MUD, but something much bigger. Let me know if there is something like this in progress.
I don't think it's available yet, but wait few months and it should be in stores near you. Naturally they enhance it a little compared to the european model that has happened with few other models. European model works in states as well, because it has the 1900 band. Better wait for its official release anyway. Good phone, I can recommend.
My ideal device would be a phone that I can just dock into a docking station and it would be connected to my monitor, keyboard and mouse. This is not so far away, Nokia has already made phone cradle that is actually stereo speakers. With that I could listen radio, mp3s and other music files on my mobile. Enhance that concept with real docking station and I have everything I need for home electronics. (yep, I don't have tv)
What is needed still is a decent scaleable (from phone mode to docked mode) operating system running on mobile phone and speeds to reach around 1GHz + 256MB RAM. Docking station can contain 40GB HD or fast network connections.
I use my home computer for browsing, open office, and e-mail. That's all, so I could trade that bulky piece of metal away very easily.
Cellphones are not a monopoly, yet are still regulated.
Actually, in many areas (such as my own), a single cell carrier does have a monopoly (ignoring the amazingly expensive satellite phones). I have a choice of US Cellular or nothing.
With that criteria Vonage is also monopoly. Is there law that everyone must have cellular phone coverage? I don't think so. As there is no law that everyone must have VoIP coverage. Only land line coverage is needed.
Anyway I think there is nothing wrong in regulating something that connects into telephone service and behaves and is marketed as telephony system. There are logging, security, and billing requirements just for example.
If I understand this article at all, then most of it should be based on the interviews of two dozen professionals from different parts of the world. One or many of these professionals must have outlined the tone of this book, intentionally or by accident. Who would have this kind of views towards Linux and what is there to be gained?
Any opinions? I'm not following so closely to this issue to give any insight.
Good explanation, here is some additional information. I don't know M-16 but when Finnish army shoots "blanks" they are actually ammunition with wooden bullets. Reason why there is orange (yellow in finland) tip is exactly what you explain, wooden bullet doesn't have enough energy to push always the lock back. It also has second function to break the wooden bullet so nobody gets hurt. Wooden bullets can be fired for a short time but sooner or later the rifle jams.
I was in USA (Kentucky) as an exchange student in high school during 92/93. I can tell you my own perspective to the whole education system.
Initially what I took was spiral physics, advanced chemistry, ap computer science, pre-calculus and mandatory U.S. history + english. My host parents just shook their heads when they saw my selection, I was 16 at that time, just got off from school in Finland (with B average) and I had to go to junior class to be with same age students.
My first exam was physics, where I got 54/50, after that the teacher didn't put any bonus assignments there anymore. In pre-calculus there was test system that if I failed the test I could retake those parts that I wanted. I always failed first (answering perfectly to few) and retake the rest, getting all A's. In english and U.S. history me and Japanese exchange student got best grades, when I returned unfinished assignment about Midway islands to U.S. history teacher I got B, because it was the best she received from the whole class.
These were just minor oddities I observed, but what was really shocking to me was the schedule. Everything was so tightly controlled that there was 5-10 min breaks between classes, compared to 15-20 min in Finland where everyone had to go out for the break. Only way to have a reason inside was to have class cleaning (whole class took turns to do that) assignment or -20C outside.
Second and maybe even more disturbing thing about the school was identical days. Every morning started with English followed with chemistry, no change for full year. I used to go to a school where schedule is made for a week and different classes were spread evenly for a week, so schedule ran on weekly basis. That made it more interesting, spring and autumn also had different schedules.
Third thing was the amazing amount of hours the school lasted. I was used to a weekly schedule where it was likely to have 5 hour days, and 7 hour days. Total of maybe 30 hours a week, 45 min studying + 15 min break. Compared to 7 hours every day that was much less.
As a result of all these three I got bored of the school before christmas and my grades started falling during spring, I know I couldn't have made it if I had to study any longer there. For a year it was still fun, because those grades were not counted any way for my future studies. I'm about to get my MSc. before summer vacations and I really appreciate the freedom and flexibility of Finnish system, especially after seeing what it was elsewhere.
Of course my dream was to go to U.S. to study in good university because those are different case all together. In high school and junior high there is really a lot to be done, maybe some revolution is required to realize what needs to be done.
This is what I think is really needed, example of others and finding out how people should behave. Next time maybe it would have been your turn to stand up for someone else, at least you got example how to do it. Later you would give similar example to someone else. When everyone is sheltered during their childhood there is no examples on how to behave in coming social situations.
Same applies to various other aspects of life, including taking somethings that are not yours to take. If during childhood there was chances of making morally right and wrong decisions that parents reacted upon then everyone would have some example how to behave when something larger was at hand. Can I steal 1 dollar and get away with it? For child that is big deal, and should be taken seriously. If later in life this person faces situation where he could steal a lot more, there should be behavioural pattern to handle that situation already in place. It is hard make morally right decision if there is no previous example or experience.
My friend told me his most memorable story, that he still remembers. There was free magazines at mall and they decided it was really good idea to get 25c for each. So they went around neighborhood door to door selling these magazines. Someone noticed that and called his father, later same day those two boys were walking door to door apologizing and giving those 25c coins back. I think since then he knew something more.
Same applies to work and work ethics, examples must be present. Unfortunately in normal school there is nobody to take example from.
1. A movie will have made money at the box office; DVD sales are just gravy on top of that. Music isn't sold to you twice this way, you buy it on CD and that's it.
Don't forget radio play, concerts, advertisements, etc. There are plenty of ways to sell same music several times.
Indeed, that is why I prefer Fahrenheit. Digital thermometers can tell me the difference between 70 and 71 F, which is a smaller differenec than between 21 and 22 C. It's worse for pounds and kilos on digital scales.
My digital thermometer will tell me 20,4C... and my digital scale says 85,2kg. Both figures are perfectly fine for me, I don't need any more precision. Rest of the world can use decimals. Making assumptions like this without knowledge of reality may lead to this kind of misunderstanding.
Also before commenting something silly I let you know that desimals are separated with ',' not '.' where I live.
True. I always feel disturbed when people don't do "What is right", but go for "What is legal". Biggest accomplishment gained from this is that in the future Roland and other companies hire more lawyers to make sure they will not lose their IPR to some OSS developer.
My symphaties are on Roland side for this, they have done all the work and someone steals their IPR (although old one) just because at some point they were not careful enough. You could argue that they deserve to lose it, but only in legal sence. Are we all becoming lawyers?
Of course communication of this could have been handeled differently on both sides, and agreement to satisfy both sides could have been reached. Roland attitude was wrong but that's what they have to do nowadays with so many other cases, where they have legal righs as well.
I checked this and Sweden + Finland counts 63000 published medical research papers compared to 630000 from USA. Both of these countries have very fine public health care system.
Population is combined 15 million against US population, feel free to do the math.
You are just jealous because you have seen too many documentaries of blonde Scandinavian females mating habits.
Seriously that kind of parties are not meant for girl searching. In my opinion they beat traditional male bonding activities like poker night, beer drinking or superbowl any day.
Besides it's not a LAN party where porn, warez and fragging is the only purpose.
...at least not in the beginning. When I shifted my reading habits from SciFi/Fantasy to "traditional" books I came across few great books but also some rather unpleasant ones. Mostly because the book was written in a way that I didn't expect. After all I think it was worth expanding my reading habits, it gave a lot better selection to read from. Good authors are in every genre and good books are always worth reading.
If I must recommend you one book to start from then check out The Egyptian by Mika Waltari. It doesn't go too far from fantasy genre.
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Don't give too much rope, they might fall on the ground and just break their legs.
The processor seems to be rather large. This kind of measurements have lately been seen in adult industry, not in home electronics.
I have been following this issue for some time now and cannot really avoid the feeling that the issue isn't really in reverse engineering the BK protocols. Real issue lies in the management of the servers and ownership of the server. What other intentions could an open source implementation of BK have other than access their hosted servers?
In my view the service (whatever it is) is owned and regulated by the company or individual who provides the service. In this case the service was free, and everyone was happy about it. Open source client would destroy this control over the service and enable users to access the service without agreeing to the terms of the service. I cannot imagine how any company would allow this kind of behaviour to happen.
What I have understood is that Linus is against reverse engineering something that sole purpose is to circumvent control mechanisms of this kind of hosted service. Maybe it is not illegal as such but it is not morally correct either as the service provider should have control over their service. One could argue it actually is an intrusion to their server and accessing data without permission.
Anyway comparison to SAMBA is a bit odd as the servers SAMBA was ment to access were mostly maintained people whose sole purpose was to share the data with all legal users. There was not one company maintaining gigantic share containing all the shared data in the world.
If I understood correctly the account is not transferable according to the terms of use. Moreover according to the submitter Blizzard said there will be enough unchangeable traces of personal information left in connection with the account that the original buyer would be able to take over the account later on.
So best solution really is to cancel/suspend the old key and create a new one, even if that new key would require monthly charge right from the beginning.
Basic problem is that games cannot be developed incrementally like web browsers. If I release a game and it's not finished odds are very low that someone else would get excited and help me in finishing it. In some other areas a program with limited functionality can provide useful application to many, especially if its free -> save several $100.
Another big obstacle is resources, good games needs good artists and good sound designers. Open source developers rarely have social groups large enough to include like minded artists, 3d designers, musicians and game designers.
Of course certain type of games can be open source and I would really like to see some kind of expanding/gradually improving game that is totally open ended. Kind of like MUD, but something much bigger. Let me know if there is something like this in progress.
Atte.
I don't think it's available yet, but wait few months and it should be in stores near you. Naturally they enhance it a little compared to the european model that has happened with few other models. European model works in states as well, because it has the 1900 band. Better wait for its official release anyway. Good phone, I can recommend.
My ideal device would be a phone that I can just dock into a docking station and it would be connected to my monitor, keyboard and mouse. This is not so far away, Nokia has already made phone cradle that is actually stereo speakers. With that I could listen radio, mp3s and other music files on my mobile. Enhance that concept with real docking station and I have everything I need for home electronics. (yep, I don't have tv)
What is needed still is a decent scaleable (from phone mode to docked mode) operating system running on mobile phone and speeds to reach around 1GHz + 256MB RAM. Docking station can contain 40GB HD or fast network connections.
I use my home computer for browsing, open office, and e-mail. That's all, so I could trade that bulky piece of metal away very easily.
Cellphones are not a monopoly, yet are still regulated.
Actually, in many areas (such as my own), a single cell carrier does have a monopoly (ignoring the amazingly expensive satellite phones). I have a choice of US Cellular or nothing.
With that criteria Vonage is also monopoly. Is there law that everyone must have cellular phone coverage? I don't think so. As there is no law that everyone must have VoIP coverage. Only land line coverage is needed.
Anyway I think there is nothing wrong in regulating something that connects into telephone service and behaves and is marketed as telephony system. There are logging, security, and billing requirements just for example.
If I understand this article at all, then most of it should be based on the interviews of two dozen professionals from different parts of the world. One or many of these professionals must have outlined the tone of this book, intentionally or by accident. Who would have this kind of views towards Linux and what is there to be gained?
Any opinions? I'm not following so closely to this issue to give any insight.
Good explanation, here is some additional information. I don't know M-16 but when Finnish army shoots "blanks" they are actually ammunition with wooden bullets. Reason why there is orange (yellow in finland) tip is exactly what you explain, wooden bullet doesn't have enough energy to push always the lock back. It also has second function to break the wooden bullet so nobody gets hurt. Wooden bullets can be fired for a short time but sooner or later the rifle jams.
I was in USA (Kentucky) as an exchange student in high school during 92/93. I can tell you my own perspective to the whole education system.
Initially what I took was spiral physics, advanced chemistry, ap computer science, pre-calculus and mandatory U.S. history + english. My host parents just shook their heads when they saw my selection, I was 16 at that time, just got off from school in Finland (with B average) and I had to go to junior class to be with same age students.
My first exam was physics, where I got 54/50, after that the teacher didn't put any bonus assignments there anymore. In pre-calculus there was test system that if I failed the test I could retake those parts that I wanted. I always failed first (answering perfectly to few) and retake the rest, getting all A's. In english and U.S. history me and Japanese exchange student got best grades, when I returned unfinished assignment about Midway islands to U.S. history teacher I got B, because it was the best she received from the whole class.
These were just minor oddities I observed, but what was really shocking to me was the schedule. Everything was so tightly controlled that there was 5-10 min breaks between classes, compared to 15-20 min in Finland where everyone had to go out for the break. Only way to have a reason inside was to have class cleaning (whole class took turns to do that) assignment or -20C outside.
Second and maybe even more disturbing thing about the school was identical days. Every morning started with English followed with chemistry, no change for full year. I used to go to a school where schedule is made for a week and different classes were spread evenly for a week, so schedule ran on weekly basis. That made it more interesting, spring and autumn also had different schedules.
Third thing was the amazing amount of hours the school lasted. I was used to a weekly schedule where it was likely to have 5 hour days, and 7 hour days. Total of maybe 30 hours a week, 45 min studying + 15 min break. Compared to 7 hours every day that was much less.
As a result of all these three I got bored of the school before christmas and my grades started falling during spring, I know I couldn't have made it if I had to study any longer there. For a year it was still fun, because those grades were not counted any way for my future studies. I'm about to get my MSc. before summer vacations and I really appreciate the freedom and flexibility of Finnish system, especially after seeing what it was elsewhere.
Of course my dream was to go to U.S. to study in good university because those are different case all together. In high school and junior high there is really a lot to be done, maybe some revolution is required to realize what needs to be done.
This is what I think is really needed, example of others and finding out how people should behave. Next time maybe it would have been your turn to stand up for someone else, at least you got example how to do it. Later you would give similar example to someone else. When everyone is sheltered during their childhood there is no examples on how to behave in coming social situations.
Same applies to various other aspects of life, including taking somethings that are not yours to take. If during childhood there was chances of making morally right and wrong decisions that parents reacted upon then everyone would have some example how to behave when something larger was at hand. Can I steal 1 dollar and get away with it? For child that is big deal, and should be taken seriously. If later in life this person faces situation where he could steal a lot more, there should be behavioural pattern to handle that situation already in place. It is hard make morally right decision if there is no previous example or experience.
My friend told me his most memorable story, that he still remembers. There was free magazines at mall and they decided it was really good idea to get 25c for each. So they went around neighborhood door to door selling these magazines. Someone noticed that and called his father, later same day those two boys were walking door to door apologizing and giving those 25c coins back. I think since then he knew something more.
Same applies to work and work ethics, examples must be present. Unfortunately in normal school there is nobody to take example from.
1. A movie will have made money at the box office; DVD sales are just gravy on top of that. Music isn't sold to you twice this way, you buy it on CD and that's it.
Don't forget radio play, concerts, advertisements, etc. There are plenty of ways to sell same music several times.
I'm sure you would like to see that change, right? Give MS time and legal right to leverage fully on their monopoly then change will happen shortly.
Indeed, that is why I prefer Fahrenheit. Digital thermometers can tell me the difference between 70 and 71 F, which is a smaller differenec than between 21 and 22 C. It's worse for pounds and kilos on digital scales.
My digital thermometer will tell me 20,4C... and my digital scale says 85,2kg. Both figures are perfectly fine for me, I don't need any more precision. Rest of the world can use decimals. Making assumptions like this without knowledge of reality may lead to this kind of misunderstanding.
Also before commenting something silly I let you know that desimals are separated with ',' not '.' where I live.
True. I always feel disturbed when people don't do "What is right", but go for "What is legal". Biggest accomplishment gained from this is that in the future Roland and other companies hire more lawyers to make sure they will not lose their IPR to some OSS developer.
My symphaties are on Roland side for this, they have done all the work and someone steals their IPR (although old one) just because at some point they were not careful enough. You could argue that they deserve to lose it, but only in legal sence. Are we all becoming lawyers?
Of course communication of this could have been handeled differently on both sides, and agreement to satisfy both sides could have been reached. Roland attitude was wrong but that's what they have to do nowadays with so many other cases, where they have legal righs as well.
Nope, Nokia 6108 for Chinese market.
To make this post more useful I have to add that you forgot to count Series 30, which includes majority of sold Nokia devices.
I checked this and Sweden + Finland counts 63000 published medical research papers compared to 630000 from USA. Both of these countries have very fine public health care system.
Population is combined 15 million against US population, feel free to do the math.
You are just jealous because you have seen too many documentaries of blonde Scandinavian females mating habits.
Seriously that kind of parties are not meant for girl searching. In my opinion they beat traditional male bonding activities like poker night, beer drinking or superbowl any day.
Besides it's not a LAN party where porn, warez and fragging is the only purpose.
What scares me is that some people actually accept this kind of business practises. It shouldn't be open season for all competitors.
Just as long no laws are broken anything can be done, right?
...at least not in the beginning. When I shifted my reading habits from SciFi/Fantasy to "traditional" books I came across few great books but also some rather unpleasant ones. Mostly because the book was written in a way that I didn't expect. After all I think it was worth expanding my reading habits, it gave a lot better selection to read from. Good authors are in every genre and good books are always worth reading.
If I must recommend you one book to start from then check out The Egyptian by Mika Waltari. It doesn't go too far from fantasy genre.