Also, people are WRITING software for it because the protection can be beaten
The boot sector of all Dreamcast discs contains an access control measure under the DMCA: it contains 14 KB of data that must match data in ROM bit-for-bit, or the disc won't boot. And this 14 KB of data contains code that displays trademarks (renewable perpetually in the USA) and is copyrighted (also perpetual in the USA).
Didn't you read the license for IE when you installed it?
NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A VALID EULA FOR EITHER MICROSOFT WINDOWS 95, WINDOWS 98, WINDOWS ME, WINDOWS NT 4, OR WINDOWS 2000, (each an "OS Product"), YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO INSTALL, COPY OR OTHERWISE USE THE OS COMPONENTS AND YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS UNDER THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA.
The version of Wintendo that comes with store-bought PCs runs everything as root, providing no real memory protection. A Windows license is often the most expensive part of a PC built from parts, costing upwards of US$300 per box.
Windows has a GUI that is easy to use because it has been developed in conjunction with literally millions of beta testers and focus groups.
Mac OS has an even better GUI than Windows's, so why aren't people using Macintosh computers?
emulation has to be slower, because there's two layers.
Wine Is Not an Emulator. The layered structure of a Wine system is similar to that of a Windows 2000 system: application on top of Win32 on top of the kernel.
you don't have to compile Windows for your PC like you do with Wine (you can get pre-built builds, but they don't work as well).
Which means you can't recompile Windows to create a system optimized for your CPU's pipelines. (AFAIK, Windows 9x is still optimized for a 486.)
For WINE to work usably, you are required to have Windows on your PC (true: all those shots of Word running on Linux only happen because Linux is using the dlls and vxds)
This is partially rebutted by your first point. Wine with the Windows 98 DLLs can be more stable than Windows 98 itself because of the protection that the underlying system provides. Even then, you don't need to use Word; you can use Emacs and LaTeX, and your output may even look better.
In a large, free market, with all kinds of roughly interesting movies to choose from, this is no big deal. You don't do business with the movie studios that require lobotomies.
But what if 90% of the sheeple[?] do? The 10% of knowledgeable geeks (I'm overestimating) who boycott "lobo studios" won't be enough to put them out of business. The only way to win is to educate the sheeple. Join EFF and help fight the good fight.
Save $600 (100%) off the retail price of Photoshop by giving up prepress capabilities (which are not necessary for web or game graphics). Try WinGIMP. Sure, it takes an hour to get used to, but so does Photoslop. Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Most musicians get the vast majority of thier money for live performance, not for records sold. Selling CDs or singles is a way to get people to want to see them live.
Your argument seems to discriminate against artists in genres that don't have a concept of live performance. For instance, do electronic artists perform live? Most of their music is generated by a computer program (e.g. Modplug Tracker or some other sequencer); what is there to watch?
But I won't give you any points for not being able to look at the filesize and be able to guess that it is the complete song.
Normally, when I search, I sort by song length. This puts all the complete files together; then I go for low pings. But this still doesn't help with users who log off and users who set their simultaneous uploads to 0.
"Black" Access - The software you get is so *ucking clever it works out what you want before you want it downloads it and puts it into your playlist so all you need to do is press play and you get the music you want without even having to think about it...
Black access would be straightforward to implement. It would be similar to platinum access, except it automatically suggests singles or albums from the same genre and artist as the ones you regularly download. Riffage.com did this.
I agree that the Bono Act has gone too far. Imagine if patent terms were as long: we wouldn't have generic drugs at all. IMHO, 25 years is more than enough to cover an author's expenses and provide a decent profit. If 17 to 20 years for a patent is enough to keep the drug industry running, why wouldn't a similar time period also work for the copyright industry?
It appears copyright has been continuously extended on everything produced since 1917 (not sure that's the right year, the copyright office website has it somewhere).
The correct year (in the US at least) is 1923. To me, a copyright date provides only one bit of information: before 1923 or on-or-after 1923. Read my short essay on the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, the root source of DisneyCo's power.
I would gladly donate to an organization doing copyright law reform.
if you walk into an emergency room and say "I need to see a doctor" it doesn't matter how much money it costs to treat you, there in no hospital in the US that can legally turn you away.
Have you seen The Confession? That film explores this very issue. Oh wait, you're boycotting Hollywood because of the DMCA that turns perpetual copyright into a perpetual patent on DVD.
It's also well excepted by most mainstream economists economists that intellectual property is absolutely necessary to innovation.
Assuming s/excepted/accepted/, it was once also "well [accepted] by most mainstream" philosophers that the Earth was at the center of the universe. "Because $CELEBRITY says so" is a logical fallacy.
The term should be long enough to make the design work to create the invention a profitable investment, and no longer.
Too bad Congress doesn't apply this logic to copyrights also. Does it really take 95 years for Disney to recoup its investment in creating Mickey Mouse?
That's why we pay the estate of Alan Turing a percentage when we use a computer, or Alexander Graham Bell's descendants own the IP on the telephone.
Unlike copyrights, which are perpetual in the USA and WIPO states because DisneyCo owns Congress, patents expire 20 years after they're filed or 17 years after they're granted, but it doesn't matter because the USPTO takes three years to process a patent. And in those three years, a company (except for drug companies that also deal with FDA induced lag) can start selling the products and building a market. Because the patent is "pending," it's still not illegal to clone the product. But after the patent is granted, the company can "pull a Unisys" and make a killing in the courtroom.
The difference is that with these market monopolies, we're talking about the ENDS, not the MEANS. You're mostly incorrectly assuming that there is only one means to an end.
Sometimes there is. What if a drug company finds a cure for AIDS, but it can be proven that the biomechanism it uses is the only mechanism possible to kill the virus without killing the patient? It'd be like the MP3 and LZW patents, where the only way to produce a conforming bitstream is by infringing the patent.
The Pokemon anime was not inspired by Nintendo's videogame. I think it was the other way around
First, there were Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue for the Game Boy handheld console, quite good console RPGs. Then the TV show came out and fscked up the whole franchise. For example, instead of Team Rocket being like the Mafia, it became two dumbarses. And Ash was also dumbed down and given a voice nearly identical to that of Noddy from PBS's Noddy. It's almost as bad as what happened to Super Mario Bros. the Movie. Ecch. And then they tried to turn the TV show into a video game (Pokemon Special Pikachu Edition, commonly known as Pokemon Yellow).
there's plenty of strategical thinking in that game
Only for newbies. Once you're good at it (> 20 hours of play), Tetris does not involve all that much strategy. Eventually, placing the next tetramino becomes almost a reflex action. Some newer versions of Tetris try to break this up by adding bonuses for forming 4x4 squares (The New Tetris), chain reactions (Tetanus, Quadra, The Next Tetris), "magic" items (TetriNET; DuelTris for Apple IIGS; Tetris Jr.), or distracting display effects (TOD; Tetripz).
JNap only runs on Java platforms. Sun provides the Java platform (J2SE) only for Microsoft Windows 9x, Microsoft Windows NT/2000, Solaris for x86, Linux for x86, and Solaris for SPARC. A C program can be more cross-platform than a Java program; just look at any application or game written with the Allegro library.
But I may try it out, as the latest official Napster client can no longer connect to OpenNap servers.
Do you have any thoughts about why the shell concept has not caught on with other operating systems?
Probably because Mac OS and Windows are designed around an assumption that newbies are very afraid of a command line.
I'm thinking of NT and Win2K in particular, but it seems to be true in general.
Bash and Fileutils have been ported to DOS (you'll need at least bsh204b.zip, fil316.zip, and txt20b.zip to get a useful shell). So has a lot of other GNU software; start with DJGPP, the DOS port of GCC.
Install Red Hat Cygwin and you get Bash, GCC, and other things you may be used to on GNU/Linux, BSD, or UNIX systems.
Slashdot Mirror
The initial set of rules in Mao is similar to Bartok. (Read more about Mao at Everything.)
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
But aren't many servers idle during the night while people sleep?
Name one hour of the day when everybody in the world with Internet access is asleep. The world is more than the USA, you know.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Also, people are WRITING software for it because the protection can be beaten
The boot sector of all Dreamcast discs contains an access control measure under the DMCA: it contains 14 KB of data that must match data in ROM bit-for-bit, or the disc won't boot. And this 14 KB of data contains code that displays trademarks (renewable perpetually in the USA) and is copyrighted (also perpetual in the USA).
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
tried IE
Didn't you read the license for IE when you installed it?
This is another way IE is tied to the OS.Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
What ever happened to the VESA video card standards? Its about time we get a VESA3 out folks, as it is though, few new cards are even VESA2 complient
There already is VESA 3 VBE/AF; here's a few free VBE/AF drivers, and here are some you have to pay for.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Windows is free with PCs. You have Windows.
The version of Wintendo that comes with store-bought PCs runs everything as root, providing no real memory protection. A Windows license is often the most expensive part of a PC built from parts, costing upwards of US$300 per box.
Windows has a GUI that is easy to use because it has been developed in conjunction with literally millions of beta testers and focus groups.
Mac OS has an even better GUI than Windows's, so why aren't people using Macintosh computers?
emulation has to be slower, because there's two layers.
Wine Is Not an Emulator. The layered structure of a Wine system is similar to that of a Windows 2000 system: application on top of Win32 on top of the kernel.
you don't have to compile Windows for your PC like you do with Wine (you can get pre-built builds, but they don't work as well).
Which means you can't recompile Windows to create a system optimized for your CPU's pipelines. (AFAIK, Windows 9x is still optimized for a 486.)
For WINE to work usably, you are required to have Windows on your PC (true: all those shots of Word running on Linux only happen because Linux is using the dlls and vxds)
This is partially rebutted by your first point. Wine with the Windows 98 DLLs can be more stable than Windows 98 itself because of the protection that the underlying system provides. Even then, you don't need to use Word; you can use Emacs and LaTeX, and your output may even look better.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
In a large, free market, with all kinds of roughly interesting movies to choose from, this is no big deal. You don't do business with the movie studios that require lobotomies.
But what if 90% of the sheeple[?] do? The 10% of knowledgeable geeks (I'm overestimating) who boycott "lobo studios" won't be enough to put them out of business. The only way to win is to educate the sheeple. Join EFF and help fight the good fight.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Save $600 (100%) off the retail price of Photoshop by giving up prepress capabilities (which are not necessary for web or game graphics). Try WinGIMP. Sure, it takes an hour to get used to, but so does Photoslop.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Most musicians get the vast majority of thier money for live performance, not for records sold. Selling CDs or singles is a way to get people to want to see them live.
Your argument seems to discriminate against artists in genres that don't have a concept of live performance. For instance, do electronic artists perform live? Most of their music is generated by a computer program (e.g. Modplug Tracker or some other sequencer); what is there to watch?
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
But I won't give you any points for not being able to look at the filesize and be able to guess that it is the complete song.
Normally, when I search, I sort by song length. This puts all the complete files together; then I go for low pings. But this still doesn't help with users who log off and users who set their simultaneous uploads to 0.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
"Black" Access - The software you get is so *ucking clever it works out what you want before you want it downloads it and puts it into your playlist so all you need to do is press play and you get the music you want without even having to think about it...
Black access would be straightforward to implement. It would be similar to platinum access, except it automatically suggests singles or albums from the same genre and artist as the ones you regularly download. Riffage.com did this.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
I agree that the Bono Act has gone too far. Imagine if patent terms were as long: we wouldn't have generic drugs at all. IMHO, 25 years is more than enough to cover an author's expenses and provide a decent profit. If 17 to 20 years for a patent is enough to keep the drug industry running, why wouldn't a similar time period also work for the copyright industry?
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
It appears copyright has been continuously extended on everything produced since 1917 (not sure that's the right year, the copyright office website has it somewhere).
The correct year (in the US at least) is 1923. To me, a copyright date provides only one bit of information: before 1923 or on-or-after 1923. Read my short essay on the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, the root source of DisneyCo's power.
I would gladly donate to an organization doing copyright law reform.
You could start at the Eldred v. Reno page. Also consider joining the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
I don't know if i'm supposed to feel bad about laughing at that gimp artist commercial
That "gimp artist" commercial didn't have anything to do with GIMP, did it?
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
if you walk into an emergency room and say "I need to see a doctor" it doesn't matter how much money it costs to treat you, there in no hospital in the US that can legally turn you away.
Have you seen The Confession? That film explores this very issue. Oh wait, you're boycotting Hollywood because of the DMCA that turns perpetual copyright into a perpetual patent on DVD.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
It's also well excepted by most mainstream economists economists that intellectual property is absolutely necessary to innovation.
Assuming s/excepted/accepted/, it was once also "well [accepted] by most mainstream" philosophers that the Earth was at the center of the universe. "Because $CELEBRITY says so" is a logical fallacy.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
The term should be long enough to make the design work to create the invention a profitable investment, and no longer.
Too bad Congress doesn't apply this logic to copyrights also. Does it really take 95 years for Disney to recoup its investment in creating Mickey Mouse?
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
That's why we pay the estate of Alan Turing a percentage when we use a computer, or Alexander Graham Bell's descendants own the IP on the telephone.
Unlike copyrights, which are perpetual in the USA and WIPO states because DisneyCo owns Congress, patents expire 20 years after they're filed or 17 years after they're granted, but it doesn't matter because the USPTO takes three years to process a patent. And in those three years, a company (except for drug companies that also deal with FDA induced lag) can start selling the products and building a market. Because the patent is "pending," it's still not illegal to clone the product. But after the patent is granted, the company can "pull a Unisys" and make a killing in the courtroom.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
The difference is that with these market monopolies, we're talking about the ENDS, not the MEANS. You're mostly incorrectly assuming that there is only one means to an end.
Sometimes there is. What if a drug company finds a cure for AIDS, but it can be proven that the biomechanism it uses is the only mechanism possible to kill the virus without killing the patient? It'd be like the MP3 and LZW patents, where the only way to produce a conforming bitstream is by infringing the patent.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
The Pokemon anime was not inspired by Nintendo's videogame. I think it was the other way around
First, there were Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue for the Game Boy handheld console, quite good console RPGs. Then the TV show came out and fscked up the whole franchise. For example, instead of Team Rocket being like the Mafia, it became two dumbarses. And Ash was also dumbed down and given a voice nearly identical to that of Noddy from PBS's Noddy. It's almost as bad as what happened to Super Mario Bros. the Movie. Ecch. And then they tried to turn the TV show into a video game (Pokemon Special Pikachu Edition, commonly known as Pokemon Yellow).
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
there's plenty of strategical thinking in that game
Only for newbies. Once you're good at it (> 20 hours of play), Tetris does not involve all that much strategy. Eventually, placing the next tetramino becomes almost a reflex action. Some newer versions of Tetris try to break this up by adding bonuses for forming 4x4 squares (The New Tetris), chain reactions (Tetanus, Quadra, The Next Tetris), "magic" items (TetriNET; DuelTris for Apple IIGS; Tetris Jr.), or distracting display effects (TOD; Tetripz).
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
JNap only runs on Java platforms. Sun provides the Java platform (J2SE) only for Microsoft Windows 9x, Microsoft Windows NT/2000, Solaris for x86, Linux for x86, and Solaris for SPARC. A C program can be more cross-platform than a Java program; just look at any application or game written with the Allegro library.
But I may try it out, as the latest official Napster client can no longer connect to OpenNap servers.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
How long before that goatse guy gets a hold of this?
I used the NetPBM suite to convert goatse.cx's "The Receiver" image to ASCII. It didn't look very good.
Oh, and IANTGCG (I am not the Goatse.cx guy).
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Do you have any thoughts about why the shell concept has not caught on with other operating systems?
Probably because Mac OS and Windows are designed around an assumption that newbies are very afraid of a command line.
I'm thinking of NT and Win2K in particular, but it seems to be true in general.
Bash and Fileutils have been ported to DOS (you'll need at least bsh204b.zip, fil316.zip, and txt20b.zip to get a useful shell). So has a lot of other GNU software; start with DJGPP, the DOS port of GCC.
Install Red Hat Cygwin and you get Bash, GCC, and other things you may be used to on GNU/Linux, BSD, or UNIX systems.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
According to The Open Group, there is no such thing as a "UNIX-like" system. I personally use the term "nixclones" for GNU systems (GNU/Linux, Cygwin) and BSD systems. Or is that also a trademark abuse?
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?