Map data is also salted with fictional bits whose only purpose is to make it obvious when somebody has copied a map's data instead of independently doing the field work from scratch (or obtaining the data from another source), and to give the copyright holder the excuse it needs to sue the creator of the derived map. Remember, you only need one trivial (but concrete) example of infringement to win in court, and by their very nature, proving infringement of that tiny bit of sentinel data is going to be taken as proof that you've infringed upon the whole thing.
Of course, things can backfire. I know there's at least one case of a municipality that "corrected" its official GIS map with salted data from a commercial map (the employees assumed there was just an oversight or mistake made at some point in the past by county officials), and the salted data made its way out into the wild... making a huge mess in the process.
It also depends upon a jury member with background knowledge managing to make it through voir dire without getting disqualified as a juror, and the fact that he made it through not resulting in a mistrial.
In real trials, your lawyer usually isn't *allowed* to reveal to the jury *why* you presumably might have been motivated to do something, if the prosecution can convince the judge that doing so might incite the jury to find you innocent because it approved of your reasons or what you did, as opposed to believing whether or not you did it (regardless of motive). That's part of the reason why most defendants end up accepting plea bargains or not taking the stand in their own defense. Their attorney realizes that the defendant won't actually be *allowed* to say anything in his defense, and taking the stand will just give the prosecution an excuse to flog their metaphorically-bound+gagged defendant even harder.
That's why it's so suicidal to count upon "no jury would ever convict me" logic. 99 times out of 100, the jury will never be allowed to find out why they wouldn't otherwise be willing to convict you, and you won't be allowed to tell them. And if you do, you'll be sent back to square one and subjected to a new trial, and if you do it again, you'll start getting imprisoned for contempt each time you try. Few things suck more than being a juror on a case, witnessing a trial, quickly agreeing to what seems to be a straightforward 'guilty' verdict, walking out to the parking garage feeling warm & fuzzy about protecting democracy & freedom... then seeing on the news that you just destroyed someone's life by convicting him of a major crime for something that was an absurdly inflated charge initiated by something stupid and minor, pursued by a prosecutor whose only concern was keeping up his quota of convictions and having numbers to show he's "tough on crime".
Impossible dig: QicEXtra tapes from sometime around 1995. For those who don't remember them, they were tapes that were supposedly compatible with Qic40/80 drives, but were roughly 3X as deep (with 2/3 the tape cartridge hanging out of the drive).
Seriously. Those damn tapes were "write-only roach-motel media" -- bits got in, and never got out.:-(
Actually, I think you're right. I guess my memory got a little fuzzy after 20 years (omg, has it *really* been that long? I feel old...). After reflecting on it for a while (and skimming a few ancient articles online), I think the years I spent writing PalmOS stuff kind of mangled my Amiga memories a bit. Thinking back harder, I think AmigaDOS multitasking worked through the video interrupt. From what I can remember, there was an official place to put your own jump vector (or maybe it was an official call to pass the address of your own verticalblank handler to a list that AmigaDOS would iterate through and jsr to one at a time after it finished doing its own vblank work), but the way AmigaDOS did context switching was to play with the return address on the interrupt stack. Something like this:
(Intuition is executing)
(vblank interrupt). AmigaDOS is the official interrupt handler. It looks at its list of executing tasks, and determines that Intuition is the current one. It pops the return address from the stack, and saves it in Intuition's "next return address" slot. It then saved the state of a0..a7 and d0..d7 in 64 bytes, and executed its own code. Then, it executed all the user interrupt handlers for other running apps. Finally, it looked at the list, determined that the next app to run was going to be Soundtracker (for example), copied its saved registers to a0..a7 and d0..d7, and pushed its return address onto the stack. Then executed the RTI, which magically resumed execution of Soundtracker.
(Soundtracker is executing)
(vblank interrupt). Same as before, except this time it saves the registers and return address in "Soundtracker's" slot. It executes its handler and the wedged handlers, then determines that the next thing to run is WordPerfect. Restore the regs, push WP's return address, and RTI.
I'm sure it was more complicated than this, but I think that was kind of the essence of how it was able to forcibly grab control of the CPU from uncooperative apps.
On the Amiga, when your app was launched, you could "halfway humor" intuition, open a screen for your app, then operate within that screen with complete indifference to the rest of the system. By doing that, other apps could be allowed to run simultaneously on screens of their own. HOWEVER, your own app had to be somewhat well-behaved for that to work. If your app never checked its message queue, hijacked the interrupt vectors, rewrote the copper display list, or basically acted like it owned the machine... it owned the machine. Coming up with programs that could genuinely and politely coexist and run simultaneously with other, unrelated programs was actually a fair amount of work. In that sense, Amiga's multitasking was cooperative.
For all intents and purposes, ALL multitasking prior to ~Win2k, Linux, and OSX was cooperative. The difference is, legacy Windows and MacOS made the UI subordinate to the applications, so badly-behaving applications compromised the UI as well. The Amiga's UI ran "above" most apps in a way that was fairly robust. Even when compromised, an application had to stomp the system pretty hard to totally disable it. Because things like the mouse pointer and screen-management basically ran on interrupt-driven autopilot, most applications (even many games) respected it and allowed it to keep living, because it was useful to them (at best), and didn't really get in their way (at worst). Thus, programs like SoundTracker could coexist with DeluxePaint and Textcraft, even if they couldn't meaningfully interact with *each other* at runtime. However, if you launched Giana Sisters, Vaxine, Grand Monster Slam, Shadow of the Beast, or anything like that, those other apps were going to get wiped away. Literally, the game would act like an arm scraping across a table to knock everything off and clear it. Even games that didn't act quite so rudely were likely to leave the other apps (or Intuition itself) in a state where they couldn't meaningfully continue to run after the game exited.
In simpler terms:
The Amiga had cooperative windowed multitasking, and pre-emptive high-level multitasking of its mouse pointer, screens, and dialogs.
Macintosh and Windows (3.x, and generally 9x as well) had cooperative windowed multitasking AND the UI itself depended upon programs behaving well, even for things like mousepointer animation and window/dialog management.
The applications themselves were always cooperatively multitasked. The Amiga's difference was that the operating system itself WAS kind of independent of those applications, as long as you didn't go out of your way to stomp on it.
Here's a later example: PalmOS. Under PalmOS, all multitasking was explicitly cooperative, but there was a "higher-up" level for PalmOS itself that ran independently in a very Amiga-like manner to ensure that you could (usually) kill crashed applications and return to the launcher. It wasn't completely *impossible* to get an application (like a terminal app) to multithread and run alongside the system, but Palm made it very hard to do so, because apps that did it were capable of completely destabilizing the device.
The point is that "pre-emptive" vs "cooperative" multitasking when you're talking about anything not involving a hypervisor (or operating system with hypervisor-like capabilities) is more a bunch of blurred shades of gray than a hard line you can draw in the sand. You can say that the Amiga's OS was "more" pre-emptive than everything else of its era, and pulled off the illusion of pre-emptive multitasking better than everything else did, but it wasn't REALLY pre-emptive in the sense anybody who's used VMware (or DOSbox emulation from ~Win2k onward, or Linux) would really view as "true" pre-emptive multitasking.
The Amiga did the best it could with the hardware it had available to it. With a MMU-equipped 68020 or better (separate on the '020, inherent to the '030+) and a bit of politeness (for apps to cooperate with Intuition and politely alloc
The Amiga's UI was preemptively-multitasked (and interrupt-driven). To a large extent, Intuition was indifferent to the state of running applications. If an application crashed, the mouse pointer still moved, you could still drag screens, and you could still move and uncover windows. It SEEMED like preemptive multitasking compared to Windows, because Windows has always made applications responsible for managing their own window contents. If you obscure a window in Windows, Windows leaves it up to the application to re-draw it. In contrast, when you obscured a Window under AmigaDOS2.x (for instance), it just set a 'dirty' bit that didn't get cleared until the application did something to change the screen. As long as the dirty bit didn't get cleared, Intuition itself would save the contents of whatever got obscured, and put it back when you revealed the underlying window again. Under Windows, if the app crashed, covering the crashed app's window with another one just smeared it away into junk.
Likewise, Amiga's dialog boxes were completely indifferent to the state of the running application. This occasionally caused problems, because if your application threw up a dialog, then took a long time to do something before bothering to check its message queue, you could end up with absurd situations, like "User clicked BOTH 'ok' AND 'cancel' at least once".
In a real sense, Windows 2000 (maybe even NT) had better preemptive multitasking than the Amiga... but it didn't feel like it, because a badly-running (or crashed app) made the UI itself appear to be partly crashed. If you think about what Windows 2000 was really doing when it ran DOS apps, it was basically the equivalent of multitasking crack screens and megademos.
Put another way, the Amiga's multitasking was more sizzle than steak, but it pulled off the illusion well, and basically pulled off multitasking better than everything else in its era (Mac, PC, ST). Win32 multitasking (at least, NT and beyond) was technically superior in more and more ways with each new version, but because Windows apps themselves sucked so badly UI-wise when things didn't go well, the illusion of multitasking was prematurely shattered, and the user felt like it was inferior. If you really want to see true preemptive multitasking in a vintage OS, get Windows 2000 and run DOOM, WordPerfect for DOS, AutoCAD, and a bunch of other DOS apps in windowed mode. That was where Windows could really shine... it's just that by the late 90s, nobody really cared about multitasking DOS apps any more, and Windows did such a shitty job of multitasking the UI for actual Windows apps.
> So when Apple starts selling the iGun, we should all be very afraid?
No, because it won't have a trigger. You'll have to launch the app, accept the EULA, acknowledge compliance with applicable laws, navigate to the 'shoot' screen, enter the unlock code, then drag & drop the 'fire' button onto the 'target' spot. And do it before the assailant with a much lower-tech Glock shoots you in the face.
Exactly. If you want to build a 100% open-source media player capable of handling just about anything you might throw at it, you're almost certainly going to have to go with x64 architecture and forget about ARM. ARM just isn't fast enough to bitbang stuff like h.264 HD encoding in realtime, and will probably struggle to do 1080p60 playback (if it can do it at all). Everything that's ARM-based depends upon hardware acceleration and custom chips you'll probably never be allowed to buy or get low-level documentation for. At least, not documentation to do the kind of stuff you're likely to want to do. Most ARM-based media players huff and puff just trying to deal with their own UIs, even when they're treating the actual media playback like an opaque black box that takes encrypted input and (hopefully) does something useful with it.
Buy a motherboard & CPU that's fast enough to decode 1080p60 to RGB and triple-buffer it in realtime, and fast enough to do realtime 720p60 & 1080i60 mpeg-2 encoding without breaking a sweat. Pair it with a few 7200RPM drives with SSD write-through cache. And whatever you do, don't put yourself in a position where you depend upon any kind of hardware codec or acceleration that lacks 100% open-source Linux drivers based upon official datasheets (reverse-engineered drivers don't count). You can always through a bigger CPU at the problem and fix things yourself with software, but you can't always depend upon mass-market media chips (almost guaranteed to be infected by AACS licensing... at least, in the US, Europe, and Australia) being available & documented.
Actually, one part of OS/2 Warp lived on (for me, at least) for almost a decade -- long after I quit caring about OS/2 itself: OS/2 Boot Manager. I used it for *years* (pretty much, up to the point when I got my first 30gb+ hard drive and had to choose between finding a new way to boot into different installations of Windows and giving up anything beyond 32gb... and even then, I'd been hitting my head against the "all bootable partitions must lie within the lower 2gb" barrier for a few years). It saved my butt plenty of times when I had a dysfunctional installation of Windows that had to be reinstalled, but I didn't have time to cut over "cold turkey".
I'm pretty sure PartitionMagic actually licensed it from IBM and made it a feature you could install from within PartitionMagic itself.
No, it's a testament to the fact that OS/2 (Warp) realistically needed 16mb of RAM to run & use WinOS/2 sessions without thrashing itself to death, and circa 1993, that basically meant tossing the 8 1mb SIMMs you paid about $800 for and replacing them with 4 4mb SIMMs for about a kilobuck (give or take).
My soundcard (Gravis Ultrasound) never worked painlessly or reliably with OS/2. I kind of got it to weakly limp along for native OS/2, but it was a brittle truce that cracked like an egg if you so much as had an impure thought. Getting it to work under WinOS/2 equaled the grief and horror of getting the GUS to work under Windows, multiplied by the pain & agony of getting it to work under OS/2. Windows 95, in contrast, "Just Worked".
Ditto, for the rest of my hardware -- my Promise caching IDE hard drive controller, my ET4000/w32 video card, and my Gravis gamepad... all of which could politely be described as "dysfunctional" under OS/2 (or at least under WinOS/2).
Was OS/2 better than Windows 3.11? Yeah, I guess. Was it better than Windows 95? Hell fscking no.
It's *possible* to change the ESN, but on the hierarchy of technically-minor things that can get you sent to prison for a really long time with minimal burden of proof on the part of the prosecution, you'd almost have to be criminally insane to do it, because you could end up serving 10+ years just for knowingly being in possession of a phone with a cloned ESN & making a call with it. And if the prosecution were feeling extraordinarily kind & let YOU off the hook because you convinced them you purchased a used phone from a store in good faith, you can bet they're going to follow the chain of custody back until they get to the guy who cloned the ESN & nail HIM.
In a way, it's almost a shame that the only way to resurrect a Sprint phone with bad ESN is to reflash it for another network. Otherwise, we could rootkit our own phones with a backdoor WE control, and have some Zoz-like fun with whomever ends up owning it down the line if it were stolen and repurposed for someone else. I can see it now... a website that turns people using stolen phones into involuntary reality-TV stars (with all business presence and infrastructure offshore, of course, since actively pwning the buyers and broadcasting their intimate lives on the internet would still probably violate a few federal laws, if only because of their friends & family members who'd be co-stars along with them)...
Sprint absolutely won't activate any phone not sold by them (or at least wholesaled to someone by them). Verizon won't go out of its way to HELP you, but if you can figure out how to make some arbitrary CDMA phone work on Verizon, they won't stand in your way and prohibit you from using it, either.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think Verizon's grudging willingness to let you use any compatible phone is an artifact of the original Bell breakup & consent decree that prohibited Bell from requiring that customers use only equipment sold/leased by them. From what I remember, the general belief was that it was somewhat up in the air and never formally tested in court whether Verizon Wireless was to be treated like a successor entity to Bell subject to the full original consent decree, but the FCC settled it once and for all by making Verizon Wireless formally acknowledge and accept it as a condition of being allowed to buy Alltel.
The problem being, even if your kernels are byte-for-byte identical, you still have to deal with making apps that run well on everything from a 4" 848x480 display to an array of 30" 2560x1920 monitors, then deal with GPU capabilities that span from roughly "Gamecube" to "multicore GPU cards running in SLI mode", and contend with everything from Model M keyboards & high-end gamepads to quirky capacitive displays that can't even do 848x480 finger-painting accurately.
Hell, just look at Android. You can't even get one app to be "best of breed" on both a high-end phone and reference-design Tegra2 Honeycomb/ICS tablet without splitting the codebase and basically rewriting half the app to optimize the UI for the larger display. The iPhone/iPad situation isn't much better (not *quite* as fractured if you compare an iPad2 to an iPhone4s, but things get uglier the more you diverge from the latest generation). Windows is guaranteed to be a thousand times worse, because neither IOS nor Android even TRIES to be everything to everybody on hardware that ranges from a pocketable phone to a pimped-out gamer's wet dream.
Forget bike helmets. Try the National Electric Code or NFP 101 (fire life safety code). Both are a part of pretty much every building code in America, and both cost a fair chunk of change to get a copy of. Officially, it's a copyright violation to reproduce either one on the web.
A few years ago, some city or county somewhere got into a fight for this very reason. They posted the relevant code to their website, and got hit by a DMCA takedown notice. They fought back by arguing that the state constitution required public dissemination of all laws, and noted that the code's inclusion by reference was in fact mandated by the state legislature. I believe they ended up with a license to make it available on their website, behind a ghetto-fabulous paywall (of sorts) intended to restrict access to only citizens of the town, contractors licensed to do business there, and people with a bona-fide building permit in the municipality.
> can you tell me where in the Constitution it gives Congress power to provide government hospitals?
Interstate commerce clause.
1. In America, getting sick without health insurance is financial suicide.
2. If your company doesn't provide health insurance coverage, you have to purchase an individual policy.
3. Individual policies aren't portable across state lines. If you move to a new state, you have to purchase a new policy.
4. An individual purchasing a new individual policy under point 3 will end up paying premiums comparable to those charged to somebody without previous coverage, and face exclusion of any condition believed to be pre-existing at the time the new policy is purchased. At best, the hapless state-moving American will find himself paying exponentially-higher premiums for the same coverage he had in his previous state.
5. As a practical matter, this means that any American dependent upon individual health insurance coverage with even the most trivial pre-existing health condition can basically forget about ever moving to another state, because the consequence of doing so would be financial devastation, exponentially higher premiums, and exclusion of pre-existing conditions. If he's "lucky", his premiums will double. Usually, the conditions will be excluded from the new policy. And if he's SOL, the conditions will be excluded AND he'll be charged exponentially higher premiums.
6. The de-facto inability of Americans to move to another state due to health insurance non-portability negatively affects America's labor mobility, and by extension harms the interstate labor market.
> So what would you think if you were the B777 pilot who's radio communication with air traffic control was > interrupted by a passenger's cell phone call?
I'd think I were schizophrenic, hallucinating, and hearing voices... because the likelihood of hearing recognizable audio from a CDMA2000 or UMTS voice call over an ATC radio is somewhere between "nonexistent" and "impossible".
Let's start with the basics... digital audio compression to produce a bitstream at a low bitrate that gets encrypted, then has its bits sprayed across 2.5 or 5 MHz of spectrum in a manner that, to a naive but astute observer, would appear to be frequency-hopping spread-spectrum modulation.
Put another way, a pilot who says he heard a cell phone conversation over his radio is lying, mistaken, or delusional. It's physically impossible with modern phones, and legacy analog was shut down a couple of years ago.
It's hard to come up with a direct analogy to a landline
It's as if you had unlimited local calling and you used that to keep your computer connected to your ISP via modem instead of paying for the phone companies "Modem only" additional phone line?
I'm not 100% sure, but I think at least one RBOC was making noises about doing exactly that sometime around 1997 (the point when lots of people were getting second phone lines for dialup, but before DSL was really available, and some people were LITERALLY connecting 24/7 to their ISP). Their argument was that the number of subscriber lines was much greater than the number of available circuits, and people who stayed online 24/7 were causing problems for them by using the backhaul resources of several dozen normal subscribers. Then... DSL(and cable internet) arrived, people dumped dialup modems & their second phone lines, and the problem mostly solved itself.
> And if demand that government makes the cookie maker work for the price other than the one they name, > then you, sir, are advocating slavery.
You're conflating 'theft' with 'infringement'.
If India's government forced Bayer to manufacture the drugs and sell them at a specific cost, you could argue that they're being robbed, if not metaphorically enslaved (particularly if they're forced to sell them below cost). However, in this case, what India's government is doing is allowing somebody ELSE to make the drugs and sell them quite voluntarily for a much lower price than Bayer would. It's merely refusing to grant Bayer a monopoly to charge whatever they like and prevent others from selling the same product at lower cost. At worst, it's state-sponsored infringement. And, as everybody on Slashdot should know by now, "Infringement is not theft. Infringement is infringement."
> Bayer would just avoid India completely, and not release their patented drugs until 10-20 years later
To a large part, this tactic is why most countries grant compulsory licensing in at least some instances -- to make it impossible for a company to metaphorically "take its ball and go home". Most countries besides the US take the attitude, "If the IP owner isn't interested in selling it here, and won't allow anybody else to sell it here by granting them a license under reasonable terms, we aren't going to stand in the way of somebody else independently taking the initiative to do an end run around them, make it themselves and sell it here anyway." India just happens to be notorious (within the pharmaceutical industry) for doing it openly, loudly, and proudly when lifesaving drugs are priced out of reach for most Indians by rent-seeking drug companies.
India is also somewhat unique in that it doesn't grant or recognize patents for "method of use" or "molecules", only manufacturing processes. So when finasteride was repurposed in lower-dose form as Propecia for baldness, it wasn't eligible for a new patent in India. That's why Propecia is patented and expensive in the US, but costs next to nothing when purchased from India. Likewise, when Indian companies came up with new ways to manufacture atomoxetine (the ingredient in Strattera), they were able to get their own patents and begin selling it, even though the original patent for Strattera was still in effect and valid in India. In the US, you can combine two old drugs in new doses into a new drug, and get it patented for another 17 years. In India, you'd be laughed at (unless you somehow came up with an innovative new manufacturing process that did something differently than just making the two original drugs by their original processes, mixing them together, and pressing them into tablets containing both).
Sorry, yeah, it was late. I meant LucasArts. However, the same goes for Sierra's old adventure games. It's *insane* that they haven't all been officially re-released with IOS and Android versions (not to mention Windows Phone, if not actually Windows Mobile, PalmOS, Sidekick, and Blackberry ~3-5 years ago). Phone hardware caught up with the capabilities of 1990s PCs literally 5+ years ago, and it seems like the people who own the IP to old games have been too busy trying to stop people from playing them on emulators to ever actually get around to re-releasing them OFFICIALLY.
All I can think of is that it's a situation like that of most of the Colecovision's old games -- their IP licensing was a shortsighted mess 20-30 years ago that would now cost a fortune to try and untangle. Or, alternatively, 20 years' worth of mergers, acquisitions, angry layoffs, random hard drive crashes, and bitchy accountants determined to make long-term archival look like an outrageously expensive blight on quarterly profits have taken their toll.
Look at the accident statistics. After DST ends, they literally go off the scale and become *insane* in the evening. It's lots of little things that all explosively add up to complete gridlock. More people hitting the road over a shorter window of time = more congestion->frustration->aggression->accidents->wrap around and keep repeating like a big daily feedback loop.
> So, you could work at a state level to just have your state not participate in it.
The problem is that most people LIKE having the sun go down later rather than earlier, and the only options available to states are "participate in DST" or "don't participate in DST". There's no option for "permanently stay in DST year-round" (or, if you prefer, declare the state's timezones to all be shifted to the next one east, so Florida (for example) would be on Atlantic & Eastern without DST instead of Eastern & Central with DST).
> Well, China seems to handle a single time zone, though it geographically should be split into five
China also has no "west coast" to speak of, and 98% of its policymakers live along the east coast. If Mexico hadn't sold California to the US, the poor suffering souls in Denver, Seattle, and Portland would probably be living on Eastern time, too. Hell, many people (though it seems to mainly be a particularly nasty Los Angeles phenomenon) have to work unholy hours like 7am-4pm to pacify their East Coast lords and masters, anyway.
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Map data is also salted with fictional bits whose only purpose is to make it obvious when somebody has copied a map's data instead of independently doing the field work from scratch (or obtaining the data from another source), and to give the copyright holder the excuse it needs to sue the creator of the derived map. Remember, you only need one trivial (but concrete) example of infringement to win in court, and by their very nature, proving infringement of that tiny bit of sentinel data is going to be taken as proof that you've infringed upon the whole thing.
Of course, things can backfire. I know there's at least one case of a municipality that "corrected" its official GIS map with salted data from a commercial map (the employees assumed there was just an oversight or mistake made at some point in the past by county officials), and the salted data made its way out into the wild... making a huge mess in the process.
It also depends upon a jury member with background knowledge managing to make it through voir dire without getting disqualified as a juror, and the fact that he made it through not resulting in a mistrial.
In real trials, your lawyer usually isn't *allowed* to reveal to the jury *why* you presumably might have been motivated to do something, if the prosecution can convince the judge that doing so might incite the jury to find you innocent because it approved of your reasons or what you did, as opposed to believing whether or not you did it (regardless of motive). That's part of the reason why most defendants end up accepting plea bargains or not taking the stand in their own defense. Their attorney realizes that the defendant won't actually be *allowed* to say anything in his defense, and taking the stand will just give the prosecution an excuse to flog their metaphorically-bound+gagged defendant even harder.
That's why it's so suicidal to count upon "no jury would ever convict me" logic. 99 times out of 100, the jury will never be allowed to find out why they wouldn't otherwise be willing to convict you, and you won't be allowed to tell them. And if you do, you'll be sent back to square one and subjected to a new trial, and if you do it again, you'll start getting imprisoned for contempt each time you try. Few things suck more than being a juror on a case, witnessing a trial, quickly agreeing to what seems to be a straightforward 'guilty' verdict, walking out to the parking garage feeling warm & fuzzy about protecting democracy & freedom... then seeing on the news that you just destroyed someone's life by convicting him of a major crime for something that was an absurdly inflated charge initiated by something stupid and minor, pursued by a prosecutor whose only concern was keeping up his quota of convictions and having numbers to show he's "tough on crime".
Impossible dig: QicEXtra tapes from sometime around 1995. For those who don't remember them, they were tapes that were supposedly compatible with Qic40/80 drives, but were roughly 3X as deep (with 2/3 the tape cartridge hanging out of the drive).
Seriously. Those damn tapes were "write-only roach-motel media" -- bits got in, and never got out. :-(
Actually, I think you're right. I guess my memory got a little fuzzy after 20 years (omg, has it *really* been that long? I feel old...). After reflecting on it for a while (and skimming a few ancient articles online), I think the years I spent writing PalmOS stuff kind of mangled my Amiga memories a bit. Thinking back harder, I think AmigaDOS multitasking worked through the video interrupt. From what I can remember, there was an official place to put your own jump vector (or maybe it was an official call to pass the address of your own verticalblank handler to a list that AmigaDOS would iterate through and jsr to one at a time after it finished doing its own vblank work), but the way AmigaDOS did context switching was to play with the return address on the interrupt stack. Something like this:
(Intuition is executing)
(vblank interrupt). AmigaDOS is the official interrupt handler. It looks at its list of executing tasks, and determines that Intuition is the current one. It pops the return address from the stack, and saves it in Intuition's "next return address" slot. It then saved the state of a0..a7 and d0..d7 in 64 bytes, and executed its own code. Then, it executed all the user interrupt handlers for other running apps. Finally, it looked at the list, determined that the next app to run was going to be Soundtracker (for example), copied its saved registers to a0..a7 and d0..d7, and pushed its return address onto the stack. Then executed the RTI, which magically resumed execution of Soundtracker.
(Soundtracker is executing)
(vblank interrupt). Same as before, except this time it saves the registers and return address in "Soundtracker's" slot. It executes its handler and the wedged handlers, then determines that the next thing to run is WordPerfect. Restore the regs, push WP's return address, and RTI.
I'm sure it was more complicated than this, but I think that was kind of the essence of how it was able to forcibly grab control of the CPU from uncooperative apps.
OK, let me put it another way.
On the Amiga, when your app was launched, you could "halfway humor" intuition, open a screen for your app, then operate within that screen with complete indifference to the rest of the system. By doing that, other apps could be allowed to run simultaneously on screens of their own. HOWEVER, your own app had to be somewhat well-behaved for that to work. If your app never checked its message queue, hijacked the interrupt vectors, rewrote the copper display list, or basically acted like it owned the machine... it owned the machine. Coming up with programs that could genuinely and politely coexist and run simultaneously with other, unrelated programs was actually a fair amount of work. In that sense, Amiga's multitasking was cooperative.
For all intents and purposes, ALL multitasking prior to ~Win2k, Linux, and OSX was cooperative. The difference is, legacy Windows and MacOS made the UI subordinate to the applications, so badly-behaving applications compromised the UI as well. The Amiga's UI ran "above" most apps in a way that was fairly robust. Even when compromised, an application had to stomp the system pretty hard to totally disable it. Because things like the mouse pointer and screen-management basically ran on interrupt-driven autopilot, most applications (even many games) respected it and allowed it to keep living, because it was useful to them (at best), and didn't really get in their way (at worst). Thus, programs like SoundTracker could coexist with DeluxePaint and Textcraft, even if they couldn't meaningfully interact with *each other* at runtime. However, if you launched Giana Sisters, Vaxine, Grand Monster Slam, Shadow of the Beast, or anything like that, those other apps were going to get wiped away. Literally, the game would act like an arm scraping across a table to knock everything off and clear it. Even games that didn't act quite so rudely were likely to leave the other apps (or Intuition itself) in a state where they couldn't meaningfully continue to run after the game exited.
In simpler terms:
The Amiga had cooperative windowed multitasking, and pre-emptive high-level multitasking of its mouse pointer, screens, and dialogs.
Macintosh and Windows (3.x, and generally 9x as well) had cooperative windowed multitasking AND the UI itself depended upon programs behaving well, even for things like mousepointer animation and window/dialog management.
The applications themselves were always cooperatively multitasked. The Amiga's difference was that the operating system itself WAS kind of independent of those applications, as long as you didn't go out of your way to stomp on it.
Here's a later example: PalmOS. Under PalmOS, all multitasking was explicitly cooperative, but there was a "higher-up" level for PalmOS itself that ran independently in a very Amiga-like manner to ensure that you could (usually) kill crashed applications and return to the launcher. It wasn't completely *impossible* to get an application (like a terminal app) to multithread and run alongside the system, but Palm made it very hard to do so, because apps that did it were capable of completely destabilizing the device.
The point is that "pre-emptive" vs "cooperative" multitasking when you're talking about anything not involving a hypervisor (or operating system with hypervisor-like capabilities) is more a bunch of blurred shades of gray than a hard line you can draw in the sand. You can say that the Amiga's OS was "more" pre-emptive than everything else of its era, and pulled off the illusion of pre-emptive multitasking better than everything else did, but it wasn't REALLY pre-emptive in the sense anybody who's used VMware (or DOSbox emulation from ~Win2k onward, or Linux) would really view as "true" pre-emptive multitasking.
The Amiga did the best it could with the hardware it had available to it. With a MMU-equipped 68020 or better (separate on the '020, inherent to the '030+) and a bit of politeness (for apps to cooperate with Intuition and politely alloc
> true multitasking (preemptive)
Well... yes, and no.
The Amiga's UI was preemptively-multitasked (and interrupt-driven). To a large extent, Intuition was indifferent to the state of running applications. If an application crashed, the mouse pointer still moved, you could still drag screens, and you could still move and uncover windows. It SEEMED like preemptive multitasking compared to Windows, because Windows has always made applications responsible for managing their own window contents. If you obscure a window in Windows, Windows leaves it up to the application to re-draw it. In contrast, when you obscured a Window under AmigaDOS2.x (for instance), it just set a 'dirty' bit that didn't get cleared until the application did something to change the screen. As long as the dirty bit didn't get cleared, Intuition itself would save the contents of whatever got obscured, and put it back when you revealed the underlying window again. Under Windows, if the app crashed, covering the crashed app's window with another one just smeared it away into junk.
Likewise, Amiga's dialog boxes were completely indifferent to the state of the running application. This occasionally caused problems, because if your application threw up a dialog, then took a long time to do something before bothering to check its message queue, you could end up with absurd situations, like "User clicked BOTH 'ok' AND 'cancel' at least once".
In a real sense, Windows 2000 (maybe even NT) had better preemptive multitasking than the Amiga... but it didn't feel like it, because a badly-running (or crashed app) made the UI itself appear to be partly crashed. If you think about what Windows 2000 was really doing when it ran DOS apps, it was basically the equivalent of multitasking crack screens and megademos.
Put another way, the Amiga's multitasking was more sizzle than steak, but it pulled off the illusion well, and basically pulled off multitasking better than everything else in its era (Mac, PC, ST). Win32 multitasking (at least, NT and beyond) was technically superior in more and more ways with each new version, but because Windows apps themselves sucked so badly UI-wise when things didn't go well, the illusion of multitasking was prematurely shattered, and the user felt like it was inferior. If you really want to see true preemptive multitasking in a vintage OS, get Windows 2000 and run DOOM, WordPerfect for DOS, AutoCAD, and a bunch of other DOS apps in windowed mode. That was where Windows could really shine... it's just that by the late 90s, nobody really cared about multitasking DOS apps any more, and Windows did such a shitty job of multitasking the UI for actual Windows apps.
> In 1991 the cellphones were giant bag phones that could only display a phone number.
If you lived in Iowa, maybe. In places like New York, LA, and Miami, we had the Motorola MicroTAC ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_MicroTAC ).
> What network would the phone run on in 1991?
Circuit-switched voice, with 300, 1200, or 2400 baud modem. Slow, but semi-adequate for a BBS, CompuServe, or GEnie.
> So when Apple starts selling the iGun, we should all be very afraid?
No, because it won't have a trigger. You'll have to launch the app, accept the EULA, acknowledge compliance with applicable laws, navigate to the 'shoot' screen, enter the unlock code, then drag & drop the 'fire' button onto the 'target' spot. And do it before the assailant with a much lower-tech Glock shoots you in the face.
Exactly. If you want to build a 100% open-source media player capable of handling just about anything you might throw at it, you're almost certainly going to have to go with x64 architecture and forget about ARM. ARM just isn't fast enough to bitbang stuff like h.264 HD encoding in realtime, and will probably struggle to do 1080p60 playback (if it can do it at all). Everything that's ARM-based depends upon hardware acceleration and custom chips you'll probably never be allowed to buy or get low-level documentation for. At least, not documentation to do the kind of stuff you're likely to want to do. Most ARM-based media players huff and puff just trying to deal with their own UIs, even when they're treating the actual media playback like an opaque black box that takes encrypted input and (hopefully) does something useful with it.
Buy a motherboard & CPU that's fast enough to decode 1080p60 to RGB and triple-buffer it in realtime, and fast enough to do realtime 720p60 & 1080i60 mpeg-2 encoding without breaking a sweat. Pair it with a few 7200RPM drives with SSD write-through cache. And whatever you do, don't put yourself in a position where you depend upon any kind of hardware codec or acceleration that lacks 100% open-source Linux drivers based upon official datasheets (reverse-engineered drivers don't count). You can always through a bigger CPU at the problem and fix things yourself with software, but you can't always depend upon mass-market media chips (almost guaranteed to be infected by AACS licensing... at least, in the US, Europe, and Australia) being available & documented.
Actually, one part of OS/2 Warp lived on (for me, at least) for almost a decade -- long after I quit caring about OS/2 itself: OS/2 Boot Manager. I used it for *years* (pretty much, up to the point when I got my first 30gb+ hard drive and had to choose between finding a new way to boot into different installations of Windows and giving up anything beyond 32gb... and even then, I'd been hitting my head against the "all bootable partitions must lie within the lower 2gb" barrier for a few years). It saved my butt plenty of times when I had a dysfunctional installation of Windows that had to be reinstalled, but I didn't have time to cut over "cold turkey".
I'm pretty sure PartitionMagic actually licensed it from IBM and made it a feature you could install from within PartitionMagic itself.
> Which innovation did you find in Microsoft Vista?
Real symlinks.
No, it's a testament to the fact that OS/2 (Warp) realistically needed 16mb of RAM to run & use WinOS/2 sessions without thrashing itself to death, and circa 1993, that basically meant tossing the 8 1mb SIMMs you paid about $800 for and replacing them with 4 4mb SIMMs for about a kilobuck (give or take).
My soundcard (Gravis Ultrasound) never worked painlessly or reliably with OS/2. I kind of got it to weakly limp along for native OS/2, but it was a brittle truce that cracked like an egg if you so much as had an impure thought. Getting it to work under WinOS/2 equaled the grief and horror of getting the GUS to work under Windows, multiplied by the pain & agony of getting it to work under OS/2. Windows 95, in contrast, "Just Worked".
Ditto, for the rest of my hardware -- my Promise caching IDE hard drive controller, my ET4000/w32 video card, and my Gravis gamepad... all of which could politely be described as "dysfunctional" under OS/2 (or at least under WinOS/2).
Was OS/2 better than Windows 3.11? Yeah, I guess. Was it better than Windows 95? Hell fscking no.
It's *possible* to change the ESN, but on the hierarchy of technically-minor things that can get you sent to prison for a really long time with minimal burden of proof on the part of the prosecution, you'd almost have to be criminally insane to do it, because you could end up serving 10+ years just for knowingly being in possession of a phone with a cloned ESN & making a call with it. And if the prosecution were feeling extraordinarily kind & let YOU off the hook because you convinced them you purchased a used phone from a store in good faith, you can bet they're going to follow the chain of custody back until they get to the guy who cloned the ESN & nail HIM.
In a way, it's almost a shame that the only way to resurrect a Sprint phone with bad ESN is to reflash it for another network. Otherwise, we could rootkit our own phones with a backdoor WE control, and have some Zoz-like fun with whomever ends up owning it down the line if it were stolen and repurposed for someone else. I can see it now... a website that turns people using stolen phones into involuntary reality-TV stars (with all business presence and infrastructure offshore, of course, since actively pwning the buyers and broadcasting their intimate lives on the internet would still probably violate a few federal laws, if only because of their friends & family members who'd be co-stars along with them)...
Sprint absolutely won't activate any phone not sold by them (or at least wholesaled to someone by them). Verizon won't go out of its way to HELP you, but if you can figure out how to make some arbitrary CDMA phone work on Verizon, they won't stand in your way and prohibit you from using it, either.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think Verizon's grudging willingness to let you use any compatible phone is an artifact of the original Bell breakup & consent decree that prohibited Bell from requiring that customers use only equipment sold/leased by them. From what I remember, the general belief was that it was somewhat up in the air and never formally tested in court whether Verizon Wireless was to be treated like a successor entity to Bell subject to the full original consent decree, but the FCC settled it once and for all by making Verizon Wireless formally acknowledge and accept it as a condition of being allowed to buy Alltel.
The problem being, even if your kernels are byte-for-byte identical, you still have to deal with making apps that run well on everything from a 4" 848x480 display to an array of 30" 2560x1920 monitors, then deal with GPU capabilities that span from roughly "Gamecube" to "multicore GPU cards running in SLI mode", and contend with everything from Model M keyboards & high-end gamepads to quirky capacitive displays that can't even do 848x480 finger-painting accurately.
Hell, just look at Android. You can't even get one app to be "best of breed" on both a high-end phone and reference-design Tegra2 Honeycomb/ICS tablet without splitting the codebase and basically rewriting half the app to optimize the UI for the larger display. The iPhone/iPad situation isn't much better (not *quite* as fractured if you compare an iPad2 to an iPhone4s, but things get uglier the more you diverge from the latest generation). Windows is guaranteed to be a thousand times worse, because neither IOS nor Android even TRIES to be everything to everybody on hardware that ranges from a pocketable phone to a pimped-out gamer's wet dream.
Forget bike helmets. Try the National Electric Code or NFP 101 (fire life safety code). Both are a part of pretty much every building code in America, and both cost a fair chunk of change to get a copy of. Officially, it's a copyright violation to reproduce either one on the web.
A few years ago, some city or county somewhere got into a fight for this very reason. They posted the relevant code to their website, and got hit by a DMCA takedown notice. They fought back by arguing that the state constitution required public dissemination of all laws, and noted that the code's inclusion by reference was in fact mandated by the state legislature. I believe they ended up with a license to make it available on their website, behind a ghetto-fabulous paywall (of sorts) intended to restrict access to only citizens of the town, contractors licensed to do business there, and people with a bona-fide building permit in the municipality.
> can you tell me where in the Constitution it gives Congress power to provide government hospitals?
Interstate commerce clause.
1. In America, getting sick without health insurance is financial suicide.
2. If your company doesn't provide health insurance coverage, you have to purchase an individual policy.
3. Individual policies aren't portable across state lines. If you move to a new state, you have to purchase a new policy.
4. An individual purchasing a new individual policy under point 3 will end up paying premiums comparable to those charged to somebody without previous coverage, and face exclusion of any condition believed to be pre-existing at the time the new policy is purchased. At best, the hapless state-moving American will find himself paying exponentially-higher premiums for the same coverage he had in his previous state.
5. As a practical matter, this means that any American dependent upon individual health insurance coverage with even the most trivial pre-existing health condition can basically forget about ever moving to another state, because the consequence of doing so would be financial devastation, exponentially higher premiums, and exclusion of pre-existing conditions. If he's "lucky", his premiums will double. Usually, the conditions will be excluded from the new policy. And if he's SOL, the conditions will be excluded AND he'll be charged exponentially higher premiums.
6. The de-facto inability of Americans to move to another state due to health insurance non-portability negatively affects America's labor mobility, and by extension harms the interstate labor market.
> So what would you think if you were the B777 pilot who's radio communication with air traffic control was
> interrupted by a passenger's cell phone call?
I'd think I were schizophrenic, hallucinating, and hearing voices... because the likelihood of hearing recognizable audio from a CDMA2000 or UMTS voice call over an ATC radio is somewhere between "nonexistent" and "impossible".
Let's start with the basics... digital audio compression to produce a bitstream at a low bitrate that gets encrypted, then has its bits sprayed across 2.5 or 5 MHz of spectrum in a manner that, to a naive but astute observer, would appear to be frequency-hopping spread-spectrum modulation.
Put another way, a pilot who says he heard a cell phone conversation over his radio is lying, mistaken, or delusional. It's physically impossible with modern phones, and legacy analog was shut down a couple of years ago.
It's hard to come up with a direct analogy to a landline
It's as if you had unlimited local calling and you used that to keep your computer connected to your ISP via modem instead of paying for the phone companies "Modem only" additional phone line?
I'm not 100% sure, but I think at least one RBOC was making noises about doing exactly that sometime around 1997 (the point when lots of people were getting second phone lines for dialup, but before DSL was really available, and some people were LITERALLY connecting 24/7 to their ISP). Their argument was that the number of subscriber lines was much greater than the number of available circuits, and people who stayed online 24/7 were causing problems for them by using the backhaul resources of several dozen normal subscribers. Then... DSL(and cable internet) arrived, people dumped dialup modems & their second phone lines, and the problem mostly solved itself.
> And if demand that government makes the cookie maker work for the price other than the one they name,
> then you, sir, are advocating slavery.
You're conflating 'theft' with 'infringement'.
If India's government forced Bayer to manufacture the drugs and sell them at a specific cost, you could argue that they're being robbed, if not metaphorically enslaved (particularly if they're forced to sell them below cost). However, in this case, what India's government is doing is allowing somebody ELSE to make the drugs and sell them quite voluntarily for a much lower price than Bayer would. It's merely refusing to grant Bayer a monopoly to charge whatever they like and prevent others from selling the same product at lower cost. At worst, it's state-sponsored infringement. And, as everybody on Slashdot should know by now, "Infringement is not theft. Infringement is infringement."
> Bayer would just avoid India completely, and not release their patented drugs until 10-20 years later
To a large part, this tactic is why most countries grant compulsory licensing in at least some instances -- to make it impossible for a company to metaphorically "take its ball and go home". Most countries besides the US take the attitude, "If the IP owner isn't interested in selling it here, and won't allow anybody else to sell it here by granting them a license under reasonable terms, we aren't going to stand in the way of somebody else independently taking the initiative to do an end run around them, make it themselves and sell it here anyway." India just happens to be notorious (within the pharmaceutical industry) for doing it openly, loudly, and proudly when lifesaving drugs are priced out of reach for most Indians by rent-seeking drug companies.
India is also somewhat unique in that it doesn't grant or recognize patents for "method of use" or "molecules", only manufacturing processes. So when finasteride was repurposed in lower-dose form as Propecia for baldness, it wasn't eligible for a new patent in India. That's why Propecia is patented and expensive in the US, but costs next to nothing when purchased from India. Likewise, when Indian companies came up with new ways to manufacture atomoxetine (the ingredient in Strattera), they were able to get their own patents and begin selling it, even though the original patent for Strattera was still in effect and valid in India. In the US, you can combine two old drugs in new doses into a new drug, and get it patented for another 17 years. In India, you'd be laughed at (unless you somehow came up with an innovative new manufacturing process that did something differently than just making the two original drugs by their original processes, mixing them together, and pressing them into tablets containing both).
Sorry, yeah, it was late. I meant LucasArts. However, the same goes for Sierra's old adventure games. It's *insane* that they haven't all been officially re-released with IOS and Android versions (not to mention Windows Phone, if not actually Windows Mobile, PalmOS, Sidekick, and Blackberry ~3-5 years ago). Phone hardware caught up with the capabilities of 1990s PCs literally 5+ years ago, and it seems like the people who own the IP to old games have been too busy trying to stop people from playing them on emulators to ever actually get around to re-releasing them OFFICIALLY.
All I can think of is that it's a situation like that of most of the Colecovision's old games -- their IP licensing was a shortsighted mess 20-30 years ago that would now cost a fortune to try and untangle. Or, alternatively, 20 years' worth of mergers, acquisitions, angry layoffs, random hard drive crashes, and bitchy accountants determined to make long-term archival look like an outrageously expensive blight on quarterly profits have taken their toll.
Look at the accident statistics. After DST ends, they literally go off the scale and become *insane* in the evening. It's lots of little things that all explosively add up to complete gridlock. More people hitting the road over a shorter window of time = more congestion->frustration->aggression->accidents->wrap around and keep repeating like a big daily feedback loop.
> So, you could work at a state level to just have your state not participate in it.
The problem is that most people LIKE having the sun go down later rather than earlier, and the only options available to states are "participate in DST" or "don't participate in DST". There's no option for "permanently stay in DST year-round" (or, if you prefer, declare the state's timezones to all be shifted to the next one east, so Florida (for example) would be on Atlantic & Eastern without DST instead of Eastern & Central with DST).
> Well, China seems to handle a single time zone, though it geographically should be split into five
China also has no "west coast" to speak of, and 98% of its policymakers live along the east coast. If Mexico hadn't sold California to the US, the poor suffering souls in Denver, Seattle, and Portland would probably be living on Eastern time, too. Hell, many people (though it seems to mainly be a particularly nasty Los Angeles phenomenon) have to work unholy hours like 7am-4pm to pacify their East Coast lords and masters, anyway.