Posts by A J Stiles 2669 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2006
From the article:<blockquote>However, consent is not required for reproduction or the other actions in relation to the computer program if those acts "are necessary for the use of the computer program by the lawful acquirer in accordance with its intended purpose, including for error correction".<blockquote>Obtaining a copy of a program that you have a licence to use surely falls within the definition of "necessary in accordance with its intended purpose".
People's own devices are a mess of hardware, software ..... and malware.
Probably the best way to get "BYOD" to work is to put together a custom Linux distro on CD, USB stick and PXE boot server; which handles logins via YP and home folders on NFS. No files are stored on the user's machine, which boots into a known, clean environment. This still requires people to be using devices of a certain minimum specification, of course.
Licensing costs are nil; you just need a Microsoft-hating school leaver to help you set it up.
A friend of mine had some serious phun with BBC model B's in stores that also sold software.
He would take a box of 5.25 inch floppy disks, all but a few of which was labelled "Watford Electronics Compatibility checker". (Watford Electronics were a third-party supplier of peripherals; they made an improved disk system for the BBC, better than but slightly incompatible with the "official" Acorn upgrade and some software, especially games, would not work with it.)
So my friend would ask to "check" if a game would be "compatible" with his Watford disk system. Inserting the "compatibility checker" disk into the drive of a BBC computer and pressing shift+BREAK produced a fancy screen with a progress indicator; which then asked for the game disk to be inserted, thrashed the drive a bit, then asked for the checker disk again. After a series of such disk swaps came the dreaded announcement that the game was not compatible with the WE DFS. He would return the compatibility checking disk to the back of the box, and ask the shop assistant if he could compatibility-check another game. While the assistant was away fetching it, my friend whipped out the compatibility-checking disk from the front of the box (nobody ever noticed this blatant switch, which was done with no sleight-of-hand) and booted it up.
Again the compatibility-checking process would require several disk swaps, and again it would fail. And my friend would wander off, dejected, before the shop assistant could work out what had just happened right under their nose.
Oh, yes. Same thing used to happen with Beebs and sideways RAM boards. When you decide that E00DFS has fallen over and corrupted one disk too many for your liking and hoik out the sideways RAM board, this usually happens:
BBC Computer
Acorn DFS
Language?
And you end up having to stick BASIC in the adjacent socket, because the one it came from can no longer make sound contact with a normal IC pin.
Well, now we're getting deep into trans* semantics.
There are several points you could consider to be the moment at which a person assigned male at birth becomes female. Obvious ones are: Completion of surgery; Beginning of surgery; Beginning of RLE; Hormone treatment kicking in; Beginning of hormone treatment; First time was addressed as "miss"; First time presenting as chosen gender; First time realised was transsexual; First time asked the question "Why can't I do X?". And almost anything in between.
Irrespective of whichever moment an individual trans* person chooses as definitive, and how they choose to handle events either side of it -- by treating their boy-self and their girl-self as two completely separate people, by retroactively claiming that things done by their boy-self were actually done by their girl-self, or whatever -- it's *their* choice, and not respecting it makes you sound passive-aggressive and antagonistic.
Also, because everyone is different, everyone's experience is different. Which means that what is right for one person may not be right for another.
Oh boy, we've got a live one here.
Eight bits in this context was the size of the CPU's accumulator. The address bus was 16 bits wide, meaning the CPU could address a total of 65536 bytes. That includes RAM and ROM, but not I/O -- the Spectrum used the NEC D780, a clone of the Z-80, which has separate I/O and memory buses. (Machines based on the 6502 or 6809, with their single-bus architecture, had to cram I/O into the memory map as well.) The Spectrum ROM occupies 16384 bytes, with RAM running to 16384 or 49152 bytes.
The Spectrum used effectively ONE-bit graphics, at a resolution of 256 by 192 pixels (requiring 6144 bytes); with an extension specifying the two colours available within each eight-by-eight character cell (an additional 768 bytes, making up 6912 in total). Hence, the phenomenon of "attribute clash" (player characters and the like had to be drawn within the main bitmap, rather than being automatically overlaid and collision-detected by fancy hardware. The Spectrum display generation is done within a Ferranti ULA). This would, however, leave you with a giddying 42240 bytes, less whatever the Spectrum OS itself needed to keep track of stuff, for your programs, variables and data.
Oh, and just to make it a bit more phun, the bitmapped screen is stored slightly "out-of-order", so that the whole first 16KB of RAM gets refreshed by the display generation hardware.
You have the "lying down in front of bulldozers" brigade to thank for this bizarre combination of events.
We were offered new reservoirs, but the NIMBY contingent chose hosepipe bans instead.
(It will backfire on them in the end, of course. Homes with a 24/7/52 water supply will end up being worth more than homes near to "unsightly" reservoirs.)
There comes a point where further economic growth is impossible, because there is nowhere for the economy to grow to. No matter what you are selling, there is bound to come a point where everybody who is ever going to have one has already got one; and from then on, all you can do is replace them as they go wrong.
The future is zero growth, and we have to get used to that.
Actually, the Spectrum was remarkably tolerant of abuse!
I remember I once shorted together A8 and A9 with a dodgy homebrew add-on (8255 card originally meant for a ZX81, modified and bodged onto a 37-way edge connector, and connected to a homemade lighting controller). The speccy lived, once I had removed the extraneous blob of solder.
Also did a couple of keyboard membrane replacements, just to eke out my meagre student grant. (And VCR idlers, and power transistors in amplifiers that blew fuses. Basically, if it plugged in and wasn't a TV, I mended it.)
Never did finish my combined joystick / printer interface design that ran to nearly half a pad of graph paper, though .....
Firstly, the interpreter in Android is based on Apache Harmony. Which was an unofficial clone of the Java programming language. Unofficial because it was unable (for Oracle's capricious reasons) to pass the test suite required to make it official. No intellectual property inheres in a language.
Secondly, what the "copied" code does couldn't sanely be done any other way. This places it beyond the scope of copyright protection.
Google should push to have the (non-)case dismissed, and Oracle branded Vexatious Litigants.
Actually, "Five items or less" is correct. "Less" refers to stuff, whereas "fewer" refers to things. "Five items" is a quantity of stuff, and you can certainly have less (stuff) than five items.
You could legitimately (but clumsily) write "Five or fewer items" (because you are counting things); but not "five items or fewer", because "five items" is stuff and you can't have fewer of stuff.
"Facial Recognition Software" is a scam anyway. It's *really* being done by humans; just without annoyances such as fair treatment, minimum wages or any of that sort of bolshie nonsense you get in developed countries where the poor mistake themselves for human beings.
Mathematically speaking, facial recognition is isomorphic with decompilation, and there's still not much happening in that arena.
The idea that we own every piece of data about ourselves, if taken to its logical conclusion, means that criminals effectively have a right not to be caught, if they refuse to sanction the use of data they own by the police to catch them.
On the other hand, any of us could suddenly be declared a criminal .....
This is a much bigger issue than you think, whatever you think.
So does this mean that coal-fired power stations will analogously be required to insure themselves against mining disasters?
More coal miners' lives have been lost in the course of digging up coal to be used for generating electricity, than would have been lost in nuclear incidents had the two technologies been in use for the same amount of time.
Anything else is unfairly discriminating against nuclear power; which probably is the only viable option to fill the gap until renewables become self-hosting (i.e. when the amount of energy generated each year by renewables exceeds the amount of energy consumed each year in building new renewables-based generation capacity).
Most of the "OMG lingering data!!!!!1!" is FUD, designed to persuade people to destroy perfectly good HDDs so they can sell more new ones (or possibly, to persuade people that data was recovered from a HDD, and not by other means that Article Five of the UDHR was meant to protect against).
Credit card numbers become useless after the card expires (every 2 years or so) anyway.
Channels 31 to 38 (aka the gap between band IV and band V) are the channels no TV aerial is designed to receive. Hence why, in the pre-SCART days, VCRs used to have their RF output somewhere in that range -- and also why, in the analogue days, Channel Five was so difficult to pick up.
"Surely it would make more sense to block copying media files that have been bought from legit sites (i.e. iTunes, Amazon etc) and only allow them to play via the device you have it located on (maybe a stamp of some sort until an authorised move was done)."
Great idea! Shame that it's impossible and that the impossibility is a limitation, not of present technology, but of the universe itself (so nothing anyone could invent would make it possible).
If DRM was mathematically possible, you might have a point. But it isn't, and you don't. Because ultimately, you have to deliver both the ciphertext and the decryption key to the recipient; and you don't know what they are going to do with them. You don't know that there won't be a camera pointed at the screen, or a mic at the speakers (desperate people do desperate things). Whatever convoluted scheme you can come up with to make it harder to access the content, it's simply a matter of time before someone manages to reverse-engineer it; and then it's rendered instantly useless, because as long as there is one copy in the wild without your Digital Restrictions Management, there are potentially infinitely many copies.
Hollywood are going to have to learn to do without the revenue, I'm afraid. They've had it all their own way for too long. Let them take their ball and go home. Creative people will still create.
Remember that in the UK, some people don't have to break the law to be labelled a criminal, and some people can keep their "law-abiding citizen" badge despite openly committing several crimes. Such are the wonders of the class system. (On the other hand, under the class system, poor black people get openly sneered at for the contents of their wallets, not so much the colour of their skin. So it makes us less racist.)
Exactly what constitutes Fair Dealing is for the Courts to decide. No jury in the land would send you down for making a cassette from a CD or LP to listen in your classic car with only a cassette deck, but the CPS wouldn't prosecute such a case precisely because of the precedent it would set.
The only ways you'd have occasion to worry about it are if Mr Plod obtains a warrant to search your premises on the strength of a home-taped recording seen in your car, and evidence of something more serious comes to light; or if some future government decides to mess with the British court system -- abolishing trial by jury, for instance, or not accepting precedents as binding.
It's going to help because it will mean that any sufficiently-clueful third party will be able to fix faulty software, not just the original vendors.
For instance, Symantec could release a fix for a truly egregious bug in Windows that Microsoft were doing nothing about. And, knowing just how much standing they would lose if Symantec fixed a bug for them, Microsoft would take a hell of a lot more care in the first place.
Also, it would put a stop to the widespread practice of writing crap code because you don't expect anybody else ever to see it. Did you see the very first Open Source versions of Mozilla or OpenOffice.Org? They were *full* of schoolkid errors (OO.org 1.x wouldn't even build on any system with a word length != 32 bits).
I have a much better idea: Require for any software sold or given away in the UK and intended to run on general-purpose hardware to be accompanied by the complete machine-readable Source Code and Build Instructions.
It needn't come with the right to distribute copies, if the software publishers want to make money selling software; just the right for users to know what is running on their machines, and if necessary alter it to suit their individual circumstances.
Not having the Source Code has done absolutely diddly-squat to prevent the rampant piracy of Windows and Office, nor has it made IIS more secure than Apache (which powers more than twice as many sites as IIS). Having it, on the other hand, could have drastically reduced the severity of the malware attacks we have seen.
Also, the Source Code *is* a guarantee: it is a guarantee that the software, when run on a computer which is working properly, will do exactly what the Source Code says it will do. (This might not be the same as what you wanted it to do, but that is another matter.)
Remember, someone's going to invent a decompiler anyway one day. It's only a matter of time before they do.
The point I was making was, if the casual user unburdened by excessive clue (sorry you didn't like the cute "Fred in the Shed" moniker) can't get a pirated copy of Photoshop for free, they are more likely to go out and pay for *something else*, for less than what Adobe want for Photoshop. So while a pirated copy of Photoshop probably does represent a lost sale, it's probably not a lost sale for Adobe, but for *one of their competitors*. Which includes The GIMP -- which can be had for nothing, legally.
The thing everybody seems to forget is that, for most people, "Not breaking the law" is actually a very weak selling point -- at least when the chances of prosecution are small enough. Big software publishers know this; which is why they tolerate (to the point where it borders on encouragement) rampant piracy among casual users, as long as businesses pay for their share. Because at least those Freds are going to end up knowing how to use *their* product, and not some competitor's product. And the few that end up working in the industry, will have their new employers buy what they already know.
Piracy of Windows, Office, Photoshop, AutoCad and so forth helps Microsoft, Adobe and Autodesk, and harms vendors of inexpensive, competing applications.
Why would someone pay even £20 for a photo editor, when they can get Adobe Photoshop for nothing and "It's what the industry uses" ? And if they ever get a job which requires them to edit photographs, then they have already learned to use Adobe Photoshop in the meantime.
Had Adobe locked down Photoshop more tightly to prevent piracy, then it's likely that Fred in the Shed, no longer able to get a pirate copy of Adobe Photoshop, would gave gone out and bought something else instead. So all those pirate copies of Photoshop are hardly lost sales for Adobe (though they might well be lost sales for Adobe's competitors. Not that that is even a market that any sane person would enter; it's very hard to compete with free -- unless you have some other selling point, such as the ability to run on the user's choice of hardware, or an appeal to some notion of "purity" [whether that be "I'm not breaking the law", "I'm not giving money to baby-poisoning multinational corporations" or "I know exactly what is running on my hardware"]). It's also likely that a whole army of Freds in a whole bunch of Sheds, deprived of free lessons in how to use Adobe Photoshop, might have ended up persuading their future employers that something other than Adobe Photoshop might satisfy their needs, and for a more modest price to boot -- in other words, lost sales for Adobe.
Yes, the big software publishers really do have it all ways up. They get to b!+(h about how they are getting ripped off, aid and abet the people who rip them off, and deprive their competitors of market share by virtue of their product getting ripped off. And although Cheap Photo Editor 2012 by Mom+Pop Software was ultimately killed off by piracy, nobody is ever going to believe that; because no goon squad dawn raid ever turned up a single pirate copy of it.
You may have meant this as a joke, but such devices already exist. They are called "air source heat pumps", and the heat extracted from the outside air can be used for space or water heating inside the building.
Since one kilowatt of electricity can move heat from place to place at a rate of three or four kilowatts, and ends up as another kilowatt of heat on the output side, it means you are effectively getting heat for somewhere between one-quarter and one-fifth of the price of the electricity you would have used to produce it.
That works out cheaper per kilowatt-hour than mains gas; and, assuming the price of gas increases more quickly over time than the price of electricity (which is reasonable; since gas is a finite resource, not all power stations burn gas and more electricity is going to be generated sustainably in future), is likely to become more economical over time.
Not everybody is running Windows. It would have been nice to have known whether these printers support PostScript or PCL natively in hardware (and therefore are easy enough to use with non-Windows systems).
Remember, Microsoft can refuse to do business with anybody, anytime, for any reason or none .....
...... it is that more battles are lost through error than won through brilliance. Having a technically superior product is no guarantee of success, if you make a bad marketing decision.
Of course, if Microsoft really did deliberately mess up APIs (and that's not at all unlikely; Office versions up to 2000 appeared to reimplement some of the low-level functionality of Windows 9x) then that's another matter entirely.
"burning algae oil does produce CO2. Creating it is supposed to use up CO2 too, but I don't see Orlowski give a figure for how much is used vs how much produced on combustion."
It's the same amount, obviously. Or weren't you listening in science class when the teacher explained balancing chemical equations?
Kudos to The Reg for referring to Morris as a transgender woman, as opposed to "a transgender man dressed as a woman" as I saw in one other news source running the story.
Now, to ruin the nice tone I just established: The backside in those pictures is hardly a good advertisement for the process, is it ?!
LEDs are *diodes*. You can actually use them as their own rectifiers, if you can live with only half of them illuminated at once.
The reverse breakdown voltage (when they act like Zener diodes) is greater than the forward voltage drop for all LED chemistries I have seen. You can wire up a nice long series chain of back-to-back pairs (blue or white LEDs need about 3V to light them, and Zener at about 4V, so they will only be dissipating any power half the time) and drop the excess voltage with a capacitor (isolation is not necessary). You can safely leave the leading power factor of such an arrangement uncorrected, as it may help to cancel out the lagging PF of another appliance. (And anyway, on most tariffs, you don't pay for reactive power.)
Also, "A transformer isn't very efficient, especially the square ones" is just plain wrong. Transformers are reckoned to be the most efficient machines ever invented. If you use enough copper and decent steel, anyway.
The 6502 uses twos complement arithmetic. You have to set the carry with SEC before you begin a subtraction, is all, because there is no SCS (set carry and subtract) instruction. Afterwards, the carry will be set unless we had to borrow one from the next byte.
Also, the 6502 writes multiple-byte numbers units-first; but the 6800 is units-last.
As to the "out of order framebuffer" thing, I always thought this was just a consequence of using the display generation process (which obviously must read every byte of the framebuffer memory) to perform DRAM refreshing. (The Z80 can do its own refreshing, but only up to 16K bytes as the R register is only 7 bits.)
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