If I understood correctly (the article was a bit fuzzy), the CPU he created is x86 compatible which is quite ironic as it's a really bad ISA, I wonder why he didn't choose say a MIPS ISA? (maybe it's because he chose Minix..)
No, it's not x86 compatible. It's his own ISA, inspired by the architecture of the Z80, which was a clone of the 8080, of which the 8086 was the successor.
His machine is a 16-bit machine with 8-bit wide memory, 256 instructions and 3 general-purpose registers, implemented using approximately 1,000 (?) gates in 200 individual 74-series ICs.
MIPS is a 32-bit architecture, typically with 32-bit wide memory, 32-bit instruction coding, 32 general-purpose registers and in its original incarnation contained approximately 15,000 gates. Rendered in 74-series ICs, it would probably require about 3-5,000 individual ICs, which is *way* more than anyone can reasonably work with in a single design. And would get _very_ hot.
There *are* countries in Europe which use an opt-out system
Read what the article said, read what the post you're replying to said, then look up the fallacy of composition.
I'm aware of exactly what the article said:
As an aside, organ donors in Europe have to opt-out to NOT become an organ donor, i.e., uncheck the box.
Note that this does not say "all organ donors in Europe". It quite clearly is a statement that may or may not apply throughout Europe. As it happens, in this case, it does not.
From the post description it doesn't sound like he is trading in anything but ads.
Still, if he is using the name as his business name when selling those ads, he may have a point. But only if the original poster also puts ads on his site.
Assuming that ICANN, supported by all the slashdot readers desperately defending their privacy, don't do away with Whois of course...
whois is unlikely to go away in the foreseeable. It may change (perhaps to a system like the UK one, where a domain that is registered for personal use only can have the contact details hidden), but it isn't going away.
The threats from the owner of simplemillionaire.com also detailed how he was going to sue me to pay for HIS legal expenses. Again, I don't know how kosher that sort of threat is.
As far as I understand it, and assuming you're in the US, not at all. See here for a blog entry written by C. E. Petit, a successful IP lawyer. I quote:
For one thing, it's a lot harder to get an award of attorney's fees in trademark actions (requires an "exceptional case") than in copyright actions.
Step 2: How strong is the trademark? A mark like Exxon is extremely strong. It has no existance except for the oil company. If you use "exxon" in any context you're probably violating the mark.
Not really, no. You're free to use "exxon" in any way you like as long as it does not cause confusion between you or a business you are promoting and Exxon. A trademark is only enforceable in respect of this.
Normally you have to use a capital letter to denote a trademark. So if I say windows it's not referring to the OS. If I say Windows it is.
Capital letters are usually required for any proper noun, and trademarks are proper nouns. But that's a grammatical rule of English, not a legal rule concerning trademarks.
Of course domains don't use uppercase, so this is where the ambiguity is.
Domain names are case insensitive. You're free to write your domain name with a capital if you wish.
Technical details in the article are slim and misleading.
Technical details in the article are substantial, although very difficult to follow. The only question I'm left with is who the fuck stores your credit card details in a _cookie_, and why...?
Not so much angry as ill informed. That's certainly not the case in the UK or Italy which, last time I checked, are part of Europe. I doubt the authors could point to either on a map.
There *are* countries in Europe which use an opt-out system, although not many yet. There have been suggestions that the UK may change to opt-out in the future, as polls have suggested that ~70% of the population would support such a change.
Uh, the SI standardized the unit prefixes in 1960 (well, at least the prefixes relevant to consumer hard drives).
Oh, right, so the SI are the only people who have the right to use the letters 'K' 'M' and 'G', then?
No?
There wasn't an internationally standardised unit of data storage until 2000. Until then, with no official standard meaning to the letters "KB", "MB" and "GB", they were available for use for whatever the innovators who started using them wanted them to mean. And they were first used with the meaning of 2^10, 2^20 and 2^30 bytes.
think the whole lawsuit is silly. Who could have possibly been confused by the claims of hard drive makers? Those who are computer illiterate would assume that 1 MB = 1*10^6 bytes
Those who are computer illiterate have little or no concept of what a byte is. They only know about file sizes by looking at what their computer tells them. And their computer (or at least the software installed on it) uses the binary definitions.
The fact that some operating systems choose to let that low-level detail show to the consumers is because of poor operating system design, not because of any logic reason.
The fact that _all mainstream operating systems_ choose to let it through is because it was a de-facto standard years before they started. Changing it at any point would have been confusing to existing users (and, yes, the first users really did care).
And it is not the fault of the hard drive makers, who just use the SI units.
Which, interestingly enough, they were doing long before the SI standardised them. But you can bet the switch was made for marketing reasons, not because of any desire to follow standards.
I guess it makes sense if you think about it, but it seems a bit weird that it's much easier to design and build a plane that flies itself than a car that drives itself.
Car that drives itself was a solved problem 20 years or so ago. Car that drives itself and can safely integrate with _people_ who are driving, that's a different matter.
Depending on how the laws are interpreted in the future, Google didn't have to ask permission to archive, index and present excerpts of her book for search purposes as it is generally accepted to fall within research based fair use rights.
They weren't presenting excerpts; they were providing large sections of the book for online reading (i.e., the "opt-in" option).
And exactly how is she damaged by this? It can only help to increase exposure of her book.
Right. And being an author who has other books in the Baen free library, there are probably few people more aware of this than she is. But that doesn't mean that her publishers should get a free pass to do what they want with her book.
What if I find one of my books in Google Book Search and would like it removed?
We're happy to remove your book from our search results at any time, just as we do for website publishers and our web search results. [...] To begin this process, please start here to identify yourself as the owner.
According to Google, though, they'd had permission to include the book from its publisher, so wouldn't remove it in this case. Despite the fact that the publisher didn't have lawful authority to grant that permission. They wouldn't identify the author of the book as being the owner, because they'd already identified the publisher as "owning" it. The entire fiasco could only be solved by the publisher informing Google that they didn't want the book included.
Hard drive makers have, for some considerable time, have meant 10**9 (1,000,000,000) when referring to a gigabyte. They always so declare in their literature.
Could you tell me when, to an approximate decade, was the last time you read a drive manufacturer's literature before buying their drive? And take a guess at what the answer is for the average computer buyer?
This has actually caused some confusion as computer people speaking of "kilo" this and "mega" that have worked with scientists who have always used the traditional SI meanings. These differences in interpretation can mean your chemical process doesn't work, the patient dies, you miss Jupiter, etc.
Could you cite some real cases? I seriously do not believe that this has ever been a real issue. Nobody ever uses K = 2^10 for *any* unit other than bits or bytes, so I don't see how it would have any effect on the things you just mentioned.
To help redress this problem, a new set of prefixes have been coined to refer to powers of two. These new prefixes have seen uneven but increasing adoption in the industry (if you have a recent Ubuntu/Debian release, run the command ifconfig -- the byte counts have the new prefixes).
Sure, and I use them when necessary. But the average user has not yet been exposed to them, because mainstream software manufacturers (primarily Microsoft and Apple) do not use them yet, so you cannot expect the average user to understand the difference.
So, the hard drive makers have been using the SI meanings for "giga"
Which they started doing before SI weighed in on this topic, and besides, why does SI have any more right than anyone else to dictate the meaning. For instance, the first dictionary definition of "gigabyte" in my dictionary is "A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to 1,024 megabytes (2^30 bytes)." Why does SI have more right to determine what an English-language word means than the lexicographers who compiled this dictionary?
and, in case there was any confusion, explicitly printed in their literature, "One gigabyte is equal to 1000000000 bytes."
What a crock. Anyone that knows enough about computers to know that GB, MB, and KB are usually base-2 should also know enough to check whether the HDD measurement is in base-2 or base-10. Non-computer people would probably assume that they are base-10... or, more likely, merely that the bigger the number, the better. In my experience non-computer people have difficulty distinguishing between hard-drive space and RAM. Saying that they are somehow miraculously able to distinguish between base-2 and base-10 measurements is ridiculous.
To the average person, the distinction between base-2 and base-10 is meaningless, yes. That doesn't mean, however, that they aren't being cheated. Their interface with the computer, when they examine a file, will tell them how large it is using base-2 units. Disk space requirements on the back of software packages are written in base-2 units. Everything they see is in base-2 units, so this is how they estimate their requirements of disk size. And then they find out that the disk is being sold using different units.
It's a confusing situation, and the disk manufacturers deliberately switched in order to take advantage of it.
The Kilo-, Mega- and Giga- prefixes are always base-10 in SI. The IT industry should come up with different terms. Misusing them was a mistake in the '60s and it is a mistake now.
While I agree with you, and try to use Ki etc myself, I don't think this is a problem that can just disappear like that. People are used to thinking in terms of 1GB as ~1.1*10^9 bytes. They might not realise that they do, but they do. Changing perceptions is a long and slow process, and software manufacturers (the only people who can realistically change these perceptions) are reluctant to start because they fear confusing their users. They're probably right.
1. Most manufacturers at the time they were introduced labelled them with an "unformatted capacity" of 2MB.
2. a 1.44MB formatted floppy has an actual capacity of 2880 x 512 byte sectors = 1,474,560 bytes. This is neither using the original definition of 1MB=2^20 bytes (which would mean 1.44MB = 1,509,949 bytes) nor the 1MB=10^6 bytes definition (where 1.44MB = 1,440,000 bytes).
I've actually seen some hard disk manufacturers use this definition, too.
One writer I know got seriously pissed when her publisher's parent company gave google permission to include her entire book in google books. No, they didn't have the rights required to do that. Did they care? Not really, no.
I don't see how they can possibly justify excluding works of minor writers as "insignificant"
The problem, you see, is that Wikipedia has positioned itself as _not making judgements of importance of a particular subject_. Yet they use a word, "notability", that is a synonym of "importance".
Whether a wikipedia article is allowed to exist is supposed to be judged by a somewhat objective standard: whether or not other writers of reference works considered reliable have considered the subject important enough to write and publish about.
Unfortunately, the result of this rule is (1) subjective squabbling over which works are considered reliable and (2) a distinct bias against topics that are on the fringes of culture. Webcomics have suffered due to both of these: works that write about webcomics have largely been considered to be unreliable, and because they are often fringe subjects there aren't many works to choose from.
Slashdot Mirror
4Mb RAM, 4MHz CPU, 500Kb ram disk - Minix: ?
2, according to his web page.
If I understood correctly (the article was a bit fuzzy), the CPU he created is x86 compatible which is quite ironic as it's a really bad ISA, I wonder why he didn't choose say a MIPS ISA? (maybe it's because he chose Minix..)
No, it's not x86 compatible. It's his own ISA, inspired by the architecture of the Z80, which was a clone of the 8080, of which the 8086 was the successor.
His machine is a 16-bit machine with 8-bit wide memory, 256 instructions and 3 general-purpose registers, implemented using approximately 1,000 (?) gates in 200 individual 74-series ICs.
MIPS is a 32-bit architecture, typically with 32-bit wide memory, 32-bit instruction coding, 32 general-purpose registers and in its original incarnation contained approximately 15,000 gates. Rendered in 74-series ICs, it would probably require about 3-5,000 individual ICs, which is *way* more than anyone can reasonably work with in a single design. And would get _very_ hot.
I'm aware of exactly what the article said:
Note that this does not say "all organ donors in Europe". It quite clearly is a statement that may or may not apply throughout Europe. As it happens, in this case, it does not.
From the post description it doesn't sound like he is trading in anything but ads.
Still, if he is using the name as his business name when selling those ads, he may have a point. But only if the original poster also puts ads on his site.
Assuming that ICANN, supported by all the slashdot readers desperately defending their privacy, don't do away with Whois of course...
whois is unlikely to go away in the foreseeable. It may change (perhaps to a system like the UK one, where a domain that is registered for personal use only can have the contact details hidden), but it isn't going away.
The threats from the owner of simplemillionaire.com also detailed how he was going to sue me to pay for HIS legal expenses. Again, I don't know how kosher that sort of threat is.
As far as I understand it, and assuming you're in the US, not at all. See here for a blog entry written by C. E. Petit, a successful IP lawyer. I quote:
For one thing, it's a lot harder to get an award of attorney's fees in trademark actions (requires an "exceptional case") than in copyright actions.
Step 2: How strong is the trademark? A mark like Exxon is extremely strong. It has no existance except for the oil company. If you use "exxon" in any context you're probably violating the mark.
Not really, no. You're free to use "exxon" in any way you like as long as it does not cause confusion between you or a business you are promoting and Exxon. A trademark is only enforceable in respect of this.
IANAL; this is not legal advice.
Normally you have to use a capital letter to denote a trademark. So if I say windows it's not referring to the OS. If I say Windows it is.
Capital letters are usually required for any proper noun, and trademarks are proper nouns. But that's a grammatical rule of English, not a legal rule concerning trademarks.
Of course domains don't use uppercase, so this is where the ambiguity is.
Domain names are case insensitive. You're free to write your domain name with a capital if you wish.
Webloyalty.com protects its reputation and monitors the blogosphere to insure information posted on our company is truthful and accurate.
That's ensure. It's quite simple:
ensure: make certain
insure: arrange a financial instrument so that in event of some loss occurring you will be compensated for it
Idiots.
Technical details in the article are slim and misleading.
Technical details in the article are substantial, although very difficult to follow. The only question I'm left with is who the fuck stores your credit card details in a _cookie_, and why...?
Not so much angry as ill informed. That's certainly not the case in the UK or Italy which, last time I checked, are part of Europe. I doubt the authors could point to either on a map.
There *are* countries in Europe which use an opt-out system, although not many yet. There have been suggestions that the UK may change to opt-out in the future, as polls have suggested that ~70% of the population would support such a change.
However, there is such a thing as fair use, as part of the copyright bargain, that she conveniently ignores.
Fair use does not extend to copying substantial portions of a work and presenting them to the public for profit.
Uh, the SI standardized the unit prefixes in 1960 (well, at least the prefixes relevant to consumer hard drives).
Oh, right, so the SI are the only people who have the right to use the letters 'K' 'M' and 'G', then?
No?
There wasn't an internationally standardised unit of data storage until 2000. Until then, with no official standard meaning to the letters "KB", "MB" and "GB", they were available for use for whatever the innovators who started using them wanted them to mean. And they were first used with the meaning of 2^10, 2^20 and 2^30 bytes.
think the whole lawsuit is silly. Who could have possibly been confused by the claims of hard drive makers? Those who are computer illiterate would assume that 1 MB = 1*10^6 bytes
Those who are computer illiterate have little or no concept of what a byte is. They only know about file sizes by looking at what their computer tells them. And their computer (or at least the software installed on it) uses the binary definitions.
The fact that some operating systems choose to let that low-level detail show to the consumers is because of poor operating system design, not because of any logic reason.
The fact that _all mainstream operating systems_ choose to let it through is because it was a de-facto standard years before they started. Changing it at any point would have been confusing to existing users (and, yes, the first users really did care).
And it is not the fault of the hard drive makers, who just use the SI units.
Which, interestingly enough, they were doing long before the SI standardised them. But you can bet the switch was made for marketing reasons, not because of any desire to follow standards.
I suppose you could write without the ECC for each sector, and get 576 bytes rather than 512. That'd do it.
I guess it makes sense if you think about it, but it seems a bit weird that it's much easier to design and build a plane that flies itself than a car that drives itself.
Car that drives itself was a solved problem 20 years or so ago. Car that drives itself and can safely integrate with _people_ who are driving, that's a different matter.
Depending on how the laws are interpreted in the future, Google didn't have to ask permission to archive, index and present excerpts of her book for search purposes as it is generally accepted to fall within research based fair use rights.
They weren't presenting excerpts; they were providing large sections of the book for online reading (i.e., the "opt-in" option).
And exactly how is she damaged by this? It can only help to increase exposure of her book.
Right. And being an author who has other books in the Baen free library, there are probably few people more aware of this than she is. But that doesn't mean that her publishers should get a free pass to do what they want with her book.
What if I find one of my books in Google Book Search and would like it removed?
We're happy to remove your book from our search results at any time, just as we do for website publishers and our web search results. [...] To begin this process, please start here to identify yourself as the owner.
According to Google, though, they'd had permission to include the book from its publisher, so wouldn't remove it in this case. Despite the fact that the publisher didn't have lawful authority to grant that permission. They wouldn't identify the author of the book as being the owner, because they'd already identified the publisher as "owning" it. The entire fiasco could only be solved by the publisher informing Google that they didn't want the book included.
Seagate should have just told the judge that the defendants could do a custom low-level format and get at least 7% more capacity.
Wouldn't have worked. The difference between 2^30 and 10^9 definitions of GB is nearly 10%.
Hard drive makers have, for some considerable time, have meant 10**9 (1,000,000,000) when referring to a gigabyte. They always so declare in their literature.
Could you tell me when, to an approximate decade, was the last time you read a drive manufacturer's literature before buying their drive? And take a guess at what the answer is for the average computer buyer?
This has actually caused some confusion as computer people speaking of "kilo" this and "mega" that have worked with scientists who have always used the traditional SI meanings. These differences in interpretation can mean your chemical process doesn't work, the patient dies, you miss Jupiter, etc.
Could you cite some real cases? I seriously do not believe that this has ever been a real issue. Nobody ever uses K = 2^10 for *any* unit other than bits or bytes, so I don't see how it would have any effect on the things you just mentioned.
To help redress this problem, a new set of prefixes have been coined to refer to powers of two. These new prefixes have seen uneven but increasing adoption in the industry (if you have a recent Ubuntu/Debian release, run the command ifconfig -- the byte counts have the new prefixes).
Sure, and I use them when necessary. But the average user has not yet been exposed to them, because mainstream software manufacturers (primarily Microsoft and Apple) do not use them yet, so you cannot expect the average user to understand the difference.
So, the hard drive makers have been using the SI meanings for "giga"
Which they started doing before SI weighed in on this topic, and besides, why does SI have any more right than anyone else to dictate the meaning. For instance, the first dictionary definition of "gigabyte" in my dictionary is "A unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to 1,024 megabytes (2^30 bytes)." Why does SI have more right to determine what an English-language word means than the lexicographers who compiled this dictionary?
and, in case there was any confusion, explicitly printed in their literature, "One gigabyte is equal to 1000000000 bytes."
What a crock. Anyone that knows enough about computers to know that GB, MB, and KB are usually base-2 should also know enough to check whether the HDD measurement is in base-2 or base-10. Non-computer people would probably assume that they are base-10... or, more likely, merely that the bigger the number, the better. In my experience non-computer people have difficulty distinguishing between hard-drive space and RAM. Saying that they are somehow miraculously able to distinguish between base-2 and base-10 measurements is ridiculous.
To the average person, the distinction between base-2 and base-10 is meaningless, yes. That doesn't mean, however, that they aren't being cheated. Their interface with the computer, when they examine a file, will tell them how large it is using base-2 units. Disk space requirements on the back of software packages are written in base-2 units. Everything they see is in base-2 units, so this is how they estimate their requirements of disk size. And then they find out that the disk is being sold using different units.
It's a confusing situation, and the disk manufacturers deliberately switched in order to take advantage of it.
The Kilo-, Mega- and Giga- prefixes are always base-10 in SI. The IT industry should come up with different terms. Misusing them was a mistake in the '60s and it is a mistake now.
While I agree with you, and try to use Ki etc myself, I don't think this is a problem that can just disappear like that. People are used to thinking in terms of 1GB as ~1.1*10^9 bytes. They might not realise that they do, but they do. Changing perceptions is a long and slow process, and software manufacturers (the only people who can realistically change these perceptions) are reluctant to start because they fear confusing their users. They're probably right.
It already started with floppy disks.
1.44MB where in fact it was 1440KB.
1.44 "MB" floppy disks are strange:
1. Most manufacturers at the time they were introduced labelled them with an "unformatted capacity" of 2MB.
2. a 1.44MB formatted floppy has an actual capacity of 2880 x 512 byte sectors = 1,474,560 bytes. This is neither using the original definition of 1MB=2^20 bytes (which would mean 1.44MB = 1,509,949 bytes) nor the 1MB=10^6 bytes definition (where 1.44MB = 1,440,000 bytes).
I've actually seen some hard disk manufacturers use this definition, too.
One writer I know got seriously pissed when her publisher's parent company gave google permission to include her entire book in google books. No, they didn't have the rights required to do that. Did they care? Not really, no.
I don't see how they can possibly justify excluding works of minor writers as "insignificant"
The problem, you see, is that Wikipedia has positioned itself as _not making judgements of importance of a particular subject_. Yet they use a word, "notability", that is a synonym of "importance".
Whether a wikipedia article is allowed to exist is supposed to be judged by a somewhat objective standard: whether or not other writers of reference works considered reliable have considered the subject important enough to write and publish about.
Unfortunately, the result of this rule is (1) subjective squabbling over which works are considered reliable and (2) a distinct bias against topics that are on the fringes of culture. Webcomics have suffered due to both of these: works that write about webcomics have largely been considered to be unreliable, and because they are often fringe subjects there aren't many works to choose from.