Most of your most makes no sense at all. I don't have any copyright, I dont need a copyright. None of that applies to most software for sale. Trademark sure, yes, I own the trademark on the Morpheus brand for image programs, but most of the rest of the stuff you mention is pure insanity. Legal cracking, force deposit of source, whatever. No matter what I choose to do with my program and my source, its always going to be my choice. If you don't like it - TOO FUCKING BAD, don't buy my program. Really. I just don't care about you. You are only one insignificant person who probably wouldn't have bought my program anyways. There are hundreds of people lining up waiting to take your place and purchase the program as-is, despite any measure I have to protect myself and my property. "What if I don't?" is a stupid argument, why not just counter that with a "What if I do." I maintain that argument must obviously hold an equal amount of wait against yours. If I sell the program, most likely that will be a forced stipulation in the contract for the terms of sale. Abondon the program and you must release a free version of the binary. "I don't trust anyone who throws obstacles in the way of people being able to use and modify works." - now that is very interesting, because I don't ever mention that I was selling anybody the ability to modify my program. You will be facing some severe legal challenges there for sure. You can use my program all you want if you buy it, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let you modify it. As for the trust issue - I think it is much more important fact that I don't trust you. I don't trust you to not pool in $1 amoung 50 people and then buy 1 copy and split it amough all of you. Back in the day I knew some (30-40 year old) women who pooled in $10 each to buy a copy of Word Perfect so they could all have a copy for their home computer. Things like that would really hurt a small guy like me in particular, so sorry, I don't trust my users, and I have all the right in the world to enforce my license. You can choose not to buy my program, but honestly its not going to put me out of business because most people won't care.
Simple, I allow 3 because some people might want to install their program at work and at home, or on a laptop, or they may screw it up the first time and need to do it again if they decide to reinstall. Also the 3 usage limit is a rolling limit so it only reflects 3 uses within the last certain amount of time (currently a few weeks). This means you can always reactivate on a near weakly basis if you decide to reinstall your OS every single week, and never have to email me for support. I try to be fairly reasonable by default, and automatically, so as not to annoy the people who are buying my program, but it is definately worth my while to be able to control the uses of the codes.
"Almost nobody even realizes my program uses activation"
So you don't tell your users that you are sending information from their computers to your website? How honest is that? Even MS tells you when this is going to occur.
Well there is a notice that says you must be online in order to activate, on the screen where the user must enter their code, but no personal information is really sent with the activation request anyways, its already stored on my server in a database from when they purchased, since you can only purchase and download my program online.
Wrong. I have prooved to myself so many times how very worth it it is to have activation in my product. Unless you don't have an internet connection, mine never has any troubles. I don't know why symantec couldn't manage to make something that just works like mine. Simple public key/private key encryption and a single registry setting and a single hit to a website to encrypt your computer specifics. Almost nobody even realizes my program uses activation unless they don't have an internet connection and have to do it by email and a little copy and paste. Several times I have seen schools purchase 1 copy and try to activate on a whole lab of computers. Didn't work and most ended up purchasing 20 or 30 copies later on. Somebody uses a stolen credit card and posts the activation code on some chinese website. Over 1000 attempts at activation with that single code within only a few days, but only the first 3 were lucky enough to get it for free because then I disabled the code forever. And if I ever decide to stop selling and supporting my product, I will compile a freeware version and let the community decide where to host it so nobody ever has to worry about not being able to use what they bought. Not that I plan to stop being self employed, its really a lot of fun.
Sounds like you've never flashed your bios before. awdflash.exe asks if you want to save the current image to disk before loading a new one. The little.bat files most vendors provide to automate the process automatically save the current image to old.bin or some file like that. If you only have one computer and need to flash the bios and you don't save a backup of the current one first, I don't feel sorry for you.
This is stil a problem. My nforce2 boards (Epox 8RDA+) are only 8 months old, made in Jan 2003, well after this was known to all the motherboard manufacturers, and already have buldging capacitors. I am currently sending them back for free repair. It only costs me $9 to ship it there and $11 for them to ship it back each time.
Last I knew, this BIOS feature simply loaded and ran the awdflash.exe on the floppy disk. The actual code to flash the bios does not exist in the bios itself, but code to load a program from the floppy disk and flash itself is stored in a read-only part of the bios on most new systems. Pressing ALT+F2 at boot will trigger this usually. Also the FAT12 filesystem is incredibly simple, so its probably not hard to write code to read (and not even write) from it.
Would it not be legally binding if you didn't write a document that only a lawyer could understand or something? Despite the fact that English can be made to be ambiguous, couldn't you just put a disclaimer saying that you, the software publisher or whatever, get to resolve any ambiguity somebody may decide to find in your normal-english legal agreement?
Somebody invited me to this 8player XBOX Halo party. It was horrible. Besides the fact I had never seen an XBOX before, my assumptions were all proved right. I played for about 30 minutes trying very hard to get used to those silly thumb pad things for rotation, but it just doesn't work. Even though I use a mouse for all PC games, I would even prefer a trackball over these weird thumb pad things on the XBOX. I seriously bet I could learn to use a trackball a lot better then the thing they come with. That isn't even mentioning the fact that the graphics sucked compared to games I'm used to (like RTCW:ET), the 4player split screen thing was like using a 9" monitor. 8players is a LOT? I seriously dont understand what these people (friends of friends) were thinking. 64 players is a lot. 24-32 is decent. 8? what ever, 8 means 4v4 which is below the minimum for a fun game really. Don't forget the lack of buttons for binding more actions then there are buttons. When playing RTCW:ET Every single one of my keyboard buttons does something. Granted most of them are quickchat binds, still a lot of other keys are actions, guns, movement, etc. To sum it all up, I would never even bother to get an XBOX, even if somebody gave it to me for free. The gaming experience for me just plain sucks compared to PCs. I doubt PS2 or GameCube are any different.
Surprisingly, its not that old, it even has the windows logo and context menu keys. It is AT, not PS2 though, but I have an adapter on it going to my P3-550 box. I remember running various programming utilities trying to capture what key combination it may be sending, and never getting any results. Maybe I wasn't looking in the right spot for that, but I am sure it was not the control alt plus/minus because I know I tested that on a computer that control+alt+minus did disable turbo mode.
I have a TURBO key on my keyboard where some people have a backslash (\) key to the right of the right shift key. My backslash key is to the left of the backspace key. The turbo key does not do anything at all as far as I can tell. It does not slow the computer to 4.77mhz mode, even when booted to dos 6.22 where things like control+alt+minus will tell the bios to disable turbo.
Sure -- some places like the one you cited use digital weather stations, but most of the National Weather Service weather stations still use old fashioned thermometers.
And I know that there were people locally that used the data for their research.
I think Wunderground.com as well as many other places like weather.com/accuweather.com probably all pull their data from the same place. I would imagine all the data comes from noaa.gov and some network like nexrad as well as all the major airports. There is likely enough automatic digitally recorded data to safely do a study without relying on human-read temperatures.
Of course, I -could- be wrong, and these airports and other stations really do have a person who reads the temp every 30 minutes and enters it into some vt100 terminal, but I doubt that.
I would hope weather stations use digital thermometers now-a-days and automatically sample hourly or even more often readings into a database someplace.
I cant imagine where else data for graphs like this come from.
The strictness of.com.au is what I was comparing to the strictness of.museum - I would not mind if.com.au provided a n index.com.au similar to index.museum along with a *.com.au pointing to the index.com.au
The restrictive nature and thus limited number of registered domains I think is what makes it ok to provide the index. A commercial free-for-all domain like.com/.net/.org should not have an index or wildcard, especially when they are just using it to exploit the system for financial gains.
I think *.museum is ok to have a wildcard for though, since not everybody can go out registering a museum domain name. It works similar to.com.au (unless.com.au changed recently)..com/.net and any other domain that requires no special terms to register domains for, should NOT have wildcards.
There is a big difference here I think. Not every nobody can go around registering a.museum domain name. You have to actually have a museum. *IF*.com required you to have a commercial organization with the same name as the domain (similar to the way.com.au works, or used to work) then it would be ok to have a wildcard to search the domains, but it should not involve advertising or tracking statistics, just a simple search of all the domains that DO exist.
Is it just simpler or something? Why would serial be any better/cheaper/easier to make then a similar parallel device? If the cost is relatively the same, and the bandwidth per wire is the same, and you aren't making long cables that you don't want a lot of wires in, doesn't it make more sense to throw some extra lines in there to double, quadruple, etc. the total throughput? Things like PCI slots and PCMCIA cards and RAM it only seems to make more sense to use a wider bus, to me at least.
While I have seen a number of NT4 based ATMs, and I have seen some of them stuck with an error message or a BSOD, this is nothing compared to the joke that is the "U-Scan" at my local Meijer. Everytime a big MS work goes through, the entire block of U-Scans is closed with a little message saying the U-Scan's cought a virus and they are working hard to restore them, blah blah blah. Don't forget those kiosks at stores like target for gift registries and stuff that go offline half the time for lots of windows (or crappy lexmark printer) related problems. I am damn glad my current bank's ATM has a nice happy monochrome screen that *always works* still.
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Oh boy, prepare for slow, buggy drivers, hardware incompatibilities, and games that will just won't support the card anyways.
Most of your most makes no sense at all. I don't have any copyright, I dont need a copyright. None of that applies to most software for sale. Trademark sure, yes, I own the trademark on the Morpheus brand for image programs, but most of the rest of the stuff you mention is pure insanity. Legal cracking, force deposit of source, whatever. No matter what I choose to do with my program and my source, its always going to be my choice. If you don't like it - TOO FUCKING BAD, don't buy my program. Really. I just don't care about you. You are only one insignificant person who probably wouldn't have bought my program anyways. There are hundreds of people lining up waiting to take your place and purchase the program as-is, despite any measure I have to protect myself and my property.
"What if I don't?" is a stupid argument, why not just counter that with a "What if I do." I maintain that argument must obviously hold an equal amount of wait against yours.
If I sell the program, most likely that will be a forced stipulation in the contract for the terms of sale. Abondon the program and you must release a free version of the binary.
"I don't trust anyone who throws obstacles in the way of people being able to use and modify works." - now that is very interesting, because I don't ever mention that I was selling anybody the ability to modify my program. You will be facing some severe legal challenges there for sure. You can use my program all you want if you buy it, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let you modify it.
As for the trust issue - I think it is much more important fact that I don't trust you. I don't trust you to not pool in $1 amoung 50 people and then buy 1 copy and split it amough all of you. Back in the day I knew some (30-40 year old) women who pooled in $10 each to buy a copy of Word Perfect so they could all have a copy for their home computer. Things like that would really hurt a small guy like me in particular, so sorry, I don't trust my users, and I have all the right in the world to enforce my license. You can choose not to buy my program, but honestly its not going to put me out of business because most people won't care.
Simple, I allow 3 because some people might want to install their program at work and at home, or on a laptop, or they may screw it up the first time and need to do it again if they decide to reinstall. Also the 3 usage limit is a rolling limit so it only reflects 3 uses within the last certain amount of time (currently a few weeks). This means you can always reactivate on a near weakly basis if you decide to reinstall your OS every single week, and never have to email me for support.
I try to be fairly reasonable by default, and automatically, so as not to annoy the people who are buying my program, but it is definately worth my while to be able to control the uses of the codes.
Well there is a notice that says you must be online in order to activate, on the screen where the user must enter their code, but no personal information is really sent with the activation request anyways, its already stored on my server in a database from when they purchased, since you can only purchase and download my program online.
Wrong. I have prooved to myself so many times how very worth it it is to have activation in my product. Unless you don't have an internet connection, mine never has any troubles. I don't know why symantec couldn't manage to make something that just works like mine. Simple public key/private key encryption and a single registry setting and a single hit to a website to encrypt your computer specifics.
Almost nobody even realizes my program uses activation unless they don't have an internet connection and have to do it by email and a little copy and paste. Several times I have seen schools purchase 1 copy and try to activate on a whole lab of computers. Didn't work and most ended up purchasing 20 or 30 copies later on. Somebody uses a stolen credit card and posts the activation code on some chinese website. Over 1000 attempts at activation with that single code within only a few days, but only the first 3 were lucky enough to get it for free because then I disabled the code forever.
And if I ever decide to stop selling and supporting my product, I will compile a freeware version and let the community decide where to host it so nobody ever has to worry about not being able to use what they bought. Not that I plan to stop being self employed, its really a lot of fun.
Sounds like you've never flashed your bios before. .bat files most vendors provide to automate the process automatically save the current image to old.bin or some file like that. If you only have one computer and need to flash the bios and you don't save a backup of the current one first, I don't feel sorry for you.
awdflash.exe asks if you want to save the current image to disk before loading a new one. The little
This is stil a problem. My nforce2 boards (Epox 8RDA+) are only 8 months old, made in Jan 2003, well after this was known to all the motherboard manufacturers, and already have buldging capacitors. I am currently sending them back for free repair. It only costs me $9 to ship it there and $11 for them to ship it back each time.
Last I knew, this BIOS feature simply loaded and ran the awdflash.exe on the floppy disk. The actual code to flash the bios does not exist in the bios itself, but code to load a program from the floppy disk and flash itself is stored in a read-only part of the bios on most new systems. Pressing ALT+F2 at boot will trigger this usually. Also the FAT12 filesystem is incredibly simple, so its probably not hard to write code to read (and not even write) from it.
Would it not be legally binding if you didn't write a document that only a lawyer could understand or something?
Despite the fact that English can be made to be ambiguous, couldn't you just put a disclaimer saying that you, the software publisher or whatever, get to resolve any ambiguity somebody may decide to find in your normal-english legal agreement?
Is there something stopping a future creation of Star Wars 2.5 for some reason? Everybody likes prequals, so why not a .. um.. interqual?
Somebody invited me to this 8player XBOX Halo party. It was horrible. Besides the fact I had never seen an XBOX before, my assumptions were all proved right. I played for about 30 minutes trying very hard to get used to those silly thumb pad things for rotation, but it just doesn't work. Even though I use a mouse for all PC games, I would even prefer a trackball over these weird thumb pad things on the XBOX. I seriously bet I could learn to use a trackball a lot better then the thing they come with.
That isn't even mentioning the fact that the graphics sucked compared to games I'm used to (like RTCW:ET), the 4player split screen thing was like using a 9" monitor. 8players is a LOT? I seriously dont understand what these people (friends of friends) were thinking. 64 players is a lot. 24-32 is decent. 8? what ever, 8 means 4v4 which is below the minimum for a fun game really. Don't forget the lack of buttons for binding more actions then there are buttons. When playing RTCW:ET Every single one of my keyboard buttons does something. Granted most of them are quickchat binds, still a lot of other keys are actions, guns, movement, etc.
To sum it all up, I would never even bother to get an XBOX, even if somebody gave it to me for free. The gaming experience for me just plain sucks compared to PCs. I doubt PS2 or GameCube are any different.
Surprisingly, its not that old, it even has the windows logo and context menu keys. It is AT, not PS2 though, but I have an adapter on it going to my P3-550 box.
I remember running various programming utilities trying to capture what key combination it may be sending, and never getting any results. Maybe I wasn't looking in the right spot for that, but I am sure it was not the control alt plus/minus because I know I tested that on a computer that control+alt+minus did disable turbo mode.
I have a TURBO key on my keyboard where some people have a backslash (\) key to the right of the right shift key. My backslash key is to the left of the backspace key. The turbo key does not do anything at all as far as I can tell. It does not slow the computer to 4.77mhz mode, even when booted to dos 6.22 where things like control+alt+minus will tell the bios to disable turbo.
For the lazy, since June 20 it looks like they have sold shares for a total amount of $2,747,819
*wrong* - Nextel charges (me at least) 15 cents for every incoming SMS message.
I think Wunderground.com as well as many other places like weather.com/accuweather.com probably all pull their data from the same place. I would imagine all the data comes from noaa.gov and some network like nexrad as well as all the major airports. There is likely enough automatic digitally recorded data to safely do a study without relying on human-read temperatures.
Of course, I -could- be wrong, and these airports and other stations really do have a person who reads the temp every 30 minutes and enters it into some vt100 terminal, but I doubt that.
I would hope weather stations use digital thermometers now-a-days and automatically sample hourly or even more often readings into a database someplace.
I cant imagine where else data for graphs like this come from.
The strictness of
The restrictive nature and thus limited number of registered domains I think is what makes it ok to provide the index. A commercial free-for-all domain like
http://verisignsucks.museum/
Just as an example.
I think *.museum is ok to have a wildcard for though, since not everybody can go out registering a museum domain name. It works similar to
There is a big difference here I think. Not every nobody can go around registering a
*IF*
Is it just simpler or something? Why would serial be any better/cheaper/easier to make then a similar parallel device? If the cost is relatively the same, and the bandwidth per wire is the same, and you aren't making long cables that you don't want a lot of wires in, doesn't it make more sense to throw some extra lines in there to double, quadruple, etc. the total throughput?
Things like PCI slots and PCMCIA cards and RAM it only seems to make more sense to use a wider bus, to me at least.
While I have seen a number of NT4 based ATMs, and I have seen some of them stuck with an error message or a BSOD, this is nothing compared to the joke that is the "U-Scan" at my local Meijer. Everytime a big MS work goes through, the entire block of U-Scans is closed with a little message saying the U-Scan's cought a virus and they are working hard to restore them, blah blah blah. Don't forget those kiosks at stores like target for gift registries and stuff that go offline half the time for lots of windows (or crappy lexmark printer) related problems. I am damn glad my current bank's ATM has a nice happy monochrome screen that *always works* still.
You're just jelous because I have a 9 inch floppy
(and yes, I really do, mounted in a 10 inch square picture frame, behind glass, hanging on my wall to the side of my computer desk)
I just got my first spam ever to my
Same link minus the ccats-20 crap. Why bother to even post anonymously?/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0672324547