"The settlements from patent infringement on this could be sizeable."
What is the patent number that covers the MOS 6581? Nobody is producing this chip today, counterfeit or otherwise. I wish they were. I have to scavenge them from breadboxes, and I hate doing that. Yeah, I know where to buy them, not reliably, but I can always find C64s. Sometimes for free, and rarely for more than $5.
"I want my MP3 player to have a SID chip in it, so I can play back all those old SIDplayer files."
I'd settle for nothing more than the 6581 going back into production. I've been building a synth based on 4 SID's, but it is rather upsetting to have to pull them out of C64s. But it costs $5 to get a C64, and to buy a SID chip costs $30-50, if you can find them.
I really don't enjoy destroying breadboxes, but that's the bottom line:-(
Re:Reminds me of that Texas/Bush-ite Bumper Sticke
on
US to Pay to go to ISS
·
· Score: 1
>"Gas, Grass, or Ass, Nobody Rides for Free!"
That's not Bushite! Texan, sure, but one of the good guys thought that one up!
"needless to say it's a bit strange coming from the US where any road with more than a 3 ft drop off the side has a giant concrete barrier."
Well, there are all kinds of roads like what you describe in the Rockies and all over the Pacifc Northwest. I've driven on badly paved roads with sheer dropoffs to a half mile certain death, as recetnly as last summer, in the US.
The blurb said the Apple can justifiably be called the first personal computer. I really had hopes for the KIM-1 to have this title. It was already popular, almost a year before the first Apple 1. And don't claim the Apple I was any turnkey system that the KIM wasn't. Early apples didn't have keyboards or even power supplies bundled.
I don't think Apple has the title to the first personal computer, or even the first "successful" personal computer. Even the Cromemco Z80s were out before Apple in '76 weren't they? (Ah, but they were "scientific" computers, not "personal", I get it.)
Nobody but us total geeks noticed any of this stuff until 77 when there were several horses in the starting gate, not just the AppleII, TRS80, and PET.
But how can anyone make the call for "the first personal home computer" as anything but the Altair? Altairs, IMSAI's, MITS peripherals, were all quite popular already, were featured in tons of magazine articles, and must have been high on the list of motivating factors for Woz and Jobs to do the amazing things they did.
They may have been the most successful, but they damn sure weren't the first.
It's not strictly "loose", and it's not exactly a "giand slab of rock.' It's half of an island of 706 square km, 2.5 km high. The "giant slab of rock" is a mountain range.
So, if a 500 billion metric ton mountain is a "slab of rock", then it's "loose enough" that, say, a quake in the 7's or an eruption like the one in 1949 might shift it a bit, causing the western half of the island to slide away from the rift.
Still think you could engineer a way to accelerate the process, or even to help insure the damage will be as dramatic as "scientists" warn about?
What are the names of these scientists, anyway, and where are their papers published?
Breathlessly repeating a dire warning does not make it scientific.
"the threat of the volcanoes in the Canary Islands causing a tsunami on the Eastern Seaboard is an unlikely event."
Wouldn't Western Africa, and Southern Europe, be far more at risk? It's funny that people try to plant the image of "New York" being flooded, when it's a hell of a lot closer to Spain and Morocco. But I guess an image of Portugal being wiped out by a Tsunami isn't as impressive as "NYC". If the wave can make it across the Atlantic, won't it also raise the Mediterranean sea level? Enough to disappear Sicily?
"1) The current calander isn't that hard to use, every intro to a programming language I've taken has forced us to deal with leap year crap, etc."
I understand the rationale, but I've often wondered why the calendar could not have been continuous. Too late now.
"2) We here in Indiana still dont have Daylight Savings Time. If we switch to 10 hours days, how are the cows going to know when to sleep?"
Here in Arizona we already have more than we need.
"Do you know how hard it is to have a birthday party on Superbowl Sunday?!?!?"
Yeah, but the other side of that, is you and your non-sports-fan friends can pretty much OWN any place that doesn't have a TV on that day. A couple of hours where there is no traffic, and places that are normally busy are empty.
"After all, we're not the ones sealing the EULA's inside the packaging."
If the manufacturer was sealing heroin in the package, and you knew it, would you use the same argument to shirk responsibility?
If the EULA is illegal, you're still pushing it. In fact, your hands, Mr. Retailer, are the last ones to touch it before the customer receives the product.
If you dance with the devil, sooner or later you must pay the fiddler, and you should have considered this when you negotiated with him. After you sign his paper, he owns your soul. Too bad for you.
But you could at least do the dignified thing and accept your share of the responsibility instead of playing this innoncent game of yours.
You don't live in a small town in a rural area. (You might consider Pleasant Hill to be that, for Bay Area standards).
I've witnessed the national chains come in and utterly devastate the local businesses in my home town. I don't blame "just Walmart" though. Even though Walmart did tear down my grandmother's entire neighborhood for their parking lot, and then, just a few years later, close down the store and open an even bigger one just a few miles away. There had been several grocery stores, and lots and lots of independent merchants near that neighborhood -- all pretty much completely gone. There are a couple of automotive shops left, and one or two food places, one of which has been there since 1927, but that's pretty much it.
But I don't hold the people in the town harmless AT ALL. These people do things like sell their timber like there is no tomorrow, and they look at you funny if you say you want to keep your place wooded. If they have more than a couple of acres of land, they cannot seem to grasp the concept of keeping it as a single estate -- they seem compelled to subdivide it.
I'm not even just talking about people who need the money!
When the timber company comes up and says they want to clearcut your 250 acres of forested land and give you 30 grand, these morons take the offer.
You don't *really* have to be a big hippie to see the insanity of that do you?
So it's no surprise to me that when Walmart and all the other big stores, especially the hardware stores, want to buy residential property for cheap and flatten it, people go for it, without hesitation.
I can't really blame Walmart for Americans being insane, stupid, myopic, or all three. (I cannot put "greedy" on this list, because if greed were driving all this, they would be getting more out of it.)
"Why can't they just whip themselves up a self signed root CA with openssl, call themselves the firefox signing authority, and use it to sign extensions that way?"
They can, and they should. But this is perceived in the marketplace the same way as you setting up a folding table on the street corner with a cashbox and calling yourself a "bank."
Verisign got early market mindshare. I was urging people, such as my employer at the time (a large internet service provider on the west coast who I will not name but whose color was Purple), but nobody seemed interested in setting up a CA when the timing would have been perfect.
All anyone seemed to care about in those days was that the little gold key icon lit up in the Netscape window:-(
>Sometimes you can or do (e.g. Nvidia, ATI, Lexmark).
In those cases, I usually assume that you're getting the result of a modest effort by a manufacturer who sees a need to have a bullet point ("Linux support checked yes") but still wants to be completely unreasonable about releasing specs. I don't expect the manufacturer to make as sincere an effort at driver development, as someone like an ALSA project developer who is actually passionate about their work.
>Why should the person installing the software even >be given any choice at all about installing it?
I have a very strong suspicion that the language of software licenses is the result of sort of a Telephone Game.
I think the language is the result of accretion, an overly cautious approach by lawyers (and often, non-lawyers who are trying to cover their asses, but blame their caution on lawyers, who never actually told them what to put in the license).
And since the language is an aggregate, nothing is ever going to be removed from a EULA.
I've worked in enough General Counsel offices to have no mythology attached to legalese. Contracts get written from boilerplate documents by secretaries and sometimes even signed by proxy under loose guidance of counsel.
The assumption is that some team of lawyers actually sat down and picked apart every word of the ridiculous, 6,144 word EULA that you're reading, and have expressly insisted that it be worded this way. That is probably the case in some situations, but if you told me it's common, I'd just laugh.
You'd be shocked at some of the things I personally framed, typed, and had signed by the chief counsel at (mumble) oil company.
I would be much more inclined to believe that the EULA language is the result of N-levels of middle management trying to make themselves as important as the lawyer, who maybe reads the thing and decides there's nothing strictly illegal about it and lets it go.
IANAL, but I've worked in quite a few law offices. Every software license I've ever been party to, has been rather straightforward, but that's because everything I've done has been aimed at a vertical market, was completely proprietary to a single company, or else GPL.
I'd love to hear from a lawyer who actually insisted on a convoluted EULA, and I'd really like to know what the argument for it was, if other than to bury uncomfortable anti-consumer language 5000 words deep in a 6144 word document.
>There are most definitely Wal-Marts in California.
Last time I was in California, I searched in vain for a store that was open 24 hours, where I could buy a USB cable, socks, or razor blades, within a half hour drive from Pasadena. I would have settled for an hour drive. From Pasadena. Or anywhere near I-5 and the 118. Or anywhere really. By dumb luck I found a pharmacy, don't know if it was a Walgreen's or a CVS.
There was a Walmart, right down the road from my hotel. Closed at 10:00. Doh!
"floodgates open up for absolutely HUGE amounts of software piracy..."
There's already a way to get nearly anything you could want, how can this lead to anything more than a marginal increase? How will post-retail copying ever even hold a candle to the 0-day or even the negative day releases that the pros and insiders do?
"Now if we can just get all websites to work equally well with all browsers..."
Right. It's not so much that websites don't work, it's that, invariably, the one web application which is desperately needed, will also happen to be the only one whose implementation doesn't quite work with, e.g., Firefox.
Some javascript stuff just doesn't work right on Firefox. For example, there are list window constructions that pop up in the wrong place, so, you select an option from a menu, and the list pops up, but you can't put your mouse cursor on it to select the item. That sort of thing.
I've seen order forms where I could not have made the purchase using Firefox. I've seen chemistry tests where the student could not complete the test with Firefox. You can say this is the user's problem, but if the user has a choice between using IE or failing Organic Chemistry, I don't think the argument is going to go very far.
On the other hand, I cannot make a case for bug-for-bug compatability either.
>The problem I have is that my hardware for MIDI and >audio (M-Audio Quattro) doesn't have Linux support
Of course it does! It even has an officialy supported ALSA driver.
>in general support for other multi channel cards is >lacking under Linux.
Well, that's true for some, but not for others. I can find no fault, at least at the driver level, with the ALSA driver for my Delta 1010 or my Delta AP2496. I bought the 1010 because of the lack of support for my Echo Layla, but that's supported now as well, as are RME/Digi and Terratec devices.
>In addition a simple loop-based layout tool (like > Acid) would be helpful.
Well, Rosegarden is shaping up to be a pretty good sequencer, and from that starting place, much is possible. I wish Imageline would just go ahead and release a Linux version of FLStudio and raise the bar.
"I'd say the average life insurance policy makes a more direct statement that a life is worth a whole lot less than that."
The life insurance payout is only the part that the owner of the life didn't use. So he presumably enjoyed his life, and got some value out of it. The insurance money is ON TOP of that value; it does not represent the TOTAL value.
"Why not just go up on the price of a renewal? Why tack on an extra fee?"
The registrar gets the renewal fee. ICANN gets the tax. Don't worry about the fee itself -- worry about what damage ICANN may be able to do with a few million extra dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
"The settlements from patent infringement on this could be sizeable."
What is the patent number that covers the MOS 6581?
Nobody is producing this chip today, counterfeit or otherwise. I wish they were. I have to scavenge them from breadboxes, and I hate doing that. Yeah, I know where to buy them, not reliably, but I can always find C64s. Sometimes for free, and rarely for more than $5.
"I want my MP3 player to have a SID chip in it, so I can play back all those old SIDplayer files."
I'd settle for nothing more than the 6581 going back into production. I've been building a synth based on 4 SID's, but it is rather upsetting to have to pull them out of C64s. But it costs $5 to get a C64, and to buy a SID chip costs $30-50, if you can find them.
I really don't enjoy destroying breadboxes, but that's the bottom line
>"Gas, Grass, or Ass, Nobody Rides for Free!"
That's not Bushite! Texan, sure, but one of the good guys thought that one up!
"needless to say it's a bit strange coming from the US where any road with more than a 3 ft drop off the side has a giant concrete barrier."
Well, there are all kinds of roads like what you describe in the Rockies and all over the Pacifc Northwest. I've driven on badly paved roads with sheer dropoffs to a half mile certain death, as recetnly as last summer, in the US.
"It isn't often we get to save 100 million lives with one bit of engineering."
You think that literally cutting an island in two and moving it while plugging a volcano is "a bit of engineering?"
The blurb said the Apple can justifiably be called the first personal computer. I really had hopes for the KIM-1 to have this title. It was already popular, almost a year before the first Apple 1. And don't claim the Apple I was any turnkey system that the KIM wasn't. Early apples didn't have keyboards or even power supplies bundled.
I don't think Apple has the title to the first personal computer, or even the first "successful" personal computer. Even the Cromemco Z80s were out before Apple in '76 weren't they? (Ah, but they were "scientific" computers, not "personal", I get it.)
Nobody but us total geeks noticed any of this stuff until 77 when there were several horses in the starting gate, not just the AppleII, TRS80, and PET.
But how can anyone make the call for "the first personal home computer" as anything but the Altair? Altairs, IMSAI's, MITS peripherals, were all quite popular already, were featured in tons of magazine articles, and must have been high on the list of motivating factors for Woz and Jobs to do the amazing things they did.
They may have been the most successful, but they damn sure weren't the first.
> Exactly how loose is this giant slab of rock
It's not strictly "loose", and it's not exactly a "giand slab of rock.' It's half of an island of 706 square km, 2.5 km high. The "giant slab of rock" is a mountain range.
So, if a 500 billion metric ton mountain is a "slab of rock", then it's "loose enough" that, say, a quake in the 7's or an eruption like the one in 1949 might shift it a bit, causing the western half of the island to slide away from the rift.
Still think you could engineer a way to accelerate the process, or even to help insure the damage will be as dramatic as "scientists" warn about?
What are the names of these scientists, anyway, and where are their papers published?
Breathlessly repeating a dire warning does not make it scientific.
"the threat of the volcanoes in the Canary Islands causing a tsunami on the Eastern Seaboard is an unlikely event."
Wouldn't Western Africa, and Southern Europe, be far more at risk? It's funny that people try to plant the image of "New York" being flooded, when it's a hell of a lot closer to Spain and Morocco. But I guess an image of Portugal being wiped out by a Tsunami isn't as impressive as "NYC". If the wave can make it across the Atlantic, won't it also raise the Mediterranean sea level? Enough to disappear Sicily?
"Uh, your birthday would still be on Christmas, and still have a Christmas Mass, regardless of the day of the week."
Lots of folks only go to church on Christmas if it's a Sunday.
"1) The current calander isn't that hard to use, every intro to a programming language I've taken has forced us to deal with leap year crap, etc."
I understand the rationale, but I've often wondered why the calendar could not have been continuous. Too late now.
"2) We here in Indiana still dont have Daylight Savings Time. If we switch to 10 hours days, how are the cows going to know when to sleep?"
Here in Arizona we already have more than we need.
"Do you know how hard it is to have a birthday party on Superbowl Sunday?!?!?"
Yeah, but the other side of that, is you and your non-sports-fan friends can pretty much OWN any place that doesn't have a TV on that day. A couple of hours where there is no traffic, and places that are normally busy are empty.
>>This work was supported by NASA's Maryland Space
>>Grant Consortium.
>I could think of a few dozen better things for NASA
>to spend its money on.
And they do. My GF has a NASA Space Grant, to research new and interesting ways to kill a specific strain of bacteria.
Quite a few people get the "NASA Space Grant" (although there is a great deal of competition for it.)
"After all, we're not the ones sealing the EULA's inside the packaging."
If the manufacturer was sealing heroin in the package, and you knew it, would you use the same argument to shirk responsibility?
If the EULA is illegal, you're still pushing it. In fact, your hands, Mr. Retailer, are the last ones to touch it before the customer receives the product.
If you dance with the devil, sooner or later you must pay the fiddler, and you should have considered this when you negotiated with him. After you sign his paper, he owns your soul. Too bad for you.
But you could at least do the dignified thing and accept your share of the responsibility instead of playing this innoncent game of yours.
You don't live in a small town in a rural area. (You might consider Pleasant Hill to be that, for Bay Area standards).
I've witnessed the national chains come in and utterly devastate the local businesses in my home town. I don't blame "just Walmart" though. Even though Walmart did tear down my grandmother's entire neighborhood for their parking lot, and then, just a few years later, close down the store and open an even bigger one just a few miles away. There had been several grocery stores, and lots and lots of independent merchants near that neighborhood -- all pretty much completely gone. There are a couple of automotive shops left, and one or two food places, one of which has been there since 1927, but that's pretty much it.
But I don't hold the people in the town harmless AT ALL. These people do things like sell their timber like there is no tomorrow, and they look at you funny if you say you want to keep your place wooded. If they have more than a couple of acres of land, they cannot seem to grasp the concept of keeping it as a single estate -- they seem compelled to subdivide it.
I'm not even just talking about people who need the money!
When the timber company comes up and says they want to clearcut your 250 acres of forested land and give you 30 grand, these morons take the offer.
You don't *really* have to be a big hippie to see the insanity of that do you?
So it's no surprise to me that when Walmart and all the other big stores, especially the hardware stores, want to buy residential property for cheap and flatten it, people go for it, without hesitation.
I can't really blame Walmart for Americans being insane, stupid, myopic, or all three. (I cannot put "greedy" on this list, because if greed were driving all this, they would be getting more out of it.)
"Why can't they just whip themselves up a self signed root CA with openssl, call themselves the firefox signing authority, and use it to sign extensions that way?"
They can, and they should. But this is perceived in the marketplace the same way as you setting up a folding table on the street corner with a cashbox and calling yourself a "bank."
Verisign got early market mindshare. I was urging people, such as my employer at the time (a large internet service provider on the west coast who I will not name but whose color was Purple), but nobody seemed interested in setting up a CA when the timing would have been perfect.
All anyone seemed to care about in those days was that the little gold key icon lit up in the Netscape window
>Sometimes you can or do (e.g. Nvidia, ATI, Lexmark).
In those cases, I usually assume that you're getting the result of a modest effort by a manufacturer who sees a need to have a bullet point ("Linux support checked yes") but still wants to be completely unreasonable about releasing specs. I don't expect the manufacturer to make as sincere an effort at driver development, as someone like an ALSA project developer who is actually passionate about their work.
>Why should the person installing the software even
>be given any choice at all about installing it?
I have a very strong suspicion that the language of software licenses is the result of sort of a Telephone Game.
I think the language is the result of accretion, an overly cautious approach by lawyers (and often, non-lawyers who are trying to cover their asses, but blame their caution on lawyers, who never actually told them what to put in the license).
And since the language is an aggregate, nothing is ever going to be removed from a EULA.
I've worked in enough General Counsel offices to have no mythology attached to legalese. Contracts get written from boilerplate documents by secretaries and sometimes even signed by proxy under loose guidance of counsel.
The assumption is that some team of lawyers actually sat down and picked apart every word of the ridiculous, 6,144 word EULA that you're reading, and have expressly insisted that it be worded this way. That is probably the case in some situations, but if you told me it's common, I'd just laugh.
You'd be shocked at some of the things I personally framed, typed, and had signed by the chief counsel at (mumble) oil company.
I would be much more inclined to believe that the EULA language is the result of N-levels of middle management trying to make themselves as important as the lawyer, who maybe reads the thing and decides there's nothing strictly illegal about it and lets it go.
IANAL, but I've worked in quite a few law offices.
Every software license I've ever been party to, has been rather straightforward, but that's because everything I've done has been aimed at a vertical market, was completely proprietary to a single company, or else GPL.
I'd love to hear from a lawyer who actually insisted on a convoluted EULA, and I'd really like to know what the argument for it was, if other than to bury uncomfortable anti-consumer language 5000 words deep in a 6144 word document.
>There are most definitely Wal-Marts in California.
Last time I was in California, I searched in vain for a store that was open 24 hours, where I could buy a USB cable, socks, or razor blades, within a half hour drive from Pasadena. I would have settled for an hour drive. From Pasadena. Or anywhere near I-5 and the 118. Or anywhere really. By dumb luck I found a pharmacy, don't know if it was a Walgreen's or a CVS.
There was a Walmart, right down the road from my hotel. Closed at 10:00. Doh!
"Eventually, the GM will just post them next to the software."
No, not Best Buy. They will claim you are comparison shopping and have you forcibly removed from the store.
"floodgates open up for absolutely HUGE amounts of software piracy..."
There's already a way to get nearly anything you could want, how can this lead to anything more than a marginal increase? How will post-retail copying ever even hold a candle to the 0-day or even the negative day releases that the pros and insiders do?
"Now if we can just get all websites to work equally well with all browsers..."
Right. It's not so much that websites don't work, it's that, invariably, the one web application which is desperately needed, will also happen to be the only one whose implementation doesn't quite work with, e.g., Firefox.
Some javascript stuff just doesn't work right on Firefox. For example, there are list window constructions that pop up in the wrong place, so, you select an option from a menu, and the list pops up, but you can't put your mouse cursor on it to select the item. That sort of thing.
I've seen order forms where I could not have made the purchase using Firefox. I've seen chemistry tests where the student could not complete the test with Firefox. You can say this is the user's problem, but if the user has a choice between using IE or failing Organic Chemistry, I don't think the argument is going to go very far.
On the other hand, I cannot make a case for bug-for-bug compatability either.
http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/doc-php/templ ate.php?company=Midiman%2FMAudio&card=USB+Audio+Qu attro.&chip=Cypress+AN2131XX&module=usb-audio
How about drugs whose manufacturers gave large amounts of money to the FDA for fasttrack approval, which turned out to be deadly?
>The problem I have is that my hardware for MIDI and
>audio (M-Audio Quattro) doesn't have Linux support
Of course it does! It even has an officialy supported ALSA driver.
>in general support for other multi channel cards is
>lacking under Linux.
Well, that's true for some, but not for others. I can find no fault, at least at the driver level, with the ALSA driver for my Delta 1010 or my Delta AP2496. I bought the 1010 because of the lack of support for my Echo Layla, but that's supported now as well, as are RME/Digi and Terratec devices.
>In addition a simple loop-based layout tool (like
> Acid) would be helpful.
Well, Rosegarden is shaping up to be a pretty good sequencer, and from that starting place, much is possible. I wish Imageline would just go ahead and release a Linux version of FLStudio and raise the bar.
"I'd say the average life insurance policy makes a more direct statement that a life is worth a whole lot less than that."
The life insurance payout is only the part that the owner of the life didn't use. So he presumably enjoyed his life, and got some value out of it. The insurance money is ON TOP of that value; it does not represent the TOTAL value.
"Why not just go up on the price of a renewal? Why tack on an extra fee?"
The registrar gets the renewal fee. ICANN gets the tax. Don't worry about the fee itself -- worry about what damage ICANN may be able to do with a few million extra dollars.