And then you have to pay $20 per year after that to renew your contract with NAI or with Symantec. Otherwise, the software won't protect you from the MacKlez 3.0 virus when it is released.
The only "free software" that Microsoft distributes is the GPL'd components of Interix, MS's competitor to Red Hat's Cygwin. I'll assume that by "free software" you mean "royalty-free licenses for Microsoft software".
which I can then resell on Ebay.
I don't think so. Microsoft would be more likely to give you a free, non-transferable license to use the software. Given the outcome the last time Microsoft products were offered on eBay, Microsoft Licensing isn't as naive as some Slashdot readers would think.
I'd vote for a reference article caching server first.
Slashdot.org does not provide this service for reasons listed in the FAQ. That said, you can usually use Google's cache to read the text of a story once the page has been slashdotted.
I bought the new tetris (Tetris Worlds) for the Gameboy Advance. I had to return it quickly because it not only failed to live up to the old ones, but was far far worse than those fake lookalikes.
And then Tetris for the N64 (The Next Tetris). Not a bad game at all. Purists would object to being able to "save" a piece (I felt like I was cheating for the longest time), but the look-ahead, and new mono-squares and multi-squares objectives made an enjoyable new twist to my old obsession.
No, The Next Tetris was for PC and PS1. The New Tetris was for N64. And yes, you described The New Tetris accurately. Recently, The New Tetris has been cloned on Game Boy Advance. The gameplay is almost exactly the same, but with a new twist: the whole screen twists. Pick up Tetanus On Drugs, a GPL'd tetrisclone for Game Boy Advance, Windows, and Linux.
Tetris has had one of the most agressive lawsuits to protect IP rights in software history.
The Tetris Company LLC has backed off with respect to Tetris clones that do not use the trademarked name "TETRIS". Such versions include Tetanus On Drugs(tm) for Windows, Linux, and Game Boy Advance.
Ditch the three hard drives for one large hard drive. Partition as necessary.
And watch disk performance go down the tube when one head seeks back and forth between the swap file and the data. For another thing, how did you know that the hard drives weren't in a RAID array?
Put an IDE internal ZIP drive in the floppy bay... Put [a floppy drive] in the 3.5" floppy drive bay
Ummm... neither the PC floppy bus nor the ATA bus is hot swap capable.
Keep in mind, ALL of a patent's claims must apply to your invention.
This applies only to parts of one Claim, or to Claims that depend on other Claims ("4. The invention of claim 1 where the number of consecutive items is four"). If something infringes even one independent Claim, then it infringes the patent.
what would such a story read like with a Mom-compatible Unix [link to Mac OS X] rather than something lacking fit, finish and finesse?
There would be a difference, and it would be about four hundred U.S. dollars. A low end PC with Windows XP Home Edition installed costs $700, while a low end Macintosh computer with Mac OS X 10.1.x installed costs $1100 (eMac base model). Many families cannot financially justify such a difference.
What's next, is TW going to use its power over architecture to mandate that its users connect to RR with Windows/Mac through Internet explorer, and not on alternate OS' such as Linux, BeOS, etc, nor through alternate browsers like Mozilla (which I'm using now)?
Time Warner Cable's parent is AOL Time Warner Inc (hereinafter "AOL(tw)"). AOL(tw) owns Netscape Communications Corp., which provides most of the labor and funding for The Mozilla Organization, the group responsible for the Mozilla browser technology used in the Netscape 6 browser and the forthcoming Netscape 7 browser. I don't see any AOL(tw) subsidiary blocking use of Mozilla in the foreseeable future.
Mozilla is a browser after all; why should it serve the intranet?
In some versions of FTP, when you request a file, your client program opens a random port, and then the server pushes the file to you. Some firewalls confuse such traffic with running a server.
A decent amount of webspace with almost unlimited bandwidth can be had for next to NOTHING!
And I'd like to recommend BinaryBlocks. You get 100 megabytes of space, with unmetered data transfer, Perl and PHP support, and a MySQL database, for only $7 per month.
No time to rip a cd I already own?
When I first started out on the MP3 scene, good ripping and encoding tools were hard to come by. My Lite-On 32x CD-ROM had a bug that would corrupt the last two seconds of any ripped CD Digital Audio track no matter which tool I used. (Then I bought a Plextor burner, which rips audio perfectly.) In addition, it was tough to find Windows binaries of a free(beer) MP3 encoder that went above 96 kbps (RealJukebox's limit) until the developers of the LAME encoder replaced the last of the ISO example code.
I buy many cd's and I leech many too.
$32 for an album? I'll pay $15 for an album at Best Buy, but this is ridiculous.
How many people use ftp for something other then mp3 trading and warez?
I use FTP to upload files to my web site because for one thing, my current provider doesn't support HTTP form uploading, and for another, I prefer the drag-and-drop interface of my FTP client to the dialog-box interface of most web browsers' file upload widgets.
If I'm leeching at top speed, and the connection goes down, it's going to take a while for the client to report "0 kps" as it will perform an average over time of how fast my download is going.
Not necessarily. WinMX (my favorite file sharing program) uses a 10-second window to compute these averages. I'd think the types of users who submit stories to Slashdot would be able to distinguish a gradual fadeoff from a true dropped conn.
without copyright protections a lot of things wouldn't get made in the first place.
Assuming life after publication is 50 years, and copyright gives the author's estate the monopoly for 70 years after the death of the author, how do you justify giving one author a monopoly over a work for 120 years?
With copyright protections, a lot of things wouldn't get made in the first place because 1. some authors, publishers, and estates refuse to license a work at any price, and 2. some authors, publishers, and estates have a reputation of filing frivolous lawsuits accusing plagiarism, discouraging people from creating new works for fear of the cost of a legal defense.
Board games [link to monopd and Atlantik] under Linux work
But because they're not Hasbro brand, they can't use the exact copyrighted look of the Hasbro boards. For instance, Hasbro may be able to win a lawsuit against somebody who uses the exact layout of the shortcuts on the Candy Land board or on the Chutes and Ladders board in a free clone.
Unfortunately, you live with a brandist. Brandists are people who claim that anything that doesn't carry the original brand must be inferior. As cuyler wrote in this comment: "And the final note, whatever scrabble game you'd find for linux might the the most amazing thing in the world but it's missing one thing. It's not Hoyle. It doesn't matter."
Unless you count on-board video [as] "normal PC s"
The original Macintosh computer had on-board video. So did the Fat Mac, Plus, SE, Classic, and SE30. So did the IIsi, IIci, IIvx, Performa, and LC models. So did the old iMac and the G4 Cube. So do the current eMac and iMac machines. So do all laptop and tablet computers. In fact, the only Apple computers not to have on-board video were the too-expensive-for-most-home-users models: II, IIx, IIcx, IIfx, some Macintosh Quadra models, and the desktop and tower Power Macintosh computers.
win-modems
The first internal modem for a PowerBook computer was a winmodem. Some winmodems are actually real modems that use a language other than Hayes AT to talk to the CPU; others (the HSP models) are in essence glorified sound cards.
The top of the line G4 with a 17" studio display is: $4,548.00
Yes, but families wanting an entry-level computer often don't have $1,099 for Apple's bottom of the line computer, the eMac. (Please, no extensible editor jokes.)
I saw a picture of [a Pentium V processor] on the web
For one thing, it's "Pentium 4" not "Pentium IV".
For another, Pentium 5 would be abbreviated as "P5", which is one of the generic terms used to refer to 586-generation processors such as the original Pentium, AMD's K5, and whatever Cyrix had out at the time.
Athlon and Pentium 4 are 786 processors. Pentium 5 and the Hammer series will probably be considered 886's unless Intel tries to squeeze another chip out of its Pentium 4 core (the PIII was just a PII with SSE and a couple slight optimizations to the P6 core).
Oh and for that to work, everyone needs a removable hotswap hard drive bay.
Those already exist. For smaller storage, you can use a CF card. For larger storage, you can connect the hard drive to the computer through a FireWire(tm) brand IEEE 1394 interface.
Slashdot Mirror
pay the $9 / month for hosting and email / shell ... But $99 is a bit extreme.
That 9 USD per month is 108 USD per year, which isn't much different from the 99 USD per year that Apple's charging.
They've already thought of that. Here's .GNU
Anti-virus: $50 Once - not yearly
And then you have to pay $20 per year after that to renew your contract with NAI or with Symantec. Otherwise, the software won't protect you from the MacKlez 3.0 virus when it is released.
then they'll send me a bunch of free software
The only "free software" that Microsoft distributes is the GPL'd components of Interix, MS's competitor to Red Hat's Cygwin. I'll assume that by "free software" you mean "royalty-free licenses for Microsoft software".
which I can then resell on Ebay.
I don't think so. Microsoft would be more likely to give you a free, non-transferable license to use the software. Given the outcome the last time Microsoft products were offered on eBay, Microsoft Licensing isn't as naive as some Slashdot readers would think.
I'd vote for a reference article caching server first.
Slashdot.org does not provide this service for reasons listed in the FAQ. That said, you can usually use Google's cache to read the text of a story once the page has been slashdotted.
I bought the new tetris (Tetris Worlds) for the Gameboy Advance. I had to return it quickly because it not only failed to live up to the old ones, but was far far worse than those fake lookalikes.
Tetris Worlds sucked.
Tetanus On Drugs for GBA doesn't.
And then Tetris for the N64 (The Next Tetris). Not a bad game at all. Purists would object to being able to "save" a piece (I felt like I was cheating for the longest time), but the look-ahead, and new mono-squares and multi-squares objectives made an enjoyable new twist to my old obsession.
No, The Next Tetris was for PC and PS1. The New Tetris was for N64. And yes, you described The New Tetris accurately. Recently, The New Tetris has been cloned on Game Boy Advance. The gameplay is almost exactly the same, but with a new twist: the whole screen twists. Pick up Tetanus On Drugs, a GPL'd tetrisclone for Game Boy Advance, Windows, and Linux.
Tetris has had one of the most agressive lawsuits to protect IP rights in software history.
The Tetris Company LLC has backed off with respect to Tetris clones that do not use the trademarked name "TETRIS". Such versions include Tetanus On Drugs(tm) for Windows, Linux, and Game Boy Advance.
Ozma [ozmaonline.com] (who have a thing for all that is Russian) did a version of that classic folk tune
So did Gregory Chekalin. Except his version sounds a bit like "Barbie Girl" by Aqua.
Ditch the three hard drives for one large hard drive. Partition as necessary.
And watch disk performance go down the tube when one head seeks back and forth between the swap file and the data. For another thing, how did you know that the hard drives weren't in a RAID array?
Put an IDE internal ZIP drive in the floppy bay ... Put [a floppy drive] in the 3.5" floppy drive bay
Ummm... neither the PC floppy bus nor the ATA bus is hot swap capable.
Keep in mind, ALL of a patent's claims must apply to your invention.
This applies only to parts of one Claim, or to Claims that depend on other Claims ("4. The invention of claim 1 where the number of consecutive items is four"). If something infringes even one independent Claim, then it infringes the patent.
what would such a story read like with a Mom-compatible Unix [link to Mac OS X] rather than something lacking fit, finish and finesse?
There would be a difference, and it would be about four hundred U.S. dollars. A low end PC with Windows XP Home Edition installed costs $700, while a low end Macintosh computer with Mac OS X 10.1.x installed costs $1100 (eMac base model). Many families cannot financially justify such a difference.
What's next, is TW going to use its power over architecture to mandate that its users connect to RR with Windows/Mac through Internet explorer, and not on alternate OS' such as Linux, BeOS, etc, nor through alternate browsers like Mozilla (which I'm using now)?
Time Warner Cable's parent is AOL Time Warner Inc (hereinafter "AOL(tw)"). AOL(tw) owns Netscape Communications Corp., which provides most of the labor and funding for The Mozilla Organization, the group responsible for the Mozilla browser technology used in the Netscape 6 browser and the forthcoming Netscape 7 browser. I don't see any AOL(tw) subsidiary blocking use of Mozilla in the foreseeable future.
Mozilla is a browser after all; why should it serve the intranet?
In some versions of FTP, when you request a file, your client program opens a random port, and then the server pushes the file to you. Some firewalls confuse such traffic with running a server.
A decent amount of webspace with almost unlimited bandwidth can be had for next to NOTHING!
And I'd like to recommend BinaryBlocks. You get 100 megabytes of space, with unmetered data transfer, Perl and PHP support, and a MySQL database, for only $7 per month.
No time to rip a cd I already own?
When I first started out on the MP3 scene, good ripping and encoding tools were hard to come by. My Lite-On 32x CD-ROM had a bug that would corrupt the last two seconds of any ripped CD Digital Audio track no matter which tool I used. (Then I bought a Plextor burner, which rips audio perfectly.) In addition, it was tough to find Windows binaries of a free(beer) MP3 encoder that went above 96 kbps (RealJukebox's limit) until the developers of the LAME encoder replaced the last of the ISO example code.
I buy many cd's and I leech many too.
$32 for an album? I'll pay $15 for an album at Best Buy, but this is ridiculous.
How many people use ftp for something other then mp3 trading and warez?
I use FTP to upload files to my web site because for one thing, my current provider doesn't support HTTP form uploading, and for another, I prefer the drag-and-drop interface of my FTP client to the dialog-box interface of most web browsers' file upload widgets.
If I'm leeching at top speed, and the connection goes down, it's going to take a while for the client to report "0 kps" as it will perform an average over time of how fast my download is going.
Not necessarily. WinMX (my favorite file sharing program) uses a 10-second window to compute these averages. I'd think the types of users who submit stories to Slashdot would be able to distinguish a gradual fadeoff from a true dropped conn.
without copyright protections a lot of things wouldn't get made in the first place.
Assuming life after publication is 50 years, and copyright gives the author's estate the monopoly for 70 years after the death of the author, how do you justify giving one author a monopoly over a work for 120 years?
With copyright protections, a lot of things wouldn't get made in the first place because 1. some authors, publishers, and estates refuse to license a work at any price, and 2. some authors, publishers, and estates have a reputation of filing frivolous lawsuits accusing plagiarism, discouraging people from creating new works for fear of the cost of a legal defense.
Board games [link to monopd and Atlantik] under Linux work
But because they're not Hasbro brand, they can't use the exact copyrighted look of the Hasbro boards. For instance, Hasbro may be able to win a lawsuit against somebody who uses the exact layout of the shortcuts on the Candy Land board or on the Chutes and Ladders board in a free clone.
Unfortunately, you live with a brandist. Brandists are people who claim that anything that doesn't carry the original brand must be inferior. As cuyler wrote in this comment: "And the final note, whatever scrabble game you'd find for linux might the the most amazing thing in the world but it's missing one thing. It's not Hoyle. It doesn't matter."
Unless you count on-board video [as] "normal PC s"
The original Macintosh computer had on-board video. So did the Fat Mac, Plus, SE, Classic, and SE30. So did the IIsi, IIci, IIvx, Performa, and LC models. So did the old iMac and the G4 Cube. So do the current eMac and iMac machines. So do all laptop and tablet computers. In fact, the only Apple computers not to have on-board video were the too-expensive-for-most-home-users models: II, IIx, IIcx, IIfx, some Macintosh Quadra models, and the desktop and tower Power Macintosh computers.
win-modems
The first internal modem for a PowerBook computer was a winmodem. Some winmodems are actually real modems that use a language other than Hayes AT to talk to the CPU; others (the HSP models) are in essence glorified sound cards.
The top of the line G4 with a 17" studio display is: $4,548.00
Yes, but families wanting an entry-level computer often don't have $1,099 for Apple's bottom of the line computer, the eMac. (Please, no extensible editor jokes.)
I saw a picture of [a Pentium V processor] on the web
For one thing, it's "Pentium 4" not "Pentium IV".
For another, Pentium 5 would be abbreviated as "P5", which is one of the generic terms used to refer to 586-generation processors such as the original Pentium, AMD's K5, and whatever Cyrix had out at the time.
Athlon and Pentium 4 are 786 processors. Pentium 5 and the Hammer series will probably be considered 886's unless Intel tries to squeeze another chip out of its Pentium 4 core (the PIII was just a PII with SSE and a couple slight optimizations to the P6 core).
Oh and for that to work, everyone needs a removable hotswap hard drive bay.
Those already exist. For smaller storage, you can use a CF card. For larger storage, you can connect the hard drive to the computer through a FireWire(tm) brand IEEE 1394 interface.
If Microsoft ever messed with Carmack, he'd just release all of his new games for Linux only.
If the CBDTPA passes, it might become a felony in the United States to make or sell a computer capable of running Linux.
it surely can't be C; my C is rusty but shouldn't it be more like (parody of hungarian notation)
no, more like #if 0
draw_advertisement(screen);
#endif in a program that uses (say) the Allegro library.
Remember, AOL and Microsoft don't even have an offering in the enterprise world yet.
Doesn't Microsoft have a private MSN Messenger as part of Exchange?