Topic: [Announcement] Avalon ASIC Development Status [Batch #1] - page 16. (Read 155339 times)

Josh is typing an angry reply right now.

You are the twerp making broad sweeping generalizations against a nation.

Kaerf and PuertoLibre, you two are the only ones focusing in on people.  I made mention of Chinese IP laws (or lack thereof, or lack of enforcement, take your pick) and made absolutely no mention of people.

How the two of you go from this:


to

OMG RACISM!  is truly a mystery, and one best left unplumbed I would wager.  I'm frightened as to what I might find in the minds of people who can't connect two simple dots sitting right next to each other.

PS -


Why would they be doing this if it's not a huge problem in China?  If it was just as rampant all over the world, how could they be rejected from the WTO on those grounds and why would they need to curb it?  Logic fail.

Here is a good example:

There was once a company called CoreCodec who had designed the fastest H.264 decoder. They opened some of the code if I recall correctly. Then they stopped and closed sourced it.

The open source folks used their designs to incorporate some of the techniques and to gather ideas as to how it was done. The Open Source folks progressive efforts eventually paid off (through hard work) and eventually designed better decoders with higher efficiency.

That lead to widespread adoption of H.264 which until then was very near impossible to play on a normal PC without serious stuttering in the picture and playback. That spawned off dedicated "encoders" who worked with the pirates to rip thousands and thousands of movies into a highly compressed and efficient formats using the [open source] H.264 encoders and decoders.

That spawned alot of the big companies use of Online Video.

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The Closed Source company tried to sue the open source people a few times under the allegations of stealing IP. The Open Source folks laughed at them (some of the time) because they found out through reverse engineering of the software that they cut many corners to achieve their incredible performance. (Lots of allegations abound)

The closed source company CoreCodec eventually went on to sell their codec software and (I think) they were sufficiently successful. But what did they find when they went CES? (You know, where BFL is demoing non-existent ASICs)

They found that quite a few demo'ing companies in the other booths were using derivatives of their software. How did they know this? They figured it out because they put in easter eggs in their own software. While playing with the demonstration software, several companies were found to be using their IP....without payment...at CES.

They first asked and later persued some of them for misappropriation of their IP.

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Big or small, corporate or individual, some people do not honor IP. It's not a Chinese issue. It is all over the world.

Last I recall the Chinese Government was working pretty hard to crack down on IP violations and piracy in their hopeful admittance to the WTO (World Trade Organization) and becoming a member of something...which I do not recall what it was anymore.

Edit: Forgot what the WTO was called. It's been years!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTO

What are people going to do when BFL declares bankrupcy after having spent all the pre-order funds? Nada. There's nothing they can do realistically.

josh, you're too funny. i'll elect to discontinue this particular conversation with you since it does not appear it will get anywhere. i myself am not a fan of minority activist groups for the same reason you said (people that are minority activists are often racist themselves). however, we must agree to disagree here. you don't see your statement as a sterotype, i do. we do not need to fling profanities at each other in an attempt to change our minds.

Focusing in on one nationality does look racist.

The reality is Human beings misappropriate IP or simply don't adhere to the philosophy of Intellectual Property. Beyond the fact that there are 1.2 or 1.1 Billion Chinese and only 300 Million-ish Americans probably throws those statistics out of proportion. I have no clue how many European or Eurasians there are...but they also do pirate and steal IP. (Even at a corporate level)

All I can tell you for certain is that focusing in on Chinese people is improper as Humanity as a whole does it. Most of the software being misappropriated is coming from a ton of different regions and nationalities.

The Chinese people have no more propensity to steal IP (Intellectual Property) than the rest of Humanity.

Then don't write stupid shit and try to paint me as a racist and I won't call you a fucking idiot.  Pretty simple, huh? 

There is no clarification of my statement needed.  If you're not capable understanding the basic written word, I can't help you.  Trying to couch what I wrote, which is an established and acknowledged fact about the laws in a given country as somehow racist, then you are far beyond help and hope.  How the hell you got from talking about the laws of China to racism, I can not fathom, but it's probably some deep seated latent racism on your part, since typically the most racist people tend to see racism everywhere.

To answer your question, no I'm not a 300 lb American that reeks of BO, are you?  I'm not sure what that has to do with anything that's being discussed, but perhaps, again, it's something you have a deep seated, latent fear of or trouble with?
 

looking forward to seeing these in use.

whoa...there. calling your customer of multiple orders a fucking idiot is not good business practice. i made a point (even took your name out of the quote) of not outright calling your statement racist to give you the benefit of the doubt and give you the opportunity to clarify your statement.

josh, we're not talking about China. We're talking about the Avalon team (who happen to be chinese). Are you a 300 lb american that reeks of BO?

Be fair on him, he probably forgot which trolling account he was logged into and accidentally went into super offensive mode. Must be difficult having to juggle so many different personas without them leaking into each other, even for an outright professional troll. I applaude you for your commitment Josh, you're the most hard working troll I've seen in the wild. Don't take this the wrong way either, you really are very good a being an absolute dick.

Yes, because commenting on well established facts about a country is stereotyping of Chinese people... That makes perfect sense.  Fucking idiot.

The whole point is that even if Avalon decided to release a binary only version of CGMiner, what are the developers going to do about it?  Nothing.. zip.  Nada.  There's nothing they can do realistically.  That is the point, besides the one on the top of your and PuertoIdiot's head.

The USA has large community of people not honoring IP protection laws, despite many laws on the books. You can't search Google without tripping over these English sites.

The rate of convictions is very tiny compared to the size of the offenders.

Take a look at three links that you can find on Google.

http://www.slyck.com/ <--- One community hub found on google.com
http://torrentfreak.com/ <--- Another community hub found on google.com
http://forum.doom9.org/ <-- I am actually a member here. Great technical discussion(s) of all kinds. Some of the forum members here cracked Bluray encryption when it first came out. (Publicly!)

Doom9 forums is also where that particular community pushed for Google Server operators to upgrade their use of Vp6 and Vp7 (Flash) and H.263/H.264 open source code software. Resulting in Googles upgrade of their YouTube platform to "Youtube HD". (Just because they asked an operator why they were still using an old buggy version).

So if you use Youtube, the encoding software was designed and discussed on those forums.

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I do not know if Youtube publishes their various components that make use of open software in their services. I believe they only provide the link to the source code if you request it. (Per the GPL rules)

That is just one tiny example.

+1. Such broad sterotyping of chinese people/groups is getting close to racism. Like Syke said, Avalon should be judged by their past actions.

Troll spotted.  Shields up.

What "China" does is irrelevent. The Avalon team has a known history of releasing Open Source stuff. That's what matters.

How is that "flailing against an adversary" exactly?  Either it applies to the Avalon team and there's jack all anyone can/will do about it or it does not apply to the Avalon team so it doesn't matter.  Or are you seriously trying to deny the fact that China has a piss poor record of honoring IP protection laws?  Or... are you just being an apologist for the poor adherence to IP laws?

Your statement lacks some degree of context and thus it is difficult to see what exactly you are driving at.  It almost looks like kind of a random flailing against an 'adversary' (I have not yet determined if BFL and Avalon are 'competitors'.)  But anyway...

One dis-advantage of their not adhering to open-source principles to a realistic degree would be loss of sales and support by at least a segment of the community.

My observation is that the 'problem' of intellectual property theft in many areas is diminishing.  I believe that a primary reason for this is that the open-source world offers superior solutions in many cases.  Much of the closed-source world is actually a lot of hot air and/or deeply troubled code which would be dis-advantageous to employ for long-term value projects.

Anyway, I'm not buying shit from anyone until they can demonstrate a working solution, and then I'll determine whether what they are selling is worth having.  And open-source will be a HUGE part of who I send my BTC/USD to.

A binary release will need to be shipped in the Avalon device itself (compiled to run on Atheros MIPS), if it's to be ready to operate out-of-the-box.

I trust that they will release the source also.  I believe they have commented saying that they will.

Not disparaging the Avalon team, as I have no idea what they are planning... but it's not like China has a great track record when it comes to IP and copyrights.  If they did release it without the source, realistically, what is the recourse?  Pretty much zip.

I did too and didn't find much in recent history: contributors in December essentially brought device specific code which could be removed for an ASIC specific cgminer. I guess you were more thorough in your codewalk.

That's one reason I used "theoretical" for this approach: it's hard to evaluate the amount of work needed to remove past contributions when you want to relicense a codebase. From a purely ideological point of view I must say I think this is a good thing: when you originally use the GPL and grow a community of developers around your project it shouldn't be easy to remove past contributions that helped the project mature to profit on your own from the codebase.