I was severely on the net when this all happened.
Hackers were everywhere. The government was all freaked out, worrying about J. Random Hacker starting WWIII.
Meanwhile, I was a college student who used to work for a small game company run by a guy named Steve Jackson.
One afternoon, the Secret Service raided Steve Jackson Games, looking for evidence (that they never found) about a game called Hacker (for a lot more information, read the absolutely essential book "The Hacker Crackdown," which has been mentioned here more than once). The next week, I woke up one Saturday morning, fired up the computer, and was ready to have a nice easy morning of cartoons and Usenet. There was a knock on the door.
Looking out the peephole, I saw two young men in suits, carrying briefcases. Being a rational sort, I immediately thought "The Secret Service!" I opened the door....
"Hello! Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior...?
I got a snailmail version of this a while back. I turned it in to the Postal Inspection Service. I was tempted not to, though... it came in a nice handmade envelope made out of beautiful paper, hand-lettered with beautiful penmanship. It looked more like a wedding invitation from some extremely rich society dame than from some low-rent scammers in Africa...
You see, that cross-licensing deal means that Microsoft has to pay for the stuff they use from Macs. So if Apple has a patent on the interface, Microsoft is contractually bound to pay for their use of it...
Your point of "controls" consists of the Lotus/Borland case, where the use of existing controls on the keyboard was not protected (control-L etc.).
This is noticeably different from calling something a "red jellybean," when it's really a blatant copy of a "crimson gumdrop" from someone else's original work. This is copyright law, plain and simple, and is protected.
"Look and feel" laws?
Yes, we do. The judge in the original Apple/Microsoft trial said, very specifically, that Microsoft would have been in real trouble if Apple hadn't signed away their rights to the user interface in a previous contract. It is a protection under copyright and patent law.
"Look and feel" is also covered under something called "trade dress," which is how Apple is successfully (and correctly, I might add) going after these cheesy little PC cloners who keep trying to make iMac-like PCs.
You do not have to "trademark every element of the way a GUI looks." I fon't know where you got that weird little idea.
Try to make a computer that looked just like one of Apple's, like the folks who made some of those translucent PCs? Did you "design" a user interface that was intended to look as much as possible as someone else's, without any new work? If so, you were stealing. Translucency of materials or transparency of buttons isn't the whole of the concept, despite what some folks would have you believe.
Note that there are plenty of PCs out there with translucent plastics that have been left alone. There are, however, some folks out there who can't manage to make a decent machine on their own, and who look to "borrowing" other people's ideas to make a profit. Those are the guys that Apple has been getting in the courts.
Titanium is common enough that it's used as an ingredient in paint. It's just harder to get the pure metal. With modern techniques, it's just like really tough aluminum.
I run trade shows for a living, so I got to hear a lot of the behind-the-scenes noise in a lot of industries. For example, most power plants would have shut down or had "issues." A lot of those little "service" computers would have detected a too-long elapse in their maintenance records, and shut down the offending systems.
We were lucky there was enough time to correct those issues, as well as a slew of others. There was also a problem with some of the big intertie lines, which would have killed power for a big chunk of the US not affected by the local blackouts.
It *was* a big issue. Fortunately, it went away.
A "cease and desist letter" is pretty much just a lawyer's way of getting your attention, and has no legal weight. A "cease and desist order" is another thing altogether, and Fandom.com seems to be very short on the "order" side of the battle.
Battlebot is too easy. They have all sorts of time to buy and make parts, then engineer them into a working robot. Anyone can drive down to Radio Shack and get a servo. It takes something different to make an old steam pipe into a working cannon...
Some reporter did the typical "news from retyping Intel press release" deal. The new Intel processor will *not* average 1 watt power use. It will use as little as 1 watt when running at the slowest SpeedStep notch (the new version has more stages than the old SpeedStep).
Overall, at 500 MHz, the new PIII will use something like 5 or 6 watts, and more at the 600 MHz "plugged in" range. Not bad for an Intel product, but it's not even matching the PPC G3 for power consumption, much less TransMeta.
Toy Story 2 was shown in Orlando at the Pleasure Island 24 cineplex in an all-digital theater. It was the first feature film that was digital from start (the computer) to finish (the screen display with a big DLP projector). It was also shown at some other places that had digital projection systems.
I saw TS2 in both formats, and the digital version was much sharper, had better color saturation, and had *no* defects.
Moore's law is only good for a limited set of 2-D devices. If you look at other technological advances, you can see other things that are actually exceeding Moore's at this point. Fiber optic transmission speeds, for example, which are doubling a LOT faster than that...
"Original Song" is for music with words. "Duel of the Fates" would fall under the category of "Original Score." Other than DotF, the Phantom Menace score just wasn't that good...
At least part of the original broadcasts were from Pittsburgh area TV stations. The video capture was done there, and forwarded to Canada. So the original theft was in the United States.
First of all, the iCrave situation is very different from early cable TV, since early cable TV systems didn't insert advertising at the bottom of the screen while you were watching Ed Sullivan.
Later, when cable took off, they made financial arrangements with the TV stations to buy air time on those channels (by inserting commercials for the cable system).
iCrave, on the other hand, slapped ads on the screen when those shows were running.
The iCrave folks make a big deal about how this is supposed to be okay under Canadian law, when that's almost certainly not the case, due to Canada's participation in several international copyright treaties.
...a friend of mine (rapidly moving down that list, as you can imagine) called me at 8:30AM today, to see if my computer was okay and to see if I had finished a flyer for a concert he's promoting. He nearly became the first documented Y2K fatality in Florida.
On the other hand, all of these folks saying "all's right with the world" won't really know until about 10 AM Monday, when the millions of corporate drones show up, get their first cup of bad coffee, talk about the lack of events this weekend, and fire up their twenty-year-old accounting packages...
The reason you saw artifacts was that "Bicentennial Man" was shot and edited on film, then scanned. A pure-digital film like "Toy Story 2" wouldn't have any.
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I was severely on the net when this all happened. Hackers were everywhere. The government was all freaked out, worrying about J. Random Hacker starting WWIII. Meanwhile, I was a college student who used to work for a small game company run by a guy named Steve Jackson. One afternoon, the Secret Service raided Steve Jackson Games, looking for evidence (that they never found) about a game called Hacker (for a lot more information, read the absolutely essential book "The Hacker Crackdown," which has been mentioned here more than once). The next week, I woke up one Saturday morning, fired up the computer, and was ready to have a nice easy morning of cartoons and Usenet. There was a knock on the door. Looking out the peephole, I saw two young men in suits, carrying briefcases. Being a rational sort, I immediately thought "The Secret Service!" I opened the door.... "Hello! Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior...?
I got a snailmail version of this a while back. I turned it in to the Postal Inspection Service. I was tempted not to, though... it came in a nice handmade envelope made out of beautiful paper, hand-lettered with beautiful penmanship. It looked more like a wedding invitation from some extremely rich society dame than from some low-rent scammers in Africa...
You see, that cross-licensing deal means that Microsoft has to pay for the stuff they use from Macs. So if Apple has a patent on the interface, Microsoft is contractually bound to pay for their use of it...
Your point of "controls" consists of the Lotus/Borland case, where the use of existing controls on the keyboard was not protected (control-L etc.). This is noticeably different from calling something a "red jellybean," when it's really a blatant copy of a "crimson gumdrop" from someone else's original work. This is copyright law, plain and simple, and is protected.
"Look and feel" laws? Yes, we do. The judge in the original Apple/Microsoft trial said, very specifically, that Microsoft would have been in real trouble if Apple hadn't signed away their rights to the user interface in a previous contract. It is a protection under copyright and patent law.
"Look and feel" is also covered under something called "trade dress," which is how Apple is successfully (and correctly, I might add) going after these cheesy little PC cloners who keep trying to make iMac-like PCs.
You do not have to "trademark every element of the way a GUI looks." I fon't know where you got that weird little idea.
Try to make a computer that looked just like one of Apple's, like the folks who made some of those translucent PCs? Did you "design" a user interface that was intended to look as much as possible as someone else's, without any new work? If so, you were stealing. Translucency of materials or transparency of buttons isn't the whole of the concept, despite what some folks would have you believe.
Note that there are plenty of PCs out there with translucent plastics that have been left alone. There are, however, some folks out there who can't manage to make a decent machine on their own, and who look to "borrowing" other people's ideas to make a profit. Those are the guys that Apple has been getting in the courts.
If Judge Jackson didn't note or mention those things, he'd be obviously biased in favor of Microsoft...
Titanium is common enough that it's used as an ingredient in paint. It's just harder to get the pure metal. With modern techniques, it's just like really tough aluminum.
I run trade shows for a living, so I got to hear a lot of the behind-the-scenes noise in a lot of industries. For example, most power plants would have shut down or had "issues." A lot of those little "service" computers would have detected a too-long elapse in their maintenance records, and shut down the offending systems.
We were lucky there was enough time to correct those issues, as well as a slew of others. There was also a problem with some of the big intertie lines, which would have killed power for a big chunk of the US not affected by the local blackouts. It *was* a big issue. Fortunately, it went away.
A "cease and desist letter" is pretty much just a lawyer's way of getting your attention, and has no legal weight. A "cease and desist order" is another thing altogether, and Fandom.com seems to be very short on the "order" side of the battle.
Battlebot is too easy. They have all sorts of time to buy and make parts, then engineer them into a working robot. Anyone can drive down to Radio Shack and get a servo. It takes something different to make an old steam pipe into a working cannon...
AppleInsider's been working fine today, and was okay until the story hit, well, here.
Of course, they *could* just go all out and directly submerge the processor in liquid nitrogen. It's nonconductive, AFAIK.
Some reporter did the typical "news from retyping Intel press release" deal. The new Intel processor will *not* average 1 watt power use. It will use as little as 1 watt when running at the slowest SpeedStep notch (the new version has more stages than the old SpeedStep).
Overall, at 500 MHz, the new PIII will use something like 5 or 6 watts, and more at the 600 MHz "plugged in" range. Not bad for an Intel product, but it's not even matching the PPC G3 for power consumption, much less TransMeta.
Toy Story 2 was shown in Orlando at the Pleasure Island 24 cineplex in an all-digital theater. It was the first feature film that was digital from start (the computer) to finish (the screen display with a big DLP projector). It was also shown at some other places that had digital projection systems.
I saw TS2 in both formats, and the digital version was much sharper, had better color saturation, and had *no* defects.
Moore's law is only good for a limited set of 2-D devices. If you look at other technological advances, you can see other things that are actually exceeding Moore's at this point. Fiber optic transmission speeds, for example, which are doubling a LOT faster than that...
I got a couple of pounds of this stuff, hooked up a microphone, a camera, and a speaker, and turned it on.
It wants to watch pro wrestling...
"Original Song" is for music with words. "Duel of the Fates" would fall under the category of "Original Score." Other than DotF, the Phantom Menace score just wasn't that good...
At least part of the original broadcasts were from Pittsburgh area TV stations. The video capture was done there, and forwarded to Canada. So the original theft was in the United States.
First of all, the iCrave situation is very different from early cable TV, since early cable TV systems didn't insert advertising at the bottom of the screen while you were watching Ed Sullivan.
Later, when cable took off, they made financial arrangements with the TV stations to buy air time on those channels (by inserting commercials for the cable system).
iCrave, on the other hand, slapped ads on the screen when those shows were running.
The iCrave folks make a big deal about how this is supposed to be okay under Canadian law, when that's almost certainly not the case, due to Canada's participation in several international copyright treaties.
Someone on one of the net-abuse groups pointed out that part of the reason @home got the UDP was that they didn't implement UDP...
Well it looks like the y2k bug didn't rear it's ugly head.
Yep. The doomsayers have been proven wrong yet again.
Did you see that too?
Houston. We have a problem.
...a friend of mine (rapidly moving down that list, as you can imagine) called me at 8:30AM today, to see if my computer was okay and to see if I had finished a flyer for a concert he's promoting. He nearly became the first documented Y2K fatality in Florida.
On the other hand, all of these folks saying "all's right with the world" won't really know until about 10 AM Monday, when the millions of corporate drones show up, get their first cup of bad coffee, talk about the lack of events this weekend, and fire up their twenty-year-old accounting packages...
The reason you saw artifacts was that "Bicentennial Man" was shot and edited on film, then scanned. A pure-digital film like "Toy Story 2" wouldn't have any.
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0091455
Academy Award Nomination, along with a bunch of other awards and such. Came out in 1986.