Exactly. Grant the patent and somebody else has to go to court. Deny the patent and YOU have to go to court...
Sorry, but PTO workers are gov-scale paid workers...there ain't enough in their salary to deal with all those lawyers. Better to pass the patent and pass the buck.
actually, the auctions page at amazon also has the buy-it-now feature...wonder if they're up for a patent exchange, giving the jackass who filed the suit full free rights to use "one click", even though he really is trying to live only through the patent, and not through providing a real service for anybody. bloody parasite.
Actually, you no longer need the date either. The dates were originally standard practice because copyrights expired based solely on the work's own creation time. With the extensions, its now based on the author's death except in cases of "work for hire" for corporations, which are of a limited time but keep getting extended (i.e., the Sonny Bono act done to keep Mickey in the hands of Disney). (actually, i'm sure you already know this). Keeping the date in the clause now serves the purposes of personal record keeping, adherance to the tradition of dating the work (from when dates were required), and personal protection against infringement by later copycats. Its not necessary, but still useful.
You know, by the description here, it sounds like its running exactly under I-405, the Santa Monica freeway, which is already one of the biggest faults LA's ever had...
and that's a lousy attempt at your own April Fool's joke. I know the 1976 movie exists, as it was just on one of the Starz network channels about 2 months ago.
And as for Talk Show hosts making movies, David Hartman of Good Morning America during the 1970s was in a made for TV remake of Miracle on 34th Street back then.
Actually, in addition to speed, the reason nobody did forums as well as merchandise sales was that the database requirements would have been prohibitive in disk space, which was still a BIG limitation on things at the time, financially. We hadn't even reached $1 / meg, much less $1 / gig. $1/100K had just crossed out of wishful thinking and into reality.
I was buying CD's online from CDConnection.com through their telnet-based interface back in 1989, pre-WWW. Had the machines been fast enough to support both cd sales and forums, they would have had them. At the time, nobody bothered to combine the two because the networks and servers weren't fast enough to handle the traffic.
This crap should have been thrown out in a combination of BOTH prior art and obviousness.
Agreed. Moore's Law is not "everything gets faster every 18 months", its "the number of transistors per square inch on a silicon chip doubles every 18 months". The increase in speed is the result of the shorter path the electrons take running through the chip, optimized in Intel's case by increasing the # of instructions available to speed up those calculations through tight specialized sections of the chip.
The other way to speed is to make the chip smaller, but with the same instruction set. In the case of RISC, this was to go to an even smaller instruction set that it did blindingly fast.
Speed limits right now really are still set by the bus, the memory size and speed, and disk access times. Sure, blind calculation is fast, but its not what people see anymore. What they see is machines working about the same as they were 5 years ago as far as response times go because Windows, browsers, Office, and games are still pushing their memory to its limits, causing page faults & increased disk access.
As far as I know, the EFF and the LPF (in its heyday) in spite of their efforts, have not been involved in a successful patent-infringement defense (whether the original patent was valid or not).
I'm not going to count on them or on anybody in this yet, as almost all of these are settled out of court (keeping the patent valid to the bane of free/open software development everywhere).
b.t.w., LPF Patent Page -- the patent described in the image at the top (XOR in screen bitmap cursors) is now out of date (filed in '78) and expired. Does that mean someone in XF86 will finally make xor-based cursors?
The real benefit I see to SBC in this is that they want to encourage people to have satellite tv since satellite TV subscribers usually have DSL and not cable modems. They may try and cut you some deal if you sign up for both, a "switch away from your cable company" kind of deal.
Yeah, but why acquire a National level service for a regional market gain? It may do well to be taking on the cable companies in its region to offering home-'net services, but 1) home 'net services aren't terribly profitable (and will get worse as it will eventually overload the existing backbone connection and force expensive upgrades), and 2) it only covers what, one 4th of the nation? Excess attention to the one region will eventually turn the satellite service into a regional service and force the other 3/4ths of the country to switch to the competitor who's still thinking nationally.
But others are already trying stuff like this Marillion is planning to release a DVD of a significant portion of their upcoming convention performance of their album Afraid of Sunlight the day after the concert.
As for the sound quality:
To quote Robert Fripp, talking of the B'Boom official bootleg of '94:
Soundboard mixes are not representative of what an audience might hear. Those instruments which are naturally louder in the theatre are not likely to be as loud in the P.A. Panning is also likely to be more extreme in a theatre, where audiences on the right might not hear a carefully placed shaker on the left. But there are refreshingly different perspectives, also intriguing close-ups on drum kits and internal guitar panning, which would never get past the censorship of a studio and good taste. Which is maybe one reason why bootlegs are popular......
In any instance, at least the production of the music is already paid for by the ticket sales.
As for mass-pressing the CDs to order, well, I really don't know how they're going to manage that...
As for the legality of it, well, its dependent on the artists relationship with the record label. Some labels hold to their exclusive rights (even as the same label would never release a live album since live albums became "kiss of death" to groups like Heart, INXS, and Poison (though its partially coincidental, as the same year as those live albums were released, Nirvana showed up and changed the whole pop-rock music genre). Anyways, the label would have to take a cut, likely.
As for providing this technology to bands NOT on the majors, its a significant achievement. Not that I want CC's hands in it, per se, but combine this with mp3.com, and you have an alliance that could finally bring enough promotion to a group to allow them some significant success without signing a slave-labor faust contract to a label.
stupid "html formatting". Didn't slashdot used to add tags automatically even in html mode?
there will be a better formatted copy of that at my blog, if you're interested. http://acroyear70.livejournal.com/
The interviewees seemed to have forgotten some aspects of American comic book history.
First off, the "other genres" besides superheroes were certainly in full swing from the 40s to the 60s, and comic-book renditions of "the classics" were the cliffnotes of the time, helping many a kid scrape his way through high school english classes.
However, those died out for the same reason comics today are 1) expensive, and 2) a collector's hobby only.
They don't seem to realize that the collectibility and financial factor of comic books changed everything. Kids might as youngsters still get "archie", but as kids learned of the history of comics and what the old ones fetch nowadays, it makes them very choosy over what from the current selection they get. Its not like music or movies where there are thousands of releases, but only a few sell millions of copies/dollars.
Its more like real book publishing here. Either it sells well enough because people think its quality will make it collectible, or its utterly forgotten and never talked about again...and that decision is made within 4 issues, or even within a "preview" of the material as guests or 2nd stories in other comics.
Thus, comic publishing companies have in a sense more at risk than the movie studios. To keep that quality up takes time (hence the monthly release schedule), and money. Collectors want stuff that will survive over time (how many copies of Action #38 were lost just because they fell apart?), and thus will pay the higher price for the higher quality paper and ink. Add to that the fact that this expense, which shrunk the customer base, has led to a reduction in the # and size of comic book stores (and thus, reduced shelf space for holding more "latest issues"); the retail stores are also very heavily hit by distribution costs -- the gas price rise of the '91 gulf war and '92 recession hit the market fairly hard.
The price is set by the distributor/publisher, and incorporates shipping costs into it. But when the price doesn't change in reflection of the increase in shipping costs, the retailer is the one that eats the loss. Many couldn't afford it and had to diversify into carrying toys and games, especially the collectable card games ("Magic", et al) in order to stay afloat during the 90s.
Cheap distribution is a BIG deal in Japan. Americans get quite worked up with how "cheap" things are in other countries like England, France, Japan, Italy, etc, and forget that those places are TINY compared to us. Its a day's drive to deliver things in most european countries, compared to a week or more for coast to coast, more than 7-10 times the cost regardless of the gas prices.
Like with "clerks" as a movie, or other low-budget works in other media, its possible that a "high quality product" can come out of a low budget release (i.e., trying to put a comic book out for less than $1 an issue), but one has to be absolutely sure of the product to manage it. Truthfully, one really can only sell as many issues as the best selling comic out there, and if you can't make a profit on that #, you can't enter the market.
Joe
Re:I've used something exatly like this for months
on
Shell Simulation Via CGI
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Doesn't need to run vi. An experienced Unix user (with a malicious streak) could easily come up with some sed and awk to muck around with just about anything...
keep in mind, if a file can be read by "anybody" (/etc/passwd is one of these), it can be read (via/bin/cat) by "nobody".
No they can't get passwords, but it allows them to get the list of users on the box and quickly reduce the # of options when it comes to running passwd dictionary scripts for login attempts.
Well, it would be different if, say like Disney's Mary Poppins or the upcoming Roger Rabbit, if the first version was the full $30 price, and then the new release with extras was also $30.
LOTR:Fellowship theatrical version went out in a "its too cheap to pass up" $15 price tag. Had it been for $30, people would have easily said "I can wait", but for $15 its "well, as long as its that cheap..."
This matrix edition is for 1) the absolute nutso diehards (every movie has them), and 2) those that just got dvd players THIS christmas, and didn't get the matrix (less hype at the time, due to the hype around LOTR) for it yet and still *need* to get it. Sure, those who had players when Matrix came out on disc got it, as did those who got dvd players for christmas that year (or even the next year), but this past year, not everybody who got one picked it up, so there's plenty of new customers to hype to.
Come to think of it, that was where the inspiration for my post came from...decent book, though I failed utterly in convincing my bosses to triple my salary;-)
Mission Critical software, such as for example, the Space Shuttle, falls under the Software Engineering banner, not so much the Software Development banner that is most of what's released commercially and internally.
The rules for Software Engineering are to assume that things won't change (there's hardware involved that has to meet the same predesigned specifications that was supplied to the software vendors to integrate with), and that changes have to be approved at several levels before being applied.
Its slow, messy, bureaucratic, and its the reason we haven't lost a Space Shuttle for a computer bug. Would that the Mars missions were so specific -- consider what happened when what could/should have been caught by a design and code review and unit and integration testing (usually required in software engineering as well as XP) in a simulator (a metric->english non-conversion).
Unfortunately, JUnit's graphical runner did not follow [JINI's] class loading model, and worked in a way that prevented class loading [...]
I found the same problem when working with Ant and XML in JUnit, because the Ant system does its own class loader for the underlying XML parser, and my stuff got a LinkageError thrown when I tried to instantiate a parser, forcing me in a utility class to catch that error and call the good old fashioned "new" on the parser class within Xerces2.
just think, in about 75 million years, Antarctica will have started moving away from the pole and headed back up north into warmer waters again. These guys are just getting a head start on the tourism trade with an early lead on Burger Kings and Gas Stations (McDonalds can't afford a new store right now). Heck, you can probably put a billboard on there for pennies a day! You won't get THAT price when the average temperature is 60deg again...
as in they've given us a variation on the prisoner's dilemna -- if nobody asks for it, nobody gets it. if one person asks for it and the other refuses, then one person gets the money and the other gets screwed. if both people ask for it, nobody gets it.
just goes to show the RIAA still doesn't respect us and wants us in our place -- as prisoners to their control over our entertainment.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Grant the patent and somebody else has to go to court. Deny the patent and YOU have to go to court...
Sorry, but PTO workers are gov-scale paid workers...there ain't enough in their salary to deal with all those lawyers. Better to pass the patent and pass the buck.
...for years now, well before the filing date of 1998. There's got to be PLENTY of prior-art for this sort of thing...
actually, the auctions page at amazon also has the buy-it-now feature...wonder if they're up for a patent exchange, giving the jackass who filed the suit full free rights to use "one click", even though he really is trying to live only through the patent, and not through providing a real service for anybody. bloody parasite.
Zork, et al., Star Raiders, MULE, 7 Cities of Gold.
Actually, you no longer need the date either. The dates were originally standard practice because copyrights expired based solely on the work's own creation time. With the extensions, its now based on the author's death except in cases of "work for hire" for corporations, which are of a limited time but keep getting extended (i.e., the Sonny Bono act done to keep Mickey in the hands of Disney). (actually, i'm sure you already know this). Keeping the date in the clause now serves the purposes of personal record keeping, adherance to the tradition of dating the work (from when dates were required), and personal protection against infringement by later copycats. Its not necessary, but still useful.
You know, by the description here, it sounds like its running exactly under I-405, the Santa Monica freeway, which is already one of the biggest faults LA's ever had...
and that's a lousy attempt at your own April Fool's joke. I know the 1976 movie exists, as it was just on one of the Starz network channels about 2 months ago.
And as for Talk Show hosts making movies, David Hartman of Good Morning America during the 1970s was in a made for TV remake of Miracle on 34th Street back then.
So neither of your comments hold up...
Uh, they DID make a new King Kong, in 1976, with Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange.
Actually, in addition to speed, the reason nobody did forums as well as merchandise sales was that the database requirements would have been prohibitive in disk space, which was still a BIG limitation on things at the time, financially. We hadn't even reached $1 / meg, much less $1 / gig. $1/100K had just crossed out of wishful thinking and into reality.
I was buying CD's online from CDConnection.com through their telnet-based interface back in 1989, pre-WWW. Had the machines been fast enough to support both cd sales and forums, they would have had them. At the time, nobody bothered to combine the two because the networks and servers weren't fast enough to handle the traffic.
This crap should have been thrown out in a combination of BOTH prior art and obviousness.
Agreed. Moore's Law is not "everything gets faster every 18 months", its "the number of transistors per square inch on a silicon chip doubles every 18 months". The increase in speed is the result of the shorter path the electrons take running through the chip, optimized in Intel's case by increasing the # of instructions available to speed up those calculations through tight specialized sections of the chip.
The other way to speed is to make the chip smaller, but with the same instruction set. In the case of RISC, this was to go to an even smaller instruction set that it did blindingly fast.
Speed limits right now really are still set by the bus, the memory size and speed, and disk access times. Sure, blind calculation is fast, but its not what people see anymore. What they see is machines working about the same as they were 5 years ago as far as response times go because Windows, browsers, Office, and games are still pushing their memory to its limits, causing page faults & increased disk access.
As far as I know, the EFF and the LPF (in its heyday) in spite of their efforts, have not been involved in a successful patent-infringement defense (whether the original patent was valid or not).
I'm not going to count on them or on anybody in this yet, as almost all of these are settled out of court (keeping the patent valid to the bane of free/open software development everywhere).
b.t.w., LPF Patent Page -- the patent described in the image at the top (XOR in screen bitmap cursors) is now out of date (filed in '78) and expired. Does that mean someone in XF86 will finally make xor-based cursors?
Yeah, but why acquire a National level service for a regional market gain? It may do well to be taking on the cable companies in its region to offering home-'net services, but 1) home 'net services aren't terribly profitable (and will get worse as it will eventually overload the existing backbone connection and force expensive upgrades), and 2) it only covers what, one 4th of the nation? Excess attention to the one region will eventually turn the satellite service into a regional service and force the other 3/4ths of the country to switch to the competitor who's still thinking nationally.
As for the sound quality:
To quote Robert Fripp, talking of the B'Boom official bootleg of '94:
In any instance, at least the production of the music is already paid for by the ticket sales.
As for mass-pressing the CDs to order, well, I really don't know how they're going to manage that...
As for the legality of it, well, its dependent on the artists relationship with the record label. Some labels hold to their exclusive rights (even as the same label would never release a live album since live albums became "kiss of death" to groups like Heart, INXS, and Poison (though its partially coincidental, as the same year as those live albums were released, Nirvana showed up and changed the whole pop-rock music genre). Anyways, the label would have to take a cut, likely.
As for providing this technology to bands NOT on the majors, its a significant achievement. Not that I want CC's hands in it, per se, but combine this with mp3.com, and you have an alliance that could finally bring enough promotion to a group to allow them some significant success without signing a slave-labor faust contract to a label.
stupid "html formatting". Didn't slashdot used to add
tags automatically even in html mode? there will be a better formatted copy of that at my blog, if you're interested. http://acroyear70.livejournal.com/
The interviewees seemed to have forgotten some aspects of American comic book history. First off, the "other genres" besides superheroes were certainly in full swing from the 40s to the 60s, and comic-book renditions of "the classics" were the cliffnotes of the time, helping many a kid scrape his way through high school english classes. However, those died out for the same reason comics today are 1) expensive, and 2) a collector's hobby only. They don't seem to realize that the collectibility and financial factor of comic books changed everything. Kids might as youngsters still get "archie", but as kids learned of the history of comics and what the old ones fetch nowadays, it makes them very choosy over what from the current selection they get. Its not like music or movies where there are thousands of releases, but only a few sell millions of copies/dollars. Its more like real book publishing here. Either it sells well enough because people think its quality will make it collectible, or its utterly forgotten and never talked about again...and that decision is made within 4 issues, or even within a "preview" of the material as guests or 2nd stories in other comics. Thus, comic publishing companies have in a sense more at risk than the movie studios. To keep that quality up takes time (hence the monthly release schedule), and money. Collectors want stuff that will survive over time (how many copies of Action #38 were lost just because they fell apart?), and thus will pay the higher price for the higher quality paper and ink. Add to that the fact that this expense, which shrunk the customer base, has led to a reduction in the # and size of comic book stores (and thus, reduced shelf space for holding more "latest issues"); the retail stores are also very heavily hit by distribution costs -- the gas price rise of the '91 gulf war and '92 recession hit the market fairly hard. The price is set by the distributor/publisher, and incorporates shipping costs into it. But when the price doesn't change in reflection of the increase in shipping costs, the retailer is the one that eats the loss. Many couldn't afford it and had to diversify into carrying toys and games, especially the collectable card games ("Magic", et al) in order to stay afloat during the 90s. Cheap distribution is a BIG deal in Japan. Americans get quite worked up with how "cheap" things are in other countries like England, France, Japan, Italy, etc, and forget that those places are TINY compared to us. Its a day's drive to deliver things in most european countries, compared to a week or more for coast to coast, more than 7-10 times the cost regardless of the gas prices. Like with "clerks" as a movie, or other low-budget works in other media, its possible that a "high quality product" can come out of a low budget release (i.e., trying to put a comic book out for less than $1 an issue), but one has to be absolutely sure of the product to manage it. Truthfully, one really can only sell as many issues as the best selling comic out there, and if you can't make a profit on that #, you can't enter the market. Joe
Doesn't need to run vi. An experienced Unix user (with a malicious streak) could easily come up with some sed and awk to muck around with just about anything... keep in mind, if a file can be read by "anybody" (/etc/passwd is one of these), it can be read (via /bin/cat) by "nobody".
No they can't get passwords, but it allows them to get the list of users on the box and quickly reduce the # of options when it comes to running passwd dictionary scripts for login attempts.
Well, it would be different if, say like Disney's Mary Poppins or the upcoming Roger Rabbit, if the first version was the full $30 price, and then the new release with extras was also $30. LOTR:Fellowship theatrical version went out in a "its too cheap to pass up" $15 price tag. Had it been for $30, people would have easily said "I can wait", but for $15 its "well, as long as its that cheap..." This matrix edition is for 1) the absolute nutso diehards (every movie has them), and 2) those that just got dvd players THIS christmas, and didn't get the matrix (less hype at the time, due to the hype around LOTR) for it yet and still *need* to get it. Sure, those who had players when Matrix came out on disc got it, as did those who got dvd players for christmas that year (or even the next year), but this past year, not everybody who got one picked it up, so there's plenty of new customers to hype to.
Not sure of its been posted by anyone on the two threads, but here's a Radar Image of the debris rain being picked up by weather stations.
Here's the comics search. Note they're in reverse order.
Come to think of it, that was where the inspiration for my post came from...decent book, though I failed utterly in convincing my bosses to triple my salary ;-)
The rules for Software Engineering are to assume that things won't change (there's hardware involved that has to meet the same predesigned specifications that was supplied to the software vendors to integrate with), and that changes have to be approved at several levels before being applied.
Its slow, messy, bureaucratic, and its the reason we haven't lost a Space Shuttle for a computer bug. Would that the Mars missions were so specific -- consider what happened when what could/should have been caught by a design and code review and unit and integration testing (usually required in software engineering as well as XP) in a simulator (a metric->english non-conversion).
I found the same problem when working with Ant and XML in JUnit, because the Ant system does its own class loader for the underlying XML parser, and my stuff got a LinkageError thrown when I tried to instantiate a parser, forcing me in a utility class to catch that error and call the good old fashioned "new" on the parser class within Xerces2.
just think, in about 75 million years, Antarctica will have started moving away from the pole and headed back up north into warmer waters again. These guys are just getting a head start on the tourism trade with an early lead on Burger Kings and Gas Stations (McDonalds can't afford a new store right now). Heck, you can probably put a billboard on there for pennies a day! You won't get THAT price when the average temperature is 60deg again...
as in they've given us a variation on the prisoner's dilemna -- if nobody asks for it, nobody gets it. if one person asks for it and the other refuses, then one person gets the money and the other gets screwed. if both people ask for it, nobody gets it. just goes to show the RIAA still doesn't respect us and wants us in our place -- as prisoners to their control over our entertainment.