Microsoft built its early business on porting its BASIC programming language interpreter to several 8-bit microcomputer platforms and licensing it to the computer manufacturers. In line-numbered BASIC, the name of a variable of type string ends in '$'. A valid program in "Applesoft BASIC" (the BASIC interpreter in the Apple II ROM, developed by Microsoft):
10 LET M$ = "Microsoft" 20 PRINT M$; " introduces the Windows XP operating system" 30 END
I find using a BASIC expression to refer to a BASIC vendor just as valid as using the pattern *n?x to refer to a family of operating systems whose shells recognize the name of the operating system in that glob pattern.
not when whole systems cost less than a game console.
Now I'm curious. What make and model of PC with TV output costs less than $150, the US price of a GameCube console at Wal-Mart or Toys "Ya" Us? And unless Wal-Mart or Best Buy brick-and-mortar stores sell them, include shipping.
Oh, you're trying to make a joke about combination keyboard/pointing devices. Some have trackballs; others have an "eraser" joystick between G, H, and B (assuming QWERTY); the one in front of me has a touchpad below the space bar.
Unfortunately, it's a bit large and hard to move around
That's why you get an iBook brand mouse, which even includes a built-in display.
Well over a thousand titles have been released for the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance platforms. Just connect a cartridge reader to your parallel port and install the cartridge reader's driver. Then insert your Game Pak into the cartridge reader and "dump" it into a file on your hard disk, which you can use with the VisualBoyAdvance emulator. You can emulate most PS1 games as well, and this time, the reader is already built into your computer because PS1 games come on CD-ROM discs. (I chose GBA and PS1 because of the ease of finding media readers for those platforms.)
"Games" does not mean "first-person shooters, real-time tactical simulations, and massively multiplayer online games". Some people prefer platformers such as "Metroid Fusion" for GBA to Quake clones. (Not that "Metroid Prime" is a Quake clone or anything.)
But if there is somethign you want your computer to do. And computers are capable of doing it. Then a computer with Windows is capable of doing it.
Really? Then why does the least expensive edition of Windows XP support only one processor per machine, encouraging vendors not to make dual-CPU machines in the home user price range? (*Linux and some *BSDs support symmetric multiprocessing out of the box.) And why does the Windows kernel limit the number of simultaneous open incoming TCP connections to a ridiculously low level unless you're running Advanced Server? (On *BSD and *Linux you can change this either by recompiling the kernel, by editing a text file, or by running a GUI app that does either of those.) And why do the headers to write a file system module cost $1000 to license, putting it far out of the CS student/hobbyist price range? (On *BSD and *Linux, the source code for several sample file systems comes with the kernel source code.)
"I like my music as music and my movies as movies."
Explain concerts. If a band can turn an album into a concert, a theatrical performance, effectively a play, then why not turn the play into a movie?
Of course, it wouldn't work for every band's album, but it could work in enough cases to bring a few extra bucks for Sony, Warner, and Universal and create demand for a product (music videos) that is slightly harder to pirate than straight recorded music.
is "making" the music the creative process of arranging notes and lyrics, or the physical process of manufacturing the CD?
Copyright law recognizes three steps in the process of making a record:
Making the music. A songwriter writes a song and (I'm assuming) buys liability insurance that the song is original and not accidentally plagiarized.
Making the recording. This is the job of the performers, producer, and sound engineer and encompasses recording, mixing, and mastering. This stage makes the difference between a demo and a commercial recording. Result: up to 74 minutes of great-sounding wav files.
Making the phonorecords. ("Phonorecord", or "phonogram" in some countries, is the copyright law term for a fixed reproduction of a recording; it does not refer to vinyl.) Any large-scale CD replicator will do this.
So they have created a product. But somebody still needs to create a demand for the product, and promotion is traditionally the job of a label.
The major American motion picture studios are doing better financially than the major American record labels partly because a movie often pays for its production at the box office alone, whereas a record has no box office at all, except for motion picture soundtracks.
Solution: Make music videos for all songs on an album. Interweave them with a cheap plot, and turn them into a movie. (I'm thinking like Moonwalker but hopefully better written.) Release the movie theatrically on the Friday before the album comes out. Then, after a few weeks in the box office, put the videos into MTV's heavy rotation.
This should be easy enough for Sony, Warner, and Universal, who own both a record label and a movie studio. It may not work for Bertelsmann and EMI, who don't have major U.S. movie holdings.
If I am talking out of my rear end, please explain to me in polite language why this wouldn't work.
Microsoft claims that the $60 version of Visual C++ doesn't optimize. I've been told that the performance of code compiled by the $60 version of Microsoft Visual C++ is close to that of interpreted JavaScript.
must be those $1000 modems keeping you down
You got me there; the excuses are over. I think I've found where to budget my next 80 USD: on an external V.92 modem plus shipping and tax.
Why studios don't want old films' � to expire
on
Copyright Rumblings
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· Score: 1
I can't see how sitting on all those B/W movies is profitable.
Movie studio's argument If old films were released to the public domain, they would reduce the market for newer copyrighted films.
A commercial MP3 encoder costs money, and use of LAME is illegal where I live. So I encode my CDs to.ogg instead. By "MP3" I assume you actually meant "recordings compressed using a popular transform codec such as MP3 or Ogg Vorbis", right?
exe install files
Other than winamp, gimp, and other files commonly available from fast HTTP servers?::checks his start menu:: Apart from Windows components, I run mostly free software (such as Mozilla, Emacs, GIMP, StepMania, MinGW, Devkit Advance, FCE Ultra, and VisualBoyAdvance), gratis proprietary software (such as Modplug, WinMX, Acrobat Reader, and QuickTime Player), and software that came with hardware (such as scanner, camera, printer, and CD recorder software). In fact, there's only one commercial app that I run regularly, and that's Cool Edit Pro ($300 shareware) because Audacity just doesn't have enough effects.
You're probably wondering why I didn't mention games. Yes, I play proprietary games, but sharing 100 NES ROMs and 50 Game Boy ROMs doesn't add up to a lot of gigabytes.
and other useful info, even sharing your partial downloads counts in my books.
And I do that.
I don't use Kazaa, I use WinMX
So do I.
I put leeches into my ignore list, and clear them from the cue.
How many gigabytes does somebody on dial-up have to share before you consider him no longer a leech?
Thanks. I don't consider a Windows program completely "free" if it depends on a $1,000 compiler from Microsoft. And I had to make a wild guess at the requirements to compile giFT because I didn't want to take the time to set up CVS, become familiar with CVS, and download the Windows build documentation, which was listed on the web as available only in CVS, only to find that building the software required a $1,000 compiler from Microsoft. (That's more than I make in a year's worth of allowance.)
but even the most popular frontend for linux, giFTcurs, is console based.
I was confused as to the requirements of the popular frontend because the top right corner of every page shows what looks like an X frontend.
Unfortunately, I can't run Linux or FreeBSD effectively on either of my computers, both of which have winmodems and neither of which I got an opportunity to customize.
That's still copyright theft. You may use that as an excuse to pirate software, but it won't protect you then the BSA comes along.
Copyright law, 17 USC 107, lists four factors used in discerning fair use from infringement, and one of them is the effect on the market for the work. By taking a work out of print for several years, the copyright owner admits that he sees no significant market for the work. Thus, an otherwise infringing use would have zero effect on the market and inflict zero actual damage to the copyright owner. Fair use. And even if the judge doesn't see a use as completely fair, he can still reduce the section 504 statutory damages far below the maximum when some fair use factors apply.
intense lobbying results in legislation to extend the term
Not if even more intense lobbying results in legislation accepted by 2/3 of the US House, 2/3 of the US Senate, and 1/2 of each of thirty-eight state legislatures, to limit the term to an absolute maximum of 50 years once and for all:
Amendment XXVIII
With respect to the exclusive rights granted to authors and inventors under Article I, section 8, the Congress shall not have power to extend their duration beyond fifty years.
Wishful thinking, but as they used to say in the McWorld commercials: "Hey, it could happen!"
It's like the case of an artist who creates lithographs. He can print as many copies as he wants, and distribute them tho who he wants.
Lithography, like almost all markets for copyrighted works, is a market characterized by monopolistic competition (many differentiated products that are imperfect substitutes for one another, and no small group of sellers dominates the market price). Because copyright covers expression not ideas, a copyright on a particular lithograph is quite narrow. Some patents are about as narrow as a typical copyright, covering only one process to make a given product, but patents can be much broader and can bring about a real monopoly by themselves.
If it turns out that SCO does hold broad patents on operating system technologies, then SCO may hold "market power" under the antitrust act and would thus lose the protection of 35 USC 271(d).
for the graphical user interface, giFTcurs..that runs in a console window.
I didn't know that giFT came with a terminal-based UI. The image in the upper-right corner of http://gift.sourceforge.net/ sure looked like an X client running in a window manager to me.
SSH, CVS, Cygwin, XFree86, perl are not giFT dependencies.
Downloading giFT currently requires CVS and SSH. Compiling UNIX code on Windows requires Cygwin, and running it requires an X server. (Or has it been ported to pure Win32 to compile with the MinGW compiler?) The install document lists Zlib, Perl, libDB, libID3, libvorbis, and ImageMagick as strongly recommended dependencies.
but you have to realize that giFT hasn't officially been released
In other words, praising giFT on Slashdot is spreading vapour.
Does it even work on dial-up?
on
Shutting down Kazaa
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'm surprised i don't see more mention of Gnucleus for file sharing. Why don't more people use this?
On my dial-up connection, I was never able to start even one download with Gnucleus.
If you lived in a geographical area without a cable Internet service provider and without a DSL provider, would you be whistling the same tune? It costs $200,000 to change which geographical area you live in.
They are slow to upload to
So increase your number of simultaneous uploads. If you have 128 kbps outbound, you can serve approximately three dial-up users at full speed, or six at half speed.
and generally dont share anything either.
Many dial-up users share, but their queues fill up real fast.
giFT has too many roadblocks for Windows users
on
Shutting down Kazaa
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's mostly Linux users apparently
Last time I checked, it didn't even build on Windows. This has changed. I don't think many Windows users are willing to 1. download all of giFT's dependencies, which include SSH, CVS, Cygwin, Cygwin Xfree86, Perl, the Ogg libraries, and more; 2. learn how to use Cygwin; 3. configure the dependencies; and 4. compile giFT when they could just go on kazaalite.
I don't see how parent could have been moderated a troll, Under the DMCA's takedown provisions, making Global Crossing and Register.com terminate Sharman/LEF's internet service is exactly what a copyright owner is supposed to do.
Statutory damages for copyright infringement
on
Shutting down Kazaa
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· Score: 2, Informative
If the fine for a song were $150,000, well...
It is. Instead of taking actual damages, a prevailing copyright owner can elect to take statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work, as defined in Title 17, United States Code, section 504. And for a sound recording, statutory damages can potentially reach $300,000 because copyrights on two separate works are infringed: the copyright on the melody (owned by the songwriter or by the songwriter's publisher) and the copyright on the sound recording (owned by the band or by the record label).
Slashdot Mirror
Also, cut it out with the "M$" crap.
Microsoft built its early business on porting its BASIC programming language interpreter to several 8-bit microcomputer platforms and licensing it to the computer manufacturers. In line-numbered BASIC, the name of a variable of type string ends in '$'. A valid program in "Applesoft BASIC" (the BASIC interpreter in the Apple II ROM, developed by Microsoft):
I find using a BASIC expression to refer to a BASIC vendor just as valid as using the pattern *n?x to refer to a family of operating systems whose shells recognize the name of the operating system in that glob pattern.
not when whole systems cost less than a game console.
Now I'm curious. What make and model of PC with TV output costs less than $150, the US price of a GameCube console at Wal-Mart or Toys "Ya" Us? And unless Wal-Mart or Best Buy brick-and-mortar stores sell them, include shipping.
And if you hurry now, they will throw in a USB=>PS2 convertor plug Absolutly free!
But you don't even need an adapter to plug a USB mouse into a PS2. You may need it for a PS/2, however.
</bad-ps2-joke>
I have this neato mouse that has 101 buttons.
Oh, you're trying to make a joke about combination keyboard/pointing devices. Some have trackballs; others have an "eraser" joystick between G, H, and B (assuming QWERTY); the one in front of me has a touchpad below the space bar.
Unfortunately, it's a bit large and hard to move around
That's why you get an iBook brand mouse, which even includes a built-in display.
Games? no.
Well over a thousand titles have been released for the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance platforms. Just connect a cartridge reader to your parallel port and install the cartridge reader's driver. Then insert your Game Pak into the cartridge reader and "dump" it into a file on your hard disk, which you can use with the VisualBoyAdvance emulator. You can emulate most PS1 games as well, and this time, the reader is already built into your computer because PS1 games come on CD-ROM discs. (I chose GBA and PS1 because of the ease of finding media readers for those platforms.)
"Games" does not mean "first-person shooters, real-time tactical simulations, and massively multiplayer online games". Some people prefer platformers such as "Metroid Fusion" for GBA to Quake clones. (Not that "Metroid Prime" is a Quake clone or anything.)
But if there is somethign you want your computer to do. And computers are capable of doing it. Then a computer with Windows is capable of doing it.
Really? Then why does the least expensive edition of Windows XP support only one processor per machine, encouraging vendors not to make dual-CPU machines in the home user price range? (*Linux and some *BSDs support symmetric multiprocessing out of the box.) And why does the Windows kernel limit the number of simultaneous open incoming TCP connections to a ridiculously low level unless you're running Advanced Server? (On *BSD and *Linux you can change this either by recompiling the kernel, by editing a text file, or by running a GUI app that does either of those.) And why do the headers to write a file system module cost $1000 to license, putting it far out of the CS student/hobbyist price range? (On *BSD and *Linux, the source code for several sample file systems comes with the kernel source code.)
"I like my music as music and my movies as movies."
Explain concerts. If a band can turn an album into a concert, a theatrical performance, effectively a play, then why not turn the play into a movie?
Of course, it wouldn't work for every band's album, but it could work in enough cases to bring a few extra bucks for Sony, Warner, and Universal and create demand for a product (music videos) that is slightly harder to pirate than straight recorded music.
is "making" the music the creative process of arranging notes and lyrics, or the physical process of manufacturing the CD?
Copyright law recognizes three steps in the process of making a record:
So they have created a product. But somebody still needs to create a demand for the product, and promotion is traditionally the job of a label.
The major American motion picture studios are doing better financially than the major American record labels partly because a movie often pays for its production at the box office alone, whereas a record has no box office at all, except for motion picture soundtracks.
Solution: Make music videos for all songs on an album. Interweave them with a cheap plot, and turn them into a movie. (I'm thinking like Moonwalker but hopefully better written.) Release the movie theatrically on the Friday before the album comes out. Then, after a few weeks in the box office, put the videos into MTV's heavy rotation.
This should be easy enough for Sony, Warner, and Universal, who own both a record label and a movie studio. It may not work for Bertelsmann and EMI, who don't have major U.S. movie holdings.
If I am talking out of my rear end, please explain to me in polite language why this wouldn't work.
The other canonical example of illegal music, but this time, it wasn't meant to be illegal at first
if by $1000, you mean $60, then you have a point.
Microsoft claims that the $60 version of Visual C++ doesn't optimize. I've been told that the performance of code compiled by the $60 version of Microsoft Visual C++ is close to that of interpreted JavaScript.
must be those $1000 modems keeping you down
You got me there; the excuses are over. I think I've found where to budget my next 80 USD: on an external V.92 modem plus shipping and tax.
I can't see how sitting on all those B/W movies is profitable.
Movie studio's argument If old films were released to the public domain, they would reduce the market for newer copyrighted films.
you should at least have MP3's
A commercial MP3 encoder costs money, and use of LAME is illegal where I live. So I encode my CDs to .ogg instead. By "MP3" I assume you actually meant "recordings compressed using a popular transform codec such as MP3 or Ogg Vorbis", right?
exe install files
Other than winamp, gimp, and other files commonly available from fast HTTP servers? ::checks his start menu:: Apart from Windows components, I run mostly free software (such as Mozilla, Emacs, GIMP, StepMania, MinGW, Devkit Advance, FCE Ultra, and VisualBoyAdvance), gratis proprietary software (such as Modplug, WinMX, Acrobat Reader, and QuickTime Player), and software that came with hardware (such as scanner, camera, printer, and CD recorder software). In fact, there's only one commercial app that I run regularly, and that's Cool Edit Pro ($300 shareware) because Audacity just doesn't have enough effects.
You're probably wondering why I didn't mention games. Yes, I play proprietary games, but sharing 100 NES ROMs and 50 Game Boy ROMs doesn't add up to a lot of gigabytes.
and other useful info, even sharing your partial downloads counts in my books.
And I do that.
I don't use Kazaa, I use WinMX
So do I.
I put leeches into my ignore list, and clear them from the cue.
How many gigabytes does somebody on dial-up have to share before you consider him no longer a leech?
The secondary method is to use MinGW
Thanks. I don't consider a Windows program completely "free" if it depends on a $1,000 compiler from Microsoft. And I had to make a wild guess at the requirements to compile giFT because I didn't want to take the time to set up CVS, become familiar with CVS, and download the Windows build documentation, which was listed on the web as available only in CVS, only to find that building the software required a $1,000 compiler from Microsoft. (That's more than I make in a year's worth of allowance.)
but even the most popular frontend for linux, giFTcurs, is console based.
I was confused as to the requirements of the popular frontend because the top right corner of every page shows what looks like an X frontend.
Unfortunately, I can't run Linux or FreeBSD effectively on either of my computers, both of which have winmodems and neither of which I got an opportunity to customize.
That's still copyright theft. You may use that as an excuse to pirate software, but it won't protect you then the BSA comes along.
Copyright law, 17 USC 107, lists four factors used in discerning fair use from infringement, and one of them is the effect on the market for the work. By taking a work out of print for several years, the copyright owner admits that he sees no significant market for the work. Thus, an otherwise infringing use would have zero effect on the market and inflict zero actual damage to the copyright owner. Fair use. And even if the judge doesn't see a use as completely fair, he can still reduce the section 504 statutory damages far below the maximum when some fair use factors apply.
intense lobbying results in legislation to extend the term
Not if even more intense lobbying results in legislation accepted by 2/3 of the US House, 2/3 of the US Senate, and 1/2 of each of thirty-eight state legislatures, to limit the term to an absolute maximum of 50 years once and for all:
Wishful thinking, but as they used to say in the McWorld commercials: "Hey, it could happen!"
Most people probably have a couple of pirated games or so they can share.
Twenty pirated NES games at 128 KB each after compression still total only 2.5 MB, nowhere near the 1 GB that most hubs seem to require.
It's like the case of an artist who creates lithographs. He can print as many copies as he wants, and distribute them tho who he wants.
Lithography, like almost all markets for copyrighted works, is a market characterized by monopolistic competition (many differentiated products that are imperfect substitutes for one another, and no small group of sellers dominates the market price). Because copyright covers expression not ideas, a copyright on a particular lithograph is quite narrow. Some patents are about as narrow as a typical copyright, covering only one process to make a given product, but patents can be much broader and can bring about a real monopoly by themselves.
If it turns out that SCO does hold broad patents on operating system technologies, then SCO may hold "market power" under the antitrust act and would thus lose the protection of 35 USC 271(d).
You start out in hubs with low requirements
So are you claiming that there exist numerous DC "starter hubs" that allow dial-up users who have nothing yet to share? I'd have to hope so.
then make your way up to hubs with higher and higher requirements.
How does a fellow "make his way up" with respect to bandwidth without plunking down 200 grand? Or did this part refer only to amount shared?
for the graphical user interface, giFTcurs ..that runs in a console window.
I didn't know that giFT came with a terminal-based UI. The image in the upper-right corner of http://gift.sourceforge.net/ sure looked like an X client running in a window manager to me.
SSH, CVS, Cygwin, XFree86, perl are not giFT dependencies.
Downloading giFT currently requires CVS and SSH. Compiling UNIX code on Windows requires Cygwin, and running it requires an X server. (Or has it been ported to pure Win32 to compile with the MinGW compiler?) The install document lists Zlib, Perl, libDB, libID3, libvorbis, and ImageMagick as strongly recommended dependencies.
but you have to realize that giFT hasn't officially been released
In other words, praising giFT on Slashdot is spreading vapour.
I'm surprised i don't see more mention of Gnucleus for file sharing. Why don't more people use this?
On my dial-up connection, I was never able to start even one download with Gnucleus.
I have been using it successfully for a long time
Are you on dial-up or high-speed?
If you lived in a geographical area without a cable Internet service provider and without a DSL provider, would you be whistling the same tune? It costs $200,000 to change which geographical area you live in.
They are slow to upload to
So increase your number of simultaneous uploads. If you have 128 kbps outbound, you can serve approximately three dial-up users at full speed, or six at half speed.
and generally dont share anything either.
Many dial-up users share, but their queues fill up real fast.
It's mostly Linux users apparently
Last time I checked, it didn't even build on Windows. This has changed. I don't think many Windows users are willing to 1. download all of giFT's dependencies, which include SSH, CVS, Cygwin, Cygwin Xfree86, Perl, the Ogg libraries, and more; 2. learn how to use Cygwin; 3. configure the dependencies; and 4. compile giFT when they could just go on kazaalite.
I don't see how parent could have been moderated a troll, Under the DMCA's takedown provisions, making Global Crossing and Register.com terminate Sharman/LEF's internet service is exactly what a copyright owner is supposed to do.
If the fine for a song were $150,000, well...
It is. Instead of taking actual damages, a prevailing copyright owner can elect to take statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work, as defined in Title 17, United States Code, section 504. And for a sound recording, statutory damages can potentially reach $300,000 because copyrights on two separate works are infringed: the copyright on the melody (owned by the songwriter or by the songwriter's publisher) and the copyright on the sound recording (owned by the band or by the record label).