Re:They probably forgot they even owned it
on
MAME To Become GPL?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
What does it matter if someone sued over it? It's still illegal. [1] Often enough, people jaywalk in front of cops without getting thrown in jail. Does that mean the government has changed their mind? No. It's just not worth persuing.
In many cases, someone still owns the rights to particular abandonware, and even if a bunch of warez kidz think it's unfair that they can't use some company's refuse doesn't mean it's not illegal. A couple years ago, a bunch of NeXT cube users offered to pay the full retail price for the current WP8 for a copy WordPerfect for NeXTSTEP, but they were declined. Told that while they still owned the rights, they weren't interested in selling them, and reminded these folks that they couldn't let them give it away either. The leader of the group told WP in his contacts that he was goign to give his pals his copy of WP for NS then. They never brought the BSA over to his house or sued him, even though WP acknowledged what he was doing was illegal and going against their license and "rights."
The USC? Would that mean the United States Constitution? If so, where is it does it state that abandonware is OK to use against the original license? Or that there's a difference between a piece of software that costs $50k and a game? I'm dying to know- sounds like an interesting part of the USC that they skip over in High School civics classes, but seems like it'd grab the students' attention!
If not months, how long would you guess? Are you sure it's a battery, rather than a capacitor- which many PalmOS units have. In those, you have to replace your batteries within a few seconds or have your RAM all wiped.
Another great solution, but more costly, is the all flash RAM route. The Newton 2x00 did this as well as the Caseo BE-300 WinCE PDA.
The poster mentioned tex. The poster doesn't seem to be looking for tex, but something WYSIWYGish. Like WP for DOS. It's very possible that someone could write a front-end or analog of LyX that worked in the terminal rather than in X, generating LaTeX and then PS or PDF.
An open platform means that HP provides hardware where you can put Linux on it if you want, rather than stick with PocketPC. Because HP provides this open, flashable hardware platform, you don't have to wait for Microsoft to decide what is right for you. You have the power to do that yourself. Other than being a novelty, what does PDA Linux have to offer most of HP's consumers? With or without OpenZaurus, they have their open platform.
Your average consumer wants to get her dollar's worth. Your average consumer has been trained over her entire lifetime to think that bigger is better. Your average consumer can sit through a commercial long enough to hear that the iPAQ has a faster processor, more RAM, and can do more. It doesn't take a genius of a consumer to be swayed by such. There is an increasing fraction of people buying PocketPCs, even when all they need is a $30 daybook.
Hell, most people don't need a PDA at all, just one of those $30 day books. That doesn't keep them from buying PDA. Your average consumer doesn't need a computer that does much more than word process, surf the web and do email- yet they get suckered into buying 2 GHz machines when a 600 MHz machine would be more than adequate.
Your average consumer doesn't care if you get full access to the platform.
Again, I never had problems during the period when I used the iPAQ with PocketPC 2000. During the period I was running Linux on it, I had more problems, but not related to stability. WinCE is so very far from perfect, but it's a relatively robust platform, more so than Palm OS. I don't doubt that Linux crashes less than WinCE, but WinCE doesn't crash often enough for it to be annoying. Perhaps your friend needs to review his coding skills for whatever demo he was working on, sounds like the problem is indeed in software, but most likely in the demo he was running.
At this point, why would HP bother shipping their iPAQs with OpenZaurus installed or on a CD? The only people interested in running Linux instead of WinCE on their PDAs are generally Linux enthusiasts.
Think like a consumer, not as a Linux cheerleader: what advantages goes Linux have over PocketPC? There has to be some. Stability isn't so much of an issue on the PDA, as WinCE is remarkably stable and manageable compared to desktop Windows. Being open source? That's not much of a selling point for the vast majority of consumers.
All too often I'm told that with OpenZaurus, you have the option of running X11 and being able to run apps remotely from your desktop. Wow- just what ever consumer needs! (and can be done on WinCE and PocketPC, for free as well.)
What about the disadvantages to Linux on the PDA? A lot less software. Even less regular PDA, bidnezz software. Often less robust software. Almost no one runs it. No real handwriting recognition, only character recognition. (what would keep me from running Linux on an iPAQ)
I mean, why the hell would HP ship with OpenZaurus, when people have to submit an "Ask Slashdot" to find an email client for OpenZaurus? What kind of PDA doesn't have a passable email client out of the box?
Yeah, I think it would be cool for HP to put a little link on their site to a version of the ROM ready to go for their iPAQs, but it's something that so few people would want that it's not woth the confusion it might end up causing in their regular customers. Almost anyone that would even remotely want to run OpenZaurus has the interest and the ability to find it at openzaurus.sf.net.
Not all high-end PDAs have shitty battery life like the Zaurus and iPAQ.
While it's still 5 years old, the Newton 2100, with it's 480x320 screen and 162 MHz CPU can still be considered high-end. The Newton 2100 gets a good 2-5 weeks of battery life on a fresh charge. In real usage, that's perhaps 24 hours of straight usage?
I tried converting from the Newton to the iPAQ, under both PocketPC and Linux, using the black and white iPAQ 3150 rather than the one of the color models. The 3150 got a good 10-12 hours of battery life, perhaps more.
Although in a different league, a Jornada 720 I was using for a while got 8 hours on a charge.
Getting decent battery life seems largely contingent on PDAs with screens that don't suck juice like there's no tommorow. As such, I've stuck with PDAs with greyscale screens, until color screens are practical for PDAs.
When you say "face the consequences," what do you mean? That if the battery runs out, the contents of the RAM is gone? I've noticed this too, and find it rather disgusting myself. On both the Newton and Jornada 720, there is a backup battery, allowing one to not have the unit plugged in or the battery charged for at least a few months with no loss of data. Yet another reason most PDAs are still just toys as far as I'm concerned...
No, this isn't some deliberate scam on the part of Intel.
The XScale is new design, seperate from the StrongARM. They're in the same archetecture family, but the XScale is a new chip, not just a renamed and reclocked SA-1100.
Part of this new design is increased power efficiency. The 400 MHz XScale achieves about the same MIPS, the same performance as a 206 MHz StrongARM, but using a lot less power. The XScale is about better MIPS per watt. I don't know off the top of my head what the ratios are, but a PDA based on the XScale at 400 MHz gets a lot better battery life than a PDA based on a 206 MHz StrongARM, at least theoretically, and assuming the same battery and non-cpu power consumers.
It's not about getting a higher sounding number, it's just a new design. Not all CPUs have the same performance/megahertz ratio- for example, the PowerPC has a pretty high performance/MHz ratio and the XScale a very low performance/MHz ratio, with the Athlon somewhere in between.
What's the deal here? Is the original asker just ignorant (not an insult, just a state of mind), or is it that hard to find a decent email client for the Zaurus?
I'm even more glad I didn't buy a Zaurus to replace my Newton 2100 when I had the impulse to do so, as a platform for running the Dynapad PDA OS/environment (which has an email client already).
IBM makes the G3 chips Apple uses and Mot makes Apple's G4s. AltiVec is something by and from Mot only. Apparently the G5/PPC970 will implement something very much like it, a clone, at this point IBM doesn't have the rights to AltiVec.
I'm glad Apple has kept the G3 in the iBook, as an iBook owner. It means lower prices and better battery life. No complaints there. For what I do, a G3 is just as fast as a G4 at the same clock speed- which is generally true for all non-AltiVec apps for OS9. OS X itself is heavily optimized for AltiVec, but, while I run OS X, I don't run many OS X apps, and none that demand much performance,
It's on both the Restore and Install disks that came with my iBook. However, AW6 only comes with "consumer" machines, like the iBook and iMac. The PowerMac and PowerBook do not come with AW for some reason, but come with some other programs that you do not get with the consumer machines. Always seemed kind of silly to me, but as I don't use AW even on my iBook, the point is moot.
In the places I've worked and schooled, I've had net access in a lot of places, but never all. This will diminish as wireless gets to be more pervasive, 802.11b in offices, &c. There are a lot of places (outdoors!) that there is little net coverage ATM.
Humor us all, and think just for a minute, and fill in the blank: a laptop's purpose is largely to be ______ (circle your answer: portable, stationary). If you guessed portable, you're right! And when you're in a place where you've taken your portable laptop, you oftentimes don't have access to the network. So. It is time like those when you can't just ssh -X in to run an app running on a Sun server somewhere.
I wonder, considering its history, why it never became the preferred language of embedded devices or PDAs?
For the same reason Smalltalk didn't become the preferred language of writing end-user apps, and for the same reason Windows is the dominant OS, and why the versions of Windows with the widest share of the pie (52%) is based on DOS-
You are very right. However, at least I think it's important to note that a lot of Forth implementations are interpreters. Even when being interpreted, this Forth can often be faster than compiled C! Gotta love Forth!
Because "nerds" often listen to shitty music, like the Sex Pistols, Def Leopard, or Brittany Spears. Most of the nerds I've known listened to the same shitty music that makes them feel special, just like everyone else, nerd or non-nerd. Many nerds think if they listen to music born of the same intent, but of a not entirely mainstream genre, with bands like the Pistols, MxPx or Marilyn Manson.
Then again, a lot of nerds listen to tripe because they actually like it, not just because they're fed it by the media. Makes no sense, but nerds often love awful music.
The Pistols weren't the first "punk" I had listened to, but when I finally got around to it, I was sure disappointed. Compared to all the stuff I was listening to before, it was utter shit. I can't say I've ever listened through the entire 'Bullocks album more than once, and that time was immiately after a friend gave it to me (he was sick of having it as baggage).
Mach has been around years longer than Linux. Mach existed before this event, but in Oct. 1988 the first NeXT cube running NeXTSTEP on a 68030 was released. Every version of NeXTSTEP ran on Mach.
Sure, these benchmarks prove nothing and say very little, but what difference does it make if the perl code runs wget rather than using LWP, provided how it's done is consistent across testing platforms?
If this was an attempt at testing the speed of perl, yeah, he really should've used LWP.
Ye, how St. Jobs has failed us! He promised us a good computer, yet he cannot deliver! Whatever will I do without my my Catweasel disk controller? Woe is me!
Many models of iMac and PowerBook have been upgradable too. I don't think there's anything out for the current-style, lampshade iMac, but the original iMac series, RevA to Rev E (?) can take G3 and G4 upgrades. I don't think the TiBook's CPU is upgradable (or no one's released an upgrade yet), but I think even the PowerBook G3 had processor upgrades available for it, from companies like Newer Tech and Sonnet.
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What does it matter if someone sued over it? It's still illegal. [1] Often enough, people jaywalk in front of cops without getting thrown in jail. Does that mean the government has changed their mind? No. It's just not worth persuing.
In many cases, someone still owns the rights to particular abandonware, and even if a bunch of warez kidz think it's unfair that they can't use some company's refuse doesn't mean it's not illegal. A couple years ago, a bunch of NeXT cube users offered to pay the full retail price for the current WP8 for a copy WordPerfect for NeXTSTEP, but they were declined. Told that while they still owned the rights, they weren't interested in selling them, and reminded these folks that they couldn't let them give it away either. The leader of the group told WP in his contacts that he was goign to give his pals his copy of WP for NS then. They never brought the BSA over to his house or sued him, even though WP acknowledged what he was doing was illegal and going against their license and "rights."
[1] Not that it bothers me.
The USC? Would that mean the United States Constitution? If so, where is it does it state that abandonware is OK to use against the original license? Or that there's a difference between a piece of software that costs $50k and a game? I'm dying to know- sounds like an interesting part of the USC that they skip over in High School civics classes, but seems like it'd grab the students' attention!
:( I get a bus error on 10.1.
If not months, how long would you guess? Are you sure it's a battery, rather than a capacitor- which many PalmOS units have. In those, you have to replace your batteries within a few seconds or have your RAM all wiped.
Another great solution, but more costly, is the all flash RAM route. The Newton 2x00 did this as well as the Caseo BE-300 WinCE PDA.
The poster mentioned tex. The poster doesn't seem to be looking for tex, but something WYSIWYGish. Like WP for DOS. It's very possible that someone could write a front-end or analog of LyX that worked in the terminal rather than in X, generating LaTeX and then PS or PDF.
An open platform means that HP provides hardware where you can put Linux on it if you want, rather than stick with PocketPC. Because HP provides this open, flashable hardware platform, you don't have to wait for Microsoft to decide what is right for you. You have the power to do that yourself. Other than being a novelty, what does PDA Linux have to offer most of HP's consumers? With or without OpenZaurus, they have their open platform.
Your average consumer wants to get her dollar's worth. Your average consumer has been trained over her entire lifetime to think that bigger is better. Your average consumer can sit through a commercial long enough to hear that the iPAQ has a faster processor, more RAM, and can do more. It doesn't take a genius of a consumer to be swayed by such. There is an increasing fraction of people buying PocketPCs, even when all they need is a $30 daybook.
Hell, most people don't need a PDA at all, just one of those $30 day books. That doesn't keep them from buying PDA. Your average consumer doesn't need a computer that does much more than word process, surf the web and do email- yet they get suckered into buying 2 GHz machines when a 600 MHz machine would be more than adequate.
Your average consumer doesn't care if you get full access to the platform.
Again, I never had problems during the period when I used the iPAQ with PocketPC 2000. During the period I was running Linux on it, I had more problems, but not related to stability. WinCE is so very far from perfect, but it's a relatively robust platform, more so than Palm OS. I don't doubt that Linux crashes less than WinCE, but WinCE doesn't crash often enough for it to be annoying. Perhaps your friend needs to review his coding skills for whatever demo he was working on, sounds like the problem is indeed in software, but most likely in the demo he was running.
At this point, why would HP bother shipping their iPAQs with OpenZaurus installed or on a CD? The only people interested in running Linux instead of WinCE on their PDAs are generally Linux enthusiasts.
Think like a consumer, not as a Linux cheerleader: what advantages goes Linux have over PocketPC? There has to be some. Stability isn't so much of an issue on the PDA, as WinCE is remarkably stable and manageable compared to desktop Windows. Being open source? That's not much of a selling point for the vast majority of consumers.
All too often I'm told that with OpenZaurus, you have the option of running X11 and being able to run apps remotely from your desktop. Wow- just what ever consumer needs! (and can be done on WinCE and PocketPC, for free as well.)
What about the disadvantages to Linux on the PDA?
A lot less software. Even less regular PDA, bidnezz software. Often less robust software. Almost no one runs it. No real handwriting recognition, only character recognition. (what would keep me from running Linux on an iPAQ)
I mean, why the hell would HP ship with OpenZaurus, when people have to submit an "Ask Slashdot" to find an email client for OpenZaurus? What kind of PDA doesn't have a passable email client out of the box?
Yeah, I think it would be cool for HP to put a little link on their site to a version of the ROM ready to go for their iPAQs, but it's something that so few people would want that it's not woth the confusion it might end up causing in their regular customers. Almost anyone that would even remotely want to run OpenZaurus has the interest and the ability to find it at openzaurus.sf.net.
Not all high-end PDAs have shitty battery life like the Zaurus and iPAQ.
While it's still 5 years old, the Newton 2100, with it's 480x320 screen and 162 MHz CPU can still be considered high-end. The Newton 2100 gets a good 2-5 weeks of battery life on a fresh charge. In real usage, that's perhaps 24 hours of straight usage?
I tried converting from the Newton to the iPAQ, under both PocketPC and Linux, using the black and white iPAQ 3150 rather than the one of the color models. The 3150 got a good 10-12 hours of battery life, perhaps more.
Although in a different league, a Jornada 720 I was using for a while got 8 hours on a charge.
Getting decent battery life seems largely contingent on PDAs with screens that don't suck juice like there's no tommorow. As such, I've stuck with PDAs with greyscale screens, until color screens are practical for PDAs.
When you say "face the consequences," what do you mean? That if the battery runs out, the contents of the RAM is gone? I've noticed this too, and find it rather disgusting myself. On both the Newton and Jornada 720, there is a backup battery, allowing one to not have the unit plugged in or the battery charged for at least a few months with no loss of data. Yet another reason most PDAs are still just toys as far as I'm concerned...
The better battery life is thanks to both the bigger and better battery as well as the XScale processor, which has a higher MIPS/watt ratio.
No, this isn't some deliberate scam on the part of Intel.
The XScale is new design, seperate from the StrongARM. They're in the same archetecture family, but the XScale is a new chip, not just a renamed and reclocked SA-1100.
Part of this new design is increased power efficiency. The 400 MHz XScale achieves about the same MIPS, the same performance as a 206 MHz StrongARM, but using a lot less power. The XScale is about better MIPS per watt. I don't know off the top of my head what the ratios are, but a PDA based on the XScale at 400 MHz gets a lot better battery life than a PDA based on a 206 MHz StrongARM, at least theoretically, and assuming the same battery and non-cpu power consumers.
It's not about getting a higher sounding number, it's just a new design. Not all CPUs have the same performance/megahertz ratio- for example, the PowerPC has a pretty high performance/MHz ratio and the XScale a very low performance/MHz ratio, with the Athlon somewhere in between.
What's the deal here? Is the original asker just ignorant (not an insult, just a state of mind), or is it that hard to find a decent email client for the Zaurus?
I'm even more glad I didn't buy a Zaurus to replace my Newton 2100 when I had the impulse to do so, as a platform for running the Dynapad PDA OS/environment (which has an email client already).
IBM makes the G3 chips Apple uses and Mot makes Apple's G4s. AltiVec is something by and from Mot only. Apparently the G5/PPC970 will implement something very much like it, a clone, at this point IBM doesn't have the rights to AltiVec.
I'm glad Apple has kept the G3 in the iBook, as an iBook owner. It means lower prices and better battery life. No complaints there. For what I do, a G3 is just as fast as a G4 at the same clock speed- which is generally true for all non-AltiVec apps for OS9. OS X itself is heavily optimized for AltiVec, but, while I run OS X, I don't run many OS X apps, and none that demand much performance,
It's on both the Restore and Install disks that came with my iBook. However, AW6 only comes with "consumer" machines, like the iBook and iMac. The PowerMac and PowerBook do not come with AW for some reason, but come with some other programs that you do not get with the consumer machines. Always seemed kind of silly to me, but as I don't use AW even on my iBook, the point is moot.
I think you must be spoiled.
In the places I've worked and schooled, I've had net access in a lot of places, but never all. This will diminish as wireless gets to be more pervasive, 802.11b in offices, &c. There are a lot of places (outdoors!) that there is little net coverage ATM.
That's afraid of ssh and remote X windows. ...
Humor us all, and think just for a minute, and fill in the blank: a laptop's purpose is largely to be ______ (circle your answer: portable, stationary). If you guessed portable, you're right! And when you're in a place where you've taken your portable laptop, you oftentimes don't have access to the network. So. It is time like those when you can't just ssh -X in to run an app running on a Sun server somewhere.
And NeXT used a modified NuBus for its NeXTbus expansion for the NeXT cube.
I wonder, considering its history, why it never became the preferred language of embedded devices or PDAs?
For the same reason Smalltalk didn't become the preferred language of writing end-user apps, and for the same reason Windows is the dominant OS, and why the versions of Windows with the widest share of the pie (52%) is based on DOS-
backwards compatibility, of mind and software.
You are very right. However, at least I think it's important to note that a lot of Forth implementations are interpreters. Even when being interpreted, this Forth can often be faster than compiled C! Gotta love Forth!
Because "nerds" often listen to shitty music, like the Sex Pistols, Def Leopard, or Brittany Spears. Most of the nerds I've known listened to the same shitty music that makes them feel special, just like everyone else, nerd or non-nerd. Many nerds think if they listen to music born of the same intent, but of a not entirely mainstream genre, with bands like the Pistols, MxPx or Marilyn Manson.
Then again, a lot of nerds listen to tripe because they actually like it, not just because they're fed it by the media. Makes no sense, but nerds often love awful music.
The Pistols weren't the first "punk" I had listened to, but when I finally got around to it, I was sure disappointed. Compared to all the stuff I was listening to before, it was utter shit. I can't say I've ever listened through the entire 'Bullocks album more than once, and that time was immiately after a friend gave it to me (he was sick of having it as baggage).
Mach has been around years longer than Linux. Mach existed before this event, but in Oct. 1988 the first NeXT cube running NeXTSTEP on a 68030 was released. Every version of NeXTSTEP ran on Mach.
Sure, these benchmarks prove nothing and say very little, but what difference does it make if the perl code runs wget rather than using LWP, provided how it's done is consistent across testing platforms?
If this was an attempt at testing the speed of perl, yeah, he really should've used LWP.
Ye, how St. Jobs has failed us! He promised us a good computer, yet he cannot deliver! Whatever will I do without my my Catweasel disk controller? Woe is me!
Many models of iMac and PowerBook have been upgradable too. I don't think there's anything out for the current-style, lampshade iMac, but the original iMac series, RevA to Rev E (?) can take G3 and G4 upgrades. I don't think the TiBook's CPU is upgradable (or no one's released an upgrade yet), but I think even the PowerBook G3 had processor upgrades available for it, from companies like Newer Tech and Sonnet.