I believe this also applies to patents. In any case, I was wondering if it did apply to copyright. Two people say no. Does anyone claim to be authoritative on this question?
Isn't there some legal precedent for copyright not having been defended over a period of time making the copyright moot? Clearly people have been implementing Java APIs for 1000s of years without law suits from Oracle or Sun. It is only recently that Oracle has decided to go after Google (specifically acquiring Sun to do so?) that these suits have been brought. Doesn't it make the suits baseless simply because of the fact of Sun/Oracle's ignoring the issue for so many years previous?
As much as I want the model proposed in the article to be successful (it would be the best scenario AFAICT), remember Cyan's Uru? That was precisely the model, and they failed miserably because there wasn't enough adoption to keep them afloat.
I have a TiVo HD (series 3) and pay $100 per year for it. I rent a cable card from Comcast for $3/month and it allows both of my tuners to record simultaneously.
I have what you have, and it's costing me $15.50 a month + the cost of the TiVo. I love the UI of the TiVo and really LOATHE the Comcast DVR's - with which I am very familiar due to my girlfriend working at Comcast and getting one for free.
The sad thing about the Computer Museum is that almost nothing there works.
I work with the young man who shot holes in the first Amdahl prototype they have there. He was Gene Amdahl's grandson, and he used it for (.22?) target practice in the family basement according to the docent I was talking with. I have never asked Saxon about this, but I bet he did it.
Having worked for Alcatel in the.COM boom time, I can tell you it's completely within character for them to build something cockamamie and then force it to be popular by dint of their market position. They're the French telecomm version of Microsoft, after all!
I dunno - USABILITY maybe? People shouldn't have to read the manual or do much of anything to get good pictures. Rocket science is for DSLRs, but even those should help you a LOT. The menu systems in cameras suck, there is no on-screen help if you want it (Why? Camera software could easily be 512MB on soldered flash and still add nearly zero cost to the camera. Why can't the "help" system HELP YOU - with full screen pictorial help, even animated examples?)
Cameras with huge microprocessors and fast DSPs still make crappy pictures in situations that are simple to identify. Cameras still let lots of people try to use the flash when it's useless because the photographer is 50M from the subject. Cameras could give users a countdown of remaining power in the batteries of the camera - in terms of number of shots left both WITH and WITHOUT flash. They could have built-in WiFi rather than requiring some kludgey flash slot after market WiFi thing to copy your pictures to your computer. Rechargeable cameras should use a STANDARD CONNECTOR for the charger rather than playing the stupid cell phone charger game.
We lemmings seem willing to follow the marketing folks over the cliff of ever more expensive, stupidly complex gadgets with higher and higher complexity, yet useless, capabilities. Why doesn't someone (Apple?) make cameras that are simple to use and do a good job without playing the game of higher gigahertz, gigabytes, megapixels, etc.?
I admit there are a few products (but not cameras, really) that exist that accomplish I'm talking about: Wii, iPod, iPhone, Tivo, probably others.
Dude. 1kw/m2 is 100% efficiency at noon at the mid-latitudes. Given efficiency losses, you will see 0.25kw/m2 and that's just not a hell of a lot of power even on a huge car (which takes MORE POWER to drive) with 3m2 of (really expensive and fragile!) solar cells.
Cars need DOZENS of kw to accelerate and at least a few kw to run reasonably at highway speeds. You're only solving 10% to 25% of the problem - at best - with solar.
Moving the power supply from a polluting/global warming hydrocarbon fuel tank + engine to a battery that stores energy derived from a huge infrastructure we already own is a BIG WIN. We can expand and improve that infrastructure incrementally (making it greener, etc.) as we go, not only making this world's growth rate POSSIBLE but also avoiding the obvious downside of killing our planetary economy through infinite wait + global warming + oil/(stupid)ethanol/biofuel silliness.
We have seen such pseudo-ballsy (sorry - Ballmersy) blather for months now. In the immortal words of Teh Bard: "Methinks he doth protest too much." These guys are worried. Bog only knows why, exactly.
Heh. I found a page at freescale.com yesterday that actually just closed my IE browser window (I was in the lab at work using a lab PC). I downloaded Firefox, installed it on the lab machine, and went to the same page - and voila! - it worked perfectly. Perhaps someone at Freescale is just a tad pro-Firefox? [snicker]
I saw this while at a meeting on Elliott Avenue West (around 351) on Tuesday 22jan2007 - ad hoc network showed up called Free Wifi. It disappeared in the space of 30 minutes while I was investigating further.
Slight correction to this. I was one of the nine people who initially worked on StarTrek. We started in early July of 1992 and had a mandatory (and richly bonused!) goal of completing the demonstration prototype by Halloween of the same year, which we did. In January we started hiring to a plan to build StarTrek as a product. It was in April or May (of 1993) that Apple got cold feet and decided to chicken out on the project. If they had carried forward, who knows what would have resulted? Not me.
If you want to read about this stuff, check out the Jim Carlton book Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders. It's pretty accurate, even if Carlton is a certified asshole.
Phil Koch and I got Nagel to fund the Copland project in late 1993. This would have delivered approximately what MacOS X is now, but in late 1995. They lost at least five years by allowing Steve Jobs to buy Apple for -$400M. Not that I'm bitter or anything...
The proper term is "X Window System" as Bob Scheifler(sp?) has always been happy to pound into everyone's head.
The author says that the Xlib API uses K&R prototypes which is simply untrue (and never has been). The Xlib.h interface file, for example, has the option of conditially supporting really old compilers that don't have ANSI prototype capability, but this is almost never used anymore. The prototypes are there, and lots of excellent programming practices can be found therein.
(By the way, I'm not associated with any X related business and have no axe to grind other than assuring accurate reporting. I did develop most of the original X server for MacOS, which was, of course, named MacX.)
Printer catches fire bug
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
WAY back in the old line printer days, a former coworker of mine worked as a summer intern at DEC. He was screening bugs in TOPS10 - a mainframe OS in the 70s and early 80s. He got a bug report, with attached tape containing a binary file, that complained: When the attached file is printed on the line printer, the printer catches fire.The REPEATABLE box was checked!
It seems that a lazy computer operator (remember those guys?) didn't like getting up from his chair to separate the users' print jobs. So, laziness being the true mother of invention, he created a job trailer banner page that included hundreds of overstruck lines completely filled with "_" characters. These had the effect of hammering a line across the paper that eventually cut the paper off at that point.
Apparently, the drum printers of the day couldn't survive hitting all solenoids simultaneously on every rotation of the drum, so they were overheating, causing (at least) some serious smoking, and maybe a bit of excitement.
The real problem is the broadband investment meltdowns that are occurring around the world with annoying frequency.
There are several vendors building hardware in this space. For example, a bunch of my friends and former Packet Engines coworkers started World Wide Packets, which builds boxes that amount to the same thing. They're a two year old startup that is waiting for a market to appear for their hardware. Their stuff rocks, but they only make equipment and don't control the deployment.
FYI Packet Engines was
acquired by Alcatel in late 1998. They managed to bungle their way through the acquisition of several companies in a short time, completely
crushing out of existence some very promising technology through truly appalling corporate stupidity during what was the biggest boom time in history for ethernet and IP routing infrastructure manufacturers.
Alas, Packet Engines and nearly all of the others are now almost completely gone.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe this also applies to patents. In any case, I was wondering if it did apply to copyright. Two people say no. Does anyone claim to be authoritative on this question?
Dude. The Irony Light was brilliantly illuminated. 1000s of years in this world is really only a few orbits of the Earth around the sun.
Isn't there some legal precedent for copyright not having been defended over a period of time making the copyright moot? Clearly people have been implementing Java APIs for 1000s of years without law suits from Oracle or Sun. It is only recently that Oracle has decided to go after Google (specifically acquiring Sun to do so?) that these suits have been brought. Doesn't it make the suits baseless simply because of the fact of Sun/Oracle's ignoring the issue for so many years previous?
As much as I want the model proposed in the article to be successful (it would be the best scenario AFAICT), remember Cyan's Uru? That was precisely the model, and they failed miserably because there wasn't enough adoption to keep them afloat.
I have a TiVo HD (series 3) and pay $100 per year for it. I rent a cable card from Comcast for $3/month and it allows both of my tuners to record simultaneously.
I have what you have, and it's costing me $15.50 a month + the cost of the TiVo. I love the UI of the TiVo and really LOATHE the Comcast DVR's - with which I am very familiar due to my girlfriend working at Comcast and getting one for free.
The sad thing about the Computer Museum is that almost nothing there works.
I work with the young man who shot holes in the first Amdahl prototype they have there. He was Gene Amdahl's grandson, and he used it for (.22?) target practice in the family basement according to the docent I was talking with. I have never asked Saxon about this, but I bet he did it.
Also, check out the keyboard on this beast! Not QUERTY. Not DVORAK. Who thought that would be a good idea?
Having worked for Alcatel in the .COM boom time, I can tell you it's completely within character for them to build something cockamamie and then force it to be popular by dint of their market position. They're the French telecomm version of Microsoft, after all!
I dunno - USABILITY maybe? People shouldn't have to read the manual or do much of anything to get good pictures. Rocket science is for DSLRs, but even those should help you a LOT. The menu systems in cameras suck, there is no on-screen help if you want it (Why? Camera software could easily be 512MB on soldered flash and still add nearly zero cost to the camera. Why can't the "help" system HELP YOU - with full screen pictorial help, even animated examples?)
Cameras with huge microprocessors and fast DSPs still make crappy pictures in situations that are simple to identify. Cameras still let lots of people try to use the flash when it's useless because the photographer is 50M from the subject. Cameras could give users a countdown of remaining power in the batteries of the camera - in terms of number of shots left both WITH and WITHOUT flash. They could have built-in WiFi rather than requiring some kludgey flash slot after market WiFi thing to copy your pictures to your computer. Rechargeable cameras should use a STANDARD CONNECTOR for the charger rather than playing the stupid cell phone charger game.
We lemmings seem willing to follow the marketing folks over the cliff of ever more expensive, stupidly complex gadgets with higher and higher complexity, yet useless, capabilities. Why doesn't someone (Apple?) make cameras that are simple to use and do a good job without playing the game of higher gigahertz, gigabytes, megapixels, etc.?
I admit there are a few products (but not cameras, really) that exist that accomplish I'm talking about: Wii, iPod, iPhone, Tivo, probably others.
Dude. 1kw/m2 is 100% efficiency at noon at the mid-latitudes. Given efficiency losses, you will see 0.25kw/m2 and that's just not a hell of a lot of power even on a huge car (which takes MORE POWER to drive) with 3m2 of (really expensive and fragile!) solar cells.
Cars need DOZENS of kw to accelerate and at least a few kw to run reasonably at highway speeds. You're only solving 10% to 25% of the problem - at best - with solar.
Moving the power supply from a polluting/global warming hydrocarbon fuel tank + engine to a battery that stores energy derived from a huge infrastructure we already own is a BIG WIN. We can expand and improve that infrastructure incrementally (making it greener, etc.) as we go, not only making this world's growth rate POSSIBLE but also avoiding the obvious downside of killing our planetary economy through infinite wait + global warming + oil/(stupid)ethanol/biofuel silliness.
Apple's System7 was released a LONG time ago. Microsoft is only about fifteen years late!
We have seen such pseudo-ballsy (sorry - Ballmersy) blather for months now. In the immortal words of Teh Bard: "Methinks he doth protest too much." These guys are worried. Bog only knows why, exactly.
Heh. I found a page at freescale.com yesterday that actually just closed my IE browser window (I was in the lab at work using a lab PC). I downloaded Firefox, installed it on the lab machine, and went to the same page - and voila! - it worked perfectly. Perhaps someone at Freescale is just a tad pro-Firefox? [snicker]
Or does any headline starting with "Bill would require..." make me - by reflex - think Gates is up to his old world domination tricks again?
I saw this while at a meeting on Elliott Avenue West (around 351) on Tuesday 22jan2007 - ad hoc network showed up called Free Wifi. It disappeared in the space of 30 minutes while I was investigating further.
If you want to read about this stuff, check out the Jim Carlton book Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders. It's pretty accurate, even if Carlton is a certified asshole.
Phil Koch and I got Nagel to fund the Copland project in late 1993. This would have delivered approximately what MacOS X is now, but in late 1995. They lost at least five years by allowing Steve Jobs to buy Apple for -$400M. Not that I'm bitter or anything...
The author says that the Xlib API uses K&R prototypes which is simply untrue (and never has been). The Xlib.h interface file, for example, has the option of conditially supporting really old compilers that don't have ANSI prototype capability, but this is almost never used anymore. The prototypes are there, and lots of excellent programming practices can be found therein.
(By the way, I'm not associated with any X related business and have no axe to grind other than assuring accurate reporting. I did develop most of the original X server for MacOS, which was, of course, named MacX.)
It seems that a lazy computer operator (remember those guys?) didn't like getting up from his chair to separate the users' print jobs. So, laziness being the true mother of invention, he created a job trailer banner page that included hundreds of overstruck lines completely filled with "_" characters. These had the effect of hammering a line across the paper that eventually cut the paper off at that point.
Apparently, the drum printers of the day couldn't survive hitting all solenoids simultaneously on every rotation of the drum, so they were overheating, causing (at least) some serious smoking, and maybe a bit of excitement.
There are several vendors building hardware in this space. For example, a bunch of my friends and former Packet Engines coworkers started World Wide Packets, which builds boxes that amount to the same thing. They're a two year old startup that is waiting for a market to appear for their hardware. Their stuff rocks, but they only make equipment and don't control the deployment.
FYI Packet Engines was acquired by Alcatel in late 1998. They managed to bungle their way through the acquisition of several companies in a short time, completely crushing out of existence some very promising technology through truly appalling corporate stupidity during what was the biggest boom time in history for ethernet and IP routing infrastructure manufacturers.
Alas, Packet Engines and nearly all of the others are now almost completely gone.