For player commands, ADVENT used it's own, non-ASCII, character encoding that fit six characters into a pair of 16-bit values.
You must have started from a PDP-11 port, because that was a common encoding on the PDP-11 (called "RAD50"), but the original PDP-10 version certainly didn't store them that way. They were stored five seven-bit ASCII characters to a machine word (36 bits), which is why the player commands had only five significant characters and the game couldn't tell "NORTHEAST" from "NORTH" (you had to use "NE").
The PDP-11 version was probably more portable than the original PDP-10 version.
IIRC, the original version of Adventure Cave used an interpreter that was written in F77.
Some ports might have used F77, but ADVENT was originally written on a DECsystem-10 using Fortran-10, which was DEC's implementation of FORTRAN 66. The original code is available in the
Interactive Fiction Archive; there are two versions ever so slightly different, adv350-pdp10.tar.gz and advent-original.tar.gz. I'm not certain which was earlier, though one of them has some messages in mixed case, so that is probably later. All others can be traced back to one of these.
String handling in FORTRAN 66 was not very portable. On the DECsystem-10, five ASCII characters were stored per word. This was the biggest hassle in porting to another platform.
In general, the government does not have the power to grant any rights, except those
powers explicitly stated in the constitution, of which copyright is a good example.
basically, the license terminates if you file a lawsuit in any court against any software that is
I know it's technically possible to file criminal charges against inanimate objects. There's a legal term for this, which I don't recall at the moment. Cases like this have titles such as "The State of California vs. a briefcase containing $50,000", and this typically happens when the government wants to seize property. The advantage to the government is that inanimate objects don't have any right to a defense, so they almost always are subject to a summary judgement. It's then up to the owner to prove that their Fourth Amendment rights have been violated.
But is it really possible to file a civil suit against an inanimate object?
This talks about something not happening in real-time, and indicates the requirements for issuing a warrant. I don't see this second part being conditions on the police to act in real-time
One might ask, then, why you think they put it in the same sentence? If it's as unrelated as you claim, surely it would have been written as a separate sentence?
The very purpose of a warrant is to authorize search or seizure. Are you arguing that the only time a warrant is necessary is when there is no probable cause? That would flatly contradict the explicit statement. You can't have it both ways. Either probable cause is necessary to issue a warrant, and a warrant is necessary to conduct a search/seizure, or there's no rationale for having warrants.
How can people be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," and at the same time give the police the power to break down their door at any moment for the slightest flimsy excuse?
if someone calls the police and reports that she sees their neighbor beating his wife that the police can't act on that until a judge grants a warrant?
From experiences of close friends, I know that the police often cannot be trusted to make a reasonable determination as to what constitutes "probable cause". This is why it is supposed to be determined by a court.
I also don't trust my neighbors to sic the cops on me only when I'm beating my wife, and not when they have some other personal vendetta against me. The neighbor claiming that I'm beating my wife is not sufficient as probable cause if there is no other evidence.
Allowing the police to determine when there is probable cause is hardly better than not requiring warrants at all.
"A policeman's job is only easy in a police state." -- Orson Welles
I really don't think the founding fathers had an impotent police force in mind that were not able to act on crimes in-progress.
It is clear that historically it was expected that people defend themselves against criminals, using force as necessary. If you expect the police to do it for you, prepare to be disappointed, and quite possibly dead.
The government will obey the Constitution to the extent that we force them to do so. If they violate it, and we just say "too bad" and don't do anything, they'll keep right on doing it, and get increasingly bold about it.
If we challenge the abuses, some of them will be curbed. But to mount an effective challenge against anything, you need citizens who are aware that there is a problem. Educating citizen as to how the goverment is supposed to work is essential. The fact that it doesn't actually work that way in practice much of the time is why we need to educate them, not a reason to let it slide.
What it says is "no warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause". Not that if there's probable cause, no warrant is necessary.
Police officers don't have the authority to issue warrants. This is a function of the courts. The Fourth Amendment requires that judges not issue warrants if there is not an oath or affirmation of probable cause.
Presumably the way the system has gotten perverted into the state it's in is that people have said "well, getting a warrant is too much trouble, and if we have probable cause, we'll get one anyhow, so we'll just skip that step or do it later, since that is easier and faster." But the fact that it is easier and faster doesn't make it legitimate.
A policeman's job is only easy in a police state. -- Orson Welles
The only privacy right granted to you by The Constitution is that of right of protection from search and seazure of your person and your home unless duly athorized by a court of law, or if a crime is in progress.
This demonstrates an amazing degree of misunderstanding of what the Constitution is all about. I wish the schools would better educate people on these matters!
The Constitution does NOT grant rights to the people. The government has no power (authority) to grant rights! The powers of government are explicitly stated in Article I Section 8 of the Constitution and expanded on by a few of the Amendments.
The people inherently have rights, and the Constitution establishes that the people grant the government certain powers, but that those powers are limited and the government is not permitted to take away the rights of the people. Certain of those rights are enumerated in the Bill of Rights. However, carefully read the Ninth Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Thus the fact that a right to privacy is not specifically enumerated in the Constitution or Bill of Rights does NOT mean that the people don't have that right, or that the government has the power to take away that right from the people.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly found that the people do have a right to privacy.
However, as with all rights, there are some limitations. It is not possible to grant an absolute right without simultaneously taking away another right. For instance, you have the right to swing your fist, but that right ends where my nose begins.
Back to your posting:
right of protection from search and seazure of your person and your home unless duly athorized by a court of law, or if a crime is in progress.
Actually, the Fourth Amendment doesn't say anything about a crime in progress. It says:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Note that this doesn't even say that the police can conduct a search without a warrant if they have probable cause. It says that if they have probably cause, and give an Oath or affirmation, a warrant shall issue. This is possibly the most-trampled of the enumerated rights.
Yahoo! Launch headline suggests that Bon Jovi album might be delayed because of the lawsuit.
I don't suppose it has occurred to anyone at Universal to simply release the album as an ordinary CD with no PIN? And that consumers might actually buy it?
And censoring statements from Bin Laden will NOT prevent this from happening. Bin Laden's agents can take out personal ads in the newspapers just the same as anyone else.
Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed
on
The First Smiley :-)
·
· Score: 2
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!"
Miriam "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas, circa 1920
I worked at Apparat from 1980-1982. They were best known for their NewDOS-80 operating system for the TRS-80 Models 1 and 3, and other TRS-80 related products, but they also had a few products for the Apple II, including an EPROM programmer. I wrote the 2nd generation software for that EPROM programmer.
One month, the plan for their full page color advertisement in Byte magazine fell through. I'm not sure what they'd originally planned to advertise, but they ended up advertising the EPROM programmer instead. It wasn't unusual for EPROM programmers to be advertised in Byte. But it was somewhat unusual for there to be a full page color ad for one.
The ad was very successful. We started getting a lot of orders. And as far as I know, most customers were happy with them. But we did get
a few customers who called us saying things like "I installed it, now what do I do with it?"
You'd think that people wouldn't buy a $250 accessory for their computer without some idea of what they planned to do with it.
Anyhow, one of these customers was really irate and demanded that we refund his money. Company
policy at the time was to only allow exchanges of defective products. So he said it was defective and sent it back.
When it arrived, we discovered bullet holes through the box. Looked to be the result of
a 9mm, though I could be wrong.
The home-movie archive may become collateral damage in the DRM war. Just as the law requires that DAT recorders have SCMS and consider material from analog sources to be copyrighted, future video devices may not let you copy your own home movies.
On the other hand, it's possible that consumers will refuse to put up with this crap, and eventually enough of them will complain to Congress to counter the effects of the huge lobbying budget of Hollywood.
Anyhow, the home-movie archive is definitely a good product idea. The Replay TV 4000 series (and presumably the 4500 series) lets you set aside space for your own still photos. Of course, it lets you record from a line input that might come from a VCR, so you can store your movies in it as well, but it really isn't intended for long-term storage of video. There's nothing the prevents it, but the disk capacity is sufficiently limited that most users will not want to keep any particular video online in it for an extended period of time.
As hard drive capacity continues to increase, though, the personal video archive becomes ever more practical.
For computers, the idea of having an always-on-line library of home movies might become more desirable as broadband comes in.
Having an online library will appeal to a lot of people. But what Hollywood wants you to do is video-on-demand pay-per-view. If the telcos (or cable companies) really solve the last mile problem, the remaining technical problems will not be that much of a challenge.
However, consumers won't be too interested unless the price is comparable to their local DVD rental store.
I doubt it. By 2010, even those drives will likely have a minimum capacity of more than 30G. There is no incentive for the manufacturers to make low-capacity drives, because the fixed costs don't allow them to sell the drives for as low a price as customers will pay. This is why you can't buy new
100 Mbyte drives now.
it'll be far more likely that by 2010 TiVo units will sport a 20 to 30 GB hard drive for the Linux-based OS
Not bloody likely. In 2010 it will not be possible to buy 20-30 GB hard drives, because they won't be made any longer. I'm not sure that there is much new production in those capacities today, other than laptop drives.
Eight years ago, 4 GB drives were common. Have you seen any new 4 GB drives available for sale lately?
An MTTF on 10^6 hours does NOT mean that they expect any particular drive to last that long. The MTTF is only valid over the rated lifetime of the drive, which is typically five years.
The "M" in MTTF stands for "mean". It's a statistical measure of a sample of drives. If you take a large number of drives, run them for a long time, and compute drives*hours/failures, you have the MTTF. So what an MTTF of 10^6 does mean is that if you buy 456 drives and run them all for one year, you can expect about four failures.
Note that this is all dependent on running the drives within the rated specifications. If you put them in a sealed box with inadequate ventilation, and the temperature of the drive exceeds the manufacturer's rating, all bets are off. In my experience, the vast majority of drive failures that lead people to claim "brand xyz drives suck" are caused by running them at excessive temperature.
MTTF and MTBF are often confused. MTBF is the mean time between failures, and as such is the sum of MTTF (mean time to failure) and MTTR (mean time to repair). Since a disk drive is an FRU (field replaceable unit), and "repair" consists of replacing the entire drive, the MTBF of a disk drive is not a very useful number. The MTTF is the right thing to consider.
Ah, I know why your results aren't as good as mine.
Before my procmailrc invokes SpamAssassin, it sorts out email from everyone that I routinely expect email from. Effectively it's a whitelist, though I'm not using the SpamAssassin whitelist feature to do it.
"Auburn University in Alabama will become the first school in the country to offer a four-year bachelor's degree in the study of wireless technology this fall.
Wireless technology is at least 105 years old, and there have been degrees relating to it for at least 40 years.
Care to cite an authoritative reference for this quote? No? I thought not.
Lots of people quote this, but no one can back it up. I seriously doubt that Bill ever said it.
I'm not an admirer of Bill, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticize him rather than by putting words in his mouth.
The 640K limit is almost certainly due to design decisions by the IBM PC design team, not by Microsoft. MS-DOS did not have a 640K limit; some early 8086- and 8088-based computers ran MS-DOS with as much as 896K of RAM. IBM was just a little short-sighted in the addresses they assigned for video cards. But to be fair, back in 1980 (when the PC was being designed) it wasn't obvious to anyone that this would be a serious limitation. Most personal computers in 1980 had no more than 128K of RAM.
Slashdot Mirror
The PDP-11 version was probably more portable than the original PDP-10 version.
String handling in FORTRAN 66 was not very portable. On the DECsystem-10, five ASCII characters were stored per word. This was the biggest hassle in porting to another platform.
In general, the government does not have the power to grant any rights, except those powers explicitly stated in the constitution, of which copyright is a good example.
But is it really possible to file a civil suit against an inanimate object?
The very purpose of a warrant is to authorize search or seizure. Are you arguing that the only time a warrant is necessary is when there is no probable cause? That would flatly contradict the explicit statement. You can't have it both ways. Either probable cause is necessary to issue a warrant, and a warrant is necessary to conduct a search/seizure, or there's no rationale for having warrants.
How can people be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," and at the same time give the police the power to break down their door at any moment for the slightest flimsy excuse?
From experiences of close friends, I know that the police often cannot be trusted to make a reasonable determination as to what constitutes "probable cause". This is why it is supposed to be determined by a court.I also don't trust my neighbors to sic the cops on me only when I'm beating my wife, and not when they have some other personal vendetta against me. The neighbor claiming that I'm beating my wife is not sufficient as probable cause if there is no other evidence.
Allowing the police to determine when there is probable cause is hardly better than not requiring warrants at all.
"A policeman's job is only easy in a police state." -- Orson Welles
It is clear that historically it was expected that people defend themselves against criminals, using force as necessary. If you expect the police to do it for you, prepare to be disappointed, and quite possibly dead.If we challenge the abuses, some of them will be curbed. But to mount an effective challenge against anything, you need citizens who are aware that there is a problem. Educating citizen as to how the goverment is supposed to work is essential. The fact that it doesn't actually work that way in practice much of the time is why we need to educate them, not a reason to let it slide.
Police officers don't have the authority to issue warrants. This is a function of the courts. The Fourth Amendment requires that judges not issue warrants if there is not an oath or affirmation of probable cause.
Presumably the way the system has gotten perverted into the state it's in is that people have said "well, getting a warrant is too much trouble, and if we have probable cause, we'll get one anyhow, so we'll just skip that step or do it later, since that is easier and faster." But the fact that it is easier and faster doesn't make it legitimate.
A policeman's job is only easy in a police state. -- Orson Welles
The Constitution does NOT grant rights to the people. The government has no power (authority) to grant rights! The powers of government are explicitly stated in Article I Section 8 of the Constitution and expanded on by a few of the Amendments.
The people inherently have rights, and the Constitution establishes that the people grant the government certain powers, but that those powers are limited and the government is not permitted to take away the rights of the people. Certain of those rights are enumerated in the Bill of Rights. However, carefully read the Ninth Amendment:
Thus the fact that a right to privacy is not specifically enumerated in the Constitution or Bill of Rights does NOT mean that the people don't have that right, or that the government has the power to take away that right from the people.The Supreme Court has repeatedly found that the people do have a right to privacy.
However, as with all rights, there are some limitations. It is not possible to grant an absolute right without simultaneously taking away another right. For instance, you have the right to swing your fist, but that right ends where my nose begins.
Back to your posting:
Actually, the Fourth Amendment doesn't say anything about a crime in progress. It says: Note that this doesn't even say that the police can conduct a search without a warrant if they have probable cause. It says that if they have probably cause, and give an Oath or affirmation, a warrant shall issue. This is possibly the most-trampled of the enumerated rights.He may have. How would we know? Presumably he wouldn't use his real name, and the message contents would appear to be innocuous.
And censoring statements from Bin Laden will NOT prevent this from happening. Bin Laden's agents can take out personal ads in the newspapers just the same as anyone else.
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!"
Miriam "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas, circa 1920
One month, the plan for their full page color advertisement in Byte magazine fell through. I'm not sure what they'd originally planned to advertise, but they ended up advertising the EPROM programmer instead. It wasn't unusual for EPROM programmers to be advertised in Byte. But it was somewhat unusual for there to be a full page color ad for one.
The ad was very successful. We started getting a lot of orders. And as far as I know, most customers were happy with them. But we did get a few customers who called us saying things like "I installed it, now what do I do with it?" You'd think that people wouldn't buy a $250 accessory for their computer without some idea of what they planned to do with it.
Anyhow, one of these customers was really irate and demanded that we refund his money. Company policy at the time was to only allow exchanges of defective products. So he said it was defective and sent it back. When it arrived, we discovered bullet holes through the box. Looked to be the result of a 9mm, though I could be wrong.
On the other hand, it's possible that consumers will refuse to put up with this crap, and eventually enough of them will complain to Congress to counter the effects of the huge lobbying budget of Hollywood.
Anyhow, the home-movie archive is definitely a good product idea. The Replay TV 4000 series (and presumably the 4500 series) lets you set aside space for your own still photos. Of course, it lets you record from a line input that might come from a VCR, so you can store your movies in it as well, but it really isn't intended for long-term storage of video. There's nothing the prevents it, but the disk capacity is sufficiently limited that most users will not want to keep any particular video online in it for an extended period of time.
As hard drive capacity continues to increase, though, the personal video archive becomes ever more practical.
However, consumers won't be too interested unless the price is comparable to their local DVD rental store.
I was the third employee of ReplayTV. I can assure you that we did our research and thought about these things. I'm sure Tivo has also.
I doubt it. By 2010, even those drives will likely have a minimum capacity of more than 30G. There is no incentive for the manufacturers to make low-capacity drives, because the fixed costs don't allow them to sell the drives for as low a price as customers will pay. This is why you can't buy new 100 Mbyte drives now.
Eight years ago, 4 GB drives were common. Have you seen any new 4 GB drives available for sale lately?
The "M" in MTTF stands for "mean". It's a statistical measure of a sample of drives. If you take a large number of drives, run them for a long time, and compute drives*hours/failures, you have the MTTF. So what an MTTF of 10^6 does mean is that if you buy 456 drives and run them all for one year, you can expect about four failures.
Note that this is all dependent on running the drives within the rated specifications. If you put them in a sealed box with inadequate ventilation, and the temperature of the drive exceeds the manufacturer's rating, all bets are off. In my experience, the vast majority of drive failures that lead people to claim "brand xyz drives suck" are caused by running them at excessive temperature.
MTTF and MTBF are often confused. MTBF is the mean time between failures, and as such is the sum of MTTF (mean time to failure) and MTTR (mean time to repair). Since a disk drive is an FRU (field replaceable unit), and "repair" consists of replacing the entire drive, the MTBF of a disk drive is not a very useful number. The MTTF is the right thing to consider.
Ah, I know why your results aren't as good as mine. Before my procmailrc invokes SpamAssassin, it sorts out email from everyone that I routinely expect email from. Effectively it's a whitelist, though I'm not using the SpamAssassin whitelist feature to do it.
Did you lower the score threshold or something? With the default setting, I'm getting more than 90% reduction in spam with ZERO false positives.
This is also true of 802.11a and 802.11g, although 802.11a uses the 5 GHz band rather than the 2.4 GHz band used by 802.11b and 802.11g.
What consumer devices actually use UWB? I haven't yet heard of any.
Lots of people quote this, but no one can back it up. I seriously doubt that Bill ever said it.
I'm not an admirer of Bill, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticize him rather than by putting words in his mouth.
The 640K limit is almost certainly due to design decisions by the IBM PC design team, not by Microsoft. MS-DOS did not have a 640K limit; some early 8086- and 8088-based computers ran MS-DOS with as much as 896K of RAM. IBM was just a little short-sighted in the addresses they assigned for video cards. But to be fair, back in 1980 (when the PC was being designed) it wasn't obvious to anyone that this would be a serious limitation. Most personal computers in 1980 had no more than 128K of RAM.