Turbo Pascal, the early versions before version 4, rocked the do a lot with a little.
Less than 40K of floppy disk space got you a text editor and a compiler/linker.
I still keep a copy around, although it doesn't see use but about once a year just for kicks.
Really? I have version 7 and it doesn't work at all any more -- there's a timing loop calibrated during startup that results in a division by zero on modern processors.
In other words, ordinary trade secret laws would have been sufficient to "stick it to the man" and to reign in Apple Computer instead of having to invoke a patent.
Trade secret laws are notoriously difficult to enforce, though. The problem is that there is nothing to prevent a would-be infringer simply claiming that they had the same idea prior to being exposed to the plaintiff's implementation of it. The plaintiff would then have to prove (on balance of probability) that they did not have the same idea, which is a very hard thing to do in most cases.
TFA asks specifically about MacWrite and MacPaint, both of which are obsolete by any reasonable definition. And neither of which did anything particularly innovative, either. Macsyma, OTOH, was a very innovative piece of software that even today has few competitors. We're talking about the difference between a commercial project to implement already-established concepts on a new platform and an academic project to break new ground and do things that weren't previously possible. It's very hard to compare the two.
Because once we forget how this software worked, someone else comes along and does a research project, thinks that they have invented something new, patents it and/or names it after themselves
OK, but what did either of these pieces of software (ie MacWrite and MacPaint) do that hadn't been done before? Their importance, historically speaking, is that they were the first implementations of their kind on the Mac, and therefore were the first to become popular. The key innovations, however (i.e. WYSIWYG document editing and mouse-based bitmap editing) were both made years previously on other platforms.
Like when Samsung beat Apple in the UK, but then Apple won on the same issues in the US. Patents are granted once and valid everywhere, but must be defeated on country at a time. NewEgg saved their own country. Now someone needs to win in every nation in the rest of the world.
My suspicion is that you'll find that only the USPTO was stupid enough to issue patents for these "inventions".
I used GTK once, 15 or more years ago. Did not look like a mature "framework".
Well, no. 15 years ago GTK was just a user-interface abstraction library designed to enable a single relatively-new C application (GIMP) to be ported away from Motif, which it had used up until that point. It has changed somewhat in the interim.
The third sentence in your comment is a fragment, and the word capitalize is misspelled.
(S (PP For instance), (S (NP they) (VP know (PP to (NP capitalise)) (SBAR (S (NP proper nouns) (VP like (NP (NP the names) (PP of (NP (NP countries) or (NP languages)))))))))
The 'S' in the outermost level indicates a complete sentence. Try it yourself here and get better formatting (doesn't get past slashdot's damned lameness filters with the whitespace required...).
In the picture, the laptop on the dashboard suspiciously looks like it was installed to be used while driving.
What difference in placement would you use between installing it for use while driving, and installing it for use during brief stops without needing the time to adjust position? I'm pretty sure using it while stopped at a red light wouldn't be an offence.
You don't need a publisher in order to get a good editor (or several).
OK... so how do you find a good editor without a publisher? How do you decide whether they are right for your book or not? How much is it going to cost you out of pocket? When you realise that around 75% of published fiction makes a loss, are you going to chance it?
You -shouldn't- need a publisher to get your books onto shelves, though my guess is that these days you probably still do (and anyway, it would probably continue to be easier... though one could imagine a do-it-yourself type publishing company that you could pay to deal only with the legal aspects of getting books onto shelves for you, but had you do everything else? I'm sure people would go for that.)
The problem with this is that bookshops rely on publishers as a filter to whether it's worth considering stocking a book. They don't as a rule stock self-published books simply because they don't have the resources to decide whether they should or not, because there are so many of them. Consider, for example, self-publishing company PublishAmerica (or vanity press, if you ask the right people), which put out more titles last year than all the proper English-language publishers put together. And they have several competitors nearly as big.
As long as it's shorter than about 3k. You're not going to get many "photographs, videos and memories of the dead person from family and friends" in that. You could actually engrave more text on a typical stone than that if you wanted to.
KDP Select is not the regular kindle publishing channel -- it's a system for making payments to authors who offer free time-limited downloads. I'm pretty sure GP was talking about regular KDP.
Just looking around, you can get a sim only contract with data for GBP 10.00 per month on a 12 month basis. I think there are cheaper ones on some of the smaller operators. iPhone contracts are around 30 per month on a 24 month basis.
Just to put some more accurate figures to what you're saying: Giff Gaff will do PAYG calls+data for £7.50/month, no contract. A cheap android phone will set you back £70 and is perfectly functional for most purposes (sure, I can't play the latest and greatest games on my Samsung GT-S5570, but most other things work fine). 2 year cost: £70 + 24*£7.50 = £250 Cheapest iPhone deal I see is actually £31. 2 year cost: £744.
The Nebula award [...] is based on the opinions of a selected group of (mostly?) science fiction writers.
Entirely science fiction and/or fantasy writers: judges must be members of SFWA, and previous publication of a work (or multiple short works) of appropriate genre fiction in a professional capacity is a membership requirement of the organisation.
But on their buy page [macmillan.com] (which I found from this article [tor.com] in the Tor blog after doing a Google search for the name) only lets me pick from a bunch of ebook retailers like Amazon, B&N, Google Books... and I know at least some of those won't be available as options for me because I'm here in Australia and not in the USA (Google Books for example is not available to us here).
The problem here goes deeper than you think -- Tor don't have the required license to sell Walton's book to you, as they only have the north american and UK distribution rights, AIUI. For you to be able to buy the book, an australian publisher will need to enter into a contract with Walton.
Yep. That, or use a commodity engine that you could realistically define as part of the basic platform the game runs on and which isn't so ruinously expensive end users couldn't afford to acquire it (I'm thinking Unity here, but I'm sure there are others -- isn't there a free-as-in-beer version of the Unreal engine these days?
The UK has never been particularly reluctant to extradite people to the US. Why is Assange so special?
There are a lot of powerful people in the UK who are currently looking for a good excuse to abandon our controversial extradition treaty (signed by the government prior to the current one) with the US. There is an ongoing media campaign against it. The current government has appeared at times to be very critical of it, although they are obviously reluctant to do anything about it. The US pushing for extradition of a Commonwealth citizen on what would blatantly be political grounds might be just the push it needs to get it overturned.
If you think someone with resources is trying to find you, visiting 2 or 3 branches of your bank is probably a very bad idea. You'll only have time to visit one before all the branches in your local area are being monitored.
I've got as much love for Wikipedia as anyone, but I think anybody trying to use it to rebuild civilization would be rather frustrated. It's full of articles that let you know things existed, who made them, how popular they were, etc. without enough detail to tell you how to make one yourself.
Not a good solution. Most flash chips are 48TSOP packages (12mmx18.4mm). Most wood chippers have 1" (25.4mm) spacing between blades. Chances are very high that your flash chip will pass straight through without damage and only the packaging will be mangled.
You could take your comment and replace "HFT" with "brokerage" and everything you say would be true... and yet, we still need brokers.
HFT makes the market more accessible by minimizing the spread. HFT firms profit by taking some of the money that speculators used to make because of wild changes in the spread, but at the same time they reduce the risk the rest of us face when investing in smaller firms, which seems to be a good thing to me.
Can they even do that? Force people to give money back?
Yes. Because the money never actually changed hands. It was only totals on a ledger that they operate that changed. Nobody settles with actual money until the end of the day at the earliest. I think there's actually a 14 day period allowed for settlement, IIRC.
Given that typing for long periods without taking a break is also problematic, you still need to be taking those breaks every half hour or so even if you do have a standing desk.
Fortunately, it does have a built in way of reminding you that you need to take a break: you begin to get tired and want to sit down.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Turbo Pascal, the early versions before version 4, rocked the do a lot with a little.
Less than 40K of floppy disk space got you a text editor and a compiler/linker.
I still keep a copy around, although it doesn't see use but about once a year just for kicks.
Really? I have version 7 and it doesn't work at all any more -- there's a timing loop calibrated during startup that results in a division by zero on modern processors.
In other words, ordinary trade secret laws would have been sufficient to "stick it to the man" and to reign in Apple Computer instead of having to invoke a patent.
Trade secret laws are notoriously difficult to enforce, though. The problem is that there is nothing to prevent a would-be infringer simply claiming that they had the same idea prior to being exposed to the plaintiff's implementation of it. The plaintiff would then have to prove (on balance of probability) that they did not have the same idea, which is a very hard thing to do in most cases.
TFA asks specifically about MacWrite and MacPaint, both of which are obsolete by any reasonable definition. And neither of which did anything particularly innovative, either. Macsyma, OTOH, was a very innovative piece of software that even today has few competitors. We're talking about the difference between a commercial project to implement already-established concepts on a new platform and an academic project to break new ground and do things that weren't previously possible. It's very hard to compare the two.
Because once we forget how this software worked, someone else comes along and does a research project, thinks that they have invented something new, patents it and/or names it after themselves
OK, but what did either of these pieces of software (ie MacWrite and MacPaint) do that hadn't been done before? Their importance, historically speaking, is that they were the first implementations of their kind on the Mac, and therefore were the first to become popular. The key innovations, however (i.e. WYSIWYG document editing and mouse-based bitmap editing) were both made years previously on other platforms.
Like when Samsung beat Apple in the UK, but then Apple won on the same issues in the US. Patents are granted once and valid everywhere, but must be defeated on country at a time. NewEgg saved their own country. Now someone needs to win in every nation in the rest of the world.
My suspicion is that you'll find that only the USPTO was stupid enough to issue patents for these "inventions".
You should get a load of my "additive eraser."
do you mean a pencil, perchance?
I used GTK once, 15 or more years ago. Did not look like a mature "framework".
Well, no. 15 years ago GTK was just a user-interface abstraction library designed to enable a single relatively-new C application (GIMP) to be ported away from Motif, which it had used up until that point. It has changed somewhat in the interim.
The third sentence in your comment is a fragment, and the word capitalize is misspelled.
The 'S' in the outermost level indicates a complete sentence. Try it yourself here and get better formatting (doesn't get past slashdot's damned lameness filters with the whitespace required...).
In the picture, the laptop on the dashboard suspiciously looks like it was installed to be used while driving.
What difference in placement would you use between installing it for use while driving, and installing it for use during brief stops without needing the time to adjust position? I'm pretty sure using it while stopped at a red light wouldn't be an offence.
You don't need a publisher in order to get a good editor (or several).
OK... so how do you find a good editor without a publisher? How do you decide whether they are right for your book or not? How much is it going to cost you out of pocket? When you realise that around 75% of published fiction makes a loss, are you going to chance it?
You -shouldn't- need a publisher to get your books onto shelves, though my guess is that these days you probably still do (and anyway, it would probably continue to be easier... though one could imagine a do-it-yourself type publishing company that you could pay to deal only with the legal aspects of getting books onto shelves for you, but had you do everything else? I'm sure people would go for that.)
The problem with this is that bookshops rely on publishers as a filter to whether it's worth considering stocking a book. They don't as a rule stock self-published books simply because they don't have the resources to decide whether they should or not, because there are so many of them. Consider, for example, self-publishing company PublishAmerica (or vanity press, if you ask the right people), which put out more titles last year than all the proper English-language publishers put together. And they have several competitors nearly as big.
QR codes can encode any binary data.
As long as it's shorter than about 3k. You're not going to get many "photographs, videos and memories of the dead person from family and friends" in that. You could actually engrave more text on a typical stone than that if you wanted to.
KDP Select is not the regular kindle publishing channel -- it's a system for making payments to authors who offer free time-limited downloads. I'm pretty sure GP was talking about regular KDP.
Just looking around, you can get a sim only contract with data for GBP 10.00 per month on a 12 month basis. I think there are cheaper ones on some of the smaller operators. iPhone contracts are around 30 per month on a 24 month basis.
Just to put some more accurate figures to what you're saying:
Giff Gaff will do PAYG calls+data for £7.50/month, no contract. A cheap android phone will set you back £70 and is perfectly functional for most purposes (sure, I can't play the latest and greatest games on my Samsung GT-S5570, but most other things work fine). 2 year cost: £70 + 24*£7.50 = £250
Cheapest iPhone deal I see is actually £31. 2 year cost: £744.
The Nebula award [...] is based on the opinions of a selected group of (mostly?) science fiction writers.
Entirely science fiction and/or fantasy writers: judges must be members of SFWA, and previous publication of a work (or multiple short works) of appropriate genre fiction in a professional capacity is a membership requirement of the organisation.
But on their buy page [macmillan.com] (which I found from this article [tor.com] in the Tor blog after doing a Google search for the name) only lets me pick from a bunch of ebook retailers like Amazon, B&N, Google Books... and I know at least some of those won't be available as options for me because I'm here in Australia and not in the USA (Google Books for example is not available to us here).
The problem here goes deeper than you think -- Tor don't have the required license to sell Walton's book to you, as they only have the north american and UK distribution rights, AIUI. For you to be able to buy the book, an australian publisher will need to enter into a contract with Walton.
Yep. That, or use a commodity engine that you could realistically define as part of the basic platform the game runs on and which isn't so ruinously expensive end users couldn't afford to acquire it (I'm thinking Unity here, but I'm sure there are others -- isn't there a free-as-in-beer version of the Unreal engine these days?
The UK has never been particularly reluctant to extradite people to the US. Why is Assange so special?
There are a lot of powerful people in the UK who are currently looking for a good excuse to abandon our controversial extradition treaty (signed by the government prior to the current one) with the US. There is an ongoing media campaign against it. The current government has appeared at times to be very critical of it, although they are obviously reluctant to do anything about it. The US pushing for extradition of a Commonwealth citizen on what would blatantly be political grounds might be just the push it needs to get it overturned.
If you think someone with resources is trying to find you, visiting 2 or 3 branches of your bank is probably a very bad idea. You'll only have time to visit one before all the branches in your local area are being monitored.
You need to build a really powerful artificially intelligent computer in hyperspace, then ask it how to solve the problem.
I've got as much love for Wikipedia as anyone, but I think anybody trying to use it to rebuild civilization would be rather frustrated. It's full of articles that let you know things existed, who made them, how popular they were, etc. without enough detail to tell you how to make one yourself.
Well, of course not. Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, textbook, or scientific journal.
the hipster o/s code goes like this:
reason() { return 0; }
commonSense() { return 0; }
realityCheck() { return 0; }
That is so true. A hipster would never code an OS in something so pedestrian it required you to declare the return types of functions.
Two word solution: Wood Chipper
Not a good solution. Most flash chips are 48TSOP packages (12mmx18.4mm). Most wood chippers have 1" (25.4mm) spacing between blades. Chances are very high that your flash chip will pass straight through without damage and only the packaging will be mangled.
You could take your comment and replace "HFT" with "brokerage" and everything you say would be true... and yet, we still need brokers.
HFT makes the market more accessible by minimizing the spread. HFT firms profit by taking some of the money that speculators used to make because of wild changes in the spread, but at the same time they reduce the risk the rest of us face when investing in smaller firms, which seems to be a good thing to me.
Can they even do that? Force people to give money back?
Yes. Because the money never actually changed hands. It was only totals on a ledger that they operate that changed. Nobody settles with actual money until the end of the day at the earliest. I think there's actually a 14 day period allowed for settlement, IIRC.
Given that typing for long periods without taking a break is also problematic, you still need to be taking those breaks every half hour or so even if you do have a standing desk.
Fortunately, it does have a built in way of reminding you that you need to take a break: you begin to get tired and want to sit down. :)