Typefaces are not copyrightable, but computer generated fonts count as programs, and so they are copyrightable.
Actually, I think in the Americas, the idea was that fonts (as in appeareance) can't be copyrighted, but specific renderings of them, including font files (whether or not they have hinting code), can. You can technically get a look-alike font that has a different name to avoid the trademark issues, doesn't have the vector control points in exact same places, and has different (often crappier) hinting. Just look in any old Corel Draw CD-ROMs. =)
I think in Europe font shapes can be copyrighted though...
...but that doesn't still do anything, because use of fonts is all about fair-use things. What use, really, is buying a font, if you can't use it the way fonts are frigging used? If the EULA (and font file) says it can't be embedded, then to hell with it, I'm getting my money back. =/
Re:Perfect time to re-install and re-play
on
Quake is 10
·
· Score: 1
I encourage you to honor Quake's 10 year aniversary by re-installing it and playing for an evening.
RE-installing??? What the hell?
-rw-r--r-- 1 root games 34257856 1996-07-12 17:31/usr/local/share/games/quake/id1/pak1.pak
-rw-r--r-- 1 root games 205 1997-04-12 12:28/usr/local/share/games/quake/config.cfg
You see, it took a while before I got my Pentium. =)
Datestamps are extremely hazy. =) I think I installed the DOS version, copied the stuff over to the Linux partition, and the rest of time I've copied the files over from disk to disk... =)
Um, it's been used recently too. I just watched The Seal of Nehahra again, and have both QuakeForge and Darkplaces installed.
MySQL deal dates a while back. I'm not exactly sure what the deal between MySQL and SCO was, but I guess it didn't really amount to that much on MySQL's side. Basically, MySQL said something along the lines of "Fine, we won't fire at you if you use it."
And also, MySQL 5 fixes a lot of problems you list... unless you use the backwards compatible mode and the ISAM tables, which means if you use someone else's apps, they've got to be updated to use strict mode and InnoDB... uh, yeah, better just use PostgreSQL anyway =)
First, where's the alleged link to the Reuters article referenced in the post? Never mind, 15 seconds of Google News helped.
Anyway, the article is a bit short on details, but the promises don't sound too, er, promising. What's it, really? Now people can write Javascriptlets and new plugins for messenger?
Yawwwwn.
Call me back when they open-source the client, release specs for the protocol, and accept input from the larger developer community. Until then, I'll be sticking with the people who have been doing all that for quite a while now.
Thanks, Slashdot, for getting to the 21st century and updating the GNOME icon. =)
As for the topic... um, I have nothing against the idea, and it's a pretty good one. Just be careful not to hire Paula, who's undoubtedly out of work right now. =)
Game saving also got rid of all those uber players. If you met a guy who finished all of those Ninja Gaiden games in one sitting he was one BAD dude at video games.
On the contrary! Nethack has save feature, yet I tend to think people who finished Nethack as As Leet Gamers As Anyone Can Get...
It seems like at any given time there is at least one segfault-every-couple-hours bug in taglib, amarok, artsdsp, jackd, libxine, or artsd.
It suddenly drops drastically when you nuke artsdsp and artsd from orbit.
If you see "artsd" or "esd" in your process list, configure the hell out of the system until you don't see a trace of them. These two were hacks to skirt around limitations of old sound hardware. If you have a modern, full-duplex, hardware-mixing sound card, you simply don't need these things.
Plus I believe they haven't been maintained for some time either.
Now show me how the different clipboards that exist on a single Linux Desktop can even cut from one and paste to another.
You don't "cut and paste from one another clipboard".
You have two different clipboards and you're probably using one to copy, another to paste, thus you're probably confused when the results are wrong.
Basically: X11 has selection and clipboard. Selection is what gets used when you select stuff. This is what gets used when you, in most cases, try to select stuff with left mouse button and try to paste with middle mouse button. The clipboard gets used when you explicitly use the clipboard, with the application's cut/copy/paste commands.
So basically: Either use left/middle copypaste, or the Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V things.
Selecting with mouse, then Ctrl+V'ing just doesn't work as expected. Selecting with mouse, Ctrl+C'ing, and then pasting with middle mouse button kind of works (due to doing selection with mouse); Selecting with keyboard, Ctrl+C'ing, and pasting with middle doesn't.
Once you learn the distinction, this thing is dead simple and you'll notice how much more useful it is than Windows clipboard. In many cases, I wish Windows had this same system too. Too bad it would be met with, um, resistance.
Heck, my father isn't a computer expert and even he could copy/paste in Linux once. "Uh, edit, copy... edit, paste. There we go!" =)
Anyone looking for blog features in Firefox should take a look at the Performancing extension instead.
Though I personally prefer Deepest Sender. Supports more blog APIs, a pretty neat interface. Works great with LiveJournal and is probably best LJ client for Linux, but it doesn't work that well with Typo-based sites (I can post, but can't tag or categorise as I go).
Anyone know a Firefox extension blogging client that would also do proper previews for Textile, the markup that Typo supports? Almost all seem to be able to do bare HTML, but not Textile.
Now, I have one purely academic question related to this.
Can it work on reverse?
In other words, suppose we have a piece of spyware that installs itself as an IE extension. Can it mark itself to have same sort of "stickiness" as the WGA add-on?
If so, it might be a bit of a headache for spyware-cleaner types...
And a practical corollary to that academic question, and a follow-up to your instructions: Exactly how long before there will be a tool that allows you to nuke an IE extension from the orbit, no matter if it's WGA or not?
...and just as you're finishing up your ad-ridden tour, a blonde guy in chainmain and a shirt with a golden ankh appears, tosses you a bubblegum-machine ankh pendant, and says "Hey, try Ultima Online. We still don't have in-game ads....I mean, not yet." And then that Everquest chick appears and beats him to pulp, and you realise it's wiser to log off before she starts her spiel.
=)
(Okay, I was just kind of excited when I saw the "Avatar-Based Marketing" headline. Sorry. Got a bit carried away.)
Just because the game is open-ended doesn't mean it can have a story that you can follow through and through without engaging all those small side tracks.
Take Ultima VII, for example - it has a reasonably long main story, and you can spend quite a time to get that done, and it's quite possible to finish the game without doing any of the subquests. But it's also open-ended; you can literally go wander around and literally live in the world (make money by engaging in honest jobs, and pay for food), explore every nook and cranny of the world at your whim (as long as you figure out how to get past the various obstacles, if not other way, there's always a ton of powder kegs =), and engage in the ton of small quests.
Alexa ratings are based on their tracking. Not everyone has that software installed.
Plus, most people use ITMS through the iTunes program. Last I checked, Alexa spyware wasn't ported to KHTML =)
Re:What about unrelease songs?
on
Online Revenge
·
· Score: 1
Let's say you buy a musician's laptop and it has an UNRELEASED song on it.
Who ownes it?
Who guy who made the song? or you?
The guy who made the song. Copyright enters the force at the instant the thing is created (US law, for example, says "set in tangible form" or somesuch, which would also apply to a file on computer hard drive), not when the thing is first published.
Copyright law, you see, covers who can release a copyrighted work, and what kind of limitations they can set to distribution. If you are not the copyright holder, by default, you can't release an unpublished work without permission.
If someone decided to publish an unreleased song made by someone else and claimed it as their own, that would be definitely a fun court matter. =) However, I believe in some places it's possible to specifically register copyrights on certain works, even if they're not published publicly, thus strengthening their status in matters of dispute; this would make that court issue much simpler...
Re:Has this guy got much legal defence?
on
Online Revenge
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Wouldn't that mean the hard drive & its contents are now owned by the guy who bought it, and its up to him what he wants to do to it?
He sold him a physical copy of the data, and didn't actually make a contract that would specifically transfer any rights to it, or allow it to be reused.
The seller's copyright on the data definitely remains, at least.
If you bought a desktop machine from a famous musician and noted "oh wow, the guy's Protools directory is still here, let's make a remix - oh, what the hell, let's just sell the song as it was famously performed and let the world know I'm the new owner of this song", guess what would happen?
The question isn't "Can it run my games", but "Is there a value to installing Vista that will make my games run better"?
But you're forgetting the very valid question of "Will my games still work when Vista is finally foisted upon me?"
I have a Situation in my recent memory. We used to have this silly, awful, yet popular platform for games called MS-DOS. Then Microsoft absolutely brutally killed its support, when they grew tired of people asking "how the hell do I run Ultima VII?". Then there was a loooooong break for playing MS-DOS games, until finally the folks came up with a little thingy called DOSBox, and >1GHz machines got common enough to run all Pentium-era games.
If Vista breaks old games, that brief period of dark ages may become pretty darn long... until, sometime in 2010s, WINE will finally catch up with Microsoft's API shenanigans and you're again able to run those good old Windows games.
Though I'm not particularly worried - Win32 game APIs probably aren't fluctuating that much, after all, to paraphrase certain failed prediction, "every API worth inventing has already been invented". Though regrettably there have been mysterious game breakages when running games that depend on proto-ancient DX versions...
FSF executive director Peter Brown said, "A media player that restricts what you can play is like a car that won't let you steer" -- a false analogy so patently absurd as to be laughable to a grade-school student.
Yeah! A more appropriate analogy would be "A media player that restricts what you can play is like a car that won't let you steer. The user absolutely doesn't care about that, because the road ahead is straight all the way to the horizon - but they should care, because there's a sudden bend 200 kilometers away where there's a tree right on the car's path." The problem is that people can usually only grasp really simple analogies, and this analogy of mine is probably pushing it a little bit.
I don't know, I always looked at CGA graphics as "this is PC. This is heavy-duty gaming." kind of thing.
Just one look at CGA graphics gives me the feeling "beyond that point lie adventures much greater than in my C64, it's just that they are in four awful colours, but who cares?"
I mean, you could just look the games on PC and say they were much bigger than the C64 games. They obviously didn't care about graphics, they had hard disks so they could make HUGE games and whatnot. =)
The speed of string comparisons is always determined by the length of the strings.
Are you seriously claiming there's a really, really, really big difference if you're strncmp()ing six-byte strings vs. one-byte strings? If so, please buy a computer that's built a bit more recently than 1970s. =)
Actually, I just wrote a small C program to do 1000000000 strncmp() calls (probably less than a typical XML parsing situation, even in the really tag-here-tag-there-tag-everywhere case of Office XML =); with 1-byte string, the program ran 1.596 seconds, with 3-byte strings, the program ran 1.595 seconds, with 6-byte strings, the program ran... ugh, 1.595 seconds. (This is an Athlon XP 3000+ running Linux.) Is my program broken?
Comparing strings is trivial. Finding out what strings you're comparing is quite a frigging lot more complicated. What about the gargantuan task of parsing the entity names out of the XML file? That thing is so complicated task that I definitely rely on the debugged and optimised libraries built by people a lot brighter than me. Unless you break the XML spec, you can't speed up the XML parsing task too much...
CSV with a statistical analysis program is great for scientific data, but it doesn't cut it for financials.
And that's only because they finally fired all those COBOL people who were building them really fine tools where CSV files would have still fared well. =) But yeah, what you describe is the regrettable state of the things in today's world, and there's little anyone can do about it... *sigh*
they use single-letter tag names, for the most part, to reduce parsing time
I fail to see how that will make parsing the document any faster. Unless, of course, they have a standards-incompliant "optimised" XML parser designed around the condition of "tags have single letter names only".
they remove all strings and put them in a look-up table
...therefore making the parser for the format a little bit harder to implement for the specific application, but gaining some efficiency; however, if you try to implement anything else besides a spreadsheet program, you're going to run in funny implementation problems.
(Okay, maybe it's just me, I can't see why anyone would use XML for spreadsheets anyway when CSV has been invented, but then again, I'm more of a "let's roll this stuff through an external analysis and plot program, a little bit of Perl will solve everything" than "let's pain ourselves with millions of funny formulas in tiny little grid cells" person =)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I think in the Americas, the idea was that fonts (as in appeareance) can't be copyrighted, but specific renderings of them, including font files (whether or not they have hinting code), can. You can technically get a look-alike font that has a different name to avoid the trademark issues, doesn't have the vector control points in exact same places, and has different (often crappier) hinting. Just look in any old Corel Draw CD-ROMs. =)
I think in Europe font shapes can be copyrighted though...
...but that doesn't still do anything, because use of fonts is all about fair-use things. What use, really, is buying a font, if you can't use it the way fonts are frigging used? If the EULA (and font file) says it can't be embedded, then to hell with it, I'm getting my money back. =/
RE-installing??? What the hell?
-rw-r--r-- 1 root games 34257856 1996-07-12 17:31 /usr/local/share/games/quake/id1/pak1.pak /usr/local/share/games/quake/config.cfg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root games 205 1997-04-12 12:28
You see, it took a while before I got my Pentium. =)
Datestamps are extremely hazy. =) I think I installed the DOS version, copied the stuff over to the Linux partition, and the rest of time I've copied the files over from disk to disk... =)
Um, it's been used recently too. I just watched The Seal of Nehahra again, and have both QuakeForge and Darkplaces installed.
You're kind of behind times. =)
MySQL deal dates a while back. I'm not exactly sure what the deal between MySQL and SCO was, but I guess it didn't really amount to that much on MySQL's side. Basically, MySQL said something along the lines of "Fine, we won't fire at you if you use it."
And also, MySQL 5 fixes a lot of problems you list... unless you use the backwards compatible mode and the ISAM tables, which means if you use someone else's apps, they've got to be updated to use strict mode and InnoDB... uh, yeah, better just use PostgreSQL anyway =)
First, where's the alleged link to the Reuters article referenced in the post? Never mind, 15 seconds of Google News helped.
Anyway, the article is a bit short on details, but the promises don't sound too, er, promising. What's it, really? Now people can write Javascriptlets and new plugins for messenger?
Yawwwwn.
Call me back when they open-source the client, release specs for the protocol, and accept input from the larger developer community. Until then, I'll be sticking with the people who have been doing all that for quite a while now.
Ayup, GNOME has their own implementation of CORBA stuff, called ORBit.
Bonobo is the component framework in GNOME, and is built atop CORBA.
AFAIK they're still pretty much in use.
Thanks, Slashdot, for getting to the 21st century and updating the GNOME icon. =)
As for the topic... um, I have nothing against the idea, and it's a pretty good one. Just be careful not to hire Paula, who's undoubtedly out of work right now. =)
On the contrary! Nethack has save feature, yet I tend to think people who finished Nethack as As Leet Gamers As Anyone Can Get...
It suddenly drops drastically when you nuke artsdsp and artsd from orbit.
If you see "artsd" or "esd" in your process list, configure the hell out of the system until you don't see a trace of them. These two were hacks to skirt around limitations of old sound hardware. If you have a modern, full-duplex, hardware-mixing sound card, you simply don't need these things.
Plus I believe they haven't been maintained for some time either.
You don't "cut and paste from one another clipboard".
You have two different clipboards and you're probably using one to copy, another to paste, thus you're probably confused when the results are wrong.
Basically: X11 has selection and clipboard. Selection is what gets used when you select stuff. This is what gets used when you, in most cases, try to select stuff with left mouse button and try to paste with middle mouse button. The clipboard gets used when you explicitly use the clipboard, with the application's cut/copy/paste commands.
So basically: Either use left/middle copypaste, or the Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V things.
Selecting with mouse, then Ctrl+V'ing just doesn't work as expected. Selecting with mouse, Ctrl+C'ing, and then pasting with middle mouse button kind of works (due to doing selection with mouse); Selecting with keyboard, Ctrl+C'ing, and pasting with middle doesn't.
Once you learn the distinction, this thing is dead simple and you'll notice how much more useful it is than Windows clipboard. In many cases, I wish Windows had this same system too. Too bad it would be met with, um, resistance.
Heck, my father isn't a computer expert and even he could copy/paste in Linux once. "Uh, edit, copy... edit, paste. There we go!" =)
Though I personally prefer Deepest Sender. Supports more blog APIs, a pretty neat interface. Works great with LiveJournal and is probably best LJ client for Linux, but it doesn't work that well with Typo-based sites (I can post, but can't tag or categorise as I go).
Anyone know a Firefox extension blogging client that would also do proper previews for Textile, the markup that Typo supports? Almost all seem to be able to do bare HTML, but not Textile.
Now, I have one purely academic question related to this.
Can it work on reverse?
In other words, suppose we have a piece of spyware that installs itself as an IE extension. Can it mark itself to have same sort of "stickiness" as the WGA add-on?
If so, it might be a bit of a headache for spyware-cleaner types...
And a practical corollary to that academic question, and a follow-up to your instructions: Exactly how long before there will be a tool that allows you to nuke an IE extension from the orbit, no matter if it's WGA or not?
...and just as you're finishing up your ad-ridden tour, a blonde guy in chainmain and a shirt with a golden ankh appears, tosses you a bubblegum-machine ankh pendant, and says "Hey, try Ultima Online. We still don't have in-game ads. ...I mean, not yet." And then that Everquest chick appears and beats him to pulp, and you realise it's wiser to log off before she starts her spiel.
=)
(Okay, I was just kind of excited when I saw the "Avatar-Based Marketing" headline. Sorry. Got a bit carried away.)
Just because the game is open-ended doesn't mean it can have a story that you can follow through and through without engaging all those small side tracks.
Take Ultima VII, for example - it has a reasonably long main story, and you can spend quite a time to get that done, and it's quite possible to finish the game without doing any of the subquests. But it's also open-ended; you can literally go wander around and literally live in the world (make money by engaging in honest jobs, and pay for food), explore every nook and cranny of the world at your whim (as long as you figure out how to get past the various obstacles, if not other way, there's always a ton of powder kegs =), and engage in the ton of small quests.
Rubbish. Files are files. And you can fit text of a book on a frigging floppy. They advertised that fact in the 1980s, for crying out loud.
Two things are vastly harder, though: "ripping" the book, and more importantly, reading the book once it's downloaded. =)
Alexa ratings are based on their tracking. Not everyone has that software installed.
Plus, most people use ITMS through the iTunes program. Last I checked, Alexa spyware wasn't ported to KHTML =)
The guy who made the song. Copyright enters the force at the instant the thing is created (US law, for example, says "set in tangible form" or somesuch, which would also apply to a file on computer hard drive), not when the thing is first published.
Copyright law, you see, covers who can release a copyrighted work, and what kind of limitations they can set to distribution. If you are not the copyright holder, by default, you can't release an unpublished work without permission.
If someone decided to publish an unreleased song made by someone else and claimed it as their own, that would be definitely a fun court matter. =) However, I believe in some places it's possible to specifically register copyrights on certain works, even if they're not published publicly, thus strengthening their status in matters of dispute; this would make that court issue much simpler...
He sold him a physical copy of the data, and didn't actually make a contract that would specifically transfer any rights to it, or allow it to be reused.
The seller's copyright on the data definitely remains, at least.
If you bought a desktop machine from a famous musician and noted "oh wow, the guy's Protools directory is still here, let's make a remix - oh, what the hell, let's just sell the song as it was famously performed and let the world know I'm the new owner of this song", guess what would happen?
But you're forgetting the very valid question of "Will my games still work when Vista is finally foisted upon me?"
I have a Situation in my recent memory. We used to have this silly, awful, yet popular platform for games called MS-DOS. Then Microsoft absolutely brutally killed its support, when they grew tired of people asking "how the hell do I run Ultima VII?". Then there was a loooooong break for playing MS-DOS games, until finally the folks came up with a little thingy called DOSBox, and >1GHz machines got common enough to run all Pentium-era games.
If Vista breaks old games, that brief period of dark ages may become pretty darn long... until, sometime in 2010s, WINE will finally catch up with Microsoft's API shenanigans and you're again able to run those good old Windows games.
Though I'm not particularly worried - Win32 game APIs probably aren't fluctuating that much, after all, to paraphrase certain failed prediction, "every API worth inventing has already been invented". Though regrettably there have been mysterious game breakages when running games that depend on proto-ancient DX versions...
To say nothing of this newfangled "FORTRAN-to-machine-code" thing...
Yeah! A more appropriate analogy would be "A media player that restricts what you can play is like a car that won't let you steer. The user absolutely doesn't care about that, because the road ahead is straight all the way to the horizon - but they should care, because there's a sudden bend 200 kilometers away where there's a tree right on the car's path." The problem is that people can usually only grasp really simple analogies, and this analogy of mine is probably pushing it a little bit.
Well, they specifically said "first PC virus". The first virus on PC was Brain, which was in 1986.
I don't know, I always looked at CGA graphics as "this is PC. This is heavy-duty gaming." kind of thing.
Just one look at CGA graphics gives me the feeling "beyond that point lie adventures much greater than in my C64, it's just that they are in four awful colours, but who cares?"
I mean, you could just look the games on PC and say they were much bigger than the C64 games. They obviously didn't care about graphics, they had hard disks so they could make HUGE games and whatnot. =)
Are you seriously claiming there's a really, really, really big difference if you're strncmp()ing six-byte strings vs. one-byte strings? If so, please buy a computer that's built a bit more recently than 1970s. =)
Actually, I just wrote a small C program to do 1000000000 strncmp() calls (probably less than a typical XML parsing situation, even in the really tag-here-tag-there-tag-everywhere case of Office XML =); with 1-byte string, the program ran 1.596 seconds, with 3-byte strings, the program ran 1.595 seconds, with 6-byte strings, the program ran... ugh, 1.595 seconds. (This is an Athlon XP 3000+ running Linux.) Is my program broken?
Comparing strings is trivial. Finding out what strings you're comparing is quite a frigging lot more complicated. What about the gargantuan task of parsing the entity names out of the XML file? That thing is so complicated task that I definitely rely on the debugged and optimised libraries built by people a lot brighter than me. Unless you break the XML spec, you can't speed up the XML parsing task too much...
And that's only because they finally fired all those COBOL people who were building them really fine tools where CSV files would have still fared well. =) But yeah, what you describe is the regrettable state of the things in today's world, and there's little anyone can do about it... *sigh*
I do, as you might have guessed if you had read the rest of the message... =)
I fail to see how that will make parsing the document any faster. Unless, of course, they have a standards-incompliant "optimised" XML parser designed around the condition of "tags have single letter names only".
...therefore making the parser for the format a little bit harder to implement for the specific application, but gaining some efficiency; however, if you try to implement anything else besides a spreadsheet program, you're going to run in funny implementation problems.
(Okay, maybe it's just me, I can't see why anyone would use XML for spreadsheets anyway when CSV has been invented, but then again, I'm more of a "let's roll this stuff through an external analysis and plot program, a little bit of Perl will solve everything" than "let's pain ourselves with millions of funny formulas in tiny little grid cells" person =)