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The biggest problem I've seen with how the MPEG group works is that it allows patented technologies into the standard without requiring (as the JPEG group requires) a royalty-free license from the patent owner to use the technology for implement the standard.
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I would think a MacOSX version of Quicktime would be the one which they'd choose to port to Linux, since OSX is based upon FreeBSD.

Darwin, the MacOSX kernel, is based on a NetBSD layer around the Mach microkernel. That doesn't mean apps are actually written to POSIX; AFAIK, QuickTime for MacOSX is written to the Carbon API (a reimplementation of Toolbox, the Mac API, around Darwin and the new proprietary GUI stuff). And NetBSD doesn't have Carbon.

What if Tetris itself could simulate the drugs itself? It'd probably be a bit like Tetanus On Drugs for DOS and Linux.

a 330 KB Tetris clone called Tetanus On Drugs. It's one of the few Tetris clones with a framerate. The included exe is for DOS, but it includes GPL'd source and recompilation instructions for Windows and Linux.

Every did DMT playing tertris [sic]

No, but I have done virtual DMT playing Tetris. (It's called Tetripz.) I decided to replicate the experience in open source, and the result was TOD: Tetanus On Drugs.

If you're sick and tired of video game violence, push nonviolent games such as Tetris on your kids.

Most people dream about sex and drugs in college

Well, the sex can be replaced with Tetris (imagine the 4-stick is a penis). Now you're left with Tetanus On Drugs.

You need a bigger challenge: playing Tetris under the influence.

Play Tetanus On Drugs. It's a Tetris clone for Linux, DOS, and Windows that (poorly) simulates the effect of hallucinogenic drugs.

a game of tetris that I had to solve that was simply out of control.

Psychedelic Tetris dream? Did it look anything like Tetanus On Drugs?

Didn't the Tetris Company try to sue clone developers such as Pin Eight Software?

1. SDMI content is watermarked in such a way that it survives D->A->D->A->D conversion and most audio compression schemes. Anything watermarked that hits Napster, iMesh, Gnutella, etc. is fully traceable.
2. Operating systems can be made SDMI-compliant too. For example, Windows ME and Whistler have a secure audio path that sends audio only to signed drivers. Fat chance Microsoft will sign a driver that fails to disable What-U-Hear (a waveOut to waveIn redirector) or, for that matter, any redirection to a digital stream, for audio data sent down the Secure Audio Path.

or even a sound-card driver that dumps the sound data to a place that can be decoded

There is a secure audio path in newer versions of Windows (ME and Whistler) that only signed drivers have access to. Anything sent down the secure audio path will not get sent to anything but an analog receiver/speaker/etc. because Microsoft signs a driver if and only if:

• the driver passes stress tests in Windows Hardware Compatibility Labs, and
• the driver shuts off all digital outputs (including without limitation waveOut->file, waveOut->socket, SBLive-style waveOut->waveIn, and waveOut->digital out on card).

Isn't there a Windows audio driver that records to disk?

Windows Media Digital Rights Management has a Secure Audio Path ( Google search )that only drivers signed by Microsoft can use. To get signed, a driver has to be bug-free in Windows Hardware Compatibility Labs stress testing, and it also must disable all cleartext digital outputs (including without limitation writing to a file, digital output on the card, and waveOut to waveIn like SB-Live). Unsigned drivers (like your waveOut writer) will not get signed.

Circumventing this with VMWare under Linux and a /dev/audio grabber is most likely a violation of DMCA.

Mac OS X's kernel (Darwin) is not your typical monolithic BSD kernel. It's a Mach kernel with a layer of BSD-like services around that. Darwin is Nearly-Free Software under the Apple Public Source License.

I'm running Slack on my desktop...

...and Windows 4.1.1 (aka Windows 98 + SP1) + various individual fixes (mostly security patches) on my laptop. Windows Update _does_ show a "service pack" that contains an updated jvm and security fixes.

1 HP == 745.5 watts, where watt == one newton meter per second. 1 HP == 550 foot-pounds per second.
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Mojo Nation will not monitor your browsing. It simply mirrors the mojonation.net web site on your local box.
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The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act exploits a loophole in the Constitution that makes "the lifetime of the Universe" a valid value for "limited times" in the copyright clause. It's all part of the slippery slope to make copyright perpetual. This must be stopped; click here to help.
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With all other variables equal (bus speed, HD speed, etc.), a 500 MHz PowerPC G3 is approximately twice as fast as a 1 GHz Intel PII/P!!! at doing hard-core integer number crunching (Photoshop, some 3D games in software mode, d.net) according to the SPEC integer math benchmark. And the vector unit in G4 is quite a bit easier to code for than the vector unit in PIII, giving even more speed and boosting Team Slashdot's RC5 rating.
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>Yes. They invented multi-processing.
I thought Al Gore did...

No, Al Gore was on the DARPA team that developed ARPAnet, which eventually became the Internet.

How do you think that SSE & SSE2 will be implimented in upcoming AMD CPUs starting with the mustang.

IIRC, KNI/SSE is just a clone of 3DNow! which debuted in the AMD K6 line.

...provided you have an account.
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United States dollars work only in the United States. You could say that they're "region coded" too.
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Existing DVD players could be modified to work around this.

Note: The Latin-derived word meaning "to work around" is "circumvent."

New DVD players can be designed to work around this.

Note: The region coding system is an access control system under the DMCA.

Software which runs on general-purpose computers (e.g. livid) can easily be modified to circumvent this.

Note: The DMCA prohibits circumventing the region coding system.

Don't count on getting the DMCA thrown out; the judges and senators have already been bought.

I agree that Nintendo's Mario Kart 64 software for its Nintendo 64 console had bugs in both design and implementation. Here's a small sample:

• Wario had an unfair advantage over everybody else in deathmatch mode. This wouldn't be as bad, except...
• Game purposely did not allow mirror matches.
• Deathmatch only vs. human player on local machine (no CPU opponent, no provisions for modem play) unlike in SMK 16 during the X-Band days.
• The Control Pad did not work at all, unlike in SMK 16.
• The deathmatch music sounded real pussy, unlike in SMK 16.
• Temporary invulnerability had its own problems:
  • Cheap. No way to counter an attack by someone with invulnerability, and the invulnerability was way too easy to camp.
  • Falling off the side of a bridge would sometimes deactivate the invulnerability powerup, but this was inconsistent unlike in SMK 16.
• Players with the "invisibility" powerup were also invulnerable, unlike in SMK 16.
• Banana peel was just as strong damage-wise as homing missile in deathmatch.
• Could not backup cartridge data (unlocked tracks, time trial) to memory cartridge.

Before you say, "That's not a bug; it's a feature," remember that Windows's BSODs are considered by some to be "a feature."

At least the MK64 CPU cheats less than the SMK-16 CPU.

Short answer: Buggy video drivers.

Long answer:
The Win2K driver development kit is not part of the standard MSSDK; it costs extra (filesystem drivers alone are $1000). NT4 driver developers whose companies wouldn't foot the bill had to reverse-engineer the W2K driver model, and this produced buggy drivers (don't run NT servers in more than 640x480x4-bit). This has crashed Win2K Pro (brought the whole system down; dumb stupid graphics-in-the-kernel) several times on Allegro library-based games that run fine in Win95/98/ME, Windows NT, DOS, and Linux.

What would O'Reilly do with the dustpuppy (#5260) on the cover of Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell?
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The question is, what will they do with the Cow from Practical C Programming?

Starcraft cheat code: "there is no cow level" does this give you any ideas? It sure gave the Diablo team some ideas, as Diablo II includes a cow bonus level. (Yes, I know they're both Blizzard but...)

Think Earthworm Jim. Think the official PC Space Invaders. Think South Park 64. Cow levels all over the place.

1. OP meant "Super Mario World" for SNES which was released as "Super Mario Bros. 4" in Japan.
2. Super Mario Land does work on SNES through the Super Game Boy hardware-accelerated emulator.

this sets the precident for banning programmers from being "inspired" by one person's source code to write their own equivalent code.

Precisely why RMS doesn't read UNIX® source code. The known legal workaround for this is "clean room R.E.": have one team translate the source code into a specification written in English or other similarly human-comprehensible notation, and have another team translate it back into C. And make sure all communication that passes over the Great Wall is logged so if they "see you in court," you'll have evidence that you used legal R.E. techniques.

The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was Disney's idea. Have you ever noticed how copyright extensions always come just in time before "Steamboat Willie" (first Mickey Mouse cartoon) goes PD?

Yes, perpetual copyright is constitutional.

does it stay on the harddrive and is simply not referenced until you write over it?

In most systems, yes.

Once you write over the information can it be recovered?

Law enforcement can get at several layers of deleted data.

Is there a way to change how an operating system or file system deletes files?

Create several large files (to fill up the HD within epsilon), overwrite them several times with random data, and "delete" them.

Are you telling me the entire legal industry (police, courts etc) will just ignore evidence of crimes just because its 6 months and one day old?

No, the courts will.

The Delete key queues files for deletion. The recycle bin actually deletes the file and (if you have privacy utilities installed) wipes it.

Seriously, why won't they rethink keyboards and actually have both a Trash and Delete key?

I think there's a (Shift+Delete? Ctrl+Delete?) key shortcut that does this.

Wasn't this the company that stole set-top technology from Apple?

A long time ago (before Mac and EGA), all computers could be used as set-top boxen. Apple even had a patent on its "HGR" image generation method (send the raw framebuffer data straight to a serializer and out the tv port, and let the software handle the NTSC color system). Is this what they stole?

Please what do we have to do to get /. to stop posting annoying news about company X's patent war with company Y???

First click here to open preferences. Then check the categories you don't want to see anymore (for example, Patents). Click savehome, refresh the home page, and watch the patent stories disappear.

• Step 6: With the money the company saves on IIS licenses, it can afford separate boxen, including a firewall/balancer.

They don't care about open source or Linux, just the performance that they will get from the machines

The license fee matters. For the price of an MS-IIS license, you can get another box running Apache HTTP Server. So unless well-tuned Apache is twice as slow as IIS, Apache has the lead here.

4. The virtualized DOS machine (VDM) allows only two nested DPMI (32-bit DOS) programs (NT 4 and all Win9x systems allow several dozen). The DJGPP environment requires at least three (make, gcc, cc1plus) nested DPMI programs.
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In Microsoft Windows 2000, both 5.0 (boxed) and 5.01 (sp1), there is a limit of two nested DPMI (32-bit DOS) programs in a single VDM (virtualized DOS machine). This severely limits the usefulness of DJGPP, as it relies on three nested DPMI programs (GNU make, gcc, cpp/cc1/as/ld) to build programs.
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... OpenbSd
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Every keyboard and OS in the world supports ASCII (positions U+0000 to U+007F of Unicode 3). Not every keyboard and OS supports Unihan (U+4C00 to U+A000 or something). One generally has to buy CJK input support for common consumer operating systems.
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OpenNIC, the Democratic Name System, has a .null TLD that is often compared to alt. of Usenet.
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What would you like to see more of?
-- I would like to see more political stories.
What would you like to see less of?
-- FUD coming from our camp.

I think this is called Kuro5hin.

IANAL, but for the record: "Method of exercising a cat" isn't patented; the particular method described in the claims is. Now with that out of the way...

The patent is on "a cat chases a dot produced by a laser pointer." How silly of the U$PTO to grant this. Prior art: a cat chases a beam of light from a properly focused MAG-LITE® flashlight. Is it really that non-obvious to go from a spotlight to a laser pointer?

Even if they get some people to switch, its simple to just write a program the captures output from the sound api, and records it into a wave file for later recompression.

Under new versions of Windows that implement the Windows Media Digital Rights Management Secure Audio Path, SDMI-compliant applications will play music on SDMI-compliant (no cleartext digital output to untrusted destinations such as a file or waveIn) drivers and silence on drivers that have not been signed by Microsoft to play SDMI audio.

Although, in Metallica's case, silence sounds better than most of their music.

• The memory devices and other componenets used on consoles are patented; only the console maker can authorize production of console software. For example, there wasn't an NES demoscene until the NES patents expired.
• Console makers are suing manufacturers of cartridge and disc dumping hardware (such as Bung) out of existence.

or you might want to think about the fact that cookies go across the wire unencrypted

Cookies go across the wire encrypted on shopping sites that use https (HTTP over SSL), don't they?

Gimme another Mario Kart, and watch me waste another year or two of my life :)

Mario Kart 64 had fifteen flaws in its gameplay. Mario Kart 3, for Game Boy Advance, returns to the old SMK style of gameplay with near-MK64 graphics (the GBA seems to have Sega Saturn-level graphics capabilities).