There is no associated statutory license for interactive broadcasts. What the web is good for is interactive content. If doubleclick can beam targeted ads to me, a webcaster sure as hell has the ability to stream me the music I want, when I want it it. Why dont they? Becuase the music industry has not created a statutory license for interactive content. This fact has crippled online music business models, there's no way you can get permission from every single artist in any reasonable way.
Dude, you just (said in not so many words or)gave me an idea for how we can solve this pesky Napster-RIAA-SaveTheArtists-DownWithCopyright debate!
HOW TO SOLVE THE NAPSTER DEBATE ONCE AND FOR ALL
Create a network of streaming music servers. Users use a Winamp-like client and create custom playlists of any songs they want. Anything conceivable. The music is then streamed to the client (and possibly cached locally). RIAA and independent artists alike could make their libraries of music available for free consumption by the public.
The catch? The service provider would track how many times a particular song is downloaded/listened to and pay a nominal royalty similar to what radio stations pay.
Furthermore, this could be the ultimate promotion/marketing tool. One that would remove all barriers to indie artists and allow directed advertising on a new scale. Imagine, while you're listening to your AC/DC tunes, an "agent" could notify you that new AC/DC tracks are available or that Brian Johnson has a new solo album.
The only problem would be convincing big-name music companies to get on board. No doubt they would be reluctant because to them, the web (after Napster) is just a new way to grossly inflate profits. But if you can convince even one major label to do this and show that it benefits everyone involved, I think we'd have a REAL music distribution revolution.
While I'm not disputing the point, it sometimes IS more convenient to download an mp3 from Napster than to rip it yourself. I've done this on many occasions.
Notwithstanding, this is NOT the primary use for Napster and you're only deluding yourself if you think it is.
This stuff is mostly the same as regular ICs, just they're using bacteria as the doping element. So, the limiting factor is still how to route 10,000 interconnections between each and every "neuron". Even with "biotransistors", you're still light years away from mimicking a real brain (and really, no closer than you were with regular transistors).
But still, what's easier: growing a chip or building one?
I don't think there's any difference here, really. You can't just stuff a bunch of bacteria in a semiconducting concoction, go take a coffee break and expect to have a working chip when you get back.
You would still have to go through meticulous design and some sort of silicon fab process (which also involves "growing" crystals and oxides)
My point is: does it even need to be done? Do we really need copy-protected music tracks?
If the cost of music wasn't so ridiculously high, then the incentive to copy it would disappear very quickly.
Watermarking is doomed to failure because it strips away all possibility of fair use. You'll have to buy two copies of the same track just so you can listen to one in your car and one in your stereo. It's ridiculous.
<rant> Copyright is not God-given. It's an incentive for creators created by government. The industry does a great job of making it seem like copyright is this birth-right that is usurped any time Joe Random makes a copy of his favourite tracks for his Walkman.
If you ask me, these people are wasting their time. They'll no doubt create some technically sound method of mangling tracks just enough so that only one person could ever listen to it. But it won't catch on, no matter how much the industry pushes it, because it will be a pain in the arse for the consumer.
Ultimately, it's all about what customers are willing to put up with. Up until now, it's been $15-20 for one or two good tracks and filler. But people are beginning to see the light. There's absolutely no good reason that the average person should subsidize the Malibu beach houses and Ferraris of some no-talent bums who got signed because they had the "look" that makes them marketable on MTV. </rant>
What I meant was, the stupid mp3 wouldn't be worth the effort it would take to break the encryption.
If someone else were to send this guy the mp3 after decoding it... that's not the same as cracking the original encryption - which is what he was suggesting would be easy to do.
The truth is, even simple encryption isn't easy to crack without some concerted effort and know-how.
We simply can't count on an organization that's funded mostly by the record industry to develop a standard for music interchange that consumers will benefit from.
$50 says that whatever these folks come up with will, for the same amount of music, end up costing the consumer just as much (OR MORE) in the long run.
The only real disincentive to "piracy" is being able to conveniently obtain a quality copy at low cost.
My time is valuable to me. I certainly do have much better things to do than search Napster for music. And it can be a chore to find anything other than mainstream music on Napster. I recently tried to find a piece from Mozart's Don Giovanni. I tried Napster's own servers, I tried several OpenNap servers and I even tried a few others. Nothing.
Rather than waste time searching Napster for incomplete, fuzzy mp3s, I'd much prefer paying a reasonable fee and being assured of a high-quality, fast-downloading digital copy I can call my own. And I don't think a "reasonable fee" is $1 per song as some people have suggested.
The idea is to compensate artists, not create bigger and richer ones. A token $0.01 will go a long way if the music is good enough and in demand.
We don't need these stupid watermarks crapping up songs and creating a new generation of inferior "pirate" copies. What we need is a new paradigm for music distribution. One that doesn't GOUGE customers and that FAIRLY compensates the artists, not their keepers.
That's kind of a sweeping generalization there with little basis in fact.
If I was to encode an mp3 with PGP, send it to one of my friends only to have you somehow intercept that message, the only way you'd hear that music is if you went to the store and bought the CD yourself.
FreeBSD has one thing that sets it apart from most other Unices: make world
By cvs updating your src tree, you can rebuild the ENTIRE system and bring it up to date. This process, while it may sound daunting, is surprisingly easy. You can always keep your system current, with all the latest bugfixes. Make world does not blow away your configuration (although it can break some config files if it's a big leap), it just rebuilds all the binaries and libraries you need to keep your system up to date.
A FreeBSD "Release" is really nothing more than a snapshot of the -STABLE branch in the cvs - which you can always track.
Virtually none. BSD is Unix. To the end user, it may be difficult to tell that it's even a different OS. To the admin, there's obviously going to be a difference, simply because it's a whole other kernel and the system is wired differently. But really, I had a little Linux experience and a bit more experience as a Solaris user when I started using FreeBSD and it took me less than a day to set up a nat-ing firewall/gateway.
... major changes would I have to make?
Again, cosmetic, really. For whatever may be new to you, the man system is VERY thorough. I've seen manpages that list under BUGS "This man page is too long". =)
Specifically is it source/binary compatible with linux.
Source? It's just as source compatible as another Unix. Meaning, if your code will compile on IRIX or Solaris too... then it's pretty much a given that it will compile under FreeBSD. There are quite a few hacked programs out there that somebody may have written that will run only on Linux - but do you really need that software in the first place? Plus there's always Ports. If there's a port for the app you want (and chances are there is) then it WILL compile. =)
If you can't get the source for some app to compile, then FreeBSD does have Linux binary-compatibility. I believe it can even be compiled into the kernel. To be honest, I've never used it... simply because I haven't needed to.
Does it have a similar "feel" to linux, how hard would it be to adapt to it?
It's Unix! You can run your favourite shell, XFree86 with KDE or Gnome and Enlightenment (or any other combo under the sun). ls is ls, xterm is xterm, etc...
How does the hardware support compare? Will it run on the "typical" PC?
It's been said that Linux tends to support more of the bleeding-edge than FreeBSD. I don't know how true this is. FreeBSD has kernel-level support for PnP, PCMCIA, USB and a whole slew of other stuff. There isn't a piece of hardware in my system that isn't supported fully in FreeBSD.
On the "typical" PC, you should absolutely NO problems.
Does it have any advantage (speed, stability, security or other)?
This is kind of a contentious issue. There was an article a few days ago about this very issue. FreeBSD outperformed Linux at some disk access benchmarks, I believe. I don't put much stock in those tests though. I think it's fair to say that performance is, at the least, on par with any of the Linux distros.
Stability and security always depend on the admin. There are some rock-solid Linux boxes out there and there are some that can barely stay up for 20 minutes.
It's not fair to say that FreeBSD is more stable or secure, because it all depends on what services you need and run.
I just want to know if it's worth playing with.
IMHO, it is. You'll be pleasantly surprised. I installed FreeBSD 3.4-release on a whim when my Redhat installer failed on an old 486. I haven't gone back since. =)
It depends on what you think are "tricky" dependency issues. In nearly all cases, ports will download all required dependencies and install them too. If there's some weird configuration problem you have, or if you need some older library to stay, then ports gives you the flexibility to work around that: unlike rpms.
Ports is basically something that holds your hand through the usually frustrating task of
find the latest source for what you need download configure download missing libs configure download another dependency (repeat) configure make fix makefile to work on your *nix make make install
It handles all the dependencies beautifully. It applies patches that ensure your make will run smoothly. In short, it's a huge timesaver.
Not only that, but it also registers installs, so removing stuff is easy. All you need to do is go into the port directory and type 'make deinstall' or even a pkg_delete.
I've already posted this elsewhere in this topic, but until now, my only unsupported piece of hardware in FreeBSD was my SBLive. Not anymore. Although I think ALSA has also added SBLive support to its list for Linux.
Hell, FreeBSD even detects my MS Sidewinder USB joystick!
Gotta love it... the least you can do is try it out. The install is painless.
You really shouldn't have any problems. FreeBSD has PnP, APM and PCMCIA support built-in.
My experience with it has been wonderful. On my desktop, I have an SBLive and struggled for a while to get OSS working with 4.0-release. Then, I looked around a little and realized that support for the emu10k had already been dropped in to 4.1-stable. All it took was a cvsup, make world and a new kernel to get my SBLive working flawlessly.
This doesn't really apply to laptops of course, but it's an indication of how smoothly FreeBSD works. Frankly, I'd be surprised if you ran into any real difficulties unless you're running some very obscure hardware.
4.0-stable? When did you last update your source tree? I was under the impression that 4.1-stable had been available for the last little while. In which case, there's no point really in updating to 4.1-release aside from cosmetic reasons.
I just did a cvsup of my 4.0-release a few days ago, and it defaulted to 4.1-stable.
Enlightenment is a 10 meg package... so it's quite possible it got dropped from the CD for size reasons. It IS available if you install packages via FTP server.
In all fairness to Solaris, it IS Solaris-x86. Although they're based on most of the same code, x86 and SPARC Solaris are worlds apart in terms of performance.
I'm always wary when I see a test such as this that says "let's keep the hardware the same and compare just the software". There's a very dangerous illusion of equality which is just a fantasy.
Linux may have better disk access -- for IDE drives. But if FreeBSD handles SCSI better, is it fair to conclude that Linux is the better OS simply because you only used IDE drives in your comparison?
The reality is that you can't compare OSes in any meaningful sort of way and generalize the results to say "X is better than Y". To be scientific about it, you have to say "X is better at Y, only if run on <this_platform>, and then only at doing <this_task>, etc..."
And to be fair, the guy who did this study, pretty much said as much. His tests are basically valid for anybody with a stock K6-450 PC wanting to run a free Unix(like) system and possibly a web server.
Somehow, this gets transmogrified into "thorough" and "unbiased". =) Not that I'm disputing the results, I run FreeBSD myself. I just think it's important to take a step back and look at the whole picture.
How powerful are your servers though? Granted, it's extremely unlikely that everyone on the campus will be using 100% of their allotted CPU time at once. But when you're building a campus of 2500 users, how do you know what is enough processing power so that users don't get miffed when Netscape takes 2 minutes to load instead of 30 seconds?
This is an honest question, I'd like to know. I'm a big fan of the client-server approach... However, till now my only experience has been with a very underpowered SGI/Irix server serving way too many dumb terminals and a Sunray lab designed for 30 stations but with only a few concurrent users. Two extremes.
There is a protocol redesign in the works. That's what Internet2 is being designed for. And I don't mean IPv6.
A lot of the big guns out there are busy developing infrastructure that will allow reliable Voice over IP, real-time video conferencing and other delay-sensitive apps to work reliably.
Cisco's Packet magazine had an article on this a while back (it was the cover story on the last issue). I'm sure there are dozens if not hundreds of other articles on this too.
You will see Voice over IP a lot more in the next few years, simply because it's cheaper to implement than traditional, circuit-switched telephony. It's not a bad thing, really, because the telcos are going to have to make it work 100% of the time. That's the #1 concern. People have been getting dialtones all across this continent for 50 years now. It's simply not acceptable that suddenly you only get 9 out of 10 dialtones. It's got to be 100% or it won't fly.
My sarcasmeter is malfunctioning on that post there too. Just in case, let me clarify...
It's not about people not knowing how to program anymore. The original post is accusing the HC11 of having "crappy assembly". I'm just coming to the defense of the HC11. I'm sure there are many good programmers who have never touched assembly.
Furthermore, it's not "crappy assembly" to have a single TAB instruction instead of a flexible MOVE A B... That TAB instruction just saved me two bytes in the program over your "better" MOVE instruction. If it's really so difficult to grasp, then find a good assembler that recognizes what you want to do when it sees "MOVE A B".
You just have to do things a little differently down there... by getting dirty with the bits moving around, you can often realize huge memory and cpu savings.
Are you kidding? The 68HC11 is a great platform to learn all sorts of neat stuff.
For my senior project, I used an HC11 to a) receive and interpret X10 home automation (extended) codes and b) act as an LCD clock. The idea was to show that you could use many of these cheap devices anywhere in your home and they could all be kept in sync.
Best of all, it worked! With less than 1024 bytes (BYTES) of memory to play with... Imagine what you could do with 16 or 32k.
I mean, using C or any other high-level language, you can barely even compile a "Hello world" inside of 1k.
uCs may not be as elegant as a SPARC, but they've got their uses. Even if it's only for hobbyists and students. You gotta start somewhere.
Also, I don't know what kind of HC11 you're programming, but last I checked, B was an 8-bit register, while X was a 16-bit index register. It's gotta be tough for Motorola's engineers to justify an instruction that only copies B to X.
Besides, you could do that with: CLRA, XGDX. It's not at all counter-intuitive.
I can't really tell from your post what you're trying to say. But just in case, have a look at this:
Main Entry: humor Pronunciation: 'hyü-m&r, 'yü- Function: noun Etymology: Middle English humour, from Middle French humeur, from Medieval Latin & Latin; Medieval Latin humor, from Latin humor, umor moisture; akin to Old Norse vokr damp, Latin humEre to be moist, and perhaps to Greek hygros wet Date: 14th century ...
3 a : that quality which appeals to a sense of the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous b : the mental faculty of discovering, expressing, or appreciating the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous c : something that is or is designed to be comical or amusing
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, you just (said in not so many words or)gave me an idea for how we can solve this pesky Napster-RIAA-SaveTheArtists-DownWithCopyright debate!
HOW TO SOLVE THE NAPSTER DEBATE ONCE AND FOR ALL
Create a network of streaming music servers. Users use a Winamp-like client and create custom playlists of any songs they want. Anything conceivable. The music is then streamed to the client (and possibly cached locally). RIAA and independent artists alike could make their libraries of music available for free consumption by the public.
The catch? The service provider would track how many times a particular song is downloaded/listened to and pay a nominal royalty similar to what radio stations pay.
Furthermore, this could be the ultimate promotion/marketing tool. One that would remove all barriers to indie artists and allow directed advertising on a new scale. Imagine, while you're listening to your AC/DC tunes, an "agent" could notify you that new AC/DC tracks are available or that Brian Johnson has a new solo album.
The only problem would be convincing big-name music companies to get on board. No doubt they would be reluctant because to them, the web (after Napster) is just a new way to grossly inflate profits. But if you can convince even one major label to do this and show that it benefits everyone involved, I think we'd have a REAL music distribution revolution.
--
Notwithstanding, this is NOT the primary use for Napster and you're only deluding yourself if you think it is.
--
This stuff is mostly the same as regular ICs, just they're using bacteria as the doping element. So, the limiting factor is still how to route 10,000 interconnections between each and every "neuron". Even with "biotransistors", you're still light years away from mimicking a real brain (and really, no closer than you were with regular transistors).
--
I don't think there's any difference here, really. You can't just stuff a bunch of bacteria in a semiconducting concoction, go take a coffee break and expect to have a working chip when you get back.
You would still have to go through meticulous design and some sort of silicon fab process (which also involves "growing" crystals and oxides)
--
If the cost of music wasn't so ridiculously high, then the incentive to copy it would disappear very quickly.
Watermarking is doomed to failure because it strips away all possibility of fair use. You'll have to buy two copies of the same track just so you can listen to one in your car and one in your stereo. It's ridiculous.
<rant>
Copyright is not God-given. It's an incentive for creators created by government. The industry does a great job of making it seem like copyright is this birth-right that is usurped any time Joe Random makes a copy of his favourite tracks for his Walkman.
If you ask me, these people are wasting their time. They'll no doubt create some technically sound method of mangling tracks just enough so that only one person could ever listen to it. But it won't catch on, no matter how much the industry pushes it, because it will be a pain in the arse for the consumer.
Ultimately, it's all about what customers are willing to put up with. Up until now, it's been $15-20 for one or two good tracks and filler. But people are beginning to see the light. There's absolutely no good reason that the average person should subsidize the Malibu beach houses and Ferraris of some no-talent bums who got signed because they had the "look" that makes them marketable on MTV.
</rant>
--
If someone else were to send this guy the mp3 after decoding it... that's not the same as cracking the original encryption - which is what he was suggesting would be easy to do.
The truth is, even simple encryption isn't easy to crack without some concerted effort and know-how.
--
We simply can't count on an organization that's funded mostly by the record industry to develop a standard for music interchange that consumers will benefit from.
$50 says that whatever these folks come up with will, for the same amount of music, end up costing the consumer just as much (OR MORE) in the long run.
The only real disincentive to "piracy" is being able to conveniently obtain a quality copy at low cost.
My time is valuable to me. I certainly do have much better things to do than search Napster for music. And it can be a chore to find anything other than mainstream music on Napster. I recently tried to find a piece from Mozart's Don Giovanni. I tried Napster's own servers, I tried several OpenNap servers and I even tried a few others. Nothing.
Rather than waste time searching Napster for incomplete, fuzzy mp3s, I'd much prefer paying a reasonable fee and being assured of a high-quality, fast-downloading digital copy I can call my own. And I don't think a "reasonable fee" is $1 per song as some people have suggested.
The idea is to compensate artists, not create bigger and richer ones. A token $0.01 will go a long way if the music is good enough and in demand.
We don't need these stupid watermarks crapping up songs and creating a new generation of inferior "pirate" copies. What we need is a new paradigm for music distribution. One that doesn't GOUGE customers and that FAIRLY compensates the artists, not their keepers.
--
That's kind of a sweeping generalization there with little basis in fact.
If I was to encode an mp3 with PGP, send it to one of my friends only to have you somehow intercept that message, the only way you'd hear that music is if you went to the store and bought the CD yourself.
That gives me an idea...
--
FreeBSD has one thing that sets it apart from most other Unices: make world
By cvs updating your src tree, you can rebuild the ENTIRE system and bring it up to date. This process, while it may sound daunting, is surprisingly easy. You can always keep your system current, with all the latest bugfixes. Make world does not blow away your configuration (although it can break some config files if it's a big leap), it just rebuilds all the binaries and libraries you need to keep your system up to date.
A FreeBSD "Release" is really nothing more than a snapshot of the -STABLE branch in the cvs - which you can always track.
--
Virtually none. BSD is Unix. To the end user, it may be difficult to tell that it's even a different OS. To the admin, there's obviously going to be a difference, simply because it's a whole other kernel and the system is wired differently. But really, I had a little Linux experience and a bit more experience as a Solaris user when I started using FreeBSD and it took me less than a day to set up a nat-ing firewall/gateway.
Again, cosmetic, really. For whatever may be new to you, the man system is VERY thorough. I've seen manpages that list under BUGS "This man page is too long". =)
Specifically is it source/binary compatible with linux.
Source? It's just as source compatible as another Unix. Meaning, if your code will compile on IRIX or Solaris too... then it's pretty much a given that it will compile under FreeBSD. There are quite a few hacked programs out there that somebody may have written that will run only on Linux - but do you really need that software in the first place? Plus there's always Ports. If there's a port for the app you want (and chances are there is) then it WILL compile. =)
If you can't get the source for some app to compile, then FreeBSD does have Linux binary-compatibility. I believe it can even be compiled into the kernel. To be honest, I've never used it... simply because I haven't needed to.
Does it have a similar "feel" to linux, how hard would it be to adapt to it?
It's Unix! You can run your favourite shell, XFree86 with KDE or Gnome and Enlightenment (or any other combo under the sun). ls is ls, xterm is xterm, etc...
How does the hardware support compare? Will it run on the "typical" PC?
It's been said that Linux tends to support more of the bleeding-edge than FreeBSD. I don't know how true this is. FreeBSD has kernel-level support for PnP, PCMCIA, USB and a whole slew of other stuff. There isn't a piece of hardware in my system that isn't supported fully in FreeBSD.
On the "typical" PC, you should absolutely NO problems.
Does it have any advantage (speed, stability, security or other)?
This is kind of a contentious issue. There was an article a few days ago about this very issue. FreeBSD outperformed Linux at some disk access benchmarks, I believe. I don't put much stock in those tests though. I think it's fair to say that performance is, at the least, on par with any of the Linux distros.
Stability and security always depend on the admin. There are some rock-solid Linux boxes out there and there are some that can barely stay up for 20 minutes.
It's not fair to say that FreeBSD is more stable or secure, because it all depends on what services you need and run.
I just want to know if it's worth playing with.
IMHO, it is. You'll be pleasantly surprised. I installed FreeBSD 3.4-release on a whim when my Redhat installer failed on an old 486. I haven't gone back since. =)
--
Ports is basically something that holds your hand through the usually frustrating task of
It handles all the dependencies beautifully. It applies patches that ensure your make will run smoothly. In short, it's a huge timesaver.
Not only that, but it also registers installs, so removing stuff is easy. All you need to do is go into the port directory and type 'make deinstall' or even a pkg_delete.
--
--
Hell, FreeBSD even detects my MS Sidewinder USB joystick!
Gotta love it... the least you can do is try it out. The install is painless.
--
My experience with it has been wonderful. On my desktop, I have an SBLive and struggled for a while to get OSS working with 4.0-release. Then, I looked around a little and realized that support for the emu10k had already been dropped in to 4.1-stable. All it took was a cvsup, make world and a new kernel to get my SBLive working flawlessly.
This doesn't really apply to laptops of course, but it's an indication of how smoothly FreeBSD works. Frankly, I'd be surprised if you ran into any real difficulties unless you're running some very obscure hardware.
--
I just did a cvsup of my 4.0-release a few days ago, and it defaulted to 4.1-stable.
--
--
I'm always wary when I see a test such as this that says "let's keep the hardware the same and compare just the software". There's a very dangerous illusion of equality which is just a fantasy.
Linux may have better disk access -- for IDE drives. But if FreeBSD handles SCSI better, is it fair to conclude that Linux is the better OS simply because you only used IDE drives in your comparison?
The reality is that you can't compare OSes in any meaningful sort of way and generalize the results to say "X is better than Y". To be scientific about it, you have to say "X is better at Y, only if run on <this_platform>, and then only at doing <this_task>, etc..."
And to be fair, the guy who did this study, pretty much said as much. His tests are basically valid for anybody with a stock K6-450 PC wanting to run a free Unix(like) system and possibly a web server.
Somehow, this gets transmogrified into "thorough" and "unbiased". =) Not that I'm disputing the results, I run FreeBSD myself. I just think it's important to take a step back and look at the whole picture.
--
Anybody know what ever happened to that?
--
This is an honest question, I'd like to know. I'm a big fan of the client-server approach... However, till now my only experience has been with a very underpowered SGI/Irix server serving way too many dumb terminals and a Sunray lab designed for 30 stations but with only a few concurrent users. Two extremes.
--
Check out the first comment in particular.
--
Damn those Mongols, invading Beverly Hills... =)
--
A lot of the big guns out there are busy developing infrastructure that will allow reliable Voice over IP, real-time video conferencing and other delay-sensitive apps to work reliably.
Cisco's Packet magazine had an article on this a while back (it was the cover story on the last issue). I'm sure there are dozens if not hundreds of other articles on this too.
You will see Voice over IP a lot more in the next few years, simply because it's cheaper to implement than traditional, circuit-switched telephony. It's not a bad thing, really, because the telcos are going to have to make it work 100% of the time. That's the #1 concern. People have been getting dialtones all across this continent for 50 years now. It's simply not acceptable that suddenly you only get 9 out of 10 dialtones. It's got to be 100% or it won't fly.
--
It's not about people not knowing how to program anymore. The original post is accusing the HC11 of having "crappy assembly". I'm just coming to the defense of the HC11. I'm sure there are many good programmers who have never touched assembly.
Furthermore, it's not "crappy assembly" to have a single TAB instruction instead of a flexible MOVE A B... That TAB instruction just saved me two bytes in the program over your "better" MOVE instruction. If it's really so difficult to grasp, then find a good assembler that recognizes what you want to do when it sees "MOVE A B".
You just have to do things a little differently down there... by getting dirty with the bits moving around, you can often realize huge memory and cpu savings.
--
For my senior project, I used an HC11 to a) receive and interpret X10 home automation (extended) codes and b) act as an LCD clock. The idea was to show that you could use many of these cheap devices anywhere in your home and they could all be kept in sync.
Best of all, it worked! With less than 1024 bytes (BYTES) of memory to play with... Imagine what you could do with 16 or 32k.
I mean, using C or any other high-level language, you can barely even compile a "Hello world" inside of 1k.
uCs may not be as elegant as a SPARC, but they've got their uses. Even if it's only for hobbyists and students. You gotta start somewhere.
Also, I don't know what kind of HC11 you're programming, but last I checked, B was an 8-bit register, while X was a 16-bit index register. It's gotta be tough for Motorola's engineers to justify an instruction that only copies B to X.
Besides, you could do that with: CLRA, XGDX. It's not at all counter-intuitive.
--
I can't really tell from your post what you're trying to say. But just in case, have a look at this:
Main Entry: humor
Pronunciation: 'hyü-m&r, 'yü-
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English humour, from Middle French humeur, from Medieval Latin & Latin; Medieval Latin humor, from Latin humor, umor moisture; akin to Old Norse vokr damp, Latin humEre to be moist, and perhaps to Greek hygros wet
Date: 14th century
...
3 a : that quality which appeals to a sense of the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous b : the mental faculty of discovering, expressing, or appreciating the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous c : something that is or is designed to be comical or amusing
synonym see WIT
--