In Lessig's book "The Future of Ideas" he has a story that shows you pretty clearly where Disney's head is. In IIRC the early seventies, RCA was working on a consumer VCR. They were concerned about publishers' IP rights so they developed a ONE-USE cassette. After showing the video once, the cassette would mechanically lock and couldn't be rewound. You'd have to take it back to the video store and pay them another rental fee to unlock it.
They showed this to a bunch of Disney executives. Their reaction was "We would NEVER distribute our movies that way. When the tape is played, we have ABSOLUTELY NO WAY OF KNOWING how many people are in the room."
...does Joe Six-pack understand the differences between DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM? Do _I_ understand the differences between these formats? Do you? Does the recent el-cheapo DVD player I bought play 2-layer disks? Do I know? WILL I know until I try to put one of them in and find that it won't play?
And now we're going to have TWO competing high-definition DVD formats? And HDTV itself, or do I mean "digital TV," is six or is it eight different formats, which are high-definition, except when they aren't, that is they are high-ER definition but not HIGH definition, only you can't get the high definition, and all the digital TV formats are about to become obsolete...
Anyone who buys ANY HDTV or DVD gear until the dust settles has gotta be nuts.
But you sure have to be amazed at the complexity and ingenuity the industry is using to shoot itself in the foot.
I've had four or five dealings with "merchant resolution" issues on credit cards over the past couple of decades. I went into every one a little nervous, because I didn't have any way of proving I _didn't_ make the purchase, and each of them was promptly resolved.
I don't know if anyone else remembers the bad old days of "holder-in-due-course." Originally the credit card companies simply took the position that they were the holder in due course of the debt you'd incurred with the merchant, and you could do anything you liked with the merchant, but THEY weren't involved and THEY were entitled to be paid, immediately. Then some good consumer laws got passed... and since then I've had the impression that buying with a credit card is really pretty powerful protection for the consumer.
The article doesn't say what really happened... why didn't those AOL customers just call their credit card companies and say "I never ordered it?" And if they did, what happened then?
(Much older than Gibson)... there was a device people would wear on their foreheads... I think the first version showed whether you were lying or telling the truth... then a second version also showed whether or not you were attracted to the person you were talking to...
I don't remember the plot device that explained why people voluntarily wore the things.
It's not so much that the free sites are turning into pay sites... it's that the payments are MUCH TOO HIGH. All these guys want $11.95 a year, $4.95 a month, whatever... and many of them are for services I use only rarely.
I'd gladly pay a nickel to end an e-card. But $11.95 a year when I only send half a dozen of them? I can buy real greeting cards cheaper than that.
A few years ago, everybody was talking about micropayment schemes. And Paypal's initial blurb talked about how you could use Paypal to send $0.01 to each of twenty friends... they'd charge your credit card $5.00 for the first payment then draw down your $5 balance a penny at a time. These days, Paypal is doing everything possible to DISCOURAGE you from using credit cards as a payment source...
Certainly, the source code at many companies is presumed to be written by engineers for engineers and contains very frank comments along the lines of "this doesn't make much sense but marketing insists on it.'
Wouldn't it be interesting if the code contained comments like
// Why is this routine in this DLL?
// So Windows can't run without IE installed.
How, exactly, does it degrade? Does it release a "harmless" gas? Does it flake off? Become discolored? What exactly happens inside the player when you try to play an expired disk?
Such a protected disk does not comply with the DVD specification, therefore there's no way to know whether it's compatible with every DVD player.
"Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands. Yet the broad facts must have glared upon any intelligent mind. All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually increasing. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of passive defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side. Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it was revolutionising the problems of police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city. These facts were before the minds of everybody; the children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as the Americans used to phrase it, 'fooled around' with the paraphernalia and pretensions of war."
--H. G. Wells, The World Set Free (1913). This was the book that described atomic bombs that worked by speeding up the natural radioactive decay process. In Wells' book, the atomic bombs did not deliver much more explosive power (in the sense of energy per unit time) than traditional explosives, but they "continued to explode" (released energy at that rate) for days and days and days.
It was, specifically, this book that got Leo Szilard to thinking about how the the process of radioactive decay could be sped up, leading to the idea of a nuclear chain reaction...
According to the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, I'm AUTHORIZED to make single-generation digital copies of CD's onto "Music CD-R" media, a portion of whose price includes a payment into two funds administered by the Library of Congress: two-thirds into a Sound Recordings Fund, with small percentages of this fund earmarked for nonfeatured artists and backup musicians, 40% of the remainder for featured artists, and the rest to record companies; one-third into a Musical Works Fund, to be split 50/50 between songwriters and music publishers.
My Teac appears to be rapidly turning into worthless junk. UMG's "More Fast and Furious" will not copy on it (it gives the error message "CANT COPY, SCMS ERROR").
So, the copy protection fails to prevent UNauthorized copies... but succeeds in preventing AUTHORIZED copies.
Midbar and UMG are cheating those of us who BOUGHT and PAID FOR the right to make copies.
Assuming the unit is bits, a trillion CD' s only hold about 10^12 * 6.0*10^9 = less than 10^21 bits. A trillion wouldn't even get you started. You'd need at least 10^79 trillion.
Still, the PATENT should be worth something. File it and then you can collect royalties every time someone sends a diskette via UPS.
The blurb at http://www.apple.com/powermac/ has a section entitled "Cache Advance" that should be good for a smirk, or at least a raised eyebrow.
It says, and I am not making this up, "In the 933MHz and dual 1GHz Power Mac G4 models, faster-than-light processor speed gets an additional boost with [now here comes the technical stuff--DPBS] advanced cache memory architecture that provides ultrafast, dedicated memory with massively enhanced throughput."
You know, as opposed to lesser machines that have only fast, dedicated memory with enchanced throughput.
But, wait, there's more... in this remarkable machine, "Accessing data from main memory is significantly faster than accessing data from the hard drive..."
Am I the only one who remembers that IBM actually DID something like this once before, with the "Ambra" brand? Ambra had a short and unhappy life somewhere around 1993-1994.
Ambra was an IBM spinoff. Of course it was an addition to, not a replacement for, IBM-branded products.
I believe it was heralded as one of the first examples of a "virtual company." In their ads they never could quite decide whether they wanted you to know and think of Ambra systems as "really" being by IBM or not.
The argument that there are accepted standards now and that everyone understands current usages carries no weight. I say off with the old, on with the new. How ironic it is that computers are now so old that computer people are stodgy, conservative, died-in-the-wool, and unable to change their ways... Going from "Cycles" to "Hertz" was DIFFICULT and didn't clarify a thing. Going from mega- to mebi- is a piece of cake by comparison--and there's actually some BENEFIT to it.
RAM sizes, since they are relevant to hardware binary addressing logic, have always been in sized in power of two. It makes no sense to manufacturer or design for a RAM (or magnetic core array) with 1000 or 1000,000 or 1,000,000,000 bytes or words of memory.
Clock speeds and communications speeds have always been decimal. Or do you think a 1 GHz Pentium has a clock speed of 1,073,741,824 Hz?
Disks are a mess. The total amount of disk storage is continuously variable, and is rarely an exact power of two. On the other hand, the amount stored per sector is related to RAM considerations and is often 512 bytes or somesuch. Disk capacities are sometimes quoted in powers of ten, sometimes in powers of two, and I have even seen "mixed systems" in which 1 "megabyte" of disk space meant 2000 (decimal) sectors of 512 bytes each, i.e. one "disk megabyte" was 1,024,000 bytes.
Nobody has any idea what the current terminology really means. At the one gig level, the discrepancy, 7%, is starting to be annoying. When we get to terabyte disks, which can't be far off, the discrepancy will be 10%. Let's start using terms that have well-defined meanings.
Check out H. Steinhaus's classical book, "Mathematical Snapshots, New Edition, Enlarged and Revised," 1960, Oxford University Press, New York, Library of Congress catalog #60-5104. You'll see an extremely similar idea shown on p. 172-176, figures 174-176. "The idea described here has been used to localize foreign bodies in the human body. For this purpose X rays are applied... the surgeon seees a picture similar to the photograph (174); looking through the [partially reflective] glass he sees the patient's skin, but he also sees the bulb exactly at the place occupied [by the object he's trying to surgically remove.]"
The only real difference is the subsitution of a real-time ultrasonic display for an X-ray.
I dunno how patent law works these days, but it would seem as if there's a pretty significant piece of prior art. That's a 1960 revised edition of a book originally published in 1950; I don't know whether or not this description is in the 1950 edition.
The technique, of course, has been used by magicians for stage effects for over a century, and is one of the main techniques used to produce the illusions in the the Disney "Haunted Mansion" (which many people believe incorrectly to be holograms).
"Joel takes particular pride in the fact that on the day Bill Gates asked if date math functions were compatible across the company's different procedure and function libraries, he, Joel Spolsky, was able to reassure the great man himself that with the exception of January and February 1900, all Microsoft application libraries counted dates the same way."
This is a joke, right? Like "a little bit pregnant" or "extended subset of?"
Besides, I personally encountered 4-year shift issues moving Excel spreadsheets between Windows and the Mac (1904 became 1900), so what was he talking about? Is this more doublespeak, like "you'll never see any UAE errors under Windows 3.1" because the name of the error was changed from UAE to GPF? "Sure, end-users may encounter all sorts of date problems but you can rest assured none of them are the result of anything in our 'applications libraries'?"
Those of us who have bought consumer two-tray CD recorders certainly ARE getting "ripped off and cheated." These recorders only make copies "Music CD-R's" which cost more than standard CD-R's, because their price, like the price of blank VHS tapes, includes a fee that gets distributed to the copyright holders.
The bargain we accepted is that get the right to copy music CD's for personal use,in exchange for what is a per-copy fee implemented in the price of the "Music CD-R."
Having accepted this bargain in good faith, the music industry is now revoking the terms.
The PDF says "*Intended only for use with your original music and other lawful applications."
This opens the way to "stealth downgrades"--you might buy a model that lacks DRM initially, then suddenly find out that a firmware upgrade was required--to access your ISP, perhaps--and that the upgrade installed restrictive DRM. And you'd have no recourse, because they'd point to that sentence and say "we never said it would store music that it doesn't think you own..."
Phooey. I clicked on "Get NASTRAN," and found that JUST THE DOC SET is $250. An IBM PC executable is $1000 PER YEAR. And the source code is $7000 PER YEAR.
I'm not sure what kind of "public domain" this is, but it's certainly not what I expected.
NASTRAN Doc-Full Set NASTRAN Documentation set for the UNIX version of the source code. Includes the four volume set of documentation on CD-ROM: User's Manual, Theoretical Manual, Programmer's Manual and Demonstration Problem Manual. $250.00
NASTRAN Doc-Full Set w/ Code NASTRAN Documentation set for the UNIX version of the source code. Includes the four volume set of documentation on CD-ROM.
Select this option if you are ordering documentation in conjuction with purchasing NASTRAN source code. $0.00
NASTRAN Exec. DEC ALPHA OSF/1 Executable version of NASTRAN for DEC Alpha AXP computers running OSF/1. This is an annual fee. (COS-10067) $2,000.00
NASTRAN Exec. HP9000 Executable version of NASTRAN for HP9000 series 7xx/8xx computers running HP-UX. This is an annual fee. (COS-10054) $2,000.00
NASTRAN Exec. IBM RS/6000 Executable version of NASTRAN for IBM RS/6000 computers running AIX. This is an annual fee. (COS-10061) $2,000.00
NASTRAN Exec. IBM/PC Executable version of NASTRAN for IBM PC compatible computers running MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, or Windows 95. This is an annual fee. (COS-10080) $1,000.00
NASTRAN Exec. Sun Solaris Executable version of NASTRAN for Sun Solaris 2.X. This is an annual fee. (COS-10065) $2,000.00
NASTRAN Source DEC ALPHA OSF/1 Source code for NASTRAN for DEC ALPHA OSF/1. This is an annual fee. (COS-10066) $7,000.00
NASTRAN Source SGI IRIX Source code for NASTRAN for SGI IRIS computers running IRIX 5.x. This is an annual fee. (COS-10057) $7,000.00
NASTRAN Source Sun Solaris Source code for NASTRAN for Sun Solaris 2.X. This is an annual fee. (COS-10064) $7,000.00
1) Simply using an answering machine cuts down enormously on phone solicitations. Some sleaze outfits do have equipment that will leave messages but most are only interested in victimizing a live caller.
2) I use an answering machine with a "voice mailbox" capability--mine was made by GE and cost $40. We don't assign anyone to Mailbox 1. Intro message says "Press 2 for Dan, 3 for [my wife]." Those few outfits that use automated equipment to leave message end up in mailbox 1. (But some real messages from baffled people end up there, too, so I still do need to listen to it).
3) On EVERY call I do get, my first words are "I don't want to be called, take me off your list." I believe this really does have some effect.
I currently get less than one solicitation per week.
4) If, for some reason, you're like me and have trouble being rude, a technique that it quite effective with phone solicitors and door-to-door salespeople is to say, politely, but firmly, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no." The person who gave me this tip said that many salespeople are specifically trained NOT to break off the conversation or go away until they have heard "no" seven times. Give them their seven noes and they'll break off gracefully. I don't know if that's the explanation, but it does work.
The "Patent Policy FAQ" was authored exclusively by representatives of Fortune 500 companies (2 from Apple Computer, 2 from Microsoft, and one from Hewlett-Packard).
Wouldn't this lead one to think that the policy favors the interests of large companies?
Why weren't small companies and academia involved in writing the FAQ?
Jonathan Swift's use of the word "yahoo" should probably be mentioned. In Gulliver's Travels, he visits the land of the Houyhnhnms, noble, moral, horse-like creatures. He hears about the miserable, uncivilized, hateful Yahoos, and is, of course, mortified to discover that Yahoo is the Houyhnhnm name for humans.
I don't know if Swift originated the word, and, yes, I understand that trademark law is complicated, but it strikes me as annoying and unseemly for Yahoo to be claiming this word as their intellectual property. I wishYahoo Serious the best of luck.
Slashdot Mirror
In Lessig's book "The Future of Ideas" he has a story that shows you pretty clearly where Disney's head is. In IIRC the early seventies, RCA was working on a consumer VCR. They were concerned about publishers' IP rights so they developed a ONE-USE cassette. After showing the video once, the cassette would mechanically lock and couldn't be rewound. You'd have to take it back to the video store and pay them another rental fee to unlock it.
They showed this to a bunch of Disney executives. Their reaction was "We would NEVER distribute our movies that way. When the tape is played, we have ABSOLUTELY NO WAY OF KNOWING how many people are in the room."
To his credit, Hiawatha Bray has a good article on this in today's Boston Globe. Try this link:
A nt ipiracy_bill_a_high_tech_threat_Hollywood_style+.s html
t ml and search for "bray" . Should be there through tomorrow.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/063/business/
or go to http://www.globe.com/globe/search/globe_search.sh
...does Joe Six-pack understand the differences between DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM? Do _I_ understand the differences between these formats? Do you? Does the recent el-cheapo DVD player I bought play 2-layer disks? Do I know? WILL I know until I try to put one of them in and find that it won't play?
And now we're going to have TWO competing high-definition DVD formats? And HDTV itself, or do I mean "digital TV," is six or is it eight different formats, which are high-definition, except when they aren't, that is they are high-ER definition but not HIGH definition, only you can't get the high definition, and all the digital TV formats are about to become obsolete...
Anyone who buys ANY HDTV or DVD gear until the dust settles has gotta be nuts.
But you sure have to be amazed at the complexity and ingenuity the industry is using to shoot itself in the foot.
I've had four or five dealings with "merchant resolution" issues on credit cards over the past couple of decades. I went into every one a little nervous, because I didn't have any way of proving I _didn't_ make the purchase, and each of them was promptly resolved.
I don't know if anyone else remembers the bad old days of "holder-in-due-course." Originally the credit card companies simply took the position that they were the holder in due course of the debt you'd incurred with the merchant, and you could do anything you liked with the merchant, but THEY weren't involved and THEY were entitled to be paid, immediately. Then some good consumer laws got passed... and since then I've had the impression that buying with a credit card is really pretty powerful protection for the consumer.
The article doesn't say what really happened... why didn't those AOL customers just call their credit card companies and say "I never ordered it?" And if they did, what happened then?
(Much older than Gibson)... there was a device people would wear on their foreheads... I think the first version showed whether you were lying or telling the truth... then a second version also showed whether or not you were attracted to the person you were talking to...
I don't remember the plot device that explained why people voluntarily wore the things.
It's not so much that the free sites are turning into pay sites... it's that the payments are MUCH TOO HIGH. All these guys want $11.95 a year, $4.95 a month, whatever... and many of them are for services I use only rarely.
I'd gladly pay a nickel to end an e-card. But $11.95 a year when I only send half a dozen of them? I can buy real greeting cards cheaper than that.
A few years ago, everybody was talking about micropayment schemes. And Paypal's initial blurb talked about how you could use Paypal to send $0.01 to each of twenty friends... they'd charge your credit card $5.00 for the first payment then draw down your $5 balance a penny at a time. These days, Paypal is doing everything possible to DISCOURAGE you from using credit cards as a payment source...
I see jejones made essentially the same observation before I did...
Certainly, the source code at many companies is presumed to be written by engineers for engineers and contains very frank comments along the lines of "this doesn't make much sense but marketing insists on it.'
Wouldn't it be interesting if the code contained comments like
// Why is this routine in this DLL?
// So Windows can't run without IE installed.
How, exactly, does it degrade? Does it release a "harmless" gas? Does it flake off? Become discolored? What exactly happens inside the player when you try to play an expired disk?
Such a protected disk does not comply with the DVD specification, therefore there's no way to know whether it's compatible with every DVD player.
"Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands. Yet the broad facts must have glared upon any intelligent mind. All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually increasing. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of passive defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side. Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it was revolutionising the problems of police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city. These facts were before the minds of everybody; the children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as the Americans used to phrase it, 'fooled around' with the paraphernalia and pretensions of war."
--H. G. Wells, The World Set Free (1913). This was the book that described atomic bombs that worked by speeding up the natural radioactive decay process. In Wells' book, the atomic bombs did not deliver much more explosive power (in the sense of energy per unit time) than traditional explosives, but they "continued to explode" (released energy at that rate) for days and days and days.
It was, specifically, this book that got Leo Szilard to thinking about how the the process of radioactive decay could be sped up, leading to the idea of a nuclear chain reaction...
I own a Teac RW-CD22 CD Recorder.
According to the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, I'm AUTHORIZED to make single-generation digital copies of CD's onto "Music CD-R" media, a portion of whose price includes a payment into two funds administered by the Library of Congress: two-thirds into a Sound Recordings Fund, with small percentages of this fund earmarked for nonfeatured artists and backup musicians, 40% of the remainder for featured artists, and the rest to record companies; one-third into a Musical Works Fund, to be split 50/50 between songwriters and music publishers.
My Teac appears to be rapidly turning into worthless junk. UMG's "More Fast and Furious" will not copy on it (it gives the error message "CANT COPY, SCMS ERROR").
So, the copy protection fails to prevent UNauthorized copies... but succeeds in preventing AUTHORIZED copies.
Midbar and UMG are cheating those of us who BOUGHT and PAID FOR the right to make copies.
Assuming the unit is bits, a trillion CD' s only hold about 10^12 * 6.0*10^9 = less than 10^21 bits. A trillion wouldn't even get you started. You'd need at least 10^79 trillion.
Still, the PATENT should be worth something. File it and then you can collect royalties every time someone sends a diskette via UPS.
The blurb at http://www.apple.com/powermac/ has a section entitled "Cache Advance" that should be good for a smirk, or at least a raised eyebrow.
It says, and I am not making this up, "In the 933MHz and dual 1GHz Power Mac G4 models, faster-than-light processor speed gets an additional boost with [now here comes the technical stuff--DPBS] advanced cache memory architecture that provides ultrafast, dedicated memory with massively enhanced throughput."
You know, as opposed to lesser machines that have only fast, dedicated memory with enchanced throughput.
But, wait, there's more... in this remarkable machine, "Accessing data from main memory is significantly faster than accessing data from the hard drive..."
Am I the only one who remembers that IBM actually DID something like this once before, with the "Ambra" brand? Ambra had a short and unhappy life somewhere around 1993-1994.
Ambra was an IBM spinoff. Of course it was an addition to, not a replacement for, IBM-branded products.
I believe it was heralded as one of the first examples of a "virtual company." In their ads they never could quite decide whether they wanted you to know and think of Ambra systems as "really" being by IBM or not.
The argument that there are accepted standards now and that everyone understands current usages carries no weight. I say off with the old, on with the new. How ironic it is that computers are now so old that computer people are stodgy, conservative, died-in-the-wool, and unable to change their ways... Going from "Cycles" to "Hertz" was DIFFICULT and didn't clarify a thing. Going from mega- to mebi- is a piece of cake by comparison--and there's actually some BENEFIT to it.
RAM sizes, since they are relevant to hardware binary addressing logic, have always been in sized in power of two. It makes no sense to manufacturer or design for a RAM (or magnetic core array) with 1000 or 1000,000 or 1,000,000,000 bytes or words of memory.
Clock speeds and communications speeds have always been decimal. Or do you think a 1 GHz Pentium has a clock speed of 1,073,741,824 Hz?
Disks are a mess. The total amount of disk storage is continuously variable, and is rarely an exact power of two. On the other hand, the amount stored per sector is related to RAM considerations and is often 512 bytes or somesuch. Disk capacities are sometimes quoted in powers of ten, sometimes in powers of two, and I have even seen "mixed systems" in which 1 "megabyte" of disk space meant 2000 (decimal) sectors of 512 bytes each, i.e. one "disk megabyte" was 1,024,000 bytes.
Nobody has any idea what the current terminology really means. At the one gig level, the discrepancy, 7%, is starting to be annoying. When we get to terabyte disks, which can't be far off, the discrepancy will be 10%. Let's start using terms that have well-defined meanings.
...I dunno... if it's not safe to store gasoline cans or propane cylinders in my house, why would it be safe to store hydrogen in my house?
Under "safety" they don't really seem to address this issue except to say that "hydrogen is supplied through safe, low-pressure canisters."
And why does the unit have "sealed lead acid batteries" in it?
Check out H. Steinhaus's classical book, "Mathematical Snapshots, New Edition, Enlarged and Revised," 1960, Oxford University Press, New York, Library of Congress catalog #60-5104. You'll see an extremely similar idea shown on p. 172-176, figures 174-176. "The idea described here has been used to localize foreign bodies in the human body. For this purpose X rays are applied... the surgeon seees a picture similar to the photograph (174); looking through the [partially reflective] glass he sees the patient's skin, but he also sees the bulb exactly at the place occupied [by the object he's trying to surgically remove.]"
The only real difference is the subsitution of a real-time ultrasonic display for an X-ray.
I dunno how patent law works these days, but it would seem as if there's a pretty significant piece of prior art. That's a 1960 revised edition of a book originally published in 1950; I don't know whether or not this description is in the 1950 edition.
The technique, of course, has been used by magicians for stage effects for over a century, and is one of the main techniques used to produce the illusions in the the Disney "Haunted Mansion" (which many people believe incorrectly to be holograms).
"Joel takes particular pride in the fact that on the day Bill Gates asked if date math functions were compatible across the company's different procedure and function libraries, he, Joel Spolsky, was able to reassure the great man himself that with the exception of January and February 1900, all Microsoft application libraries counted dates the same way."
This is a joke, right? Like "a little bit pregnant" or "extended subset of?"
Besides, I personally encountered 4-year shift issues moving Excel spreadsheets between Windows and the Mac (1904 became 1900), so what was he talking about? Is this more doublespeak, like "you'll never see any UAE errors under Windows 3.1" because the name of the error was changed from UAE to GPF? "Sure, end-users may encounter all sorts of date problems but you can rest assured none of them are the result of anything in our 'applications libraries'?"
Those of us who have bought consumer two-tray CD recorders certainly ARE getting "ripped off and cheated." These recorders only make copies "Music CD-R's" which cost more than standard CD-R's, because their price, like the price of blank VHS tapes, includes a fee that gets distributed to the copyright holders.
The bargain we accepted is that get the right to copy music CD's for personal use,in exchange for what is a per-copy fee implemented in the price of the "Music CD-R."
Having accepted this bargain in good faith, the music industry is now revoking the terms.
The PDF says "*Intended only for use with your original music and other lawful applications."
This opens the way to "stealth downgrades"--you might buy a model that lacks DRM initially, then suddenly find out that a firmware upgrade was required--to access your ISP, perhaps--and that the upgrade installed restrictive DRM. And you'd have no recourse, because they'd point to that sentence and say "we never said it would store music that it doesn't think you own..."
...except for being seven times smaller and made out of different materials.
And the Boeing 777 is just like his airplane design too, except for being bigger and a different shape and made out of different materials.
Phooey. I clicked on "Get NASTRAN," and found that JUST THE DOC SET is $250. An IBM PC executable is $1000 PER YEAR. And the source code is $7000 PER YEAR.
I'm not sure what kind of "public domain" this is, but it's certainly not what I expected.
NASTRAN Doc-Full Set NASTRAN Documentation set for the UNIX version of the source code. Includes the four volume set of documentation on CD-ROM: User's Manual, Theoretical Manual, Programmer's Manual and Demonstration Problem Manual. $250.00
NASTRAN Doc-Full Set w/ Code NASTRAN Documentation set for the UNIX version of the source code. Includes the four volume set of documentation on CD-ROM.
Select this option if you are ordering documentation in conjuction with purchasing NASTRAN source code. $0.00
NASTRAN Exec. DEC ALPHA OSF/1 Executable version of NASTRAN for DEC Alpha AXP computers running OSF/1. This is an annual fee. (COS-10067) $2,000.00
NASTRAN Exec. HP9000 Executable version of NASTRAN for HP9000 series 7xx/8xx computers running HP-UX. This is an annual fee. (COS-10054) $2,000.00
NASTRAN Exec. IBM RS/6000 Executable version of NASTRAN for IBM RS/6000 computers running AIX. This is an annual fee. (COS-10061) $2,000.00
NASTRAN Exec. IBM/PC Executable version of NASTRAN for IBM PC compatible computers running MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, or Windows 95. This is an annual fee. (COS-10080) $1,000.00
NASTRAN Exec. Sun Solaris Executable version of NASTRAN for Sun Solaris 2.X. This is an annual fee. (COS-10065) $2,000.00
NASTRAN Source DEC ALPHA OSF/1 Source code for NASTRAN for DEC ALPHA OSF/1. This is an annual fee. (COS-10066) $7,000.00
NASTRAN Source SGI IRIX Source code for NASTRAN for SGI IRIS computers running IRIX 5.x. This is an annual fee. (COS-10057) $7,000.00
NASTRAN Source Sun Solaris Source code for NASTRAN for Sun Solaris 2.X. This is an annual fee. (COS-10064) $7,000.00
1) Simply using an answering machine cuts down enormously on phone solicitations. Some sleaze outfits do have equipment that will leave messages but most are only interested in victimizing a live caller.
2) I use an answering machine with a "voice mailbox" capability--mine was made by GE and cost $40. We don't assign anyone to Mailbox 1. Intro message says "Press 2 for Dan, 3 for [my wife]." Those few outfits that use automated equipment to leave message end up in mailbox 1. (But some real messages from baffled people end up there, too, so I still do need to listen to it).
3) On EVERY call I do get, my first words are "I don't want to be called, take me off your list." I believe this really does have some effect.
I currently get less than one solicitation per week.
4) If, for some reason, you're like me and have trouble being rude, a technique that it quite effective with phone solicitors and door-to-door salespeople is to say, politely, but firmly, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no." The person who gave me this tip said that many salespeople are specifically trained NOT to break off the conversation or go away until they have heard "no" seven times. Give them their seven noes and they'll break off gracefully. I don't know if that's the explanation, but it does work.
The "Patent Policy FAQ" was authored exclusively by representatives of Fortune 500 companies (2 from Apple Computer, 2 from Microsoft, and one from Hewlett-Packard).
Wouldn't this lead one to think that the policy favors the interests of large companies?
Why weren't small companies and academia involved in writing the FAQ?
Jonathan Swift's use of the word "yahoo" should probably be mentioned. In Gulliver's Travels, he visits the land of the Houyhnhnms, noble, moral, horse-like creatures. He hears about the miserable, uncivilized, hateful Yahoos, and is, of course, mortified to discover that Yahoo is the Houyhnhnm name for humans.
I don't know if Swift originated the word, and, yes, I understand that trademark law is complicated, but it strikes me as annoying and unseemly for Yahoo to be claiming this word as their intellectual property. I wishYahoo Serious the best of luck.
Me, I'd rather be called a Houyhnhnm.