Does anyone know what happens to patents if the company that holds them dies? Certainly if these patents hold up they are worth as much as the company itself. With these patents Amazon will never die - more likely it will be bought out by some other huge online retailer/entity in order to own inherit their patents. AOL maybe?
Wow - the PET... I have one on my computer collection shelf sitting over my head (a VERY sturdy shelf to be sure). I remember a public domain game for the PET called Toker (sp?). Unfortunately I don't remember it very well (nothing to do with drugs - more with the forward march of time) but the idea was that you had to get the guy high without him coughing... or something like that. The PET also had a line of disk drives - all with their own CPUs inside. The top of the line was able to store 1MB per ds/dd floppy! Not sure how they were able to do that. One last thing about the PET - its pretty well known that there was a POKE value with which you could fry the motherboard. Not sure which models were affected - there were a tonne of different models in this line.
customers would be happier if we made the servers look more like furniture than a water heater.
Haha - I sat on the Cray 1 at the German Museum in Munich while none of the museum staff were looking. Around the bottom of the Cray 1s, Cray built a circular leather covered base which looks (and feels) like a comfortable bench in which to sit. Indeed the Cray 1 was powerful AND furniture.
>>- but he just doesn't stand up to Knuth. I mean, >> the guy's a shining beacon of excellence in computer science.
>Have you ever looked at the license for TeX?
So he wrote TeX and is nominated because of it. My point was that his acheivements in the field of computer science are not particularly relevant to THIS award. His comp sci acheivements are why some posters seem to think he should have won... is this simple point really that tough to follow?
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Does anyone know what happens to patents if the company that holds them dies? Certainly if these patents hold up they are worth as much as the company itself. With these patents Amazon will never die - more likely it will be bought out by some other huge online retailer/entity in order to own inherit their patents. AOL maybe?
Wow - the PET... I have one on my computer collection shelf sitting over my head (a VERY sturdy shelf to be sure). I remember a public domain game for the PET called Toker (sp?). Unfortunately I don't remember it very well (nothing to do with drugs - more with the forward march of time) but the idea was that you had to get the guy high without him coughing... or something like that. The PET also had a line of disk drives - all with their own CPUs inside. The top of the line was able to store 1MB per ds/dd floppy! Not sure how they were able to do that. One last thing about the PET - its pretty well known that there was a POKE value with which you could fry the motherboard. Not sure which models were affected - there were a tonne of different models in this line.
Haha - I sat on the Cray 1 at the German Museum in Munich while none of the museum staff were looking. Around the bottom of the Cray 1s, Cray built a circular leather covered base which looks (and feels) like a comfortable bench in which to sit. Indeed the Cray 1 was powerful AND furniture.
>> the guy's a shining beacon of excellence in computer science.
>Have you ever looked at the license for TeX?
So he wrote TeX and is nominated because of it. My point was that his acheivements in the field of computer science are not particularly relevant to THIS award. His comp sci acheivements are why some posters seem to think he should have won... is this simple point really that tough to follow?
> of excellence in computer science.
So let him continue to win Computer Science awards - this award was for the advancement of free software.