Tim May <tcmay@got.net> wrote :

Saw this interesting application of the new hardware copyright/anti-tampering/anti-reverse-engineering regime in place"

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011107/tc/sony_robot_hack_1.html

This shows how crazy the laws have gotten. These robots are essentially computers, and the "hacks" are just new computer programs.

Imagine:

"Dell has announced they are are suing anyone who makes available software for their machines that Dell did not authorize."

--Tim May

I have my own gripe about this and related items. We've all read about MS's nasty license agreements and how they affect the spread of alternative operating systems. Well, I wanted to pick a decent graphics card that would be well supported under Linux. ATI has a lot of hooplah on their site about how they are Linux-friendly so I started there. The card I tentatively chose was the All-in-Wonder Radeon. It has MPEG2 HW, TV Tuner, Graphics engine, TV out. There is XFREE86 support and there is a project that has video capture working but no matter where I looked I couldn't find technical docs for the thing. Isn't that where most driver projects begin? It's what I've always stared with anyway. So I called their Developer Support number and was told, in spite of the talk about Linux support on the website, that they don't give that technical reference out to just anyone but that some information had been released to the Linux community. I have yet to locate exactly what was released. I know it does not include the register set description for the TVout portion and having seen SW DCT code in project sources I wonder if the HW is being put fully to use. A HW DCT makes a huge difference in performance. The net effect is that Linux development is hobbled. Is this because ATI is protecting some sort of IP? Anyway it kind of ticks me off. So there's more, I'm pretty suspicious of BIOS and MS OS snoopiness. Wouldn't it be nice to have open source BIOS? There is a Sourceforge project called FreeBIOS and a cousin called LinuxBIOS. Again, I like to start with documentation. Well the motherboard mfr offers little in the way of technical info. Same for the chipset mfr. Unless you're a corporate customer. I don't really have a lot of time to reverse engineer this shit but I'm just about mad enough to make time. Mike