I never did learn dBase, skipped directly from CTREE to SQL so I can't address the fine points of tweaking dBase (the "queries" in this kind of application were all along the line of single record lookups). But back then dBase was interpeted, and our main competition was the system that someone's brother in law cobbled together to run a mom-and-pop video store.
PC's did indeed outlive TRS-80's. I had actually been hired on to do a complete rewrite and port of the product from TRS-DOS and BASIC to the PC using "C". But first, I had to prove I could do the job by finishing up a few "loose ends" that the boss had promised to some customers. The original programmer's "documentation" was a paperback book from Radio Shack with wizards and rocket ships in the cover art. Once I got through that 2 month project, he found he could still sell the TRS-80s, so I was stuck with tweaking the darn thing for another year. (basically until sales stopped dead and the boss finally realized the horse he was sitting on smelled bad and attracted a lot of flies)
Some good did come of it though. In that year I discovered QNX. Using a multiuser multitasking OS and ISAM system (CTREE) from the start (instead of some kludge on top of DOS) probably saved the company since I didn't lose time thrashing out network and multiuser issues. It also saved boatloads of money for our customers as we could hang cheap dumb terminals off even an XT. Of course, with a 286 running in protected mode we could hang as many as 10 terminals off a machine with 8 megs of RAM. In the mid to late 80s, PCs were expensive, and networked PCs were even more so. I never had to price networking software back then but I assume that Netware or MSFT LAN licenses were fairly pricey. We were able to sell multiuser systems for a very decent profit for quite a bit less than our networked competitors.
in 1985.
The system was a TRS-80 IV (CPU was an 8080) that had been overclocked and had a megabyte of RAM stuffed in it. The RAM cost more than the computer.
The application was a point-of-sale system for video stores and it used floppies for backup (a 10 meg HD for a "trash-80s was even more expensive than the additional RAM) The idea was that the user would fire up th machine in the morning, the system would load program files and data from 360K floppies to RAM disk. Several times during the day, the user would back up the data to the floppies and again after closing before shutting the system down. We sold about 30 systems like that.
I told my boss that it was a very Bad Thing as the stores could lose data so easily. He told me several things:
Running entirely in RAM, the system was very very fast. When the system could smoke a more expensive IBM PC-XT running a dBase app, he could sell more systems
Every system would have a UPS as he refused to sell them without
He signed my paycheck, not the other way around
As best I can figure, Darwin was more interested in awarding JATO assisted drag racers back then because we got lucky and actually had more trouble with the systems using hard drives. That was back during the heyday of the small mom-and-pop video stores. The last of those RAM disk based systems that I knew of converted to a "real" system in 1993. I believe they were assimilated by one of the national chains soon after.
Yes, but you cannot make a movie from a comic book. (well you can if your name is William Shatner)
Remember a little series called "TekWar"?
Willaim Shatner gave a "making of" interview where he said flat out that he used the comic books (Dark Horse I think) based on his literary masterpieces directly as the storyboards for the series episodes. Very obviously he did expect the result to be entertaining. (actually, there were four "TV movies" followed by 18 regular episodes so the Hollywood types agreed with him)
Just as a bit of trivia does anyone know if Shatner really did write the books without a ghostwriter? The timing of the first book (during a screenwriters strike) sure seems to suggest that ghostwriters would probably work pretty cheaply...
The letters from the pilots "suggest" that the Navy still trained pilots in "lobbing" through the mid- 60's. The letters also suggest that most of the pilots believed that using the lobbing method with a real nuke would be a suicide mission.
Of course, remember that the reason for this was to make sure that carrier groups had a "nuclear role" - If the Air Force was the only service to carry nukes on airplanes, that could have a significant effect on the Navy's budget down the road. (The first "Polaris" submarine - The "Gearge Washington" - was launched in 1959, and commissioned in 1960. It took a few years to build a fleet of those subs - and the Navy could still point to the far greater accuracy of their Spads)
Never underestimate the effect of interservice rivalries on the missions that the various services would undertake. (And if the pilots thought the missions were suicide missions, the admirals who came up with the mission probably knew it was - but approved it because those missions would only be flown in a nuclear war where the only goal was Mutual Assured Destruction.)
Ok they are looking for computer operators. I have done this in a prior life and had several friends who did so as well (geophyical data a few years back).
That means things like running print jobs, (making sure the paper stock is lined up properly, and that the ribbons have enough ink). It might also mean hanging tapes. And in extreme cases it might still mean handling freaking punch cards. (How would you feel about a job where you spent six hours per shift feeding a card reader - when the cards have been stored in a non climate controlled environment?)
There is also a considerable element of skill in properly scheduling jobs to run (in batch mode environments). Generally, the operators know a great deal about their "dinosaurs" and how to get peak performance out of them. This is generally not a skill needed by programmers.
But the main point is that this type of work is not software development, nor is it the sort of network admin tasks associated with PC sysadmins. So, yes it can be mind-numbingly boring - nothing but hanging tapes, feeding printer/plotters, and making sure that the very expensive mainframe is being used optimally - if jobs aren't getting completed in a timely fashion, the vendor will be more than happy to recommend an obscenely expensive upgrade.
So, the operator needs fairly expensive technical skills, but much of the actual job performance does not *seem* to require those skills.
I was channel surfing and clicked over to this on it's opening scene. I saw the too-bright moon and instantly knew that whatever the darn show was, it was based on "Inconstant Moon" before they ever got to the title or opening credits.
While it was good for TV, it lost most of the humorous bits that made the actual story so much more enjoyable (and really nailed the main character for me). Since I had last read that story more than ten years earlier, I think it is safe to say it struck me as very good story.
Now if you want to have some fun, name the TV series that Niven's collaborator (Pournelle) wrote an episode for. I started laughing out loud when I saw "written by Jerry Pournelle" on the credits. Note that this was an episode he wrote, not an episode based on one of his stories. (Hint: it involved an improbably old Civil War veteran and his cannon)
No, more importantly, how many valid emails were blocked?
I had to to send a business email to someone with an AOL address. The bounce message indicated that it was rejected because it came from an open relay. (more interetingly, the bounce happened between two AOL servers, not even involving my IP address on RoadRunner)
X-38? or maybe X-33?
on
More on Columbia
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The US won't have a real space program as long as NASA has any control over it. Real spacecraft will not be invented by a massive US govenment program any more than any other transportation system has been.
Government programs did not make the first aircraft, automobiles, locomotives, steamships (or sailing ships for that matter). Why should the first true spacecraft be any different? It does not take any more fuel to get a pound into orbit than it takes to fly a pound from the US to Australia. (yeah, airliners don't carry oxidizer - but bear with me).
The SSTO (X-whatever) that got funded and then killed was a damnable con job. It would be like Curtis Aviation promising to build a supersonic jumbo jet capable of flying 12,000 km at MACH 6 without refueling.
In 1908.
NASA does not "get" the idea of manned spaceflight. They "get" 20,000 jobs to keep some 20 year old experimental spacecraft flying at a cost of about 1 billion dollars per flight. Experimental spacecraft that were designed by political committes ten years earlier. Experimental spacecraft that the designers promised would be orders of magnitude cheaper to operate than the Saturn V (1970 cost to launch a Saturn was around 100 million). An experimental spacecraft that would be re-uasable. Well the solid fuel boosters cost more to recover and refurbish than paying for new ones each time. And the Orbiter itself has a tendency to be pretty well rebuilt between flights. (Maintenance and upgrades)
We still need the orbital equivalent of the Wright Flyer. Then data from that design can be used in developing newer, better designs. What is not needed is "the most complicated machine ever built" (NASA's favorite way of describing the Shuttle)
But don't fret about Mankind's destiny among the stars - there are other countries besides the US that have space programs. Once the US government realizes that lack of a real space program with cheap access to space means condemning the USA to a role in international affairs somewhat less prestigious than what France now enjoys, there will be a new Space Race - one that won't be looking to an organization whose greatest claim to fame now is that they once sent some powdered orange drink to the Moon. (Ok, I know that Tang never made it to the Moon, but hte makers of Tang claimed it did)
The RIAA companies "own" lots of artists who are not big right now. Only so many artists can be "big", and the recording insutry has made the deliberate decision ot only push the "big" ones.
Now I'm pulling numbers out of my hat below, just to make a point. But I'm sure youcan find real numbers to back up the argument.
The recording industry decided that since people collectively will only be buying 300 million CDs per year, then if they only run 30 marketing campaigns to push 30 artists, they would still sell 300 million CDs - but spend a heck of a lot less than they would pushing say 3000 artists.
The problem which they are unable to recognize is that not everyone likes the 30 artists that are being forced down our throats. So they are not seeing the 10 million CDs per artist that they expected. But since nothing is being done to promote the other 2970 artists, they might just conceivably want to see some additional sales - but that would involve online distribution of their music. But wait, their music is "owned" by RIAA members.
The people using the service would have paid 32 million more to get cable and internet from a private sector company like AOL Time Warner.
But wait, no cable company wanted to bother with a little burg like that. To get Time Warner in, they probably would have had to agree to even higher rates.
So the 32 million that they did not send to big cable company stayed in town. The money that they did spend (probably close to that amount) stayed in town as well - and probably helped keep overall utility costs down for everyone at the same time as they are proviing the service over wire they had to string anyways.
Maybe "big cable co" could try and use the FCC to demand acces to that cable to sell their services on.
I have thought it over and decided that this is not a stupid strategy on the part of Lexmark.
Now remove your tinfoil propellor beanies so I can give you the straight story
You see, at Lexmark they realy don't like the DMCA any more than your average card carrying member of the EFF. But they are a public corporation, so the board and oficers can't (fiduciary responsibility and all) take a public stand againt it. That would cause them to lose business as every company that did like and desire the DMCA to write software that would corrupt the Lexmark printer drivers. So, Lexius Loopner (CEO at Lexmark) took a long term view back in 1998.
They began work on a new geneation of printer where they could prevent unauthorized consumables from being used via a smart chip. See, if they REALLY wanted to prevent third party consumables they would have patented the physical connection between the printer and the cartridge - like Nintndo did on the old SNES. But Lexius demanded an approach which could be circumvented.
Now why would they do this you ask? Well, duh! I already told you that! They don't like the DMCA either, so they went to all his trouble knowing that anyone or his kid brother would be able to put together a replacement cartridge and sll it for a tenth the price they charge. All they had to do was wait till someone took the bait. Then they waited till they could track (via warranty registrations) the placement of their printers in the offices of **AA officers.
Now that all the pieces have fallen into place, Lexmark has launched it;s lawsuit. One of two things will happen:
A> The anti-circumevention provisions of the DMCA will be ruled unconstitutional or
B> The Hammurabi Ninja clause of the DMCA (a little know addendum to the Act, added after midnight by a Congresional aide tasked with correcting speling errors in the DMCA) will be activated. This is the clause which strips all entertainment lawyers of all human and civil rights. In addition it legally defines any person who brings a complaint under the anti-circumvention clause as nonhuman vermin and authorizes a bounty of ten thousand dollars for each such vermin's head. Said bounty will be paid by the Librarian of Congress.
Thank you, please replace your tinfoil beanies before the orbiting mind control lasers make you think this scenario is crazy.
I have a rule about games. When the "startegy guide" appears on the store shelves and the game is not available, I will not buy the game until it hits $1.88 on the clearance rack at CompUSA. That way I only feel bad about losing a couple of bucks and won't feel cheated that the game does not include all of the features so glowingly described in the strategy guide.
So, when I feel the need to go conquer the Galaxy, I'll fire up Space Empires IV, or MOO, or Spaceward Ho!, or Acension. But MOO 3 can wait a heckuva long time. (Especially since I browsed through the "Official Strategy Guide" - nothing seemed remotely appealing)
No, they are not claiming copyright violation. They are claiming violation of the "anti-cirumvention" clause in the DMCA. Please understand that the only way this involves copyright is that they have a copyright on the software in their printers.
The way the DMCA is written - and this is exactly the way that Lexmark is using it - is that the third party chips are allowing ACCESS to a "protected" copyrighted work. It doesn't matter that the copyright on the work is not being infringed (you are not copying it after all). All that matters is that you are gaining access to it.
This "exploit" of the DMCA was identified long before it became law. Oh well, when the Librarian of Congress is required to report again on the DMCA maybe he can address this issue as he has decrypting the blacklists in censorware.
And this is where the MSFT legal team would nail anyone who cracks the key.
They will claim that the encryption is a device (under the relevant DMCA terms) which controlled access to a copyrighted work (the XBox bios).
Of course, they might also just claim a trade secret as well. If lawyers fought with conventional weapons, they would use minefields, (claymores) and fragmentation grenade launchers.
Re:It might be kosher (two maybes, an if and a but
on
Lab-Grown Steak
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· Score: 1
But another requirement for kosher meat is that no more than three days (72 hours?) pass from the time the animal is slaughtered till the meat is eaten. So if you consider your definition based on time from when your "seed animal" is slaughtered, you still wind up with non-kosher meat because too much time has passed.
Just a bit of trivia I remember from a restaurant purchasing class in a prior life.
what multi-million dollar bribes?
on
Euro DMCA Fails
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· Score: 1
US Congresscritters are a whole lot cheaper than that. While the total cost might hit the seven figure range, that is for buying a whole passel of Congresscritters.
Now, how many Congresscritter equivalents does one have to buy to get a law passed in France? the UK?, Belgium?, the Netherlands?, Germany?, Italy? I suspect it wouldn't take too long before you are looking at serious money compared to the number of US Congresscritters needed.
Want to really change the level of corruption in the US Congress? Return selection of Senators to the states rather than by direct election. Without Senatorial re-election campaigns to run, it will be impossible for "campaign contributiuons" to affect a Senator's vote.
I can just see the implications of this "new technology" in car audio systems. Just think of what will happen when someone is playing the latest pop diva on their car system and they hit a bump...
Pirates: are ready for your "Record".
I recall a story (do your own google) about someone doing an optical scan of an LP and massaging it to get a digitzed (albeit low quality) copy of the music on the LP.
Get blockbuster movie off the net (or episode 19 of Freaks & Geeks):
Pay 2.99 to the media company for the self-desturcts in 24 hours file that will only play on the DRM enabled player. It will come complete with commercials and tie-in offers that you are forced to watch, and a restrictive EULA that has real teeth. (enforced by Admiral Poindexter and his good buddies over at the Bureau of Total Information Awareness)
The download will take at least six hours, or you can switch to a "priority download" for an extra.75 which goes to your ISP.
See? There is no conflict. All that yummy high quality digital content will drive the adoption of broadband. Everyone is happy. (well, everyone except those anti-government techno-terrorists who live in their parents basements)
Sorry nurb432, but as CEO of SCOTI (Some Company Out There Inc.), I just wanted to let you know that we are proceeding to market with our WYD (Who's Yer Daddy?) DNA based content licensing scheme.
Next time you want to protect an idea, patent it. The best you can claim here is a copyright on your words - but no copyrights on ideas.
Of course, I have already gotten our preliminary patent claims filed - you'll be able to read them when USPTO gets around to granting our patent. However, we here at SCOTI are firm believers in the doctrin of "fair use" so we have also applied for patents on two important offshoot technolgies:
1> To allow fair use under copyright law, any person may claim a "fair use" exemption - even if they do not hold a license to access the content. This will invoke the IYB (I'm Your Bitch) module which overwrites the user's DNA with the default DNA provided by the copyright holder (Sony Music will be using either Mariah Carey, Thalia, or Jennifer Lopez - depending on who Tommy Mottola wants to f*ck that day - We here at SCOTI don't even want to think about who Casablanca Records (The Village People) might pick for their fair use defaults)
2> Of course, after invoking your fair use rights, you will most likely want to Just Be Yourself (JBY) again and you will find our licensing terms for our JBY algrithm both reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND).
Slashdot Mirror
I never did learn dBase, skipped directly from CTREE to SQL so I can't address the fine points of tweaking dBase (the "queries" in this kind of application were all along the line of single record lookups). But back then dBase was interpeted, and our main competition was the system that someone's brother in law cobbled together to run a mom-and-pop video store.
PC's did indeed outlive TRS-80's. I had actually been hired on to do a complete rewrite and port of the product from TRS-DOS and BASIC to the PC using "C". But first, I had to prove I could do the job by finishing up a few "loose ends" that the boss had promised to some customers. The original programmer's "documentation" was a paperback book from Radio Shack with wizards and rocket ships in the cover art. Once I got through that 2 month project, he found he could still sell the TRS-80s, so I was stuck with tweaking the darn thing for another year. (basically until sales stopped dead and the boss finally realized the horse he was sitting on smelled bad and attracted a lot of flies)
Some good did come of it though. In that year I discovered QNX. Using a multiuser multitasking OS and ISAM system (CTREE) from the start (instead of some kludge on top of DOS) probably saved the company since I didn't lose time thrashing out network and multiuser issues. It also saved boatloads of money for our customers as we could hang cheap dumb terminals off even an XT. Of course, with a 286 running in protected mode we could hang as many as 10 terminals off a machine with 8 megs of RAM. In the mid to late 80s, PCs were expensive, and networked PCs were even more so. I never had to price networking software back then but I assume that Netware or MSFT LAN licenses were fairly pricey. We were able to sell multiuser systems for a very decent profit for quite a bit less than our networked competitors.
I told my boss that it was a very Bad Thing as the stores could lose data so easily. He told me several things:
- Running entirely in RAM, the system was very very fast. When the system could smoke a more expensive IBM PC-XT running a dBase app, he could sell more systems
- Every system would have a UPS as he refused to sell them without
- He signed my paycheck, not the other way around
As best I can figure, Darwin was more interested in awarding JATO assisted drag racers back then because we got lucky and actually had more trouble with the systems using hard drives. That was back during the heyday of the small mom-and-pop video stores. The last of those RAM disk based systems that I knew of converted to a "real" system in 1993. I believe they were assimilated by one of the national chains soon after.Remember a little series called "TekWar"?
Willaim Shatner gave a "making of" interview where he said flat out that he used the comic books (Dark Horse I think) based on his literary masterpieces directly as the storyboards for the series episodes. Very obviously he did expect the result to be entertaining. (actually, there were four "TV movies" followed by 18 regular episodes so the Hollywood types agreed with him)
Just as a bit of trivia does anyone know if Shatner really did write the books without a ghostwriter? The timing of the first book (during a screenwriters strike) sure seems to suggest that ghostwriters would probably work pretty cheaply...
Of course, remember that the reason for this was to make sure that carrier groups had a "nuclear role" - If the Air Force was the only service to carry nukes on airplanes, that could have a significant effect on the Navy's budget down the road. (The first "Polaris" submarine - The "Gearge Washington" - was launched in 1959, and commissioned in 1960. It took a few years to build a fleet of those subs - and the Navy could still point to the far greater accuracy of their Spads)
Never underestimate the effect of interservice rivalries on the missions that the various services would undertake. (And if the pilots thought the missions were suicide missions, the admirals who came up with the mission probably knew it was - but approved it because those missions would only be flown in a nuclear war where the only goal was Mutual Assured Destruction.)
Ok they are looking for computer operators. I have done this in a prior life and had several friends who did so as well (geophyical data a few years back).
That means things like running print jobs, (making sure the paper stock is lined up properly, and that the ribbons have enough ink). It might also mean hanging tapes. And in extreme cases it might still mean handling freaking punch cards. (How would you feel about a job where you spent six hours per shift feeding a card reader - when the cards have been stored in a non climate controlled environment?)
There is also a considerable element of skill in properly scheduling jobs to run (in batch mode environments). Generally, the operators know a great deal about their "dinosaurs" and how to get peak performance out of them. This is generally not a skill needed by programmers.
But the main point is that this type of work is not software development, nor is it the sort of network admin tasks associated with PC sysadmins.
So, yes it can be mind-numbingly boring - nothing but hanging tapes, feeding printer/plotters, and making sure that the very expensive mainframe is being used optimally - if jobs aren't getting completed in a timely fashion, the vendor will be more than happy to recommend an obscenely expensive upgrade.
So, the operator needs fairly expensive technical skills, but much of the actual job performance does not *seem* to require those skills.
For some reason, that little exchange brings to mind "War of the Worlds". A rather different book entirely.
You get the Ceegar! But I never thought of Pournelle as a "big name writer" back then (before Mote etc).
I was channel surfing and clicked over to this on it's opening scene. I saw the too-bright moon and instantly knew that whatever the darn show was, it was based on "Inconstant Moon" before they ever got to the title or opening credits.
While it was good for TV, it lost most of the humorous bits that made the actual story so much more enjoyable (and really nailed the main character for me). Since I had last read that story more than ten years earlier, I think it is safe to say it struck me as very good story.
Now if you want to have some fun, name the TV series that Niven's collaborator (Pournelle) wrote an episode for. I started laughing out loud when I saw "written by Jerry Pournelle" on the credits. Note that this was an episode he wrote, not an episode based on one of his stories. (Hint: it involved an improbably old Civil War veteran and his cannon)
Yes it does. Now hand over that karma before I cut you biotch.
No, more importantly, how many valid emails were blocked?
I had to to send a business email to someone with an AOL address. The bounce message indicated that it was rejected because it came from an open relay. (more interetingly, the bounce happened between two AOL servers, not even involving my IP address on RoadRunner)
The US won't have a real space program as long as NASA has any control over it. Real spacecraft will not be invented by a massive US govenment program any more than any other transportation system has been.
Government programs did not make the first aircraft, automobiles, locomotives, steamships (or sailing ships for that matter). Why should the first true spacecraft be any different? It does not take any more fuel to get a pound into orbit than it takes to fly a pound from the US to Australia. (yeah, airliners don't carry oxidizer - but bear with me).
The SSTO (X-whatever) that got funded and then killed was a damnable con job. It would be like Curtis Aviation promising to build a supersonic jumbo jet capable of flying 12,000 km at MACH 6 without refueling.
In 1908.
NASA does not "get" the idea of manned spaceflight. They "get" 20,000 jobs to keep some 20 year old experimental spacecraft flying at a cost of about 1 billion dollars per flight. Experimental spacecraft that were designed by political committes ten years earlier. Experimental spacecraft that the designers promised would be orders of magnitude cheaper to operate than the Saturn V (1970 cost to launch a Saturn was around 100 million). An experimental spacecraft that would be re-uasable. Well the solid fuel boosters cost more to recover and refurbish than paying for new ones each time. And the Orbiter itself has a tendency to be pretty well rebuilt between flights. (Maintenance and upgrades)
We still need the orbital equivalent of the Wright Flyer. Then data from that design can be used in developing newer, better designs. What is not needed is "the most complicated machine ever built" (NASA's favorite way of describing the Shuttle)
But don't fret about Mankind's destiny among the stars - there are other countries besides the US that have space programs. Once the US government realizes that lack of a real space program with cheap access to space means condemning the USA to a role in international affairs somewhat less prestigious than what France now enjoys, there will be a new Space Race - one that won't be looking to an organization whose greatest claim to fame now is that they once sent some powdered orange drink to the Moon. (Ok, I know that Tang never made it to the Moon, but hte makers of Tang claimed it did)
The RIAA companies "own" lots of artists who are not big right now. Only so many artists can be "big", and the recording insutry has made the deliberate decision ot only push the "big" ones.
Now I'm pulling numbers out of my hat below, just to make a point. But I'm sure youcan find real numbers to back up the argument.
The recording industry decided that since people collectively will only be buying 300 million CDs per year, then if they only run 30 marketing campaigns to push 30 artists, they would still sell 300 million CDs - but spend a heck of a lot less than they would pushing say 3000 artists.
The problem which they are unable to recognize is that not everyone likes the 30 artists that are being forced down our throats. So they are not seeing the 10 million CDs per artist that they expected. But since nothing is being done to promote the other 2970 artists, they might just conceivably want to see some additional sales - but that would involve online distribution of their music.
But wait, their music is "owned" by RIAA members.
The city has not made 32 million.
The people using the service would have paid 32 million more to get cable and internet from a private sector company like AOL Time Warner.
But wait, no cable company wanted to bother with a little burg like that. To get Time Warner in, they probably would have had to agree to even higher rates.
So the 32 million that they did not send to big cable company stayed in town. The money that they did spend (probably close to that amount) stayed in town as well - and probably helped keep overall utility costs down for everyone at the same time as they are proviing the service over wire they had to string anyways.
Maybe "big cable co" could try and use the FCC to demand acces to that cable to sell their services on.
I have thought it over and decided that this is not a stupid strategy on the part of Lexmark.
Now remove your tinfoil propellor beanies so I can give you the straight story
You see, at Lexmark they realy don't like the DMCA any more than your average card carrying member of the EFF. But they are a public corporation, so the board and oficers can't (fiduciary responsibility and all) take a public stand againt it. That would cause them to lose business as every company that did like and desire the DMCA to write software that would corrupt the Lexmark printer drivers. So, Lexius Loopner (CEO at Lexmark) took a long term view back in 1998.
They began work on a new geneation of printer where they could prevent unauthorized consumables from being used via a smart chip. See, if they REALLY wanted to prevent third party consumables they would have patented the physical connection between the printer and the cartridge - like Nintndo did on the old SNES. But Lexius demanded an approach which could be circumvented.
Now why would they do this you ask? Well, duh! I already told you that! They don't like the DMCA either, so they went to all his trouble knowing that anyone or his kid brother would be able to put together a replacement cartridge and sll it for a tenth the price they charge. All they had to do was wait till someone took the bait. Then they waited till they could track (via warranty registrations) the placement of their printers in the offices of **AA officers.
Now that all the pieces have fallen into place, Lexmark has launched it;s lawsuit. One of two things will happen:
A> The anti-circumevention provisions of the DMCA will be ruled unconstitutional or
B> The Hammurabi Ninja clause of the DMCA (a little know addendum to the Act, added after midnight by a Congresional aide tasked with correcting speling errors in the DMCA) will be activated. This is the clause which strips all entertainment lawyers of all human and civil rights. In addition it legally defines any person who brings a complaint under the anti-circumvention clause as nonhuman vermin and authorizes a bounty of ten thousand dollars for each such vermin's head. Said bounty will be paid by the Librarian of Congress.
Thank you, please replace your tinfoil beanies before the orbiting mind control lasers make you think this scenario is crazy.
I have a rule about games. When the "startegy guide" appears on the store shelves and the game is not available, I will not buy the game until it hits $1.88 on the clearance rack at CompUSA. That way I only feel bad about losing a couple of bucks and won't feel cheated that the game does not include all of the features so glowingly described in the strategy guide.
So, when I feel the need to go conquer the Galaxy, I'll fire up Space Empires IV, or MOO, or Spaceward Ho!, or Acension. But MOO 3 can wait a heckuva long time. (Especially since I browsed through the "Official Strategy Guide" - nothing seemed remotely appealing)
The way the DMCA is written - and this is exactly the way that Lexmark is using it - is that the third party chips are allowing ACCESS to a "protected" copyrighted work. It doesn't matter that the copyright on the work is not being infringed (you are not copying it after all). All that matters is that you are gaining access to it.
This "exploit" of the DMCA was identified long before it became law. Oh well, when the Librarian of Congress is required to report again on the DMCA maybe he can address this issue as he has decrypting the blacklists in censorware.
And this is where the MSFT legal team would nail anyone who cracks the key.
They will claim that the encryption is a device (under the relevant DMCA terms) which controlled access to a copyrighted work (the XBox bios).
Of course, they might also just claim a trade secret as well. If lawyers fought with conventional weapons, they would use minefields, (claymores) and fragmentation grenade launchers.
But another requirement for kosher meat is that no more than three days (72 hours?) pass from the time the animal is slaughtered till the meat is eaten. So if you consider your definition based on time from when your "seed animal" is slaughtered, you still wind up with non-kosher meat because too much time has passed.
Just a bit of trivia I remember from a restaurant purchasing class in a prior life.
US Congresscritters are a whole lot cheaper than that. While the total cost might hit the seven figure range, that is for buying a whole passel of Congresscritters.
Now, how many Congresscritter equivalents does one have to buy to get a law passed in France? the UK?, Belgium?, the Netherlands?, Germany?, Italy? I suspect it wouldn't take too long before you are looking at serious money compared to the number of US Congresscritters needed.
Want to really change the level of corruption in the US Congress? Return selection of Senators to the states rather than by direct election. Without Senatorial re-election campaigns to run, it will be impossible for "campaign contributiuons" to affect a Senator's vote.
It just isn't an RPG without a Hackmaster.
Must have Hackmaster+12
Death to the "Storyweavers"!
the cash is for the lawyers, the replacement DVD is for the consumer.
Do they have class actions in Japan?
I can just see the implications of this "new technology" in car audio systems. Just think of what will happen when someone is playing the latest pop diva on their car system and they hit a bump...
Pirates: are ready for your "Record".
I recall a story (do your own google) about someone doing an optical scan of an LP and massaging it to get a digitzed (albeit low quality) copy of the music on the LP.
Get blockbuster movie off the net (or episode 19 of Freaks & Geeks):
.75 which goes to your ISP.
Pay 2.99 to the media company for the self-desturcts in 24 hours file that will only play on the DRM enabled player. It will come complete with commercials and tie-in offers that you are forced to watch, and a restrictive EULA that has real teeth. (enforced by Admiral Poindexter and his good buddies over at the Bureau of Total Information Awareness)
The download will take at least six hours, or you can switch to a "priority download" for an extra
See? There is no conflict. All that yummy high quality digital content will drive the adoption of broadband. Everyone is happy. (well, everyone except those anti-government techno-terrorists who live in their parents basements)
After having James T. Kirk killed and buried in "Generations", why did you write a book in which the Borg resurrect him?
Sorry nurb432, but as CEO of SCOTI (Some Company Out There Inc.), I just wanted to let you know that we are proceeding to market with our WYD (Who's Yer Daddy?) DNA based content licensing scheme.
Next time you want to protect an idea, patent it. The best you can claim here is a copyright on your words - but no copyrights on ideas.
Of course, I have already gotten our preliminary patent claims filed - you'll be able to read them when USPTO gets around to granting our patent. However, we here at SCOTI are firm believers in the doctrin of "fair use" so we have also applied for patents on two important offshoot technolgies:
1> To allow fair use under copyright law, any person may claim a "fair use" exemption - even if they do not hold a license to access the content. This will invoke the IYB (I'm Your Bitch) module which overwrites the user's DNA with the default DNA provided by the copyright holder (Sony Music will be using either Mariah Carey, Thalia, or Jennifer Lopez - depending on who Tommy Mottola wants to f*ck that day - We here at SCOTI don't even want to think about who Casablanca Records (The Village People) might pick for their fair use defaults)
2> Of course, after invoking your fair use rights, you will most likely want to Just Be Yourself (JBY) again and you will find our licensing terms for our JBY algrithm both reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND).