I was going to say that an obfuscated Perl contest made about as much sense as an obfuscated APL contest. I mean, how could you tell?
(BTW, I did APL tech support for a couple of years. It is possible to write unobfuscated APL, but actually seeing an unobfuscated APL program "in the wild" is about as likely as seeing an unobfuscated Perl script.)
APL is a terminal disease -- joke dating back to when APL was run on mainframes from terminals with wierd character sets.
What would happen if a copyright owner, who is not an MPAA member, and instead had their own terms for permission, released a CSS-protected DVD, is subject to speculation. I think it would have some very interesting consequences.
Heh, technically that makes every commercial DVD player and DVD software a "device for bypassing access control", putting the entire DVD industry at jeopardy.
Now, the catch that makes it hard to convince a judge to find that way is that you didn't have to use CSS to encode your DVD, and that doing so is implicitly granting permission to all those existing DVD-player owners to access the content of your DVD. (OTOH, by that same logic, one could argue that anyone producing a CSS-scrambled DVD after DeCSS was made public is similarly granting implicit permission to use DeCSS or similar programs to access their content. Although I think you'd have a hard time finding a judge that would buy that logic, either.)
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Doesn't the Microsoft Office EULA specify that you may only license the software if you own a legitimate license for any of their Windows 9x - NT - 2000 software?
Sounds like the sort of thing they'd include in their license, yeah, but so what? Why on Earth would you own a copy of Office (for Windows) if you didn't already have a Windows system to run it on? Hopefully they didn't word the license to prevent you from running it on non-Windows systems, because it probably never occurred to them that anybody would. That will change.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Well... the S/390 port runs on a VM, so Linux doesn't know the kind of power that is actually down there..
Nope, the S/390 port runs either in a VM or natively. You can boot up a 390 with Linux as your only OS, and then it definitely knows about the whole machine.
It's just that far more people are likely to have access to a VM running on a 390 than there are that have a whole 390 to play with.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Now there's an interesting thought. That certainly makes it legal for me to reverse engineer any of the software on those CD's. Although I must say I'm not sure why anybody would bother. Probably still wouldn't let you copy and distribute anything off of it -- they're giving you a copy, like a book.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
old enough to not have the new RPC-2 region controls
Well, there is that. Mine predates those (it was what, anything manufactured after January or February of this year?) but yes, the newer ones will probably have them (or not be able to play DVD movies at all).
Hmm, now if some off-shore DVD manufacturer were to incorporate, say, DeCSS-derived firmware rather than a CCA-licensed version, they'd save the CCA tax and be able to undercut competition. CCA of course would probably try to get the things halted at the borders, it'd make for an interesting court case.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
I saw a stack of 10X DVD drives at CompUSA a few days ago for about that. It also works as some ridiculous multiplier CD drive, too. Heck, they might even be cheaper than that (I got one on sale for about $110 nearly a year ago.)
Go get one.
You don't have to run MPAA movie DVDs on the thing if you don't want to. (Er, actually you can't very easily, can you?) But you can then access all the stuff that's becoming availale on DVD-ROM, like this Yggdrasil basket of goodies, or SuSE's now-up-to-6-or-7-CDs-or-1-DVD distro. (And maybe even stuff like Brittanica's DVD encyclopedia if it doesn't require some wierd proprietary Windows-only reader software.)
(Now, if only the price of DVD writers (and blanks) would come down so that I can afford to back up all those gigabytes of cheap hard drive I have.)
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
whether they are wholly spiritual but exclusive (so maybe one on the head of a pin), or if they can kind of overlap (infinite angels on the head of a pin?
It depends on whether they're fermions or bosons.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Now, it's been a long time since I had to build drivers into a Sun operating system (so long that it was probably SunOS rather than Solaris), but AFAIK it does not support dynamic loading of driver modules the way Linux does. (And even if it does, that could be argued as irrelevant -- it's a matter of dynamic vs static linking.)
Now, if Becker's drivers were released under the LGPL, which explicitly allows linking with proprietary code, this would be a non-issue. However, the general intent of the GPL is to not allow such linking, static or dynamic -- although the latter has been argued as insufficiently made clear in the GPL. And there's the problem.
If the drivers are statically linked into a Solaris kernel, then that's pretty clearly a GPL violation. If dynamically loaded, then it may be as Bruce Perens states, violating the spirit of the GPL (vs LGPL). Whether it also violates the letter of the GPL may end up being up to a judge to decide.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Well yes, there's the BSDs, of course. I tend to prefer Linux. Not sure why, maybe it has something to do with a traumatic experience with a VAX and BSD 4.3 (or was it 4.2?) in my youth...:-)
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Cool, I've been wondering about SuSE for SPARC since a friend is donating an old IPC to me. Already running it here on various x86s and have a PPC machine and SuSE PPC in a box just waiting for me to get a chance to bring them together:-)
(Oh, I've tried and like other distros but settled on SuSE, and AFAIK Red Hat (the only(?) other distro with wide cross-platform support) doesn't support PPC.)
(And yes, I'm too lazy/have too little time to recompile everything in a distro for another platform myself.)
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Apparently you can put most keyboards in the dishwasher to clean them.. because the electronics are sealed off.
Yes and no. I've heard of this being done, with the proviso that you rinse the thing off thoroughly when done (preferably with distilled water) and then similarly dry it thoroughly.
I should have done that with the last keyboard I ruined. I spilled a Diet Coke near it (I only drink diet drinks near the keyboard -- no syrupy stuff to worry about) but didn't realize how much had gotten into the keyboard until the next day when it wouldn't work. Drained about a tablespoon of Coke out of it then, but apparently the acid had attacked the circuitry enough that it was too late to save. Might have been alright if I'd immediately run it through the dishwasher or the shower. No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Yeah, I'm nitpicking, but that's the second time in the last couple of days I've seen it misspelled. The right spelling is easy to remember, it's made up only of the first letters of the four DNA bases: Guanine, Adenine, Thymine and Cytosine. No "i", nothing to do with the various places named "Attica".
(The sequence GATTACA doesn't code for anything in particular. GAT codes for aspartic acid and TAC codes for tyrosine, and there's a base left over.)
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
There's nothing on the:CueCat packaging to indicate the serial number of that particular scanner. Yeah, the RatShack guy scanned mine (and the other stuff I was buying, of course), but that's more for inventory management (why else track a $0.00 sale?) and such. Since the serial number isn't scanned they can't tell *which* scanner is yours until you register at the web site.
Which of course I have not done. I have no intention of using the thing to scan crappy bar codes in ads. I might use it to inventory my library, although that's way down on the priority list at the moment. Mainly it's gathering dust now after playing with it for the first afternoon I got it. Just like most of my other toys:-)
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Sorry, I've gotta nitpick that one for two reasons. "Mote" was by both Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, and Niven used the heat superconductor in quite a few other stories. (Recall "Ringworld", and the solution to flying over a field of sunflowers. For those who haven't read it, the sunflowers in Niven's "Known Space" series are reflective, and will move to focus the local sun's rays on anything flying over the field. The solution involved a heat superconductor floating where the flowers could shine on it, and trailing down to a nearby lake.)
But yes, Niven's superconductor of heat is the first thing I thought of when I read that.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
It seems to me that a fundamental flaw of Mr. Stallman's open source philosophy is that it implies that adherance to his particular license is of more importance than the overal quality and value of a product.
It's your perspective that is flawed. Aside from the nitpick of Stallman being a free software rather than open source advocate, Stallman recognizes that that the quality and value of a product can (and will) be improved by the user/developer community if it is free, but non-free software, however good, can only be improved or freed by the copyright holder.
The latter case is far more limiting upon users than the former. A good (but flawed, as is virtually all software) proprietary product may in the short term meet an immediate need better than a poor or mediocre open/free product, but the user of the former is held hostage to the whim of the proprietor for any bugfixes or improvements. The user of the latter is free to fix/change the software himself (or if not competent to do so, to hire anyone else to do it), and in the long term, the free product will likely end up better than than any closed equivalent.
Stallman certainly recognizes this. So what you call a "flaw" in the above quote is, in fact, not a bug but a feature.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
HP networked laser printers routinely support anything that'll speak to lpd. My HP LaserJet 2100 TN certainly supports Linux (and every other *nix, and Mac, and Windows), and it looks like the 4000 does too.
(Okay, sure, it doesn't have a fancy graphic interface to control exotic printer options like it does for the Mac or Windows -- but show me where the API for such an interface is defined in Linux or any other 'nix. I know, it's in progress.)
While the source code to the VISION* (nee AMS/GIS) product (see this post) was hardly open, it was provided in escrow to various customers. But more to the point, a number of our developers (and marketeers, of course) presented papers on the overall design at various technical (mostly GIS and AM/FM related) conferences. The proceedings of those would surely qualify as publicly publishing them.
I don't know how early this goes back. I know we made a big song and dance of going "all relational" (including the spatial data in the RDB) because we were perhaps the first company to do this and the buzz was that "it couldn't be done" (too much of a performance hit). But I'm sure that other papers and sales literature hit on the general design (RDBappX-windows) before we went "AR". (I don't recall exact dates on the latter, I'd have to dig out old calendars for things like design meetings, etc.)
I posted a lot more about the product before I saw your posting. FYI, VISION* is know owned and sold by Autodesk (makers of AutoCAD, etc.), but they're still only targeting the big cu$tomers.
(The flat files for spatial data were dropped with VISION* 2.0, where we went all-relational. I don't know who came up with the technology first, but Oracle's spatial-data extensions are very similar to what we (well, Orest, John, etc.) implemented).
Actually the software goes back before then, but 1987 is when I joined the company (since defunct, the technology has passed on through several hands, more below.)
The product (then) had two versions (some overlapping code), AMS (Advanced Mapping System) and GIS (Geographic Information System), the company was GeoVision Systems Ltd (in the US, parent corp was GeoVision Corporation in Canada), spun off from SystemHouse Graphics. Later the products were slightly rearchitected and made more flexible, and renamed to "VISION*" under which name it's still sold.
The core technology comprised a relational database -- primarily Oracle (Oracle 6, back then, Oracle 8 now), but we briefly flirted with Ingres and one other. The display technology was X Windows, X 10 back then, migrating to X 11 sometime around 1989 or 1990. The application code inbetween included various components such as a database-interface layer (which also added the spatial component), various form managers, display list managers, graphic editors, and a scripting language (we called it a "macro language" - GML, GeoVision Macro Language - but it wasn't really) to customize it and tie all the pieces together.
Pretty neat actually, and with potential beyond the cartographic/GIS/etc domain (I once prototyped a CASE tool based on it in about a day). (In fact, so neat I'm working on an open source reimplementation of it -- see www.cavor.org -- but there's a lot to go yet).
As far as documenting it goes -- there ought to be some documents, old manuals, etc around although I don't have any. We had a number of large companies, municipal governments, and other government organizations as customers.
The original company, GeoVision (not to be confused with another GIS company of the same name) went bankrupt back in 1993. The VISION* technology was bought by SystemHouse Ltd, (and most of the customers had source in escrow), traded hands a few times as companies were bought and sold, and is now owned by Autodesk who still markets the software.
Depending on the details of this patent, it could well threaten Autodesk's marketing of VISION*, so assuming they acquired whatever historical documents were around, they might be the people to talk to.
Slashdot Mirror
Dang, you (sort of) beat me to it.
I was going to say that an obfuscated Perl contest made about as much sense as an obfuscated APL contest. I mean, how could you tell?
(BTW, I did APL tech support for a couple of years. It is possible to write unobfuscated APL, but actually seeing an unobfuscated APL program "in the wild" is about as likely as seeing an unobfuscated Perl script.)
APL is a terminal disease
-- joke dating back to when APL was run on mainframes from terminals with wierd character sets.
That last paragraph is a gem.
What would happen if a copyright owner, who is not an MPAA member, and instead had their own terms for permission, released a CSS-protected DVD, is subject to speculation. I think it would have some very interesting consequences.
Heh, technically that makes every commercial DVD player and DVD software a "device for bypassing access control", putting the entire DVD industry at jeopardy.
Now, the catch that makes it hard to convince a judge to find that way is that you didn't have to use CSS to encode your DVD, and that doing so is implicitly granting permission to all those existing DVD-player owners to access the content of your DVD. (OTOH, by that same logic, one could argue that anyone producing a CSS-scrambled DVD after DeCSS was made public is similarly granting implicit permission to use DeCSS or similar programs to access their content. Although I think you'd have a hard time finding a judge that would buy that logic, either.)
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Doesn't the Microsoft Office EULA specify that you may only license the software if you own a legitimate license for any of their Windows 9x - NT - 2000 software?
Sounds like the sort of thing they'd include in their license, yeah, but so what? Why on Earth would you own a copy of Office (for Windows) if you didn't already have a Windows system to run it on? Hopefully they didn't word the license to prevent you from running it on non-Windows systems, because it probably never occurred to them that anybody would. That will change.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Well... the S/390 port runs on a VM, so Linux doesn't know the kind of power that is actually down there..
Nope, the S/390 port runs either in a VM or natively. You can boot up a 390 with Linux as your only OS, and then it definitely knows about the whole machine.
It's just that far more people are likely to have access to a VM running on a 390 than there are that have a whole 390 to play with.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
they say I can't have the hardware connected to more then one computer at a time. Uhhh... and can only be used on a single machine at any one time.
Okay, so I toss out my elaborate 'Y'-adapter hookup and use a KVM switch instead. It only talks to one computer at a time, right?
(I've gotta wonder -- are these guys really this clueless or is it all an elaborate plot to distract hackerdom from something serious?)
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
You are talking about AOL CD's right?
Now there's an interesting thought. That certainly makes it legal for me to reverse engineer any of the software on those CD's. Although I must say I'm not sure why anybody would bother. Probably still wouldn't let you copy and distribute anything off of it -- they're giving you a copy, like a book.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
old enough to not have the new RPC-2 region controls
Well, there is that. Mine predates those (it was what, anything manufactured after January or February of this year?) but yes, the newer ones will probably have them (or not be able to play DVD movies at all).
Hmm, now if some off-shore DVD manufacturer were to incorporate, say, DeCSS-derived firmware rather than a CCA-licensed version, they'd save the CCA tax and be able to undercut competition. CCA of course would probably try to get the things halted at the borders, it'd make for an interesting court case.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
I saw a stack of 10X DVD drives at CompUSA a few days ago for about that. It also works as some ridiculous multiplier CD drive, too. Heck, they might even be cheaper than that (I got one on sale for about $110 nearly a year ago.)
Go get one.
You don't have to run MPAA movie DVDs on the thing if you don't want to. (Er, actually you can't very easily, can you?) But you can then access all the stuff that's becoming availale on DVD-ROM, like this Yggdrasil basket of goodies, or SuSE's now-up-to-6-or-7-CDs-or-1-DVD distro. (And maybe even stuff like Brittanica's DVD encyclopedia if it doesn't require some wierd proprietary Windows-only reader software.)
(Now, if only the price of DVD writers (and blanks) would come down so that I can afford to back up all those gigabytes of cheap hard drive I have.)
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
I'd like to see more artists jump on that bandwagon.
Heh, yep. This has all the makings of a class action lawsuit by various recording artists.
Of course in the end the lawyers will end up with all the money, that's the downside.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
We don't want them to change their minds about GPL'ing StarOffice in October.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
whether they are wholly spiritual but exclusive (so maybe one on the head of a pin), or if they can kind of overlap (infinite angels on the head of a pin?
It depends on whether they're fermions or bosons.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Now, it's been a long time since I had to build drivers into a Sun operating system (so long that it was probably SunOS rather than Solaris), but AFAIK it does not support dynamic loading of driver modules the way Linux does. (And even if it does, that could be argued as irrelevant -- it's a matter of dynamic vs static linking.)
Now, if Becker's drivers were released under the LGPL, which explicitly allows linking with proprietary code, this would be a non-issue. However, the general intent of the GPL is to not allow such linking, static or dynamic -- although the latter has been argued as insufficiently made clear in the GPL. And there's the problem.
If the drivers are statically linked into a Solaris kernel, then that's pretty clearly a GPL violation. If dynamically loaded, then it may be as Bruce Perens states, violating the spirit of the GPL (vs LGPL). Whether it also violates the letter of the GPL may end up being up to a judge to decide.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Well yes, there's the BSDs, of course. I tend to prefer Linux. Not sure why, maybe it has something to do with a traumatic experience with a VAX and BSD 4.3 (or was it 4.2?) in my youth... :-)
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Cool, I've been wondering about SuSE for SPARC since a friend is donating an old IPC to me. Already running it here on various x86s and have a PPC machine and SuSE PPC in a box just waiting for me to get a chance to bring them together :-)
(Oh, I've tried and like other distros but settled on SuSE, and AFAIK Red Hat (the only(?) other distro with wide cross-platform support) doesn't support PPC.)
(And yes, I'm too lazy/have too little time to recompile everything in a distro for another platform myself.)
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Apparently you can put most keyboards in the dishwasher to clean them.. because the electronics are sealed off.
Yes and no. I've heard of this being done, with the proviso that you rinse the thing off thoroughly when done (preferably with distilled water) and then similarly dry it thoroughly.
I should have done that with the last keyboard I ruined. I spilled a Diet Coke near it (I only drink diet drinks near the keyboard -- no syrupy stuff to worry about) but didn't realize how much had gotten into the keyboard until the next day when it wouldn't work. Drained about a tablespoon of Coke out of it then, but apparently the acid had attacked the circuitry enough that it was too late to save. Might have been alright if I'd immediately run it through the dishwasher or the shower.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Yeah, I'm nitpicking, but that's the second time in the last couple of days I've seen it misspelled. The right spelling is easy to remember, it's made up only of the first letters of the four DNA bases: Guanine, Adenine, Thymine and Cytosine. No "i", nothing to do with the various places named "Attica".
(The sequence GATTACA doesn't code for anything in particular. GAT codes for aspartic acid and TAC codes for tyrosine, and there's a base left over.)
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Yep, also one of the best lines from the otherwise rather silly Harrison Ford movie "Airforce One".
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
There's nothing on the :CueCat packaging to indicate the serial number of that particular scanner. Yeah, the RatShack guy scanned mine (and the other stuff I was buying, of course), but that's more for inventory management (why else track a $0.00 sale?) and such. Since the serial number isn't scanned they can't tell *which* scanner is yours until you register at the web site.
:-)
Which of course I have not done. I have no intention of using the thing to scan crappy bar codes in ads. I might use it to inventory my library, although that's way down on the priority list at the moment. Mainly it's gathering dust now after playing with it for the first afternoon I got it. Just like most of my other toys
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Sorry, I've gotta nitpick that one for two reasons. "Mote" was by both Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, and Niven used the heat superconductor in quite a few other stories. (Recall "Ringworld", and the solution to flying over a field of sunflowers. For those who haven't read it, the sunflowers in Niven's "Known Space" series are reflective, and will move to focus the local sun's rays on anything flying over the field. The solution involved a heat superconductor floating where the flowers could shine on it, and trailing down to a nearby lake.)
But yes, Niven's superconductor of heat is the first thing I thought of when I read that.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
It seems to me that a fundamental flaw of Mr. Stallman's open source philosophy is that it implies that adherance to his particular license is of more importance than the overal quality and value of a product.
It's your perspective that is flawed. Aside from the nitpick of Stallman being a free software rather than open source advocate, Stallman recognizes that that the quality and value of a product can (and will) be improved by the user/developer community if it is free, but non-free software, however good, can only be improved or freed by the copyright holder.
The latter case is far more limiting upon users than the former. A good (but flawed, as is virtually all software) proprietary product may in the short term meet an immediate need better than a poor or mediocre open/free product, but the user of the former is held hostage to the whim of the proprietor for any bugfixes or improvements. The user of the latter is free to fix/change the software himself (or if not competent to do so, to hire anyone else to do it), and in the long term, the free product will likely end up better than than any closed equivalent.
Stallman certainly recognizes this. So what you call a "flaw" in the above quote is, in fact, not a bug but a feature.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
Or perhaps not FUD, just stupidity.
HP networked laser printers routinely support anything that'll speak to lpd. My HP LaserJet 2100 TN certainly supports Linux (and every other *nix, and Mac, and Windows), and it looks like the 4000 does too.
(Okay, sure, it doesn't have a fancy graphic interface to control exotic printer options like it does for the Mac or Windows -- but show me where the API for such an interface is defined in Linux or any other 'nix. I know, it's in progress.)
Get a grip.
Ditto for reading newsgroups with an HTML-enabled newsreader.
Something to keep in mind when browsing the alt.binaries.pictures newsgroups...
While the source code to the VISION* (nee AMS/GIS) product (see this post) was hardly open, it was provided in escrow to various customers. But more to the point, a number of our developers (and marketeers, of course) presented papers on the overall design at various technical (mostly GIS and AM/FM related) conferences. The proceedings of those would surely qualify as publicly publishing them.
I don't know how early this goes back. I know we made a big song and dance of going "all relational" (including the spatial data in the RDB) because we were perhaps the first company to do this and the buzz was that "it couldn't be done" (too much of a performance hit). But I'm sure that other papers and sales literature hit on the general design (RDBappX-windows) before we went "AR". (I don't recall exact dates on the latter, I'd have to dig out old calendars for things like design meetings, etc.)
Hi there, whichever ex-GeoVisioner you are :-)
I posted a lot more about the product before I saw your posting. FYI, VISION* is know owned and sold by Autodesk (makers of AutoCAD, etc.), but they're still only targeting the big cu$tomers.
(The flat files for spatial data were dropped with VISION* 2.0, where we went all-relational. I don't know who came up with the technology first, but Oracle's spatial-data extensions are very similar to what we (well, Orest, John, etc.) implemented).
Actually the software goes back before then, but 1987 is when I joined the company (since defunct, the technology has passed on through several hands, more below.)
The product (then) had two versions (some overlapping code), AMS (Advanced Mapping System) and GIS (Geographic Information System), the company was GeoVision Systems Ltd (in the US, parent corp was GeoVision Corporation in Canada), spun off from SystemHouse Graphics. Later the products were slightly rearchitected and made more flexible, and renamed to "VISION*" under which name it's still sold.
The core technology comprised a relational database -- primarily Oracle (Oracle 6, back then, Oracle 8 now), but we briefly flirted with Ingres and one other. The display technology was X Windows, X 10 back then, migrating to X 11 sometime around 1989 or 1990. The application code inbetween included various components such as a database-interface layer (which also added the spatial component), various form managers, display list managers, graphic editors, and a scripting language (we called it a "macro language" - GML, GeoVision Macro Language - but it wasn't really) to customize it and tie all the pieces together.
Pretty neat actually, and with potential beyond the cartographic/GIS/etc domain (I once prototyped a CASE tool based on it in about a day). (In fact, so neat I'm working on an open source reimplementation of it -- see www.cavor.org -- but there's a lot to go yet).
As far as documenting it goes -- there ought to be some documents, old manuals, etc around although I don't have any. We had a number of large companies, municipal governments, and other government organizations as customers.
The original company, GeoVision (not to be confused with another GIS company of the same name) went bankrupt back in 1993. The VISION* technology was bought by SystemHouse Ltd, (and most of the customers had source in escrow), traded hands a few times as companies were bought and sold, and is now owned by Autodesk who still markets the software.
Depending on the details of this patent, it could well threaten Autodesk's marketing of VISION*, so assuming they acquired whatever historical documents were around, they might be the people to talk to.