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Now I don't claim to know that DSL is slow. I have no idea, I've never had it at my house. But cable ain't slow. My cable modem provider has put a 12MB file for download at their central site. This download is directly at the other end of the cable infrastructure, so downloading this file is a good test of the cable infrastructure. Armed with linux (as the only OS in my household thank you very much) I set up a cron job to download this file every 30 minutes and report the results.

During the first 21 months or so, I got between 600 and 700 kBytes/s (i.e. 4.8 - 5.6 Mbits/s). Then at about 21 months, roadrunner installed a bandwidth cap, and since then I've gotten between 240 kBytes/s (1.9 Mbits/s) and 260 kBytes/s (2.0 Mbits/s).

After almost 30 months of continuous testing, I have NEVER seen the alleged slow downs that are supposed to come because the cable infrastructure is shared. And it isn't for lack of subscribers in my neighborhood! There are 4 people that I know have it on my culdesac alone!

Now, of course, it's a whole different ball of wax when I try to go to the Internet in general. There I get wildly fluctuating speed variations. (As you would expect) But across the cable infrastructure, I can floor it whenever I want, at any time of day.

My conclusion? I don't know if DSL is slow or not but what Simson Garfinkle said in his salon article is 100% on the money.

And the stuff that the DSL providers tell you about speed is just hogwash. And I'm pretty sure that all the stuff that they tell you about security is also crap.. although I can't really prove that it's crap.

The only thing that I don't like about cable modem is the lack of competition. I wish there was someone else out there other than roadrunner. Cuz they suck. Their mail server is slow, their response to problems is terrible. I'd love to be able to threaten them with switching to another provider. But hey, what's a monopoly if you don't get to stick it to someone!

Britons are usually quite innovative, the problem is this pre-eminence is not usually matched with businesses prowess, most inventors usually end up dying a porper or having their invention ripped off, and not receiving any recognition... or both of the above.

Such examples include the light bulb, Joseph Swan published his work in a journal and a guy called Edison ripped him a few months later. People today still believe Edison invented the light bulb.

There was Sir Frank Whittle who created the jet engine, he had to fund his research one shoestring because the government turned their back on him for years, then US company also tried to steal his work. Anyway, he finally succeeded, he didn't make any money out of his invention, but he finally achieved the recognition he deserved. (hence the knighthood).

Other calamities include the guys at GCHQ who created public-key crypto years before it was even a twinkle in Diffie's and Hellman's eye. But they didn't see the significance of their invention, mainly because the official secrets act stopped from applying it commercially.

Donald Davies who worked at Middlesex University invented the concept of Packet Switching but couldn't receive funding from the British government at the time, he took his research to ARPA where his technology was integrated into a little known project called "APRANET"... I'm not exactly sure what became of that :)

Fibre optics and the optical amplifier also came out of British Research

Obviously there's also the likes of Alan Turing and the rest of the slightly madcap bunch who were the brains behind Bletchley Park and the WW2 code breaking.

There's countless others too, and obviously some we probably don't even know about. Above all, they failed yet succeeded in a magnificent British way, a lot didn't make much or any money out their work, but they changed things.

There's lots of innovation and pure research in the UK, however not much it carried through to commercialisation, maybe because the British are more risk adverse, there's also a deep stigma attached to failure and bankruptcy in the UK, something which is often admired in the US.

This is changing though.

Bayer tried to protect its trademark on "aspirin" too late in the U.S.

Not exactly. Bayer used to own trademarks on ASPIRIN® and HEROIN® but lost them in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

In Europe, it's still in vigor (in several forms -- Aspirin, Aspirina, etc.), making it harder for the competition, which must bill themselves as acetylsalicylic acid....

Here's a map showing places where Bayer still owns the ASPIRIN® trademark.

Here is a link to some pictures/movies taken by my friend Jay at a recent highschool robotics match we attended recently. It was held near the Rocket Garden (the well-maintained one on the Nasa side, not the dilapidated but cooler one on the Airforce side) of the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, FL. Only bad part was the price of a (lousy) beer at the concessions ($4+!) but overall a very cool time. Yes, it's pretty nice living in Melbourne. :)
JMR

If you like the idea of a credit-card sized PDA that gets you a lot of the basic functionality of a Palm/Visor, try the REX 6000. You can get it now for about $120-$150, a little pricy but still reasonable.

Yeah and that little daemon, "Windows Critical Update Notification", then checks MS for security patches every 5 minutes. If you change the interval in the scheduler to something more sensible, say, once a day, it magically changes the interval back to every 5 minutes.

In knowledge base article QQ230318, Microsoft states "Due to the importance of this component, it is by design that the Windows Critical Update Notification schedule can not be modified or disabled".

My guess is Microsoft didn't want people monkeying with this, so that the Notification would be assured of being run. They achieved the exact opposite. The five minute interval is so annoying I don't run the notification at all, I uninstalled it. I check for updates by hand.

Note: Supposedly, there is a way to change all of this in the registry, so that your change of the interval takes hold. For example, see this. But I've tried that twice and it hasn't worked. Here is another discussion of this problem at technofile.

dkwright
--------
Microsoft: With friends like these who needs an enema?

Well, I've tried Irex for E, and it's pretty good (there is a gtk+ partner theme). Also just now while googling for a cache'd page of the very slashdotted 5dwm.org site, I ran across an IMD clone done using FVWM2. Note that I have only the most cursory user experience with SGIs (too po' to afford one of them on my own :-( ), so I can't comment on exactingly true either one is to the IMD.
--
Fuck Censorship.

Heinrich Hertz: Hertz lived from 1857 to 1894 and was the first to demonstrate experimentally the production and detection of Maxwell's waves. This discovery of course lead directly to radio. [more..]

Guglielmo Marconi: The Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi, repeated Hertz's experiments and eventually succeeded in getting secondary sparks over a distance of 30 feet (nine meters). [more..]

Nikola Tesla: Inventions related to radio ( the Supreme Court overturned Marconi's patent in 1943 in favor of Tesla) X-rays, the vacuum tube amplifier. [more..]

Lee De Forest: American inventor of the Audion vacuum tube, which made possible live radio broadcasting and became the key component of all radio, telephone, radar, television, and computer systems before the invention of the transistor in 1947. [more..]

Ernst F. W. Alexanderson: The engineer whose high-frequency alternator gave America its start in the field of radio communication. [more..]

It seems we can't truly give credit to any ONE inventor. For without all of the above, and countless others, I'm sure, radio and many other innovations would not be where they currently are. Hope these links help.

That Kamen has a habit of doing everything he says. The more ridiculous it is, the more likely he is to do it, do it well and make a great deal of money at it. The price range being talked about here makes it seem like his stirlings have been renamed.

Those would indeed change the world. They would also be faced with an onslaught of opposition from the established companies in this area. People would plan cities around it.

If Kamen has really done it then I doubt that any of this is exageration.

Quality in software is that computer programs are too complicated, well, building a skyscraper is IMHO just as complicated, but if the Empire State Building falls down, you can't just release Empire State Building Service Pack 2, can you ?

As far as I know, my RoadRunner service isn't currently blocking any services. My OpenBSD firewall gets regular hits on all the good ports.

Here are the snippets from their policy:

• Advertising of products and or services of any type is not permitted on Residential Road Runner accounts regardless of transmission medium used, including but not limited to, email, news groups, web services and chat services.
• Customers are strictly prohibited from running server-based applications on Residential Road Runner accounts. This would include, without limitation to the running of HTTP Web servers, FTP servers, Gaming servers, SMTP and POP Mail servers, Domain Name Servers, Chat servers, etc.
• Advertising of products and or services of any type is not permitted on home pages for Residential Road Runner accounts.
• The hosting of Gaming servers of any kind is prohibited on Residential Road Runner Accounts. This includes, but is not limited to Quake servers, etc.

The policies are pretty bad, but it seems like they adopt a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude in practice, at least locally. I've only heard of one person getting kicked off RoadRunner and he was running a ftp server with MP3z or warez.

I've got a *SMALL* site, but I'm willing to go all-netscape if I can. I don't know HTML, so someone point me in a good, cheap/open source HTML editor so I can dump frontpage, and find me a "Netscape Now!" button.

e-mail, please.

When Sony killed the betamax format, the vcr market was still a very very new and undeveloped market. The same can hardly be said about the videogame console market, which sony currently dominates and has had years of experience dominating.

The second important difference to note is that Sony completely screwed up the marketing/promotion side for betamax. Sony actually cut back marketing expenditures when sales initially rose and failed to raise them when vhs started making headway. But if you've seen any of Sony's marketing efforts recently, you know there's been a lot of change.

The industry is a different place from what it was back in 1975. PS2 might still fail, but if it does, it won't be because it too much resembled betamax.

Try the link below.

Heck, check those scrollbars on that screenshot of Excel

The ones on the Word2k screenshot (with the oddball non-standard scroll utilities) look fine.

home.cfl.rr.com/ischmidt/wineimg/word2k.jpg

You can take a look at all the screenshots by looking at:

home.cfl.rr.com/ischmidt/wineimg/

--
Evan

Try the link below.

Heck, check those scrollbars on that screenshot of Excel

The ones on the Word2k screenshot (with the oddball non-standard scroll utilities) look fine.

home.cfl.rr.com/ischmidt/wineimg/word2k.jpg

You can take a look at all the screenshots by looking at:

home.cfl.rr.com/ischmidt/wineimg/

--
Evan

Now hiring experienced client- & server-side developers

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 14,...
Reading about his house and habits reminds me of my childhood-favorite biography of Thomas Edison.

I should have expected that from 'timothy'. Try reading more history and you'll find that Edison's biographies are often inflated ego trips for the man, and mysteriously choose to avoid talking about Nikolai Tesla. Check out this, this, and this to understand why. If it were up to Edison we'd have *no* electricity because he wanted us to use a DC system simply because it was his idea. 'NIH' (Not Invented Here) syndrome is a bad thing.

I would say if you are in a technological industry and don't want to put up a full scale website, then put up a very straightforward 'business card' site.

A link: search on Alta-Vista turns up Pearl 9 Design which lists Flash VOS as a client. Pearl 9 Design has a mission statement that states, "Endeavor to bear standards beyond the ordinary." And looking at their site and the FlashVOS site, their concept of ordinary must be really low.

Secondly, the other clients Pearl 9 List, don't exist (or at least the links don't work). Looking at who FlashVOS lists as business partners and the list on Pearl 9 clients...I see a large amount of overlap.

Seeing that this looks like a big ol' hoax, and the fact that they are taking credit card orders, I suspect something malicious. From the broken links, the lack of anything to download, the lack of a user guide, the lack of screenshots, one can oly conclude that this is a pure vaporware site, or something criminal. I've written to the President of Flash VOS to have him contact Slashdot to verify his company's product (which is selling for just $30!).

Hmm, I'm comparing the series of mockups/screenshots of the lisa GUI with those of early releases of Windows, and I'd say that Windows is consistently more awful by a factor of 5 years....

Hmm, I'm comparing the series of mockups/screenshots of the lisa GUI with those of early releases of Windows, and I'd say that Windows is consistently more awful by a factor of 5 years....

Yeah, I know I shouldn't be complaining about this. It's still pretty fast, I'm just bothered that it's happening! It bothers me that they can advertise one thing, and then blatently, without warning implement changes!

Yes, I'm just whining!

in my dealings with SBC they were overwhelmed - and i believe this is partly due to their own errors. the campaign of offering free installation drove SBC in Houston to being 2 months behind on appointments - when they finally called to confirm that i still had an appointment, i had already been using RR for a month!

so i guess it would not be that odd to find that SBC is having rate problems and that in some managers short-sightedness they might have capped the rates. as i understand it, breaking out the line at the router is expensive and time consuming, of course, SBC is a big ass Co.

IMHO - if you can get it, go RoadRunner - i have yet to have problems and it has been three months on CounterStrike bliss!

I get scanned by RR every few days. If you take a look at this site you'll see an explanation(?) of what they're doing.

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

This is a case that wouldn't look too out of place at my mother's house. Maybe not not the coolest case, but definitly one of the classier custom cases.

Who cares if Napster wins or loses? What's going to happen as napster-like software becomes more common with the advent of high-bandwidth connections?

In the distant future, (heh) when everybody in a technologically-advanced location is able to transfer gigabytes of data across the country in a moment and for a minimal cost, what will the Recording industries do then?

I predict that there will soon come a true "Information Age," where information will be so easy and inexpensive to propagate, that there will be absolutely no way to stop its dissemmination.

With the wide availability of fast internet connections, the feasability of wide-area shared data repositories are becoming (and will become) quite commonplace... right? So what happens when Big Evil Corporation can no longer police or control the dissemination of its electronic information?

All computer-based information, be it somebody's "art" (i.e. music) or somebody's hard work and talent (i.e. software) is nothing more than a string of 1's and 0's, that can be duplicated and redistributed at a low (and, in my hypothetical rant, at an eventual zero) cost. Encrypted or not, built with a pop-up liscence, whatever... it still boils down to easily-replicable 1s and 0s.

So, in the future, maybe businesses and people who deal in electronic information be forced to assume that once their particular information, product, or artwork has been put into an electronic form, that product is available to anybody at nearly zero cost.

Then the question becomes, how would they make money? My opinion is that the music artist would make money with live performances, or with music released to television or radio distributions before they release it in a recorded media format. In the case of software, people would be paid based on the speed at which they could produce somehting, or people would be paid to fill a software void that hadn't been filled yet. We already see an example of the possible business model with open-source software.

Overall, I think we're moving into an age where information becomes plentiful and not "worth" anything; rather: time, service, and conveinience become the main things that draw the consumer dollar. Like water. For the most part, water is free. You can walk down to the pool and get some. But people still buy packaged water, and people pay a fee to have it pumped from a central location into their homes. People who live in an area where water is scarce might pay a high price for the same water that is freely available to somebody who lives by a lake and owns a well. It would be a complete upheaval compared to the way we do things now, but that's one possible way I see it happening.

And I suspect that when that day comes, there'll have to be a great change for the RIAA, et. al.

Just musing. I'd be very interested in the opinions of the more well-informed and econmically-savvy than I. Apologies for my spelling.

-Mikey

While I'm at it, you may be interested in this web-page about exactly your argument: The Human Eye: A design review, which takes exactly the opposite stance. To boot, it's well written :-).

You say that "prejudices" are preventing the ability to make reason arguments. I could say the same thing. I don't think it's fair though - we believe in different things, and howevermuch I believe in evolution, and also disbelieve the existence of divinity, I recognize there is a damn good chance that I'm wrong. I'm just human - but so are you.

--EMN

Therefore, I've posted my own copy here: http://home.rochester.rr.com/crayz/

BTW, this is what an Apple legal threat would look like:

-----------

From cpyrt@apple.com Fri Jul 7 20:56:43 2000
Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2000 17:28:28 -0700
From: Copyright Admin.
To: Ryan Meader
Subject: NOTICE OF INFRINGEMENT

*Apple Confidential*
-NOT FOR POSTING OR REDISTRIBUTION-

Dear Ryan,

Re: www.macosrumors.com

It has been brought to our attention that you have posted an article on the above web site titled, 'Apple's "Cube" desktop Mac confirmed' (hereafter referred to as "the Article").

By posting the Article, you are improperly disclosing Apple's trade secrets. Apple believes that the person(s) who disclosed the information in the Article to you violated their non-disclosure agreement with Apple. Consequently, Apple has never authorized the information to be disclosed or published and your continued display of the Article could result in your company being held for violating Apple's proprietary rights. Your continued dissemination and use of this information is in violation of Apple's statutory and other rights.

We believe, in good faith, that the information posted is being used in a manner that is not authorized by Apple and that the information contained in this email is accurate. Therefore, Apple demands that you cease and desist from disseminating the Article posted at the referenced URL immediately, including any hyperlinks to other locations where the information or Article may be available from all web sites and servers under your control.

Please immediately remove the Article and confirm in writing by Monday, July 10, 2000 that you have removed the Article from your web site. Apple reserves its right to seek immediate equitable and other relief, including damages claims, should you fail to remove this material.

Thank your for your courtesy and immediate cooperation. I can be reached at (408) 974-9994 should you have any questions.

Sincerely, Sue Runfola Apple Computer, Inc. Legal

Sue Runfola Apple Legal Copyright Administration 1 Infinite Loop, MS: 38-I Cupertino, CA 95014

Phone: (408) 974-9994 Email: copyright@apple.com Fax: (408) 974-5436

THIS TRANSMISSION MAY BE PRIVILEGED AND MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION INTENDED ONLY FOR THE PERSON(S) NAMED ABOVE. ANY OTHER DISTRIBUTION, RE-TRANSMISSION, COPYING OR DISCLOSURE IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED. IF YOU HAVE RECEIVED THIS TRANSMISSION IN ERROR, PLEASE NOTIFY ME IMMEDIATELY BY TELEPHONE OR RETURN E-MAIL, AND DELETE THIS FILE/MESSAGE FROM YOUR SYSTEM.

>and the things Steve Jobs saw at Xerox PARC were the Mac initial inspiratione

no, No, NO! A thousand times, NO!

PARC certainly influenced the mac, but it is not the source. The notion
that the Lisa was insired by PARC is pure urban legend.

The Lisa project began *before* the PARC tour. There were screen mockups *before* the PARC tour. Try
http://home.san.rr.com/deans/lisagui.html
for some of the history.

Also note that many of the ideas used by PARC predate the project. Notably, Jeff Raskin's Master's thesis . . . yes, Raskin worked at PARC, but he was able to implement some things on the Mac that he'd proposed nearly 20 years earlier.

hawk

I'll send you some new pictures sometime soon, people might want to check out Ian's WINE pictures

Chris Morgan(also a wine developer)

Where's all the time between 1984 and 2000?...(ok, 14 years in one sense, but still??)

Yeah, but it was a crappy (1/2? 1/4?) scale AT/AT. I mean a "minifig scale" AT/AT, like this one. C'mon... that would be awesome.
~luge

Specifically, the well-known Independant JPEG Group libjpeg, which requires a credit (it's under an old-style BSD license with the advertising clause).

And as for how "integrated" IE really is, check it out under Wine.

I found the PDF file on a website (which has since vanished) describing the M$ version of Kerberos. Since I found only the PDF and not executable, I agreed no EULA.

Therefore, my publishing the specs is not in violation of any agreement.

You will be able to find them after 17:00 EST at my web site. Tell any Samba team members you know!

If you can't translate 24 hour time into AM/PM format, perhaps you shouldn't read them.

There is an ongoing project to put together a usable PPP connection on the Atari 8-bit; it's located here.

The program is so simple it could even run on an 8k Atari 400 (remember those?)

Later models (the 600xl, 800xl and 130xe) had a parallel bus - I'm sure they could handle higher throughput.

Hmm... a minimally featured webserver on the Atari 8-bit. Hasn't anyone ported Apache there yet?

Americas:
http://www.zdnet.com/ - Ziff-Davis, North America
http://download.cnet.com/ - CNET/Download.com, California
ftp://.beoscentral.com/pub/ - BeOS CentralJohnson City, TN
http://freebe.nerdygirls.com/ - Oak Ridge, TN
ftp://www.beforever.com/pub/beforever /freebe/ - BeForever, Omaha, NE
ftp://mirrors.rochester.rr.com/pub/be/ - RoadRunner.Com, Rochester, NY
ftp://ftp.be.com/pub/beos/ - Be, Inc. San Jose, CA

Europe/Australia:
ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/beos/ - AARNet, Brisbane, Australia
ftp://ftp.beeurope.com/pub/ - BeEurope, Paris, France
ftp://ftp.worldonline.fr/ - World Online, Paris, France
ftp://ftp.gigabell.net/pub/beos/ - Gigabell.Net, Frankfurt, Germany
ftp://ftp.ph-freiburg.de/pub/m irrors/ftp.be.com/beos - P.H. Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
http://www.computerchannel.de/download /beos/ - ComputerChannel, Hamburg, Germany
ftp://ftp.xtdnet.com/pub/ - XTDNet, Karlsruhe, Germany
ftp://ftp.zdf.de/pub/ - Neues-3Sat Online, Mainz, Germany
http://pcteor1.mi.infn.it/beos/ - Univ. of Milan, Milan, Italy
ftp://dl.xs4all.nl/pub/ - XS4All, Amsterdam, Netherlands
ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/os/BeOS/ - SUNET, Uppsala, Sweden

Then one day they changed their name to Eidos (do either of those words mean anything? I don't know.)

IIRC, 'Eidos' is Greek for 'idea'. I believe that Plato used it to refer to his idea of 'forms' in the _Republic_.

Daikatana is the biggest joke in the industry since Battlecruiser 3k.

At least Romero doesn't have a degree mill 'PhD' and lie about it.

The perception that the office issues patents on "basically anything," while understandable, is greatly exaggerated.

It is certainly true that a decent lawyer can probably get something out of any disclosure, it remains to be seen if the claims allowed have any meaningful effect. In most art areas, a survey of USPTO records provides a fairly complete account of the state of the art. Unfortunately, this is not so in software arts and methods of doing business, owing largely to the history of decades of practice (centuries in the latter case) before patents were permitted.

There already exist "registries of neat ideas." They are called trade and academic journals. And they already constitute prior art.

I have a proposal which I think more effectively balances the relevant considerations more adequately than the status quo. You will also find there a brief discussion of the examination process, what it does and more importantly what it does not do. But I certainly would not do away with examination.

Trust me, its not as easy in practice as it may seem.

The correct URL for your proposal is actually http://home.tampabay.rr.com/werdna/r eform.html. It looks like you cut and pasted too much.

It has never been the case that an average examination was less than seven or eight hours. Never. For an examination fee of a few hundred bucks, the most that can be hoped for is what is called in the trade a "novelty" or "patentability" search (as opposed to a validity search). In most art areas, this is reasonably adequate.

A validity search typically requires far more resources, on the order of $10K-$50K or more. In litigation scenarios, a six figure search bill is not suprisingly uncommon. Since the corpus of prior art is virtually infinite in scope, one can spend as much as you want and still not have considered all the relevant art.

Congress made a determination to balance the quality of a patent search against the cost of access to the patent system. And for most art areas, this balancing is adequate.

Now as to the rhetoric. While an average eight hours are spent on examination, this does not mean that eight hours only will be spent on a multi-hundred page document. The number of huge applications are a small fraction, and even for large applications (at least in the software arts), they are large because of the multiplicity of claims (most of which are similar, and the patterns to which are obvious) filed as a result of recent case law. His remark that they are highly technical ignores that examiners only review applications in their particular area of expertise.

In short, it is perhaps most polite simply to note that Bryar was using his statistics improvidently.

Now, that being said, I for one acknowledge and agree that a novelty search is inadequate for certain art areas, in particular the software arts and methods of doing business. Too many patents are issuing when the best art had not been considered.

The real harm from this is that once the stamp is impressed on the deed, the claims are cloaked in a virtually impossible to overcome presumption of validity, even when killer art is available. The jury is instructed that unless "clear and convincing evidence" of invalidity is offered, they must find for the plaintiff. In practice, juries always find some doubt, and find the patent valid.

This is wrong and unjust, particularly when a defendant raised art that: (i) was not considered by the examiner; and (ii) which raises a substantial new question of patentability.

I have a proposal for legislation presently being considered in various fora, which I think may adequately strike more fairly the balance between keeping the scope and costs of examination in check, while protecting the marketplace. For prior art that fits the preceding two criteria, reduce the standard of evidence to that of a mere preponderance of the evidence. If the art is new, let the court consider it without enhanced evidentiary requirements, and thus let the plaintiff go to court at his or her own risk.

For more detail on the proposed reforms, check out this memorandum.

Of course, it was leap day.

Kean de Lacy
http://home.san.rr.com/dlacey

That said, you're correct that it would be more effort than it is worth to bring a probe back and reuse it.

Personally, I'm a fan of the ion-drive. Slow, but has the potential to last much longer and do much more, without the nasty safety factors of nuclear power.

Kean de Lacy
http://home.san.rr.com/dlacey/

I just checked the base page at http://home.san.rr.com/ and found a list of all the users off this home page. When I clicked on a few of them I received various errors from Apache, though I was able to load some of the other member pages. Some I could load once, then not, then yes again.

I don't think the author cut us off on purpose. Based on this little experiment, I'd say they just urgently need some help in configuring their web server.

Cheers!

I have this but my computer is too lame to run it smoothly. Please e-mail me if you are interested.

Yes, they can take your stuff, and then never let you have a trial. It happened
to my friend, money artist (and NOT a counterfeiter!!!!) J.S.G. Boggs. The SS
took his stuff and didn't charge him, in order to make him sue. They knew from
long experience that when he gets in front of a jury, they let him off, so they
forced the issue by never charging him after stealing his stuff. Stupidly, the US
Supreme court just denied cert. after he finally had to sue to get his life's work
returned. Not good from a free speech or property-rights perspective. :(

His studio page, with links to the
appeals court transcript and an
article about him. Here's a
Swiss gallery with some of his stuff (they may have counterfeits, too, according to Boggs).
another article. And
another. Finally, if you want to see one of the REAL reasons my friend Boggs gets in trouble, click on:
this and note the inscription over the dome: "Red Gold We Trust," in a year of campaign finance
scandals. That, and making folks actually THINK about the value of art & paper
money is not counterfeiting, but it IS very subversive. IMO. I don't own that bill
anymore, and the current owner, if he will sell, wants a lot of gold for it. Don't ask. :)
JMR

(Speaking only for myself, again.)

Corel has already committed HUGE chunks of code and bugfixes to Wine, and that includes in the last couple of months. Corel paid Cygnus to add several MS Visual C++ compatibility features to gcc. These are now available free of charge for everyone in gcc 2.95.2. Even if they never submit another patch they'll have done a ton of good things for Wine, including many "unsexy" things that wouldn't normally get done in an open source project.

That said, they have indeed slowed down commits recently as they approach beta. It's because they want to have a stable tree to build a shipping product. This is perfectly normal, as anyone who's developed commercial software knows. (heck, or even non-commercial - the Linux kernel has code freezes too). They've been reasonably open about the process with the Wine team (ie, we don't know their ship dates, but we don't care either).

As far as future participation, they're going to merge back any Wine bugfixes they make post-codefreeze once their apps go gold. They are currently paying Alexandre Julliard (Wine's leader) to make a necessary major architectural change that should greatly improve compatibility for Win32 apps. (Keep in mind this change won't help their applications - it's only for running existing Windows binaries that it comes fully into play). Once all this is done and shaken down I think you'll see a real "beta" version of Wine rather than the current pre-alphas. So if you have a favorite Windows app that's misbehaving read wine/documentation/bug-reports in the Wine source distribution and get posting on comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine.

Finally, Corel's work is even helping their competitors - we are aware on wine-devel of a fairly major Mac/Windows app who's developers have it up and running on WineLib to prove to their bosses that a Linux port is easy and feasible. It's doubtful that would've happened this soon if Corel hadn't gotten involved and blazed the trail.

BTW, Wine is under an X11-style license (and is switching to the real X11 license as we speak). If it were GPL'd it would be useless for closed-source commercial applications such as Corel's.

-Ian, wine-devel and proud (grep "Ian Schmidt" ChangeLog).
See Wine run! Screenshots at http://home.twcf.rr.com/ischmidt/wine.ht ml

I've read quite a bit about Nikola Tesla and his inventions, and I'm certain he invented this system right after the turn of the century.

He invented radio, patented it, and in 1893 gave a lecture about it and published it free for everyone in the world to use. He was then totally ripped off by Marconi around the turn of the century when he made the first transatlantic broadcast using the exact same apparatus that Tesla had described in the paper he published.

At this time, Tesla was trying to push the government to adopt his system of wireless war machines that could do battle without having humans be sitting ducks inside them. He demonstrated a model boat at the world's fair that was not only wireless, but used spread spectrum techonology to encrypt its signal. Nobody, of course picked up on this.

He went on to invent radar and offered to build radar systems for the government in the late 1920's, but they refused, and were forced to play catchup in 1938 and develop their own radar system.

If you'd like some more information about Tesla, go check out this short article about his major achievements: http://home.nycap.rr.com/useless/ tesla/tesla.html.

Tesla was not a crackpot, like a lot of people who know nothing about the man seem to think. This view was created by Thomas Edison who spent a large portion of his life trying to smash Tesla's image, and he ended up succeeding very well.

- Chris

" Road Runner is a joint venture (ServiceCo LLC) among affiliates of Time Warner Inc., MediaOne Group, Inc., Microsoft Corp., Compaq Corp., and Advance/Newhouse. This strategic partnership, formed in June of 1998, combines the resources and world class talent of five entrepreneurial companies united in their commitment to make Road Runner and its affiliates the preferred providers of online services. These five partners are recognized as world leaders in media, broadband communications, computer software and hardware, and publishing. "

Check it out youself at here

Last I checked AOL didn't offer this

Time to check again. That's what the merger adds.