Long answer:
The Win2K driver development kit is not part of the standard MSSDK; it costs extra (filesystem drivers alone are $1000). NT4 driver developers whose companies wouldn't foot the bill had to reverse-engineer the W2K driver model, and this produced buggy drivers (don't run NT servers in more than 640x480x4-bit). This has crashed Win2K Pro (brought the whole system down; dumb stupid graphics-in-the-kernel) several times on Allegro library-based games that run fine in Win95/98/ME, Windows NT, DOS, and Linux.
The question is, what will they do with the Cow from Practical C Programming?
Starcraft cheat code: "there is no cow level" does this give you any ideas? It sure gave the Diablo team some ideas, as Diablo II includes a cow bonus level. (Yes, I know they're both Blizzard but...)
Think Earthworm Jim. Think the official PC Space Invaders. Think South Park 64. Cow levels all over the place.
this sets the precident for banning programmers from being "inspired" by one person's source code to write their own equivalent code.
Precisely why RMS doesn't read UNIX® source code. The known legal workaround for this is "clean room R.E.": have one team translate the source code into a specification written in English or other similarly human-comprehensible notation, and have another team translate it back into C. And make sure all communication that passes over the Great Wall is logged so if they "see you in court," you'll have evidence that you used legal R.E. techniques.
No, Sonny Bono was Disney's idea.
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RIAA CEO Speaks
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· Score: 2
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was Disney's idea. Have you ever noticed how copyright extensions always come just in time before "Steamboat Willie" (first Mickey Mouse cartoon) goes PD?
Wasn't this the company that stole set-top technology from Apple?
A long time ago (before Mac and EGA), all computers could be used as set-top boxen. Apple even had a patent on its "HGR" image generation method (send the raw framebuffer data straight to a serializer and out the tv port, and let the software handle the NTSC color system). Is this what they stole?
If you don't want to read stupid patent stories...
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One Click Patent News
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· Score: 2
Please what do we have to do to get/. to stop posting annoying news about company X's patent war with company Y???
First click here to open preferences. Then check the categories you don't want to see anymore (for example, Patents). Click savehome, refresh the home page, and watch the patent stories disappear.
They don't care about open source or Linux, just the performance that they will get from the machines
They're only concerned about performance. The license fee shouldn't be a deciding factor unless the two systems are otherwise quite similar.
The license fee matters. For the price of an MS-IIS license, you can get another box running Apache HTTP Server. So unless well-tuned Apache is twice as slow as IIS, Apache has the lead here.
4. The virtualized DOS machine (VDM) allows only two nested DPMI (32-bit DOS) programs (NT 4 and all Win9x systems allow several dozen). The DJGPP environment requires at least three (make, gcc, cc1plus) nested DPMI programs. <O ( \ XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
In Microsoft Windows 2000, both 5.0 (boxed) and 5.01 (sp1), there is a limit of two nested DPMI (32-bit DOS) programs in a single VDM (virtualized DOS machine). This severely limits the usefulness of DJGPP, as it relies on three nested DPMI programs (GNU make, gcc, cpp/cc1/as/ld) to build programs. <O ( \ XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Every keyboard and OS in the world supports ASCII (positions U+0000 to U+007F of Unicode 3). Not every keyboard and OS supports Unihan (U+4C00 to U+A000 or something). One generally has to buy CJK input support for common consumeroperating systems. <O ( \ XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
IANAL, but for the record: "Method of exercising a cat" isn't patented; the particular method described in the claims is. Now with that out of the way...
The patent is on "a cat chases a dot produced by a laser pointer." How silly of the U$PTO to grant this. Prior art: a cat chases a beam of light from a properly focused MAG-LITE® flashlight. Is it really that non-obvious to go from a spotlight to a laser pointer?
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How do you think that SSE & SSE2 will be implimented in upcoming AMD CPUs starting with the mustang.
IIRC, KNI/SSE is just a clone of 3DNow! which debuted in the AMD K6 line.
<O
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
...provided you have an account.
<O
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
United States dollars work only in the United States. You could say that they're "region coded" too.
<O
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Existing DVD players could be modified to work around this.
Note: The Latin-derived word meaning "to work around" is "circumvent."
New DVD players can be designed to work around this.
Note: The region coding system is an access control system under the DMCA.
Software which runs on general-purpose computers (e.g. livid) can easily be modified to circumvent this.
Note: The DMCA prohibits circumventing the region coding system.
Don't count on getting the DMCA thrown out; the judges and senators have already been bought.
<O
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I agree that Nintendo's Mario Kart 64 software for its Nintendo 64 console had bugs in both design and implementation. Here's a small sample:
Before you say, "That's not a bug; it's a feature," remember that Windows's BSODs are considered by some to be "a feature."
At least the MK64 CPU cheats less than the SMK-16 CPU.
<O
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Short answer: Buggy video drivers.
Long answer:
The Win2K driver development kit is not part of the standard MSSDK; it costs extra (filesystem drivers alone are $1000). NT4 driver developers whose companies wouldn't foot the bill had to reverse-engineer the W2K driver model, and this produced buggy drivers (don't run NT servers in more than 640x480x4-bit). This has crashed Win2K Pro (brought the whole system down; dumb stupid graphics-in-the-kernel) several times on Allegro library-based games that run fine in Win95/98/ME, Windows NT, DOS, and Linux.
<O
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
What would O'Reilly do with the dustpuppy (#5260) on the cover of Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell?
<O
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
The question is, what will they do with the Cow from Practical C Programming?
Starcraft cheat code: "there is no cow level" does this give you any ideas? It sure gave the Diablo team some ideas, as Diablo II includes a cow bonus level. (Yes, I know they're both Blizzard but...)
Think Earthworm Jim. Think the official PC Space Invaders. Think South Park 64. Cow levels all over the place.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
this sets the precident for banning programmers from being "inspired" by one person's source code to write their own equivalent code.
Precisely why RMS doesn't read UNIX® source code. The known legal workaround for this is "clean room R.E.": have one team translate the source code into a specification written in English or other similarly human-comprehensible notation, and have another team translate it back into C. And make sure all communication that passes over the Great Wall is logged so if they "see you in court," you'll have evidence that you used legal R.E. techniques.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was Disney's idea. Have you ever noticed how copyright extensions always come just in time before "Steamboat Willie" (first Mickey Mouse cartoon) goes PD?
Yes, perpetual copyright is constitutional.
<O
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
does it stay on the harddrive and is simply not referenced until you write over it?
In most systems, yes.
Once you write over the information can it be recovered?
Law enforcement can get at several layers of deleted data.
Is there a way to change how an operating system or file system deletes files?
Create several large files (to fill up the HD within epsilon), overwrite them several times with random data, and "delete" them.
<O
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Are you telling me the entire legal industry (police, courts etc) will just ignore evidence of crimes just because its 6 months and one day old?
No, the courts will.
<O
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The Delete key queues files for deletion. The recycle bin actually deletes the file and (if you have privacy utilities installed) wipes it.
Seriously, why won't they rethink keyboards and actually have both a Trash and Delete key?
I think there's a (Shift+Delete? Ctrl+Delete?) key shortcut that does this.
<O
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Wasn't this the company that stole set-top technology from Apple?
A long time ago (before Mac and EGA), all computers could be used as set-top boxen. Apple even had a patent on its "HGR" image generation method (send the raw framebuffer data straight to a serializer and out the tv port, and let the software handle the NTSC color system). Is this what they stole?
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Please what do we have to do to get /. to stop posting annoying news about company X's patent war with company Y???
First click here to open preferences. Then check the categories you don't want to see anymore (for example, Patents). Click savehome, refresh the home page, and watch the patent stories disappear.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
<O
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
The license fee matters. For the price of an MS-IIS license, you can get another box running Apache HTTP Server. So unless well-tuned Apache is twice as slow as IIS, Apache has the lead here.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
4. The virtualized DOS machine (VDM) allows only two nested DPMI (32-bit DOS) programs (NT 4 and all Win9x systems allow several dozen). The DJGPP environment requires at least three (make, gcc, cc1plus) nested DPMI programs.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
In Microsoft Windows 2000, both 5.0 (boxed) and 5.01 (sp1), there is a limit of two nested DPMI (32-bit DOS) programs in a single VDM (virtualized DOS machine). This severely limits the usefulness of DJGPP, as it relies on three nested DPMI programs (GNU make, gcc, cpp/cc1/as/ld) to build programs.
<O
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
... OpenbSd
<O
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Every keyboard and OS in the world supports ASCII (positions U+0000 to U+007F of Unicode 3). Not every keyboard and OS supports Unihan (U+4C00 to U+A000 or something). One generally has to buy CJK input support for common consumer operating systems.
<O
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
OpenNIC, the Democratic Name System, has a .null TLD that is often compared to alt. of Usenet.
<O
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What would you like to see more of?
-- I would like to see more political stories.
What would you like to see less of?
-- FUD coming from our camp.
I think this is called Kuro5hin.
<O
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
IANAL, but for the record: "Method of exercising a cat" isn't patented; the particular method described in the claims is. Now with that out of the way...
The patent is on "a cat chases a dot produced by a laser pointer." How silly of the U$PTO to grant this. Prior art: a cat chases a beam of light from a properly focused MAG-LITE® flashlight. Is it really that non-obvious to go from a spotlight to a laser pointer?
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!