Man, either you live in a rotten country of the sorts, where the CIA helps out real bad ass dictators to launch a coup against the democratically elected government
Not the CIA but the Congress. During the Monica Lewinsky proceedings, the US legislative body passed two bills by anonymous, unaccountable voice vote: Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. A voice vote means that constituents back home are unable to review how their representative or senator voted. So how is DisneyCo CEO Michael Eisner not a de facto "bad ass dictator"?
I've had one of their Sidewinder joysticks too and it was great.
I've heard good stories about their joysticks, but their pads are awful. The directional control on Microsoft Sidewinder USB game pads is rotated 20 degrees clockwise from how it is on Nintendo and PlayStation pads, making it nearly impossible to press straight down without also pressing to the right; Tetris was unplayable. Specifically, Nintendo and PSX pads have the "up" direction parallel to the cord coming out the top, whereas MS pads have "up" along the direction of the handgrips. This does NOT feel good for somebody who has played Nintendo products for 12 years.
How can Microsoft prosecute schools when they're all still running on Apple IIs?
The version of Basic built into the ROM of all Apple II computers from II Plus to IIGS is copyright Microsoft. "Pay up on Office, or we'll terminate your Applesoft Basic license, and you won't be able to use your IIGS lab."
Correct. I wrote a thorough essay on the legal issues surrounding Tetris. To sum up, TETRIS is a trademark of The Tetris Company LLC, but there are no U.S. Patents on the game itself, and the game's graphics are simple enough that any source code or audiovisual work copyright can be circumvented by a simple clean room cloning project such as freepuzzlearena, which produced the Tetanus engine (soon to be renamed to Lockjaw to distance it further from the TETRIS Mark).
Want a taste of LSD? Try TOD, a falling tetramino game with nine screen distortion effects. Includes static DOS binaries plus GPL sources for recompiling on Win32 or X11 systems. Only dependency is libc + Allegro + your window system's libraries.
just because there's no tetris on the game system yet
Apparently, you've never played The Next TETRIS for PlayStation and Wintendo9x.
Of course, nothing you read on Slashdot is legal advice. See an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.
I went to TESS and did a boolean search for basic: WINDOWS, owner: MICROSOFT, and got serial 74212523 (WINDOWS NT) and 74090419 (WINDOWS) that had something like 'operating environments for computers' in their Goods and Services field. Note that marks are always officially recorded in capital letters, but they can be "stylized" into the more common Windows form.
B5 and thus the Gaim intellectual property is owned by Time Warner
Don't give them any ideas, or AOL Time Warner will add its trademark on Gaim to the lawsuit. We don't want to have TWO plausible claims by a faceless monopoly against innocent independent developers, do we?
And yes, AOL is a monopoly and probably a predatory one. It's trying to use its monopoly on cable television (Time Warner cable) to create a monopoly on Internet access by refusing to carry other ISPs' TV ads, apparently replacing them with AOL ads when they are shown on non-TW channels.
Another good way to pick names for forms is to pick a random first name and last name from characters that have appeared in popular major studio movies, such as Pinocchio Poppins ("Pinocchio" from AOL/New Line's The Adventures of Pinocchio with Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Martin Landau, "Poppins" from Disney's Mary Poppins with Julie Andrews and Penis Van Lesbian).
QED. Besides, most of the consoles with 68K were early '90s consoles, not late '80s consoles.
Either way, the CPU doesn't handle most of the game; the TVIA, PPU, GPU, GS, or whatever they call the display circuitry does. But in case you wondering what CPU(s) your system uses:
Atari 2600: MOS 6507 (6502 without A13-A15 or interrupts) at
NES: MOS 2A03 (6502 with on-chip DMA and sound but without BCD mode) at 1.8 MHz
Sega Master System: Zilog Z80 at 3.6 MHz
Game Boy: Sharp Z80 (slightly different set of undocumented instructions) at 4 MHz
Game Boy Color: Sharp Z80 at 8 MHz
Genesis: Motorola 68000 (It's 32-bit!) at 7.8 MHz + full Master System.
Super NES: WDC 65c816 (if you call 68000 16-bit, this is 8-bit) with on-chip DMA at 2.8/3.6 MHz + Sony SPC700 (bitch to code for but somewhat similar to 6502) at 2 MHz.
Well, the cops can just say posession itself proves intent.
Possession of a tool indicates possible intent to use that tool for one or more of the purposes for which it is designed, not necessarily for the most destructive purpose. For instance, a crowbar can be used for changing a tire, a well-written portscanner can help index the Internet by finding hosts that run a given service, and the Back Orifice package is designed to administer Windows machines remotely. Other factors must be considered.
but have a very small performance increase over todays computers in searching ordered lists?
That's because machines similar to Turing's can already bsearch() a sorted list in O(log n) comparisons. It's not like quicksort (a sorting algorithm with O(n log n) comparisons), where lousy implementations perform badly on already-sorted data, and some implementations fall back to Shell's gap insertion sort for ranges smaller than 10 or so items.
He meant on Linux, not a different OS. (Emacs: Good OS, bad Editor)
If you're going to call an operating environment such as "Emacs" an operating system, then GNOME and KDE are also operating systems, and so is Windows 3.x. And no, the editor in Emacs isn't all that bad for your wrists if you turn on your terminal's Sticky Keys feature so that you can (tap Control tap W) instead of (hold Control tap W) to cut text between mark and point.
Is that necessarily a bad thing? There's a difference between "not finishing the article because the article started out too boring to continue reading" and "not even starting to read the article." If a Slashdot editor posted a thousand-page dissertation, would you feel obligated to read all of it before adding even one comment here?
I would think that the capatilization of the I would cause a problem
There is no difference under trademark law between Killustrator and KIllustrator. Trademarks under the Lanham Act fold to uppercase, which is why Adobe's trademarks are on "ILLUSTRATOR" and "ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR".
the reason I suggested 2050 was because the cap in most of the world is 70 years
William H. Gates III is still alive, isn't he? In cases where works for hire do not have a fixed term, the rule is LIFE of the last surviving contributor plus 70 years. MS-DOS won't go PD until at LEAST 70 years after some slashdot zealot murders bill gates.
Charles Dickens, sure, he's on Project Gutenberg, but what about Geoffrey Chaucer? If DisneyCo has its way, copyright terms will be repeatedly extended until the average reader can no longer understand the language of works written hundreds of years ago in 1922, and it'll still be constitutional according to the letter of the law.
Public domain is a closed constant set, and the consumers show their approval of this by voting with their dollars for products whose makers engage in destruction of the value of the public domain. Write your representatives in whatever government you're under if you disagree with these practices.
Software companies get to have their cake and eat it too. After the patent rights expire, they still have copyright control over the code, for a fantastically long time. MS-DOS 1.0's copyright should expire sometime around 2050 or so.
IMO, Slashcode should let an article have multiple topics. For instance, a Darwin kernel article could go under both Apple and BSD, and a patent humor article such as this one could go under Patents and Humor. It would make topic searching a bit more accurate.
The support for mingw/32 seems worse, since it doesn't have the Unix emulation layer provided by Cygwin
Cygwin is licensed under GNU GPL 2 or later with exception "You may link this code to any code under an OSI approved license." No binary only code is under an OSI approved license. Qt for Windows is binary only. Therefore, Qt for Windows is not compatible with Cygwin or any other GPL program.
However, Qt for *n?x can probably be made to work on Cygwin XFree86 with minimal porting.
Pinocchio was on Star Trek
on
Review: A.I.
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· Score: 1
Not Star Trek
Pinocchio was on Star Trek: TNG, and his name was Data. (Or at least that's what Roddenberry thought.)
Where to get the original book
on
Review: A.I.
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· Score: 1
Have you never heard of Pinnochio?
You mean Pinocchio?
a rip off of the original version... The real one, not the disney one.
You can read (or print) the original novel by Carlo "Collodi" Lorenzini at PinEight.com. Thank goodness it was written before 1923, as Di$ney steals from PD to make its stories and takes deliberate steps (Sonny Bono act) to make sure it never has to give back.
or else we're going to start seeing "Windows/Pentium 4", "Windows/AMD", "Windows/64-bit AMD" and "Windows/Itanium" sections in compUSA
As another user commented above, high-performance consumer applications often put their hotspots into DLLs so that a build optimized for a given microarchitecture can be used. For example, Windows could have nthotp4.dll and nthotk7.dll. And no, *hammer and Itanium would not have their own sections, as app binaries would be shipped for multiple architectures (as was done during the Macintosh computer's transition from 68K to PowerPC processors).
The other way to do it would be to recompile the software at installation time. For example, ALFS and Gentoo are Linux distributions that come as source; a distro based on ALFS or Gentoo would provide boot floppies for each architecture, a CD with just enough binaries to get the compiler going, and a source CD, and then build everything especially for your processor at installation time.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, either you live in a rotten country of the sorts, where the CIA helps out real bad ass dictators to launch a coup against the democratically elected government
Not the CIA but the Congress. During the Monica Lewinsky proceedings, the US legislative body passed two bills by anonymous, unaccountable voice vote: Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. A voice vote means that constituents back home are unable to review how their representative or senator voted. So how is DisneyCo CEO Michael Eisner not a de facto "bad ass dictator"?
Regardless of what jailing Bill will do, nationalizing Microsoft would take even more power FROM the people: it would make it even less accountable.
If Microsoft were a government agency, a fellow could get the Windows source code with a simple FOIA request, as works of the United States government are in the public domain.
I've had one of their Sidewinder joysticks too and it was great.
I've heard good stories about their joysticks, but their pads are awful. The directional control on Microsoft Sidewinder USB game pads is rotated 20 degrees clockwise from how it is on Nintendo and PlayStation pads, making it nearly impossible to press straight down without also pressing to the right; Tetris was unplayable. Specifically, Nintendo and PSX pads have the "up" direction parallel to the cord coming out the top, whereas MS pads have "up" along the direction of the handgrips. This does NOT feel good for somebody who has played Nintendo products for 12 years.
How can Microsoft prosecute schools when they're all still running on Apple IIs?
The version of Basic built into the ROM of all Apple II computers from II Plus to IIGS is copyright Microsoft. "Pay up on Office, or we'll terminate your Applesoft Basic license, and you won't be able to use your IIGS lab."
Windows isn't trademarked unless there is a microsoft in front
Wrong. I went to TESS and found this information (#129 in the mono discussion). Microsoft Corporation owns trademarks on WINDOWS and WINDOWS NT.
I couldn't just call my Playstation 2 game Tetris
Correct. I wrote a thorough essay on the legal issues surrounding Tetris. To sum up, TETRIS is a trademark of The Tetris Company LLC, but there are no U.S. Patents on the game itself, and the game's graphics are simple enough that any source code or audiovisual work copyright can be circumvented by a simple clean room cloning project such as freepuzzlearena, which produced the Tetanus engine (soon to be renamed to Lockjaw to distance it further from the TETRIS Mark).
Want a taste of LSD? Try TOD, a falling tetramino game with nine screen distortion effects. Includes static DOS binaries plus GPL sources for recompiling on Win32 or X11 systems. Only dependency is libc + Allegro + your window system's libraries.
just because there's no tetris on the game system yet
Apparently, you've never played The Next TETRIS for PlayStation and Wintendo9x.
Of course, nothing you read on Slashdot is legal advice. See an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.I went to TESS and did a boolean search for basic: WINDOWS, owner: MICROSOFT, and got serial 74212523 (WINDOWS NT) and 74090419 (WINDOWS) that had something like 'operating environments for computers' in their Goods and Services field. Note that marks are always officially recorded in capital letters, but they can be "stylized" into the more common Windows form.
B5 and thus the Gaim intellectual property is owned by Time Warner
Don't give them any ideas, or AOL Time Warner will add its trademark on Gaim to the lawsuit. We don't want to have TWO plausible claims by a faceless monopoly against innocent independent developers, do we?
And yes, AOL is a monopoly and probably a predatory one. It's trying to use its monopoly on cable television (Time Warner cable) to create a monopoly on Internet access by refusing to carry other ISPs' TV ads, apparently replacing them with AOL ads when they are shown on non-TW channels.
Just not anything that needs a constant web connection
The d.net client needs to connect to the server only about twice a day if you have it download 12 hours worth of work at once.
William H. Gates III [and similar obscene names]
Another good way to pick names for forms is to pick a random first name and last name from characters that have appeared in popular major studio movies, such as Pinocchio Poppins ("Pinocchio" from AOL/New Line's The Adventures of Pinocchio with Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Martin Landau, "Poppins" from Disney's Mary Poppins with Julie Andrews and Penis Van Lesbian).
Can't watch mpgs and avis from the command line.
Unless you have an avi viewer that supports AA-lib.
-->>68000 is a toy
>video game machines
QED. Besides, most of the consoles with 68K were early '90s consoles, not late '80s consoles.
Either way, the CPU doesn't handle most of the game; the TVIA, PPU, GPU, GS, or whatever they call the display circuitry does. But in case you wondering what CPU(s) your system uses:
Well, the cops can just say posession itself proves intent.
Possession of a tool indicates possible intent to use that tool for one or more of the purposes for which it is designed, not necessarily for the most destructive purpose. For instance, a crowbar can be used for changing a tire, a well-written portscanner can help index the Internet by finding hosts that run a given service, and the Back Orifice package is designed to administer Windows machines remotely. Other factors must be considered.
favorite German word that succinctly sums up an abstract concept that does not have an English/French/etc counterpart is "Schadenfreude"
We English and French speakers just call it sadism (or some spelling variant thereof).
but have a very small performance increase over todays computers in searching ordered lists?
That's because machines similar to Turing's can already bsearch() a sorted list in O(log n) comparisons. It's not like quicksort (a sorting algorithm with O(n log n) comparisons), where lousy implementations perform badly on already-sorted data, and some implementations fall back to Shell's gap insertion sort for ranges smaller than 10 or so items.
He meant on Linux, not a different OS. (Emacs: Good OS, bad Editor)
If you're going to call an operating environment such as "Emacs" an operating system, then GNOME and KDE are also operating systems, and so is Windows 3.x. And no, the editor in Emacs isn't all that bad for your wrists if you turn on your terminal's Sticky Keys feature so that you can (tap Control tap W) instead of (hold Control tap W) to cut text between mark and point.
well then you didn't read the article, did you
Is that necessarily a bad thing? There's a difference between "not finishing the article because the article started out too boring to continue reading" and "not even starting to read the article." If a Slashdot editor posted a thousand-page dissertation, would you feel obligated to read all of it before adding even one comment here?
I would think that the capatilization of the I would cause a problem
There is no difference under trademark law between Killustrator and KIllustrator. Trademarks under the Lanham Act fold to uppercase, which is why Adobe's trademarks are on "ILLUSTRATOR" and "ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR".
the reason I suggested 2050 was because the cap in most of the world is 70 years
William H. Gates III is still alive, isn't he? In cases where works for hire do not have a fixed term, the rule is LIFE of the last surviving contributor plus 70 years. MS-DOS won't go PD until at LEAST 70 years after some slashdot zealot murders bill gates.
"Life plus 70." Doesn't that sound like a prison sentence?
Dickens, which people still read and enjoy
Charles Dickens, sure, he's on Project Gutenberg, but what about Geoffrey Chaucer? If DisneyCo has its way, copyright terms will be repeatedly extended until the average reader can no longer understand the language of works written hundreds of years ago in 1922, and it'll still be constitutional according to the letter of the law.
Public domain is a closed constant set, and the consumers show their approval of this by voting with their dollars for products whose makers engage in destruction of the value of the public domain. Write your representatives in whatever government you're under if you disagree with these practices.
Software companies get to have their cake and eat it too. After the patent rights expire, they still have copyright control over the code, for a fantastically long time. MS-DOS 1.0's copyright should expire sometime around 2050 or so.
No, 95 years for works made for hire. Try around 2075. DisneyCo and the other MPAA studios are way too good at lobbying for effectively perpetual copyright.
Shoudn't this article have the "funny" icon?
IMO, Slashcode should let an article have multiple topics. For instance, a Darwin kernel article could go under both Apple and BSD, and a patent humor article such as this one could go under Patents and Humor. It would make topic searching a bit more accurate.
The support for mingw/32 seems worse, since it doesn't have the Unix emulation layer provided by Cygwin
Cygwin is licensed under GNU GPL 2 or later with exception "You may link this code to any code under an OSI approved license." No binary only code is under an OSI approved license. Qt for Windows is binary only. Therefore, Qt for Windows is not compatible with Cygwin or any other GPL program.
However, Qt for *n?x can probably be made to work on Cygwin XFree86 with minimal porting.
Not Star Trek
Pinocchio was on Star Trek: TNG, and his name was Data. (Or at least that's what Roddenberry thought.)
Have you never heard of Pinnochio?
You mean Pinocchio?
a rip off of the original version ... The real one, not the disney one.
You can read (or print) the original novel by Carlo "Collodi" Lorenzini at PinEight.com. Thank goodness it was written before 1923, as Di$ney steals from PD to make its stories and takes deliberate steps (Sonny Bono act) to make sure it never has to give back.
those machine alien-type creatures
Echoes of the land of busy-bees from Pinocchio ?
or else we're going to start seeing "Windows/Pentium 4", "Windows/AMD", "Windows/64-bit AMD" and "Windows/Itanium" sections in compUSA
As another user commented above, high-performance consumer applications often put their hotspots into DLLs so that a build optimized for a given microarchitecture can be used. For example, Windows could have nthotp4.dll and nthotk7.dll. And no, *hammer and Itanium would not have their own sections, as app binaries would be shipped for multiple architectures (as was done during the Macintosh computer's transition from 68K to PowerPC processors).
The other way to do it would be to recompile the software at installation time. For example, ALFS and Gentoo are Linux distributions that come as source; a distro based on ALFS or Gentoo would provide boot floppies for each architecture, a CD with just enough binaries to get the compiler going, and a source CD, and then build everything especially for your processor at installation time.