What you meant to say there is there is no means to expand the device within the same form factor. Once more, I have to point out that just about anything you are likley to attach will have some sort of USB or Firewire adaptor solution, and further add that anything not already built in is probably going to be something you only infrequently attach. The very nature of the PCMCIA form factor is that if offers wired connectivity or ports to other external devices, for all of the cases that is not so (like 802.11x) then built in solutions are right there
No. Not at all.
Look, here's the simpler way to look at it. A desktop system isn't full-featured unless it has some way to add arbitrary devices that haven't been invented yet to some sort of primary bus. On PCs, ISA, EISA, and PCI have all filled that need. On Macs, NuBus and PCI have filled that need. If you don't have any way to add strange new devices to the system directly via some kind of bus, then the system can't be called full-featured.
The same thing is true of a laptop. PCMCIA fills this need in some laptops. CompactPCI could fill this need if Apple supported it in a general way, I suppose, but there isn't really a benefit to that. There's nothing wrong with Cardbus. It has the bandwidth for 802.11g, even. There's no reason to jump to an incompatible form factor here, because that form factor doesn't in fact offer any benefits that aren't already in place.
I imagine if you wanted to diverge to some aborted wireless standard you could swap out the card inside - if you could find drivers that worked with it...
You imagine wrong, because of the way the antennas work. Anything that goes there has to be specially built to go into that slot, and has to use the same frequency range as AirPort (2.4GHz), so you couldn't put 802.11a there.
Now, I'm not saying that the 12" PowerBook sucks. It doesn't. It's clearly the right combination of features for an awful lot of people. I just object to calling it full featured. It's lacking features some people need, and doesn't have a way to add those features.
Saying the laptop is not "full featured" is pretty much the same is saying that no laptop can be full featured without an 8" floppy or nine-pin serial port.
Not at all. The lack of a floppy doesn't prevent it from being full featured, but only because there's another writable removable media drive in there -- the CDRW drive.
There's no replacement for PCMCIA in there. There's no port or device that can be used to expand in arbitrary ways that the laptop designers haven't thought of yet. If the microPCI slot that Airpor Extreme goes into were done in a more general manner, then that might count, but as things stand, well, how do you get 802.11a in there, for example?
Personally, I think Rendezvous is going to revolutionize the trade show floor.
The trade show wireless network a small local network, the sort Rendezvous works with. Vendors and consultants will be able to promote themselves by having web sites and servers advertise themselves. You'll be able to find FTP or file servers and grab demo versions of products. You'll be able to chat with representatives. You'll be able to grab contact information into your address book and product release calendars into iCal. Who knows what else?
I've got a digital camera that works by unfolding into a PCMCIA card. You load pictures off it by putting the camera itself into a PCMCIA slot. I've got fax software, and a PCMCIA fax modem that can talk to a cell phone, unlike the modem built into the powerbook. I've got a Franklin/Rolodex REX, which is a PDA that is a PCMCIA card, and I've been thinking about writing a MacOS X/iSync driver for it. I've got a bunch of linear (ie. non-ATA/IDE) flash PCMCIA cards, used with my old newtons. I've got a bunch of SRAM memory cards, used to exchange data with all sorts of other devices. I've got multiple ethernet cards, so I can have more than one network connection to build a bridge or firewall.
Does everyone need PCMCIA? No. Do most people need PCMCIA? No. Can you reasonably call a laptop full featured without PCMCIA? No.
Sure seems full-featured to me, I can't think of anything I'd want a PC card for that this laptop doesn't have a connection to handle
That's sort of the point. A PC card slot is for later expansion for things that you can't currently think of.
Some examples that might be useful with the 12" PowerBook: high-speed firewire ports, a USB 2.0 bus, 802.11a networking, or heck, 802.11g networkin in other countries that use other frequency ranges for it, for international travelers.
I'm not saying the lack of PCMCIA makes the thing useless. It's probably the right choice for a whole lot of people. I am saying it means it's unreasonable to call the thing "full featured".
Yeah, I was excited about the "smallest full-featured laptop", until I discovered that it's not in fact full featured. I'm sorry, but any laptop that doesn't include even a single type 1 PCMCIA slot just can't be called full-featured. Bah.
Do we reallly want to build a highway that cuts through the Mountains of Madness? I mean, do we really want to make it that much easier for the Shoggoths to get out of there and move to a warmer climate?
If you tape a Pay-Per-View movie and give the tape away, you're clearly violationg copyright in a way not covered by fair use.
If you pay to get a basic cable channel such as Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network, and you make an AVI file of a show on that network, and you make it available to folks who haven't paid to receive those networks, you're clearly violating copyright in a way not covered by fair use.
Just because the DMCA doesn't forbid it doesn't mean it's legal. Show-swapping is still a violation of ordinary, regular copyright, whether done via TiVo or VHS tape, regardless of what the DMCA says.
If you pay to receive programming, and you make a videotape of it, and you give that videotape to someone who doesn't pay to receive the same programming, you're violating copyright and are breaking the law. Using a TiVo doesn't change that.
Knew about Catacomb 3D, didn't know about Hovertank. But, at least around CMU campus back then, nobody really knew about any of these until Wolf3D. That was the one that popularized the genre, at least here.
Actually, the FPS grandaddy would have to be Wolfenstein 3D. That was a hell of a game when it came out, and created the hype for Doom. The day Doom first came out for download, network traffic all over the internet ground to a halt, and the experience people had playing Wolf3D was one of the reasons.
I think there is a difference. The $50K software package is being sold. I could purchase it if I wanted. However, it's not possible to purchase the ROMs used in MAME even if you wanted to.
While that may be justification for saying there's a moral grey area, that has absolutely no bearing on the legality of the act at all.
And still, the owners of the ROMs are still using them and making money off them. They're being sold in emulators for other platforms, like the GameBoy Advance. Those vendors have a vested interest in making sure the original is not available, so that more sales of the emulated versions occur.
Re:OT - How many Roms are legal?
on
MAME To Become GPL?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Sure there is. The concept is known colloquially as squatters rights. If you abandon real property, other people can come along and "steal it" if they settle down on it and improve it.
That applies to land, buildings, and the like. There is no related concept for intellectual property.
There is no legal grey area here.
Re:OT - How many Roms are legal?
on
MAME To Become GPL?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
To me, ROMs are they same legal gray area as abandonware.
Abandonware is not in a legal gray area. Pirating abandonware is just as illegal as pirating a $50000 software package. If you must, say it's in a moral grey area (in which case I simply won't agree with you), but don't kid yourself, there's absolutely no legal grey area.
So what is up here? Since when do black holes occupy so much space (I thought they were points)? And how can something with a density only 1/100 of our Sun be called super-massive?
Well, are we talking about the radius from the center to the surface of the matter, or from the center to the event horizon, or from the center to the radius at which it's possible for other stars to be stable, or what?
Why shouldn't companies slap whatever restrictions they want on their products? Microsoft's EULA could state that by opening the wrapper I agree to eat the contents. If I don't agree to that, I don't buy the product.
They should go right ahead and slap whatever restrictions they want on their products. They just shouldn't do it by the mechanism of shrink-wrap EULAs. Folks are used to just buying stuff and getting full use out of it. In my opinion, a shrink-wrap EULA isn't disclosure enough for licensing terms that differ dramatically from standard expectations. This mechanism borders on fraud. Make sure the customer understands the restrictions, and actually make them provide a real signature with a pen and ink, and all is joy. Just don't slip in unexpected restrictions via a shrink-wrap EULA that most people won't read anyway.
I have exactly one application that won't work under OS X and also won't work under "Classic". Further, the vendor has promised to never ever update it again, so if I get a mac that can't boot into OS9, I can never run this application on that mac.
The application? Connectix Virtual GameStation, their old commercial PlayStation emulator, bought and then burried by Sony.
It's a great thing to be able to bring my mac onto a flight from the east coast to the west coast and have the choice of watching a DVD or playing "Final Fantasy". I'd like to keep that choice.
Re:Just another toy
on
Newton Won't Die
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Seems to me that one could do a lot better by getting a used mini-laptop. Mine didn't cost me a huge amount, and it was a lot more productive than any handheld.
Depends on what you want. I have an eMate, which is a Newton that's shaped like a laptop. I've charged it up, taken it with me to a 3-day conference, and used it to take notes at the conference for the full 3 days without ever having to charge it. I took it on a business trip to Europe, and didn't have to worry about getting an AC converter because I didn't have to plug it in the entire time I was there. Can you do that with your used mini-laptop?
I've got an Imation SuperDisk drive in my desktop Athlon/WinXP box, and the VST SuperDisk expansion bay drive for my PowerBook (G3/Firewire) running MacOS X. (My Linux server actually has ordinary floppies, both 3.5" and *360k* 5.25", but that's a story for another day.) I use it from time to time. It's more useful than a plain floppy drive in that it can also deal with 100MB media, and it connects via IDE rather than a floppy controller, but it does function as a floppy drive.
I don't think I could do without it. Sometimes you've got to do something along the lines of copying your network drivers around, and it's much nicer to do that with full-fledged R/W media as opposed to burning a CDRW.
Floppys can go away, but if they do, they'd better be replaced by something like bootable USB thumb drives or bootable CF slots -- bootable media that's removable and genuinely R/W.
So, has anyone tried to rig up something with a laser and a bunch of spinning mirrors, so that the disc can actually stay still while being read? It'd be a more complex mechanism, but it could go arbitrarily fast without stressing the CD at all.
A faster release process is required if we expect newbies (Debian newbies -- not Linux newbies) to install Debian and have a fairly up-to-date set of packages.
And why do we want that? I don't want that. Why should I give a rat's ass if Debian contains a "fairly up-to-date set of packages"? I want it to be a stable server OS. I want to be able to set it up and then proceed to ignore the "state of the art", getting actual work done instead of caring about software releases. As long as it's all basically POSIX and gets security-related updates quickly enough, who cares what the exact version numbers are?
Oh, well. Perhaps some day they'll give in and build in Vorbis support.
Any Mac-aware types care to guess on if/when this'll happen?
I suspect it won't happen until after the iPod supports the Vorbis format, and I don't see that happening quickly.
One way to make it happen more quickly would be to hack the iPod to play Vorbis files and release the hack for free. We've seen Apple play catch-up when other folks have added features to the iPod before. This would be really hard though.
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Look, here's the simpler way to look at it. A desktop system isn't full-featured unless it has some way to add arbitrary devices that haven't been invented yet to some sort of primary bus. On PCs, ISA, EISA, and PCI have all filled that need. On Macs, NuBus and PCI have filled that need. If you don't have any way to add strange new devices to the system directly via some kind of bus, then the system can't be called full-featured.
The same thing is true of a laptop. PCMCIA fills this need in some laptops. CompactPCI could fill this need if Apple supported it in a general way, I suppose, but there isn't really a benefit to that. There's nothing wrong with Cardbus. It has the bandwidth for 802.11g, even. There's no reason to jump to an incompatible form factor here, because that form factor doesn't in fact offer any benefits that aren't already in place.
You imagine wrong, because of the way the antennas work. Anything that goes there has to be specially built to go into that slot, and has to use the same frequency range as AirPort (2.4GHz), so you couldn't put 802.11a there.
Now, I'm not saying that the 12" PowerBook sucks. It doesn't. It's clearly the right combination of features for an awful lot of people. I just object to calling it full featured. It's lacking features some people need, and doesn't have a way to add those features.
There's no replacement for PCMCIA in there. There's no port or device that can be used to expand in arbitrary ways that the laptop designers haven't thought of yet. If the microPCI slot that Airpor Extreme goes into were done in a more general manner, then that might count, but as things stand, well, how do you get 802.11a in there, for example?
Well, there goes the whole Omega Point thing. I guess there'll be no subjective eternity of omniciense and omnipotence for the likes of us. Oh, well.
Personally, I think Rendezvous is going to revolutionize the trade show floor.
The trade show wireless network a small local network, the sort Rendezvous works with. Vendors and consultants will be able to promote themselves by having web sites and servers advertise themselves. You'll be able to find FTP or file servers and grab demo versions of products. You'll be able to chat with representatives. You'll be able to grab contact information into your address book and product release calendars into iCal. Who knows what else?
Does everyone need PCMCIA? No. Do most people need PCMCIA? No. Can you reasonably call a laptop full featured without PCMCIA? No.
Some examples that might be useful with the 12" PowerBook: high-speed firewire ports, a USB 2.0 bus, 802.11a networking, or heck, 802.11g networkin in other countries that use other frequency ranges for it, for international travelers.
I'm not saying the lack of PCMCIA makes the thing useless. It's probably the right choice for a whole lot of people. I am saying it means it's unreasonable to call the thing "full featured".
Yeah, I was excited about the "smallest full-featured laptop", until I discovered that it's not in fact full featured. I'm sorry, but any laptop that doesn't include even a single type 1 PCMCIA slot just can't be called full-featured. Bah.
Do we reallly want to build a highway that cuts through the Mountains of Madness? I mean, do we really want to make it that much easier for the Shoggoths to get out of there and move to a warmer climate?
If you tape a Pay-Per-View movie and give the tape away, you're clearly violationg copyright in a way not covered by fair use.
If you pay to get a basic cable channel such as Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network, and you make an AVI file of a show on that network, and you make it available to folks who haven't paid to receive those networks, you're clearly violating copyright in a way not covered by fair use.
Just because the DMCA doesn't forbid it doesn't mean it's legal. Show-swapping is still a violation of ordinary, regular copyright, whether done via TiVo or VHS tape, regardless of what the DMCA says.
If you pay to receive programming, and you make a videotape of it, and you give that videotape to someone who doesn't pay to receive the same programming, you're violating copyright and are breaking the law. Using a TiVo doesn't change that.
Knew about Catacomb 3D, didn't know about Hovertank. But, at least around CMU campus back then, nobody really knew about any of these until Wolf3D. That was the one that popularized the genre, at least here.
First, you have to make one of those iDVD-type DVDs of the wedding, with all sorts of footage and slide shows and all.
Then, that DVD has to be pirated and released on the internet as a DivX rip.
And still, the owners of the ROMs are still using them and making money off them. They're being sold in emulators for other platforms, like the GameBoy Advance. Those vendors have a vested interest in making sure the original is not available, so that more sales of the emulated versions occur.
There is no legal grey area here.
I have exactly one application that won't work under OS X and also won't work under "Classic". Further, the vendor has promised to never ever update it again, so if I get a mac that can't boot into OS9, I can never run this application on that mac.
The application? Connectix Virtual GameStation, their old commercial PlayStation emulator, bought and then burried by Sony.
It's a great thing to be able to bring my mac onto a flight from the east coast to the west coast and have the choice of watching a DVD or playing "Final Fantasy". I'd like to keep that choice.
I've got an Imation SuperDisk drive in my desktop Athlon/WinXP box, and the VST SuperDisk expansion bay drive for my PowerBook (G3/Firewire) running MacOS X. (My Linux server actually has ordinary floppies, both 3.5" and *360k* 5.25", but that's a story for another day.) I use it from time to time. It's more useful than a plain floppy drive in that it can also deal with 100MB media, and it connects via IDE rather than a floppy controller, but it does function as a floppy drive.
I don't think I could do without it. Sometimes you've got to do something along the lines of copying your network drivers around, and it's much nicer to do that with full-fledged R/W media as opposed to burning a CDRW.
Floppys can go away, but if they do, they'd better be replaced by something like bootable USB thumb drives or bootable CF slots -- bootable media that's removable and genuinely R/W.
So, has anyone tried to rig up something with a laser and a bunch of spinning mirrors, so that the disc can actually stay still while being read? It'd be a more complex mechanism, but it could go arbitrarily fast without stressing the CD at all.
One way to make it happen more quickly would be to hack the iPod to play Vorbis files and release the hack for free. We've seen Apple play catch-up when other folks have added features to the iPod before. This would be really hard though.