Patent for a machine that prints a table of areas of a square pieces of land for when the size of one side is already known.
The system consists of a computer, with instructions in memory instructing it to increase a counter, and then multiply this by itself to find the square......
Perhaps the moderators should be encouraged to moderate UP every AC with anything remotely interesting to say instead of moderating down this one troll with LOTS of unintersting things to say.
Does what this troll is doing count as a hack. It is using human failings to circumvent a protection measure in Slashdot.
Strictly speaking, you can't patent software in the UK. In practice, it just takes clever wording. Essentially the patent is for a machine that could consist of a computer with an appropriate program to perform a task.
This does however protect from some of the more trivial patents, so the above advice does still apply.
Well, PSPro is very nice, but it still seems aimed rather heavily at image processing rather than painting. I think the Amiga's use of Full screen apps helped as well. So much easier to be creative when there's none of those distracting bits of GUI, and no possibility of the mouse leaving the window.
Well, I only had an A500P, so I got DP3 with it. I quite liked the look of the onion skins (i.e. transparent frames that let you see the previous fram) that DP4 could do
As for the animation features, Animbrushes were great, but the way it worked took up a lot of my Meagre 2 megs of RAM.
This would be so much better now that I have 32 times that much, and about a gig of VM under Linux
Well, I was thinking that they might find a floppy and not even realise that it might be used for data storage. You would have analyse it using a magnetic reader to actually spot the data. I just felt that people would be more likely to analyse it with a microscope.
But I'll moderate your post up anyway.:-)
Thanks, but the fact that you responded to my comment is a much better vote of confidence than moderation.
I think the point was that most server admins won't want people playing IK+ on their machines, so they won't emulate a C64. They won't mind people using Word, so they will emulate a PC
Nevertheless, I think it is important to make sure that these are kept and that people in the future can play them. In 500 years time, they will be as important a resource as any entertainment from 500 years ago is today.
Anyway, you missed Fort Apocolypse And Invaderload. And Spy Hunter. Ignoring the first two is reasonable, but how COULD you forget the classic game that every C64 had to have.
Not being a DOpus user myself, I'm not sure if this really shows DOpus well. Seems a shame that all GUI aspects that are ever copied seem to be the Win95 and Mac ones. The Amiga had some wonderfully designed GUI's.
This suggests that ALL data should be made freely available for archiving. If NASA had made an effort to make sure as many people as possible had copies of that data, then you wouldn't need to do all this transferring. It would have been transferred to newer systems by someone already.
Apart from with MAME, nobody is making any effort to archive old computer games. The BBC managed to destroy a lot of valuable origional video tapes (Apparently they taped over their copy of the moon landings). These show that data is kept around much longer if copying is encouraged rather than discouraged.
Assuming that I have no information about a Disk Drive, then I agree that it would be unreadable, but not punchcards. If you know about the alphabet, then ASCII punchcards containing source code probably wouldn't be too hard to decypher. Newspapers are frequently archived using photographic reduction. These are expected to last a very long time. Reading these just requires a very good magnifying glass. Even CD's would probably be quite easy to decode and decypher with technology equivalent to ours.
Also, we keep a lot of data around purely for future historians. I think destroying everything, or even just that part of all the worlds data stored to prevent decay would be virtually impossible. What might be harder to decypher than the technology is the language that these are written in. We need to start making some Rosetta Stones, and burying them all over the world.
My line manager explained the way patent infringement works.
Both companies pile up all their patents, and whoever has the heaviest pile wins.
Most companies actually use their patents defensively, or arrange a swapping deal. If the patent is actually useful, then they are usually tolerant of people experimenting with it as long as they don't try to use it directly against them, because the patent will still apply to possible derived technologies, which will make the patent that its derived from more valuable.
The difficulty comes from the companies with a single patent that their whole business is based on. Then the patent is more valuable to them to keep a stranglehold on the market, by eliminating direct competition.
If we created a patent and allowed everyone to use it, then these companies would still be able to use this ill-mannered behaviour simply because we can't patent everything. I think what we really need is some patents with a licence that allows free use for non-profit purposes, and free use to all organisations who own no patents. The patent could be donated to a non-profit organisation, who would fund the patent applications by charging reasonable licencing fees to large companies. Most companies who can afford patents can afford a reasonable licensing fee. The licence fee would be used only to cover costs, and fund the occasional counter suit if a company tries to prevent an open source rival by using a trivial patent.
Just think of what could happen if we win this case. Suddenly, all the developers who have agreed to licenses for using CSS code can bypass those licenses and save some dough in the process. A new breed of players could crop up, designed by people/groups who have the programming ability but not the cash to afford a license.
Totally true, but also remember that the movie industry currently is using this licence to control the electronics industry. No electronics company really wants single region DVD players. Regions were just introduced to appease the movie industry. If this case gets through, there's nothing stopping them from producing multi-region players, with macrovision disabled by default.
Not sure if I agree with this one. The transistor was just a new type of electronic switch, which could be used in much the same way as a valve or a relay. Without the invention (or discovery for us Roswell conspiracy nuts) of this, we would have seen the reduction of the size of the valve. So perhaps #4 should be the electronic switch (Whichever came first. Valve or relay?)
Personally I think that everyones making far too much noise about this.
The excuse is that George Lucas wants to spend time on it himself. Any really greedy corporation would just churn out a generic DVD with virtually no features, and then release a "Special Edition" at twice the price after a year, then release a special Boxed set with "Special George Lucas Edition" extra features after Episode 3.
It is conceivable that George Lucas genuinly doesn't want to release a half baked product.
Finally, please remember that as he is the creator of Star Wars, he deserves the right to release it as and when he wants. Even if you disagree with it. No-one is forcing you to buy the video.
even if Regions were removed from DVDs the versions on sale in the UK will still be butchered and less featured thanks to the BBFC.
Which is precisely why I don't like regional encoding.
The BBFC has no power to prevent people from importing films that aren't regulated, nor are they really concerned. It is illegal to sell imported DVD's in England, but not to buy them. We have always had the right to watch them if we are willing to go to the effort of importing them. The Film industry are the ones who want to stop us from doing this.
The ironic thing is that it seems that the availability of region free DVD's has actually made more people realise that the DVD import market exists. No-one I knew bothered to import NTSC VHS tapes.
Do the MPA actually have any proof that DeCSS has been used to pirate DVD's? If they don't actually have any DVD's that they can prove were pirated using DeCSS, then surely its quite a hard case to prove.
I take it you've never used Blitz Basic. It really is a wonderful package for doing what the Amigas good at (i.e games with lots of fast moving graphics)
I'd love to see a verion of Blitz for Linux. Despiter its flaws (Full of arbitrary limits, and actually more cryptic when creating windows than the C interface due to lack of #defines) it really was fun to use.
Really? I thought the benefit of RSA was that it allowed public Key encryption, that could not usefully be broken even if you knew the algorithm and decryption key.
Bletchley Park of all people should know not to rely on the secrecy of the algorithm.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft has admitted Linux to be a major competitor and cause of concern.
But only in the server market. I think they don't see it as much of a threat to Windows 97±2, and this is very much a desktop application.
Patent for a machine that prints a table of areas of a square pieces of land for when the size of one side is already known.
The system consists of a computer, with instructions in memory instructing it to increase a counter, and then multiply this by itself to find the square......
Just add some flowery legalese to obfuscate.
Perhaps the moderators should be encouraged to moderate UP every AC with anything remotely interesting to say instead of moderating down this one troll with LOTS of unintersting things to say.
Does what this troll is doing count as a hack. It is using human failings to circumvent a protection measure in Slashdot.
Strictly speaking, you can't patent software in the UK. In practice, it just takes clever wording. Essentially the patent is for a machine that could consist of a computer with an appropriate program to perform a task.
This does however protect from some of the more trivial patents, so the above advice does still apply.
Well, PSPro is very nice, but it still seems aimed rather heavily at image processing rather than painting. I think the Amiga's use of Full screen apps helped as well. So much easier to be creative when there's none of those distracting bits of GUI, and no possibility of the mouse leaving the window.
We have Tomb Raider. That puts us at least two points ahead:)
Well, I only had an A500P, so I got DP3 with it. I quite liked the look of the onion skins (i.e. transparent frames that let you see the previous fram) that DP4 could do
As for the animation features, Animbrushes were great, but the way it worked took up a lot of my Meagre 2 megs of RAM.
This would be so much better now that I have 32 times that much, and about a gig of VM under Linux
Why would floppies be unreadable?
:-)
Well, I was thinking that they might find a floppy and not even realise that it might be used for data storage. You would have analyse it using a magnetic reader to actually spot the data. I just felt that people would be more likely to analyse it with a microscope.
But I'll moderate your post up anyway.
Thanks, but the fact that you responded to my comment is a much better vote of confidence than moderation.
I think the point was that most server admins won't want people playing IK+ on their machines, so they won't emulate a C64. They won't mind people using Word, so they will emulate a PC
Nevertheless, I think it is important to make sure that these are kept and that people in the future can play them. In 500 years time, they will be as important a resource as any entertainment from 500 years ago is today.
Anyway, you missed Fort Apocolypse
And Invaderload.
And Spy Hunter.
Ignoring the first two is reasonable, but how COULD you forget the classic game that every C64 had to have.
Except I didn't have it.
Here's a screenshot
Not being a DOpus user myself, I'm not sure if this really shows DOpus well. Seems a shame that all GUI aspects that are ever copied seem to be the Win95 and Mac ones. The Amiga had some wonderfully designed GUI's.
This suggests that ALL data should be made freely available for archiving. If NASA had made an effort to make sure as many people as possible had copies of that data, then you wouldn't need to do all this transferring. It would have been transferred to newer systems by someone already.
Apart from with MAME, nobody is making any effort to archive old computer games. The BBC managed to destroy a lot of valuable origional video tapes (Apparently they taped over their copy of the moon landings). These show that data is kept around much longer if copying is encouraged rather than discouraged.
Assuming that I have no information about a Disk Drive, then I agree that it would be unreadable, but not punchcards. If you know about the alphabet, then ASCII punchcards containing source code probably wouldn't be too hard to decypher.
Newspapers are frequently archived using photographic reduction. These are expected to last a very long time. Reading these just requires a very good magnifying glass.
Even CD's would probably be quite easy to decode and decypher with technology equivalent to ours.
Also, we keep a lot of data around purely for future historians. I think destroying everything, or even just that part of all the worlds data stored to prevent decay would be virtually impossible.
What might be harder to decypher than the technology is the language that these are written in. We need to start making some Rosetta Stones, and burying them all over the world.
A different article on the page (About Linux being used for spying) says:
"The name Linux ("Line X") was coined because the kernel can extract any arbitrary line of intelligence from any document it has access to"
So obviously it was pointless expecting DVD's to remain secure when exposed to such a powerful system
Yes. I agree that it would be unfair to some companies, and might discourage them from applying for patents that are actually beneficial to humanity.
It also fails to prevent a company with a trivial patent from getting more trivial patents as a counterattack.
The problem is that I couldn't think of another means of licencing that is objective.
Still, I think the idea could be workable with a little more thought.
My line manager explained the way patent infringement works.
Both companies pile up all their patents, and whoever has the heaviest pile wins.
Most companies actually use their patents defensively, or arrange a swapping deal. If the patent is actually useful, then they are usually tolerant of people experimenting with it as long as they don't try to use it directly against them, because the patent will still apply to possible derived technologies, which will make the patent that its derived from more valuable.
The difficulty comes from the companies with a single patent that their whole business is based on. Then the patent is more valuable to them to keep a stranglehold on the market, by eliminating direct competition.
If we created a patent and allowed everyone to use it, then these companies would still be able to use this ill-mannered behaviour simply because we can't patent everything. I think what we really need is some patents with a licence that allows free use for non-profit purposes, and free use to all organisations who own no patents. The patent could be donated to a non-profit organisation, who would fund the patent applications by charging reasonable licencing fees to large companies. Most companies who can afford patents can afford a reasonable licensing fee. The licence fee would be used only to cover costs, and fund the occasional counter suit if a company tries to prevent an open source rival by using a trivial patent.
Well, there's dozens of places in the UK where you can get multi region DVD players.
These might not be quite so popular in the US because they get most films before everyone else anyway.
Just think of what could happen if we win this case. Suddenly, all the developers who have agreed to licenses for using CSS code can bypass those licenses and save some dough in the process. A new breed of players could crop up, designed by people/groups who have the programming ability but not the cash to afford a license.
Totally true, but also remember that the movie industry currently is using this licence to control the electronics industry. No electronics company really wants single region DVD players. Regions were just introduced to appease the movie industry. If this case gets through, there's nothing stopping them from producing multi-region players, with macrovision disabled by default.
On you second birthday, your parents bought you a really wonderful present.
And you discarded it and played with thte box for the whole day
4: The transistor.
Not sure if I agree with this one. The transistor was just a new type of electronic switch, which could be used in much the same way as a valve or a relay. Without the invention (or discovery for us Roswell conspiracy nuts) of this, we would have seen the reduction of the size of the valve. So perhaps #4 should be the electronic switch (Whichever came first. Valve or relay?)
Personally I think that everyones making far too much noise about this.
The excuse is that George Lucas wants to spend time on it himself. Any really greedy corporation would just churn out a generic DVD with virtually no features, and then release a "Special Edition" at twice the price after a year, then release a special Boxed set with "Special George Lucas Edition" extra features after Episode 3.
It is conceivable that George Lucas genuinly doesn't want to release a half baked product.
Finally, please remember that as he is the creator of Star Wars, he deserves the right to release it as and when he wants. Even if you disagree with it. No-one is forcing you to buy the video.
even if Regions were removed from DVDs the versions on sale in the UK will still be butchered and less featured thanks to the BBFC.
Which is precisely why I don't like regional encoding.
The BBFC has no power to prevent people from importing films that aren't regulated, nor are they really concerned. It is illegal to sell imported DVD's in England, but not to buy them. We have always had the right to watch them if we are willing to go to the effort of importing them. The Film industry are the ones who want to stop us from doing this.
The ironic thing is that it seems that the availability of region free DVD's has actually made more people realise that the DVD import market exists. No-one I knew bothered to import NTSC VHS tapes.
It is legal to reverse engineer in Norway
Do the MPA actually have any proof that DeCSS has been used to pirate DVD's? If they don't actually have any DVD's that they can prove were pirated using DeCSS, then surely its quite a hard case to prove.
Why not learn how to use GTK?
I take it you've never used Blitz Basic. It really is a wonderful package for doing what the Amigas good at (i.e games with lots of fast moving graphics)
I'd love to see a verion of Blitz for Linux. Despiter its flaws (Full of arbitrary limits, and actually more cryptic when creating windows than the C interface due to lack of #defines) it really was fun to use.
Really? I thought the benefit of RSA was that it allowed public Key encryption, that could not usefully be broken even if you knew the algorithm and decryption key.
Bletchley Park of all people should know not to rely on the secrecy of the algorithm.