> the ads do not present a true viewpoint or political message and would therefore not be protected
I keep running into things by people who seem to have read a different version of the Constitution than I did. What's special about a 'true viewpoint' that makes it any more protected than any other form of expression?
That's been my experience as well -- the crackers who broke one of my games (in three days -- took me two weeks to do the protection) lived in my apartment complex and chatted with me about it.
They were just looking for a challenge. They had hundreds of games, and as near as I can tell they never really played them.
But of course they gave copies and compilations away to anyone who asked, often with a "cracked by (stupid hackerish name)" splash screen.
This is a case where just a couple of tweaks to the original x86 architecture might have had a dramatic impact on the industry.
The paragraph size of the 8086 was 16 bytes; that is, the segment registers were essentially multiplied by 16, giving an address range of 1MB, which resulted in extreme memory pressure (that 640K limit) starting in the mid 80s.
If the paragraph size had been 256 bytes, that would have resulted in a 24MB address space. We probably wouldn't have hit the wall for another several years. Companies such as VisiCorp might have succeeded at products like VisiOn, which were bending heaven and earth to cram their products into 640K, it would have been much easier to do graphics-oriented processing (death of Microsoft and Apple, anyone?). And so on.
Things might look profoundly different now, if only the 8086 had had four more address pins, and someone at Intel hadn't thought, "Well, 1MB is enough for anyone..."
Fortunately I have a simple answer in this case: You don't *need* the stuff I produce. So if you wind up with it in your possession and you haven't paid for it, it's pretty clear cut: You have no *right* to my work, and if it's clear that you've ripped it off I'll feel justified suing the bollocks off of you.
Everything else is details on how this is accomplished. I agree that SWAT teams and a patent system that makes patent trolling easy are bad. But if you're "trading" music or software, I have no problem with hauling you to court, and technologies that make ferreting you out easier are just dandy with me.
Strutting around arguing that you are somehow entitled to the fruits of my labor just because it is easly copyable is simple greed. Copy protection systems are the speed-bumps that get lazy oxygen-wasters like yourself to occasionally pay for the stuff you would otherwise steal. The fact that copy protection systems need to exist has more to say about *your* morality than my own.
I have a Sony PRS-505. It's really great having 300-400 books available at my fingertips, wherever I travel.
The device has PDF support, but it is glacial and nearly inadequate for reading (say) ACM papers. There are conversion possibilities here, or the device may get better support in the future (it wouldn't be hard, frankly).
But for plain text it's wonderful. I'm on vacation now with my unit, and have ploughed through 3-4 books in the last few days.
My balk at getting a Kindle: Having to route your content through Amazon. The privacy aspects of this are terrifying.
Re:Other Media of Related Interest
on
Donkey Kong and Me
·
· Score: 5, Informative
We just played it. A *lot*. And read the cheat guides in books and magazines. (For some titles we got "expert hands" and took video tape).
But you don't need to beat a game to get a good feel for it.
That is exactly right; this is pure geek nostalgia. Nobody really cares about the details of a failed company 25 years ago, or about some guy who wrote an arcade game clone on an obsolete computer. The world has moved on.
But . . . some of the lessons are timeless: Failing companies go south in common ways (poor hiring practices, success concealing bad mistakes, miserable engineering practices, etc.). This was my first job out of college, I had no idea what the real world was like, and it was a real eye-opener. (And from a geek perspective: You can do amazing stuff in 16K. Still can. Firmware engineers do this kind of thing every day).
(It kind of sucks to be slashdotted. I never expected that).
The proposed legislation giving us X-ray Mind-Reading Super Powers will permit us to find out when people are thinking Bad Thoughts, anywhere! Criminals should give themselves up now!
Cringley's an idiot. There are far cheaper ways to do this. BillG could stand on the sidewalk in front of Yahoo and hand out hire-on-bonus checks if all that MS wanted was employees, and MS would have been far, far ahead, stock-price-wise.
In the early 90s, Intel marketing had a similar idea involving "renting" the floating point processor; each CPU would come with (say) a billion ops, with cryptographically protected fuses to open up more blocks. You'd pay for software that would blow the fuses and give you more ops, if you ran out.
Stupid idea (even if it was implementable, which I doubt).
And then Quake came along, and suddenly people were using floating point ops for things other than spreadsheets...
I wrote my first commerical game on the Atari 400, and it got me into the games industry (straight out of college) in 1982.
It sucked, but it was all I could afford, and after a month or two I was touch-typing on it.
PC World missed the ISC Intecolor, though. Its keyboard *looked* okay, but it had "zero key rollover," meaning that you had to *completely* release a key -- *all* the way to the top -- before hitting another, or you got some random keystroke instead. Next to impossible to type on; the most efficient way was with a pencil, poking at the keys.
That's incredibly good to hear (I haven't touched a Mac since I left Apple in the mid 90s).
The thing about an "installer" is that you're already in trouble. You have to learn another language (looking at the knowledge base for InstallShield was a real eye-opener, things like "no longer crash when a case-statement expression is not constant" in like version 5 of the product), with no debugger and essentially no specified semantics, with buggy, inconsistent runtime support routines (such as the 'delete' landmine that the Eve folks were bit by), and that's all in preparation for loading up registry entries with gnarly, picky, badly documented values and arcane strings. It's an all-you-can-eat nightmare.
The.NET folks seem to have their act together, to some extent; sensible search paths, just have the infrastructure installed and apps are likely to work. But it's still not totally wonderful.
I'm not aware of a single installer package on Windows that isn't a useless, complicated, badly-documented, bug-ridden piece of crap. The times when I've had to use (say) InstallShield, I've seriously thought about finding a new job. This stuff sucks *and* blows. (Don't get me started on USB support and BlueTooth. Oh my God. Don't even think about reading about that stuff: Once you crack open the docs and see the wavy tentacles, the squamous mouths, the eyes, the eyes, the eyes that . . . well, you'll never be quite the same again. T-tr-trust me on th-that).
Remember the happy days of "just copy" installs, which worked great on MacOs in the 90s? Upgrade to a new system? Just copy your "apps" folder over.
The question, "What kind of installer should our OS have?" is like asking, "Should we drink the red poison or the green one?" Just asking the question seals your doom.
Slashdot Mirror
> IBM has a history of burying its best stuff (like OS/2 for instance).
Ah ... um, Hrulllpghhh!
4. Which of these phrases most typifies the profoundest love:
A. Don't leave me with strangers.
B. I love you.
C. God is love.
D. Use the needle.
> the ads do not present a true viewpoint or political message and would therefore not be protected
I keep running into things by people who seem to have read a different version of the Constitution than I did. What's special about a 'true viewpoint' that makes it any more protected than any other form of expression?
"Ooopsie! Sorry, Judge. That shouldn't read 'child porn,' that should read 'parking ticket.' I'll talk to the data entry clerks again."
"Never mind, prosecutor. Just lock 'em up for not having the receipts for the music on their hard drives."
"But . . . your Honor, we bought those at Wal Mart!"
"Lock 'em up for being stupid, too."
Yeah. What's the MIME type for copper?
That's been my experience as well -- the crackers who broke one of my games (in three days -- took me two weeks to do the protection) lived in my apartment complex and chatted with me about it.
They were just looking for a challenge. They had hundreds of games, and as near as I can tell they never really played them.
But of course they gave copies and compilations away to anyone who asked, often with a "cracked by (stupid hackerish name)" splash screen.
'cause:
- physicians don't have to deal with "People 2.0"
- part of a lawyer's job is to deal with people who know they are lying. People who spec software don't even know that much.
- engineers have been building bridges for thousands of years (a *lot* of the early efforts fell down, right?)
- accountants ... i don't trust accountants, do you?
Second that. Pretty much brainless copy-and-paste. No insight about what's taught.
Don't bother.
8088 (an 8086 with an 8-bit bus) at 8Mhz, and a graphics card architecture that was absolutely miserable, like stuffing pixels through a straw.
:-)
Oh, we suffered back then, believe me...
This is a case where just a couple of tweaks to the original x86 architecture might have had a dramatic impact on the industry.
The paragraph size of the 8086 was 16 bytes; that is, the segment registers were essentially multiplied by 16, giving an address range of 1MB, which resulted in extreme memory pressure (that 640K limit) starting in the mid 80s.
If the paragraph size had been 256 bytes, that would have resulted in a 24MB address space. We probably wouldn't have hit the wall for another several years. Companies such as VisiCorp might have succeeded at products like VisiOn, which were bending heaven and earth to cram their products into 640K, it would have been much easier to do graphics-oriented processing (death of Microsoft and Apple, anyone?). And so on.
Things might look profoundly different now, if only the 8086 had had four more address pins, and someone at Intel hadn't thought, "Well, 1MB is enough for anyone..."
I make my living from "oppressing" you, I guess.
Fortunately I have a simple answer in this case: You don't *need* the stuff I produce. So if you wind up with it in your possession and you haven't paid for it, it's pretty clear cut: You have no *right* to my work, and if it's clear that you've ripped it off I'll feel justified suing the bollocks off of you.
Everything else is details on how this is accomplished. I agree that SWAT teams and a patent system that makes patent trolling easy are bad. But if you're "trading" music or software, I have no problem with hauling you to court, and technologies that make ferreting you out easier are just dandy with me.
Strutting around arguing that you are somehow entitled to the fruits of my labor just because it is easly copyable is simple greed. Copy protection systems are the speed-bumps that get lazy oxygen-wasters like yourself to occasionally pay for the stuff you would otherwise steal. The fact that copy protection systems need to exist has more to say about *your* morality than my own.
I owe you nothing. Go to Hell.
I have a Sony PRS-505. It's really great having 300-400 books available at my fingertips, wherever I travel.
The device has PDF support, but it is glacial and nearly inadequate for reading (say) ACM papers. There are conversion possibilities here, or the device may get better support in the future (it wouldn't be hard, frankly).
But for plain text it's wonderful. I'm on vacation now with my unit, and have ploughed through 3-4 books in the last few days.
My balk at getting a Kindle: Having to route your content through Amazon. The privacy aspects of this are terrifying.
We just played it. A *lot*. And read the cheat guides in books and magazines. (For some titles we got "expert hands" and took video tape).
But you don't need to beat a game to get a good feel for it.
That is exactly right; this is pure geek nostalgia. Nobody really cares about the details of a failed company 25 years ago, or about some guy who wrote an arcade game clone on an obsolete computer. The world has moved on.
But . . . some of the lessons are timeless: Failing companies go south in common ways (poor hiring practices, success concealing bad mistakes, miserable engineering practices, etc.). This was my first job out of college, I had no idea what the real world was like, and it was a real eye-opener. (And from a geek perspective: You can do amazing stuff in 16K. Still can. Firmware engineers do this kind of thing every day).
(It kind of sucks to be slashdotted. I never expected that).
The proposed legislation giving us X-ray Mind-Reading Super Powers will permit us to find out when people are thinking Bad Thoughts, anywhere! Criminals should give themselves up now!
Cop: "Yer unner arrest."
Perp: "What for? I haven't done anything."
Cop: "Dis machine here says you wuz gonna."
Perp: "You got me. It's a fair cop."
"... Nobel Peace Prize..."
Obviously you have never met RMS.
I can't decide whether to put a ":-)" on that or not. I'll just leave it ambiguous. He's yelled at me. I won the argument by leaving.
Cringley's an idiot. There are far cheaper ways to do this. BillG could stand on the sidewalk in front of Yahoo and hand out hire-on-bonus checks if all that MS wanted was employees, and MS would have been far, far ahead, stock-price-wise.
"Neeners! We want to do our *own* layoffs!"
Could have made the DTD a unique ID, rather than an address.
Having it be usable URL makes about as much sense as making it the phone number of your company's customer support group.
What were they thinking?
Just unfurl a huge Goatse banner.
Instant Cthulhu-class crowd mindwipe. "The horror..."
In the early 90s, Intel marketing had a similar idea involving "renting" the floating point processor; each CPU would come with (say) a billion ops, with cryptographically protected fuses to open up more blocks. You'd pay for software that would blow the fuses and give you more ops, if you ran out.
Stupid idea (even if it was implementable, which I doubt).
And then Quake came along, and suddenly people were using floating point ops for things other than spreadsheets...
I wrote my first commerical game on the Atari 400, and it got me into the games industry (straight out of college) in 1982.
It sucked, but it was all I could afford, and after a month or two I was touch-typing on it.
PC World missed the ISC Intecolor, though. Its keyboard *looked* okay, but it had "zero key rollover," meaning that you had to *completely* release a key -- *all* the way to the top -- before hitting another, or you got some random keystroke instead. Next to impossible to type on; the most efficient way was with a pencil, poking at the keys.
Someone beat me to champmitchellsucks.com, registered early today. (Champ is their CEO. Who names a kid Champ? No wonder NSI has problems).
So now they're holding champmitchellshouldfirewhoeverdecidedtostealdomains.com
Now to write a letter...
That's incredibly good to hear (I haven't touched a Mac since I left Apple in the mid 90s).
.NET folks seem to have their act together, to some extent; sensible search paths, just have the infrastructure installed and apps are likely to work. But it's still not totally wonderful.
The thing about an "installer" is that you're already in trouble. You have to learn another language (looking at the knowledge base for InstallShield was a real eye-opener, things like "no longer crash when a case-statement expression is not constant" in like version 5 of the product), with no debugger and essentially no specified semantics, with buggy, inconsistent runtime support routines (such as the 'delete' landmine that the Eve folks were bit by), and that's all in preparation for loading up registry entries with gnarly, picky, badly documented values and arcane strings. It's an all-you-can-eat nightmare.
The
I'm not aware of a single installer package on Windows that isn't a useless, complicated, badly-documented, bug-ridden piece of crap. The times when I've had to use (say) InstallShield, I've seriously thought about finding a new job. This stuff sucks *and* blows. (Don't get me started on USB support and BlueTooth. Oh my God. Don't even think about reading about that stuff: Once you crack open the docs and see the wavy tentacles, the squamous mouths, the eyes, the eyes, the eyes that . . . well, you'll never be quite the same again. T-tr-trust me on th-that).
Remember the happy days of "just copy" installs, which worked great on MacOs in the 90s? Upgrade to a new system? Just copy your "apps" folder over.
The question, "What kind of installer should our OS have?" is like asking, "Should we drink the red poison or the green one?" Just asking the question seals your doom.