The reason that the "core" bits of NX were always Free is because dxpc (and, thus, mlview-dxpc, from which NX sprang) is only available under the GPL.
If i was involved in dxpc (or mlview-dxpc, really, although I'd imagine most of those changes are owned by the NX folks) development I'd be lawyering up at this point, if only to get some kind of proof that I wasn't being ripped off.
That's NOT going to be your average user. That's going to that same class of idiot that randomly sticks ram modules into their motherboards without regard to whether the motherboard will accept that particular speed or configuration. The kind who tries sharing his printer by plugging it into the usb port on his PVR, the kind who has his entire living room plugged into a bar plugged into a power bar plugged into a power bar. The kind who have their cable modem plugged into a LAN port on their router, the kind who plug their TV into their PVR using an HDMI to DVI adapter and wonder why their is no sound only to then plug in a set of composite cables and watch everything on the composite input "in HD".
Nice examples, but there's no reason that audio won't work over DVI equally well as over HDMI. There are no HDMI "audio pins", audio is sent during the video VBI, and works equally well over DVI-DVI, DVI-HDMI, and HDMI-HDMI, assuming the source device supports HDMI audio.
Here's the catch. When its a company faced with punitive damages, no one seems to have a problem. When its someone of wealth, no one seems to have a problem. But when its their pet illicit act, suddenly everyone is upset about how broken the system. In fact, you could actually argue that your reaction actually validates the system is "blind" and working properly in this specific detail.
No. People have a problem because the damages awarded are thoroughly disproportionate to the act committed. I'm amazed you can't grasp this, I really am.
Ugh, replying to my own post:
In the interest of fairness, it's worth noting that I have no involvement in this whatsoever besides being thoroughly unimpressed with burst.net's behavior. As a result, my opinions above are just that, opinions; not grounded in any first hand experience whatsoever.
My rage upon finding out what
So, the Burst.net guys get a request for information about a machine they host which has ~70k users, give or take. Instead of asking the box's sysadmin (who's their CLIENT), they pull the pin, then go on to mutter vague conspiracy-minded commentary such as "getting a refund is the least of his (the site owner/sysadmin) problems" on fora such as WHT (see http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=05a61aabdfcacdb369e1582aff4686a1&t=964013 ) Apparently the fact that he _received_ abuse complaints in the past was grounds to terminate his service; never mind the fact that he had SEVENTY THOUSAND USERS and acted on DMCA notifications and other abuse requests in a timely fashion, which is better than can be said about a lot of sites.
Had burst.net forwarded the request to the site owner (or even simply given the feds his name, and explained how he fit in) instead of disconnecting the machine, making borderline slanderous statements (such as 'he'll never get his data back' and 'a refund is the least of his worries right now',) they would have come out of this looking reasonably good. As it stands, you'd have to be completely brain-dead retarded to even think about giving them money.
The fact that VP8 is incredibly SIMILAR to H.264 (but has several almost arbitrary differences in key places) suggests that it was written with the intent of avoiding specific patents in the H.264 pool. If you don't match all claims of a patent, you're not infringing that patent.
It's unlikely that VP8 would be as similar to H.264 as it is if its authors hadn't set out to deliberately NOT infringe H.264's patents.
When the reaction hit the point of being self-sustaining, one of his colleagues would take an axe and chop the rope, dropping the control rod back in place to absorb the excess neutrons and halt the reaction before it was too late.
Leading to the term "SCRAM", short for "Shit! Cut Rope, AxeMan!"
IMEIs are not used at all in the call routing process, and are, ultimately, pretty easy to forge convincingly. Granted, this will stop everybody whose handsets have totally bogus IMEIs, but as long as the first 8 digits (type allocation code) and check digit are correct, then there's very little India can do without impacting legitimate customers.
GREAT idea.
The problem, as I understand it, isn't that 3D hardware is difficult to handle in a VM (it's not, really, you simply paravirtualise calls to the 3D hardware and translate them into libGL calls in the VM host software). The problem is that doing so in Windows is practically impossible, because of MS's licensing terms for the DDKs you need. Smart move on their part, of course, if Paravirtual D3D was considered a first-order citizen of windows in the same way that NVidia or ATI D3D was, then nobody would have any really compelling reason to use windows as any sort of on-the-metal OS.
While this holds true for both directx lower-level drivers and ICDs to suit MS OpenGL, it's possible to simply REIMPLEMENT OpenGL, as everything (barring perhaps the "WGL" parts specific to windows, i'm honestly unsure about that) is nicely standardised. This doesn't help with DirectX, so the approach to date has been to replace d3d8.dll and d3d9.dll with mingw-compiled versions of the Wine D3D dlls, which simply wrap DX in OpenGL.
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
