Original Spectrum 128's are quite rare because IIRC they were only produced for a few months before being replaced by the +/+2. (I have one in pretty good condition that my dad was still using through the 90s because it ran some old medical software). The case was made using the same molds as the QL.
Before you go off and invest large sums of money in more daft micropayments schemes, you might want to read this article about why consumers don't accept them:
The reasons aren't obvious. I've seen this myth before, notably from Microsoft employees. The idea that you can be "infected" by simply looking at GPLd code is nonsense.
Indeed you are correct. Imagine it like this. I write books for a living. I read a detective novel. Therefore I am banned from writing a detective novel... Erm, I don't think so.
Ironically, proprietary code is generally far more "infectious". I work on Wine - if I were to have seen the Windows code, I would be immediately banned from working on it, indeed, probably I'd be banned from working on most GPLd code.
While the Wine developers might or might not do this, there would be nothing illegal about working on Wine, provided you didn't do the obvious things like cutting and pasting large chunks of code.
Reminds me of the old Windows 1.0 days... Looked just like that, except not as advanced.
Actually it looks very little like Windows 1.0 (speaking as someone who actually used it - for work). Windows 1.0 didn't have overlapping windows, but was graphical. Twin is the opposite way around.
It is very strongly reminiscent of Quarterdeck's DESQview, screenshots circa 1988. It could run textual and graphical apps side by side - pretty revolutionary (in the PeeCee world) for the time.
At the last company I worked for I was mostly in charge of hiring developers. I used Joel's interview technique very effectively to locate smart people who Get Things Done. This has
several sections, one of which is a wild
question like "How many trucks does it take
to move Mt Fuji".
Unfortunately it was disappointing how few people did well in the interview. I forget the exact numbers of course, but I must have looked at 500 CVs in my time there, interviewed perhaps 30 people, and hired 2.
Another great technique we found was to install a computer with Linux on it in the interview room, and prepare a bunch of tests. Example: create a directory full of filenames in UPPERCASE and ask the candidate to use "any tools available" to convert the names to lowercase. We had the
screen projected up on the wall of the interview
room so everyone could see, and we gave the candidates
no help.
The first thing you notice is: this guy doesn't know Linux. At least 50% of the candidates
didn't know about "ls" and "cd"! (These are people
who claim Linux on their CVs, interviewing
for a job which requires Linux on their desktop).
The second thing you notice is the difference
between the top 1% whom we hired and the bottom
75% is something like 20 to 1 differential in
their knowledge.
It was an eye-opener. I now no longer trust
pimps^Wrecruitment consultants as far as I can
throw them.
In an interesting review they would have managed
to work out how to use Linux and run some 64 bit apps
instead of "Look mom, I can run Windoze, I'm so
1337, and look, I can download some 32 bit benchmarks and take screenshots too!"
You've obviously not tried to use Kaffe for any serious work.
Blackdown is a port of Sun's JVM.
You might have mentioned IBM's JVM, but that's just as proprietary as Sun's.
Remember that the JVM includes libraries, and without a complete set of working, compatible, debugged libraries your Java development is basically fscked.
It immediately creates the notion that Java is a proprietary language.
Which it is, or might as well be. Until gcj came along (and it's not there yet) there were no free implementations of Java, and any development you did could at any time have been razed had Sun decided not to give their JVM away for free.
Compare to C - multiple free, high-quality implementations. Compare to Perl - one extremely high-quality free implementation and it's a considerably better thought out and more powerful language to boot.
I'm half way through this book, and it's absolutely brilliant. For once a refreshing insight into the problems at NASA and a vision of how to actually explore Mars, by an engineer who's qualified to know what he's talking about.
I haven't been to see a "Big Media" film in 6 months. I haven't purchased a DVD or Video in that time (except second hand). If you're still going to the cinema or still buying DVDs and videos, then you are explicitly supporting the companies who are attacking Johansen.
This begs the question: why bother with checking any prior art anyways? Why not just reduce the USPTO to a "copyright" sort of office, where anybody can file a patent for anything, and the courts decide?
The problem is that if I get a cease-and-desist from
someone who holds a patent on dog-walking or
whatever, it is very expensive for me to
defend myself in court. If I don't defend myself,
then I could end up losing by default.
Such patents have a chilling effect on development: people instinctively avoid
working in these areas, even when there is
plenty of prior art so they have no reason
to fear.
A better solution would be for the patent
office to be paid to find prior art, rather
than the current system where they seem to
be paid to rubber-stamp dubious patents.
Rich. (IANAL, but I have written and submitted 2 patents:-)
I run several mailing lists on a 486 DX 2 (66 MHz IIRC). I also read my mail off the same box. How would you choose numbers that wouldn't impede me reading mail, yet would stop a spammer using the latest wizzy n-GHz Pentium IIIIII?
Rich.
Re:Market morphology?
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 3, Informative
As the co-author of a moderately popular FTP server, I think it's a great shame that FTP is regarded as a second-class citizen in the world of the web.
FTP is a quirky, extensible protocol, great for uploading, downloading and sharing files, and you can do wonderful things with FTP and databases which web servers only dream about.
Except that it does help with
avoidance. If my cunningly placed black bolt causes
my numberplate to be misread, then one of two things
happens: either the other plate doesn't exist, or
some innocent sucker gets a fine. In either case
the photo can then be checked by hand and such
details as the colour/make of car can be checked to
find the real plate and real owner.
- It would be a money sink that would never pay back its construction costs - a tax money sink, because no commercial firm could ever get investment funding (not this side of AD 3000 anyhow).
The cost is actually quite modest. Figures
between $5bn and $40bn have been mentioned. At
the lower end of the scale, this is about 15
shuttle launches. At the high end, it's a tiny
fraction of the US defence budget. The benefits to the first
company or government who does this are the
ability to launch satellites at a tiny cost,
build further space elevators for (relatively)
next to nothing, and in the long term the full
exploration and exploitation of natural resources
in space.
- It would be the worst sort of governmental monopoly, a choke point where everyone must bow and scrape to the groundbound owners, in order to get a lift.
This is certainly true in the short term. In
the longer term, many elevators can be built
by different companies and governments. (Only
the first elevator is expensive - once that's
working the others are cheap to build).
- It would be The Definitive Terrorist Target - and the bad guys only have to get lucky once. It would be utterly indefensible from a simple kamikaze attack, being so long that no weapons installation could keep cover over its whole length without weighing it down.
The proposal is to have an exclusion zone around
of the order of 10-100 miles. It would be
extremely hard to fly unnoticed into such an
area. Attacks from underneath (submarines, etc)
and attacks from people actually travelling on
the elevator are harder to deal with. In the
end it doesn't matter however. Once one elevator
is up, you build more, and you keep a few
reels of carbon nanotubes "parked" in space to
cover this eventuality and natural disasters.
- And it would be a catastrophe waiting to happen, when (not if) it snaps and rains megatons of carbon cable down upon the ground below.
Yes, we've all read Kim Stanley Robinson too.
He's a good writer, but not a great scientist.
A break in the cable is most likely to happen
in the first 20-40 miles (ie. in the atmosphere).
So the 20-40 miles of cable drops down - into
the exclusion zone which is just a harmless area
of sea. The top part slowly drifts off into
space. There's even the possibility of
repairing a broken cable by lowering more down
to earth before it drifts off.
Just encrypt all your files, encode as likely looking web pages, and upload them to your website. Wait for google to cache them.. presto, instant backup.
Slashdot Mirror
Rich.
I remember that bomber game! Wasn't it called B52 or something. Probably typed in from Your Computer ...
The Japanese have had fairly low-resolution (640 x 480) single use digital cameras since at least Nov 2001. I saw them there on a trip to Tokyo.
Rich.
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/microp ayments.html
Rich.
OCaml has all the above advantages, but with a MUCH smaller memory footprint and C-like speed.
Rich.
The reasons aren't obvious. I've seen this myth before, notably from Microsoft employees. The idea that you can be "infected" by simply looking at GPLd code is nonsense.
Indeed you are correct. Imagine it like this. I write books for a living. I read a detective novel. Therefore I am banned from writing a detective novel. .. Erm, I don't think so.
Ironically, proprietary code is generally far more "infectious". I work on Wine - if I were to have seen the Windows code, I would be immediately banned from working on it, indeed, probably I'd be banned from working on most GPLd code.
While the Wine developers might or might not do this, there would be nothing illegal about working on Wine, provided you didn't do the obvious things like cutting and pasting large chunks of code.
Rich.
Reminds me of the old Windows 1.0 days... Looked just like that, except not as advanced.
Actually it looks very little like Windows 1.0 (speaking as someone who actually used it - for work). Windows 1.0 didn't have overlapping windows, but was graphical. Twin is the opposite way around.
It is very strongly reminiscent of Quarterdeck's DESQview, screenshots circa 1988. It could run textual and graphical apps side by side - pretty revolutionary (in the PeeCee world) for the time.
Rich.
Rich.
At the last company I worked for I was mostly in charge of hiring developers. I used Joel's interview technique very effectively to locate smart people who Get Things Done. This has several sections, one of which is a wild question like "How many trucks does it take to move Mt Fuji".
Unfortunately it was disappointing how few people did well in the interview. I forget the exact numbers of course, but I must have looked at 500 CVs in my time there, interviewed perhaps 30 people, and hired 2.
Another great technique we found was to install a computer with Linux on it in the interview room, and prepare a bunch of tests. Example: create a directory full of filenames in UPPERCASE and ask the candidate to use "any tools available" to convert the names to lowercase. We had the screen projected up on the wall of the interview room so everyone could see, and we gave the candidates no help.
The first thing you notice is: this guy doesn't know Linux. At least 50% of the candidates didn't know about "ls" and "cd"! (These are people who claim Linux on their CVs, interviewing for a job which requires Linux on their desktop).
The second thing you notice is the difference between the top 1% whom we hired and the bottom 75% is something like 20 to 1 differential in their knowledge.
It was an eye-opener. I now no longer trust pimps^Wrecruitment consultants as far as I can throw them.
Rich.
In an interesting review they would have managed to work out how to use Linux and run some 64 bit apps instead of "Look mom, I can run Windoze, I'm so 1337, and look, I can download some 32 bit benchmarks and take screenshots too!"
You've obviously not tried to use Kaffe for any serious work.
Blackdown is a port of Sun's JVM.
You might have mentioned IBM's JVM, but that's just as proprietary as Sun's.
Remember that the JVM includes libraries, and without a complete set of working, compatible, debugged libraries your Java development is basically fscked.
Rich.
It immediately creates the notion that Java is a proprietary language.
Which it is, or might as well be. Until gcj came along (and it's not there yet) there were no free implementations of Java, and any development you did could at any time have been razed had Sun decided not to give their JVM away for free.
Compare to C - multiple free, high-quality implementations. Compare to Perl - one extremely high-quality free implementation and it's a considerably better thought out and more powerful language to boot.
Rich.
Rich.
Red Hat ES is $349 or $799.
Red Hat AS is $1499 or $2499!!! Holy @#$%!
No, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (AS|ES|AW) is just as free as Red Hat Linux. The fees above are an optional annual support fee.
Rich.
http://www.annexia.org/freeware/cpptemplates/index .msp
Rich.
Rich.
The problem is that if I get a cease-and-desist from someone who holds a patent on dog-walking or whatever, it is very expensive for me to defend myself in court. If I don't defend myself, then I could end up losing by default.
Such patents have a chilling effect on development: people instinctively avoid working in these areas, even when there is plenty of prior art so they have no reason to fear.
A better solution would be for the patent office to be paid to find prior art, rather than the current system where they seem to be paid to rubber-stamp dubious patents.
Rich. (IANAL, but I have written and submitted 2 patents :-)
Rich.
Rich.
Rich.
FTP is a quirky, extensible protocol, great for uploading, downloading and sharing files, and you can do wonderful things with FTP and databases which web servers only dream about.
Rich.
Rich.
- It would be a money sink that would never pay back its construction costs - a tax money sink, because no commercial firm could ever get investment funding (not this side of AD 3000 anyhow).
The cost is actually quite modest. Figures between $5bn and $40bn have been mentioned. At the lower end of the scale, this is about 15 shuttle launches. At the high end, it's a tiny fraction of the US defence budget. The benefits to the first company or government who does this are the ability to launch satellites at a tiny cost, build further space elevators for (relatively) next to nothing, and in the long term the full exploration and exploitation of natural resources in space.- It would be the worst sort of governmental monopoly, a choke point where everyone must bow and scrape to the groundbound owners, in order to get a lift.
This is certainly true in the short term. In the longer term, many elevators can be built by different companies and governments. (Only the first elevator is expensive - once that's working the others are cheap to build).- It would be The Definitive Terrorist Target - and the bad guys only have to get lucky once. It would be utterly indefensible from a simple kamikaze attack, being so long that no weapons installation could keep cover over its whole length without weighing it down.
The proposal is to have an exclusion zone around of the order of 10-100 miles. It would be extremely hard to fly unnoticed into such an area. Attacks from underneath (submarines, etc) and attacks from people actually travelling on the elevator are harder to deal with. In the end it doesn't matter however. Once one elevator is up, you build more, and you keep a few reels of carbon nanotubes "parked" in space to cover this eventuality and natural disasters.- And it would be a catastrophe waiting to happen, when (not if) it snaps and rains megatons of carbon cable down upon the ground below.
Yes, we've all read Kim Stanley Robinson too. He's a good writer, but not a great scientist. A break in the cable is most likely to happen in the first 20-40 miles (ie. in the atmosphere). So the 20-40 miles of cable drops down - into the exclusion zone which is just a harmless area of sea. The top part slowly drifts off into space. There's even the possibility of repairing a broken cable by lowering more down to earth before it drifts off.Rich.
Rich.
Ah, but where is arial???