Sorry, your wrong. WOTC is not publishing the changes (and there are a lot), just a document to upgrade your characters from 3 to 3.5.
This is only sort-of true: WotC isn't publishing a detailed list of changes for this update any more than they (or any other RPG publisher) is. What WotC is doing for the 3.5 update is publishing the revised SRD at (roughly) the same time the books themselves hit the stores. Since the SRD contains all the rules (`crunchy bits', as they're called in the industry), you can update your game without buying the new books (but you will need the 3.0 books, and the revised SRD, and you'll probably want the upgrade guide and the old SRD for assistance).
If what you really want is a detailed list of changes from 3.0 to 3.5, there are several available on the net already (the books are already in people's hands in various places around the world). Personally, I've been using this one, referenced from EN World, although I'm not fond of Word documents...
In general, EN World has been tracking the various 3.5 revision information very closely, and I recommend the site in general (no affiliation).
Kerberos is used (although not as uniformly as might be wished) in a few decent remote filesystems as well. This can be a real boon for such setups (which should be more common, IMHO). Without it, you can get a secure login to a remote machine, but still need to provide that machine with an authenticator for secure network services (such as afs, nfs, ftp, imap, etc.).
At MIT, at least a year or two back, we had people using a mixture of ssh and kerberized rlogin just to deal with the ticket-forwarding issues.
It's not that prior art needs to exist for a year before the filling date of the patent. What's going on is this:
The U.S. (and very nearly only the U.S.) allows a one-year grace period between first commercial use of an invention (remember, patents are about inventions) and the filing of the patent on said invention. If the patent is granted, the patent protection extends back to the invention date. (This is partially what spawned those `patent pending' inscriptions you see everywhere.)
Most countries require that you apply for the patent before making first commercial use of the patent.
This is either not as true or not as important as you think -- the publishing guidelines you mention are more or less correct (submission of a paper to a tech journal, for example, is an excellent step), but you can also establish your invention by making public `commercial use' of it. The courts have been very liberal in interpreting use as `commercial' (like, ``Use this software to save money on internet access.'').
Sometimes it's depressing how much the commercial/corporate/business aspects dominate the laws in this area, but that was really the original goal of the framers (to create commercial/business incentive without starving/killing the public/state of the art).
Simply using Squid will not (necessarily) provide examples of prior art -- the patent (thankfully) covers something more specific than just `using squid'.
Someone certainly could use Squid as part of a system to do what the patent claims, and I suspect that some people were. the average Squid user was NOT engaged in this sort of activity, however.
Yup, although it doesn't have to be a sale; the grace period (nearly unique to the US) applies from the date of first ``commercial use''. The courts have shown a willingness to interpret `first commercial use' pretty broadly.
They claim to have designed their system in 1996, so your 1998 practices are unlikely to have much of an effect.
That said, I believe that numerous cases of prior art exist. I don't know if anyone will actually pursue such a claim, since doing so can be difficult and time-consuming.
I simply think it's sad that Apple clearly has no technical reason for not upgrading the 1st and 2nd generation iPods
Actually, they do: Apple didn't do the firmware for that hardware; they hired someone else to do it. They did their own for the 3rd generation. The downside of this is all the new bugs and `quirks' that came from Apple's `r3' software (the `click', the backlight control, reportedly much more frequent crashing). The upside is that they can make changes directly (like putting out new versions with new features).
I agree with you that it would be nice if my top-of-the-line r2 ipod had some of the features of the newer models. On the other hand, I certainly wasn't asking Apple to add an annoying click in between tracks on my ipod, either. Asserting that these features should be free simply because they're not hardware features is incorrect, in this case.
Shrug. I do think that I've received enough value from my ipod purchase. I'd love to receive more. Offtopic, an SDK would be a nice way to accomplish this.:-)
Real Programmers don't play tennis, or any other sport that requires you to change clothes. Mountain climbing is OK, and real programmers wear their climbing boots to work in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of the machine room.
There's a small but active community that works on NetBSD support for those `Palm PCs' of yore, built to run WinCE, with small screen and keyboard. I myself have an IBM WorkPad Z50: ThinkPad keyboard, 8.4" LCD, CF and PCMCIA (not cardbus).
The battery life on these things is phenomenal -- the extended capacity battery goes for about 11-12 hours. The common package for it includes a battery bay that lets you run the thing off of a bunch of AA's. Wireless networking has worked for years. It has no hard drive, so you generally end up using the CF slot for storage and the PCMCIA for wireless network card.
If you want it, and have the space for it, the thing also supports X and sound; I don't bother (space is a premium).
The same group does a lot of work on various models of the MobilePro, reporting good success (the keyboard's not as nice as the workpad z50, but the workpad z50 is discontinued, so...).
Node-locked named clients, and the lack of flexibility that goes with them, are a large PITA. Branching is better in Perforce -- IF you're on a fast, secure network connection to the server.
Remote access security in Perforce was terrible when I used it last (about 3 years ago), but maybe it's better now. Attempting to shoehorn it over ssh produced effects much worse than CVS.
Running a dedicated SQL server for your VCS is a bit of a pain -- or ours was especially bad in some way, 'cause it needed to be taken down for maintenance WAAAY too often.
Perforce is a pretty nice VCS for a dedicated group sitting at exactly the same desktops, on a closed/protected net every day. Even better if those desktops all run the same version of Windows. Introduce laptops into the mix and things start to get tricky. Try to add a developer base who migrate between working locations (like `home' and `office') and want to be able to work in both places, and you'll find yourself missing the good old days of CVS.
An xbox-linux has great potential to lower the barriers to entry for games creators.
Imagine xbox-linux with network and controller support. High school kids writing python can now make games for the consoles that their friends already own.
Please note that I'm not saying that this is currently feasible -- the existing no-mod methods for xbox-linux are too complicated for pretty much everyone. They are getting better as time goes on, though -- that's the benefit of work like this.
I don't believe that you missed the very first item in his list: ``I already have an xbox.'', so you must have chosen to ignore it. Shrug.
Now, I believe that most people bought an xbox to play games, with an aside of ``and other home entertainment purposes'' (i.e. playing CD's, DVD's, etc). Given this as a starting point, is there something wrong with the idea of `Tux Racer on the XBox'? Maelstrom on the XBox? Frozen Bubble on the XBox? Random-other-linux-game on the XBox? Not-yet-written, free software, open source game on the XBox?
In general, this hack (and the non-hardware-intrusive one before it) provide a way for people to make xboxes better able to do the sorts of things that many slashdot readers [like to] do. What's so hard to understand?
When you `buy' software, you're not really buying the software, as you probably already know.
When you say ``we already decided'', you're talking about the doctirne of first sale (mentioned often in this topic). This will clearly apply to the MEDIUM of the software (manuals, CD's, box, etc), but MAY NOT apply to the *license* to use the software. Yes, this does lead to some startling situations, where someone pays for a CD containing software that they can't use.
This is not, however, equivalent to losing an inalienable right, which is what the original poster seemed to be trying to claim. Nor is it currently a violation of current US statute (although one can always hope...). I don't know of any common law that would make it illegal, but I haven't looked; I would love to have someone point me at some relevant precedent...
I'm afraid that you are quite mistaken in this matter. There are a small number of rights and priveledges that you cannot abrogate via contract (for example, you cannot make yourself a slave). Further, you cannot be forced via contract to commit criminal acts (such as a contract to murder someone).
Licenses are a certain form of contract, and may include nearly any other sort of restriction you want, including removal of rights of speach, distribution, sale, etc (think about NDA's -- simple, common contracts that restrict your right to free speech).
Now, whether or not shrink-wrap licenses are BINDING in your area is an important question; equally important is whether or not they are ENFORCEABLE. Further, given the suggestion that this may be a non-US area in question, the local laws on copyright might come into play (but probably not, since the `harmonization' efforts have been pretty effective).
Unclutter should certainly do the job. Another generally useful tool for this sort of thing is `xwit', the `X Window Interface Tool', which can change the pointer location (as well as [un]iconify, raise/lower, and resize windows, etc.) from the command line.
If `these drives' are Flash drives, be very careful buying used materials -- Flash drives wear out much more quickly than memory, or spinning drives, or whatnot (generally guaranteed between 100,000 and 1,000,000 writes).
If you're not talking about Flash, then ignore the above, and accept my apologies for the confusion.
An old friend of mine went over `to the Dark Side', becoming one of the founding members of MS's Business Data Mining & Intelligence (or somesuch) group, well before the days of FireFly, so I kind of doubt this.
Certainly, FireFly's MD preference-matching system could be used with passport-style marketing information for things like ad-targeting (my friend more or less told me they were working on this sort of thing), but this use equires, rather than provides, the sort of technology that Passport represents. Shrug.
This sort of thing used to kill me -- I use a couple different systems that call for me to enter large amounts of text into a browser textarea. Whenever I edit large chunks of multi-paragraph text in emacs (which I've been using for more than a dozen years, so it's `built into my fingers'), I habitually hit `Meta-q' to re-fill the paragraph. Since the text isn't saved anywhere, I'd generally `just lose' when Mozilla exited.
These days I use Galeon, so changing the key binging was trivial; I've also developed a habit of just composing the text in emacs and cut-and-pasting it into the browser.
That's news to me -- the product that FireFly worked on when I knew about them (and the research project it came from) had nothing to do with what MS's Passport does.
A company called Ultimate makes keyboard stands and `studio equipment stations' that are quite popular in the music world. After poking at some of these in my local Mars Music, I decided that they were almost what I wanted, and then found the `ThinkerToys' stuff -- basically, Ultimate sells the individual pieces used to construct these stands, so you can design your own. Mine is a 3-tier, sitting next to a 6' wire rack shelf. I made the `desktop' myself, from thin pressed wood (Mmmmm, luan...) sheathed in corrugated plastic (available at any decent art supply store). The displays sit on a row slightly above this one, and there's a utility shelf above them. There's also a side-shelf mounted on the right support, slightly above the kayboard, that holds my laptop when I want it and swings out of the way the rest of the time. The wire rack shelf holds the CPUs, printer, scanner, and other junk.
My setup was a little pricey (about $400 total, I believe), and took a while to get `just right', but I enjoyed putting it together, and I'm pretty happy with it.
For several years now (about 11) I've used X11 to make the Caps_Lock key on my various keyboards produce a distinct, generally unused keycode/modifier (generally Hyper_R/mod5). Then I configure almost all of my window manager commands (keyboard or mouse) to use this modifier, effectively turning a giant waste of space and position (the caps lock key on my teeny vaio sr27k laptop keyboard is larger than every key but one of the 2 shifts, spacebar, enter, and backspace, and it's on the home row) into a useful `mode switch'. This is basically the only thing that changed my opinion of the caps lock key, which used to be: ``It should be attached to the bottom of the keyboard, requiring the user to pick up and flip the keyboard with both hands, while then pressing the button with the nose.''.
I'm currently in the middle of trying out a Mac OS X laptop, and this is one of the abilities that I miss most. Yes, I know most new users find modes confusing, but I'm quite happy with it...
Slashdot Mirror
This is only sort-of true: WotC isn't publishing a detailed list of changes for this update any more than they (or any other RPG publisher) is. What WotC is doing for the 3.5 update is publishing the revised SRD at (roughly) the same time the books themselves hit the stores. Since the SRD contains all the rules (`crunchy bits', as they're called in the industry), you can update your game without buying the new books (but you will need the 3.0 books, and the revised SRD, and you'll probably want the upgrade guide and the old SRD for assistance).
If what you really want is a detailed list of changes from 3.0 to 3.5, there are several available on the net already (the books are already in people's hands in various places around the world). Personally, I've been using this one, referenced from EN World, although I'm not fond of Word documents...
In general, EN World has been tracking the various 3.5 revision information very closely, and I recommend the site in general (no affiliation).
Plan 9's new take on `make' is `mk'. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a good on-line source for the original paper on mk:
I seem to have no trouble finding things that reference this paper. The following might also be helpful:
Kerberos is used (although not as uniformly as might be wished) in a few decent remote filesystems as well. This can be a real boon for such setups (which should be more common, IMHO). Without it, you can get a secure login to a remote machine, but still need to provide that machine with an authenticator for secure network services (such as afs, nfs, ftp, imap, etc.).
At MIT, at least a year or two back, we had people using a mixture of ssh and kerberized rlogin just to deal with the ticket-forwarding issues.
It's not that prior art needs to exist for a year before the filling date of the patent. What's going on is this:
The U.S. (and very nearly only the U.S.) allows a one-year grace period between first commercial use of an invention (remember, patents are about inventions) and the filing of the patent on said invention. If the patent is granted, the patent protection extends back to the invention date. (This is partially what spawned those `patent pending' inscriptions you see everywhere.)
Most countries require that you apply for the patent before making first commercial use of the patent.
This is either not as true or not as important as you think -- the publishing guidelines you mention are more or less correct (submission of a paper to a tech journal, for example, is an excellent step), but you can also establish your invention by making public `commercial use' of it. The courts have been very liberal in interpreting use as `commercial' (like, ``Use this software to save money on internet access.'').
Sometimes it's depressing how much the commercial/corporate/business aspects dominate the laws in this area, but that was really the original goal of the framers (to create commercial/business incentive without starving/killing the public/state of the art).
Simply using Squid will not (necessarily) provide examples of prior art -- the patent (thankfully) covers something more specific than just `using squid'.
Someone certainly could use Squid as part of a system to do what the patent claims, and I suspect that some people were. the average Squid user was NOT engaged in this sort of activity, however.
Yup, although it doesn't have to be a sale; the grace period (nearly unique to the US) applies from the date of first ``commercial use''. The courts have shown a willingness to interpret `first commercial use' pretty broadly.
They claim to have designed their system in 1996, so your 1998 practices are unlikely to have much of an effect.
That said, I believe that numerous cases of prior art exist. I don't know if anyone will actually pursue such a claim, since doing so can be difficult and time-consuming.
You said:
Actually, they do: Apple didn't do the firmware for that hardware; they hired someone else to do it. They did their own for the 3rd generation. The downside of this is all the new bugs and `quirks' that came from Apple's `r3' software (the `click', the backlight control, reportedly much more frequent crashing). The upside is that they can make changes directly (like putting out new versions with new features).
I agree with you that it would be nice if my top-of-the-line r2 ipod had some of the features of the newer models. On the other hand, I certainly wasn't asking Apple to add an annoying click in between tracks on my ipod, either. Asserting that these features should be free simply because they're not hardware features is incorrect, in this case.
Shrug. I do think that I've received enough value from my ipod purchase. I'd love to receive more. Offtopic, an SDK would be a nice way to accomplish this. :-)
Real Programmers don't play tennis, or any other sport that requires you to change clothes. Mountain climbing is OK, and real programmers wear their climbing boots to work in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of the machine room.
Also, I just noticed that NEC has a new item in the MobilePro line coming out soon: the MobilePro 900.
There's a small but active community that works on NetBSD support for those `Palm PCs' of yore, built to run WinCE, with small screen and keyboard. I myself have an IBM WorkPad Z50: ThinkPad keyboard, 8.4" LCD, CF and PCMCIA (not cardbus).
The battery life on these things is phenomenal -- the extended capacity battery goes for about 11-12 hours. The common package for it includes a battery bay that lets you run the thing off of a bunch of AA's. Wireless networking has worked for years. It has no hard drive, so you generally end up using the CF slot for storage and the PCMCIA for wireless network card.
If you want it, and have the space for it, the thing also supports X and sound; I don't bother (space is a premium).
The same group does a lot of work on various models of the MobilePro, reporting good success (the keyboard's not as nice as the workpad z50, but the workpad z50 is discontinued, so...).
Node-locked named clients, and the lack of flexibility that goes with them, are a large PITA. Branching is better in Perforce -- IF you're on a fast, secure network connection to the server.
Remote access security in Perforce was terrible when I used it last (about 3 years ago), but maybe it's better now. Attempting to shoehorn it over ssh produced effects much worse than CVS.
Running a dedicated SQL server for your VCS is a bit of a pain -- or ours was especially bad in some way, 'cause it needed to be taken down for maintenance WAAAY too often.
Perforce is a pretty nice VCS for a dedicated group sitting at exactly the same desktops, on a closed/protected net every day. Even better if those desktops all run the same version of Windows. Introduce laptops into the mix and things start to get tricky. Try to add a developer base who migrate between working locations (like `home' and `office') and want to be able to work in both places, and you'll find yourself missing the good old days of CVS.
An xbox-linux has great potential to lower the barriers to entry for games creators.
Imagine xbox-linux with network and controller support. High school kids writing python can now make games for the consoles that their friends already own.
Please note that I'm not saying that this is currently feasible -- the existing no-mod methods for xbox-linux are too complicated for pretty much everyone. They are getting better as time goes on, though -- that's the benefit of work like this.
I don't believe that you missed the very first item in his list: ``I already have an xbox.'', so you must have chosen to ignore it. Shrug.
Now, I believe that most people bought an xbox to play games, with an aside of ``and other home entertainment purposes'' (i.e. playing CD's, DVD's, etc). Given this as a starting point, is there something wrong with the idea of `Tux Racer on the XBox'? Maelstrom on the XBox? Frozen Bubble on the XBox? Random-other-linux-game on the XBox? Not-yet-written, free software, open source game on the XBox?
In general, this hack (and the non-hardware-intrusive one before it) provide a way for people to make xboxes better able to do the sorts of things that many slashdot readers [like to] do. What's so hard to understand?
When you `buy' software, you're not really buying the software, as you probably already know.
When you say ``we already decided'', you're talking about the doctirne of first sale (mentioned often in this topic). This will clearly apply to the MEDIUM of the software (manuals, CD's, box, etc), but MAY NOT apply to the *license* to use the software. Yes, this does lead to some startling situations, where someone pays for a CD containing software that they can't use.
This is not, however, equivalent to losing an inalienable right, which is what the original poster seemed to be trying to claim. Nor is it currently a violation of current US statute (although one can always hope...). I don't know of any common law that would make it illegal, but I haven't looked; I would love to have someone point me at some relevant precedent...
I'm afraid that you are quite mistaken in this matter. There are a small number of rights and priveledges that you cannot abrogate via contract (for example, you cannot make yourself a slave). Further, you cannot be forced via contract to commit criminal acts (such as a contract to murder someone).
Licenses are a certain form of contract, and may include nearly any other sort of restriction you want, including removal of rights of speach, distribution, sale, etc (think about NDA's -- simple, common contracts that restrict your right to free speech).
Now, whether or not shrink-wrap licenses are BINDING in your area is an important question; equally important is whether or not they are ENFORCEABLE. Further, given the suggestion that this may be a non-US area in question, the local laws on copyright might come into play (but probably not, since the `harmonization' efforts have been pretty effective).
Unclutter should certainly do the job. Another generally useful tool for this sort of thing is `xwit', the `X Window Interface Tool', which can change the pointer location (as well as [un]iconify, raise/lower, and resize windows, etc.) from the command line.
If `these drives' are Flash drives, be very careful buying used materials -- Flash drives wear out much more quickly than memory, or spinning drives, or whatnot (generally guaranteed between 100,000 and 1,000,000 writes).
If you're not talking about Flash, then ignore the above, and accept my apologies for the confusion.
An old friend of mine went over `to the Dark Side', becoming one of the founding members of MS's Business Data Mining & Intelligence (or somesuch) group, well before the days of FireFly, so I kind of doubt this.
Certainly, FireFly's MD preference-matching system could be used with passport-style marketing information for things like ad-targeting (my friend more or less told me they were working on this sort of thing), but this use equires, rather than provides, the sort of technology that Passport represents. Shrug.
This sort of thing used to kill me -- I use a couple different systems that call for me to enter large amounts of text into a browser textarea. Whenever I edit large chunks of multi-paragraph text in emacs (which I've been using for more than a dozen years, so it's `built into my fingers'), I habitually hit `Meta-q' to re-fill the paragraph. Since the text isn't saved anywhere, I'd generally `just lose' when Mozilla exited.
These days I use Galeon, so changing the key binging was trivial; I've also developed a habit of just composing the text in emacs and cut-and-pasting it into the browser.
That's news to me -- the product that FireFly worked on when I knew about them (and the research project it came from) had nothing to do with what MS's Passport does.
A company called Ultimate makes keyboard stands and `studio equipment stations' that are quite popular in the music world. After poking at some of these in my local Mars Music, I decided that they were almost what I wanted, and then found the `ThinkerToys' stuff -- basically, Ultimate sells the individual pieces used to construct these stands, so you can design your own. Mine is a 3-tier, sitting next to a 6' wire rack shelf. I made the `desktop' myself, from thin pressed wood (Mmmmm, luan...) sheathed in corrugated plastic (available at any decent art supply store). The displays sit on a row slightly above this one, and there's a utility shelf above them. There's also a side-shelf mounted on the right support, slightly above the kayboard, that holds my laptop when I want it and swings out of the way the rest of the time. The wire rack shelf holds the CPUs, printer, scanner, and other junk.
My setup was a little pricey (about $400 total, I believe), and took a while to get `just right', but I enjoyed putting it together, and I'm pretty happy with it.
For several years now (about 11) I've used X11 to make the Caps_Lock key on my various keyboards produce a distinct, generally unused keycode/modifier (generally Hyper_R/mod5). Then I configure almost all of my window manager commands (keyboard or mouse) to use this modifier, effectively turning a giant waste of space and position (the caps lock key on my teeny vaio sr27k laptop keyboard is larger than every key but one of the 2 shifts, spacebar, enter, and backspace, and it's on the home row) into a useful `mode switch'. This is basically the only thing that changed my opinion of the caps lock key, which used to be: ``It should be attached to the bottom of the keyboard, requiring the user to pick up and flip the keyboard with both hands, while then pressing the button with the nose.''.
I'm currently in the middle of trying out a Mac OS X laptop, and this is one of the abilities that I miss most. Yes, I know most new users find modes confusing, but I'm quite happy with it...
wayV is an attempt to make libstroke more widely avaialble than `in fvwm', so this is hardly surprising...