PS3 And Inconveniencing The User

 General, Media  No Responses »
May 312007
 

Sony have recently upgraded the firmware available for PlayStation 3s; one of the features is for “upscaling” DVDs to HD resolution. Not exactly the same thing as blue ray, but definitely worth having especially given my situation. However Sony will only upscale DVDs over an HDMI connection to the TV; if you are limited to a component connection for some reason, you are out of luck.

Now this is not solely Sony’s fault as there is an agreement in place to not release equipment to upscale over any kind of TV connection that does not support anti-piracy measures such as HDCP(?). That rules out component cables.

So what is the reason for this ? To prevent piracy, but who is going to pirate “upscaled” DVDs which will offer quality less than blue ray disks and won’t play on DVD players ? Seems a little unlikely to me, or at least it is unlikely to be a serious commercial threat.

The media companies are yet again inconveniencing the legitimate consumer in the name of preventing piracy despite the evidence that pirates can get around the restrictions anyway.

Wildlife And Farming

 General  No Responses »
May 262007
 

There’s a news item on at the moment about some endangered bears in the Italian Apennine mountains, and the farmers there who are not so keen on them because they steal what the farmers produce.

What I can never understand is why the most obvious solution to this is not tried. Farmers raise livestock to sell in the marketplace; if a wild animal steals that livestock, they lose money. Make up that money fairly (with the price set to what it would have been in the marketplace) and the farmers are likely to stop grumbling so much.

Hell, instead of grumbling about wild animals (and in some cases wandering off in stealth and attempting to terminate the careers of some wild animals) they are likely to suddenly start encouraging the wild animals to breed!

The Motorist, The Pedestrian, Roads and Council Tax

 General, Politics  No Responses »
May 262007
 

A bit of an odd mixture, but this all occurred to me when I was waiting 2 minutes at a pedestrian crossing for a chance to cross the road in 10 seconds; at which point I would have to do this all over again.

It occurred to me that most of the cars whizzing past my nose were being driven by people who didn’t pay the local council tax which funds the local roads whereas I do. Seemed a little unfair that they get more time to get across the crossing than I do, when it is my money paying for everything. Don’t get me wrong … whilst I might like the roads to be a bit cheaper, and we should spend more money on public transport, I still think the roads are worth having.

Of course it is not a simple matter where every pedestrian is a tax payer and every motorist is an outside who doesn’t pay the council tax. And motorists will say that their road tax is being used to pay for the roads … which is true for motorways (which I’m not commenting on here), but not the case for local roads.

I just think we need to redress the balance between the pedestrian and the motorist a little more.

Historically we have gone to an enormous amount of effort to keep traffic moving, and it is time to accept that it just isn’t possible with the levels of traffic we can have in today’s cities. And giving pedestrians a bit more priority on the roads is the polite thing to do given that we are helping pay for the roads. We need equal time to cross the roads that motorists have to cross the pedestrian crossings, and we need more pedestrian crossings.

If it takes a motorist 20 minutes to traverse my city rather than 15 minutes, so what? The motorist will still be well ahead of the pedestrian who will take an hour or more for the same journey so they will still be well ahead.

IT: The Spam Problem

 Computing  No Responses »
May 192007
 

Just fixed the scripts that create (and update) my spam report. I decided long ago not to block spam (previously it was difficult to block it properly because of how email was setup; I could properly block it now but it would ruin the report), so I could produce an archive of spam and do some basic analysis on the content. I’ve been running the report a few years now (the oldest spam in hand dates to roughly June 2003) and it now shows the expected trends … the number of spams is growing and the size of each spam message is growing (because many these days are image spams).

Apart from the existence of spammers themselves (if they were to vanish overnight, nobody would mourn), there are two major contributions to the spam problem :-

  • People unwittingly providing the spammers with massive supercomputer with an enormous amount of network bandwidth available. Almost every
    spam you and I get has been sent via someone’s infected computer. If you don’t have a router between your computer and the internet,
    buy one online in the next 15 minutes. Whilst there are other things you can (and should) do to make your computer more secure, a router is
    probably the biggest single thing you can do.
  • ISPs who don’t bother to deal with infected machines. In the old days, if you were to warn a network administrator that they had a machine
    with a possibly dangerous infection sending large quantities of network traffic, they would move heaven and earth to fix the problem. Today
    an unfortunate number of ISPs would rather let the spam go through than possibly annoy a customer.

IT: Software Patents and Microsoft Bullying Open Source Developers

 Computing  No Responses »
May 192007
 

Microsoft has recently claimed that open source software breaches exactly 235 software patents. Apparently open source developers “burn down the patents system”. Well my response to that is “well done open source developers”. Software patents are the biggest scam out there … bigger by far that all those scams we receive in our inbox every day. I quite happily say that companies trading on their portfolio of software patents are amongst the slimiest examples of capitalism and that even Microsoft were not that bad. Of course now they seem determined to join them.

A bit of tedious history … patents were first introduced as a mechanism to protect individual inventors from being ripped off by large companies. The 19th century is full of examples of individual inventors being ripped off by large companies. So patents for “hardware” inventions are not necessarily bad things.

Software is somewhat different. Software developers utilise software libraries written by others without inspecting the libraries for ‘patent violations’. When writing new code, they will come up with solutions to problems without realising that the solution they come up with has been used before. For instance one of the many algorithms for sorting is the insertion sort; it is not the most efficient sort, but is efficient enough (and probably more importantly is a stable algorithm) and is so simple that it has probably been re-invented many times. Certainly I thought of it back when I wrote a database engine for the BBC micro. There are many examples of software patents that are this simple.

For example, Microsoft holds a patent on a mechanism for navigating a web page in a graphical browser using the keyboard which requires that the ‘current link’ is highlighted in some way. Not only is there an example of a web browser using this mechanism before Microsoft’s patent (Lynx … a text browser that does exactly what is described in Microsoft’s patent), but it is a mechanism that is so obvious that it has been invented many times independently. Text editors on text terminals in the 1970s (and earlier!) used some sort of highlighting to indicate the current ‘active point’ on the screen and many of these editors were developed independently. So Microsoft’s patent here is a development of prior art (the only new thing is the graphical interface), and the basic concept of pointing where the ‘active point’ is, is one of those things that is obvious.

Back to Microsoft’s claim that open-source software is in breach of its patents … what exactly are these patents ? Well Microsoft doesn’t appear to be letting anyone know, which is kind of underhand as it stops open source developers from attempting to remove the problematic code. Linux Torvalds also points out that Microsoft hasn’t released their own source code to see how many patents they might be in breach of. Who knows ? Perhaps Microsoft has taken open source code and then patented concepts developed by open source developers … certainly it is known that Microsoft’s TCP/IP software is based on the BSD TCP/IP network software. Linux also points out that Microsoft has probably used many technologies developed by IBM such as demand paging and the like.

Most sensible people seem to believe that Microsoft’s tactic here is to spread FUD over the use of open source software to encourage people to use their own software. Perhaps they should spend more time on making their software better rather than indulge in dubious legal practices.

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