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I want to patent something, and I understand that to get your patent accepted, all you have to do is put "On-line" in front of it!

How about this:

"An On-line method of keeping and modifying a journal corresponding to entries in the Gregorian calendar. This method, comprising a transaction processing front-end, a database back-end, a Gregorian calendar lookup module, ..."

Or this:

"An On-line method of providing illumination on demand. This method, comprising of a Java Servelet that responds to specific user-defined input by displaying a pre-specified color and intensity of light..."

Gosh, the possibilities... Now that it's online, it's a new idea! Can we take this further?

"A method of holding drinks and keeping them cool while in the garage."

Wow, now that we're in the garage, suddenly it's a new patent! I love the US Patent System!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Ooo, the dread "Overrated" moderation.

Would anyone care to reply to my post, instead of silently dissenting?

I'd love to hear some actual opinions, from real people...

Here's some ammunition, if you think it might help...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I knew a boy from Taiwan who came over here maybe 8 years ago, and he had a device that had an integrated TI-81, currency converter, TaiwaneseEnglish dictionary, etc., etc.

A quick search should turn up some results, though; I found Lingo easily enough.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

How Do You Prevent the Spread of Viruses?

You can prevent the spread of a macro virus. Here are some tips to help you from being attacked.

Know where you get a document If someone sends you a document or file, be sure you know you can trust them. Is this person someone you work with? Would this person send around files that have been sent from untrustworthy sources?

Talk to the person who created the document If you are unsure whether or not the document is safe, contact the person who created the document.

Use Office 97 macro virus protection In Office 97, the applications will tell you if a document you open contains macros. This feature allows you to either enable or disable the macros as you open the document. For more information, read Turn On Macro Virus Protection.

Use virus scanning software to detect and remove macro viruses Virus scanning software can detect and often remove macro viruses from documents. Microsoft recommends using anti-virus software that is certified by the International Computer Security Association (ICSA). You can view a current list of ICSA-certified anti-virus products at the ICSA Web Site.

I got it.

If you're having problems with the site, (you have, say, Flash 4 for Linux installed, but the JavaScript is giving you trouble) try going here.

Of course, once I tried to *play* a game, it said...

"Mac users! We
haven't forgotten
about ya. All these
great games will be
ready for you soon so
hurry back."

Grr. Someone doesn't get it. Time to play some games on XMAME...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Joust, Spy Hunter, and Rampage. (I sucked at Defender)

I could never get the hang of the controls on the arcade Spy Hunter, I did much better at the Nintendo version.

Joust, on the other hand, was awesome, as was Rampage with three players.

So are these games really free now? Can we finally use them on MAME without fear of retribution? ('cause it does say "exclusively on shockwave.com...)

I don't think that's very fair. Especially since their page was broken enough to give me a Javascript error instead of taking me to the Shockwave download page, and *then* they said it was "downloading", with nary a mention of those other "platforms" that people might be using, yea, even on the web.

When I did try to get it, it redirected me to "Flash 4 for Linux", which I already have. I guess Shockwave does stuff that Flash doesn't? Oh well, I at least know that their Javascript looks pretty broken on my version of netscape. Otherwise, it'd redirect me to the proper page.

Anyone know the absolute address of this one?

And who would write an emulator in that stuff anyhow? Weird...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

But never forget that we do have the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of bug-free software!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

From the copy of Microsoft Visual J++ 6.0 Professional Edition that I won today in a raffle:

"You must accept the
enclosed License Agree-
ment before you can use
this product. If you do not
accept the terms of the
License Agreement, you
should promptly return
the product for a refund."

Of course, it also says on it:

MONEY-BACK
Microsoft
30-DAY
GUARANTEE

...and it has no information on how to return it.

Well, since I don't use Windows, I'll try to find a way to return it within 30 days, and maybe get some cash.

But could someone explain to me how I can agree to something without ever seeing it, and later when it breaks get told "It's your fault, by opening the package, you waived all your rights..."?

Ah well. I don't think the GPL has adopted *that* clause yet, so I'll continue on my merry way...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Pardon me, are you referring to what I wrote about Word? Hey, I only tried to avoid *two* style flaws on that one...

...and I don't see a flamewar yet, perhaps because my point was, most software can't be all things to all people. Any time there is an implementation choice, someone won't like it. And if you add a checkbox to switch between them, someone won't like it because there are too many checkboxes. And if you arrange them on separate tabs, some people will find it too confusing. And if you...

(also, if you check, my post was moderated as "Funny", amongst other things. If I'm ever being *entirely* serious, I might put a disclaimer at the top, saying so...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I don't care *what* it is, widespread use or playing of MPEG movies sounds good to me!

I'm tired of seeing all these ASF files on the web that are unreadable under Linux. Microsoft even pulled their "NetShow for Linux", (even if it didn't really work in the first place) so the entire format is unsupported.

Linux already has a bunch of MPEG-1 video players, some of them more free than others, some with snazzier interfaces, and some decent MPEG-2 players as well, but I just wish people would standardize on a file format without so many proprietary codecs here. (I'm not necessarily looking forward to "MPEG4"...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Linux *can* work with a microkernel.

It's faster the way it is now.

No one wants to change it, and its already on a *lot* of platforms, with special ports for smaller devices.

The last thing we need is a "Linux/NetBSD Platform Pissing War". I tend to only use a few hardware platforms, and they're all supported on both platforms, to my knowledge.

Mentioning NT as an example of good design is amusing. A Microkernel and a castrated version of VMS makes a portable operating system that no sane person would want to code for. Oh well... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Wow, reasons why we don't like MySQL here:

- It isn't really Open Source, it's only free

- They don't know what they're talking about on the obscure technical issues that we like.

- Most people could use it just fine, but that's not the point!

- Okay, sure, its fast, but our database is safer!

- Why does everyone have to use MySQL anyhow, hmm?

This sounds like a case of sour grapes, pure and simple. One database is not going to be for everyone. Oracle is expensive, MySQL isn't robust enough for some people, and PostGreSQL is slow (compared to MySQL, for some common operations).

So, my advice. If money is tight, don't use Oracle. If data integrity is your utmost concern, don't use MySQL. If speed is an issue for your little database on your overworked computer, don't use PostGreSQL.

...And if you live in the real world, don't whine about how software application X is better than popular software application Y for reasons that many people don't care about, because you will be flamed to a crisp, especially on Slashdot. Just admit that software X has a place in the world, and some people, maybe even many people might want to use it, but they are other people, doing other things.

Example:

Microsoft Word is a popular word processor. But it is not robust enough for some people's needs. 95% of people might be able to do their job just fine having it crash and autorecover their documents, but for the 5% who are working on mission-critical data, or get their documents eaten, this isn't good enough. They would rather waste their time working on free solutions with bad Word DOC File Import/Export routines. For those who care about proper formatting and ease of use, however, Word's stranglehold on the market makes it a more useful product for now.

Notice that I didn't say "Word has no place in the market", or even argue that "Microsoft didn't know what it was doing when they made Word!", but rather showed some strengths and weaknesses, and let you decide which category applies...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

For some impressive SID music, check out the '97 Second Reality for the C64 demo.

Man, I'm amazed that they managed to get those tunes right!

It's at least as amazing to me as hearing awesome music from a 4-channel AMIGA .MOD...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Look, everybody, here's a legitimate use for Napster and Gnutella! Anyone who got these songs want to mirror/share them, 'cause I can't get them from the site!

Now on to my rantings...

Boy, those games rule...

Anyone remember that the NES emulator from Japan for Windows ("PasoFami", I think) used MIDI for its output? It let you change the samples for the four channels, and at the time I also had a software midi synthesizer, so let's just say that Mario and Zelda sounded kinda funky, in a good, remixed way. :)

Later, I 'ripped' the intro music from Zelda (as a .WAV, using Nesticle, back when I ran DOS natively...) and converted it to an mp3. (hey, chill, I bought the game fair and square when it came out. :)

Who can forget the music from Final Fantasy, especially seeing as how the "Battle Victory Music" hasn't really changed! I love those songs in all of their incarnations, but I think I have a soft spot for FF2. (FF4J for the purists, not NES, I know, I know...)

I saw that they had music from Castlevania, but what about Castlevania 2? That had some awesome music, especially for 'night-time'.

("WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE")

Also, yes, Metroid ("JUSTIN BAILEY") had some awesome music, and especially Super Metroid, although that doesn't count here. :|

Also, I loved Megaman 2, and I've heard some techno remixes from that and some of the others. (some *much* worse than others, but Flash Man was funky. :)


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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What size limit?

Did you try typing "make bzimage" or "make bzlilo"?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

When they release 2.4.x! (or 2.5.x, for that matter...)

But, in the meantime... over a meg? Anything really cool I should know about?

If there's no Changelog, I guess I could just grep through the patch. Documentation is for wussies anyhow, right, guys? :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Festival is an awesome program for speech, Emacs has support for it too, and I believe BILINUX is the distribution for the blind.

But I don't think this is too terribly well-known, since my search on Google just turned up the last "Ask Slashdot" we had about this. :)

Any good resources out there about this, guys?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's actually one of the complaints they cite in the contest pages.

However, a lot of the proposed programs (maybe half?) build on prior systems without any real new ideas. Some of the other ones look somewhat vague and use a lot of different terms. I liked the XML description of feature sets, but it looked too complex/verbose.

So I guess I'd rather see all this energy go into coming up with good examples for how to use the existing (robust, working, tried-and-true) tools. As usual, the best reference outside of good documentation is a real-live, working ugly program/script.

(For example, I learned a lot about Makefiles looking at both generated and custom-made ones, so now I have my own hybrid "favorite" Makefile-style...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Thank you. I'm currently reading the essay about so-called VHLL's, and it's interesting, so if I get the point I'll try to explain it. :)

But yes, note to moderators, take the time to read that sig of mine before you moderate. Call me "Troll, troll, TROLL" all you like in an Anonymous reply an ye must, but please back it up with some reasoning...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

...why we need these other tools?

Not only are the standard tools good, but there are already alternatives! (cook, autoconf, configure, blah blah blah...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I don't believe you replied to that. Okay...

I don't see a problem with the situation. I don't think there *is* a problem. I think the only problem we've had with this so far is the one you invented in your own little head. However, since you're taking all of this seriously, I'll do my best to do the same.

If I had a kid, say a male one, I might call him "my kid". Is this child not "Bruce's kid?". Is it sexist to know someone and say "Hey, how's your kid doing?", as opposed to "Hey, how's you and your wife's kid doing?" Hmm?

Also, it isn't unheard of to name a kid after the father or the mother, or call your son Junior. This is cultural. It isn't sexist, and if you consider it to be so, realize that it's a feature of the culture that is so deeply ingrained that the very people involved don't consider it sexist, and therefore it isn't. In short, if intent means anything to you, this debate is useless, because the only person who doesn't understand is you, an uninvolved third-party (goes back to minding your own business...).

Also, I don't see how applying program-naming terms to children without problems applies to sexism at all. And the issues I've raised about programming languages are supposed to be humorous, not serious. Must you be the person to make me have to put "HUMOR:" back into my subject lines?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Nope, it's "bad". In fact, it's evil. Why?

Well, for something that's supposed to be so gosh-darned "Intuitive", why wasn't it designed right the first time?

If I close a program, it goes away. Why would it still be there?

If I drag a file to the trash, it's gone, waiting to be deleted perhaps. If I drag a disk to the trash, it isn't deleted at all! In fact, it spits at me!

...and god forbid if you try to eject something and the Mac wants it back later.

(How do you confuse a Mac? Take its CD out and put a different one in... (infinite loop, always asking for the *other* CD...))
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Chill out, Wah. Okay, so you were rejected again. This still isn't the place to get your message out.

Well, we all know slashdot sucks, so get it posted on kuro5hin or something. Actually, its a good article, so if you don't, I will. But I'd rather you did, since you have that nifty "Retort". :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No, the kid was just typecasted to the parent of the same class. This is fair because then a girl would be "Valerie 2.0".

Or, perhaps someone was trying to say "Bruce's kid", in a geeky sort of way. I think that's what Linus was saying here.

However, abandoning common sense and continuing on with an alternate interpretation of the can of worms you insisted on creating where there was none before...

Using multiple inheritance and polymorphism correctly is bad enough in C++, and hyphenated names are kludgey in English, and I don't think the populace is ready for the gender-bending implications if the kid were Bruce-Valerie-2.0, possibly with both genders and other conflicts.

Basically, typecasting is incompatible with political-correctness, which just goes to show that programming languages are direct, to-the-point, and don't care about those wussy Humanities issues of fairness, children with more than one parent, or the English language.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Gamecenter and their readers suggested stuff like this twice already. ...But it's still fun. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Are you accusing Bill Gates of having a God Complex? I'm sure no one else would think him to be capable of such a thing!

I agree, whatever his problem is, he's certainly deluded if he thinks that DOS pushed the industry FORWARD. Maybe he's just dyslexic...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I know it's true to life, guys. Satire is sometimes scarily accurate. But it's still just humor...

(and Pi Squared is pretty close to g, actually... :)

So I guess my point is, who cares what g really is if no one uses it? Especially if it took them this long to find out they were wrong, they really weren't paying attention...

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

In other news, Physicists admit to generally rounding their constants to 3, 2, or even 1 significant digit.

"I always used Pi Squared for g, the math seemed to come out right", said local physicist Fred Flintstone.

However, his assistant Barney Rubble disagreed, saying "Gee, Fred, I thought Pi was somewhere between 2 and 5. That doesn't sound very precise to me!"

Apparently the tried-and-true method of waiting for an apple to fall from a tree and counting "One Mississippi, Two Mississippi..." doesn't offer significant resolution to reliably yield a better approximation for g, either. Scientists are now experimenting with coconuts, and early results look optimistic.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Oh no. He's different. Get rid of him.

He's made it clear that he's part of a separate movement. If you read that article and thought he was part of an "Open Source" movement, then you don't know how to read.

Also, gcc seems to compile code rather well, and I hear emacs can even be used to edit text!

So... just because someone doesn't fit in with your idea of a developer, they don't need to be deposed by some mainstream linux mafia. And RMS has one helluva track record for his quality of results.

The reason Linux is GPL'ed is out of respect for gcc. Think about that.

(For example:

I hate the GNU/Linux fiasco as much as the next guy, (in part just because RMS is being an asshole here, Linus has acknowledged the FSF's contribution from the very beginning) but I still don't hold it against Stallman, especially if Linus doesn't.
(don't be an involved third party when the first two parties don't care == none of your business))
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Think of it as a moral problem.

People don't like to starve.

Too many people and not enough food make for some unhappy people.

Or, if you like, starving people don't do a very good job of producing goods or performing services, and might end up stunted for life, besides.

"Overpopulation" means having more people than an area can support, like overgrazing. Overpopulation is a problem in precisely these times. Optimally using the Earth's resources, maybe we could have more people on Earth and keep them all happy. But as long as there are places where we can't, overpopulation is a problem.

Also, from my time on slashdot, "the more people [...] the better" isn't true at all. Society breaks down whenever it gets too crowded. This is true of rats, people, governments, and online forums.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I find it funny when Stallman says something like "I'd rather not talk about it until I've talked to a lawyer"....

There's nothing wrong with being careful, we get enough phony legal advice on Slashdot. But what would it hurt? Looks like Stallman needs an Open Legal Community, so he can freely exchange ideas and get answers. "Many lawyers make all lawsuits trivial", or that sort of thing.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

once more people realize just how evil the RIAA is, and see mp3 as a viable alternative, maybe their sales will go down, and they will be forced to compete, or offer a more fair, legal alternative.

I hope. In any case, I haven't bought CDs in a while. I've gotten a couple as presents, and I got The Matrix on a gift certificate. I was thinking of joining one of those music clubs ("11 Free CDs For $1" or whatnot), but they don't have much in the way of 11 decent CDs. :)

So what are you going to do, RIAA? Sell CDs at cost + royalties? Heck, give the artist a buck or two, I'll pay for that.

What does the current model look like?

cost
+ royalties
+ 3 cents for the artist
+ legal bills
+ media kickbacks
+ mafia kickbacks
+ money lost from drug seizures
+ legal bills from fighting the war on mp3's

I mean, really, *explain* where that $15-20 goes and I'll be impressed. That's a lot of money to account for. A book costs $5, and that's paper, wood pulp. The author gets money, the publisher gets money, the cover artist gets money, the book gets printed on a press that is already paid for. So where's the extra $10-15 that goes into the cost of the CD? Hmmm?

Or how about singles? They make money off of those, right? And they're about half the price of the CD. With nothing to make them cheaper. Implying that CDs could be half their current cost and *still* be very profitable.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Rumors of the death of the DMOZ story have been greatly exaggerated?

Oh well, reposting stories that disappeared off the main page is one way to combat first posters, I suppose.

Now let's get some news on this site! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Unfortunately, many others seem to agree with you, and they're serious.

I don't think a video card company is going to find some great, hidden knowledge in "bttv.c". I'm sure their programmers could produce something very similar in no time at all.

Given the choice between copying a little code illegally but alienating the community, or writing that same bit of code themselves, like usual, I think I know what they would have picked.

So why did NVIDIA do it? Because it was a mistake. Read the article again, read how the parties involved are taking it, (rather well, it seems) and cool off, guys.

Every time a new company comes along trying to use Linux in their business model, (Caldera, Corel, SGI, NVIDIA, etc...) I get anxious about it. I think to myself, "This time, we're going to have a GPL court case, there's no way this big nasty company will ever understand or respect what the community does"...

And so far I've been wrong. In this case, I like having these big companies prove me wrong and show that they really do get it, they're part of this movement too. And what do we get out of it? Better network integration tools, friendlier distributions, perhaps another journaling filesystem, fault tolerance, better multiprocessor support... and now 3D graphics drivers. Sounds good to me.

Give them time. Either they'll come around, or I'll be buying a Voodoo card soon. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

He's planning out a series for this trilogy, from the perspectives of Ender's friends in battle school. This one's from Petra's perspective, I think, and the last one was from Bean's p.o.v.

Ender's Shadow was pretty good, it was weird having a lot of the dialogue from Ender's Game but with completely different stuff going on, but interesting as well. Of course, I'm a fan, so expect some bias... :)

I just did a paper about (among other things) Orson Scott Card, so here's some stuff on the site: the partial movie script for Ender's Game, (they had better not call them "Wooly Ants"! Why not Buggers, would the British be offended?), the complete bibliography, and his essays (in the library).

The essay about Fantasy and the reader is cool, since at one point he talks about how people overinterpret books and then act like their interpretation is the "correct" one. (that's what my paper was about...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hey, it's new to timothy, right guys?

Nothing to see here, guys, just keep on trolling...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Heh heh heh.

Yeah, and emulating that stuff comes with quite a penalty, I understand.

Ah well, no Bleem. Next option? :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No, but gcc is available as a cross-compiler.

(see above, over-moderated crap about PSXDEV, sorry guys...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

First, it's "conceited".

Second, I've been here for a while, and it works like this. Moderators have a limited amount of time to look through a lot of posts for important stuff. Tagging a post with "Moderate this up!" increases the chance that they will look at it, and evaluate it to see if it looks important.

Therefore, writing something that looks important and saying "Moderate this up!" is a good way to get initially modded up. However, if you didn't deserve this moderation, you'll get flamed, sometimes quite legitimately, followed by "Insightful? WTF?!?!!", and get moderated down to oblivion.

Therefore, this tactic should only work correctly if you actually have something to say, which is the point of moderation in the first place.

I thought I had something important to say about what I saw as a rather large GPL violation. But upon rereading their page carefully, I realized that I was completely wrong. And maybe you could have figured that out from my reply to Foogle (if that was up at the time you posted), I essentially said "Never mind, my fault, etc., etc.".

Sure, their website is confusing, and they got other details wrong, but fundamentally I didn't realize what people were getting upset about, didn't see the source RPMs, and thought the situation was worse than it actually was.

Feel free to keep moderating, just mod the good posts up, and ignore these three! ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Don't mind me, I didn't realize this was just one package, I thought he meant the whole distribution (all of PSXDEV).

(The wording didn't seem clear to me, just like where they say "GNU General Public License Version 2", and link to the LGPL...)

What confused me was, I still saw all the binary RPMs for the different packages, which would mean that he *is* still distributing it. Now I see the source RPMs, and realize they were just talking about one program. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I quote from freshmeat:

PSXDEV is a free GPL'd development environment for the PlayStation (PSX).

Releases 6 and 7 (and probably earlier ones) were under the GPL. Therefore, he has to provide source for these versions, which he is not doing. Also, he must stop using any other GPL'ed code if he wishes to release binary RPM's to the public, and considering the nature of the product, this might be difficult. (We're talking about gcc, binutils... free software, guys!)

Someone please send him a nice e-mail explaining what he can and can't do with GPL'ed software. There's nothing wrong with changing your own license for a new version of a program that's all your code, but that isn't what's going on here.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Maybe the various playstation projects for Linux will show some more progress? Or maybe people will show some more interest in them?

Do any of the PSX emulators reimplement the BIOS functions with C routines? I heard that was what UltraHLE did. Besides, then non-PSX owners could use it without having to (legally) get a PSX BIOS.

However, I'd be very happy if a game company released a cross-platform emulator sometime before the system itself is dead. I don't want a Playstation, but I'd love to be able to play the later Final Fantasy games under Linux, for instance.

That means that either Square has to port them, x86/DOS/Windows emulators under Linux have to get a lot better (Wine doesn't run FF7; does Wine run "Bleem!"? Does VMWare use 3D-cards, or could the X Server help on that?), or PSX emulators will have to get a lot better. I'd happily buy Tactics, but I'd be playing it on my computer! (I don't have a TV, just a TV Card, getting a PSX just seems silly. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

lynx -dump http://www.execpc.com/~halkun/PSX/html/playstation .html > ps.txt

Because I couldn't read that *tiny* font, and the centered lines were annoying me. Also, the HTML file is *HUGE*, thanks to StarOffice. The text version is about 3.5 times smaller!

Maybe next time I'll try converting one of the other versions, or use a browser that better supports tables, but for now at least I can read the darn thing!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

People releasing mature, production-quality code to get hacked on are very cool.

Maybe this could get used for floppies or RAM disks as well? Fast mp3-playing PC-like things? Or devfs, to save the state of the darn thing?

Anyhow, I'm sure the community will find nifty uses for it. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I got www.macster.com so
I put www.toaster.org as my reply.

I like this site. Maybe I'll try it again tomorrow.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, and it's the first chip I ever heard to have more L1 cache than L2 cache! (that's definitely a feature for the "value" market...)

Not duplicating the data is interesting, what do they do, though? If data not found in L1, send data that will be overwritten to L2 cache, and read new data from L1 cache? If data not found in L2 cache, get data from memory, and write to L1 cache? Age stuff in L2 cache? I don't think it'd be too different, but it's weird... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, if they own the music in the first place as well, could they give me a copy, since I own it too? :)

(I know, I know, duplicating something you already own and giving it to someone else who owns it too is called "stealing", not "giving", I'll get my terminology right one day...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What? That's the dumbest argument I ever heard!

If I had, say, a bad disk in a set, and I proved I had ownership of that disk and got someone (anyone!) to give me a replacement, did I break the law?

I paid for a license to use software, (listen to music, read a book, whatever) and I own something that should be bit-for-bit (dot-for-dot, word-for-word...) identical, so if I get that, *however* I get that, it shouldn't be a violation of that license.

Two people own the same intellectual property, and wish to trade copies. If the licenses at work doesn't allow that, there's something seriously foul about the whole system. IF that is the case, I encourage everyone to use Napster, Gnutella, and whatever the hell you want, and copy whatever you want, and give credit to whoever you want.

Why? Because even anarchy is better than a broken, unfair system. Copyright was created to encourage innovation on the part of the scientists and the artists and other *creative* people. If it is used only to keep the money and the power in the hands of a select few (non-scientists, non-artists, money-grubbing) people, I say distribute the IP to the masses.

It isn't any more creative, or more fair for the artists, it's just more equitable, and eventually when the few people who were at the top realize they have no power, they will have to find a system that works for the masses.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

128k on-die cache sounds great to me. Any benchmarks yet?

I'm in the market for an Athlon, at least this summer, and it's great to see AMD get the business, but if I could get an extra $100 of purchasing power with one of these, I'd happily get a sweet video card or a larger hard drive as well as a chip that performs about as well as the Athlon I would have gotten.

In the meantime, I suggest the name for the "new" competing Intel counterpart soon to be marketed should be the Caveon, as in "Caveat Emptor"... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Some of these look pretty nice, but others look like rejects from 80's cartoons.

I'm sure "Dyna Soar" could carve out a nice place in "The Transformers" or "G.I. Joe", but the name is still too cheesy. Good thing they didn't build it. Spiral looks pretty, though.

This is *definitely* a labor of love, looking at what he had to do to get the images to look nice. Three different programs, image maps, mapping textures to individual, hand-picked polygons, tweaking... Ugh. Too much work for me. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.