'Each of the XPP's 128 processor cores sports its own 32-bit fixed-point multiplier, yielding a theoretical output of 12.8 billion multiply-accumulate operations per second at an expected clock frequency of 100 MHz. Pact claims the architecture will scale to produce devices capable of more than 400 giga operations/s in 2002 and into the peta-ops range within a decade.'
Mother of God! The first time some fool runs Quake IV Slaughter on a Beowulf cluster of these puppies (you knew that had to get in here somewhere), it'll instantly self-evolve into Quake X^100 and wipe out the human race!
I was around to witness more than a few of those old FidoNet (BBS) flame wars, and rarely participated in them, considering them a waste of time and energy. I did come away from that "era" (dammit, I'm not old!) with the distinct feeling that many of these flame wars were the exercise of the desire to exhibit cleverness at venting bile and at inventing smart-aleck putdowns without the traditional risk of face-to-face confrontation. These flame wars only moderated (significantly, though) when the participants did have reason to meet personally, such as at local FidoNet policy fab-wabs (not sure if that was the word, so the hell with it).
Verbal conflicts in the "local" echoes tended to moderate greatly as you describe, sometimes even degenerating into disgusting love-fests, while the "distant" echoes (nationwide in scope) would suffer from endless flame wars with much clever but ultimately repetitious repartee and streaks of sheer bile. Still, there did tend to be at least a reasonable level of intellect. Nowadays, it's not even at kindergarten level almost everywhere I look (in Usenet). It's much harder to find the signal in the noise, although it's still possible to find isolated strands of very high-quality conversation even in wild, woolly Usenet.
Mind you, this talk of brimstone refers to the "controversial" echoes. Mostly it'd be much quieter in the cooking or various technical discussion echoes, although one could be very surprised on occasion to see just what sorts of arguments might arise over what odd points. Some of the conversations in certain echoes could become very strange indeed, much as they do today in less-frequented corners of Usenet.:)
I never did like the pointless exercises in scorching, and tried hard to not even see them nearly all of the time. Feh. I'd rather write prose or program or do almost anything else productive.
If this is legal in the first place, then why didn't they go ahead and require 99.9999% of all revenue, and the first born children of all ISP employees? It's not like requiring 75/25% of revenue is subtle, so why not just go all out?
Satan doesn't want to be too obvious, right away. It attracts immediate attention from On High.
Locusts are most often noted for the damage they cause to crops when they aggregate into large swarms.
Sounds like lobbyists to me. Could they be brought under control by hooking them up to little carts, with special code to prevent them from going into the offices of politicians?
So, send an encrypted email to a litigious enemy, and a copy of it to his boss and all his friends saying, "You're creepy, you eat dead cockroaches, and you smell like spoiled milk." Wait until six months and one day later to release the key to decrypt it. Scot-free! Mua-ha-ha-ha!
It's high time specifically to sue these companies for terrorism and conspiracy under the R.I.C.O. statutes. Those terrifying police-state statutes are used against ordinary folks for anything and everything and nothing at all, so it's time to get the corporations all stirred up against those Nazi-like statutes, and dish out some justice as well.
A patent is a privilege, a monopoly granted by the government to a single entity for a period of time. To argue that an individual or company has the inherent right to dictate to the rest of the world what can and cannot be done with an idea is as ludicrous as arguing that an individual or company has the inherent right to dictate what can and cannot be done with other forms of property that individuals own, like saying that an individual or company has the right to say what I can and cannot do with my computer, my car, or anything else I legitimately have in my possession.
I like the way you said it better. I was composing my own furious response at the time you were writing your thought-out response, and didn't see it until after posting. These people who think they have a right to shove a gun into my face to force me to give them my wallet just to use my own, trivial, routine thoughts, just make my trigger finger extremely itchy. They are plain and simple thugs, and make me vastly more sympathetic to the zealots who oppose all software patents.
It seems high time to start suing these companies specifically for attempting to go far beyond valid patents into the realm of thought theft. Perhaps the First Amendment would apply here, as well as the same "intellectual property theft" laws they so love to abuse?
We need aggressive and imaginative attourneys willing to break new legal ground on behalf of us ordinary, non-monied mortals against greedy, manipulative companies with more lobbyists and corrupt lawyers than they have of simple morality.
Dan Reznik, a Brazilian computer science Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Berkeley, has developed a table with a shaking top that moves objects as if by magic -- the only finger lifted is the one on the mouse controlling what objects are moved where.
Combine this effect with the pressure-sensitive polymer from a few days ago and some control electronics, and you'd have a floor able to react automatically to the presence of a life insurance salesman by wisking him effortlessly back out the door.
Walker added: "The burden of proof is not for the people who defend property rights, but those who want to take them away."
Goddamn it, what a load of manipulative crap! It's frankly up to the people who allege a certain idea to be their idea, to prove that instead of smirkingly demanding that other people prove that it was stolen or blaringly obvious. I approve of valid patents, but vehemently oppose the idea that a fucking grant of privilege ought to just automatically be your problem unless you prove, at your great cost, that it shouldn't be your problem.
The patent system today is simply whacko, insane. It amounts to massive, legalized extortion against all of us for using our own damn ideas in routine, even trivial ways.
No, no, that's not meant to be a bad pun. It's the marketing droid wording in the linked document. Maybe i'm just tired, but it's almost all Greek to me. What are they saying exactly, in plain English? It sounds vaguely as if special servers are communicating at very high speed over "cat-5" cabling, using special adapter cards, and are meant to work with semi-dumb terminals hooked up to them over short distances for userland tasks.
Is that wrong? It doubtless is, but geez. Why can't these people ever just be plain and simple? Is it so hard?
How would one accumulate a library of favorite episodes or movies with this device? I can't really see stacking up dozens of these devices on a heavy-duty steel shelf unit in the basement. Videocassettes are much cheaper, not to mention less bulky. Perhaps I'm missing something...?
Lessig's follow-up question was if a person purchased a movie (presumably on DVD or some media type protected by the DMCA) and then proceded to watch the movie on a player that was not authorized by the author, does that go beyond "fair use" of that media. At which point, Jack essentially said "Oh, look at the time! Got to go!" (Paraphrased, but essentially accurate.)
I'd like to see Jack Valenti tied up to a tree, hanging from his hands and feet all wrapped up, whereupon the good folks who finally served up some justice respond to Jack Valenti's whining, "When you gonna lemme go! I demand you lemme go right this instant!" with, ""Oh, look at the time! Got to go!"
I'd laugh like Hell at this, then go for a good pepperoni pizza and a nice quiet evening of hacking code.
[...] a lightweight, malleable conductor named Peratech that
can detect, measure and respond to a range of pressures "from the
lightest touch to the heaviest hammer blow," and that can be
incorporated into fabrics, plastics, and other solids.
Another (and probably obvious) application of this technology
is plasticised sheets of it sandwiched between a bare floor and
the less expensive and more cleanable layer of
vinyl flooring
or plush carpeting. Home, hotel or company electronics could detect intrusion
by the mere presence of footsteps, or distinguish between behaviors of
footsteps (their heaviness and frequency) associated with certain
people who are authorized or not to be in certain areas.
Parents would always know where exactly was their
terrible-two's baby
at any given minute, with an alarm set to go off if the footsteps
headed into the basement with the cat-eating rats or into the attic with the
medieval
edged weapons collection from Crazy Uncle Frank. High-class hotels would
appreciate the ability to track when guests left their rooms, so
that cleaning maids would know when to clean their rooms, and long-term-care
hospitals (dying homes, if you must) would appreciate the ability to track
dementia patients without needing to tag them like animals or to confine them
to their rooms at night.
The Orwellian implications of all of this are thick enough that I
won't bother to beat them to death with the skull of a horse.
I've taunted the RIAA, the MPAA, I've denounced the christian coalition, NOW (national organization of women), and I have yet to receive a single letter of reprisal.
Hmmm. Interesting.
Watch for a page soon that taunts mad pit bulls with RIAA-approved Christian Coalition cease-and-letters to NOW for hacking the CueCat with the help of the MPAA to secretly send information to Digital Convergence about anti-feminist movies from open-source MPEG4-based DVD-ripper programs powered by DeCSS.
That should stir up a nicely amusing unholy mess, not to mention a very confusing one.
Whoever put together this plan has got to be sitting in his chair rocking back and forth laughing his butt off at how we fell for it hook, line and sinker!
Yes, this is exactly what I said in another post earlier this week.
It would be interesting to use this tactic (also posted earlier this week).
These people are starting to very seriously cheese me off, stunt or no stunt. Judges are making up laws based on this crap.
I have a throw-away password I use for unencrypted web stuff [...]
I've found that the best way to good password security in reality is to systematically back them up as they're created, to a plain text file which is easily viewable on an simple unconnected box (no network at all) and automatically backed up to floppy diskette (extremely cheap, and multiple copies can be physically strewn about).
As long as I can easily find the passwords again if the GnuPG-encrypted copy of the text file on the connected box (for cut and paste from a temporary unencrypted RAMdisk copy) is mangled, it's much easier to bring myself to make up a zillion different passwords for every conceivable demand).
Sure, a 1337 h4}{02 d00d might rappel down from the roof with Cat-5 cabling and crack open the window with a high-technological assault screwdriver, snatch a floppy diskette labelled "secret valuable password text file" and run hell for leather to get to a terminal from which he can clean out my bank account, but oddly enough, I don't sleep with one eye always open. That ain't gonna happen.
Besides, I also encrypt these sensitive physical-media backup text files with heavy-duty WinZip 8.0 password protection. (The Windows box is for graphical programs that run overnight to render complex images, and it doesn't need to be connected more than occasionally). Even the 1337 d00dz can't crack that.
I just took a look at ebay, and someone is apparently willing to pay at least $380.66 for Windows.
Some people will pay big bucks for old Nazi souvenirs, too. Not that Microsoft is trying to take over the world, of course. They don't have
heavy, sloppy vehicles of war with which to run over opponents and blast the competition to pieces.
It would be more productive to extensively train the managers to be competent in dealing specifically with bright and knowledgeable people, rather than ignoring a fundamental problem with IT work, which is that the more complex the work, the harder it is for managers to avoid being oafish fools about dealing with people who often are much smarter and more knowledgeable than they. This problem will only get worse as complex technologies continue to creep into every aspect of formerly simple products and services.
Hiring as a manager the venture capitalist's son-in-law or the college buddy is just not going to work anymore, not that it ever did....
The lawyers at Digital Convergence are being just ridiculous.
How about open-source software for generating (stickum-backed) barcodes for little bottles of prescription medicine, so older folks with poor vision or folks with poor reading skills can run CueCats over them to have a synthesized voice speak to them the important details that are way too small or hard to read in those bitty pamplets or on the bottles themselves?
Trying to stomp on that would make the snarling poodles at Digital Convergence look just plain mean. Not that they need any help with looking like mean bullies....
Imagine ... Yes, Imagine ...
on
3D Printers
·
· Score: 1
It might as well be said. "Imagine one of these making a Beowulf cluster!"
This reminds me of Microsoft's response when I pointed out a problem with one of their C++ libraries: "It isn't a bug. It's a limitation." That slogan was my.sig for years.
"It isn't a bug. It's an exclusive Microsoft feature."
This would make Windows 95/98/2000/Me/CE/NT what, a cockroach motel?
It actually doesn't seem possible that there could be such clueless tossers.
Frankly, I'm starting to believe strongly that certain people at Radio Shack and Digital Convergence are laughing their asses off at how they got a bunch of hackers all riled up for nothing, and a shitload of free publicity that brings vitally needed attention to kickstart such a radically different, not to mention ambitious, business plan. After all, as has been pointed out many times, savvy Linux users are a rather small part of the total potential audience for the CueCat, and even open-source free Windows 95/98/2000/ME drivers would only be used by a small minority of savvy users of that operating system (save the obvious jokes about that, please).
I've had quite enough experience with people who don't grok computers, some otherwise fairly intelligent people at that, to see clearly how the great mass of people who might use the CueCat would never bother to download and use such open-source free Windows 95/98/2000/ME drivers, even if large blinking purple "CLICK-ME-NOW" links walked right up to them and bit them on the eyeballs.
It's not as if the original blatherware that came on the CD-ROM's is nicking their credit
cards, is it?
People who don't grok computers except as odd and expensive appliances are alien, make no mistake about it, just weird to those of us who cannot imagine caring so little about even great blaring differences in, say, the choice of a primary operating system. They just don't care!
The smart, monied technology folks at the top have got to know this, to have been trusted with even their own little checking accounts, let alone many tens of millions in other people's money.
Think about those vaguely threatening, chain-rattling "pseudo-cease-and-desist" letters from some apparent loonie-bin escapee that seem almost parodies of the MPAA/RIAA pit-bull letters (for DeCSS and MP3's), and tell me if I'm wrong, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
'Each of the XPP's 128 processor cores sports its own 32-bit fixed-point multiplier, yielding a theoretical output of 12.8 billion multiply-accumulate operations per second at an expected clock frequency of 100 MHz. Pact claims the architecture will scale to produce devices capable of more than 400 giga operations/s in 2002 and into the peta-ops range within a decade.'
Mother of God! The first time some fool runs Quake IV Slaughter on a Beowulf cluster of these puppies (you knew that had to get in here somewhere), it'll instantly self-evolve into Quake X^100 and wipe out the human race!
I was around to witness more than a few of those old FidoNet (BBS) flame wars, and rarely participated in them, considering them a waste of time and energy. I did come away from that "era" (dammit, I'm not old!) with the distinct feeling that many of these flame wars were the exercise of the desire to exhibit cleverness at venting bile and at inventing smart-aleck putdowns without the traditional risk of face-to-face confrontation. These flame wars only moderated (significantly, though) when the participants did have reason to meet personally, such as at local FidoNet policy fab-wabs (not sure if that was the word, so the hell with it).
Verbal conflicts in the "local" echoes tended to moderate greatly as you describe, sometimes even degenerating into disgusting love-fests, while the "distant" echoes (nationwide in scope) would suffer from endless flame wars with much clever but ultimately repetitious repartee and streaks of sheer bile. Still, there did tend to be at least a reasonable level of intellect. Nowadays, it's not even at kindergarten level almost everywhere I look (in Usenet). It's much harder to find the signal in the noise, although it's still possible to find isolated strands of very high-quality conversation even in wild, woolly Usenet.
Mind you, this talk of brimstone refers to the "controversial" echoes. Mostly it'd be much quieter in the cooking or various technical discussion echoes, although one could be very surprised on occasion to see just what sorts of arguments might arise over what odd points. Some of the conversations in certain echoes could become very strange indeed, much as they do today in less-frequented corners of Usenet. :)
I never did like the pointless exercises in scorching, and tried hard to not even see them nearly all of the time. Feh. I'd rather write prose or program or do almost anything else productive.
If this is legal in the first place, then why didn't they go ahead and require 99.9999% of all revenue, and the first born children of all ISP employees? It's not like requiring 75/25% of revenue is subtle, so why not just go all out?
Satan doesn't want to be too obvious, right away. It attracts immediate attention from On High.
Locusts are most often noted for the damage they cause to crops when they aggregate into large swarms.
Sounds like lobbyists to me. Could they be brought under control by hooking them up to little carts, with special code to prevent them from going into the offices of politicians?
So, send an encrypted email to a litigious enemy, and a copy of it to his boss and all his friends saying, "You're creepy, you eat dead cockroaches, and you smell like spoiled milk." Wait until six months and one day later to release the key to decrypt it. Scot-free! Mua-ha-ha-ha!
It's high time specifically to sue these companies for terrorism and conspiracy under the R.I.C.O. statutes. Those terrifying police-state statutes are used against ordinary folks for anything and everything and nothing at all, so it's time to get the corporations all stirred up against those Nazi-like statutes, and dish out some justice as well.
A patent is a privilege, a monopoly granted by the government to a single entity for a period of time. To argue that an individual or company has the inherent right to dictate to the rest of the world what can and cannot be done with an idea is as ludicrous as arguing that an individual or company has the inherent right to dictate what can and cannot be done with other forms of property that individuals own, like saying that an individual or company has the right to say what I can and cannot do with my computer, my car, or anything else I legitimately have in my possession.
I like the way you said it better. I was composing my own furious response at the time you were writing your thought-out response, and didn't see it until after posting. These people who think they have a right to shove a gun into my face to force me to give them my wallet just to use my own, trivial, routine thoughts, just make my trigger finger extremely itchy. They are plain and simple thugs, and make me vastly more sympathetic to the zealots who oppose all software patents.
It seems high time to start suing these companies specifically for attempting to go far beyond valid patents into the realm of thought theft. Perhaps the First Amendment would apply here, as well as the same "intellectual property theft" laws they so love to abuse?
We need aggressive and imaginative attourneys willing to break new legal ground on behalf of us ordinary, non-monied mortals against greedy, manipulative companies with more lobbyists and corrupt lawyers than they have of simple morality.
Dan Reznik, a Brazilian computer science Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Berkeley, has developed a table with a shaking top that moves objects as if by magic -- the only finger lifted is the one on the mouse controlling what objects are moved where.
Combine this effect with the pressure-sensitive polymer from a few days ago and some control electronics, and you'd have a floor able to react automatically to the presence of a life insurance salesman by wisking him effortlessly back out the door.
From the linked document:
Walker added: "The burden of proof is not for the people who defend property rights, but those who want to take them away."
Goddamn it, what a load of manipulative crap! It's frankly up to the people who allege a certain idea to be their idea, to prove that instead of smirkingly demanding that other people prove that it was stolen or blaringly obvious. I approve of valid patents, but vehemently oppose the idea that a fucking grant of privilege ought to just automatically be your problem unless you prove, at your great cost, that it shouldn't be your problem.
The patent system today is simply whacko, insane. It amounts to massive, legalized extortion against all of us for using our own damn ideas in routine, even trivial ways.
No, no, that's not meant to be a bad pun. It's the marketing droid wording in the linked document. Maybe i'm just tired, but it's almost all Greek to me. What are they saying exactly, in plain English? It sounds vaguely as if special servers are communicating at very high speed over "cat-5" cabling, using special adapter cards, and are meant to work with semi-dumb terminals hooked up to them over short distances for userland tasks.
Is that wrong? It doubtless is, but geez. Why can't these people ever just be plain and simple? Is it so hard?
How would one accumulate a library of favorite episodes or movies with this device? I can't really see stacking up dozens of these devices on a heavy-duty steel shelf unit in the basement. Videocassettes are much cheaper, not to mention less bulky. Perhaps I'm missing something ...?
Lessig's follow-up question was if a person purchased a movie (presumably on DVD or some media type protected by the DMCA) and then proceded to watch the movie on a player that was not authorized by the author, does that go beyond "fair use" of that media. At which point, Jack essentially said "Oh, look at the time! Got to go!" (Paraphrased, but essentially accurate.)
I'd like to see Jack Valenti tied up to a tree, hanging from his hands and feet all wrapped up, whereupon the good folks who finally served up some justice respond to Jack Valenti's whining, "When you gonna lemme go! I demand you lemme go right this instant!" with, ""Oh, look at the time! Got to go!"
I'd laugh like Hell at this, then go for a good pepperoni pizza and a nice quiet evening of hacking code.
[...] a lightweight, malleable conductor named Peratech that can detect, measure and respond to a range of pressures "from the lightest touch to the heaviest hammer blow," and that can be incorporated into fabrics, plastics, and other solids.
Another (and probably obvious) application of this technology is plasticised sheets of it sandwiched between a bare floor and the less expensive and more cleanable layer of vinyl flooring or plush carpeting. Home, hotel or company electronics could detect intrusion by the mere presence of footsteps, or distinguish between behaviors of footsteps (their heaviness and frequency) associated with certain people who are authorized or not to be in certain areas.
Parents would always know where exactly was their terrible-two's baby at any given minute, with an alarm set to go off if the footsteps headed into the basement with the cat-eating rats or into the attic with the medieval edged weapons collection from Crazy Uncle Frank. High-class hotels would appreciate the ability to track when guests left their rooms, so that cleaning maids would know when to clean their rooms, and long-term-care hospitals (dying homes, if you must) would appreciate the ability to track dementia patients without needing to tag them like animals or to confine them to their rooms at night.
The Orwellian implications of all of this are thick enough that I won't bother to beat them to death with the skull of a horse.
I've taunted the RIAA, the MPAA, I've denounced the christian coalition, NOW (national organization of women), and I have yet to receive a single letter of reprisal.
Hmmm. Interesting.
Watch for a page soon that taunts mad pit bulls with RIAA-approved Christian Coalition cease-and-letters to NOW for hacking the CueCat with the help of the MPAA to secretly send information to Digital Convergence about anti-feminist movies from open-source MPEG4-based DVD-ripper programs powered by DeCSS.
That should stir up a nicely amusing unholy mess, not to mention a very confusing one.
Whoever put together this plan has got to be sitting in his chair rocking back and forth laughing his butt off at how we fell for it hook, line and sinker!
Yes, this is exactly what I said in another post earlier this week.
It would be interesting to use this tactic (also posted earlier this week).
These people are starting to very seriously cheese me off, stunt or no stunt. Judges are making up laws based on this crap.
I have a throw-away password I use for unencrypted web stuff [...]
I've found that the best way to good password security in reality is to systematically back them up as they're created, to a plain text file which is easily viewable on an simple unconnected box (no network at all) and automatically backed up to floppy diskette (extremely cheap, and multiple copies can be physically strewn about).
As long as I can easily find the passwords again if the GnuPG-encrypted copy of the text file on the connected box (for cut and paste from a temporary unencrypted RAMdisk copy) is mangled, it's much easier to bring myself to make up a zillion different passwords for every conceivable demand).
Sure, a 1337 h4}{02 d00d might rappel down from the roof with Cat-5 cabling and crack open the window with a high-technological assault screwdriver, snatch a floppy diskette labelled "secret valuable password text file" and run hell for leather to get to a terminal from which he can clean out my bank account, but oddly enough, I don't sleep with one eye always open. That ain't gonna happen.
Besides, I also encrypt these sensitive physical-media backup text files with heavy-duty WinZip 8.0 password protection. (The Windows box is for graphical programs that run overnight to render complex images, and it doesn't need to be connected more than occasionally). Even the 1337 d00dz can't crack that.
I just took a look at ebay, and someone is apparently willing to pay at least $380.66 for Windows.
Some people will pay big bucks for old Nazi souvenirs, too. Not that Microsoft is trying to take over the world, of course. They don't have heavy, sloppy vehicles of war with which to run over opponents and blast the competition to pieces.
Oh, wait a minute ....
Well that depends, what kind of windows are they? Anderson? Double hung? Tempered glass? Bulletproof? [...]
Will double hung tempered bulletproof glass keep Windows away from my Linux box? If so, I want some!
Tell a man that there are 400 billion stars and he'll believe you. Say a bench has wet paint and he has to touch it.
Tell the man there are 400 billion molecules of wet paint on the bench.
It would be more productive to extensively train the managers to be competent in dealing specifically with bright and knowledgeable people, rather than ignoring a fundamental problem with IT work, which is that the more complex the work, the harder it is for managers to avoid being oafish fools about dealing with people who often are much smarter and more knowledgeable than they. This problem will only get worse as complex technologies continue to creep into every aspect of formerly simple products and services.
Hiring as a manager the venture capitalist's son-in-law or the college buddy is just not going to work anymore, not that it ever did ....
The lawyers at Digital Convergence are being just ridiculous.
How about open-source software for generating (stickum-backed) barcodes for little bottles of prescription medicine, so older folks with poor vision or folks with poor reading skills can run CueCats over them to have a synthesized voice speak to them the important details that are way too small or hard to read in those bitty pamplets or on the bottles themselves?
Trying to stomp on that would make the snarling poodles at Digital Convergence look just plain mean. Not that they need any help with looking like mean bullies ....
It might as well be said. "Imagine one of these making a Beowulf cluster!"
You may now return to the normal excited chatter.
This reminds me of Microsoft's response when I pointed out a problem with one of their C++ libraries: "It isn't a bug. It's a limitation." That slogan was my .sig for years.
"It isn't a bug. It's an exclusive Microsoft feature."
This would make Windows 95/98/2000/Me/CE/NT what, a cockroach motel?
Where did I put that rare earth magnet? ;']
It actually doesn't seem possible that there could be such clueless tossers.
Frankly, I'm starting to believe strongly that certain people at Radio Shack and Digital Convergence are laughing their asses off at how they got a bunch of hackers all riled up for nothing, and a shitload of free publicity that brings vitally needed attention to kickstart such a radically different, not to mention ambitious, business plan. After all, as has been pointed out many times, savvy Linux users are a rather small part of the total potential audience for the CueCat, and even open-source free Windows 95/98/2000/ME drivers would only be used by a small minority of savvy users of that operating system (save the obvious jokes about that, please).
I've had quite enough experience with people who don't grok computers, some otherwise fairly intelligent people at that, to see clearly how the great mass of people who might use the CueCat would never bother to download and use such open-source free Windows 95/98/2000/ME drivers, even if large blinking purple "CLICK-ME-NOW" links walked right up to them and bit them on the eyeballs.
It's not as if the original blatherware that came on the CD-ROM's is nicking their credit cards, is it?
People who don't grok computers except as odd and expensive appliances are alien, make no mistake about it, just weird to those of us who cannot imagine caring so little about even great blaring differences in, say, the choice of a primary operating system. They just don't care!
The smart, monied technology folks at the top have got to know this, to have been trusted with even their own little checking accounts, let alone many tens of millions in other people's money.
Think about those vaguely threatening, chain-rattling "pseudo-cease-and-desist" letters from some apparent loonie-bin escapee that seem almost parodies of the MPAA/RIAA pit-bull letters (for DeCSS and MP3's), and tell me if I'm wrong, eh?
[...] a very compact device driver called catnip.
I was unable to find this with Google or AltaVista. Is there a link for that driver?
I've been reading too much CueCat stuff all over the Web, and just saw a Battlebot article. Sorry about that ....