Yep, and indeed I still run it occasionally. When I cannibalized my wife's old 286 AT-clone to build a new PC (salvaged the case and power supply, that's about it) I backed up the old hard drive using a utility that turned out not to work on IDE drives, so I couldn't restore the data (which included a rather important Q&A database) to the upgraded PC. No problem, I loaded SoftPC (came with SoftWindows) on our Mac and the software was happy with the emulation. On the infrequent occasions where we need to access the data in that DB, we just fire up Q&A under SoftPC on the Mac. Basically the entire old 286 machine is mirrored in emulation under SoftPC.
Performance-wise, the emulated PC even on a rather old PPC Mac (Performa 6400 at 120 (I think) MHz) runs much faster than the old 286 machine (10 MHz in "turbo" mode) ever did, or seems to (faster disks and bus helps too). Maybe one day I'll convert the database to MySQL or something civilized, but that's a real low priority.
There's probably tons of this sort of old DOS stuff out there, data that's formatted to a particular application that may not even run on more modern hardware or DOS versions. Good emulators are invaluable for accessing that. (Although floppies that old are probably starting to lose data through sheer age.)
The system there is divided into "Clusters" each cluster having about 400 machines. There are about 12 clusters there, which mean about 4,800 machines. [...] they are having to add machines and clusters as fast as they can because of all the increased volume/new users.
An earlier poster said something about using "the right tool for the job". Those 4800 machines are about one ninth (1/9) of the number of virtual Linux machines that an IBM S/390 can run simultaneously, and at several times the cost of that S/390.
This isn't about the right tool for the job at all, Hotmail should be hosted on Big Iron. (To bad for MS that NT or W2K won't run on 390 hardware.) I would hope that the difference in cost (of the 4800 x86 boxes vs an S/390) is coming out of Marketing's budget. (But of course it isn't.)
Canada's 'secret service' is CSIS, which stands for Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (with some such permutation for the French version of the name). Founded in the 1980s, such work used to be done by the RCMP (at least on the counter-intelligence side. CSIS is a bit more like CIA in some aspects.)
(Not the only such outfit, of course, and not exactly secret. Various other departments have their own spooks - e.g. External Affairs has folks who do thinks like bug sweeps and security audits of Canadian embassies in other countries. Or used to, maybe CSIS does that now.)
Nope, pre-Noahian makes more sense, in reference to one Noah Webster, who created a dictionary full of (to the rest of the English-speaking world) spelling errors.
You're right, DeCSS (or something like it) does seem to be being used as part of the process of making unauthorized (and downgraded) copies of DVD movies.
However, if you look at the time taken to rip a DVD and downconvert it to, say, something that'll fit on a CD (upwards of 15 hours, I've seen), you realize that folks are probably doing to more so they can say they've done it than anything else. If I wanted to make a CD of a DVD movie, I'd just play the thing into a video capture card and grab it in real time. No DeCSS involved at all.
Heck, where do you think the bootleg V-CDs of 'The Phantom Menace' came from? Certainly not from someone ripping a DVD, there aren't any of TPM. (The one I've seen came from a vidcap of a tape somebody made by sneaking a camcorder into a theatre. There are probably better ones now that the movie has been officially released on VHS.)
but are still limiting the color depth to a pitiful 32 bits per pixel (8bits per channel)??
Why not, since the CRT (or LCD) you're going to display that on isn't capable of any better. (TV screens are even worse, since the transmission standards impose a contrast range even lower than what the hardware is capable of.)
Now, when something like micromirror projectors become more widely available, increasing that might make more sense. (The Cineon image format for motion picture work uses I think 10 bpp, on a logarithmic scale to correspond to photographic film's range.)
Face it the best systems for games are the really expensive cutting edge ones.
Heh, yep. About two decades ago when I was working at Concordia University we got in a brand spanking new VAX 11/780, complete with a Norpak graphics unit for some mechanical engineering project, and an A/D - D/A converter for some speech recognition project.
Starting from a simple program to put a shape on the graphics screen and move it around, it wasn't long before I had multi-player "Vaxteroids" running on it: input was by keyboard from the various VT-52 terminals in the room, display was on the central large monitor connected to the graphics box (not card!), and sound was via an amp and speaker I'd rigged up to the D/A outputs. The whole thing written in Fortran, running under VMS no less.
Not quite up to the likes of Galaxian that was hitting the arcades about that time, but better (IMHO) than original Asteroids and multi (up to 4) players (kind of a cross between Asteroids and Space War).
At first I thought this was a review of a collection of Bob Shaw's (I think)"slow glass" stories, the first of which was "Light of Other Days" (written sometime in the mid 1960s).
Slow glass was a material that transmitted images (like glass) very, very slowly -- up to several years in some cases, but it could be manufactured with varying time thicknesses (eg "24 hours thick", or "2 years thick"). (Ignore for the sake of the story the physics problems of storing a few years worth of, say, sunlight in a material a few millimeters thick.)
In a later story (I forget the title) it turns out that the government is sowing the countryside with little beads of (differing time) slow-glass: a spying mechanism where you just collect up the glass beads later and look at what went on.
Slow glass itself is probably a physical impossibility, but the ubiquitous spying is not: imagine billions of nano-cams with varying amounts of storage, or some sort of cellular wireless communication. You could (well, almost -- as far as we know the state-of-the-art is not quite there) make them the size of ants, with sufficient ant-like AI to let them crawl around. Perhaps they relay their images to a "queen ant" with a little more processing ability and broadcast range. Optical quality per image might be low (given the tiny optics), but combining multiple images gets around that, you could even get good 3-D images with multiple sensors and good position information (a couple of pairs of queen ants could triangulate that).
A lot more likely than magic wormholes, they just don't give you a record any further back than their deployment.
Yes, I was a little surprised the first time I heard that myself. But the UNIX trademark is now owned by OpenGroup, and any OS that passes the UNIX certification tests (API compatibilities, required utilities, etc.) is qualified to brand itself a UNIX. OS/390 qualified a year or so back. (And it's probably the only UNIX around that uses EBCDIC (or for that matter anything but ASCII) as its native character set.
(Most Linux distros almost qualify, the main problems being some slight differences in GNU utilities vs the UNIX flavor -- plus the fact that it costs money to go through the cert process.)
Mostly it means that any portably-written UNIX program will build and run on any such OS.
Other distros are catching up, but Caldera's install and GUI admin tools (eg COAS) make it a much better system for folks who just want to use it to get work done rather than geeks that like to tweak.
I ran it (Open Linux 2.1 and 2.2) for a while (I've since been a pretty steady SuSE user) and I've installed it and recommended it at/to a number of places with little 'nix expertise instead of NT machines for miscellaneous server duties. (Eg my daughter's school, a small mostly-Windows business, various individuals.) Come to think of it, my personal 'net server (ajwm.net and a couple of other domains) is running Caldera (on a 486!) since I never saw any need to change it. (I use SuSE for development.)
Mind, lately Caldera seems to be targetting less the individual user and more businesses (so the SCO deal may make some sense.)
I would think that you would be able to get the appelate court to strike down the ruling simply because of the conflict of interest with the judge
Perhaps not struck down, but a retrial ordered at least. On the other hand, if Kaplan is really as scurrilous as some are making him out to be (rather than merely incompetent), perhaps he's laying the groundwork for such a strike down based on other factors than flaws in the DMCA itself.
Consider: perhaps he realizes that the DMCA is flawed with respect to DVDs and DeCSS. If he rules that way, or it goes to appeal and the appeals court rules that way, then MPAA is up the creek (from their point of view) as far as that goes. On the other hand, if the case is thrown out for other reasons, no ruling has been made on DMCA and the law can still be used to intimidate other folks.
Tar doesn't fit the bill. And actually, 'ar' is better suited because the index gives you faster access to files buried at the back of the archive. (And I once implemented a system like this to get around a 40-file quota (but no limit on file size!) on a Cyber mainframe I once had an account on.)
But creating cleartext copies on the disk is a huge flaw, one might as well just not bother encrypting in the first place.
Consider: PGP Disk lets me create, say, a 100 MB file on a FAT filesystem which it'll then mount as a virtual disk. I can see the file if I mount the partition under Linux, what's needed is something that'll understand the loopback filesystem embedded in it so I can mount it. (For that matter, PGP Disk makes a Mac version too, supposedly -- can the Mac version read the Windows version? Everything below the hooks into the OS to make the contents of the file look like a filesystem could/should be common to all platforms, that's just whatever format the author chooses. But is such a cross-platform package available? (For that matter, is there open source available for mounting a file as a filesystem on Windows and Mac, encrypted or not? From there it's a simple step to encrypt the thing.)
(Of course, the truly paranoid will re-wire their drive controllers and make personal patches to the OS as well as using strong encryption, for the same reason that crypt(3) perturbs the DES algorithm: it makes it tougher for the folks that might have hardware solutions.)
Sure. Not only drop packets, but also alter packets and created forged packets.
Not finding the evidence you need? Or just want to stir things up a bit and see what develops? Heck, just program Carnivore to change some wording in the next e-mail....
Everybody understands the principle of the basic wiretap. This is much more insidious, particularly seeing as it's a closed box. (Remember the old "Mission: Impossible" series where they'd tap into the phone lines and a voice artist would pretend to be the other party so that they could inject false information? Can you prove Carnivore can't/doesn't do this at the email level?
Speaking of PGP, is there a PGP Disk-like package that'll work cross-platform? That is, if set up a file as a virtual encrypted filesystem on a shared partition, it'll let me access the files from either Windoze or Linux? Or if I put that file on a ZIP, I could then access the files on a Mac (reading DOS format) too?
Encrypted filesystems (real or virtual) are great stuff, but so is the ability to access the same encrypted filesystem from different OS's.
No, the previous poster was right. AOL was never cool. Back when I was running a C-64 with a 300 baud modem (and a VIC-20 before that...) BIX was cool, or the university computer and Usenet.
But not AOL. Never. Nor Compuserve or Prodigy either.
Actually, cool was the time on one of my first jobs, back in the late 70s, when I had to check up on a weekend-long job running back at the office while I was away on a dive trip. Using a TI Silent 700 terminal (hardcopy thermal paper terminal, about the size of a portable typewriter, with built-in acoustic coupler 300 (or was it 110?) baud modem). The hotel we were in didn't have room phones, so I used the payphone in the hotel lobby...
Actually I take that back, it wasn't cool, just a pain in the butt.
So, where can I get acid-free printer paper (or, vellum that'll fit my printer:-) and an inkjet printer that uses non-water-soluable ink? I'll just make hardcopy backups of everything...
And for binary data, there's mylar tape (like paper tape only on mylar (or some similar tough plastic) so it won't tear. Or perhaps punched cards onto thin sheets of e.g. stainless steel.
Mind, the problem with any storage technology is that durability tends to be inversely proportional to density and read/write time. Hieroglyphs carved on granite may last a long time, but where do I find a SCSI or USB equipped engraver/reader for those?
Call a full-length motion picture (on DVD) about 6 gigabytes (give or take, depending on exact length and amount of compression). That's 2.5 minutes per gigabyte (for a 15min download), or 400 megabytes per minute (assume 1000 MB per GB for simiplicity), or 3200 Megabits/minute, or a bit over 53 Mb/sec (plus packet overhead).
You might be able to hit that over a very lightly loaded 100 Mb/sec Ethernet, but that's 35 T1's. On the other hand, that's only a third of an OC3.
And, gee, doesn't everyone have their own OC3 these days?
If copyright were done away with, I could take the Slackware distribution, make a bunch of source code changes, compile those changes and sell the resulting binaries while refusing to give anyone my source code changes.
Quite right. However, anyone else would be free to take your binary distribution and make as many copies of it as they chose, and give those away.
They might not get the source, but neither would you make any profit from the binaries. Where do you think Microsoft would be if the hardware vendors (and everyone else) didn't have to pay for Windows licenses?
The copyrights are probably still there, not that anyone buys Xenix any more.
A couple of years ago this came up while I was working on an OSF/1 system. Out of curiousity I ran grep on/usr/include/sys/* and turned up a handful of files with Microsoft copyright notices. Mostly, as I recall, stuff related to reading DOS floppies.
It's a violation of FCC -- not FAA -- regulations to use cell phones aboard aircraft because of the transmitting range at altitude. Your signal covers more ground, giving greater potential for interference and confusing the multiple cells you're overlapping. FCC couldn't give a rats behind if it happens to screw up navigation equipment too. (Well, except where that nav equipment is also based on radio signals.)
Now, the FAA and airlines may also have a legitimate beef, and maybe even some regulations, but it's the FCC who will slap you with a heavy fine if they catch you doing it.
Actually, the lawyers may know very well what they're talking about (at least to the level of an educated person who isn't involved in software development on a day to day basis).
The thing is, they know that the testimony is going to be read/heard by at least a judge and quite possibly a jury, who are virtually guaranteed to know far less about this sort of thing, and the only opportunity they have to educate the judge/jury on it is through what they ask the witnesses. Which can lead to asking a lot of dumb questions.
In effect, the laywer is serving as proxy for the judge/jury, since the jury cannot ask questions itself. (Of course, he's acting as a filtering proxy -- he won't ask questions he doesn't want the jury to hear the answers too, but the opposing lawyer might.)
The Microsoft thing is pretty much out of the Administration's (Bush or Gore) hands now. Despite the cries of "two years of appeals", this is likely to be expedited to the Supreme Court and we could well have a final decision before the next President takes office. As for appointing Supreme Court justices -- the Democrats have something of a history of appointing revisionist judges (those who like to find emanations of penumbras of meaning in the Constitution, no doubt causing the original signers to roll in their graves) where as Rebublicans tend to appoint judges who tend to favor original intent. (Sure, there are exceptions.) Since the authority to grant and enforce copyrights and patents comes directly from the Constitution, we would be well served (in this respect) to have Justices who understand that their role is to interpret the original intent of that document, not legislate from the bench by finding new meaning in it. The Constitution provided for copyright and patent for a limited time to foster the progress of science and the useful arts. (Hmm, is the music of Metallica or the latest Hollywood DVD a "useful art"? Now there's an interesting court case waiting to happen...). We would do well to have Justices appreciate the original intent. Bush is more likely to give us those than Al "no controlling legal authority" Gore. (Maybe I need a new sig -- "Judge Jackson for Supreme Court Justice":-)
Well, it confirms my view that you have to be a pot-smoking drunkard to use Windows.:-)
You're simply making a distinction between short-term self interest (immediate gratification) vs long-term self interest. In the long run, it's the latter that counts.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone remember ... SoftPC for the Mac?
Yep, and indeed I still run it occasionally. When I cannibalized my wife's old 286 AT-clone to build a new PC (salvaged the case and power supply, that's about it) I backed up the old hard drive using a utility that turned out not to work on IDE drives, so I couldn't restore the data (which included a rather important Q&A database) to the upgraded PC. No problem, I loaded SoftPC (came with SoftWindows) on our Mac and the software was happy with the emulation. On the infrequent occasions where we need to access the data in that DB, we just fire up Q&A under SoftPC on the Mac. Basically the entire old 286 machine is mirrored in emulation under SoftPC.
Performance-wise, the emulated PC even on a rather old PPC Mac (Performa 6400 at 120 (I think) MHz) runs much faster than the old 286 machine (10 MHz in "turbo" mode) ever did, or seems to (faster disks and bus helps too). Maybe one day I'll convert the database to MySQL or something civilized, but that's a real low priority.
There's probably tons of this sort of old DOS stuff out there, data that's formatted to a particular application that may not even run on more modern hardware or DOS versions. Good emulators are invaluable for accessing that. (Although floppies that old are probably starting to lose data through sheer age.)
The system there is divided into "Clusters" each cluster having about 400 machines. There are about 12 clusters there, which mean about 4,800 machines. [...] they are having to add machines and clusters as fast as they can because of all the increased volume/new users.
An earlier poster said something about using "the right tool for the job". Those 4800 machines are about one ninth (1/9) of the number of virtual Linux machines that an IBM S/390 can run simultaneously, and at several times the cost of that S/390.
This isn't about the right tool for the job at all, Hotmail should be hosted on Big Iron. (To bad for MS that NT or W2K won't run on 390 hardware.) I would hope that the difference in cost (of the 4800 x86 boxes vs an S/390) is coming out of Marketing's budget. (But of course it isn't.)
Actually Robert X Cringley still is a team. The "person" you've seen on the PBS shows and such is actually a clever digital construct.
Canada's 'secret service' is CSIS, which stands for Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (with some such permutation for the French version of the name). Founded in the 1980s, such work used to be done by the RCMP (at least on the counter-intelligence side. CSIS is a bit more like CIA in some aspects.)
(Not the only such outfit, of course, and not exactly secret. Various other departments have their own spooks - e.g. External Affairs has folks who do thinks like bug sweeps and security audits of Canadian embassies in other countries. Or used to, maybe CSIS does that now.)
Nope, pre-Noahian makes more sense, in reference to one Noah Webster, who created a dictionary full of (to the rest of the English-speaking world) spelling errors.
Case in point, "colour" vs "color".
Nothing to do with the flood at all.
You're right, DeCSS (or something like it) does seem to be being used as part of the process of making unauthorized (and downgraded) copies of DVD movies.
However, if you look at the time taken to rip a DVD and downconvert it to, say, something that'll fit on a CD (upwards of 15 hours, I've seen), you realize that folks are probably doing to more so they can say they've done it than anything else. If I wanted to make a CD of a DVD movie, I'd just play the thing into a video capture card and grab it in real time. No DeCSS involved at all.
Heck, where do you think the bootleg V-CDs of 'The Phantom Menace' came from? Certainly not from someone ripping a DVD, there aren't any of TPM. (The one I've seen came from a vidcap of a tape somebody made by sneaking a camcorder into a theatre. There are probably better ones now that the movie has been officially released on VHS.)
but are still limiting the color depth to a pitiful 32 bits per pixel (8bits per channel)??
Why not, since the CRT (or LCD) you're going to display that on isn't capable of any better. (TV screens are even worse, since the transmission standards impose a contrast range even lower than what the hardware is capable of.)
Now, when something like micromirror projectors become more widely available, increasing that might make more sense. (The Cineon image format for motion picture work uses I think 10 bpp, on a logarithmic scale to correspond to photographic film's range.)
Face it the best systems for games are the really expensive cutting edge ones.
Heh, yep. About two decades ago when I was working at Concordia University we got in a brand spanking new VAX 11/780, complete with a Norpak graphics unit for some mechanical engineering project, and an A/D - D/A converter for some speech recognition project.
Starting from a simple program to put a shape on the graphics screen and move it around, it wasn't long before I had multi-player "Vaxteroids" running on it: input was by keyboard from the various VT-52 terminals in the room, display was on the central large monitor connected to the graphics box (not card!), and sound was via an amp and speaker I'd rigged up to the D/A outputs. The whole thing written in Fortran, running under VMS no less.
Not quite up to the likes of Galaxian that was hitting the arcades about that time, but better (IMHO) than original Asteroids and multi (up to 4) players (kind of a cross between Asteroids and Space War).
on top of that, the Linux user base is not very graphically oriented.
Ah, this no doubt explains the miserable failure of the GIMP to gain any users. And the absolute dearth of eye-candy window managers.
At first I thought this was a review of a collection of Bob Shaw's (I think)"slow glass" stories, the first of which was "Light of Other Days" (written sometime in the mid 1960s).
Slow glass was a material that transmitted images (like glass) very, very slowly -- up to several years in some cases, but it could be manufactured with varying time thicknesses (eg "24 hours thick", or "2 years thick"). (Ignore for the sake of the story the physics problems of storing a few years worth of, say, sunlight in a material a few millimeters thick.)
In a later story (I forget the title) it turns out that the government is sowing the countryside with little beads of (differing time) slow-glass: a spying mechanism where you just collect up the glass beads later and look at what went on.
Slow glass itself is probably a physical impossibility, but the ubiquitous spying is not: imagine billions of nano-cams with varying amounts of storage, or some sort of cellular wireless communication. You could (well, almost -- as far as we know the state-of-the-art is not quite there) make them the size of ants, with sufficient ant-like AI to let them crawl around. Perhaps they relay their images to a "queen ant" with a little more processing ability and broadcast range. Optical quality per image might be low (given the tiny optics), but combining multiple images gets around that, you could even get good 3-D images with multiple sensors and good position information (a couple of pairs of queen ants could triangulate that).
A lot more likely than magic wormholes, they just don't give you a record any further back than their deployment.
Yes, I was a little surprised the first time I heard that myself. But the UNIX trademark is now owned by OpenGroup, and any OS that passes the UNIX certification tests (API compatibilities, required utilities, etc.) is qualified to brand itself a UNIX. OS/390 qualified a year or so back. (And it's probably the only UNIX around that uses EBCDIC (or for that matter anything but ASCII) as its native character set.
(Most Linux distros almost qualify, the main problems being some slight differences in GNU utilities vs the UNIX flavor -- plus the fact that it costs money to go through the cert process.)
Mostly it means that any portably-written UNIX program will build and run on any such OS.
Other distros are catching up, but Caldera's install and GUI admin tools (eg COAS) make it a much better system for folks who just want to use it to get work done rather than geeks that like to tweak.
I ran it (Open Linux 2.1 and 2.2) for a while (I've since been a pretty steady SuSE user) and I've installed it and recommended it at/to a number of places with little 'nix expertise instead of NT machines for miscellaneous server duties. (Eg my daughter's school, a small mostly-Windows business, various individuals.)
Come to think of it, my personal 'net server (ajwm.net and a couple of other domains) is running Caldera (on a 486!) since I never saw any need to change it. (I use SuSE for development.)
Mind, lately Caldera seems to be targetting less the individual user and more businesses (so the SCO deal may make some sense.)
I would think that you would be able to get the appelate court to strike down the ruling simply because of the conflict of interest with the judge
Perhaps not struck down, but a retrial ordered at least. On the other hand, if Kaplan is really as scurrilous as some are making him out to be (rather than merely incompetent), perhaps he's laying the groundwork for such a strike down based on other factors than flaws in the DMCA itself.
Consider: perhaps he realizes that the DMCA is flawed with respect to DVDs and DeCSS. If he rules that way, or it goes to appeal and the appeals court rules that way, then MPAA is up the creek (from their point of view) as far as that goes. On the other hand, if the case is thrown out for other reasons, no ruling has been made on DMCA and the law can still be used to intimidate other folks.
Tar doesn't fit the bill. And actually, 'ar' is better suited because the index gives you faster access to files buried at the back of the archive. (And I once implemented a system like this to get around a 40-file quota (but no limit on file size!) on a Cyber mainframe I once had an account on.)
But creating cleartext copies on the disk is a huge flaw, one might as well just not bother encrypting in the first place.
Consider: PGP Disk lets me create, say, a 100 MB file on a FAT filesystem which it'll then mount as a virtual disk. I can see the file if I mount the partition under Linux, what's needed is something that'll understand the loopback filesystem embedded in it so I can mount it. (For that matter, PGP Disk makes a Mac version too, supposedly -- can the Mac version read the Windows version? Everything below the hooks into the OS to make the contents of the file look like a filesystem could/should be common to all platforms, that's just whatever format the author chooses. But is such a cross-platform package available? (For that matter, is there open source available for mounting a file as a filesystem on Windows and Mac, encrypted or not? From there it's a simple step to encrypt the thing.)
(Of course, the truly paranoid will re-wire their drive controllers and make personal patches to the OS as well as using strong encryption, for the same reason that crypt(3) perturbs the DES algorithm: it makes it tougher for the folks that might have hardware solutions.)
Sure. Not only drop packets, but also alter packets and created forged packets.
Not finding the evidence you need? Or just want to stir things up a bit and see what develops? Heck, just program Carnivore to change some wording in the next e-mail....
Everybody understands the principle of the basic wiretap. This is much more insidious, particularly seeing as it's a closed box. (Remember the old "Mission: Impossible" series where they'd tap into the phone lines and a voice artist would pretend to be the other party so that they could inject false information? Can you prove Carnivore can't/doesn't do this at the email level?
Speaking of PGP, is there a PGP Disk-like package that'll work cross-platform? That is, if set up a file as a virtual encrypted filesystem on a shared partition, it'll let me access the files from either Windoze or Linux? Or if I put that file on a ZIP, I could then access the files on a Mac (reading DOS format) too?
Encrypted filesystems (real or virtual) are great stuff, but so is the ability to access the same encrypted filesystem from different OS's.
No, the previous poster was right. AOL was never cool. Back when I was running a C-64 with a 300 baud modem (and a VIC-20 before that...) BIX was cool, or the university computer and Usenet.
But not AOL. Never. Nor Compuserve or Prodigy either.
Actually, cool was the time on one of my first jobs, back in the late 70s, when I had to check up on a weekend-long job running back at the office while I was away on a dive trip. Using a TI Silent 700 terminal (hardcopy thermal paper terminal, about the size of a portable typewriter, with built-in acoustic coupler 300 (or was it 110?) baud modem). The hotel we were in didn't have room phones, so I used the payphone in the hotel lobby...
Actually I take that back, it wasn't cool, just a pain in the butt.
So, where can I get acid-free printer paper (or, vellum that'll fit my printer :-) and an inkjet printer that uses non-water-soluable ink? I'll just make hardcopy backups of everything...
And for binary data, there's mylar tape (like paper tape only on mylar (or some similar tough plastic) so it won't tear. Or perhaps punched cards onto thin sheets of e.g. stainless steel.
Mind, the problem with any storage technology is that durability tends to be inversely proportional to density and read/write time. Hieroglyphs carved on granite may last a long time, but where do I find a SCSI or USB equipped engraver/reader for those?
Well, let's do the math:
Call a full-length motion picture (on DVD) about 6 gigabytes (give or take, depending on exact length and amount of compression). That's 2.5 minutes per gigabyte (for a 15min download), or 400 megabytes per minute (assume 1000 MB per GB for simiplicity), or 3200 Megabits/minute, or a bit over 53 Mb/sec (plus packet overhead).
You might be able to hit that over a very lightly loaded 100 Mb/sec Ethernet, but that's 35 T1's. On the other hand, that's only a third of an OC3.
And, gee, doesn't everyone have their own OC3 these days?
If copyright were done away with, I could take the Slackware distribution, make a bunch of source code changes, compile those changes and sell the resulting binaries while refusing to give anyone my source code changes.
Quite right. However, anyone else would be free to take your binary distribution and make as many copies of it as they chose, and give those away.
They might not get the source, but neither would you make any profit from the binaries. Where do you think Microsoft would be if the hardware vendors (and everyone else) didn't have to pay for Windows licenses?
The copyrights are probably still there, not that anyone buys Xenix any more.
/usr/include/sys/* and turned up a handful of files with Microsoft copyright notices. Mostly, as I recall, stuff related to reading DOS floppies.
A couple of years ago this came up while I was working on an OSF/1 system. Out of curiousity I ran grep on
It's a violation of FCC -- not FAA -- regulations to use cell phones aboard aircraft because of the transmitting range at altitude. Your signal covers more ground, giving greater potential for interference and confusing the multiple cells you're overlapping. FCC couldn't give a rats behind if it happens to screw up navigation equipment too. (Well, except where that nav equipment is also based on radio signals.)
Now, the FAA and airlines may also have a legitimate beef, and maybe even some regulations, but it's the FCC who will slap you with a heavy fine if they catch you doing it.
Actually, the lawyers may know very well what they're talking about (at least to the level of an educated person who isn't involved in software development on a day to day basis).
The thing is, they know that the testimony is going to be read/heard by at least a judge and quite possibly a jury, who are virtually guaranteed to know far less about this sort of thing, and the only opportunity they have to educate the judge/jury on it is through what they ask the witnesses. Which can lead to asking a lot of dumb questions.
In effect, the laywer is serving as proxy for the judge/jury, since the jury cannot ask questions itself. (Of course, he's acting as a filtering proxy -- he won't ask questions he doesn't want the jury to hear the answers too, but the opposing lawyer might.)
The Microsoft thing is pretty much out of the Administration's (Bush or Gore) hands now. Despite the cries of "two years of appeals", this is likely to be expedited to the Supreme Court and we could well have a final decision before the next President takes office. As for appointing Supreme Court justices -- the Democrats have something of a history of appointing revisionist judges (those who like to find emanations of penumbras of meaning in the Constitution, no doubt causing the original signers to roll in their graves) where as Rebublicans tend to appoint judges who tend to favor original intent. (Sure, there are exceptions.) Since the authority to grant and enforce copyrights and patents comes directly from the Constitution, we would be well served (in this respect) to have Justices who understand that their role is to interpret the original intent of that document, not legislate from the bench by finding new meaning in it. The Constitution provided for copyright and patent for a limited time to foster the progress of science and the useful arts. (Hmm, is the music of Metallica or the latest Hollywood DVD a "useful art"? Now there's an interesting court case waiting to happen...). We would do well to have Justices appreciate the original intent. Bush is more likely to give us those than Al "no controlling legal authority" Gore. (Maybe I need a new sig -- "Judge Jackson for Supreme Court Justice" :-)
Well, it confirms my view that you have to be a pot-smoking drunkard to use Windows. :-)
You're simply making a distinction between short-term self interest (immediate gratification) vs long-term self interest. In the long run, it's the latter that counts.