Among the various "hacks" done to the Comodore Pet, perhaps the most bizzare was connecting three modems to a 64K PET and "timesharing" the computer with a rudimentary operating system. This could support up to 4 simultaneous users (including the console user) and do some of the really cool stuff you could do with timeshared environments (well before the internet was even available to the casual hobbiest). From what I understood, this was all with a "stock" PET, except for perhaps the extra modems.
It had a really strog users community at the time, and some really interesting experiemnts took place on that platform that in some ways seem to have been forgotten.
This is just a thought, and some random ramblings, but what about if you launch this thing from lunar orbit?
First of all, although only a dozen people ever got to walk on the moon, there were another dozen who at least got to orbit the moon (including preparatory missions like Apollo 8 & 10 as well as the command module pilots) This way you are outside of the Van Allen Belts, but still close enough to home that other vehicles could get you to your "spacecraft" without having to burn fuel to get there in the first place.
In many ways it is too bad that the Jupiter rocket was never built (that was to follow the Saturn V... and talk about a monster rocket!) One of the early proposals was to send people to the moon by building a large earth-orbiting space station and then sending the moon craft directly from a docking bay of a space station. Von Braun pushed for the method eventually used (with a direct take-off from the ground, and everything brought with them). Had the orbiting station been built (for admittedly more money), at least there would have been an established infrastructure to build upon for future missions.
Unforunately all we got out of all the money spent by NASA for a space infrastructure is Kennedy Space Center (which still is an accomplishment) and a bunch of souviners scattered over Australia when Skylab came crashing down. Oh, and I can't forget the 5 space shuttles. Wow! What a marvelous space infrastructure to really go places!
I can't speak from any specific comments or commitments from Borland, but there HAS already been a port of Delphi to the Alpha processor (mainly as something to run native with Windows NT running on an Alpha box). Much of the compiler core is written in Object Pascal, as well as the IDE (which was written with Delphi), so I can't imagine that it would be particularly difficult to port to other environments.
Porting from Windows to Linux is a much bigger step than going from an i386 platform to some of the other architectures, especially if you can make sure the system calls are consistant. That is one big bonus that Linux has over the Microsoft products.
I was just thinking that for folks who are blind or otherwise visually impared could really use a monitor like this, especially if it were used in a display environment where folks who are also not so handicapped would also be able to use the same device.
I imagine that there are some braile reading devices already, but this certainly could be used in a manner like that, allowing you to view web pages in braile and even grab images with some false relief so they can enjoy some of the benefits of the web as well. At least this is a very pratcial application for even using a two-height display.
This could also be useful in applications where you need to have a configurable tactile display, such as the classic bridge controls found in the Star Trek TV series (post TOS). As you are pushing buttons you can change the "feel" of the user interface, and even "vibrate" the buttons to give a tactile response.
Yeah, I think you could find some customers for something like this, even at the $8800 price tag.
Several years ago Coca-Cola was in the process of doing a major land purchase in the small Central American country of Belize (which borders Mexico and Guatamala). When they were thorugh with the initial proposal, Coke would have owned approximately 60%-75% of all of the land in the country. This effect was something similar to somebody purchasing 60%-70% of a company's stock in the stock market.
From what I last heard, Coca-Cola backed down on the project because of the PR reprecusions from "owning" their own country in a very literal sense. If there were a company who didn't care so much about PR perception, especially if they were principally an industrial supplier, they probabally could get away with doing something that bold. At least it is an idea to consider... or at least a good plotline for a science fiction novel.
In terms of more local poltical juristictions, this already happens. At the beginning of the 20th Century, coal mining companies routinely established "company towns" where the mining company literally owned everything, from the schools, police, fire departments, banks, grocery stores, and homes. (For a non-confrontational view of this, watch the movie "October Sky", which uses the coal town as a story background to a surpurbly geeky moive)
This was probabally best described by Tennessee Ernie Ford in the song Sixteen Tons where he sings about life in a coal town. (BTW, the link has the lyrics and a real-audio recording of the song.)
A company cannot criminally prosecute you, only a government can. A company can sue you in civil court and the First Amendment is not and never has been a defence against that. In any case, First Amendment is binding only on the government, not on private companies.
Sure, you can only be sued by a company, not hauled off to jail, but they can otherwise make your life miserable to where a prison would be preferable. That being said, the first ammendment still applies to private individuals as well. If I walk with a picket sign in front of a business, I can't be stopped with a lawsuit as long as I'm factually correct or expressing my opinion. Sure, there are municipal ordinances saying how I can do something like this or where, but I can't be stopped because this is exactly what the first ammendment is about.... I'm free to say what ever I want and there is nothing you can do to stop me.
A (somewhat) recent encounter between the President of the People's Republic of China and US President Clinton illistrates this point a little more clearly. At the time, the movie "A Walk in Tibet", staring Brad Pitt, was being widly distributed in movie theaters throughout the United States. President Jiang requested that President Clinton force the movie theaters in the US to stop playing this movie, because it portrays China as an agressor country in a manner that the Chinese government didn't appreciate. I'm sure it was a little awkward to explain that not only would President Clinton probabally not do something that raw, he didn't even have the legal authority to even require something like that. Furthermore, an "offical" plea not to watch a movie like that would actually be like free advertising to promote a movie like that here.
The reason why people defend the first ammendment is that the right to speak freely is usually the first citizen privlege to disappear during a crisis. And not everything that can be said about you or anybody else is always pleasant to hear, so there are always some struggle to restrict that speech or discussion. Especially when you are in a position to be able to stop that speech.
Keep in mind that the US government doesn't care how much something costs. "A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money." -- (US Senator Everett Dirksen, Illinois)
Anyway, the point I'm making is that the US government is much more interested in political power, and the abilty to effectively shut down tranportation facilities is a real potent tool. And it looks like it is in the interests of the US government (!= interests of the average citizens of the US) to keep this technlogy in the hands of the US military.
That and the technology to build a real competitor to the GPS satellite system is now available. Consider the costs over doing something like the Iridium, and putting up a competitor to the GPS satellites would be relatively trivial. Other than the fact that the GPS satellite uses a hyper accurate clock, it isn't all that much more complicated than the original Sputnik satellite put up by the USSR. It just transmits the current time and its position (with some accuracy references.) Ground stations are necessary to control the satellites mainly to make sure the clocks are accurate.
With the US government eliminating the intentional errors, they have dried up the market for all potential early users of a GPS alternative. I always thought it was a stupid thing to do anyway... deliberately engineer something to be less accurate than it could be. And introduce bugs and other problems in trying to cope with those intentional errors.
Yeah, but if Red Hat really did buy out Microsoft, it would be a major news event... probabally the lead story even for the major network news shows.
My point is that for something to be news, it should be something which is current that most people don't know about. Older web sites would be OK if they've been sitting pretty idle for the most part (and few links to them), but such a site should be an exception.
I would totally agree that the stories themselves need to be moderated as well. There are some times where I wouldn't mind troll'n for some really off the wall stories, but if a story of earth-shattering news comes along (RedHat buys Microsoft OS Div for $10 Million, ect.) you may only want to see those top headlines.
Consider this like the Sunday edition of the New York Times. Sure, there are some interesting stories in the back pages of the travel section, but should that be a "headline" story?
Besides... this is only a natural evolution of the posting moderation. That and the main editors (Rob & Co.) could still have "unlimited" story moderation points to pretty much put things where they want them anyway. It would allow the readers to put a little bit into how they feel about a story as well.
Anyways.... this story is truly stale news. The page info from the server says:
Last Modified: Sunday, August 01, 1999 06:33:45 PM Local time
Or even note that cross reference pages even have a link to/.
The necessity of a Real-time OS
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Get QNX For Free
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There are certainly a number of applications where you need to have quite a bit more control over the operating system than is possible under an OS like Windows 98 or NT.
For the past several years I've been working in a couple of industries where the price of the computer hardware is insignificant, and the driving cost is actually the software development. For the most part, these can be considered machines that are dedicated to one particular task, but we are using a general purpose computer as the platform to operate the system. That you can install MS Word and play Quake on it is besides the point. As a matter of fact, these systems are replacing machines which were built up from discrete IC as dedicated controlers.
One of the problems you encounter is that the designers of an operating system have to make some basic assumptions about what the priorities of certain common tasks should be. Right now we are selling a system running Windows NT which is controlling an outdoor electronic sign (such as the scoreboard at a football stadium). Our fiber-optic output device is trying to send data real-time to the scoreboard 30 times a second, but we are being pre-empted by the hard drive controller. The fact is that we want the hard drive (and the mouse for that matter) to take a back seat for what is the main task, running that sign.
If you are in the medical products industry, the situation becomes even more important. If your computer crashes and needs to reboot, you've just killed somebody. It can cause some problems if your system needs to pause for a couple of seconds to perform a heap cleanup routine. In these situations a lousy operating system is an embaressment when you are selling your product. Industrial controlers are another area where this is important, such as a controller which mixes ingredients in a modern food processing plant. (Opps, I guess we didn't turn that valve off soon enough. I guess we need to dump this batch of food worth $10,000 and try again)
I'll admit that Linux is probabally capable of doing just about everything I've mentioned, but there are some other considerations: As somebody else posted here recently (and I apoligize that I can't remember who or on what article) you can't go wrong buying Microsoft. Like it or not, MS has a reputation with CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and they consider Linux still to be an upstart OS. This is very similar to how IBM has been (and for the more part still is) percieved by these same people. They write in to the bid proposals that you must provide a controller which runs a certain operating system. Sometimes we can influence the people writing the bids and suggest a certain operating system or another, and if you do suggest something they aren't familiar with you need to explain some very clear benefits that a very non-technical person can understand with about one or two minutes of explaination.
The CEO of the company I work for has read about Linux in the Wall Street Journal and some other general magazines, and has suggested we investigate the possibility of developing controllers with it. I'm also keeping an eye out for other OS products, like QNX, which may also help out with our product lines. I will say that I don't think Microsoft products are up to the task for real-time applications, and this is one operating system area that MS has significantly ignored or neglected. It is also an area of OS development that can be extreamly expensive to develop if you havn't planned for it from the very beginning of the OS development.
I'm sorry that I'm commenting on an article that is considered old news now, but I thought I'd put in my $0.02
The Video Toaster on the PC IS an Amiga, just stripped of the keyboard, video drivers, mouse, and all I/O stuff except for a simple serial port. So when you are using the Video Toaster on a PC, just remember what you are working with. IMHO this was one of the few smart things Comodore did with the licensing of Amiga hardware. I'm not sure what they are currently doing for hardware, but I'm pretty sure you could hack into that box and get the Amiga running as a stand-alone box from the Video Toaster if you tried.
One of the problems with using the cellular phone service contract has to do with the use of the phone itself. If you try to weasel your way out of the contract, they can always shut off the phone service, and usually do. And a cell phone that won't send or recieve phone calls is essentially an expensive plastic paperweight.
The problem with this Netpliance system is that it can continue to be used even after it has had the ISP turned off, provided you are able to hack into the thing. So yes, there are some problems with model.
The next thing to consider is more the practicality of a company trying to chase you down legally in court. They will probabally spend far more for the lawyers (case prep work, legal filing fees, ect.) than they could possibly get from you. Some states allow you to sue for court costs as well, but not always. Some prominent people might be sued, or a couple of FUD cases to try and scare people into submission, but probabally not everybody, nor a large group of independent people who each fail to pay for the service agreement, not to mention that Netpliance may not even succeed in every venue anyway, or even set a precidence against the terms of the service contract.
What if I am not a mormon what then? Public execution? whipped and beaten?
No, like most other major religions outsider are tolerated and encouraged to join up. The Mormon religion also has a doctrine on how un-believers will be given a chance to recieve the gospel after they die. When you hold incredibly high standards you get real good at tolerating those that don't, or you form a hate group. If you want to read about whipped and beaten read a little bit of Mormon history. Ever seen somebody tarred and feathered? You do know how Joseph Smith died right?
You know, I get a little upset when people from outside of Utah move into this state and start throwing their views that this should be identical to the rest of the United States, or even like European countries. It isn't, and for a good reason. When the Mormons came into Utah, they were forced at gunpoint to leave their homes, and move outside the borders of the United States. Not even the Jews or Blacks have ever had that happen to them. (Fill in your own popular opressed minority group) Salt Lake Valley was considered a worthless piece of real estate, indeed something to avoid if at all possible. There weren't even Native Americans living there in the mid 1850's when the Mormons moved in becase it was so difficult to live there, and indeed that was part of the reason why Mormons chose Utah to live, because they could finally build some homes where nobody would care what they were doing.
Basically, if you can't stand the religion, why are you moving to Utah in the first place? Other than some other quirky think like not being able to shop at many stores and malls on Sunday (or find an open tavern either) visitors to Utah probabally won't really notice anybody forcing their viewpoints on you either. And in most cases you can find things like that in many other parts of the United States as well, including even tougher liquor laws.
There was a Daily Universe article at the vernerable Utah institution of Brigham Young University that pointed out that the Harold B. Lee Library had a subscription to Playboy. There were a couple of raised eyebrows over this, but the faculty tried to explain that it was for the "art classes".
There are some ultra orthodox religious conservatives in Utah, and considering that the state legislature is about 70% Republican, with so much control that the Democrats can't even stop a bill even if it is vetoed by the Governor. This tends to make legislative activity more like political platform actions, and some people have even suggested that most state legislative action actually occurs during the state Republican party convention, or at least during the party legislative caucus meetings.
Even with all of that kept in mind, it is still surprising how much erotic literature can be found in paper form, even at public libraries in a very conservative state like Utah. And don't think that the people in Utah are technically illiterate. Senator Bob Bennett chairs the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem (The Y2K Comittee), in fact he helped push the formation of the comittee in the Senate. Utah is also home to tech companies like Novell, Caldera, Thiokol(the makers of the space shuttle booster rockets), Iomega, and many others. To say that Utah is being backward in their decisions is not really taking notice of what happened. The state legislature took the considered opinions of many tech professionals, together with the screaming opinions of a strong conservative religious constituancy and came up with the legislation that could be considered "the will of the people" in a representative democracy.
This isn't to say that this is a one-way street either. If it turns out that net filtering will keep out politically sensitive sites (which it does), it will eventually prove to be a faulty technology.
Why not? There was some extream competition back in the early days of computing, and just about everything else was a propriatary standard anyway, why not the character encoding scheme as well? (which IBM did anyway)
I think the real reason why ASCII was adopted had nothing to do with the computer industry, but rather with Western Union (which was a part of American Telephone and Telegraph at the time). All of the teletype machines used ASCII, and it proved to be a stock terminal option for many years. The control characters are a legacy of this heratige as well. The reason for the ASCII codes of #10 followed by #13 is that the teletype machines had to be told to scroll up the paper one line and then physically move the printer head to the left side of the terminal. How many systems still need these codes, even though all it really means is that the cursor is moved to a new position on the monitor?
I've been working with the Linux Video group where we've been trying to make an open source player for DVD discs. The ONLY problem that we're fighting right now is not the know-how to get it done, but rather trying to obtain the file format documents for DVD-Video and being able to use them legally. Indeed, the recent deCSS program is another really good example of how file format specifications can be illegal to implement, even if you have obtained the specifications legally.
The way that the DVD Fourm (formerly known as the DVD Consortium, with oversees the DVDCCA... this is the group of companies that cross-license each other's patents and shares information regarding DVD development) currenly requires you to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) to obtain the specifications, and that NDA also prohibits you from even discussing the specifications with anybody unless they have also signed the same NDA. Since this is covered under the trade secret laws, this particular bit of intellectual property is theirs theoretically forever. At least until you can hire a bunch of lawyers to demonstrate that a DVD is no longer a trade secret.
I've also set up a seperate mailing list from the main Linux Video group that is in the process of developing an Open Video Disc specification which is trying to allow people to develop products without having to pay royalties or deal with patent infringments. Fees for most of the current video formats range from over $10,000 (for the DVD specs.... license fees are on top of that) to the MPEG Licensing Authority who is being quite reasonable for most close-source projects, but if you read the details of what you must do to license a product, is contrary to the nature of most open-source projects. It is still possible to write a GPL'ed MPEG player, but it would only be free as in speech and not free as in beer. In fact, you would probabally have to charge somebody to download the software. Shareware MPEG players are probabally skating on some very thin ice legally, and certainly part of the registration costs would have to go to the MPEGLA.
One of the things that is so nice about HTML is the fact that this standard is open, patent and royalty free. If CERN had tried to put a patent on HTML I doubt that the web would have developed nearly so quickly. Or rather imagine if Apple's hypercard system had been developed with the GPL and file formats were made open for anybody on any platform to use.
One of the things that I believe is killing the Unicode character encoding is that all kinds of intellectual property restrictions are placed on it, and you need to pay royalties to develop much software that uses it. Again, think what would have happened with ASCII had it been kept closed up, and why EBDIC isn't being used for character encoding.
More importantly, open and free specifications are critical to data preservation, and a point that really hasn't been brought up by Calc (the author of the original post on/.)
You might be surprised with some "sham" clubs
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This is a little off topic, but I think it is still appropriate with this tread so bear with me a little here.
Utah State Law has a minor provision with its alcohol laws that permit the sale of alcoholic beverages by "clubs" to its "members". This law was originally intended to allow operations like the VFW, Elks Club, ect. who typically have a bar for their members use. The idea is that the clubs can control the drinking habits of their members so the state doesn't have to regulate it as much as they do to open public taverns.
The only problem with this law is that it never specified what exactly constituted a "private club". If you are passing through the Salt Lake City airport, I think there is a "private club" you can join for a $10 annual membership (with a $10 coupon towards purchases of beverages in the "club"). The annual fee is the only membership requirement (oh... I guess you have to be of legal drinking age as well, but that is another issue).
"Clubs" like this are actually quite common throughout Utah, and it should prove to be very entertaining to see how many more "clubs" will be starting up with the 2002 Winter Olympics coming to town.
So in answer to the previous post... yes, I think a "software" club would be legal, but the question to beg and ask is who would "join" such a club or company? If the software is really that good then it would certainly be entertaining to see what folks would be saying about the "software clubs"? In addition, I fail to see how software produced in such an environment really would be better, but until something like that is actually setup and contested in court, the theorical discussion is really rather moot.
The idea of sending a petition around, especially if you could "scan" in your signature (not just a.sig file) and send one in with the petition is a particularly good one.
I would like to start to organize a group that would be willing to prepare petitions to take to trade shows, geek events, ect. and come up with some show of support that demonstrates just how many people are really interested.
I understand that you are uncomfortable regarding the implications that I'm throwing out the research results merely because I may not agree with the conclusions. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
I will say that I feel there are legitimate issues regarding pollution that can and should be addressed, and local pollution problems should clearly be addressed. The point I'm making is that most climate models that are being used to proclaim "Global Warming" don't usually take into account the factors I mentioned. This is even worse when you get "global warming" stories in the popular media (which in regards to climatology you must regard Slashdot as a general news source).
One particularly disturbing instance of fraudlant data collection is in the case of current weather data gathering systems: When temperature data is recorded, for the most part the weather station data is recorded on paper logs. This is going more toward automated systems, but many historical records (as in most of them) are done on paper.
Anyway, when somebody writes down the daily high and low temperatures for a station, sometimes the numbers get inverted (a daily high of 92 degrees gets recorded as 29 degrees... in July for a North American desert) Based upon what surrounding weather stations are recording and historical records for that station (including the previous day's data) a determination is made to accept or reject this data as accurate. If the data is rejected, sometimes an approximation is made for that station and date, or it is simply not including in calculations (for temperature averages, ect. based on the intended purpose of the data)
Where the real problem comes is that much of the weather data used in these models has to be painstakingly entered in by hand one daily temperature at a time. A very expensive and slow procedure at best for what is not immediately useful information by itself. This also means that most climate data before 1950 (and 1970 as a real benchmark) has not been digitized for some serious number crunching, although there are some remarkable exceptions. In many cases researcher are aware of this fact and try to do alternative forms of data collection such as ocean floor sediments, glacial core tests, and geologic queries to try and pull some longer-term information.
Now imagine if you would, that the algorithms trying to determine if the recorded temperatures are accurate, as listed above, had been tweaked by a somebody trying to prove the point of global warming. (And don't tell me that scientific data doesn't get faked or bent... even in peer reviewed journals) How could you prove that the data was fraudlent? By challenging what was rejected.
Here is the real killer: The original unmodified temperature data for most of the United States has not been preserved, and instead the researchers are using filtered data to make all of their calculations. The original data is available in paper form... usually, but imagine the expense of having to re-enter the data all over again. For very little real value besides trying to prove a poltical point.
The other aspect that I question regarding data collection is the location of the weather stations. Many times the monitoring stations are placed in locations that are:
Easy to get to - regardless of how automated a station becomes, you still have to service it regularly with replacement parts, power supplies, cleaning dirt out of the measuring equipment, ect. When it goes beyong temperature, air speed, air pressure, and humidity (for example, checking for certain pollutants, pollen counts, ect) these usually need to be serviced on a daily basis.
Close to places you want to monitor - Many "official" weather stations for municipalities are located near or at airports or sea ports, due to the importance of commerce, and the fact that a pilot would really like to know what the weather is like at the airport he is going to... not necessarily what the weather is like in the downtown district. Which can be different.
Near population centers - Much of the weather reporting is done by volunteers, many of whom even pay for the equipment themselves. Even if the equipment is donated, it is placed near schools or businesses that have a steady supply of consistant volunteers who can constantly monitor a station. This becomes a problem in rural areas in particular (even though some land-grant universities do have rural weather station programs.... still, you gotta consider how many grad students really want to trek out to the middle of nowhere just to get a bunch of weather data)
What I'm getting at is that the collecting of the weather data can be problematic, even if everybody is sincerely trying to do their best and report the data honestly. I sincerely believe that there are _**SOME**_ individuals that have a political beef and believe that the ends justify the means, so at least some of the data may not be as accurate as you may want to believe.
Does this mean you can sit back and dismiss global warming completely? Absolutely not!
Does this mean we have to immediately shut down the entire petroleum, automotive, avation, and any other industry that uses or releases any chemicals that are proven to produce greenhouse gasses (which also includes mass genocide because you can't have all of these people breathing CO2 into the air either)? Absolutely not!
This is a public discussion that requires accurate information, and as an ordinary citizen who as a minority actually understands the scientific method believes that the researchers discussing global warming and climate changes should do a better job of convincing me that we should undergo massive changes in our society with new laws and customs.
From my understanding, your point is totally correct. The purpose of a trade secret is to provide a legal means of prosecuting when somebody "spills the beans" and discloses stuff they've seen, such as what Xerox should have done with Steve Jobs at the PARC with their GUI interfaces.
In terms of DVD technology, this is a house of cards that is ready to fall apart from somebody trying to poke a hole at it.
Take a look at the DVD Licensing Agreement if you want to look at some perverted licensing agreements. This IS the trade secret agreement the DVD licensing authority is going to try to enforce. The CSS agreement is a seperate license, but nevertheless it is still along the same lines of thought.
The authority of the intellectual property agreements come from Article I, Section 8, clause 8 which says: "The Congress shall have Power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" Since trade secrets don't have a time limit (at least the DVD Forum's doesn't) I can't see how it can promote the progress of science or art.
Please let people know how silly the DVD licensing agreement really is, and how the DVD Forum is actually preventing the development of DVD technology as a video medium. You would be able to have your home movies on DVD for $1 + video transfer costs right now if it weren't for the stupid licensing requirement that are actually preventing people from exploiting the technology.
Imagine just what the WWW would be like if you had to pay $10,000 to obtain the specs for http, and deciphering shttp would get you into a similar lawsuit like this one over deCSS.
In general, boycotts are fairly useless in and of themselves. The goal of any boycott is to try and remove enough demand from the product that the person (or people) selling the product will either stop selling it or try to resolve the issues of the boycott.
There are a few boycotts that have succeeded, but generally those were a part of a much larger political movement where the boycott was used mainly as a Public Relations vehicle to express outrage at a particular idea.
For example, I doubt the boycott of beef purchases by Vegans against the Texas Cattleman's Association is going to be effective, but at least it is consistant with their politcal philosphy.
I salute Richard Stallman in at least being consistant, and I would encourage people to make purchases consistant with their political, ethical, religious, and moral beliefs. In a larger picture, on a broad political movement, protesting against Amazon will be effective in the sense that he is bringing awareness to the issues of intellectual property that affects the everyday lives of ordinary citizens.
Primitive Keyboards and other data entry devices
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If you think that the current keyboards found on a typical WinTel system are horrid, you should try to get ahold of one of the keyboards for the original IBM-PC. When I had to sit down at thing for the first time (Using PC-DOS 1.0) I was truly disgusted. The enter key was stuck in a really awkward place, and the left-shift key was just another normal key. There was no numeric keypad, and in general was a simply terrible design. In fact, it was so bad that one of the early after-market hardware products for the PC's was a replacement keyboard, where you could throw out the PC keyboard made by IBM.
If that wasn't bad enough, anybody remember the chicklet keyboard on the PC jr? It was so bad that IBM ended up recalling the entire line and replacing every keyboard on every computer for that line. Just before they shut down the assembly line that actually made the computers.
Oh the early days!!
Even before I had my chance to use a PC (including stuff from Comodore, Apple, Tandy, Atari, Sinclair, Acorn and the other 70's computer manufacturers) I used a CRT teletype terminal that only included very basic keys. I'm not sure how old that beast was, but it used vacuum tubes instead of transistors for some of the circuitry. Anyway, at 110 baud you didn't have to type that fast to keep up with the computer. If I remember right, the terminal didn't even have a shift key for lower case letters, nor even a backspace key. I had to learn the basic control letters like control-H for backspace, control-F for a form feed (which blanked the CRT) and a couple of other letters that I've since forgotten but were quite useful at the time. The truth is that I got quite proficient at using that terminal and when I finally had to start using the Apple ][s, I was rather disapointed that the same control functions wouldn't work. I guess you could say that I "zoned" in with that terminal, cruising around the original Collosal Cave and shooting buffalo on the Oregon trail (with a text-only interface...never mind). I guess that I why I still enjoy text-only muds.
One of the problems with DVD-Video in general is that it hasn't been patented. If it were, the spec would be in the public domain and all of this discussion would be pointless except for trying to decide just how much of a royalty each of the original developer of DVD would be getting when for-profit copies of open source DVD software was sold.
If you look at the DVD Fourm's licensing non-disclosure agreement you will find that it is quite restrictive. Mainly this is because DVD hasn't been patented, but instead they are persuing a course of protected under trade secret laws. If you spill the beans then your will be roasted alive.
The Linux DVD folks are trying to get a DVD-Video player working, and right now the knowlede is being spread by osmosis or some other very painfully slow process. About half of the group has signed the DVD Forum's agreement, and the other half are busy trying to hack at DVD trying to understand how it works. The folks who know DVD are saying "yeah, you are close" or "the specs for that part of DVD are actually ISO 13818-3" or something like that to give them a hand.
Eventually all of the information regarding DVD-Video will be made, one way or another, public knowledge. Unfortunately there won't be an open source DVD player until this happens.
I'd like to mention just how these regulatory agencies work: He didn't send an e-mail or go down to the local FEC office and ask one of the people for their opinion over a cup of coffee. Instead Leo Smith probabally got a phone call or an e-mail from the Federal Elections Comission and asked him to start filling out the required paperwork.
As part of the appeal process he demanded a formal written opinion from the FEC, which is one of the first steps they are required to do before any legal action can take place. This process is the same if you are disputing something from the IRS, NSA, FCC, or any other federal agency. The advisory opinion is taken as the official position of the FEC on the matter and is treated similarly (although not exactly) to an opinion written by a federal judge, or at least a legal briefing by a procesuting attorney.
The fact that the FEC would even write such an opinion indicates that they take the issue seriously and are in the process of of trying to enforce what they percieve as violations of US Elections Laws. They even specify the exact laws they feel are being broken and are threating legal action.
Specifically, the FEC said "Should the activity qualify as an independent expenditure, you would be required to file reports with the Commission if the total value of your expenditures exceeds $250 during 1998. 2 U.S.C. 431(17), 434(c), 441a(a)(7)(B); 11 CFR 109.1, 109.2. In contrast, if your activity were not conducted completely independent of the Koskoff campaign, your expenditures would be reportable by the Koskoff Committee as an in-kind contribution from you. 2 U.S.C. 431(8)(A)(i), 434(b)(2)(A), 434(b)(3)(A); 11 CFR 104.3(a)(3)(i), 104.3(a)(4)(i), 104.13. 10"
I think that is pretty specific and shows they mean business.
Slashdot Mirror
Among the various "hacks" done to the Comodore Pet, perhaps the most bizzare was connecting three modems to a 64K PET and "timesharing" the computer with a rudimentary operating system. This could support up to 4 simultaneous users (including the console user) and do some of the really cool stuff you could do with timeshared environments (well before the internet was even available to the casual hobbiest). From what I understood, this was all with a "stock" PET, except for perhaps the extra modems.
It had a really strog users community at the time, and some really interesting experiemnts took place on that platform that in some ways seem to have been forgotten.
This is just a thought, and some random ramblings, but what about if you launch this thing from lunar orbit?
First of all, although only a dozen people ever got to walk on the moon, there were another dozen who at least got to orbit the moon (including preparatory missions like Apollo 8 & 10 as well as the command module pilots) This way you are outside of the Van Allen Belts, but still close enough to home that other vehicles could get you to your "spacecraft" without having to burn fuel to get there in the first place.
In many ways it is too bad that the Jupiter rocket was never built (that was to follow the Saturn V... and talk about a monster rocket!) One of the early proposals was to send people to the moon by building a large earth-orbiting space station and then sending the moon craft directly from a docking bay of a space station. Von Braun pushed for the method eventually used (with a direct take-off from the ground, and everything brought with them). Had the orbiting station been built (for admittedly more money), at least there would have been an established infrastructure to build upon for future missions.
Unforunately all we got out of all the money spent by NASA for a space infrastructure is Kennedy Space Center (which still is an accomplishment) and a bunch of souviners scattered over Australia when Skylab came crashing down. Oh, and I can't forget the 5 space shuttles. Wow! What a marvelous space infrastructure to really go places!
I can't speak from any specific comments or commitments from Borland, but there HAS already been a port of Delphi to the Alpha processor (mainly as something to run native with Windows NT running on an Alpha box). Much of the compiler core is written in Object Pascal, as well as the IDE (which was written with Delphi), so I can't imagine that it would be particularly difficult to port to other environments.
Porting from Windows to Linux is a much bigger step than going from an i386 platform to some of the other architectures, especially if you can make sure the system calls are consistant. That is one big bonus that Linux has over the Microsoft products.
I was just thinking that for folks who are blind or otherwise visually impared could really use a monitor like this, especially if it were used in a display environment where folks who are also not so handicapped would also be able to use the same device.
I imagine that there are some braile reading devices already, but this certainly could be used in a manner like that, allowing you to view web pages in braile and even grab images with some false relief so they can enjoy some of the benefits of the web as well. At least this is a very pratcial application for even using a two-height display.
This could also be useful in applications where you need to have a configurable tactile display, such as the classic bridge controls found in the Star Trek TV series (post TOS). As you are pushing buttons you can change the "feel" of the user interface, and even "vibrate" the buttons to give a tactile response.
Yeah, I think you could find some customers for something like this, even at the $8800 price tag.
Several years ago Coca-Cola was in the process of doing a major land purchase in the small Central American country of Belize (which borders Mexico and Guatamala). When they were thorugh with the initial proposal, Coke would have owned approximately 60%-75% of all of the land in the country. This effect was something similar to somebody purchasing 60%-70% of a company's stock in the stock market.
From what I last heard, Coca-Cola backed down on the project because of the PR reprecusions from "owning" their own country in a very literal sense. If there were a company who didn't care so much about PR perception, especially if they were principally an industrial supplier, they probabally could get away with doing something that bold. At least it is an idea to consider... or at least a good plotline for a science fiction novel.
In terms of more local poltical juristictions, this already happens. At the beginning of the 20th Century, coal mining companies routinely established "company towns" where the mining company literally owned everything, from the schools, police, fire departments, banks, grocery stores, and homes. (For a non-confrontational view of this, watch the movie "October Sky", which uses the coal town as a story background to a surpurbly geeky moive)
This was probabally best described by Tennessee Ernie Ford in the song Sixteen Tons where he sings about life in a coal town. (BTW, the link has the lyrics and a real-audio recording of the song.)
A company cannot criminally prosecute you, only a government can. A company can sue you in civil court and the First Amendment is not and never has been a defence against that. In any case, First Amendment is binding only on the government, not on private companies.
Sure, you can only be sued by a company, not hauled off to jail, but they can otherwise make your life miserable to where a prison would be preferable. That being said, the first ammendment still applies to private individuals as well. If I walk with a picket sign in front of a business, I can't be stopped with a lawsuit as long as I'm factually correct or expressing my opinion. Sure, there are municipal ordinances saying how I can do something like this or where, but I can't be stopped because this is exactly what the first ammendment is about.... I'm free to say what ever I want and there is nothing you can do to stop me.
A (somewhat) recent encounter between the President of the People's Republic of China and US President Clinton illistrates this point a little more clearly. At the time, the movie "A Walk in Tibet", staring Brad Pitt, was being widly distributed in movie theaters throughout the United States. President Jiang requested that President Clinton force the movie theaters in the US to stop playing this movie, because it portrays China as an agressor country in a manner that the Chinese government didn't appreciate. I'm sure it was a little awkward to explain that not only would President Clinton probabally not do something that raw, he didn't even have the legal authority to even require something like that. Furthermore, an "offical" plea not to watch a movie like that would actually be like free advertising to promote a movie like that here.
The reason why people defend the first ammendment is that the right to speak freely is usually the first citizen privlege to disappear during a crisis. And not everything that can be said about you or anybody else is always pleasant to hear, so there are always some struggle to restrict that speech or discussion. Especially when you are in a position to be able to stop that speech.
Keep in mind that the US government doesn't care how much something costs. "A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money." -- (US Senator Everett Dirksen, Illinois)
Anyway, the point I'm making is that the US government is much more interested in political power, and the abilty to effectively shut down tranportation facilities is a real potent tool. And it looks like it is in the interests of the US government (!= interests of the average citizens of the US) to keep this technlogy in the hands of the US military.
That and the technology to build a real competitor to the GPS satellite system is now available. Consider the costs over doing something like the Iridium, and putting up a competitor to the GPS satellites would be relatively trivial. Other than the fact that the GPS satellite uses a hyper accurate clock, it isn't all that much more complicated than the original Sputnik satellite put up by the USSR. It just transmits the current time and its position (with some accuracy references.) Ground stations are necessary to control the satellites mainly to make sure the clocks are accurate.
With the US government eliminating the intentional errors, they have dried up the market for all potential early users of a GPS alternative. I always thought it was a stupid thing to do anyway... deliberately engineer something to be less accurate than it could be. And introduce bugs and other problems in trying to cope with those intentional errors.
Yeah, but if Red Hat really did buy out Microsoft, it would be a major news event... probabally the lead story even for the major network news shows.
My point is that for something to be news, it should be something which is current that most people don't know about. Older web sites would be OK if they've been sitting pretty idle for the most part (and few links to them), but such a site should be an exception.
I would totally agree that the stories themselves need to be moderated as well. There are some times where I wouldn't mind troll'n for some really off the wall stories, but if a story of earth-shattering news comes along (RedHat buys Microsoft OS Div for $10 Million, ect.) you may only want to see those top headlines.
/.
Consider this like the Sunday edition of the New York Times. Sure, there are some interesting stories in the back pages of the travel section, but should that be a "headline" story?
Besides... this is only a natural evolution of the posting moderation. That and the main editors (Rob & Co.) could still have "unlimited" story moderation points to pretty much put things where they want them anyway. It would allow the readers to put a little bit into how they feel about a story as well.
Anyways.... this story is truly stale news. The page info from the server says:
Last Modified: Sunday, August 01, 1999 06:33:45 PM Local time
Or even note that cross reference pages even have a link to
There are certainly a number of applications where you need to have quite a bit more control over the operating system than is possible under an OS like Windows 98 or NT.
For the past several years I've been working in a couple of industries where the price of the computer hardware is insignificant, and the driving cost is actually the software development.
For the most part, these can be considered machines that are dedicated to one particular task, but we are using a general purpose computer as the platform to operate the system. That you can install MS Word and play Quake on it is besides the point. As a matter of fact, these systems are replacing machines which were built up from discrete IC as dedicated controlers.
One of the problems you encounter is that the designers of an operating system have to make some basic assumptions about what the priorities of certain common tasks should be. Right now we are selling a system running Windows NT which is controlling an outdoor electronic sign (such as the scoreboard at a football stadium). Our fiber-optic output device is trying to send data real-time to the scoreboard 30 times a second, but we are being pre-empted by the hard drive controller. The fact is that we want the hard drive (and the mouse for that matter) to take a back seat for what is the main task, running that sign.
If you are in the medical products industry, the situation becomes even more important. If your computer crashes and needs to reboot, you've just killed somebody. It can cause some problems if your system needs to pause for a couple of seconds to perform a heap cleanup routine. In these situations a lousy operating system is an embaressment when you are selling your product. Industrial controlers are another area where this is important, such as a controller which mixes ingredients in a modern food processing plant. (Opps, I guess we didn't turn that valve off soon enough. I guess we need to dump this batch of food worth $10,000 and try again)
I'll admit that Linux is probabally capable of doing just about everything I've mentioned, but there are some other considerations: As somebody else posted here recently (and I apoligize that I can't remember who or on what article) you can't go wrong buying Microsoft. Like it or not, MS has a reputation with CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and they consider Linux still to be an upstart OS. This is very similar to how IBM has been (and for the more part still is) percieved by these same people. They write in to the bid proposals that you must provide a controller which runs a certain operating system. Sometimes we can influence the people writing the bids and suggest a certain operating system or another, and if you do suggest something they aren't familiar with you need to explain some very clear benefits that a very non-technical person can understand with about one or two minutes of explaination.
The CEO of the company I work for has read about Linux in the Wall Street Journal and some other general magazines, and has suggested we investigate the possibility of developing controllers with it. I'm also keeping an eye out for other OS products, like QNX, which may also help out with our product lines. I will say that I don't think Microsoft products are up to the task for real-time applications, and this is one operating system area that MS has significantly ignored or neglected. It is also an area of OS development that can be extreamly expensive to develop if you havn't planned for it from the very beginning of the OS development.
I'm sorry that I'm commenting on an article that is considered old news now, but I thought I'd put in my $0.02
The Video Toaster on the PC IS an Amiga, just stripped of the keyboard, video drivers, mouse, and all I/O stuff except for a simple serial port. So when you are using the Video Toaster on a PC, just remember what you are working with. IMHO this was one of the few smart things Comodore did with the licensing of Amiga hardware. I'm not sure what they are currently doing for hardware, but I'm pretty sure you could hack into that box and get the Amiga running as a stand-alone box from the Video Toaster if you tried.
The problem with this Netpliance system is that it can continue to be used even after it has had the ISP turned off, provided you are able to hack into the thing. So yes, there are some problems with model.
The next thing to consider is more the practicality of a company trying to chase you down legally in court. They will probabally spend far more for the lawyers (case prep work, legal filing fees, ect.) than they could possibly get from you. Some states allow you to sue for court costs as well, but not always. Some prominent people might be sued, or a couple of FUD cases to try and scare people into submission, but probabally not everybody, nor a large group of independent people who each fail to pay for the service agreement, not to mention that Netpliance may not even succeed in every venue anyway, or even set a precidence against the terms of the service contract.
No, like most other major religions outsider are tolerated and encouraged to join up. The Mormon religion also has a doctrine on how un-believers will be given a chance to recieve the gospel after they die. When you hold incredibly high standards you get real good at tolerating those that don't, or you form a hate group. If you want to read about whipped and beaten read a little bit of Mormon history. Ever seen somebody tarred and feathered? You do know how Joseph Smith died right?
You know, I get a little upset when people from outside of Utah move into this state and start throwing their views that this should be identical to the rest of the United States, or even like European countries. It isn't, and for a good reason. When the Mormons came into Utah, they were forced at gunpoint to leave their homes, and move outside the borders of the United States. Not even the Jews or Blacks have ever had that happen to them. (Fill in your own popular opressed minority group) Salt Lake Valley was considered a worthless piece of real estate, indeed something to avoid if at all possible. There weren't even Native Americans living there in the mid 1850's when the Mormons moved in becase it was so difficult to live there, and indeed that was part of the reason why Mormons chose Utah to live, because they could finally build some homes where nobody would care what they were doing.
Basically, if you can't stand the religion, why are you moving to Utah in the first place? Other than some other quirky think like not being able to shop at many stores and malls on Sunday (or find an open tavern either) visitors to Utah probabally won't really notice anybody forcing their viewpoints on you either. And in most cases you can find things like that in many other parts of the United States as well, including even tougher liquor laws.
There are some ultra orthodox religious conservatives in Utah, and considering that the state legislature is about 70% Republican, with so much control that the Democrats can't even stop a bill even if it is vetoed by the Governor. This tends to make legislative activity more like political platform actions, and some people have even suggested that most state legislative action actually occurs during the state Republican party convention, or at least during the party legislative caucus meetings.
Even with all of that kept in mind, it is still surprising how much erotic literature can be found in paper form, even at public libraries in a very conservative state like Utah. And don't think that the people in Utah are technically illiterate. Senator Bob Bennett chairs the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem (The Y2K Comittee), in fact he helped push the formation of the comittee in the Senate. Utah is also home to tech companies like Novell, Caldera, Thiokol(the makers of the space shuttle booster rockets), Iomega, and many others. To say that Utah is being backward in their decisions is not really taking notice of what happened. The state legislature took the considered opinions of many tech professionals, together with the screaming opinions of a strong conservative religious constituancy and came up with the legislation that could be considered "the will of the people" in a representative democracy.
This isn't to say that this is a one-way street either. If it turns out that net filtering will keep out politically sensitive sites (which it does), it will eventually prove to be a faulty technology.
Why not? There was some extream competition back in the early days of computing, and just about everything else was a propriatary standard anyway, why not the character encoding scheme as well? (which IBM did anyway)
I think the real reason why ASCII was adopted had nothing to do with the computer industry, but rather with Western Union (which was a part of American Telephone and Telegraph at the time). All of the teletype machines used ASCII, and it proved to be a stock terminal option for many years. The control characters are a legacy of this heratige as well. The reason for the ASCII codes of #10 followed by #13 is that the teletype machines had to be told to scroll up the paper one line and then physically move the printer head to the left side of the terminal. How many systems still need these codes, even though all it really means is that the cursor is moved to a new position on the monitor?
I've been working with the Linux Video group where we've been trying to make an open source player for DVD discs. The ONLY problem that we're fighting right now is not the know-how to get it done, but rather trying to obtain the file format documents for DVD-Video and being able to use them legally. Indeed, the recent deCSS program is another really good example of how file format specifications can be illegal to implement, even if you have obtained the specifications legally.
/.)
The way that the DVD Fourm (formerly known as the DVD Consortium, with oversees the DVDCCA... this is the group of companies that cross-license each other's patents and shares information regarding DVD development) currenly requires you to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) to obtain the specifications, and that NDA also prohibits you from even discussing the specifications with anybody unless they have also signed the same NDA. Since this is covered under the trade secret laws, this particular bit of intellectual property is theirs theoretically forever. At least until you can hire a bunch of lawyers to demonstrate that a DVD is no longer a trade secret.
I've also set up a seperate mailing list from the main Linux Video group that is in the process of developing an Open Video Disc specification which is trying to allow people to develop products without having to pay royalties or deal with patent infringments. Fees for most of the current video formats range from over $10,000 (for the DVD specs.... license fees are on top of that) to the MPEG Licensing Authority who is being quite reasonable for most close-source projects, but if you read the details of what you must do to license a product, is contrary to the nature of most open-source projects. It is still possible to write a GPL'ed MPEG player, but it would only be free as in speech and not free as in beer. In fact, you would probabally have to charge somebody to download the software. Shareware MPEG players are probabally skating on some very thin ice legally, and certainly part of the registration costs would have to go to the MPEGLA.
One of the things that is so nice about HTML is the fact that this standard is open, patent and royalty free. If CERN had tried to put a patent on HTML I doubt that the web would have developed nearly so quickly. Or rather imagine if Apple's hypercard system had been developed with the GPL and file formats were made open for anybody on any platform to use.
One of the things that I believe is killing the Unicode character encoding is that all kinds of intellectual property restrictions are placed on it, and you need to pay royalties to develop much software that uses it. Again, think what would have happened with ASCII had it been kept closed up, and why EBDIC isn't being used for character encoding.
More importantly, open and free specifications are critical to data preservation, and a point that really hasn't been brought up by Calc (the author of the original post on
This is a little off topic, but I think it is still appropriate with this tread so bear with me a little here.
Utah State Law has a minor provision with its alcohol laws that permit the sale of alcoholic beverages by "clubs" to its "members". This law was originally intended to allow operations like the VFW, Elks Club, ect. who typically have a bar for their members use. The idea is that the clubs can control the drinking habits of their members so the state doesn't have to regulate it as much as they do to open public taverns.
The only problem with this law is that it never specified what exactly constituted a "private club". If you are passing through the Salt Lake City airport, I think there is a "private club" you can join for a $10 annual membership (with a $10 coupon towards purchases of beverages in the "club"). The annual fee is the only membership requirement (oh... I guess you have to be of legal drinking age as well, but that is another issue).
"Clubs" like this are actually quite common throughout Utah, and it should prove to be very entertaining to see how many more "clubs" will be starting up with the 2002 Winter Olympics coming to town.
So in answer to the previous post... yes, I think a "software" club would be legal, but the question to beg and ask is who would "join" such a club or company? If the software is really that good then it would certainly be entertaining to see what folks would be saying about the "software clubs"? In addition, I fail to see how software produced in such an environment really would be better, but until something like that is actually setup and contested in court, the theorical discussion is really rather moot.
The idea of sending a petition around, especially if you could "scan" in your signature (not just a .sig file) and send one in with the petition is a particularly good one.
I would like to start to organize a group that would be willing to prepare petitions to take to trade shows, geek events, ect. and come up with some show of support that demonstrates just how many people are really interested.
I will say that I feel there are legitimate issues regarding pollution that can and should be addressed, and local pollution problems should clearly be addressed. The point I'm making is that most climate models that are being used to proclaim "Global Warming" don't usually take into account the factors I mentioned. This is even worse when you get "global warming" stories in the popular media (which in regards to climatology you must regard Slashdot as a general news source).
One particularly disturbing instance of fraudlant data collection is in the case of current weather data gathering systems: When temperature data is recorded, for the most part the weather station data is recorded on paper logs. This is going more toward automated systems, but many historical records (as in most of them) are done on paper.
Anyway, when somebody writes down the daily high and low temperatures for a station, sometimes the numbers get inverted (a daily high of 92 degrees gets recorded as 29 degrees... in July for a North American desert) Based upon what surrounding weather stations are recording and historical records for that station (including the previous day's data) a determination is made to accept or reject this data as accurate. If the data is rejected, sometimes an approximation is made for that station and date, or it is simply not including in calculations (for temperature averages, ect. based on the intended purpose of the data)
Where the real problem comes is that much of the weather data used in these models has to be painstakingly entered in by hand one daily temperature at a time. A very expensive and slow procedure at best for what is not immediately useful information by itself. This also means that most climate data before 1950 (and 1970 as a real benchmark) has not been digitized for some serious number crunching, although there are some remarkable exceptions. In many cases researcher are aware of this fact and try to do alternative forms of data collection such as ocean floor sediments, glacial core tests, and geologic queries to try and pull some longer-term information.
Now imagine if you would, that the algorithms trying to determine if the recorded temperatures are accurate, as listed above, had been tweaked by a somebody trying to prove the point of global warming. (And don't tell me that scientific data doesn't get faked or bent... even in peer reviewed journals) How could you prove that the data was fraudlent? By challenging what was rejected.
Here is the real killer: The original unmodified temperature data for most of the United States has not been preserved, and instead the researchers are using filtered data to make all of their calculations. The original data is available in paper form... usually, but imagine the expense of having to re-enter the data all over again. For very little real value besides trying to prove a poltical point.
The other aspect that I question regarding data collection is the location of the weather stations. Many times the monitoring stations are placed in locations that are:
Near population centers - Much of the weather reporting is done by volunteers, many of whom even pay for the equipment themselves. Even if the equipment is donated, it is placed near schools or businesses that have a steady supply of consistant volunteers who can constantly monitor a station. This becomes a problem in rural areas in particular (even though some land-grant universities do have rural weather station programs.... still, you gotta consider how many grad students really want to trek out to the middle of nowhere just to get a bunch of weather data)
What I'm getting at is that the collecting of the weather data can be problematic, even if everybody is sincerely trying to do their best and report the data honestly. I sincerely believe that there are _**SOME**_ individuals that have a political beef and believe that the ends justify the means, so at least some of the data may not be as accurate as you may want to believe.
Does this mean you can sit back and dismiss global warming completely? Absolutely not!
Does this mean we have to immediately shut down the entire petroleum, automotive, avation, and any other industry that uses or releases any chemicals that are proven to produce greenhouse gasses (which also includes mass genocide because you can't have all of these people breathing CO2 into the air either)? Absolutely not!
This is a public discussion that requires accurate information, and as an ordinary citizen who as a minority actually understands the scientific method believes that the researchers discussing global warming and climate changes should do a better job of convincing me that we should undergo massive changes in our society with new laws and customs.
From my understanding, your point is totally correct. The purpose of a trade secret is to provide a legal means of prosecuting when somebody "spills the beans" and discloses stuff they've seen, such as what Xerox should have done with Steve Jobs at the PARC with their GUI interfaces.
In terms of DVD technology, this is a house of cards that is ready to fall apart from somebody trying to poke a hole at it.
Take a look at the DVD Licensing Agreement if you want to look at some perverted licensing agreements. This IS the trade secret agreement the DVD licensing authority is going to try to enforce. The CSS agreement is a seperate license, but nevertheless it is still along the same lines of thought.
The authority of the intellectual property agreements come from Article I, Section 8, clause 8 which says: "The Congress shall have Power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" Since trade secrets don't have a time limit (at least the DVD Forum's doesn't) I can't see how it can promote the progress of science or art.
Please let people know how silly the DVD licensing agreement really is, and how the DVD Forum is actually preventing the development of DVD technology as a video medium. You would be able to have your home movies on DVD for $1 + video transfer costs right now if it weren't for the stupid licensing requirement that are actually preventing people from exploiting the technology.
Imagine just what the WWW would be like if you had to pay $10,000 to obtain the specs for http, and deciphering shttp would get you into a similar lawsuit like this one over deCSS.
In general, boycotts are fairly useless in and of themselves. The goal of any boycott is to try and remove enough demand from the product that the person (or people) selling the product will either stop selling it or try to resolve the issues of the boycott.
There are a few boycotts that have succeeded, but generally those were a part of a much larger political movement where the boycott was used mainly as a Public Relations vehicle to express outrage at a particular idea.
For example, I doubt the boycott of beef purchases by Vegans against the Texas Cattleman's Association is going to be effective, but at least it is consistant with their politcal philosphy.
I salute Richard Stallman in at least being consistant, and I would encourage people to make purchases consistant with their political, ethical, religious, and moral beliefs. In a larger picture, on a broad political movement, protesting against Amazon will be effective in the sense that he is bringing awareness to the issues of intellectual property that affects the everyday lives of ordinary citizens.
If you think that the current keyboards found on a typical WinTel system are horrid, you should try to get ahold of one of the keyboards for the original IBM-PC. When I had to sit down at thing for the first time (Using PC-DOS 1.0) I was truly disgusted. The enter key was stuck in a really awkward place, and the left-shift key was just another normal key. There was no numeric keypad, and in general was a simply terrible design. In fact, it was so bad that one of the early after-market hardware products for the PC's was a replacement keyboard, where you could throw out the PC keyboard made by IBM.
If that wasn't bad enough, anybody remember the chicklet keyboard on the PC jr? It was so bad that IBM ended up recalling the entire line and replacing every keyboard on every computer for that line. Just before they shut down the assembly line that actually made the computers.
Oh the early days!!
Even before I had my chance to use a PC (including stuff from Comodore, Apple, Tandy, Atari, Sinclair, Acorn and the other 70's computer manufacturers) I used a CRT teletype terminal that only included very basic keys. I'm not sure how old that beast was, but it used vacuum tubes instead of transistors for some of the circuitry. Anyway, at 110 baud you didn't have to type that fast to keep up with the computer. If I remember right, the terminal didn't even have a shift key for lower case letters, nor even a backspace key. I had to learn the basic control letters like control-H for backspace, control-F for a form feed (which blanked the CRT) and a couple of other letters that I've since forgotten but were quite useful at the time. The truth is that I got quite proficient at using that terminal and when I finally had to start using the Apple ][s, I was rather disapointed that the same control functions wouldn't work. I guess you could say that I "zoned" in with that terminal, cruising around the original Collosal Cave and shooting buffalo on the Oregon trail (with a text-only interface...never mind). I guess that I why I still enjoy text-only muds.
One of the problems with DVD-Video in general is that it hasn't been patented. If it were, the spec would be in the public domain and all of this discussion would be pointless except for trying to decide just how much of a royalty each of the original developer of DVD would be getting when for-profit copies of open source DVD software was sold.
If you look at the DVD Fourm's licensing non-disclosure agreement you will find that it is quite restrictive. Mainly this is because DVD hasn't been patented, but instead they are persuing a course of protected under trade secret laws. If you spill the beans then your will be roasted alive.
The Linux DVD folks are trying to get a DVD-Video player working, and right now the knowlede is being spread by osmosis or some other very painfully slow process. About half of the group has signed the DVD Forum's agreement, and the other half are busy trying to hack at DVD trying to understand how it works. The folks who know DVD are saying "yeah, you are close" or "the specs for that part of DVD are actually ISO 13818-3" or something like that to give them a hand.
Eventually all of the information regarding DVD-Video will be made, one way or another, public knowledge. Unfortunately there won't be an open source DVD player until this happens.
I'd like to mention just how these regulatory agencies work: He didn't send an e-mail or go down to the local FEC office and ask one of the people for their opinion over a cup of coffee. Instead Leo Smith probabally got a phone call or an e-mail from the Federal Elections Comission and asked him to start filling out the required paperwork.
As part of the appeal process he demanded a formal written opinion from the FEC, which is one of the first steps they are required to do before any legal action can take place. This process is the same if you are disputing something from the IRS, NSA, FCC, or any other federal agency. The advisory opinion is taken as the official position of the FEC on the matter and is treated similarly (although not exactly) to an opinion written by a federal judge, or at least a legal briefing by a procesuting attorney.
The fact that the FEC would even write such an opinion indicates that they take the issue seriously and are in the process of of trying to enforce what they percieve as violations of US Elections Laws. They even specify the exact laws they feel are being broken and are threating legal action.
Specifically, the FEC said "Should the activity qualify as an independent expenditure, you would be required to file reports with the Commission if the total value of your expenditures exceeds $250 during 1998. 2 U.S.C. 431(17), 434(c), 441a(a)(7)(B); 11 CFR 109.1, 109.2. In contrast, if your activity were not conducted completely independent of the Koskoff campaign, your expenditures would be reportable by the Koskoff Committee as an in-kind contribution from you. 2 U.S.C. 431(8)(A)(i), 434(b)(2)(A), 434(b)(3)(A); 11 CFR 104.3(a)(3)(i), 104.3(a)(4)(i), 104.13. 10"
I think that is pretty specific and shows they mean business.
I do apologize.
ESR didn't write INTERCAL, but he did write C-INTERCAL, the current compiler for the language.
I'm sorry I messed that up.