"Although I havent read all the posts, dont think I saw any IMSAI's or Altairs or Ohio Scientifics."
I'm surprised too, even if for the same phenomenon where "everybody was at Woodstock."
When I was in high school, I had a friend whose dad was a university physics professor, who had one of the big Challengers, but I never saw it run, since the machine he actually used was some HP contraption. The HP was very cool though.
C64's are common, but I never actually saw one until I bought one in 2002. I knew people who had PET's, and had lots of friends who had Amigas (still jealous), but I never saw a C64.
I had a TRS-80 with a two digit serial number. I was upset when I had it upgraded to "Level II" and they replaced the case and the serial number stamp:-(
I had the horrible noisy electrostatic "Screen Printer", and then later I had a Telex-branded ASR teletype and paper tape reader. Learned a whole lot about the serial interface, early on, since it was DIY all the way.
At one point, a guy whose name I have forgotten, gave me a software System Monitor that he had coded for TRS-80, and that changed my life.
I got into the first generation of TRS-80 pocket computer for a long time. I loved that thing! But when someone stole it and I couldn't replace it with the same model, I got my first Color Computer 2. Ran OS/9 on it, spend some time learning the BASIC and 6809 asm, wrote my own editor, modified a UCSD Pascal interpreter, and started a whole lot of projects that I never finished. (The reasons were laziness and also, I could never afford to upgrade my drives, so my old busted disc drives were slow unreliable.)
By that time most of my friends had Apples or Commodores. We all thought the first generation of IBM-compatables sucked, and then we all pretty much got 80286's with VGA. Life got interesting again when I got my first 386 and could run Desqview. And then the first public releases of Linux were available, and it's been smooth sailing from then, to now.
"It's kind of shocking that they haven't found a way to leverage the huge brand recognition they have amoung the graphics geeks out there."
We predicted this when they changed their very cool brand name to a very stupid trademark. What was the point of that, anyway? Right here on Slashdot, the day they announced it, it was well understood that it would be the end for SGI. People acted like that was a petty, insignificant thing, but here we are.
Re:lost me on the pronunciation
on
Vonage IPO
·
· Score: 1
Yes, yes, I understand. But they started out calling it with a francophone pronunciation and then CHANGED it to an americanized pronunciation, and it's painfully obvious that this is a "freedom fries" situation and I'm not buying the service because of that.
lost me on the pronunciation
on
Vonage IPO
·
· Score: 0, Troll
I thought Vonage was kind of cool until they started airing tv commercials with the name pronounced with the stress on the first syllable. It's obvious they are trying to not sound French, which reeks of the right-wing party line. They want you to say "Vone-idge" instead of "vahn-aaahj". And that's enough to keep me on my landline.
"I wouldn't be surprised if in the average jury selected for a BitTorrent case, less than half of the people in the jury have even heard the name, let alone know what it is."
Therein lies a sufficient defense against any finding that the name is diluted and should be stripped of protection...
If the people who built my school didn't even think enough of it to give it a *name*, I'd certainly limit my expectations anyway.
The labs in my school, (named after the State of Arizona), have about 50% Windows XP machines and 50% Fedora Core 4 running on Dells. A course in MIPS assembly language programming and hardware organization is required in the first year of CS, the second year has a UNIX programming course requirement.
Many university CS programs include courses in Computer Organization using Hennessy & Patterson on a MIPS platform, Systems Programming in some flavor of UNIX, OS Development that is definitely NOT Windows-ish, and all the Discrete Math and Automata courses that are not really associated with any given platform.
I have evaluated the CS curriculum of many university programs, and I have not come to the same conclusion that you have.
"I'd like to meet the purchase manager who picks out these computer labs. "
If you seriously had something to offer, I could put you in touch with one of them. You'd be disappointed however. He worked for the DoD, not Motorola, and is anything but and "entry level idiot."
Nevertheless, if they distribute a version of it and refuse to distribute the source code, there is no limit to the amount of civil liability to which they are exposing themselves, being in breach of a contract which does not specify any limitation on the value of damages which can be sought.
This could become serious, if anyone on the plaintiff side of a GPL dispute is ever somebody who is not dependent on nickle and dime donations. Fortunately or unfortunately, nobody is really afraid of any real consequences of a GPL violation. At least, they are not afraid of having to pay settlements that send them into bankruptcy, or of having to face a plaintiff in court who is an economic and political peer.
This could change, perhaps, and the damages could be sought retroactively, and with interest. I don't think the violators would be so smug if there were a real chance of being called on their contract violation, in those terms, in a court situation where the plaintiff isn't a broke and dysfunctional rabble of software commies.
Sooner or later, somebody is going to distribute a piece of GPL code to which a large, well-funded corporation has a strong interest in preserving as GPL code. And it won't be the FSF, with their T-shirt sale budget, they have to face, but somebody that they really wouldn't want to argue against in court.
"You can not selectivly inforce your trademark and hope to retain it for any period of time."
On the other hand, there's no law that requires you to be a litigious bastard just because you have a trademark. If your product reaches the level of cultural saturation where a jury would decide that the name is in common, universal usage, and that it would be uncommon for a person to even know that the name was trademarked, you've succeeded in something much larger than trademarks, and also, your product has almost certainly reached a point in its history where it should not be necessary for society to continue to give you arbitrary protection.
"First, if you think Xerox, Hoover, Kleenex, and Band-Aid aren't trademarked, you're deluded, and that certainly hasn't stopped their names from becoming common usage."
There's a term for it: "Genericide"
Allen wrench, brassiere, escalator, heroin, laundromat, and linoleum are examples of former trademarks that can no longer be exclusively used by any one party.
One test is this. If you can collect a jury of 12 individuals who are all familiar with the term and also all unaware that the word is a trademark, it's unlikely that any party would prevail if they were to attempt to enforce their exclusive rights to the term.
> I doubt you can selectively apply a trademark like that.
Why not? Did you run it past an IP lawyer? Do you think if you had a claim like this, you wouldn't be able to get a lawyer to file your case, instead saying "no, Kjella, I don't think we can sue this one guy without suing everybody on the planet." It doesn't work this way. I know you want to refer to the doctrine of laches, but it's really not the barrier people seem to believe it to be.
"There's stupid. There's really, really stupid. Then there is mind-buggeringly space-bending stupid, which is what pretty much everything the Bush administration touches, most particularly anything resembling science."
Then there's insanity, where somebody is genuinely surprised that money for scientific research isn't easily acquired from this particular source.
"I hate to break it to you, but it's not like we are watching the super bowl all over the world. We don't care much for your silly sports."
I wish that were true, because I would like to see the influence of American sports decline.
But the fact is, millions of people *are* watching this game all over the world, and not all of them US expats either.
YOU didn't watch it, but then, neither did I, and I'm in the US... To be honest, I did not even know today was the game day until late in the afternoon. I did read the news this morning, using Google News, and I suppose since I have "Sports" unchecked as a topic of interest, I wasn't reminded (thank you Google!)
It's already Monday, and I still could not tell you what teams played, or who won. I did gather that it was cold wherever the game was held. The only thing I'm really interested in, though, is whether there were any interesting TV ads during the game, and I suppose I'd be interested in knowing whether someone set up them the bomb.
Pundits (or trolls) like that are forgetting something simpler:
As a cop, you don't want your last job to be the guy who didn't notice someone committing an act of mayhem at an event on your watch. Something like that will always be the last item on your resume.
Never mind "Homeland Security" or "Patriotism." These guys are operating at a historically unprecedented level of "Cover Your Own Ass."
I use Photoshop CS for manipulating my images, which usually involves perspective compensation and color correction. But I use GIMP for editing icons and UI elements! I prefer each of these programs in different situations and I would not want to do without either of them.
Also, I routinely run PS under a Win2000 VMWare machine, but I don't print that way, because I have to use native printer drivers to get proper ink control.
I'm an amateur photographer but I have an 8MP camera and I like to make large prints. I pay a lot of attention to color, and this is not an area where GIMP really competes.
It's not the GIMP developers' fault, for the most part. Many of the desirable features tread into IP-encumbered implementation territory. There's no way you can even work with standard colorspaces because there are arbitrary barriers to entry in that marketplace, but there are lots of other issues that even a mildy serious photographer will run into quickly.
But like I said, there are things that are easy to do in GIMP that would be a chore to do in PS. It really isn't a choice that I would make between these two programs.
The way I see it, everybody already has GIMP, take it or leave it. That leaves the only question: Do I need Photoshop? The answer might be, you only need Photoshop Elements, which can often be obtained free-as-in-beer anyway (bundled with cameras, and with certain books).
Or maybe you can get by just fine with GIMP. It does have some excellent features and for certain kinds of tasks, its usability is better than PS.
Just imagine how successful Bill Gates could be today, if he hadn't been such a jerk so early in his career! Pissing off the whole hobbyist community cost him dearly.
Nor will you be able to make content that plays on that DRM'd player, or at least, there will be some limitation that prevents you from making content that is received the same way as a commercial production.
I draw the line at hardware that forces DRM or any copy protection against my own work. I didn't give anyone the right to do that, and I consider it a violation of my copyrights when devices do this. For example, I can't use a Sony Minidisc to record my songs, because they are a one-way digital recording. Using the device deprives me of my copyright. The company's right to protect its copyrights and other interests stops before they abridge mine.
Plenty of hobbyists (amateur producers doing video and music) will need to be able to *create* content in whatever medium is required. It's not just about consuming, it's also about being able to deliver in the format that's required, or risk being shut out. That said, I doubt any studios will ever be in the position where they can't import a 16 bit.wav file. But there are already enough artificial barriers between an amateur music or video producer and the commercial world.
Slashdot Mirror
>Dungeons of Daggorath!!!
That game took me into a new threshold of touch typing.
Temple of Apshai trilogy had done the same, for a previous threshold.
"Although I havent read all the posts, dont think I saw any IMSAI's or Altairs or Ohio Scientifics."
I'm surprised too, even if for the same phenomenon where "everybody was at Woodstock."
When I was in high school, I had a friend whose dad was a university physics professor, who had one of the big Challengers, but I never saw it run, since the machine he actually used was some HP contraption. The HP was very cool though.
> The most common by far
C64's are common, but I never actually saw one until I bought one in 2002. I knew people who had PET's, and had lots of friends who had Amigas (still jealous), but I never saw a C64.
>Damn I miss my coco.
OS-9 was a hell of a good platform.
I had a TRS-80 with a two digit serial number. I was upset when I had it upgraded to "Level II" and they replaced the case and the serial number stamp :-(
I had the horrible noisy electrostatic "Screen Printer", and then later I had a Telex-branded ASR teletype and paper tape reader. Learned a whole lot about the serial interface, early on, since it was DIY all the way.
At one point, a guy whose name I have forgotten, gave me a software System Monitor that he had coded for TRS-80, and that changed my life.
I got into the first generation of TRS-80 pocket computer for a long time. I loved that thing! But when someone stole it and I couldn't replace it with the same model, I got my first Color Computer 2. Ran OS/9 on it, spend some time learning the BASIC and 6809 asm, wrote my own editor, modified a UCSD Pascal interpreter, and started a whole lot of projects that I never finished. (The reasons were laziness and also, I could never afford to upgrade my drives, so my old busted disc drives were slow unreliable.)
By that time most of my friends had Apples or Commodores. We all thought the first generation of IBM-compatables sucked, and then we all pretty much got 80286's with VGA. Life got interesting again when I got my first 386 and could run Desqview. And then the first public releases of Linux were available, and it's been smooth sailing from then, to now.
"It's kind of shocking that they haven't found a way to leverage the huge brand recognition they have amoung the graphics geeks out there."
We predicted this when they changed their very cool brand name to a very stupid trademark. What was the point of that, anyway? Right here on Slashdot, the day they announced it, it was well understood that it would be the end for SGI. People acted like that was a petty, insignificant thing, but here we are.
Yes, yes, I understand. But they started out calling it with a francophone pronunciation and then CHANGED it to an americanized pronunciation, and it's painfully obvious that this is a "freedom fries" situation and I'm not buying the service because of that.
I thought Vonage was kind of cool until they started airing tv commercials with the name pronounced with the stress on the first syllable. It's obvious they are trying to not sound French, which reeks of the right-wing party line. They want you to say
"Vone-idge" instead of "vahn-aaahj". And that's enough to keep me on my landline.
"I wouldn't be surprised if in the average jury selected for a BitTorrent case, less than half of the people in the jury have even heard the name, let alone know what it is."
Therein lies a sufficient defense against any finding that the name is diluted and should be stripped of protection...
>I go to an unnamed school in north east Ohio
If the people who built my school didn't even think enough of it to give it a *name*, I'd certainly limit my expectations anyway.
The labs in my school, (named after the State of Arizona), have about 50% Windows XP machines and 50% Fedora Core 4 running on Dells. A course in MIPS assembly language programming and hardware organization is required in the first year of CS, the second year has a UNIX programming course requirement.
"They teach everyone on or in windows. "
Many university CS programs include courses in Computer Organization using Hennessy & Patterson on a MIPS platform, Systems Programming in some flavor of UNIX, OS Development that is definitely NOT Windows-ish, and all the Discrete Math and Automata courses that are not really associated with any given platform.
I have evaluated the CS curriculum of many university programs, and I have not come to the same conclusion that you have.
"I'd like to meet the purchase manager who picks out these computer labs. "
If you seriously had something to offer, I could put you in touch with one of them. You'd be disappointed however. He worked for the DoD, not Motorola, and is anything but and "entry level idiot."
> You do not need the linux source code
Nevertheless, if they distribute a version of it and refuse to distribute the source code, there is no limit to the amount of civil liability to which they are exposing themselves, being in breach of a contract which does not specify any limitation on the value of damages which can be sought.
This could become serious, if anyone on the plaintiff side of a GPL dispute is ever somebody who is not dependent on nickle and dime donations. Fortunately or unfortunately, nobody is really afraid of any real consequences of a GPL violation. At least, they are not afraid of having to pay settlements that send them into bankruptcy, or of having to face a plaintiff in court who is an economic and political peer.
This could change, perhaps, and the damages could be sought retroactively, and with interest. I don't think the violators would be so smug if there were a real chance of being called on their contract violation, in those terms, in a court situation where the plaintiff isn't a broke and dysfunctional rabble of software commies.
Sooner or later, somebody is going to distribute a piece of GPL code to which a large, well-funded corporation has a strong interest in preserving as GPL code. And it won't be the FSF, with their T-shirt sale budget, they have to face, but somebody that they really wouldn't want to argue against in court.
"You can not selectivly inforce your trademark and hope to retain it for any period of time."
On the other hand, there's no law that requires you to be a litigious bastard just because you have a trademark. If your product reaches the level of cultural saturation where a jury would decide that the name is in common, universal usage, and that it would be uncommon for a person to even know that the name was trademarked, you've succeeded in something much larger than trademarks, and also, your product has almost certainly reached a point in its history where it should not be necessary for society to continue to give you arbitrary protection.
"First, if you think Xerox, Hoover, Kleenex, and Band-Aid aren't trademarked, you're deluded, and that certainly hasn't stopped their names from becoming common usage."
There's a term for it: "Genericide"
Allen wrench, brassiere, escalator, heroin, laundromat, and linoleum are examples of former trademarks that can no longer be exclusively used by any one party.
One test is this. If you can collect a jury of 12 individuals who are all familiar with the term and also all unaware that the word is a trademark, it's unlikely that any party would prevail if they were to attempt to enforce their exclusive rights to the term.
> I doubt you can selectively apply a trademark like that.
Why not? Did you run it past an IP lawyer? Do you think if you had a claim like this, you wouldn't be able to get a lawyer to file your case, instead saying "no, Kjella, I don't think we can sue this one guy without suing everybody on the planet." It doesn't work this way. I know you want to refer to the doctrine of laches, but it's really not the barrier people seem to believe it to be.
People do tend to respect the law when it comes to their door and seizes their assets following a judgement against them.
"There's stupid. There's really, really stupid. Then there is mind-buggeringly space-bending stupid, which is what pretty much everything the Bush administration touches, most particularly anything resembling science."
Then there's insanity, where somebody is genuinely surprised that money for scientific research isn't easily acquired from this particular source.
" No, seriously, practically nobody in Europe even knows or cares whether the Soupa Bowl is Baseball or American football"
I'm not arguing with that, but the worldwide broadcast contracts for the televised game are huge and tend to disagree with your observations.
"I hate to break it to you, but it's not like we are watching the super bowl all over the world. We don't care much for your silly sports."
I wish that were true, because I would like to see the influence of American sports decline.
But the fact is, millions of people *are* watching this game all over the world, and not all of them US expats either.
YOU didn't watch it, but then, neither did I, and I'm in the US... To be honest, I did not even know today was the game day until late in the afternoon. I did read the news this morning, using Google News, and I suppose since I have "Sports" unchecked as a topic of interest, I wasn't reminded (thank you Google!)
It's already Monday, and I still could not tell you what teams played, or who won. I did gather that it was cold wherever the game was held. The only thing I'm really interested in, though, is whether there were any interesting TV ads during the game, and I suppose I'd be interested in knowing whether someone set up them the bomb.
Pundits (or trolls) like that are forgetting something simpler:
As a cop, you don't want your last job to be the guy who didn't notice
someone committing an act of mayhem at an event on your watch. Something like that will always be the last item on your resume.
Never mind "Homeland Security" or "Patriotism." These guys are operating at a historically unprecedented level of "Cover Your Own Ass."
I use Photoshop CS for manipulating my images, which usually involves perspective compensation and color correction. But I use GIMP for editing icons and UI elements! I prefer each of these programs in different situations and I would not want to do without either of them.
Also, I routinely run PS under a Win2000 VMWare machine, but I don't print that way, because I have to use native printer drivers to get proper ink control.
I'm an amateur photographer but I have an 8MP camera and I like to make large prints. I pay a lot of attention to color, and this is not an area where GIMP really competes.
It's not the GIMP developers' fault, for the most part. Many of the desirable features tread into IP-encumbered implementation territory. There's no way you can even work with standard colorspaces because there are arbitrary barriers to entry in that marketplace, but there are lots of other issues that even a mildy serious photographer will run into quickly.
But like I said, there are things that are easy to do in GIMP that would be a chore to do in PS. It really isn't a choice that I would make between these two programs.
The way I see it, everybody already has GIMP, take it or leave it. That leaves the only question: Do I need Photoshop? The answer might be, you only need Photoshop Elements, which can often be obtained free-as-in-beer anyway (bundled with cameras, and with certain books).
Or maybe you can get by just fine with GIMP. It does have some excellent features and for certain kinds of tasks, its usability is better than PS.
>because the software dictates the terms
I'm not so sure it's the software that does the dictation, as much as it is the NP-complete problems that protect the cryptography.
The strategy may backfire badly if the crypto does not manage to outlive the copyright term.
Just imagine how successful Bill Gates could be today, if he hadn't been such a jerk so early in his career! Pissing off the whole hobbyist community cost him dearly.
Nor will you be able to make content that plays on that DRM'd player, or at least, there will be some limitation that prevents you from making content that is received the same way as a commercial production.
I draw the line at hardware that forces DRM or any copy protection against my own work. I didn't give anyone the right to do that, and I consider it a violation of my copyrights when devices do this. For example, I can't use a Sony Minidisc to record my songs, because they are a one-way digital recording. Using the device deprives me of my copyright. The company's right to protect its copyrights and other interests stops before they abridge mine.
Plenty of hobbyists (amateur producers doing video and music) will need to be able to *create* content in whatever medium is required. It's not just about consuming, it's also about being able to deliver in the format that's required, or risk being shut out. That said, I doubt any studios will ever be in the position where they can't import a 16 bit .wav file. But there are already enough artificial barriers between an amateur music or video producer and the commercial world.