I have tried, and failed miserably, to find music from small (unsigned) bands that I have heard and like on Napster because either they haven't released an album or nobody distributes the albums. It's actually nearly impossible to find anything like this on Napster without being very specific.
Well, no actually this DOES mean that nobody could duplicate and sell a product featuring the particular "scent of fresh cut grass" on sports equipment or whatever scope their trademark covers. That's why this ruling is significant at all is it changed the old rules (where you could duplicate a scent for instance)
I expect that many perfume companies will use this ruling to shove similar scent trademarks through which (personally considered) should be legal under current laws. Personally I don't really believe in trademarks at all, but I do think that governments should understand and abide by the laws they make. When courts give people the argument that sort of works out to: "oh you can't do that because it's never been done before" even though the law should encompass it really makes my stomach ache.
Regarding the formula... The recipe to create such scent would have to be protected as a trade secret and would not be able to be trademarked as it is not a signature of any sort. The process of creating the scent (if sufficiently unique) could be patented for further protection.
Your argument is that trademarks are for brands and slogans. Text. Given.
What about logos? Obviously you can trademark them.
Why? Company logos, names, slogans etc. that are trademark-able are unique identifying signatures of an individual, group, or corporation that that individual, group, or corporation should be entitled to protect.
A textual trademark is a linguistic expression of a signature. It might be spoken, written, or translated into foreign languages. Likewise, a company logo is a visual expression of a signature. It could be drawn, photocopied, or made into an enormous sign. There is little argument that these two types of "signatures" should be able to be protected.
If you think about this stuff in terms of a trademark-able signature, things really start making more sense. Tactile, auditory, olfactory, and gustatory signatures should be entitled for protectection just as much as visual and linguistic signatures are. Quite some years ago, courts finally gave into the auditory trademark issue and allowed trademark of signatures such as (HELLO YOU'RE ALL STUPID FOR MISSING THESE) the Intel sound and the godawful Nokia ring.
Come up with a good reason why Nokia should be able to trademark some beeps and a perfume company shouldn't be able to trademark its scent and then we'll argue against the court's decision. This has been a long time coming.
This is lending in the legal sense as in "rent or lease"... it doesn't mean giving it to a buddy to watch on Saturday night. If you charge a fee for people to view or borrow the movie, you will be required to pay royaltys to the film's studio. Things are a bit fuzzy here as well because you also owe royaltys if you want to do a public or large-party showing of a film. You must rent a special copy for public showing that usually costs between 50 and 1000 dollars each time you show it.
Right of first sale that people are talking about is your right to resell the copy; however whoever you sell it to is still bound by the restrictions on public showing and lending.
Actually, PSX2 will do some enhancements similar to what bleem! (D3D) does to PSX1 games, such as increasing the resolution and texture interpolation.
The Dreamcast graphics hardware has a couple extra features that bleem! takes advantage of that the PSX2 does not: trilinear filtering and anti-aliasing.
The PSX2 probably provides more complete emu(sim/cosim)ulation without these features, but bleem! for Dreamcast probably will make some games look a little nicer than even the PSX2 will.
There are a couple things to consider if you're Sony when you look at bleem! and VGS and then throw the bleem! port to Dreamcast into the mix.
Sony has more of an issue with the VGS people reverse engineering the PSX copy protection scheme than emulating the machine itself. This is quite significant in that bleem! couldn't afford to fight Sony on this one and consequently bleem! backed down and does not check the integrity of playstation cd's.
Of course it is widely known that console game companies make more money selling the games than the consoles themselves. I personally think it is a misconception that Sony wants to quaff emulation. I just think that they want to make sure that they get a piece of the profits. If VGS had licensed the copy protection from Sony and Sony had gotten a kickback from the sale of each copy of VGS, lawsuits would have probably been a non-issue as all that VGS could possibly do to Sony is broaden their market and their popularity. It is the REVERSE ENGINEERING that they take issue with and NOT EMULATION. Sony's methods of copy protecting playstation disks are patented and protected and in this particular case there's not much of an argument against that particular fact. No matter who argues for the "freedom of information," "Broad customer choice," or whatnot, it's very difficult to argue that an emulator should be able to play a backup copy of a PSX game any more than a legitimate Playstation should. (Especially when Sony will send you a replacement disk if your original copy breaks or otherwise becomes unplayable.) [Personal note: I think that emulation software and all legitimate playstation hardware should also be able to run original software/demos/etc.]
Sony's case against bleem! and VGS was to protect Sony's rights to their copy protection system. Granted, they also went after the emulation aspect as well, but the copy protection was the major thing. The media and the public seems to mangle these facts every time Sony vs. the Emu's comes up.
Sega is obviously condoning this (as they gave bleem! a development license) -- and they get a kickback from sales of bleem! for Dreamcast. If you look at the bleem! for Dreamcast situation, Sony would have much to gain by not having made such a fuss of this whole thing from the beginning - e.g. if bleem! for Dreamcast had copy-protection measures then Sony would lose much less money to piracy than it obviously will now.
Sony shot itself in the foot with emulation. It should have jumped in to help VGS and bleem! (which could have very easily included contracts to distribute the emulation software with copy-protection measures.) They would have had a lot to gain doing that.
Star Trek was the System 7 on x86, but it never made it to anyone outside of Apple really.
In its infancy, MacOS/X was called Rhapsody and was mostly OpenSTEP code with a MacOS flavor and some virtual machine work done. What most people don't remember is that it ran on X86 (And indeed NeXTstep/OpenSTEP run on X86 fine) I know because they sent me a beta of it.
It also sucked compared to the PPC version. In both speed and functionality. It was a project destined for the grave from the beginning which I found very sad when running it. Maybe my hopes are going up a little bit since it seems to still be around a bit.
So can Excel and Powerpoint and any other document that lets you include ActiveX (Formerly OLE) objects. Maybe they didnt exclude them because 99% of the documents attached to E-Mail in the Outlook-using business community are Word or Excel documents. Funny their own browser (IE) gets "features" broken by this update such as "Send page as link" which sends a.URL attachment to a person. ~GoRK
First, there is no "bug" anywhere. I know people that got hosed using AOL mail and hotmail and eudora and whatever else have you. Technically, I could have hosed myself with PINE (and I got the mail) by moving the windows program over to a windows machine (where it would naturally have to be run) and run it. All these people ran the attachment (a program file) and it ate their systems.
Now, I do think Microsoft is a little at fault for not allowing users to have very fine-grained control over security.
For example, I should be able to set my javascript security preferences to do things like prompt me to create popup windows or close windows or NOT if I so wish.
I should be able to set my Outlook (Express) preferences to warn me when opening.vbs,.exe,.com,.doc,.bat,.cmd, etc files. I should be able to tell IE/Outlook - Hey you programs can't access my registry or create files no matter what.
Honestly, I like VBS. It's very very very very useful for what I use it for.
It's not $1.50. It's 150 YEN, guys. This is a different market. A CD in Japan costs way more than the equivalent 15 bucks that we pay. That's why very few people actually own CD's. They rent them for what we would consider to be a ludicrous rental price. It's actually a lower rental fee when you base it on a cost to buy/cost to rent ratio than we pay to rent movies here in the states. Video games also fall under this same umbrella over there too. 150 yen is a bargain even for the old games.
If they were ever to make this service available here in the US, I think that we'd see more reasonalbe rates probably.50 - 1.00 day instead of ~ $1.51
Developing on the dreamcast system using the real tools is actually not very expensive. Sega even sells the development hardware at cost. I looked into it when I was poking at the OpenBSD/SH3->SH4 hacks. BTW anyone know what happened to that project? Might should ask/.
What is almost impossible to do however is obtain a development license. You must build a fairly reputable software company and demonstrate your ability to provide high-quality game releases (read: profit potential) before they will even read your app.
Then there's all kinds of exclusivity rights and things that cost you extra $$$ to get taken out of your contract (e.g. if you want to produce the same game for both the Dreamcast and the PlayStation)
On one hand, this leads to very good (or at least 99% bug free) games for any console. Imagine if Microsoft licensed windows application developers this way -- it probably would never crash.
On the other hand it makes it almost impossible for a small company to afford to develop console games and games notwithstanding, developing software for said system that is NOT A GAME is almost unheard of. Look at what happened to the "Game Genie" people that made the first "game enhancer" product for the NES - Nintendo threw them for broke with lawsuits. Luckily the GameShark guys handled development through the console manufacturers so they aren't out of business.
As far as I am concerned, software that is not games needs to make it down to consoles; and soon. The Dreamcast has been a very good step in this direction with Sega embracing applications other than games.
Well... as for web development environments that use "templates" - e.g. server-parsed scripts that are a little less involved (program-wise) than CGI scripting include:
1) ColdFusion (my personal choice even though it's a bit slow) www.allaire.com (commercial)
2) PHP (And w/ 4.0 Zend) www.php.com
3) Zope www.zope.org
4) iHTML www.ihtml.com (commercial)
5) MetaHTML www.metahtml.com/www.metahtml.org (commercial and GNU versions)
I have used all of these on Linux with sucess in each. All of them could allow you to create templates that replace "blank spots" in web pages with user-entered information from a database.
What you are asking though seems a little bit different -- you seem to be looking for a prebuilt approach like a tripod, geocities, xoom, or AOL "home page wizard/generator"
You might have a look at www.cgi-resources.com. They have a VERY good listing of CGI's and I believe I've seen a categor for page wizard scripts.
Has anybody collected links or is there even available any sort of collection of ISO's of anything OTHER than the OS distro's themselves?
E.G. StarOffice (cd for all sorts of platforms)
RedHat contribs?
Games, graphics, X, compos?
It would be really sweet to see some ISO's for apps. For some reason, I always find myself burning a bunch of tarballs onto a stack of CD's and I end up losing everything.
The influence of fog on this system drops initially, especially over short distances. But with any wireless system (optical or radio) - pick your spectrum - fog will still cause problems.
The problem comes with a layer of fog settling on the ground. The top of the fog is often the top of the cloudline and the radiation reflection off the top of the fog blanket causes TEMPERATURE INVERSION.
Temperature inversion can bend everything in the spectrum all the way from HEAT TO GAMMA radiation. It's the phenomenon that can be seen in the apparent "waves" rising from asphalt on hot days. They are visible because the temperature inversion is bending the electromagnetic spectrum all to hell. You think shooting a laser through that wouldnt move the beam around?!?
Short RF links (15km) aren't generally affected by temperature inversion, but the precise aiming needed in a laser system is going to push the distance numbers way down. Perhaps someday someone will be able to develop an automatic aiming apparatus to correct for all sorts of spectrum bending, but that day hasn't yet arrived!
Even amongst qt/gtk/motif/lesstif and any other programs that may be running with static libs? What if you're not using XFree? How about copying from X to a real vt and not an xterm? What about the half of users who only have two buttons? What about the people trying out YellowDog or something of the sort on their mac where they are stuck with only one button? (Command-NumLock is my middle click? WTF?)
The only point is that there are still some major obstacles to cut/paste in linux. I agree about middle-click working most of the time. Then there's still going to be people like me who try to do everything with the keyboard because it's often faster. There should be standard methods set up to handle copy/paste with the keyboard just like there is in all other major OS's. (Windows, MacOS, Be, NeXTstep [OpenSTEP]) -- hell, the Apple ][gs had standardized copy/paste and so did the amiga in its GUI.
It's a single-board computer that plugs into a passive backplane (bascially a bunch of ISA/PCI slots). The AGP bus is connected directly to On-board video so now AGP bus is broken out onto the connectors.
This is a Single-Board Computer (SBC). They have been produced with dual-processor designs back to the days of the 486. They even have SBC's that can handle quad xeons. And there are a lot of these that are a helluva lot smaller than this one.
They are absolutely NOT laptop tech. They require as much power consumption as a full system. They are designed to facilitate hardware upgrades with minimal downtime. (Swap the motherboard without removing peripheral cards; etc)
Now, the question of a dual-processor laptop is a nice one to raise, but the power needs of let's say... two 300 mhz processors is WAY MORE than the requirements of ONE 600Mhz processor, so why bother? Maybe in the future, these new extremely low power cpu's will be put into mobiles in multiples, but until then; no.
Honestly I can't even see why this item even made news. First, it's old tech. Secondly, it's WRONG, and thirdly the suggestions are totally off-base.
Perhaps someone should have posted an "Ask Slashdot" for "Are dual-processor mobiles in our future?"
I use linux. I have manually grok'd a slackware 1.2 install into a RedHat 3 install with SRPMS. I have learned (ba)sh, perl, and tcl. I can make damn near anything thats out there work if it's possible. Do I use Linux on a day-to-day basis? Nope. Why?
No matter how many daemon's are running on top of X to facilitate matters, I cannot always copy and paste between applications. When I can, it's impossible to tell whether it's Ctrl-V or Alt-V or Shift-Ins (If your keys even work). It takes hours to fix all this crap. I dont have the time for that anymore. Sure, say fix it once it's done; yeah until the new.rpm wipes the.conf because someone forgot to change a config file. I should have backed it up? Right. I could go on. A lot of people reading this can probably afford the time it takes to come up with the most 31337 E theme you ever saw, or hack at mesa/glx for a half a day so they can play quake? What if you lost $500 per hour while you tried to figure out why in hell Samba wasn't joining the NT domain? What O/S would you use? I'll take the 95% uptime of windows to the 75% usability time of Linux any day; thanks.
I only wish sometimes that the OSS movement had as many proponents concerned with the SOFTWARE ITSELF rather than the OPERATING SYSTEM it runs on. Let's see some adherence to established functionality standards rather than a lot of this "I know how to make my menu widget better" garbage.
Don't get me wrong. I have a ton of web abd mail servers running Linux. I just designed an entire embedded system around Linux. It's small. It's robust. It's stable, and it burns rubber. But the systems aren't designed to be used interactively by ANYONE. Honestly; if cut and paste between programs barely works, then I'm going to lose hope for Linux on the home desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
I have tried, and failed miserably, to find music from small (unsigned) bands that I have heard and like on Napster because either they haven't released an album or nobody distributes the albums. It's actually nearly impossible to find anything like this on Napster without being very specific.
Well, no actually this DOES mean that nobody could duplicate and sell a product featuring the particular "scent of fresh cut grass" on sports equipment or whatever scope their trademark covers. That's why this ruling is significant at all is it changed the old rules (where you could duplicate a scent for instance)
I expect that many perfume companies will use this ruling to shove similar scent trademarks through which (personally considered) should be legal under current laws. Personally I don't really believe in trademarks at all, but I do think that governments should understand and abide by the laws they make. When courts give people the argument that sort of works out to: "oh you can't do that because it's never been done before" even though the law should encompass it really makes my stomach ache.
Regarding the formula... The recipe to create such scent would have to be protected as a trade secret and would not be able to be trademarked as it is not a signature of any sort. The process of creating the scent (if sufficiently unique) could be patented for further protection.
~GoRK
Your argument is that trademarks are for brands and slogans. Text. Given.
What about logos? Obviously you can trademark them.
Why? Company logos, names, slogans etc. that are trademark-able are unique identifying signatures of an individual, group, or corporation that that individual, group, or corporation should be entitled to protect.
A textual trademark is a linguistic expression of a signature. It might be spoken, written, or translated into foreign languages. Likewise, a company logo is a visual expression of a signature. It could be drawn, photocopied, or made into an enormous sign. There is little argument that these two types of "signatures" should be able to be protected.
If you think about this stuff in terms of a trademark-able signature, things really start making more sense. Tactile, auditory, olfactory, and gustatory signatures should be entitled for protectection just as much as visual and linguistic signatures are. Quite some years ago, courts finally gave into the auditory trademark issue and allowed trademark of signatures such as (HELLO YOU'RE ALL STUPID FOR MISSING THESE) the Intel sound and the godawful Nokia ring.
Come up with a good reason why Nokia should be able to trademark some beeps and a perfume company shouldn't be able to trademark its scent and then we'll argue against the court's decision. This has been a long time coming.
~GoRK
My god, for the first time in history the virus warnings on slashdot are outnumbering the ones inept people are e-mailing me!
~GoRK
This is lending in the legal sense as in "rent or lease" ... it doesn't mean giving it to a buddy to watch on Saturday night. If you charge a fee for people to view or borrow the movie, you will be required to pay royaltys to the film's studio. Things are a bit fuzzy here as well because you also owe royaltys if you want to do a public or large-party showing of a film. You must rent a special copy for public showing that usually costs between 50 and 1000 dollars each time you show it.
Right of first sale that people are talking about is your right to resell the copy; however whoever you sell it to is still bound by the restrictions on public showing and lending.
~GoRK
Remember that Sony filed a lawsuit against bleem! to prevent them from incoporating psx copy protection in their emulator (which they didn't).
Actually, PSX2 will do some enhancements similar to what bleem! (D3D) does to PSX1 games, such as increasing the resolution and texture interpolation.
The Dreamcast graphics hardware has a couple extra features that bleem! takes advantage of that the PSX2 does not: trilinear filtering and anti-aliasing.
The PSX2 probably provides more complete emu(sim/cosim)ulation without these features, but bleem! for Dreamcast probably will make some games look a little nicer than even the PSX2 will.
~GoRK
There are a couple things to consider if you're Sony when you look at bleem! and VGS and then throw the bleem! port to Dreamcast into the mix.
Sony has more of an issue with the VGS people reverse engineering the PSX copy protection scheme than emulating the machine itself. This is quite significant in that bleem! couldn't afford to fight Sony on this one and consequently bleem! backed down and does not check the integrity of playstation cd's.
Of course it is widely known that console game companies make more money selling the games than the consoles themselves. I personally think it is a misconception that Sony wants to quaff emulation. I just think that they want to make sure that they get a piece of the profits. If VGS had licensed the copy protection from Sony and Sony had gotten a kickback from the sale of each copy of VGS, lawsuits would have probably been a non-issue as all that VGS could possibly do to Sony is broaden their market and their popularity. It is the REVERSE ENGINEERING that they take issue with and NOT EMULATION. Sony's methods of copy protecting playstation disks are patented and protected and in this particular case there's not much of an argument against that particular fact. No matter who argues for the "freedom of information," "Broad customer choice," or whatnot, it's very difficult to argue that an emulator should be able to play a backup copy of a PSX game any more than a legitimate Playstation should. (Especially when Sony will send you a replacement disk if your original copy breaks or otherwise becomes unplayable.) [Personal note: I think that emulation software and all legitimate playstation hardware should also be able to run original software/demos/etc.]
Sony's case against bleem! and VGS was to protect Sony's rights to their copy protection system. Granted, they also went after the emulation aspect as well, but the copy protection was the major thing. The media and the public seems to mangle these facts every time Sony vs. the Emu's comes up.
Sega is obviously condoning this (as they gave bleem! a development license) -- and they get a kickback from sales of bleem! for Dreamcast. If you look at the bleem! for Dreamcast situation, Sony would have much to gain by not having made such a fuss of this whole thing from the beginning - e.g. if bleem! for Dreamcast had copy-protection measures then Sony would lose much less money to piracy than it obviously will now.
Sony shot itself in the foot with emulation. It should have jumped in to help VGS and bleem! (which could have very easily included contracts to distribute the emulation software with copy-protection measures.) They would have had a lot to gain doing that.
~GoRK
y35.
Star Trek was the System 7 on x86, but it never made it to anyone outside of Apple really.
In its infancy, MacOS/X was called Rhapsody and was mostly OpenSTEP code with a MacOS flavor and some virtual machine work done. What most people don't remember is that it ran on X86 (And indeed NeXTstep/OpenSTEP run on X86 fine) I know because they sent me a beta of it.
It also sucked compared to the PPC version. In both speed and functionality. It was a project destined for the grave from the beginning which I found very sad when running it. Maybe my hopes are going up a little bit since it seems to still be around a bit.
~GoRK
So can Excel and Powerpoint and any other document that lets you include ActiveX (Formerly OLE) objects. Maybe they didnt exclude them because 99% of the documents attached to E-Mail in the Outlook-using business community are Word or Excel documents. Funny their own browser (IE) gets "features" broken by this update such as "Send page as link" which sends a .URL attachment to a person. ~GoRK
First, there is no "bug" anywhere. I know people that got hosed using AOL mail and hotmail and eudora and whatever else have you. Technically, I could have hosed myself with PINE (and I got the mail) by moving the windows program over to a windows machine (where it would naturally have to be run) and run it. All these people ran the attachment (a program file) and it ate their systems.
.vbs, .exe, .com, .doc, .bat, .cmd, etc files. I should be able to tell IE/Outlook - Hey you programs can't access my registry or create files no matter what.
Now, I do think Microsoft is a little at fault for not allowing users to have very fine-grained control over security.
For example, I should be able to set my javascript security preferences to do things like prompt me to create popup windows or close windows or NOT if I so wish.
I should be able to set my Outlook (Express) preferences to warn me when opening
Honestly, I like VBS. It's very very very very useful for what I use it for.
~GoRK
Anyone find it sort of strange that a server dishing out nothing but =5k pages takes so long to respond?
~GoRK
Just a side note for those of you who are hailing this as such a "big deal" and "finally they get it" etc.
Nintendo developed and released their "super gameboy" product that allowed you to play GameBoy games on your SNES probably 5 or 6 years ago.
~GoRK
It's not $1.50. It's 150 YEN, guys. This is a different market. A CD in Japan costs way more than the equivalent 15 bucks that we pay. That's why very few people actually own CD's. They rent them for what we would consider to be a ludicrous rental price. It's actually a lower rental fee when you base it on a cost to buy/cost to rent ratio than we pay to rent movies here in the states. Video games also fall under this same umbrella over there too. 150 yen is a bargain even for the old games.
.50 - 1.00 day instead of ~ $1.51
If they were ever to make this service available here in the US, I think that we'd see more reasonalbe rates probably
~GoRK
Developing on the dreamcast system using the real tools is actually not very expensive. Sega even sells the development hardware at cost. I looked into it when I was poking at the OpenBSD/SH3->SH4 hacks. BTW anyone know what happened to that project? Might should ask /.
What is almost impossible to do however is obtain a development license. You must build a fairly reputable software company and demonstrate your ability to provide high-quality game releases (read: profit potential) before they will even read your app.
Then there's all kinds of exclusivity rights and things that cost you extra $$$ to get taken out of your contract (e.g. if you want to produce the same game for both the Dreamcast and the PlayStation)
On one hand, this leads to very good (or at least 99% bug free) games for any console. Imagine if Microsoft licensed windows application developers this way -- it probably would never crash.
On the other hand it makes it almost impossible for a small company to afford to develop console games and games notwithstanding, developing software for said system that is NOT A GAME is almost unheard of. Look at what happened to the "Game Genie" people that made the first "game enhancer" product for the NES - Nintendo threw them for broke with lawsuits. Luckily the GameShark guys handled development through the console manufacturers so they aren't out of business.
As far as I am concerned, software that is not games needs to make it down to consoles; and soon. The Dreamcast has been a very good step in this direction with Sega embracing applications other than games.
~GoRK
Anyone compiled eggdrop recently?
There's always "ads" for candy companies that show up during the compile.
E.G. "This will take a while.. go get some Runts"
~GoRK
how about:
login; look; touch; make > out; touch; grep; unzip; finger; mount; fsck; fsck; yes; gasp; yes; unouunt; wait; mount; fsck; fsck; gasp; gasp; unmount; sleep; logout
you could throw 'tee' in there and another process to really spice things up!!!
Well... as for web development environments that use "templates" - e.g. server-parsed scripts that are a little less involved (program-wise) than CGI scripting include:
1) ColdFusion (my personal choice even though it's a bit slow) www.allaire.com (commercial)
2) PHP (And w/ 4.0 Zend) www.php.com
3) Zope www.zope.org
4) iHTML www.ihtml.com (commercial)
5) MetaHTML www.metahtml.com/www.metahtml.org (commercial and GNU versions)
I have used all of these on Linux with sucess in each. All of them could allow you to create templates that replace "blank spots" in web pages with user-entered information from a database.
What you are asking though seems a little bit different -- you seem to be looking for a prebuilt approach like a tripod, geocities, xoom, or AOL "home page wizard/generator"
You might have a look at www.cgi-resources.com. They have a VERY good listing of CGI's and I believe I've seen a categor for page wizard scripts.
~GoRK
Has anybody collected links or is there even available any sort of collection of ISO's of anything OTHER than the OS distro's themselves?
E.G. StarOffice (cd for all sorts of platforms)
RedHat contribs?
Games, graphics, X, compos?
It would be really sweet to see some ISO's for apps. For some reason, I always find myself burning a bunch of tarballs onto a stack of CD's and I end up losing everything.
~GoRK
The influence of fog on this system drops initially, especially over short distances. But with any wireless system (optical or radio) - pick your spectrum - fog will still cause problems.
The problem comes with a layer of fog settling on the ground. The top of the fog is often the top of the cloudline and the radiation reflection off the top of the fog blanket causes TEMPERATURE INVERSION.
Temperature inversion can bend everything in the spectrum all the way from HEAT TO GAMMA radiation. It's the phenomenon that can be seen in the apparent "waves" rising from asphalt on hot days. They are visible because the temperature inversion is bending the electromagnetic spectrum all to hell. You think shooting a laser through that wouldnt move the beam around?!?
Short RF links (15km) aren't generally affected by temperature inversion, but the precise aiming needed in a laser system is going to push the distance numbers way down. Perhaps someday someone will be able to develop an automatic aiming apparatus to correct for all sorts of spectrum bending, but that day hasn't yet arrived!
~GoRK
Even amongst qt/gtk/motif/lesstif and any other programs that may be running with static libs? What if you're not using XFree? How about copying from X to a real vt and not an xterm? What about the half of users who only have two buttons? What about the people trying out YellowDog or something of the sort on their mac where they are stuck with only one button? (Command-NumLock is my middle click? WTF?)
The only point is that there are still some major obstacles to cut/paste in linux. I agree about middle-click working most of the time. Then there's still going to be people like me who try to do everything with the keyboard because it's often faster. There should be standard methods set up to handle copy/paste with the keyboard just like there is in all other major OS's. (Windows, MacOS, Be, NeXTstep [OpenSTEP]) -- hell, the Apple ][gs had standardized copy/paste and so did the amiga in its GUI.
~GoRK
It's a single-board computer that plugs into a passive backplane (bascially a bunch of ISA/PCI slots). The AGP bus is connected directly to On-board video so now AGP bus is broken out onto the connectors.
This is a Single-Board Computer (SBC). They have been produced with dual-processor designs back to the days of the 486. They even have SBC's that can handle quad xeons. And there are a lot of these that are a helluva lot smaller than this one.
They are absolutely NOT laptop tech. They require as much power consumption as a full system. They are designed to facilitate hardware upgrades with minimal downtime. (Swap the motherboard without removing peripheral cards; etc)
Now, the question of a dual-processor laptop is a nice one to raise, but the power needs of let's say... two 300 mhz processors is WAY MORE than the requirements of ONE 600Mhz processor, so why bother? Maybe in the future, these new extremely low power cpu's will be put into mobiles in multiples, but until then; no.
Honestly I can't even see why this item even made news. First, it's old tech. Secondly, it's WRONG, and thirdly the suggestions are totally off-base.
Perhaps someone should have posted an "Ask Slashdot" for "Are dual-processor mobiles in our future?"
~GoRK
I use linux. I have manually grok'd a slackware 1.2 install into a RedHat 3 install with SRPMS. I have learned (ba)sh, perl, and tcl. I can make damn near anything thats out there work if it's possible. Do I use Linux on a day-to-day basis? Nope. Why?
.rpm wipes the .conf because someone forgot to change a config file. I should have backed it up? Right. I could go on. A lot of people reading this can probably afford the time it takes to come up with the most 31337 E theme you ever saw, or hack at mesa/glx for a half a day so they can play quake? What if you lost $500 per hour while you tried to figure out why in hell Samba wasn't joining the NT domain? What O/S would you use? I'll take the 95% uptime of windows to the 75% usability time of Linux any day; thanks.
No matter how many daemon's are running on top of X to facilitate matters, I cannot always copy and paste between applications. When I can, it's impossible to tell whether it's Ctrl-V or Alt-V or Shift-Ins (If your keys even work). It takes hours to fix all this crap. I dont have the time for that anymore. Sure, say fix it once it's done; yeah until the new
I only wish sometimes that the OSS movement had as many proponents concerned with the SOFTWARE ITSELF rather than the OPERATING SYSTEM it runs on. Let's see some adherence to established functionality standards rather than a lot of this "I know how to make my menu widget better" garbage.
Don't get me wrong. I have a ton of web abd mail servers running Linux. I just designed an entire embedded system around Linux. It's small. It's robust. It's stable, and it burns rubber. But the systems aren't designed to be used interactively by ANYONE. Honestly; if cut and paste between programs barely works, then I'm going to lose hope for Linux on the home desktop.
~GoRK