You cannot copyright raw information, such as a list of phone numbers in a telephone book.
I think this precedence should be applied here as well. It should also be applied to the perl module that "screen scraped" a TV's listing page. Although you can't copy the overall look of the page, the raw information is free (as in speech) to be used.
It's unfortunate that licensing agreements are now trumping copyright limits.
I have worked with Folio Infobases for many years as a hobby.
With their v2 dos-based infobases, they had a free viewer that could open the contents and dump out a txt file.
With their v3 16-bit based software/infobases, they also had a viewer for 3.0 infobases, but stopped it when they started v3.1x infobases. Fortunately, the 3.0 viewer could read the 3.1x infobases, but it wasn't widely distributed.
With their v4 32-bit based software/infobases, they greatly improved the performance of the database, increased it's total size, and brought the UI up to the "standard" win32 interface.
They have proprietary compression algorithms to compress the built infobases. The APIs that are available from the company are only into the.dlls so you can tweak a custom interface, but the raw data is pretty much locked down.
You can include images and even raw data like Excel spreadsheets into the infobase so you can share a single file and it has all the data inclusive to itself. It's a very powerful format.
There is also the ability (within the infobase itself) to lock down the contents even to the point where a user can't co a ctrl-c to copy text to the clipboard, or prevent an "export" of text out to.doc format. Be aware of this so that if you buy the software for $150, there's a chance you might not even be able to get the data out of it. Most infobases aren't locked down that far, but most commercial infobases do prevent the exporting of text to a file.
As for Folio on linux, I've heard win4lin can run Folio just fine. But, you have to have a copy of Folio Views.
http://www.thefiengroup.com sells Folio, but their website is a bit screwed up right now. $150 for the "viewer" program, and $2000 for the developer software (with html/doc/wpd/txt/etc import/convert/compile/build/manage features). Then there is the $2000 Publisher software that actually makes the CD-ROM installation binaries for a product. Then, there is a 5% per copy sale tax with quarterly updates back to Folio. So, it's targeted to data publishers for products.
The Folio Flat File format is SGML-derived. I write a lot of perl scripts to take OCR'd text or html and convert them to properly marked up.fff files.
So, the moral of the story is: If you could come up with a flat file sourced database with an OpenOffice front end to it with full regexp/wildcard/thesaurus/boolean searching down to user-specified context (string/paragraph/article/monthly/entire database), you could have a killer ap for the publishing business. Acrobat PDF is great for brochures and such, but when you have 2GB of text, Folio beats anything out there for less than $25,000 to combine/search/manage/filter it, which it does extremely well and fast.
So, when you were a little kid, were you the class clown type, where all of your humor come naturally and you flaunted it in the lunchroom or in the halls, whether everyone else was laughing at you or not?
Seriously, did you want to become a humourous writer/author when you were a child? When did you realize it could be a viable career?
Thx, Ryan
Already covered on ST:TNG
on
Starcraft
·
· Score: 2
ST:TNG had an episode where Picard went traipsing off looking into microscopic anthropology, or something like that, that his professor was researching when he died.
Picard runs into Klingons, Romulans, etc. and they have a showdown in a cave where Picard and Beverly plug a chunk of junk into the tricorder that then produces a video from our "parents" who "seeded" our galaxy with DNA to start all of the races in ST.
So, now that it's all cleared up, what is this guy trying to come up with now that Roddenberry didn't "discover" first?
Bellesiles resigned before he could be fired after peer review of his books found out that he had been inventing data, misrepresenting historical facts, etc.
He's the one source that is always cited when gun control activists start beating their war drums.
One time NASA came to town and they did this with a raquetball ball. Dipped it in, then threw it against the gymnasium wall and it shattered. Very cool. I picked up off of the floor one of the tiny chunks after the demonstration and kept it;)
My science teacher in high school did this one that I really liked:
Heat up an empty pop can over boiling water (using tongs of some sort), right side up. Then, quickly turn it upside down and plunge it into an icewater bath. It will implode with a small pop and end up almost as small as if you had stomped on it to crush it for recycling.
Here's a question that I've been pondering for a little while:
Since we are so forcefully asserting our right to space-shift music from CDs to mp3s, DVDs to mpeg files, etc, what about books? If you own a physical copy of a book, then why can't you also have an electronic copy to read on breaks while at work, etc?
On the "copyright page" of all new books, they are stating that you can't make any copy of the book, even for archival purposes.
If I can convert music tracks on a CD to mp3, then why can't I scan in a book and have an electronic copy (space shifting) to keep on my laptop's hard drive?
Also, if you look at the big silver capacitor on the bottom right, you can see the black fin mark where the GPU's heatsink overlaps the Capacitor in the original picture.
Also, hold a piece a paper up against the top edge of the board itself. You can see where the two pieces don't form a straight line.;)
and waited YEARS for an OpenGL driver, you'll understand my reservations about Matrox.
They promised an OpenGL driver before the card launched, but it was something like 2 years later before they finally got a crippled one out.
By that time, they had the G400 out, and it could do it (with somewhat reasonable framerates), so to me it looked like they fixed a few hardware issues.
For that reason alone, I won't go with Matrox anymore.
with a Fujitsu 3092DG (Duplex-SCSI) scanner. I'd recommend either a Fujitsu or a Canon DR* scanner.
On the rare occasion that a book doesn't want to feed smoothly, I just stand next to the scanner and loosly put each page on the input. Doing this, I can still queue up about 30 pages, leave for a minute, come back and add more, etc. I've done a 500 page book like this once without ever stopping the scanner.
I chop the spine off at Kinkos, OCR it with TypeReader or FineReader (auto-straighten of skewed images, auto-split of an open-faced 2-page scan on smaller books, despeckle, etc).
I scan at 400dpi, which seems to give just an error or two less than 300dpi without too much extra disk usage.
The biggest thing you can do to adjust OCR result quality is to play with the contrast and brightness settings. I've scanned several books that had about 1 OCR error every 3-4 pages. No, I'm not kidding.
Finereader can output directly to PDF, doc, txt, html, etc.
I have never liked the smell of bit-rot, so I like to keep them close by my desk where I can keep them well-watered and pruned.;)
For years, whenever I've found an article that I've liked, or data that I thought would be useful later on, I've always either saved the.html file or text off to my hard drive, or (lately) used Adobe Acrobat to get the whole page (preserving graphics and layout in one binary file, rather than 100 extra.gif/.jpg images in a directory somewhere).
Ryan
Re:I ordered one of the cards....
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Actually, the $30 coupon originated from Cheetah Mail, an online direct marketing company. So, now they sold your information to a marketing company as well.
The $30 "gift-certificate" (actually a "coupon") also had a few extra strings attached.
What a nice way to "make up for their screw-up."
Also, if you used it, then you forfeit your ability to enter into any class-action lawsuit, or complain in any way after that, or receive any part of a settlement or compromise that could happen at a later date.
The difference is whether you want copyright protection for said program or not. If you want it copyrighted, then hand the source code over to the copyright office, and after x years, they release it upon request, after you have had your chance to make your $$$.
If you don't ever want your source code out there, you don't have to file for a copyright. But, then people could copy/hack the binaries all they wanted.
I've been waiting for a US-available Transmeta-powered laptop for quite a while. Dynamism was one source, but way to expensive. eBay has several Japanese-market laptops for sale all the time (Toshiba L1/L2/L3's) from a guy in Korea (very good reputation though!). I've even seen some of the other Japanese-only Transmeta-powered laptops on eBay from time to time (like the Fujitsu Bibio Loox-T).
The problem is, at 600MHz, the TM5600 just can't quite do full motion DVDs without problems, which is what they promised it could do. There just isn't quite enough horsepower in it. And, the battery life is Good, but not Great. So, all the manufacturers have been waiting for the TM5800 (800MHz) cpus to come out.
In general, the Japanese market is very aggressive with tiny electronic devices like the Sony Picturebooks. But in the US, it's more the bigger screens and CD-RW/DVD drives that sell more units. For this reason, Toshiba, Fujitsu and Sony have several Transmeta-based laptops for sale only in Japan, but not here in the US (yet).
I've been drooling over the Fujitsu P-Series laptop ever since it was put up on their website a few months ago. 3.5lbs, 3+ hours runtime (up to 15 with optional batteries) with an integrated DVD/CD-RW drive. All for $1500 up. The "available by" date has kept creeping later and later though. It originally said in October, then November, then before 2002, and now it says "Will ship in January."
Transmeta is having a few manufacturing problems at the fab, and it's pushing everything back. This also hurts the manufacturers in trusting the company any further.
Also, Transmeta has had a high CEO rollover rate the last few months, causing worry about the internal health/vision of the company.
The other problem is Intel got all worried about it and developed their Ultra Low Voltage chips which are also coming out in laptops over the next few months. Dell is rumored to have an ultra-cool 3lb unit with this chip in it. 700MHz, with the same power usage as Transmeta, same run time, but with the Intel brand name behind it. I bet this will sell very well, especially to the corporate/college student market.
Overall, Transmeta was a good idea, but poorly executed for the laptop market. Intel will squash them in the next 6 months. But, Transmeta, with their code-morphing technology, has a lot of other markets to work with (low-power/small size servers, etc) and their TM6000 chip is supposed to be an all-in-one web-pad solution type chip. Small-footprint laptops is just one possible market for their technology, with a big gorilla hanging around the banana tree.
So, instead of hoping for a Transmeta-based laptop for Christmas, wait a few months and get the best one you can find from the soon-to-be-released chips (with either Transmeta or Intel inside).
Researchers with a Canadian exploration company said
they filmed over the summer ruins of a possible submerged "lost city" off the Guanahacabibes Peninsula on the Caribbean island's western tip.
Did they use a helicopter to "film over" a civilization's "summer ruins"? Now the hunt begins in Alaska for their "winter ruins" that are possibly on top of a mountain.
And you thought snowbirds are a recent problem!
Also, look at the phrase "possible submerged 'lost city.'" Under 2100 feet of water and they still call it "possible." How much more evidence do they need???
See, it's people like you that are a drain on the internet, causing companies to go out of business because of the bandwidth that can't be accounted for, yet has to be paid for upstream.
Turn off the modem, I say, and start paying for a slower connection with horrible customer service before you run another clueless company into the ground.
You have half of it here, but here's the other half.
The beauty of the constitution is the fact that it balances and spreads the power out to different people/branches. And it has the "checks and balances" to try to keep any one or two of the three from acquiring more power to itself, usually to the detriment of the others.
Globalization aims to concentrate power into a small clique or group, which might or might not of itself become corrupted.
The real threat is that once the power is concentrated into a small group, that group can be influenced (and corrupted) from other "interested" parties.
As long as the power is decentralized (as in the original intent of the Constitution), many people would have to be "corrupted" before the balance could be shifted by outside forces. Once that power is concentrated, it's a much smaller, more enticing and powerfull target.
Because of a hardware issue, all KT7* motherboards before rev 1.3 will not work with XP processors. Abit has released a new bios for v1.3 and newer motherboards that give it XP support. Since you probably don't have the KT7a model, and a fairly "old" processor, I'd assume yours is a pre-v1.3 model.
Check for the rev on the motherboard to be sure. Or, if you feel lucky (or careless like I did, since I didn't read their warning at the top of the page and got the 1.3 bios since it was the top one), try flashing your board with the 1.3 compatible bios and see if it works or not. It said it wasn't compatible with my board and simply dropped back to a dos prompt. No damage done though.
One thing about carbon dating and other systems like it make on BIG assumption: the rate of decay has stayed constant through eons of time and massive climate changes.
What if it hasn't stayed constant? What if it's on an exponential rate itself? What if it decayed at a slower/faster rate 1 million years ago? What if an asteroid collision (or some other massive geological event) caused a limited duration decay acceleration?
Actually, 802.11a is in the 5GHz range. This is a reserved frequency spectrum, unlike 2.4 GHz (Bluetooth, HomeRF, cordless phone, microwave oven interference).
All of your arguments are great, for a corporate presentation. This is talking about average personal use to get a bunch of friends in the neighborhood to have some low-latency quake3 games without having a LAN party at one person's house, or sharing a cable modem, etc.
For personal use, the "fragil[ity]" is acceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's hope AMD doesn't try to copy this...
Yah, then Intel could sue them for patent infringement!
Sheesh, you'd think people would learn something here.
You cannot copyright raw information, such as a list of phone numbers in a telephone book.
I think this precedence should be applied here as well. It should also be applied to the perl module that "screen scraped" a TV's listing page. Although you can't copy the overall look of the page, the raw information is free (as in speech) to be used.
It's unfortunate that licensing agreements are now trumping copyright limits.
I have worked with Folio Infobases for many years as a hobby.
.dlls so you can tweak a custom interface, but the raw data is pretty much locked down.
.doc format. Be aware of this so that if you buy the software for $150, there's a chance you might not even be able to get the data out of it. Most infobases aren't locked down that far, but most commercial infobases do prevent the exporting of text to a file.
.fff files.
With their v2 dos-based infobases, they had a free viewer that could open the contents and dump out a txt file.
With their v3 16-bit based software/infobases, they also had a viewer for 3.0 infobases, but stopped it when they started v3.1x infobases. Fortunately, the 3.0 viewer could read the 3.1x infobases, but it wasn't widely distributed.
With their v4 32-bit based software/infobases, they greatly improved the performance of the database, increased it's total size, and brought the UI up to the "standard" win32 interface.
They have proprietary compression algorithms to compress the built infobases. The APIs that are available from the company are only into the
You can include images and even raw data like Excel spreadsheets into the infobase so you can share a single file and it has all the data inclusive to itself. It's a very powerful format.
There is also the ability (within the infobase itself) to lock down the contents even to the point where a user can't co a ctrl-c to copy text to the clipboard, or prevent an "export" of text out to
As for Folio on linux, I've heard win4lin can run Folio just fine. But, you have to have a copy of Folio Views.
http://www.thefiengroup.com sells Folio, but their website is a bit screwed up right now. $150 for the "viewer" program, and $2000 for the developer software (with html/doc/wpd/txt/etc import/convert/compile/build/manage features). Then there is the $2000 Publisher software that actually makes the CD-ROM installation binaries for a product. Then, there is a 5% per copy sale tax with quarterly updates back to Folio. So, it's targeted to data publishers for products.
The Folio Flat File format is SGML-derived. I write a lot of perl scripts to take OCR'd text or html and convert them to properly marked up
So, the moral of the story is: If you could come up with a flat file sourced database with an OpenOffice front end to it with full regexp/wildcard/thesaurus/boolean searching down to user-specified context (string/paragraph/article/monthly/entire database), you could have a killer ap for the publishing business. Acrobat PDF is great for brochures and such, but when you have 2GB of text, Folio beats anything out there for less than $25,000 to combine/search/manage/filter it, which it does extremely well and fast.
Ryan
Dave,
So, when you were a little kid, were you the class clown type, where all of your humor come naturally and you flaunted it in the lunchroom or in the halls, whether everyone else was laughing at you or not?
Seriously, did you want to become a humourous writer/author when you were a child? When did you realize it could be a viable career?
Thx,
Ryan
ST:TNG had an episode where Picard went traipsing off looking into microscopic anthropology, or something like that, that his professor was researching when he died.
Picard runs into Klingons, Romulans, etc. and they have a showdown in a cave where Picard and Beverly plug a chunk of junk into the tricorder that then produces a video from our "parents" who "seeded" our galaxy with DNA to start all of the races in ST.
So, now that it's all cleared up, what is this guy trying to come up with now that Roddenberry didn't "discover" first?
Coldmist
Bellesiles resigned before he could be fired after peer review of his books found out that he had been inventing data, misrepresenting historical facts, etc.
He's the one source that is always cited when gun control activists start beating their war drums.
Do any google search to get info.
So, please take this into account when looking for information on this topic.
Coldmist
Shattering things with liquid nitrogen
One time NASA came to town and they did this with a raquetball ball. Dipped it in, then threw it against the gymnasium wall and it shattered. Very cool. I picked up off of the floor one of the tiny chunks after the demonstration and kept it ;)
My science teacher in high school did this one that I really liked:
Heat up an empty pop can over boiling water (using tongs of some sort), right side up. Then, quickly turn it upside down and plunge it into an icewater bath. It will implode with a small pop and end up almost as small as if you had stomped on it to crush it for recycling.
Here's a question that I've been pondering for a little while:
Since we are so forcefully asserting our right to space-shift music from CDs to mp3s, DVDs to mpeg files, etc, what about books? If you own a physical copy of a book, then why can't you also have an electronic copy to read on breaks while at work, etc?
On the "copyright page" of all new books, they are stating that you can't make any copy of the book, even for archival purposes.
If I can convert music tracks on a CD to mp3, then why can't I scan in a book and have an electronic copy (space shifting) to keep on my laptop's hard drive?
Just a question.
The player controls the robot by issuing commands.
You'd think they would have better package handling standards than USPS and/or UPS!
http://ars.flyingember.com/
There are some pretty good recipes in there!!!
Check it out!
Also, if you look at the big silver capacitor on the bottom right, you can see the black fin mark where the GPU's heatsink overlaps the Capacitor in the original picture.
;)
Also, hold a piece a paper up against the top edge of the board itself. You can see where the two pieces don't form a straight line.
and waited YEARS for an OpenGL driver, you'll understand my reservations about Matrox.
They promised an OpenGL driver before the card launched, but it was something like 2 years later before they finally got a crippled one out.
By that time, they had the G400 out, and it could do it (with somewhat reasonable framerates), so to me it looked like they fixed a few hardware issues.
For that reason alone, I won't go with Matrox anymore.
with a Fujitsu 3092DG (Duplex-SCSI) scanner. I'd recommend either a Fujitsu or a Canon DR* scanner.
On the rare occasion that a book doesn't want to feed smoothly, I just stand next to the scanner and loosly put each page on the input. Doing this, I can still queue up about 30 pages, leave for a minute, come back and add more, etc. I've done a 500 page book like this once without ever stopping the scanner.
I chop the spine off at Kinkos, OCR it with TypeReader or FineReader (auto-straighten of skewed images, auto-split of an open-faced 2-page scan on smaller books, despeckle, etc).
I scan at 400dpi, which seems to give just an error or two less than 300dpi without too much extra disk usage.
The biggest thing you can do to adjust OCR result quality is to play with the contrast and brightness settings. I've scanned several books that had about 1 OCR error every 3-4 pages. No, I'm not kidding.
Finereader can output directly to PDF, doc, txt, html, etc.
I have never liked the smell of bit-rot, so I like to keep them close by my desk where I can keep them well-watered and pruned. ;)
.html file or text off to my hard drive, or (lately) used Adobe Acrobat to get the whole page (preserving graphics and layout in one binary file, rather than 100 extra .gif/.jpg images in a directory somewhere).
For years, whenever I've found an article that I've liked, or data that I thought would be useful later on, I've always either saved the
Ryan
Actually, the $30 coupon originated from Cheetah Mail, an online direct marketing company. So, now they sold your information to a marketing company as well.
The $30 "gift-certificate" (actually a "coupon") also had a few extra strings attached.
What a nice way to "make up for their screw-up."
Also, if you used it, then you forfeit your ability to enter into any class-action lawsuit, or complain in any way after that, or receive any part of a settlement or compromise that could happen at a later date.
From the way I understand it from Lessig,
The difference is whether you want copyright protection for said program or not. If you want it copyrighted, then hand the source code over to the copyright office, and after x years, they release it upon request, after you have had your chance to make your $$$.
If you don't ever want your source code out there, you don't have to file for a copyright. But, then people could copy/hack the binaries all they wanted.
Interesting tradeoff!
but maybe not with Linux support.
usbdrive
thumbdrive
"Q" drive
I've been waiting for a US-available Transmeta-powered laptop for quite a while. Dynamism was one source, but way to expensive. eBay has several Japanese-market laptops for sale all the time (Toshiba L1/L2/L3's) from a guy in Korea (very good reputation though!). I've even seen some of the other Japanese-only Transmeta-powered laptops on eBay from time to time (like the Fujitsu Bibio Loox-T).
The problem is, at 600MHz, the TM5600 just can't quite do full motion DVDs without problems, which is what they promised it could do. There just isn't quite enough horsepower in it. And, the battery life is Good, but not Great. So, all the manufacturers have been waiting for the TM5800 (800MHz) cpus to come out.
In general, the Japanese market is very aggressive with tiny electronic devices like the Sony Picturebooks. But in the US, it's more the bigger screens and CD-RW/DVD drives that sell more units. For this reason, Toshiba, Fujitsu and Sony have several Transmeta-based laptops for sale only in Japan, but not here in the US (yet).
I've been drooling over the Fujitsu P-Series laptop ever since it was put up on their website a few months ago. 3.5lbs, 3+ hours runtime (up to 15 with optional batteries) with an integrated DVD/CD-RW drive. All for $1500 up. The "available by" date has kept creeping later and later though. It originally said in October, then November, then before 2002, and now it says "Will ship in January."
Transmeta is having a few manufacturing problems at the fab, and it's pushing everything back. This also hurts the manufacturers in trusting the company any further.
Also, Transmeta has had a high CEO rollover rate the last few months, causing worry about the internal health/vision of the company.
The other problem is Intel got all worried about it and developed their Ultra Low Voltage chips which are also coming out in laptops over the next few months. Dell is rumored to have an ultra-cool 3lb unit with this chip in it. 700MHz, with the same power usage as Transmeta, same run time, but with the Intel brand name behind it. I bet this will sell very well, especially to the corporate/college student market.
Overall, Transmeta was a good idea, but poorly executed for the laptop market. Intel will squash them in the next 6 months. But, Transmeta, with their code-morphing technology, has a lot of other markets to work with (low-power/small size servers, etc) and their TM6000 chip is supposed to be an all-in-one web-pad solution type chip. Small-footprint laptops is just one possible market for their technology, with a big gorilla hanging around the banana tree.
So, instead of hoping for a Transmeta-based laptop for Christmas, wait a few months and get the best one you can find from the soon-to-be-released chips (with either Transmeta or Intel inside).
Here's another one:
Did they use a helicopter to "film over" a civilization's "summer ruins"? Now the hunt begins in Alaska for their "winter ruins" that are possibly on top of a mountain.
And you thought snowbirds are a recent problem!
Also, look at the phrase "possible submerged 'lost city.'" Under 2100 feet of water and they still call it "possible." How much more evidence do they need???
See, it's people like you that are a drain on the internet, causing companies to go out of business because of the bandwidth that can't be accounted for, yet has to be paid for upstream.
Turn off the modem, I say, and start paying for a slower connection with horrible customer service before you run another clueless company into the ground.
It's all your fault! ;)
You have half of it here, but here's the other half.
The beauty of the constitution is the fact that it balances and spreads the power out to different people/branches. And it has the "checks and balances" to try to keep any one or two of the three from acquiring more power to itself, usually to the detriment of the others.
Globalization aims to concentrate power into a small clique or group, which might or might not of itself become corrupted.
The real threat is that once the power is concentrated into a small group, that group can be influenced (and corrupted) from other "interested" parties.
As long as the power is decentralized (as in the original intent of the Constitution), many people would have to be "corrupted" before the balance could be shifted by outside forces. Once that power is concentrated, it's a much smaller, more enticing and powerfull target.
Because of a hardware issue, all KT7* motherboards before rev 1.3 will not work with XP processors. Abit has released a new bios for v1.3 and newer motherboards that give it XP support. Since you probably don't have the KT7a model, and a fairly "old" processor, I'd assume yours is a pre-v1.3 model.
Check for the rev on the motherboard to be sure. Or, if you feel lucky (or careless like I did, since I didn't read their warning at the top of the page and got the 1.3 bios since it was the top one), try flashing your board with the 1.3 compatible bios and see if it works or not. It said it wasn't compatible with my board and simply dropped back to a dos prompt. No damage done though.
See Abit's bios page for details.
One thing about carbon dating and other systems like it make on BIG assumption: the rate of decay has stayed constant through eons of time and massive climate changes.
What if it hasn't stayed constant? What if it's on an exponential rate itself? What if it decayed at a slower/faster rate 1 million years ago? What if an asteroid collision (or some other massive geological event) caused a limited duration decay acceleration?
The list can go on and on.
Actually, 802.11a is in the 5GHz range. This is a reserved frequency spectrum, unlike 2.4 GHz (Bluetooth, HomeRF, cordless phone, microwave oven interference).
All of your arguments are great, for a corporate presentation. This is talking about average personal use to get a bunch of friends in the neighborhood to have some low-latency quake3 games without having a LAN party at one person's house, or sharing a cable modem, etc.
For personal use, the "fragil[ity]" is acceptable.