John said:
You don't favor copyrights or legal protection for intellectual
property? If you spent years writing a book or a symphony or
developing a product that was mostly firmware, you wouldn't mind if
people copied it and sold cheap knockoffs?
I didn't say that at all. I am in favour of protection of genuine novel
inventions and copyright on creative works. I am absolutely opposed to
the idiotic USPTO granting patents on mathematical identities and
blindingly obvious prior art in the software field.
Remember I originate mostly software. And that is far more easily copied
by the unscrupulous since it is designed to run on a generic computer.
These days mostly PCs but I have done stuff in the past that ran on
everything from a humble Z80 (with a lot of paging) to a CrayXMP.
Strange thing was we learnt a few new tricks with every compiler the
code was compiled on. The Z80 compiler was very strict and minimalist.
There is an argument against copyrights and patents, but it would
change a lot of things.
Your DMCA is an insane piece of legislation intended to pander to the
rip-off merchants in Hollywood and US music industry. ISTR analogue
playback of DVDs in the US is deliberately hobbled to satisfy them.
Yes. Their mistake was making it too easy.
Exactly. Got it in one.
It looks as if hardware-hacking the varicap bandwidth limiter is
legal, but doing it through the serial port may be a crime in the US.
More fool the US legislators. The customer must always be ripped off.
Are you seriously claiming that you think the DCMA is good legislation?
The hardware is clearly capable of 100MHz operation and a trivial
command sequence will enable it (or reversibly degrade the bandwidth).
Cutting a track and a quick hardware mod would also do the job.
I don't see that changing a few bytes in NV ram using undocumented
commands is any different to swapping out the front end transistors or
whatever other tricks were done on some of the old analogue scopes to
soup them up. What about using some of the undocumented hardware
features of the profiling instructions on my Intel PCs. No doubt you
would say that infringes the DMCA since I don't have Intels blessing.
Agreed. Hackers are amazingly inventive.
Serious point here. I don't mind registering and binding the licence key
to the MAC address of one PC and/or owners name. That is pretty much
what I do. Once it is installed I cannot stop them giving it away, but I
can tell if I ever see an illicit copy who gave it away. This is usually
sufficient to discourage all but the most untrustworthy characters. Most
people are basically honest but require a bit of encouragement.
I rather like the game industry copy protection where an illicit cloned
game would play OK for 5 or 10 minutes and then have gravity decrease to
zero or mutate the laws of physics in some other way. Enough time to get
people hooked on the gameplay but still needing to buy a copy.
I absolutely hate paranoid invasive security measures like dongles on
parallel ports I no longer have that only work on slow machines or
require the DVD inserted every 10th use. These generally only
inconvenience genuine purchasers without putting up that much resistance
to a concerted attack by professional pirates. The Chessmaster series of
programs is a good example of this daft insert the CD method and it is
protecting something that retails for about £10.
If you have ever been in the Far East you will know what I mean about
knock-off software being everywhere (and often laden with malware).
I don't intend to hack any of them and I never steal IP. I hope that
people won't hack my products and steal my engineering investment.
You never knowingly steal IP. You have no way of telling when the slimy
fat lawyers from Patent Carpet Baggers Inc will come knocking and demand
that you pay a huge ransom for infringing their US patent on "whatever".
And 50 MHz is a good place for a bench scope, clear of a lot of FM and
TV crud. The Rigol looks great at 50 MHz, but noisy and ringy at 100.
But if you happened to want to use it at 100MHz then enabling that
feature would be useful. In the UK 85MHz bandwidth would be OK.
Waveforms with sharp rise times always look worse at higher bandwidth.
Regards,
Martin Brown