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You can't just wait until everyone in the world is using your stuff and suddenly spring on them and claim they all owe you money.

They're doing the exact same thing Unisys did. But doesn't Unisys have a patent on "submarine" patents?

Can your Pentium 4 even run 64-bit programs?

If the answer were "no," then why would Nintendo 64 emulators, which emulate a 64-bit MIPS CPU, exist on x86 CPUs? Besides, double-precision floating-point and MMX are already 64-bit (although they may not be executed as 32-bit ops in a particular implementation).

Can you document this?

I refer you to Google. In particular, if you do not have a TCP/IP connection to the full Internet, you cannot use Microsoft Office 2000.

Our sole anti-piracy measure is a network check for unique serial numbers.

This is what Office 2000 does. After you have launched the program fifty times, it connects via a wide-area network to Microsoft's server to verify the authenticity of the software. And if you do not connect to the network, Office refuses to run as advertised.

The next step in unique serial numbers is associating each serial number with a name and password.

This is why I just memorize the IP numbers (in 32-bit hexadecimal format, of course...what's up with all those dots anyhow?) of all the sites I ever go to, and avoid any reliance on DNS at all.

1. Often, several different web sites will be hosted at the same IP, distinguished only by HTTP/1.1 virtual hosting (as another poster pointed out).
2. DNS is there for a reason. Keeping a private /etc/hosts file fixes problem 1 but does not help when a site moves to another provider or uses a changing IP address to foil attackers.

1. Run on less than 3% of all desktop machines 2. Run on less than 5% of all desktop machines

1. The old bandwagon argument. If all your lemming friends were jumping off a cliff, would you also jump?
2. "5%" and growing. As computer hardware becomes cheaper, the Microsoft Windows tax becomes a larger percentage of the price, making a GNU/Linux system a viable option for low-end PCs and set-top boxen. For example, Dell systems are now available with Linux preinstalled instead of Windows, and the new AOL TV(TM) set-top box reportedly uses a Linux-based system.
3. You emphasize the word desktop. AFAIK, JavaServer Pages(TM) technology runs on Linux and UNIX servers; server-side content generation with .NET doesn't. Last time I checked, there were more UNIX or nixclone servers than NT/Win2K servers on the Web; check Netcraft if you don't believe me.

.NET is language independant. You can use PERL, Java, Python, C#, VB, whatever the hell you want

Same with Java technology. It's not limited to the Java language; any language that can be preprocessed into the Java language (covers Basic, C, and COBOL), compiled into JVM bytecode (covers Java, JVM assembly language, ML, C, Ada, Eiffel, Python, Smalltalk, and Haskell), or interpreted easily (covers Tcl/Tk, Forth, Perl, Lisp/Scheme, EcmaScript, Logo, Prolog, and Python) can be used with the Java platform. And there are many more.

I'd rather see an OS written in C++

The version of IE for Macintosh computers seems to be written in C++ (I've ResEdited version 3.0 before.) The Windows version is most likely also in C++, and it's considered part of the OS (it has a Supplemental EULA just like this instead of the full EULA). I don't know what other parts of Windows are written in C++, but I'd say at least 25 percent.

That's funny, Microsoft.com is responding with HTTP Error 500 Server Too Busy.

The KDE desktop for GNU/Linux, BSD, and UNIX systems is written almost entirely in C++.

I dare you to find me an application that java can handle that C# cannot - TODAY.

• Run as an applet in web browsers on Macintosh computers.
• Run as an applet in web browsers on GNU/Linux or Solaris systems.
• Run at all on Mac, Linux, or Sun systems.

Micro$oft Java

Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems. Could that be why Microsoft is calling its next J*v*-like product .NET instead of Java?

This library uses bits of Wine so that it can load Windows-native en-/de-coder DLLs

Sounds like DivX ;-)

But where does the end user get the license to use the DLLs? From a copy of Windows. The WiMP EULA is tied to the Windows license; its "Supplemental EULA" (also used for IE) states, in effect, "If you are not a licensed user of Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition, Microsoft Windows NT, or Microsoft Windows 2000, you have no rights under this EULA."

Running the DLLs on Alpha, Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC, or any other platform supported by NetBSD or GNU/Linux will be dog slow because it must go through an x86 emulation layer.

I would LOVE to contribute to the community everything except that which I may not through the dictates of an outside agency, which is maybe fifteen hundred lines out of forty-thousand odd lines of code.

So isolate the proprietary stuff and the GPL stuff in separate executables. The GPL virus does NOT infect independent executables by "mere aggregation" on a storage medium if they don't share any code.

There is nothing wrong with just cloning the interface AFAIK.

Apparently The Tetris Company didn't think so for a while and sent cease-and-desist form letters to authors of falling tetramino games. (Eventually, they realized they were pissing in the wind, and only sent letters to the authors of games who called their work "Tetris" in violation of the trademark.)

if only there were article moderation... if only there were article moderation... if only there were article moderation...

There's no place like Kuro5hin... There's no place like Kuro5hin... There's no place like Kuro5hin...

...where YOU choose the stories!

Martin Hock, who sent in the Godzilla MAME sighting, wrote a TI calculator game called Insane Game a while back. A(n unofficial) pixel-perfect PC port of Insane Game is available here (press the T key in game to turn off candy graphics and turn on pixel-perfect mode).
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?

how many of you still use cassette tapes?

I do. Portable cassette players are cheaper, and I haven't yet found a CD boom box that can survive inside a high-humidity environment so I can listen to techno and video game music in the shower.

CDMA is a digital cellphone standard. DMCA is Public Enemy #1.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?

the copyright to Disney characters will _never_ expire.

There's an interesting explanation of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the slippery slope it creates at PinEight.com.

the copyright to Disney characters will _never_ expire.

There's an interesting explanation of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the slippery slope it creates at PinEight.com.

If proprietary formats are going to "prevent" people from copyright their own creations (such as the example "birthday party" video)

<IANAL>
At most birthday parties, the copyrighted musical work "Happy Birthday to You"[?] is performed. Thus, Warner-Chappell Music (a division of AOL Time Warner and the "Happy Birthday" copyright owner) has the right to claim your birthday party video (which includes a performance of "Happy Birthday") as a "derivative work" under copyright law. And no, the copyright on "Happy Birthday" hasn't expired; because it was copyrighted on or after January 1, 1923, it's under perpetual copyright in the US and WIPO states.
</IANAL>

If a single stream in a given format cannot go past a certain pixel count, break the image into quadrants, encode each as a separate stream, and have the decoder sort things out.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?

I guess I'll have to connect my NES to it (yes, the old-school, 8-bit NES).

NES games look just as good or better on a VGA monitor. Here are some Free (as in speech) NES-compatible ROMs to play on a Free (as in speech) NES emulator.

I've seen independent "IU Opoly," "Purdue Opoly," and "Michigan Opoly" board games for sale at Sears stores. For example, under this pattern, the original MONOPOLY® board game would be called "Atlantic City Opoly."
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?

Pillsbury's trademarks include The Doughboy® and likeness, Häagen-Dazs®, Old El Paso®, Green Giant®, Sprout®, and Bake-Off®. Now you know what brands to avoid.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?

We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE, although we do object to the use of our product image in association with that term. Also, if the term is to be used, it should be used in all lower-case letters to distinguish it from our trademark SPAM, which should be used with all uppercase letters.

I won't advertise it. I'll let my sig do the talking.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?

You only really need an OS when it's your first computer.

Or if your old OS doesn't support your new hardware. Windows 95A does not support USB or large disks.

After that it should be like any other periferal device that you swap to the new machine.

For instance, I can't swap ISA cards into my new machine because it doesn't have any ISA slots. I can't swap my old non-USB joysticks into my new machine because my PCI sound card doesn't have a game port. And I can't swap old versions of DOS into my new machine because DOS can't handle hard disks bigger than 8 gigabytes.

I wanted one of those gorgeous new SXGA flat screens (and trust me, they are really the best screens I ever used), and only Dell offer them right know. Working in 1400x1050

Ever try an Apple Cinema Display?

Use a Unix based machine an unzip them (prevents that zip password crap).

Or, if your machine for some reason can't run Linux or a BSD, you can download a DOS version of the same unzipper (Info-ZIP UnZip) that is distributed with most Linux distros, and run it on FreeDOS.

Oui. Ja.

Christians say no to Ouija boards (or, as they were called in Nintendo Power, "Luigi boards").

English is SVO. Spanish, French, and Italian are SVO or SOV depending on whether the object is a noun or pronoun respectively. Japanese is SOV. Irish is VSO. Arabic and Hebrew used be VSO; now AFAIK they're SVO. Klingon is OVS. German is largely IvSOV (I = initial subject or adverb; v = auxiliary verb). Yodaisms are OSV. Lisp and Scheme are largely VSO.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?

I didn't read the whole blurb. I didn't recognize the "Babelfish" variant spelling of "Babel Fish".

OK, I thought of another one. There were stories in Contact magazine (used to be put out by the same people as Sesame Street magazine) about such a portable device. More to the point, this was an electronic device that operated when the user stuck his or her finger in it.

Except Adams, in H2G2, called it a Babel Fish.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?

Fair Use derives from the Constitution ... I don't think it's possible to sign away or agree to anything that conflicts with the Constitution.

<IANAL>
The United States Constitution, as amended, states that "Congress shall make no law" abridging freedom of speech (17 USC 107, the fair use section, makes most of copyright law constitutional), not that private individuals shall make no law (that is, contract). If this were true, non-disclosure agreements would be unconstitutional. A EULA for DVDs that pretty much amounts to an NDA would not be out of the question.

And yes, the contract is there; the offer is the EULA, the acceptance is removing the content from the package, and the consideration is the price paid for the content (in terms of dollars, square inches of ad space, or personal information) in exchange for the right to view the content.
</IANAL>

UltraHLE also backed out because it emulates high-level constructs (HLE == High-Level Emulator) created by the early C compilers for the MIPS processor in the N64. As the compilers used for newer games became more advanced (and optimized assembly subroutines became more common), the UltraHLE team could not keep up.

UltraHLE backed out because they felt threatened

...not by Nintendo, but by authors of other N64 emulators that provided more low-level functionality.

I'll be perfectly happy with my Coltranes & Tetrises & games written for Palm Pilots

If you like Tetris®, you might like a Tetris clone I wrote that simulates the effect of hallucinogens(no, Tetripz is that other one) called TOD. It runs on my 486 under DOS, my PII laptop under Wintendo 98, and my PIII tower under Linux.

The fair use agreement, which is something I use all the time as a journalist, gives me the right to use whatever tool I want

And any right can be waived in a contract, for example, one to which you agree by breaking the seal on the DVD. It only takes three words to destroy the first sale doctrine[?]: "licensed not sold." From there, they can take away any right you have. And because the sheeple[?] never read the fine print of the TOS or the EULA, they don't give a fsck.

"yourname.city.state.us". And "cybertron.podunk-city.co.us" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

If Colorado (.co.us), Nebraska (.ne.us), and Oregon (.or.us) would take the "city" field out of their domain patterns, they could get some business that would have otherwise gone to .com, .net, and .org, respectively. (Compare .co.uk and .org.uk.)

your bag over your shoulder and get on board with an alternate root.

OpenNIC, where D in DNS stands for "Democratic," is your alternate root. Its TLDs include .oss (free software) and .parody (self-explanatory). And it runs just fine alongside ICANN's root.

Or you could just use some BIND exploit to root the root nameserver :-)

Hey Brainchild, you can buy those products for Mac.

But by the time they're finally released on the Mac, many of the products are already passé; it's no longer "hip" to be good at them. For example, is being able to kick ass at Doom still a valuable skill? No, the game of the month is Quake III Team Arena for Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Windows 98, and Microsoft Windows ME.

Any why are we forgetting Debian?

I'd like to see your grandma install Debian. There's currently a trade-off between ease of installation by GNU/Linux newbies (Debian is reported to be a bitch to install) and support for architectures (Red Hat and Mandrake, two relatively easy distros, do not support PPC AFAIK).

If I ever get into game programming, my mantra will be this: the bounding box is the tris, the tris is the bounding box.

But tris games are supposed to do their collisions with rectilinear bounding boxes; that's the shape of the blocks in Tetris pieces. Even in games such as Dr. Mario, pixel-perfect collision detection is overkill, as pieces move in tile-sized units anyway.

In many games, polygonal objects are stored at several levels of detail; objects close up are drawn with more complex models. If you always use the lowest LOD model for collision detection, people will notice how much better it is than a cubic bounding box but will probably not notice a couple cm difference in the detail silhouettes.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?

But then with OSX, install Virtual PC ... Windows

I don't know about you, but I'd rather not play Q3A/UT/FPS of the month at 3 frames per second.

• Photoshop => GIMP (except prepress)
• Office => OpenOffice
• Cakewalk => Jazzware
• 3D Studio =gt; Blender

release a version that could handle css better

Recent Mozilla supports CSS stylesheets, and it supports them well. Or are you trying to make a combination DVD player/set-top Web terminal? In that case, you'll need to get your CSS elsewhere.

or didnt fail because some piss poor coder forgot to close off a table

Not only is the HTML invalid in that case, it isn't even well-formed, and (once the stricter XHTML standard becomes widespread) most browsers will throw up an alert box for that. Note that even in Slashdot and Kuro5hin comments, I use a </p> for every <p> .

The version 6 is so freaking bloated

The release labeled as "Netscape Communicator 6.0" is bloated with AOL brand clutter. If you download a Mozilla brand milestone such as 0.7, it'll be almost as fast as the Netscape 4.5 you're currently using.

x86 PC doesn't mean a damned thing games wise unless it's x86 running a Win-32 derivative.

An x86-based machine can dual-boot between Wintendo (that's all it's good for) and a Real OS such as *BSD or GNU/Linux. PowerPC-based machines cannot dual-boot to Wintendo.

Linux people know the workarounds. Casual user does not.

By "casual user" do you mean the sheeple[?] who inhabit AOL? In that case, give them GNU/Linux, X, GNOME, an SNES emulator, and a pirated game library, and they'll be happy.

Everything, which (it appears) GNUPedia is trying to copy, allows no outward hyperlinks; otherwise, it would degrade into yet another Yahoo!.

GNUPedia looks a bit like Everything. Everything is a flexible web database run by the people who used to run Slashdot and written and edited by the world. (Ever wonder what those [?]s are on /. articles? That's E2.) Copyright doesn't stop people from adding song lyrics to the database.

All information generated outside of the free software community is under perpetual copyright anyway.

The GNU System is a POSIX layer. It can run on Linux (producing GNU/Linux aka the Linux OS), HURD (still in development), or Win32 (producing Red Hat Cygwin).
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?