If you don't do anything with a patent, then (a) it's officially invalid
Technically, that's correct; patents expire after 3 1/2, 7 1/2, and 11 1/2 years after grant unless the holder pays periodic maintenance fees. If you don't do anything, not even pay the maintenance fee, the patent becomes invalid.
However, most people would take this to mean "an unenforced patent becomes worthless." That's not patents; that's trademarks.
(b) you're depriving society of technology which they would otherwise have had, for no good reason
No good reason except your own bottom line. For any for-profit corporation, that's reason enough. (Corporations that claim to have ethics do so in order to build goodwill, that is, the value of their trademarks, and that can be measured in dollars.)
it doesn't keep it out - it keeps it hidden, for the people who choose to hide it. kinda like how filters & blacklists work for usenet readers.
Filters and blacklists don't catch users who change their e-mail address regularly to avoid the filters. The analogous action in Slash is to create several new accounts, but moderators quickly moderate down the individual comments that a new account posts. The difference lies in moderating the user vs. moderating the posts.
news://nntp.slashdot.org/msft.general.bitching would work on 99% of the browsers out there
It works on IE=>Outlook Express and Netscape=>Netscape, but the last version of Forte Agent that I tried (1.7) has a bug such that any news: URL that includes a hostname requires the user to re-enter the registration code.
how many nerds out there do you know who use aol, or don't know how to configure a newsreader?
Not all nerds have been nerds for years; some are still learning, and some aren't 18 yet. Elitism will get you nowhere.
unless, of course, they search through the headers.
Only if the subject of a message adequately describes the content. Often, this is not the case because Usenet users tend to put the same subject on replies that the parent article had because many common newsreaders do a poor job of parenting followups. Even then, with nearly three million comments in Slashdot's database, you'd still have to download gigabytes of headers.
Putting something under the GPL does not negate any of the original copyright holder's rights. That is why, for example, a copyright holder can place a work under the GPL, and then sell that work to a commerical company under a closed-source license.
I understand multi-licensing. However, a copyright holder can't claim to have released a work under GNU GPL unless there is at least one copy distributed under the GPL. Your "paper tape under the Eiffel Tower" is a Section 10 alternative license scheme in addition to an open source license. Once one other person has a copy of the source code under the GPL, it's free software.
The difference between our views seems to spring from a misunderstanding of the term "putting something under the GPL." I believe that applying the GPL to a piece of software requires that at least one copy be distributed under the GPL.
The original author is NOT required to follow GPL.
But if he claims to release the program under the GPL, he must release the GPL copies with source code as defined by the GPL. I understand that this says nothing about the non-GPL copies, but it's impossible to release a program under the GPL without providing one GPL copy.
The key word here is "release." You can't claim to have released open source software until you have transferred at least one copy to a third party.
The author of the article opposing release of publicly funded works under an open source license seems to have a misconception as to what common free software licenses say constitutes source code. From the anti-OSS article:
Open source licenses rarely require that local changes be distributed. Open source licenses do not set a limit on the fees charged. Open source licenses set no restriction on when, how, or where the source is distributed (with minor exceptions). As an open source publisher I am free to release my source code only once a year, at a charge of $1 million paid at least two months in advance, and you have to accept it on paper tape while we are both standing under the Eiffel Tower. (I'll cover my own travel arrangements if you take me up on this.) If I am the original copyright holder I'm even allowed to obfuscate the code by removing comments, using nonsense variable names, and other tricks.
This conflicts with the most common definition of source code. The GNU General Public License, one of the most popular free software licenses, specifies the following in section 3: "Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange," that is, something other than paper tape. Also, "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it," meaning that if reasonable comments aid modification, leave them in.
Just a (dumb) question: You can browse the web with Winamp? I've never looked into that
Winamp 2.x embeds MSHTML, the browser engine at the core of IE. Press Alt+t to open the minibrowser, then press Ctrl+o http://slashdot.org to open Slashdot. It looks much better if you set Slashdot to Simple HTML first. To change text size in any MSHTML app, use Ctrl+mousewheel.
[Your article, "DMCA in Plain English,"] takes away all credibility that anyone could give you when your 'translation' of the dmca is so far more biased than its supporters could even think of making their opinion.
Have you written up your objections in a response to my journal entry?
[Slashdot's M1 and M2] are completely broken and cause more problems than they solve.
At least it keeps the gay porn out 95% of the time.
[retention] isn't a problem if you run your own.
And restrict your audience (although this may not be entirely a bad thing). Many users don't know how to switch their NNTP server. Others use newsreaders that support only one NNTP server per installation. Some users can't switch it at all (such as users of America Online).
[Usenet] has working client-side searching, rather than broken/incomplete server-side searching.
Client-side searching requires the user to have downloaded multigigabytes of Slashdot's previous stories. Not all users who want to search Slashdot have the T1 to download the whole site.
i've been meaning to bitch about this... thanks for the chance to let me do it on-topic.
Wow, looks like its time to rescind those EFF and GNU donations.
On the contrary, whenever I buy anything produced by a member of RIAA or MPAA, I make a donation to EFF matching the product's retail price. I learned about this from another Slashdot reader. Call it "penance" if you will.
[Reinventing the wheel] Like a Web based message board where NNTP would do?
NNTP doesn't support mass moderation or metamoderation. NNTP doesn't readily support banner advertisements that keep the server free. NNTP servers often don't have very long retention of old discussion. NNTP doesn't have server-side search. Slash supports all of the above.
of course then Netscape came out and the rest is history... the main feature of Netscape that made everyone use it was that partial pages were displayed while the images downloaded.
Both IE and Netscape had problems displaying partial pages that contained tables. (IE still does.) The fact that Mozilla can display a partial page (right-click anywhere to force a reflow) makes browsers based on Mozilla code (skipstone, k-meleon, netscape 6.x, etc) feel faster than browsers based on MSHTML (winamp, neoplanet, msie, etc), especially when displaying tall tables such as the one Slashdot's standard mode uses to draw its page.
In addition to the advantages and drawbacks given in this section of the article, color LCD technology is inherently sharper than CRT. Because of the inherent misregistration of the red, green, and blue planes of pixels, it's possible to address sub-pixels individually, resulting in a nearly threefold improvement in the effective horizontal resolution. More info is available here, Slashdot covered it here, and software to sharpen bitmap images on LCDs is available here.
.it is a well established fact that you can not compare MHz to MHz on 2 proccessors that have a diffrent archetecture....hell, it isn't even right to do the same on proccessors on the same (intel/AMD) arch.
First of all, the current PowerPC architecture is said to be only about 30 to 50 percent faster MHz for MHz than Intel for tasks that don't involve heavy digital signal processing. (The common Photoshop filter benchmarks that Apple continues to bring up are a form of DSP.) This means you're going to get a 1200 PR out of a Mac with an 800 MHz CPU, in comparison to upwards of 1800 out of PCs using the latest AMD or Intel parts.
Second of all, these new iMac computers lack memory bandwidth. Their 100 MHz bus can move much less data than the 133 MHz bus of a cheap Dell computer.
Considering most systems come with 15-60gig drives now, it would take a long time to actually write over all the sectors used for that file in its entire lifetime.
No longer than a couple defrags. Simply open thousands of multimegabyte files, and then in each file, write a layer of 0's, a layer of 1's, and a couple layers of random data, and you're pretty safe. Five passes on a 20 GB partition shouldn't take more than a few hours depending on the transfer rate from computer to drive.
I ask this since there are unerase utils in windows, could they be using a vfs? If they are, wouldn't they have to stay resident forever monitoring all content?
DOS 6.x had an undelete.exe TSR that patched the DOS call to remove a file. It had two modes: Delete Tracker (remember deleted directory entries) and the stronger Delete Sentry (similar to the Mac's trash can and to the forthcoming Windows 9x's recycle bin). When using the Delete Tracker or non-TSR mode, it would look at the directory entry of the deleted file (from the directory in non-TSR or from a database in Delete Tracker) and then follow the FAT chain to retrieve as much of the file as it could. Delete Sentry simply moved files into a folder C:\SENTRY, no matter what program deleted them, ignoring *.tmp and a few other file types.
Mac OS 7 or later and Windows 4 or later, on the other hand, have two separate delete calls (for discussion, call them unlink() and ShellDelete()). The unlink() call actually deletes a file and should be used on tmp files, in uninstallers, etc. ShellDelete(), on the other hand, moves a file to a folder called vol:Trash (on Mac) or vol:\Recycled (on Windows); the shell (Finder or Explorer) provides a command Empty Trash... to do what is essentially an rm -rf on the Trash folder.
In UNIX systems and their clones, merely make a shell command alias that maps a command to move the file to the ~/.trash folder.
I think PC manufacturers are still in denial that good, quiet cooling would actually sell more boxes, and keep the things from coming back for repair.
Or they just go into denial in front of their customers: "It's broke. You're going to have to buy another one (and line our pockets yet again)." Disposable hardware creates a revenue stream.
Advantages of TNN image squashing
on
Star Trek TNG DVDs
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Can you explain this "image squashing technology" for us non-Americans? Do they change the aspect ratio?
TNN (The National Network, formerly The Nashville Network before Viacom bought it, moved all its programming to CMT, and turned TNN into a TBS/USA clone) vertically scales the image on many of its shows into the top 6/7 or so of US TV's 240 visible scanlines. In the bottom 1/7, TNN displays its logo and unobtrusive textual advertisements. Good points: It lets TNN go longer without a commercial interruption, it moves the captions out of the way of the picture, and it's easily switched off for broadcasting letterboxed feature films. Bad point: It modifies the image.
First of all, it won't work with PS2 titles released in 2000 or later because those titles are designed for a different platform: Sony PlayStation 2. Bochs emulates IBM Personal System 2; many PS/2 titles released before 1994 work in Bochs. However, there are still thousands of titles on abandonware sites such as this that run on IBM PS/2.
Once you know you have an IBM title and not a Sony title, just read the Bochs manual to learn how to install DR DOS or FreeDOS and then read the game's manual to learn how to install it to Bochs's virtual drive.
Yes, just like half the people around you have below-average intelligence.
Not necessarily. "Half are below" the median. "Average" most commonly refers to the mean. Not many statistical distributions have enough symmetry to make mean == median (normal and uniform do).
If they want to save things that are private: use a disk.
A CD burner will add upwards of $100 to the cost of the machine.
A portable PS/2 emulator already exists
on
X-Box Emulated (Not)
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
Does the Gameboy Advance have a more powerful graphics card than most computers?
Yes. Its 2D hardware is much more powerful than the computer in your microwave or coffee maker.
There was a Macintosh PS2 emu hoax going around a few months ago. Just a hoax, of course.
I have your PS/2 emulator right here. Bochs emulates a PS/2 nearly perfectly and can run many of the most popular games released for the PS/2. Strangely enough though, it can't run games made for the original PlayStation. Rumor has it that if you type a secret code into VMWare, you can also get a PS/2 emulator that way.
(In other words, computer != PC, and PS2 != PS/2.)
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't do anything with a patent, then (a) it's officially invalid
Technically, that's correct; patents expire after 3 1/2, 7 1/2, and 11 1/2 years after grant unless the holder pays periodic maintenance fees. If you don't do anything, not even pay the maintenance fee, the patent becomes invalid.
However, most people would take this to mean "an unenforced patent becomes worthless." That's not patents; that's trademarks.
(b) you're depriving society of technology which they would otherwise have had, for no good reason
No good reason except your own bottom line. For any for-profit corporation, that's reason enough. (Corporations that claim to have ethics do so in order to build goodwill, that is, the value of their trademarks, and that can be measured in dollars.)
it doesn't keep it out - it keeps it hidden, for the people who choose to hide it. kinda like how filters & blacklists work for usenet readers.
Filters and blacklists don't catch users who change their e-mail address regularly to avoid the filters. The analogous action in Slash is to create several new accounts, but moderators quickly moderate down the individual comments that a new account posts. The difference lies in moderating the user vs. moderating the posts.
news://nntp.slashdot.org/msft.general.bitching would work on 99% of the browsers out there
It works on IE=>Outlook Express and Netscape=>Netscape, but the last version of Forte Agent that I tried (1.7) has a bug such that any news: URL that includes a hostname requires the user to re-enter the registration code.
how many nerds out there do you know who use aol, or don't know how to configure a newsreader?
Not all nerds have been nerds for years; some are still learning, and some aren't 18 yet. Elitism will get you nowhere.
unless, of course, they search through the headers.
Only if the subject of a message adequately describes the content. Often, this is not the case because Usenet users tend to put the same subject on replies that the parent article had because many common newsreaders do a poor job of parenting followups. Even then, with nearly three million comments in Slashdot's database, you'd still have to download gigabytes of headers.
Putting something under the GPL does not negate any of the original copyright holder's rights. That is why, for example, a copyright holder can place a work under the GPL, and then sell that work to a commerical company under a closed-source license.
I understand multi-licensing. However, a copyright holder can't claim to have released a work under GNU GPL unless there is at least one copy distributed under the GPL. Your "paper tape under the Eiffel Tower" is a Section 10 alternative license scheme in addition to an open source license. Once one other person has a copy of the source code under the GPL, it's free software.
The difference between our views seems to spring from a misunderstanding of the term "putting something under the GPL." I believe that applying the GPL to a piece of software requires that at least one copy be distributed under the GPL.
The original author is NOT required to follow GPL.
But if he claims to release the program under the GPL, he must release the GPL copies with source code as defined by the GPL. I understand that this says nothing about the non-GPL copies, but it's impossible to release a program under the GPL without providing one GPL copy.
The key word here is "release." You can't claim to have released open source software until you have transferred at least one copy to a third party.
The author of the article opposing release of publicly funded works under an open source license seems to have a misconception as to what common free software licenses say constitutes source code. From the anti-OSS article:
Open source licenses rarely require that local changes be distributed. Open source licenses do not set a limit on the fees charged. Open source licenses set no restriction on when, how, or where the source is distributed (with minor exceptions). As an open source publisher I am free to release my source code only once a year, at a charge of $1 million paid at least two months in advance, and you have to accept it on paper tape while we are both standing under the Eiffel Tower. (I'll cover my own travel arrangements if you take me up on this.) If I am the original copyright holder I'm even allowed to obfuscate the code by removing comments, using nonsense variable names, and other tricks.
This conflicts with the most common definition of source code. The GNU General Public License, one of the most popular free software licenses, specifies the following in section 3: "Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange," that is, something other than paper tape. Also, "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it," meaning that if reasonable comments aid modification, leave them in.
Shouldn't the topic of the story say 'FreeBSD changes Pitchforks again?'
More like "Wind River Passes the FreeBSD Pitchfork" in the Olympic® tradition.
Just a (dumb) question: You can browse the web with Winamp? I've never looked into that
Winamp 2.x embeds MSHTML, the browser engine at the core of IE. Press Alt+t to open the minibrowser, then press Ctrl+o http://slashdot.org to open Slashdot. It looks much better if you set Slashdot to Simple HTML first. To change text size in any MSHTML app, use Ctrl+mousewheel.
[Your article, "DMCA in Plain English,"] takes away all credibility that anyone could give you when your 'translation' of the dmca is so far more biased than its supporters could even think of making their opinion.
Have you written up your objections in a response to my journal entry?
[Slashdot's M1 and M2] are completely broken and cause more problems than they solve.
At least it keeps the gay porn out 95% of the time.
[retention] isn't a problem if you run your own.
And restrict your audience (although this may not be entirely a bad thing). Many users don't know how to switch their NNTP server. Others use newsreaders that support only one NNTP server per installation. Some users can't switch it at all (such as users of America Online).
[Usenet] has working client-side searching, rather than broken/incomplete server-side searching.
Client-side searching requires the user to have downloaded multigigabytes of Slashdot's previous stories. Not all users who want to search Slashdot have the T1 to download the whole site.
i've been meaning to bitch about this... thanks for the chance to let me do it on-topic.
Another place for complaining about Slashcode bugs: Slashcode Bug Tracker
Wow, looks like its time to rescind those EFF and GNU donations.
On the contrary, whenever I buy anything produced by a member of RIAA or MPAA, I make a donation to EFF matching the product's retail price. I learned about this from another Slashdot reader. Call it "penance" if you will.
Now that Be has gone chapter 11, can I finally get a free copy _FULL_ of Be?
Yes. In ninety-five years.
[Reinventing the wheel] Like a Web based message board where NNTP would do?
NNTP doesn't support mass moderation or metamoderation. NNTP doesn't readily support banner advertisements that keep the server free. NNTP servers often don't have very long retention of old discussion. NNTP doesn't have server-side search. Slash supports all of the above.
of course then Netscape came out and the rest is history... the main feature of Netscape that made everyone use it was that partial pages were displayed while the images downloaded.
Both IE and Netscape had problems displaying partial pages that contained tables. (IE still does.) The fact that Mozilla can display a partial page (right-click anywhere to force a reflow) makes browsers based on Mozilla code (skipstone, k-meleon, netscape 6.x, etc) feel faster than browsers based on MSHTML (winamp, neoplanet, msie, etc), especially when displaying tall tables such as the one Slashdot's standard mode uses to draw its page.
In addition to the advantages and drawbacks given in this section of the article, color LCD technology is inherently sharper than CRT. Because of the inherent misregistration of the red, green, and blue planes of pixels, it's possible to address sub-pixels individually, resulting in a nearly threefold improvement in the effective horizontal resolution. More info is available here, Slashdot covered it here, and software to sharpen bitmap images on LCDs is available here.
First of all, the current PowerPC architecture is said to be only about 30 to 50 percent faster MHz for MHz than Intel for tasks that don't involve heavy digital signal processing. (The common Photoshop filter benchmarks that Apple continues to bring up are a form of DSP.) This means you're going to get a 1200 PR out of a Mac with an 800 MHz CPU, in comparison to upwards of 1800 out of PCs using the latest AMD or Intel parts.
Second of all, these new iMac computers lack memory bandwidth. Their 100 MHz bus can move much less data than the 133 MHz bus of a cheap Dell computer.
man I have to wait a couple hours? too lazy do even that.
So take an eight-hour nap while your computer wipes your HD's free sectors.
Considering most systems come with 15-60gig drives now, it would take a long time to actually write over all the sectors used for that file in its entire lifetime.
No longer than a couple defrags. Simply open thousands of multimegabyte files, and then in each file, write a layer of 0's, a layer of 1's, and a couple layers of random data, and you're pretty safe. Five passes on a 20 GB partition shouldn't take more than a few hours depending on the transfer rate from computer to drive.
Presumably PGP runs on unix?
PGP 6.5.8, the last freeware version
GnuPG 1.0.6, the GNU Privacy Guard, is a free implementation of the OpenPGP spec.
I ask this since there are unerase utils in windows, could they be using a vfs? If they are, wouldn't they have to stay resident forever monitoring all content?
DOS 6.x had an undelete.exe TSR that patched the DOS call to remove a file. It had two modes: Delete Tracker (remember deleted directory entries) and the stronger Delete Sentry (similar to the Mac's trash can and to the forthcoming Windows 9x's recycle bin). When using the Delete Tracker or non-TSR mode, it would look at the directory entry of the deleted file (from the directory in non-TSR or from a database in Delete Tracker) and then follow the FAT chain to retrieve as much of the file as it could. Delete Sentry simply moved files into a folder C:\SENTRY, no matter what program deleted them, ignoring *.tmp and a few other file types.
Mac OS 7 or later and Windows 4 or later, on the other hand, have two separate delete calls (for discussion, call them unlink() and ShellDelete()). The unlink() call actually deletes a file and should be used on tmp files, in uninstallers, etc. ShellDelete(), on the other hand, moves a file to a folder called vol:Trash (on Mac) or vol:\Recycled (on Windows); the shell (Finder or Explorer) provides a command Empty Trash... to do what is essentially an rm -rf on the Trash folder.
In UNIX systems and their clones, merely make a shell command alias that maps a command to move the file to the ~/.trash folder.
I think PC manufacturers are still in denial that good, quiet cooling would actually sell more boxes, and keep the things from coming back for repair.
Or they just go into denial in front of their customers: "It's broke. You're going to have to buy another one (and line our pockets yet again)." Disposable hardware creates a revenue stream.
Can you explain this "image squashing technology" for us non-Americans? Do they change the aspect ratio?
TNN (The National Network, formerly The Nashville Network before Viacom bought it, moved all its programming to CMT, and turned TNN into a TBS/USA clone) vertically scales the image on many of its shows into the top 6/7 or so of US TV's 240 visible scanlines. In the bottom 1/7, TNN displays its logo and unobtrusive textual advertisements. Good points: It lets TNN go longer without a commercial interruption, it moves the captions out of the way of the picture, and it's easily switched off for broadcasting letterboxed feature films. Bad point: It modifies the image.
How do u get [bochs] to emulate ps2???
First of all, it won't work with PS2 titles released in 2000 or later because those titles are designed for a different platform: Sony PlayStation 2. Bochs emulates IBM Personal System 2; many PS/2 titles released before 1994 work in Bochs. However, there are still thousands of titles on abandonware sites such as this that run on IBM PS/2.
Once you know you have an IBM title and not a Sony title, just read the Bochs manual to learn how to install DR DOS or FreeDOS and then read the game's manual to learn how to install it to Bochs's virtual drive.
Yes, just like half the people around you have below-average intelligence.
Not necessarily. "Half are below" the median. "Average" most commonly refers to the mean. Not many statistical distributions have enough symmetry to make mean == median (normal and uniform do).
If they want to save things that are private: use a disk.
A CD burner will add upwards of $100 to the cost of the machine.
Does the Gameboy Advance have a more powerful graphics card than most computers?
Yes. Its 2D hardware is much more powerful than the computer in your microwave or coffee maker.
There was a Macintosh PS2 emu hoax going around a few months ago. Just a hoax, of course.
I have your PS/2 emulator right here. Bochs emulates a PS/2 nearly perfectly and can run many of the most popular games released for the PS/2. Strangely enough though, it can't run games made for the original PlayStation. Rumor has it that if you type a secret code into VMWare, you can also get a PS/2 emulator that way.
(In other words, computer != PC, and PS2 != PS/2.)