Slashdot Mirror

You'll soon get your wish!

G.W. says stock up on beer!

so, does this make any mp3 generating software liable for "viral" infringment?

No, but if you don't turn on the "ogg" option in abcde, you commit patent infringement. In the United States of America and several other countries, inventors can patent algorithms by patenting any device running the algorithm, and Fraunhofer owns patents on MP3 in several jurisdictions.

My game freepuzzlearena contains some "viral infringement" of its own, as it includes a clone of the patented game "Dr. Mario" whose object is to remove viruses from a bottle.

Feel sorry for the modem user - put more images on your page.

When I took one of the banners, I made it 10 times smaller by converting it from JPG to an indexed PNG posterized to 6 levels, ending up with a 500 byte version that travels over a 50 kbps link in the time of the average eyeblink (100 ms). I also notified the webmistress of the location of this smaller PNG.

hard to read

When I downloaded the button, I pumped up the gamma in GIMP by 2.0. This made it much easier to read.

GIF banners

A GIF would look silly next to my "burn all .gifs" button, so I converted it to PNG.

those of us who often surf through lynx

Users of Links, w3m, and Lynx will see the alt text "56K PRIDE" along with alt text for every other textual image on my site.

Games that seem to stimulate the mind either do it directly (chess, go)

And don't forget Tetanus! This falling tetramino game builds spatial skills and hand-eye coordination.

IE has always been more W3C HTML compliant then Netscrape.

More like "had always been." Mozilla 0.9.x, aka Netscape 6.1, does quite a bit more CSS than 4.x did. IE's CSS engine has a nasty problem: it inserts three extra pixels of whitespace on both sides of a floating object, even when its margin-left and margin-right are set to zero. This creates problems when creating cute little rounded corners on web pages, especially when CSS itself can only do one corner per box (fine for Slashdot's design but not for that of Misunderestimated).

Keeping a "Pentium or better" is not sufficient in the long run and the reason is just one word: "Games".

TOD is very playable on Pentium 100 computers. And if you don't like that kind of game, you can try hundreds of others with TuxNES including open-source games such as GNOME vs. KDE.

The games makers seem to push the limits of the operating system out there right now

"Games makers," or "first person shooter makers"? Not everybody is a Quakeoholic; some people enjoy thinking games such as Solitaire, SameGame, or Tetanus (a falling tetramino game). Some like the Flash games you can find at Newgrounds. They all run fine on the PII/233 MHz laptops I see everywhere at my school. Not everybody needs a 2 GHz Pentium 4 and GeForce 3 because not everybody thinks Black & White is that much more than a glorified SimCity (which, incidentally, ran on a 3.6 MHz 65816-based Super NES console).

And people will buy this new hardware (and subscription software OS'es) up because right now, they really need their fix of games.

Or they can just connect their GAMECUBE console (coming 5 November in many markets) to their current computer's TV tuner.

Keeping a "Pentium or better" is not sufficient in the long run and the reason is just one word: "Games".

TOD is very playable on Pentium 100 computers. And if you don't like that kind of game, you can try hundreds of others with TuxNES including open-source games such as GNOME vs. KDE.

The games makers seem to push the limits of the operating system out there right now

"Games makers," or "first person shooter makers"? Not everybody is a Quakeoholic; some people enjoy thinking games such as Solitaire, SameGame, or Tetanus (a falling tetramino game). Some like the Flash games you can find at Newgrounds. They all run fine on the PII/233 MHz laptops I see everywhere at my school. Not everybody needs a 2 GHz Pentium 4 and GeForce 3 because not everybody thinks Black & White is that much more than a glorified SimCity (which, incidentally, ran on a 3.6 MHz 65816-based Super NES console).

And people will buy this new hardware (and subscription software OS'es) up because right now, they really need their fix of games.

Or they can just connect their GAMECUBE console (coming 5 November in many markets) to their current computer's TV tuner.

You mean like when Netscape and IE were competing?

Were?

HTML rendering between the two browsers haven't exactly meshed.

Most sites are designed around IE 5, but I see very few problems with Mozilla 0.9.x aka Netscape 6.1, except for some Really Stupid Sites(tm) that use VBS instead of ECMAScript. HTML is not designed to be a pixel-perfect layout language; it's a structural markup language. For layout use CSS, which supports pixel-perfect positioning and is supported in current versions of IE (5+) and Netscape (6+). Except for a few glitches in IE such as inserting an extra 3px of left and right margins into the CSS box property float: and treating a newline before </div> as whitespace (contrary to the SGML spec), Mozilla and IE look pretty much the same.

I agree that Netscape 4.x is sucks. Users can't turn off CSS (cascading stylesheets) without turning off CSS (client-side scripting), and the buggy implementations of the parts of CSS it does support will only make sites look ugly.

Nope, I don't think that they should have a right to sue in that case, because it's the same thing. AIM is a strong trademark, given the installed base. Does that mean AOL should have the right to sue the Aim Recording Company

No. AIM isn't that strong. Such strengths are generally reserved for trademarks such as AMERICA ONLINE®, WARNER BROS.®, NINTENDO®, POKEMON®, MICROSOFT®, DISNEY®, STAR WARS®, and other marks along those lines where use of a trademark by a company in a related field would be considered endorsement of the new business by the existing TM owner. For example, Israel's Supreme Court overturned a registration for "BAKARDI" brand jeans because it was too similar to BACARDI® brand liquor. The Republic of China, based on the island Taiwan, also has a law about famous trademarks. And here's some information about the Federal Trademark Dilution Act of 1995, which sets guidelines for protection of famous trademarks in the U.S.

But remember Tetrisgate? The Tetris Company was found not to have a copyright or patent on the game of falling tetraminoes but merely a trademark on TETRIS®; the cloners simply changed the names of their games, all of which had been clean-room from the start. Nevertheless, the findings didn't stop a quality control consulting firm based out of Edmonton, Alberta, from calling itself Tetris Management Group. Guess the TETRIS trademark isn't that strong in Canada.

Government-granted monopolies[?] are easiest to deal with when problems are solved before they escalate; that's why trademark law (unlike US copyright and patent law) requires TM owners to react in a speedy manner, that is, either license or sue would-be infringers.

Oh, and by the way, according to Lego^H^H^H^H Elgo Irrigation's web site, there was a recent name change.

Amazing that people will pay $70 to register a domain to point at goatse.cx.

.org .com .net domains for under $12 per year at GANDI. Services offered include URL-rewriting redirection and email redirection with NO ads. The terms of service are among the best in the industry.

Why pay more? Register your domain at www.gandi.net before it's squatted.