The Game Boy has been basically the only portable on the market for years
Wonder Swan? Palm? Windows CE? Graphing calculators (especially among junior high and high school kids)? Sure there hasn't been a direct competitor in the vein of Cube vs. Xbox, but competition doesn't require exact substitutes.
Surprising....They'd have sold at least 50 million Mario worlds if they had it on game cube
There was a Mario game, and it was called Super Smash Bros. Melee. I consider it a Mario game because it has a one-player side-scrolling adventure mode.
Wouldn't this open up the field a bit for smaller, more visionary companies to produce games that rock?
Not if the small publisher can't pay the entry fees that the console makers charge to make up for the losses they take on marketing the console. The big pubs generally won't take projects from smaller developers unless the project clearly appeals to the lowest-$-common-$-denominator.
for the most part, the GBA is the only portable game system available now. When was the last time Nintendo had a true competitor in the portable game market?
Texas Instruments graphing calculators pose serious competition to Nintendo products. They have the advantage that a large portion of Nintendo's target audience (students aged 12-18) can bring calculators to school, but most school systems have non-negotiable regulations banning all products produced by Nintendo of America Inc. from the premises.
Palm OS and WinCE devices also pose a threat because they pretty much own the market for cheap games for traveling businesspeople.
I'm surprised that Sony hasn't pushed their PSone more as a portable of late, especially since you can attach a screen to it.
PSone can't be made handheld because a 12cm disc is just too clunky for a handheld unless you either make a two-piece system (controller and screen connected to a Discman-looking device) or expose the CD (done in the PlayStation Portable) which might incur action from the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
This leaves out the few million people who watch movies on their standalone DVD players.
I can already do that with my laptop that has S-Video out and is actually smaller than most set-top DVD players. But for the rest of consumers, why can't a set-top DVD player maker make its codec system extensible so that users can compile codecs such as xvid (which grew out of the OpenDivX code), put them on CD-ROM, and load them into the player's flash memory?
I don't think DivX supports Dolby Digital 5.1 sound yet
Most casual movie watchers have only stereo anyway.
Umm, if there were no copyright law, there wouldn't be any proprietary products in the first place.
Yes there would; they'd just be protected under trade secret + contract law rather than copyright law. Copyright infringement cases are generally civil cases, and damages usually don't top five figures per work infringed. Trade secret cases, on the other hand, carry even bigger damages, plus jail time for all involved.
Being against this ruling and against copyright law is not hypocritical. Being for the ruling and against copyright law is.
If I decided to stop using that software, is that EULA still binding?
Some clauses in the EULA for AOL Instant Messenger 4.0 and later are labeled to "survive termination of this License." Because one of those terms said that I couldn't use thirdpartysoftware to access AOL's servers, I clicked "Disagree." My winbox still runs AIM 3.0, whose EULA doesn't have such restrictions.
If it is still binding, for how long?
In perpetuity, unless you believe in reincarnation.
Fact: EULAs can last longer than the copyright on the software (which is nearly perpetual anyway).
She had the free will to get a new job, just like you have the free will not to use a product with a crappy EULA.
OK, so what if the software that runs your life support has a crappy EULA? That is, if you don't license the software, you die. Is that free will, or gunpoint?
because in the absence of explicitly stated agreement the copyright holder by default reserves ALL rigts and you can do nothing at all with that piece of software, not even run it:-(
Wrong. 17 USC 117 makes it lawful for U.S. residents to load into RAM and back up software that they own a copy of. However, in some jurisdictions, mere possession of a copy does not necessarily constitute owning a copy; this can happen in a software rental.
In the U.K., loading and backing up software may or may not be protected as "fair dealing".
Well, if we're going to try that, let's avoid Latin and start with Esperanto, or Lojban, or Klingon or something which at least starts out with fewer irregulars.
Esperanto? Ecch! Too Polish. I'd suggest something based on one of the Interlinguas (Interlingua de IALA or Latino sine flexione) as the Latin/Romance bases of those language both sound less harsh than Slavic and prepare the children for the language of science.
[In practice, Turing completeness] means the language (or system) can compute the same functions as can a Turing machine, with the understanding there are finite resources.
OK. "Turing-complete with storage restricted to 128 MB" I can handle. I first began to point this out in a discussion on one of the Transmeta articles to somebody who argued that a Crusoe processor can in theory recursively emulate itself because it's "Turing complete." I responded that for each layer of emulation, you'd need additional storage (at least 1 KB for registers and 16 MB for the decode cache). Metacircularity for a system (often talked about in Lisp books) requires at least a constant amount of additional storage for each virtual machine, and you eat this overhead when you run a program inside JVM, CLR, VMware, Bochs, plex86, anything.
how would I be able to tell the difference [between Go Video dual decks that can and can't defeat VHS copy protection]? If I see a Go Video deck on eBay, is there a manufacturing date or model number
This is only a guess, but make sure it was manufactured before October 1998, when Congress voice-voted the DMCA onto President Clinton's desk.
From now on, schools should teach creationism and evolution at the same time. Included in the classwork: [a half-dozen-plus creation mythologies]
You forgot the halflings' creation myth. But seriously, I wonder why school literature classes don't teach comparative mythology. At the high school I attended, the mythological curriculum was restricted to the Greek myths, presumably so they could lead from that into Homer's epics.
cultural prefrences still exhibit selective breeding. What does this mean? Human beings will continue to become more intelligent, probably taller, and probably more beautiful.
More intelligent yes, more beautiful yes, but taller not necessarily, as for one thing, humanity of AD 2001 is a tool-using species, with machines to do work and platform shoes to make up for deficiencies in physical appearance, and for another, some people are attracted to the disabled. Even the "more intelligent" part is in question: what if the human race forks over the next couple hundred millennia, leaving the cuter (as in Precious Moments cute) but slightly less intelligent people above ground, where they become herbivores, and putting the slightly more intelligent people below ground, where they evolve night vision and a taste for the flesh of those above ground?
This is how the human race will have evolved in the year A.D. 802701 if the late H. G. Wells has his way.
heavy women were considered highly attractive. If you don't believe me, watch a movie with Mae West
Say I watch a movie with Mae West. That is, I download the movie over the Internet, and the bits travel over the Mae West router. Result: All the star actresses in this movie are thin because nearly all the movies I can find on eDonkey are relatively recent.
This illustrates a problem with the English language's instrumental construct, such that "with" can refer to "containing" which you probably meant (movie with Mae West == movie starring Mae West) or to "using" (watch a movie with Mae West == watch a movie via Mae West).
ObEvolution: I'm surprised that with the "evolution" of huperchildity, language hasn't become any more precise.
well, it's a pretty safe bet that the.NET version of Visual Basic is going to generate code that makes calls to lots of Windows-specific, unpublished, and possibly patented API's.
Anything one could do in native assembler, one could do in IL or JBC.
Not if the language doesn't support constant-space tail calls, which are the primary method of iteration in the Scheme programming language, and which can be implemented with a jmp (or whatever it's called) in any silicon CPU's assembly language. I've read that Java bytecode doesn't support it, but Microsoft added a tailcall instruction to MSIL at the request of compiler developers.
The Java platform's VM and the CLR both require code to be type-safe. How does this mesh with the dynamic typing (in.NET framework terms, everything inherits from System.Object and all variables are of type System.Object) that some functional languages use?
As long as the language is Turing-complete, it should be possible; the question is in the level of difficulty
No physically implementable computer system is Turing-complete, as a Turing machine has an unbounded storage tape. Even C on a 64-bit architecture isn't, as it limits you to only a few exabytes of memory.
what the fuck do you mean define real land mass? dirt? sendiment? LAND? prepare to argue what at length you halfwit?
Fallacy: failure to elucidate. You introduced the terms "real world" and "land mass"; now you have to unambiguously define them. Other than the fact that things in the EQ or DAoC world are modeled in terms of things in the RL world, how is EQ or DAoC any less real than RL?
the definition of what the REAL WORLD is? stop watching the matrix so much
Fallacy: ad hominem. Just because AOL Pictures' The Matrix supports a view doesn't make that view necessarily incorrect.
when I say "real world" I mean "the real world as opposed to a video game fantasy world"
How do you know that God isn't just a college student in some other world and that this universe is his senior project, monotheism being instituted when all his other team members got kicked off?
Given the frequency of pointer passing in C based API's, though, I can't believe that any C code running in CLR would have much intra-assembly security.
The Java environment also uses a lot of pointer passing (in fact, it's impossible to pass a non-primitive type by value in the Java language without explicitly calling a copy constructor) but apparently, the difference between what people refer to as a "reference" vs. a "pointer" lies in whether pointer arithmetic is allowed.
Languages may allow what looks like C-style pointer arithmetic through iterators that overload the following operators:
GCJ is just a compiler for the Java language, and it needs a class library to run programs, and if the software relies on a class that your JRE's class library doesn't have, you're screwed. From the GCJ home page: "Most of the APIs specified by 'The Java Class Libraries' Second Edition and the 'Java 2 Platform supplement' are supported... AWT is currently unsupported" (my bold), which means it can't run GUI apps or applets.
this is a software problem. It would be trivial to add the functionality to an eBook reader to apply user-supplied notes to a given offset in the eBook text.
PDF and other eBook formats already support the types of annotations you describe, but the creator of a document can specify that users are not allowed to annotate the document.
Slashdot Mirror
The Game Boy has been basically the only portable on the market for years
Wonder Swan? Palm? Windows CE? Graphing calculators (especially among junior high and high school kids)? Sure there hasn't been a direct competitor in the vein of Cube vs. Xbox, but competition doesn't require exact substitutes.
Surprising....They'd have sold at least 50 million Mario worlds if they had it on game cube
There was a Mario game, and it was called Super Smash Bros. Melee. I consider it a Mario game because it has a one-player side-scrolling adventure mode.
Wouldn't this open up the field a bit for smaller, more visionary companies to produce games that rock?
Not if the small publisher can't pay the entry fees that the console makers charge to make up for the losses they take on marketing the console. The big pubs generally won't take projects from smaller developers unless the project clearly appeals to the lowest-$-common-$-denominator.
for the most part, the GBA is the only portable game system available now. When was the last time Nintendo had a true competitor in the portable game market?
Texas Instruments graphing calculators pose serious competition to Nintendo products. They have the advantage that a large portion of Nintendo's target audience (students aged 12-18) can bring calculators to school, but most school systems have non-negotiable regulations banning all products produced by Nintendo of America Inc. from the premises.
Palm OS and WinCE devices also pose a threat because they pretty much own the market for cheap games for traveling businesspeople.
I'm surprised that Sony hasn't pushed their PSone more as a portable of late, especially since you can attach a screen to it.
PSone can't be made handheld because a 12cm disc is just too clunky for a handheld unless you either make a two-piece system (controller and screen connected to a Discman-looking device) or expose the CD (done in the PlayStation Portable) which might incur action from the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Maybe when they try to patent the method this may come up as "prior art".
No, the patent will most likely be on the specific material used or the application to DVD or both.
This leaves out the few million people who watch movies on their standalone DVD players.
I can already do that with my laptop that has S-Video out and is actually smaller than most set-top DVD players. But for the rest of consumers, why can't a set-top DVD player maker make its codec system extensible so that users can compile codecs such as xvid (which grew out of the OpenDivX code), put them on CD-ROM, and load them into the player's flash memory?
I don't think DivX supports Dolby Digital 5.1 sound yet
Most casual movie watchers have only stereo anyway.
Umm, if there were no copyright law, there wouldn't be any proprietary products in the first place.
Yes there would; they'd just be protected under trade secret + contract law rather than copyright law. Copyright infringement cases are generally civil cases, and damages usually don't top five figures per work infringed. Trade secret cases, on the other hand, carry even bigger damages, plus jail time for all involved.
Being against this ruling and against copyright law is not hypocritical. Being for the ruling and against copyright law is.
I agree with many of the general principles of copyright, and I agree with this ruling, but I don't agree with the specifics of the implementation of copyright in the United States. For instance, I don't agree with the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA as interpreted in recent cases (the courts have flatly ignored many of the exceptions), and I don't agree with life+70 copyright terms. I also don't like companies whose products teach a message of sharing but who do not themselves share (i.e. license to individual webmasters under reasonable terms) their own IP. Does that make me a hypocrite?
But what about cached copies of the full images?
Google Images doesn't cache full images but only thumbnails.
If I decided to stop using that software, is that EULA still binding?
Some clauses in the EULA for AOL Instant Messenger 4.0 and later are labeled to "survive termination of this License." Because one of those terms said that I couldn't use third party software to access AOL's servers, I clicked "Disagree." My winbox still runs AIM 3.0, whose EULA doesn't have such restrictions.
If it is still binding, for how long?
In perpetuity, unless you believe in reincarnation.
Fact: EULAs can last longer than the copyright on the software (which is nearly perpetual anyway).
She had the free will to get a new job, just like you have the free will not to use a product with a crappy EULA.
OK, so what if the software that runs your life support has a crappy EULA? That is, if you don't license the software, you die. Is that free will, or gunpoint?
because in the absence of explicitly stated agreement the copyright holder by default reserves ALL rigts and you can do nothing at all with that piece of software, not even run it :-(
Wrong. 17 USC 117 makes it lawful for U.S. residents to load into RAM and back up software that they own a copy of. However, in some jurisdictions, mere possession of a copy does not necessarily constitute owning a copy; this can happen in a software rental.
In the U.K., loading and backing up software may or may not be protected as "fair dealing".
Well, if we're going to try that, let's avoid Latin and start with Esperanto, or Lojban, or Klingon or something which at least starts out with fewer irregulars.
Esperanto? Ecch! Too Polish. I'd suggest something based on one of the Interlinguas (Interlingua de IALA or Latino sine flexione) as the Latin/Romance bases of those language both sound less harsh than Slavic and prepare the children for the language of science.
Heck, if you're going with a relatively regular language, you might as well use a regular alphabet, but note that regular alphabets may be more difficult for dyslexics to learn than Latin ASCII!
.cixelsyd eb yam uoy
[In practice, Turing completeness] means the language (or system) can compute the same functions as can a Turing machine, with the understanding there are finite resources.
OK. "Turing-complete with storage restricted to 128 MB" I can handle. I first began to point this out in a discussion on one of the Transmeta articles to somebody who argued that a Crusoe processor can in theory recursively emulate itself because it's "Turing complete." I responded that for each layer of emulation, you'd need additional storage (at least 1 KB for registers and 16 MB for the decode cache). Metacircularity for a system (often talked about in Lisp books) requires at least a constant amount of additional storage for each virtual machine, and you eat this overhead when you run a program inside JVM, CLR, VMware, Bochs, plex86, anything.
how would I be able to tell the difference [between Go Video dual decks that can and can't defeat VHS copy protection]? If I see a Go Video deck on eBay, is there a manufacturing date or model number
This is only a guess, but make sure it was manufactured before October 1998, when Congress voice-voted the DMCA onto President Clinton's desk.
From now on, schools should teach creationism and evolution at the same time. Included in the classwork: [a half-dozen-plus creation mythologies]
You forgot the halflings' creation myth. But seriously, I wonder why school literature classes don't teach comparative mythology. At the high school I attended, the mythological curriculum was restricted to the Greek myths, presumably so they could lead from that into Homer's epics.
But I can see the point about evolution !=progress from that evil Harry Potter who opressed the poor and built the depressing Potterville
No, that's not Harry Potter. That's Henry Potter, but it's close enough to get me thinking of possible connections. Anybody else?
cultural prefrences still exhibit selective breeding. What does this mean? Human beings will continue to become more intelligent, probably taller, and probably more beautiful.
More intelligent yes, more beautiful yes, but taller not necessarily, as for one thing, humanity of AD 2001 is a tool-using species, with machines to do work and platform shoes to make up for deficiencies in physical appearance, and for another, some people are attracted to the disabled. Even the "more intelligent" part is in question: what if the human race forks over the next couple hundred millennia, leaving the cuter (as in Precious Moments cute) but slightly less intelligent people above ground, where they become herbivores, and putting the slightly more intelligent people below ground, where they evolve night vision and a taste for the flesh of those above ground?
This is how the human race will have evolved in the year A.D. 802701 if the late H. G. Wells has his way.
heavy women were considered highly attractive. If you don't believe me, watch a movie with Mae West
Say I watch a movie with Mae West. That is, I download the movie over the Internet, and the bits travel over the Mae West router. Result: All the star actresses in this movie are thin because nearly all the movies I can find on eDonkey are relatively recent.
This illustrates a problem with the English language's instrumental construct, such that "with" can refer to "containing" which you probably meant (movie with Mae West == movie starring Mae West) or to "using" (watch a movie with Mae West == watch a movie via Mae West).
ObEvolution: I'm surprised that with the "evolution" of huperchildity, language hasn't become any more precise.
well, it's a pretty safe bet that the .NET version of Visual Basic is going to generate code that makes calls to lots of Windows-specific, unpublished, and possibly patented API's.
"Unpublished" and "patented" are at a certain level mutually exclusive. if Microsoft wants to collect damages, Microsoft will have to put conspicuous patent notices on every single copy of Windows, or perhaps even require every developer that uses VB.NET to put patent notices on their software.
Anything one could do in native assembler, one could do in IL or JBC.
Not if the language doesn't support constant-space tail calls, which are the primary method of iteration in the Scheme programming language, and which can be implemented with a jmp (or whatever it's called) in any silicon CPU's assembly language. I've read that Java bytecode doesn't support it, but Microsoft added a tailcall instruction to MSIL at the request of compiler developers.
The Java platform's VM and the CLR both require code to be type-safe. How does this mesh with the dynamic typing (in .NET framework terms, everything inherits from System.Object and all variables are of type System.Object) that some functional languages use?
As long as the language is Turing-complete, it should be possible; the question is in the level of difficulty
No physically implementable computer system is Turing-complete, as a Turing machine has an unbounded storage tape. Even C on a 64-bit architecture isn't, as it limits you to only a few exabytes of memory.
what the fuck do you mean define real land mass? dirt? sendiment? LAND? prepare to argue what at length you halfwit?
Fallacy: failure to elucidate. You introduced the terms "real world" and "land mass"; now you have to unambiguously define them. Other than the fact that things in the EQ or DAoC world are modeled in terms of things in the RL world, how is EQ or DAoC any less real than RL?
the definition of what the REAL WORLD is? stop watching the matrix so much
Fallacy: ad hominem. Just because AOL Pictures' The Matrix supports a view doesn't make that view necessarily incorrect.
when I say "real world" I mean "the real world as opposed to a video game fantasy world"
How do you know that God isn't just a college student in some other world and that this universe is his senior project, monotheism being instituted when all his other team members got kicked off?
Given the frequency of pointer passing in C based API's, though, I can't believe that any C code running in CLR would have much intra-assembly security.
The Java environment also uses a lot of pointer passing (in fact, it's impossible to pass a non-primitive type by value in the Java language without explicitly calling a copy constructor) but apparently, the difference between what people refer to as a "reference" vs. a "pointer" lies in whether pointer arithmetic is allowed.
Languages may allow what looks like C-style pointer arithmetic through iterators that overload the following operators:
There's always gcj, and gcj is Free
GCJ is just a compiler for the Java language, and it needs a class library to run programs, and if the software relies on a class that your JRE's class library doesn't have, you're screwed. From the GCJ home page: "Most of the APIs specified by 'The Java Class Libraries' Second Edition and the 'Java 2 Platform supplement' are supported ... AWT is currently unsupported" (my bold), which means it can't run GUI apps or applets.
this is a software problem. It would be trivial to add the functionality to an eBook reader to apply user-supplied notes to a given offset in the eBook text.
PDF and other eBook formats already support the types of annotations you describe, but the creator of a document can specify that users are not allowed to annotate the document.