Actually, it seems that the only thing RISC stands for any more is a marketing term for "non-x86." (Aside: does anybody actually use "IA32" instead of x86?) So saying something is the dominant RISC platform is just saying "except for the commodity x86 boxes, we're it."
Is anybody else sick of that penguin being attached to everything Linux-related? C'mon, Linux is an OS, not a logo. I would rather have the effort currently going into "cute" penguin merchandise, packaging, promos, trade show gimmicks, etc. go toward actual software development instead.
Sen. Feinstein has had a tendency to sponsor nonsense like this, and I guess the main reason she keeps getting elected in spite of this stupidity is both voter apathy and the fact that her Republican opposition is usually worse. It's a sad state of affairs.
If this thing does become law, I think somebody should set up some offshore web page with some information deemed to be illegal, while not something terribly offensive (maybe something like a technical description of a water pipe -- better yet, find a patent on something like that in IBM's patent database, or find some other gov't document with similar info) then everybody can put a very innocent looking link on their pages to that "illegal" info. That's a slightly more active form of civil disobendience than yet another colored ribbon gif.
I don't see how Pepsico's giving away a Harrier is obviously a joke. Sure, I think it's ridiculous, but this is an industry that turns consumption of colored, caffeinated, fizzy sugar water into a lifestyle. For all I know, Pepsico might have actually wanted to give away a Harrier just to feature it in some future ad campaign. Isn't this the same company that makes Mountain Dew, a beverage which they try to associate with all kinds of edgy, extreme sports activities? I could almost see how it would fit in.
I think running a contest where the "winner" gets a rock concert in their back yard as equally ridiculous, but apparently it's worked for MTV.
Having said all that, however, I wonder what the official rules of the contest said. You know, the fine print that almost nobody reads but that the promoters are required to provide. Surely somebody going to the trouble of raising $700K would have spent 5 minutes reading the official rules first. It doesn't completely excuse Pepsico from their mistake of promoting a non-prize in their high-profile ads, but it should limit their liability. They should provide some reasonable compensation for the guy's time and money, but he's not entitled to a windfall.
I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that Pepsico/McDonalds/... should be held reasonably accountable for their actions, advertising claims, etc., but their mistakes shouldn't be somebody else's lottery ticket to riches.
To make this slightly relevant to slashdot's normal topics, I note with some glee that a lot of the marketing spew from Microsoft, which they've presented as testimony in their anti-trust trial, has fallen completely apart when examined for truthfulness in a court of law. It's a shame that the rest of the world is too tolerant of BS, then we wouldn't have exaggerated and/or meaningless claims in advertising like "Windows 98 makes everything up to 36% faster" or "Pentium III makes the Internet go faster" or "19-inch monitor (17.8-inch viewable area)".
It's already available. A coworker has a Cassiopeia which can play MP3's off of CompactFlash cards. It's WinCE, not PalmOS, but otherwise it's already a reality.
It's not true vaporware until somebody spreads a rumor that it will be the next-generation Amiga CPU.
(cf. Transmeta and Sun's MAJC)
For that matter, I think that in the years since Commodore folded, the always-forthcoming new Amiga has been rumored to use a 680x0 (x > 6), x86, Alpha, PowerPC, HP PA-RISC, and now Transmeta and MAJC. I wonder if anyone can dig out any Sparc or MIPS rumors. (Or start a few.)
It was either Edison or Tesla who refused to accept an award named for the other because it implicitly honored the guy named in the award more than the "winner." (Or so I've heard. Maybe it's apocryphal.)
I mention that only because I wonder how RMS feels about receiving the "Linus Torvalds" award. He should turn around and give Linus the "FSF/Richard M. Stallman" award for contributing to the ideals of Free Software.
Announcing the Distributed Internet Ego Stroking Project
Unlike prior distributed computing projects, the sole purpose of DIESP is to give nerds with flashy computers bragging rights over their friends. The compute task is still to be chosen, but will be something that exercises a good mix of integer and floating-point ops, and is highly optimizable to take advantage of the most arcane instruction-set extensions. The actual task will be meaningless, but who cares? (Our beta progam searches for Bible Code-type messages in the works of Nostradamus, and ray-traces the results.) It will be open source so that everyone can tweak it to their heart's content. We'll put up all kinds of statistics on the DIESP web site, and we're actively exploring logo partnerships with various hardware vendors and co-branded clients for major ISP's.
Another major innovation of DIESP is our unique Virtual Result Computation which eliminates the annoyances of other projects, like requiring you to leave your computer on all the time. Submit just one work unit, and, for a small fee, our VRC program will pretend that you're running at that speed on a virtual CPU(TM)(Patent Pending) and your statistics will be continuously updated! You may purchase as many virtual CPU's as you wish. We'll also be introducing our Premium program, where, for an extra fee, we'll assume that you're optimizing your client software and/or upgrading your hardware over time, so your virtual compute rate will gradually be increased.
I wonder how a typical Internet company IPO road show goes...
We don't make any money and don't even know how, but our company name ends in dot com. Get in on our IPO and you can turn over your stock the next day to some wannabe day trader and triple your money.
But seriously, I'm sure the SEC doesn't permit "disclosures" like this, but you know that's what any IPO investor is thinking these days.
This is great. TP 3.02 was a wonderful package for its time -- one of those rare programs that seems to get more out of the underlying hardware than you would have thought possible. An old version of Visicalc is also available at Dan Bricklin's web site. I'm sure that to accountants it fits that category, too, but as a programmer, TP was more significant to me. What I'd also like to see is the CP/M version of Wordstar 2.2, which amazed me for the interactivity and full-screen editing it allowed on dumb ASCII terminals, and how enormously configurable it was.
Too often today we have the opposite: programs which are amazing for how slow they can make awesome hardware seem. Programmers today should study these classic programs -- they'd learn something.
I think that, while not a copyright violation, linking directly to someone else's images is improper use of their material, and is indicative of laziness and plagiarism. Others have already pointed out the many technical defenses a site can employ to discourage others from linking to their images and other content elements.
It's worth noting that while using some other guy's image is a quick and dirty way to make your web page look like it has more content, it also places your web page at the mercy of those whose content you've linked. You might link to somebody's nifty icon, but if he replaces it with pr0n, your pages are going to look pretty bad. Professional sites go out of their way to avoid this, often explicitly notifying the user when links leave their site.
I know someone who posted an auction on eBay, complete with a picture they went to the trouble of scanning, cropping, etc. Someone else with a similar item to sell linked to his image, so we went back and added some text to the image -- nothing profane, just a note that it was an original scan intended only for use in a specific auction. The lazy bum who linked to it had no alternative but to either close his auction or put up with the modified image, although I doubt that he ever noticed. With CGI, we could have been much more creative.
Bottom line: this will sort itself out without lawyers, if given a chance.
Compaq has posted a list of the 13 patents it alleges are infringed by emachines h ere.
One that stands out in my mind is 5,724,226: Housing Access Door Construction for a Portable Computer Docking Station. I didn't think emachines made either portables or docking stations.
The other patents cover a variety of generic PC stuff, including one that looks a lot like the infamous XOR cursor patent. IMHO, Compaq is casting a pretty wide net here, throwing any of its patents marginally related to generic PC hardware at emachines. They wouldn't dare do this to a bigger player without expecting countersuits for violating that company's patent portfolio. I guess they think that emachines doesn't have any patent portfolio of their own.
Prediction: this will get settled out of court for "an undisclosed sum." It's entirely FUD.
It seems to me that, with current Internet culture, if you took an astroturf campaign and simply acknowledged that you had a financial interest in whay you're hyping instead of trying to keep it a secret, you'd still generate positive buzz. (Assuming that there are any redeeming qualities in what you're hyping. In the end, all the commercials and astroturf in the world would never have helped something as poorly conceived as DIVX.)
Look at how people still get excited whenever whoever currently owns the ashes of the Amiga announces this year's flavor of vaporware. (Hmm. I think my opinion on that issue is showing.) Or the following that Babylon 5 got before it was ever in production because J. Michael Strwhatshisname (the producer) took the time to post to Usenet.
On the net, there's the illusion that everyone is on equal footing, and just the fact that an insider dealing with a movie or new computer is participating in the same forums as you generates positive buzz in itself. That is, as long as people don't feel like they're being talked down to, and that's exactly what fake hype does by being deceptive about its origins, so it's actually riskier than being honest.
I think it's been pretty clear from the beginning that Bezos' strategy for amazon didn't have anything specifically to do with books, but with selling any product that can successfully be sold online. Books were an excellent first choice, strictly from a business perspective.
The irony is that amazon still isn't making money, and I'm beginning to wonder if it ever can.
I was attempting to browse amazon.com last night -- emphasis on attempting because it was so slow I couldn't actually browse anything, much less buy something. If the sluggishness I experienced at that time was due to amazon.com and not my ISP, I don't see how they could have sold a single item at all, and whether this was an isolated incident or not, this should scare anybody trying to make a buck in e-commerce.
If the parking lot at Wal-Mart gets full, they'll lose some overflow business, but they can live with that because when it happens they've got a store full of shoppers. When a web site gets too much traffic and their servers get slashdotted, business suffers. So there must be a fine line between underutilization and overutilization, and unless a commerce site can walk that fine line, they're either spending too much money on their infrastructure or losing too much business due to frustrated users.
It seems that the ridiculous valuations of internent stocks must be because people see huge opportunities for growth, but too much growth could be a site killer, and enterprise hardware and the admin talent to keep it running ain't cheap, so overbuilding could also be a business killer.
I bought a consumer device prior to 1992 that seems to meet all these qualifications
I guess you're describing a portable CD player, and, IMHO, you're stretching the definitions of 'data interface' and 'compressed' audio. However, even if I accept your definitions and admit that claim 1 of the patent is too broad and can be invalidated because of this prior art, that doesn't invalidate the remaining claims, which are more narrowly focused on devices similar to the Rio.
I don't think Audiohighway's patent is broad enough to extort license fees from every possible use of digital recording, but it does seem, IMHO again, to cover portable MP3 players with a download interface pretty well, and that's enough of an innovation that I'm not troubled by the fact that somebody was able to patent it.
I'm troubled by many software and business process patents which seem to be granted in the face of much prior art and in complete disregard for the obviousness of the 'invention,' but I just don't see this patent as one of those.
Unlike a lot of posters, I've read the claims in the patent. (Yes, it has been granted, despite misinformed posts here. It's US #5,914,941.) I don't think it's all that broad of a patent, and a lot of what has been presented here as prior art isn't. Looking at the broadest claim (claim 1), the significant features of the invention are:
Portable - open to some interpretation, but still applies, and would probably be interpreted based on the other claims
Data interface - pretty vague, but I'd interpret that, given the context of the rest of the patent, as being a "live" serial/USB/firewire/modem type of interface instead of a disk drive
Faster-than-real-time reception of data - this rules out a straight digital recorder
Compressed, digitized audio - someone claimed MODs were compressed, which is stretching the definition a bit, but I wouldn't consider them digitized. They use digitized samples, but that doesn't make the whole MOD a digitized sample.
Audio output - self-explanatory
So show me a portable device that let you download and store compressed, digitized audio faster than real time and play it back, that existed prior to 1995. Somebody mentioned a Psion -- could you download audio to it faster than real time? It's not enough if the hardware had the basic specifications to allow it; prior art would actually require the software.
Sure, it seems obvious now, with the Rio on the shelf, but was it really that obvious in May of 1995?
Granted, this article is on an "opinion" site, but it, like a lot of other articles about Linux, has practically nothing in the way of specific technical content. (Another recent example, also posted on Slashdot, was a comparison of Linux and *BSD.)
Platitudes about user-friendliness, stability of Linux vs BSD, or whatever, are great, but I really miss the technical details. Want to make Linux user-friendly? Ok, let's walk through the list of daemons and other services that a typical distro starts up and decide whether they belong on a desktop OS. Want to compare the TCP/IP stacks of Linux and BSD? Ok, give me some technical details about what is different about them. I don't much care about when and where they were written.
Maybe I'm not going to find this kind of information from Slashdot. Where does one find real technical discussions these days?
That sucks if your contributions are taken without proper credit. One can only hope that people who do this are shooting themselves in the foot in the long run because contributors will figure out what's going on and abandon the project.
However, it's not always so cut and dried as when your code shows up verbatim in the next version. (And if it does, could it just be an oversight? Did you politely point the omission of credit out to the author?)
Put yourself in the author's shoes. Somebody sends you the diffs for a new feature, but you decide for whatever reason that it isn't appropriate to include that now. Perhaps it is buggy, perhaps you don't have the resources to test it, perhaps it conflicts with your future plans, perhaps it makes the feature set inconsistent, or whatever. A few versions down the road, that same feature may now make sense and you put it in. Maybe by now you've forgotten about the code somebody sent you several months ago. Depending on the triviality of the feature, your implementation of it might look similar, even if done independently. It would be nice to credit the other guy at least for the idea, even if you don't use his implementation, but what if it was something you already thought of long before he sent it?
This is the kind of thing that makes publishers return unsolicited manuscripts unopened. Otherwise they get sued over every blockbuster that bears any resemblance to anything that's ever been in their slush pile.
What if you place the code that is to be output under a less restrictive license? (For example, place it into the public domain.) It seems to me that you would not be violating the GPL because you would be permitting redistribution of the source under all of the terms of the GPL (and then some), but the viral aspect of the GPL wouldn't attach to further use of the code that is output because it would be in the public domain.
The only teeth the GPL has is that a user must accept its terms to copy the software, but if the software is already copyable, then the GPL need not be accepted.
If I add a "#pragma abe" to GCC to emit the Gettysburg Address, that doesn't put the GA under GPL, does it?
Don't Miss the Anti-Microsoft Rant
on
Hacker's Diet
·
· Score: 0
I'm not going to comment on The Hacker's Diet itself, except to say that I don't think there's such a thing as a diet plan that works for everyone.
However, if you look on the Computer Tools page, under "Why So Many Versions?" you'll see a delightful rant about how Microsoft's pattern of incompatible upgrades to Excel has made it impossible to write simple spreadsheets that work in all versions.
Follow the Palm case link and you'll find just a few pictures and little explanation but a mention of a thread on comp.sys.palmtops.pilot. Here is the URL for DejaNews:
Not yet, but it is getting to the point where it takes a professional or a very dedicated amateur to exploit the benefits of film's better resolution and dynamic range.
For consumers, it's amazing how far both digital cameras and low cost printers have come in the last few years. I had an old DC20, which was worthless for anything larger than a thumbnail. Now 1-2 megapixel cameras take pictures so good you need a magnifying glass or a trained eye to see any limitations on a typical sized print.
Film still has advantages that will keep it around for a long time. Motion picture film cameras are relatively cheap and light, and the effective resolution is about 4K pixels for a motion picture frame (which is smaller than a 35mm still frame), and film has a much wider exposure latitude than any digital sensor I'm aware of, but consumer photo printing is so awful that I think it has already been surpassed by the current generation of digital cameras.
I've compared a traditional photo print side-by-side with the same image printed by a $250 ink jet printer, and while the inkjet image isn't perfect, it's better than the photo because the photo processing was so bad, as is typical of consumer quality prints (incorrect exposure; out of focus). And this print was made at a high-end photo store in Rochester, NY, where they should know what they're doing!
Before too long, I think we might see traditional film cameras relegated to motion picture and high-end applications where medium format cameras are today, and when was the last time you actually saw someone using a medium format camera?
That still depends on your definition. Others have mentioned that the 68000 has a 16-bit data bus. I'll also point out that the 68000 has a 16-bit ALU, so 32-bit aritmetic operations take two passes through the ALU and thus are slower than 16-bit operations. Writing Amiga programs to use 16-bit ints resulted in a performance boost on 68000/68010 Amigas.
The 68020 and later had 32-bit ALU's, so I don't think there is any 16-bitness left in them.
Good point. Let's see. "pay-zero.com" is currently being auctioned on eBay for a minimum bid of $100,000. (Believe it or not. Of course, there are zero bids.) If I thought that name was a good fit for my business, I could (a) pay this greedy fool $100K for something that may have cost him $70; (b) wait 60 days from when he registered the name (which was only on July 5th), betting that he never actually paid for it, then register it myself; (c) spend 60 seconds of my own time searching for a permutation that isn't registered. Currently, it looks like "you-pay-zero.com" and "you-pay-nothing.com" are available, so why should I pay a $100K premium to some greedy speculator?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it seems that the only thing RISC stands for any more is a marketing term for "non-x86." (Aside: does anybody actually use "IA32" instead of x86?) So saying something is the dominant RISC platform is just saying "except for the commodity x86 boxes, we're it."
Is anybody else sick of that penguin being attached to everything Linux-related? C'mon, Linux is an OS, not a logo. I would rather have the effort currently going into "cute" penguin merchandise, packaging, promos, trade show gimmicks, etc. go toward actual software development instead.
If this thing does become law, I think somebody should set up some offshore web page with some information deemed to be illegal, while not something terribly offensive (maybe something like a technical description of a water pipe -- better yet, find a patent on something like that in IBM's patent database, or find some other gov't document with similar info) then everybody can put a very innocent looking link on their pages to that "illegal" info. That's a slightly more active form of civil disobendience than yet another colored ribbon gif.
I think running a contest where the "winner" gets a rock concert in their back yard as equally ridiculous, but apparently it's worked for MTV.
Having said all that, however, I wonder what the official rules of the contest said. You know, the fine print that almost nobody reads but that the promoters are required to provide. Surely somebody going to the trouble of raising $700K would have spent 5 minutes reading the official rules first. It doesn't completely excuse Pepsico from their mistake of promoting a non-prize in their high-profile ads, but it should limit their liability. They should provide some reasonable compensation for the guy's time and money, but he's not entitled to a windfall.
I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that Pepsico/McDonalds/... should be held reasonably accountable for their actions, advertising claims, etc., but their mistakes shouldn't be somebody else's lottery ticket to riches.
To make this slightly relevant to slashdot's normal topics, I note with some glee that a lot of the marketing spew from Microsoft, which they've presented as testimony in their anti-trust trial, has fallen completely apart when examined for truthfulness in a court of law. It's a shame that the rest of the world is too tolerant of BS, then we wouldn't have exaggerated and/or meaningless claims in advertising like "Windows 98 makes everything up to 36% faster" or "Pentium III makes the Internet go faster" or "19-inch monitor (17.8-inch viewable area)".
It's already available. A coworker has a Cassiopeia which can play MP3's off of CompactFlash cards. It's WinCE, not PalmOS, but otherwise it's already a reality.
(cf. Transmeta and Sun's MAJC)
For that matter, I think that in the years since Commodore folded, the always-forthcoming new Amiga has been rumored to use a 680x0 (x > 6), x86, Alpha, PowerPC, HP PA-RISC, and now Transmeta and MAJC. I wonder if anyone can dig out any Sparc or MIPS rumors. (Or start a few.)
I mention that only because I wonder how RMS feels about receiving the "Linus Torvalds" award. He should turn around and give Linus the "FSF/Richard M. Stallman" award for contributing to the ideals of Free Software.
Unlike prior distributed computing projects, the sole purpose of DIESP is to give nerds with flashy computers bragging rights over their friends. The compute task is still to be chosen, but will be something that exercises a good mix of integer and floating-point ops, and is highly optimizable to take advantage of the most arcane instruction-set extensions. The actual task will be meaningless, but who cares? (Our beta progam searches for Bible Code-type messages in the works of Nostradamus, and ray-traces the results.) It will be open source so that everyone can tweak it to their heart's content. We'll put up all kinds of statistics on the DIESP web site, and we're actively exploring logo partnerships with various hardware vendors and co-branded clients for major ISP's.
Another major innovation of DIESP is our unique Virtual Result Computation which eliminates the annoyances of other projects, like requiring you to leave your computer on all the time. Submit just one work unit, and, for a small fee, our VRC program will pretend that you're running at that speed on a virtual CPU(TM)(Patent Pending) and your statistics will be continuously updated! You may purchase as many virtual CPU's as you wish. We'll also be introducing our Premium program, where, for an extra fee, we'll assume that you're optimizing your client software and/or upgrading your hardware over time, so your virtual compute rate will gradually be increased.
We don't make any money and don't even know how, but our company name ends in dot com. Get in on our IPO and you can turn over your stock the next day to some wannabe day trader and triple your money.
But seriously, I'm sure the SEC doesn't permit "disclosures" like this, but you know that's what any IPO investor is thinking these days.
Too often today we have the opposite: programs which are amazing for how slow they can make awesome hardware seem. Programmers today should study these classic programs -- they'd learn something.
It's worth noting that while using some other guy's image is a quick and dirty way to make your web page look like it has more content, it also places your web page at the mercy of those whose content you've linked. You might link to somebody's nifty icon, but if he replaces it with pr0n, your pages are going to look pretty bad. Professional sites go out of their way to avoid this, often explicitly notifying the user when links leave their site.
I know someone who posted an auction on eBay, complete with a picture they went to the trouble of scanning, cropping, etc. Someone else with a similar item to sell linked to his image, so we went back and added some text to the image -- nothing profane, just a note that it was an original scan intended only for use in a specific auction. The lazy bum who linked to it had no alternative but to either close his auction or put up with the modified image, although I doubt that he ever noticed. With CGI, we could have been much more creative.
Bottom line: this will sort itself out without lawyers, if given a chance.
One that stands out in my mind is 5,724,226: Housing Access Door Construction for a Portable Computer Docking Station. I didn't think emachines made either portables or docking stations.
The other patents cover a variety of generic PC stuff, including one that looks a lot like the infamous XOR cursor patent. IMHO, Compaq is casting a pretty wide net here, throwing any of its patents marginally related to generic PC hardware at emachines. They wouldn't dare do this to a bigger player without expecting countersuits for violating that company's patent portfolio. I guess they think that emachines doesn't have any patent portfolio of their own.
Prediction: this will get settled out of court for "an undisclosed sum." It's entirely FUD.
Look at how people still get excited whenever whoever currently owns the ashes of the Amiga announces this year's flavor of vaporware. (Hmm. I think my opinion on that issue is showing.) Or the following that Babylon 5 got before it was ever in production because J. Michael Strwhatshisname (the producer) took the time to post to Usenet.
On the net, there's the illusion that everyone is on equal footing, and just the fact that an insider dealing with a movie or new computer is participating in the same forums as you generates positive buzz in itself. That is, as long as people don't feel like they're being talked down to, and that's exactly what fake hype does by being deceptive about its origins, so it's actually riskier than being honest.
The irony is that amazon still isn't making money, and I'm beginning to wonder if it ever can.
I was attempting to browse amazon.com last night -- emphasis on attempting because it was so slow I couldn't actually browse anything, much less buy something. If the sluggishness I experienced at that time was due to amazon.com and not my ISP, I don't see how they could have sold a single item at all, and whether this was an isolated incident or not, this should scare anybody trying to make a buck in e-commerce.
If the parking lot at Wal-Mart gets full, they'll lose some overflow business, but they can live with that because when it happens they've got a store full of shoppers. When a web site gets too much traffic and their servers get slashdotted, business suffers. So there must be a fine line between underutilization and overutilization, and unless a commerce site can walk that fine line, they're either spending too much money on their infrastructure or losing too much business due to frustrated users.
It seems that the ridiculous valuations of internent stocks must be because people see huge opportunities for growth, but too much growth could be a site killer, and enterprise hardware and the admin talent to keep it running ain't cheap, so overbuilding could also be a business killer.
Am I making any sense?
I bought a consumer device prior to 1992 that seems to meet all these qualifications
I guess you're describing a portable CD player, and, IMHO, you're stretching the definitions of 'data interface' and 'compressed' audio. However, even if I accept your definitions and admit that claim 1 of the patent is too broad and can be invalidated because of this prior art, that doesn't invalidate the remaining claims, which are more narrowly focused on devices similar to the Rio.
I don't think Audiohighway's patent is broad enough to extort license fees from every possible use of digital recording, but it does seem, IMHO again, to cover portable MP3 players with a download interface pretty well, and that's enough of an innovation that I'm not troubled by the fact that somebody was able to patent it.
I'm troubled by many software and business process patents which seem to be granted in the face of much prior art and in complete disregard for the obviousness of the 'invention,' but I just don't see this patent as one of those.
Portable - open to some interpretation, but still applies, and would probably be interpreted based on the other claims
Data interface - pretty vague, but I'd interpret that, given the context of the rest of the patent, as being a "live" serial/USB/firewire/modem type of interface instead of a disk drive
Faster-than-real-time reception of data - this rules out a straight digital recorder
Compressed, digitized audio - someone claimed MODs were compressed, which is stretching the definition a bit, but I wouldn't consider them digitized. They use digitized samples, but that doesn't make the whole MOD a digitized sample.
Audio output - self-explanatory
So show me a portable device that let you download and store compressed, digitized audio faster than real time and play it back, that existed prior to 1995. Somebody mentioned a Psion -- could you download audio to it faster than real time? It's not enough if the hardware had the basic specifications to allow it; prior art would actually require the software.
Sure, it seems obvious now, with the Rio on the shelf, but was it really that obvious in May of 1995?
Platitudes about user-friendliness, stability of Linux vs BSD, or whatever, are great, but I really miss the technical details. Want to make Linux user-friendly? Ok, let's walk through the list of daemons and other services that a typical distro starts up and decide whether they belong on a desktop OS. Want to compare the TCP/IP stacks of Linux and BSD? Ok, give me some technical details about what is different about them. I don't much care about when and where they were written.
Maybe I'm not going to find this kind of information from Slashdot. Where does one find real technical discussions these days?
However, it's not always so cut and dried as when your code shows up verbatim in the next version. (And if it does, could it just be an oversight? Did you politely point the omission of credit out to the author?)
Put yourself in the author's shoes. Somebody sends you the diffs for a new feature, but you decide for whatever reason that it isn't appropriate to include that now. Perhaps it is buggy, perhaps you don't have the resources to test it, perhaps it conflicts with your future plans, perhaps it makes the feature set inconsistent, or whatever. A few versions down the road, that same feature may now make sense and you put it in. Maybe by now you've forgotten about the code somebody sent you several months ago. Depending on the triviality of the feature, your implementation of it might look similar, even if done independently. It would be nice to credit the other guy at least for the idea, even if you don't use his implementation, but what if it was something you already thought of long before he sent it?
This is the kind of thing that makes publishers return unsolicited manuscripts unopened. Otherwise they get sued over every blockbuster that bears any resemblance to anything that's ever been in their slush pile.
The only teeth the GPL has is that a user must accept its terms to copy the software, but if the software is already copyable, then the GPL need not be accepted.
If I add a "#pragma abe" to GCC to emit the Gettysburg Address, that doesn't put the GA under GPL, does it?
However, if you look on the Computer Tools page, under "Why So Many Versions?" you'll see a delightful rant about how Microsoft's pattern of incompatible upgrades to Excel has made it impossible to write simple spreadsheets that work in all versions.
Amazing Palm Case Pics Posted!
It still doesn't explain much.
For consumers, it's amazing how far both digital cameras and low cost printers have come in the last few years. I had an old DC20, which was worthless for anything larger than a thumbnail. Now 1-2 megapixel cameras take pictures so good you need a magnifying glass or a trained eye to see any limitations on a typical sized print.
Film still has advantages that will keep it around for a long time. Motion picture film cameras are relatively cheap and light, and the effective resolution is about 4K pixels for a motion picture frame (which is smaller than a 35mm still frame), and film has a much wider exposure latitude than any digital sensor I'm aware of, but consumer photo printing is so awful that I think it has already been surpassed by the current generation of digital cameras.
I've compared a traditional photo print side-by-side with the same image printed by a $250 ink jet printer, and while the inkjet image isn't perfect, it's better than the photo because the photo processing was so bad, as is typical of consumer quality prints (incorrect exposure; out of focus). And this print was made at a high-end photo store in Rochester, NY, where they should know what they're doing!
Before too long, I think we might see traditional film cameras relegated to motion picture and high-end applications where medium format cameras are today, and when was the last time you actually saw someone using a medium format camera?
That still depends on your definition. Others have mentioned that the 68000 has a 16-bit data bus. I'll also point out that the 68000 has a 16-bit ALU, so 32-bit aritmetic operations take two passes through the ALU and thus are slower than 16-bit operations. Writing Amiga programs to use 16-bit ints resulted in a performance boost on 68000/68010 Amigas.
The 68020 and later had 32-bit ALU's, so I don't think there is any 16-bitness left in them.
Good point. Let's see. "pay-zero.com" is currently being auctioned on eBay for a minimum bid of $100,000. (Believe it or not. Of course, there are zero bids.) If I thought that name was a good fit for my business, I could (a) pay this greedy fool $100K for something that may have cost him $70; (b) wait 60 days from when he registered the name (which was only on July 5th), betting that he never actually paid for it, then register it myself; (c) spend 60 seconds of my own time searching for a permutation that isn't registered. Currently, it looks like "you-pay-zero.com" and "you-pay-nothing.com" are available, so why should I pay a $100K premium to some greedy speculator?
Check out www.nettleton.com for an example of a surname domain used by MailBank specifically for reselling vanity email and web addresses.