We need to find an ISP willing to distribute Mozilla instead of IE.
Thirty percent of people who connect to the Internet do so through America Online. After AOL's contract with Microsoft (bundling IE in exchange for bundling an AOL icon on the desktop) expired, AOL switched CompuServe to Gecko, and the next version of the AOL client is headed that way as well (AOL keyword: beta).
When one says, "Copyrights do not expire," that's an unambiguous statement of fact. In this case, it's a statement that's completely and utterly false.
No copyright has expired in the last four December 31s, and no copyright will expire in the next sixteen. The Bono Act follows a previous 19-year extension (Copyright Act of 1976). Let me rewrite what I said into what I originally meant:
As long as Congress continues to extend the term of subsisting copyrights, no copyright will ever expire in the United States. Congress shows no intention of deviating from a policy of successive term extensions.
Worse was posting that link to a web page that is so full of vitriol and bile as to be practically useless in any meaningful discussion.
works owned by an individual remain the exclusive property of that individual for his or her lifetime, then the property of that individual's estate for seventy years.
How much are you willing to insure me for that this number "seventy" will not increase further within the next fifty years?
After that term, the copyright expires
This means that for virtually all works, anybody who has ever seen the work commercially exploited will not live to produce anything from that work.
Many uninformed reactionaries have written that copyright is now perpetual, because Congress can extend it any time they want. This has always been true, within the limits set forth by the Constitution.
What limits? The "for limited Times" language of the U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8, clause 8, has been declared moot by a District Court unless Eldred wins a Supreme Court battle.
It doesn't mean that copyright is meaningless, or that it doesn't expire.
But if Congress has the power to do everything short of explicitly stating that "Resolved, that it is the policy of the Congress of the United States to enact a 20-year copyright term extension act on every 20-year anniversary of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act," then what is the substantive limit on Congress's power to make copyright perpetual in practice?
To achieve guaranteed dvd-quality, I need to compress movies (in dvd-resolution) with at least 1 Mbit/s when using DivX. And HDTV is 1920 x 1024. That means at least 5 times the information. You'll need alot more than 1mbit.
I said 1 MB/s with a capital B, meaning megabytes per second. I apologize for not being clear enough that I meant 8 megabits per second. Now is 8 Mbit/s big enough for 1920x1024 pixels at 24 fps using MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Video?
And what about the ordinary dvd-players?
And what about the ordinary TVs? Those with ordinary TVs aren't going to need HDTV DVD players.
Not everyone got PC-dvd and just upgrade their software.
MPEG-4 is an international standard. When the DVD forum makes an MPEG-4 based HDTV DVD format, it won't be "DVD Video" anymore, but instead "DVD Advanced Video" or something. Set-top boxes will be sold that advertise "Supports DVD Advanced Video".
Anyhow, you might not even possess the CPU-power to decompress at this resolution realtime.
MPEG standards are written with ASIC decompression in mind. You won't need a set of Athlon processors.
noone is going to alter an established format, if it means that the entire public will have to buy a new dvd-player.
The typical DVD Video player outputs 480i only. Those who have the cash to buy an HDTV set will probably have the cash to buy a DVD Advanced Video player.
the original poster was pointing out that creative works will be made whether or not copyright exists.
In fact, there are some creative works that will not be made because copyright exists. An individual composer does not have the resources to license works by composers who have been dead for sixty years. This kills the entire sampling genre.
Stealing isn't right, irregardless of whatever tertiary issues you care to bring up.
If a composer has been dead for sixty-eight years, and you record his music, from whom are you stealingvt. Taking and carrying away, feloniously; taking without right or leave, and with intent to keep wrongfully; as, stealing the personal goods of another.
Much of the problem here (specifically in relation to the works of George Gershwin and other 1920s composers) relates to excessive copyright duration.
There is content out there that down right takes a lot of money to create. Movies.
Movies. For free. An animated movie takes about 10 hours per minute to make using Macromedia Flash software (based on the time cost of making Irrational Exuberance). Now we've reduced the cost of producing a film by an order of magnitude or more without reducing its ability to tell a story.
Music that uses an orchestra or session players.
I understand that for sound recordings. But it should be cheaper to compose (at least some genres of) music in a tracker. I'll forgive you this time because many people confuse the copyright on a musical work with the copyright of a particular recording of that work.
Video games.
It doesn't cost very much to develop a Game Boy Advance game. The costs of GBA games lie largely in replication, marketing, and promotion. (Join gbadev@yahoogroups.com and read the last week of discussion to see why.)
Content that would not exist in a world without copyrights.
Some areas of the world without strong copyright protection have a thriving motion picture industry. Know how? Product placement is one way.
But that would let you watch it 4+ times vs. once.
For another thing, Blockbuster doesn't have a government-granted monopoly on DVD rentals. You may be able to rent an older release from a local store for $1.
Are you sure? The MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Video codec (used in DivX 5) compresses much tighter than the MPEG-2 video codec (used in DVD-Video). Would it be hard to compress 1280x720p/24 video at a 1 MB/s bitrate?
What specific features does the OpenOffice.org 1.0 suite lack? OpenOffice.org even has the "show codes" feature from WordPerfect, as its file format is simply a tarball of XML documents.
GIMP poorer than Photoshop
GIMP is as powerful as Adobe Photoshop Elements ($100). If GIMP were as powerful as the full version of Photoshop, the developers would have to charge $400 a copy to pay Pantone for the right to do CMYK conversion. What non-patented bitmap editing features are you looking for that GIMP doesn't provide?
What does this have to do with Eminem (aka Marshall Mathers)?... Oh, you mean s/mathers/matters/.
does this web page load.
First, before you can have a web page load, you have to have a web page to begin with. If you put some content up on AOL's proprietary system, would it be a "web page"? Does Flash served up through HTTP count as a "web page"? And if you made some content available through HTTP in Microsoft's proprietary mark-up language (which happens to look similar to HTML), would it also count as a "web page"?
There has to be some definition of a "web page". You may choose "web page" as it's defined by the documentation on MSDN, with VBScript, ActiveX, and the like. I'd rather define "web page" using the W3C specification of HTML and related technologies (CSS, ECMAScript, DOM, PNG, etc).
now that would be a good way for all of you whiners saying that IE is bugriden to prove to the world that you are better than Microsoft and implement their features correctly
And end up in court for violating patents owned by Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft's latest patent licenses specifically exclude any software licensed under the GNU GPL (part of the tri-license covering most of Mozilla).
In principle, can't it be replaced by a web page with radio buttons that say "do you want your download to include/exclude $FOO, $BAR, $BAZ", and upon clicking "submit", give you a page with the corresponding packages/zips/tarballs/whatevers?
To an extent, RealPlayer did this (small, medium, and large downloads), and AOL's Winamp still does. Any more than a S/M/L scheme, and you have to store 2^n packages on the server, one for every possible subset of the n components. Or you get a set of separate zip files, which is hard for the average point-and-drool user to install correctly.
Good AOL products: Mozilla and Winamp. Bad AOL products: AOL and DMCA.
You know how you're not supposed to remove a game cartridge while you're playing?
Not necessarily. On the Game Boy Advance, if part of a program is running entirely from RAM, it is completely safe to pull out the cartridge and put in another one while the power is on. Now that Square is a licensed GBA developer, we may begin to see RPGs that are so big that they won't fit on one 8-megabyte cartridge. (Nintendo currently won't manufacture a cartridge with more data than 8 megabytes.)
Of course Nintendo doesn't document everything correctly. The first version of the N64 manual stated that you can't even plug in or out controllers or memory cards while the power was on, until Nintendo introduced a Rumble Pak. The new manuals contained detailed instructions for how to "pak-swap" safely.
Horizontal resolution is limited by how fast the signal can change states, is measured in "lines" where a "line" is the combination of a black vertical bar next to a white vertical bar, is the normal specification for video performance and is directly related to signal bandwidth.
So each line is two pixels, one black, the other white.
VHS, for instance, is only good for 150 lines or less. That means that a signal recorded or played back from a VHS machine can only change states 150 times per scan line.
Wrong. That means it can change states 300 times a second (black to white to black again).
The effective resolution of that picture would be 150x500 (25 lines for vertical blanking).
Actually, vblank is closer to 45 lines, giving you about a 320x480 picture at 60 fps, or 320x240 at 30 fps. Some of the later PSX games (such as Square's Ehrgeiz fighting game) run at that resolution (320x480i).
So when [companies] compete on this feature [opening thousands of existing Microsoft Word documents], which company do you think is able to produce the most compatible output?
(Context for mods: The U.S. government specifies what software it buys based on a list of required features and then lets companies bid. But sometimes, it simply reads the requirements from a particular package's manual to get around the bidding laws. WordPerfect's "show codes" feature is an example of such a requirement.)
I miss "show codes"
In this case, Microsoft could claim that a form of Show Codes exists in Office as well. Just save as HTML;-)
devkitadv is a GCC port for the GBA which has been around for OVER TWO YEARS. Flash carts from www.visoly.com have been around for about the same.
Huh? The Game Boy Advance system itself has been available in the United States of America for only one year. (IIRC, the anniversary is about a week from today.)
The 65c816 was more than a 6502 on roids. It was a fully functional 16bit cpu
The 65c816, used in the Apple IIGS computer and Super NES game console, was a 16-bit processor with an 8-bit data bus and only three integer registers (A, X, and Y).
at least as capable as some low end 32bit cpu's
The Motorola 68000, used in the Sega Genesis and SNK Neo-Geo game consoles and the original Apple Macintosh computer, was a 32-bit processor with a 16-bit data bus. So was the Intel 386SX processor, used in some PC clones.
Without looking at the specs, the GBA is certainly more powerful than the SNES
After becoming intimately familiar with the specs, I'd say twice as powerful overall, or about as powerful as the Super NES with Super FX.
but we're not talking orders of magnitudes.
Correct. In general, you need at least an order of magnitude speed difference to emulate a video game console. The 16 MHz ARM7TDMI in the GBA just barely squeezes by when emulating a 1.8 MHz 6502 and the rest of the original NES chipset.
NO. The 6502 architecture (used in the NES and Super NES) and the Sharp-Z80 architecture (used in the Game Boy and Game Boy Color) are mutually incompatible. Otherwise, the Wide Boy (play Game Boy games on the Famicom, the Japanese NES) wouldn't have been so d*mn expensive.
That is Infinitely more powerful than a 65C816. The GBA runs laps around the SNES.
I have a 75 MHz Mac and a 333 MHz Acer laptop, and the laptop runs laps around the Mac. However, I don't think Mac software would run in real time on the laptop. There is a LOT of overhead involved in emulation of binary code for a foreign processor. It's not like wine, which is just a PE loader and a re-implementation of the Windows DLLS. It's not like vmware, which runs the target OS on the native processor and emulates the rest of the motherboard. You actually have to interpret every single instruction.
Have you ever played a GBA?
Yes. I've developed for the GBA, and I know that its CPU is not fast enough to emulate the whole Super NES chipset (65C816 Plus, Super PPU, SPC700, DSP, and Super FX) in real time. In general, a port of a Super NES game to the GBA is straightforward (except for the smaller screen size, the lack of A and X buttons, the lack of a mouse, light gun, or other pointing device, and the completely different multiplayer paradigm), but it does require access to the original trade-secret source code. You can't just prepend SuperNESOnGBA.bin to the.smc file as you can with NES games.
Slashdot Mirror
We need to find an ISP willing to distribute Mozilla instead of IE.
Thirty percent of people who connect to the Internet do so through America Online. After AOL's contract with Microsoft (bundling IE in exchange for bundling an AOL icon on the desktop) expired, AOL switched CompuServe to Gecko, and the next version of the AOL client is headed that way as well (AOL keyword: beta).
When one says, "Copyrights do not expire," that's an unambiguous statement of fact. In this case, it's a statement that's completely and utterly false.
No copyright has expired in the last four December 31s, and no copyright will expire in the next sixteen. The Bono Act follows a previous 19-year extension (Copyright Act of 1976). Let me rewrite what I said into what I originally meant:
As long as Congress continues to extend the term of subsisting copyrights, no copyright will ever expire in the United States. Congress shows no intention of deviating from a policy of successive term extensions.
Worse was posting that link to a web page that is so full of vitriol and bile as to be practically useless in any meaningful discussion.
Here's a much less biased link: clicky
Exaggeration for effect is one, and I think that's what this poster was doing.
How is "a 20 year extension every 20 years creates perpetual copyright in effect" an exaggeration?
works owned by an individual remain the exclusive property of that individual for his or her lifetime, then the property of that individual's estate for seventy years.
How much are you willing to insure me for that this number "seventy" will not increase further within the next fifty years?
After that term, the copyright expires
This means that for virtually all works, anybody who has ever seen the work commercially exploited will not live to produce anything from that work.
Many uninformed reactionaries have written that copyright is now perpetual, because Congress can extend it any time they want. This has always been true, within the limits set forth by the Constitution.
What limits? The "for limited Times" language of the U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8, clause 8, has been declared moot by a District Court unless Eldred wins a Supreme Court battle.
It doesn't mean that copyright is meaningless, or that it doesn't expire.
But if Congress has the power to do everything short of explicitly stating that "Resolved, that it is the policy of the Congress of the United States to enact a 20-year copyright term extension act on every 20-year anniversary of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act," then what is the substantive limit on Congress's power to make copyright perpetual in practice?
To achieve guaranteed dvd-quality, I need to compress movies (in dvd-resolution) with at least 1 Mbit/s when using DivX. And HDTV is 1920 x 1024. That means at least 5 times the information. You'll need alot more than 1mbit.
I said 1 MB/s with a capital B, meaning megabytes per second. I apologize for not being clear enough that I meant 8 megabits per second. Now is 8 Mbit/s big enough for 1920x1024 pixels at 24 fps using MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Video?
And what about the ordinary dvd-players?
And what about the ordinary TVs? Those with ordinary TVs aren't going to need HDTV DVD players.
Not everyone got PC-dvd and just upgrade their software.
MPEG-4 is an international standard. When the DVD forum makes an MPEG-4 based HDTV DVD format, it won't be "DVD Video" anymore, but instead "DVD Advanced Video" or something. Set-top boxes will be sold that advertise "Supports DVD Advanced Video".
Anyhow, you might not even possess the CPU-power to decompress at this resolution realtime.
MPEG standards are written with ASIC decompression in mind. You won't need a set of Athlon processors.
noone is going to alter an established format, if it means that the entire public will have to buy a new dvd-player.
The typical DVD Video player outputs 480i only. Those who have the cash to buy an HDTV set will probably have the cash to buy a DVD Advanced Video player.
IMO, record companies should not have copyrights to the work of deceased artists
So you think it should be OK to arrange the offing of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls just to get the rights to sell 2Pac and Notorious B.I.G. CDs?
That's why copyright is limited, and that's why it expires!
Bullshit. Copyright in the United States and the European Union no longer expires.
Disney movies based on fairy tales
But anything based on Disney movies?
Sure it is... as long as the author/creator of the information says it's ok to share.
What if the author/creator is dead?
Now what if a playwright states "This play may be performed only by people with 99% or more African blood, even in areas where no African people live. All whites on the stage will be arrested. Oh, and my estate has a perpetual copyright on this play, so even 200 years after I die, my estate will still get 90% of the box office." Is that fair?
the original poster was pointing out that creative works will be made whether or not copyright exists.
In fact, there are some creative works that will not be made because copyright exists. An individual composer does not have the resources to license works by composers who have been dead for sixty years. This kills the entire sampling genre.
Stealing isn't right, irregardless of whatever tertiary issues you care to bring up.
If a composer has been dead for sixty-eight years, and you record his music, from whom are you stealing vt. Taking and carrying away, feloniously; taking without right or leave, and with intent to keep wrongfully; as, stealing the personal goods of another.
Much of the problem here (specifically in relation to the works of George Gershwin and other 1920s composers) relates to excessive copyright duration.
There is content out there that down right takes a lot of money to create. Movies.
Movies. For free. An animated movie takes about 10 hours per minute to make using Macromedia Flash software (based on the time cost of making Irrational Exuberance). Now we've reduced the cost of producing a film by an order of magnitude or more without reducing its ability to tell a story.
Music that uses an orchestra or session players.
I understand that for sound recordings. But it should be cheaper to compose (at least some genres of) music in a tracker. I'll forgive you this time because many people confuse the copyright on a musical work with the copyright of a particular recording of that work.
Video games.
It doesn't cost very much to develop a Game Boy Advance game. The costs of GBA games lie largely in replication, marketing, and promotion. (Join gbadev@yahoogroups.com and read the last week of discussion to see why.)
Content that would not exist in a world without copyrights.
Some areas of the world without strong copyright protection have a thriving motion picture industry. Know how? Product placement is one way.
But that would cost $4 vs. $1.
But that would let you watch it 4+ times vs. once.
For another thing, Blockbuster doesn't have a government-granted monopoly on DVD rentals. You may be able to rent an older release from a local store for $1.
1080i looks like hell at 9.8Mb/s, and you only get around an hour per DVD layer at that rate.
Wouldn't 1080i look halfway decent at 9 Mb/s or so using MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Video (the DivX video codec)?
you can't stuff a HDTV movie onto a DVD.
Are you sure? The MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Video codec (used in DivX 5) compresses much tighter than the MPEG-2 video codec (used in DVD-Video). Would it be hard to compress 1280x720p/24 video at a 1 MB/s bitrate?
I still find OpenOffice poorer than MS Office
What specific features does the OpenOffice.org 1.0 suite lack? OpenOffice.org even has the "show codes" feature from WordPerfect, as its file format is simply a tarball of XML documents.
GIMP poorer than Photoshop
GIMP is as powerful as Adobe Photoshop Elements ($100). If GIMP were as powerful as the full version of Photoshop, the developers would have to charge $400 a copy to pay Pantone for the right to do CMYK conversion. What non-patented bitmap editing features are you looking for that GIMP doesn't provide?
what mathers in the end is
What does this have to do with Eminem (aka Marshall Mathers)? ... Oh, you mean s/mathers/matters/.
does this web page load.
First, before you can have a web page load, you have to have a web page to begin with. If you put some content up on AOL's proprietary system, would it be a "web page"? Does Flash served up through HTTP count as a "web page"? And if you made some content available through HTTP in Microsoft's proprietary mark-up language (which happens to look similar to HTML), would it also count as a "web page"?
There has to be some definition of a "web page". You may choose "web page" as it's defined by the documentation on MSDN, with VBScript, ActiveX, and the like. I'd rather define "web page" using the W3C specification of HTML and related technologies (CSS, ECMAScript, DOM, PNG, etc).
now that would be a good way for all of you whiners saying that IE is bugriden to prove to the world that you are better than Microsoft and implement their features correctly
And end up in court for violating patents owned by Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft's latest patent licenses specifically exclude any software licensed under the GNU GPL (part of the tri-license covering most of Mozilla).
In principle, can't it be replaced by a web page with radio buttons that say "do you want your download to include/exclude $FOO, $BAR, $BAZ", and upon clicking "submit", give you a page with the corresponding packages/zips/tarballs/whatevers?
To an extent, RealPlayer did this (small, medium, and large downloads), and AOL's Winamp still does. Any more than a S/M/L scheme, and you have to store 2^n packages on the server, one for every possible subset of the n components. Or you get a set of separate zip files, which is hard for the average point-and-drool user to install correctly.
Good AOL products: Mozilla and Winamp. Bad AOL products: AOL and DMCA.
You know how you're not supposed to remove a game cartridge while you're playing?
Not necessarily. On the Game Boy Advance, if part of a program is running entirely from RAM, it is completely safe to pull out the cartridge and put in another one while the power is on. Now that Square is a licensed GBA developer, we may begin to see RPGs that are so big that they won't fit on one 8-megabyte cartridge. (Nintendo currently won't manufacture a cartridge with more data than 8 megabytes.)
Of course Nintendo doesn't document everything correctly. The first version of the N64 manual stated that you can't even plug in or out controllers or memory cards while the power was on, until Nintendo introduced a Rumble Pak. The new manuals contained detailed instructions for how to "pak-swap" safely.
Horizontal resolution is limited by how fast the signal can change states, is measured in "lines" where a "line" is the combination of a black vertical bar next to a white vertical bar, is the normal specification for video performance and is directly related to signal bandwidth.
So each line is two pixels, one black, the other white.
VHS, for instance, is only good for 150 lines or less. That means that a signal recorded or played back from a VHS machine can only change states 150 times per scan line.
Wrong. That means it can change states 300 times a second (black to white to black again).
The effective resolution of that picture would be 150x500 (25 lines for vertical blanking).
Actually, vblank is closer to 45 lines, giving you about a 320x480 picture at 60 fps, or 320x240 at 30 fps. Some of the later PSX games (such as Square's Ehrgeiz fighting game) run at that resolution (320x480i).
Why would you call yourself a Yank? I always had the impression that that was a somewhat derogatory term.
Likewise, why would Slashdot call itself "News for Nerds"? I always had the impression that "nerd" and "geek" were somewhat derogatory terms.
[Circumventing the infrared copy protection is] what IR filters are for.
Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
Watch Hollywood pull some Congressional strings and get a ban on owning an IR filter without a license.
So when [companies] compete on this feature [opening thousands of existing Microsoft Word documents], which company do you think is able to produce the most compatible output?
wvware.
(Context for mods: The U.S. government specifies what software it buys based on a list of required features and then lets companies bid. But sometimes, it simply reads the requirements from a particular package's manual to get around the bidding laws. WordPerfect's "show codes" feature is an example of such a requirement.)
I miss "show codes"
In this case, Microsoft could claim that a form of Show Codes exists in Office as well. Just save as HTML ;-)
devkitadv is a GCC port for the GBA which has been around for OVER TWO YEARS. Flash carts from www.visoly.com have been around for about the same.
Huh? The Game Boy Advance system itself has been available in the United States of America for only one year. (IIRC, the anniversary is about a week from today.)
The 65c816 was more than a 6502 on roids. It was a fully functional 16bit cpu
The 65c816, used in the Apple IIGS computer and Super NES game console, was a 16-bit processor with an 8-bit data bus and only three integer registers (A, X, and Y).
at least as capable as some low end 32bit cpu's
The Motorola 68000, used in the Sega Genesis and SNK Neo-Geo game consoles and the original Apple Macintosh computer, was a 32-bit processor with a 16-bit data bus. So was the Intel 386SX processor, used in some PC clones.
Without looking at the specs, the GBA is certainly more powerful than the SNES
After becoming intimately familiar with the specs, I'd say twice as powerful overall, or about as powerful as the Super NES with Super FX.
but we're not talking orders of magnitudes.
Correct. In general, you need at least an order of magnitude speed difference to emulate a video game console. The 16 MHz ARM7TDMI in the GBA just barely squeezes by when emulating a 1.8 MHz 6502 and the rest of the original NES chipset.
The 6502 is GB-compatible.
NO. The 6502 architecture (used in the NES and Super NES) and the Sharp-Z80 architecture (used in the Game Boy and Game Boy Color) are mutually incompatible. Otherwise, the Wide Boy (play Game Boy games on the Famicom, the Japanese NES) wouldn't have been so d*mn expensive.
That is Infinitely more powerful than a 65C816. The GBA runs laps around the SNES.
I have a 75 MHz Mac and a 333 MHz Acer laptop, and the laptop runs laps around the Mac. However, I don't think Mac software would run in real time on the laptop. There is a LOT of overhead involved in emulation of binary code for a foreign processor. It's not like wine, which is just a PE loader and a re-implementation of the Windows DLLS. It's not like vmware, which runs the target OS on the native processor and emulates the rest of the motherboard. You actually have to interpret every single instruction.
Have you ever played a GBA?
Yes. I've developed for the GBA, and I know that its CPU is not fast enough to emulate the whole Super NES chipset (65C816 Plus, Super PPU, SPC700, DSP, and Super FX) in real time. In general, a port of a Super NES game to the GBA is straightforward (except for the smaller screen size, the lack of A and X buttons, the lack of a mouse, light gun, or other pointing device, and the completely different multiplayer paradigm), but it does require access to the original trade-secret source code. You can't just prepend SuperNESOnGBA.bin to the .smc file as you can with NES games.