Irrespective of how horrific you may think a particular patent is, it runs for only 17 years. If in fact, the GIF patent had been somthing that we had been unable to get around, if we had to suck it up and have overlarge image files for 17 years, would it have been the end of the world, or would "Image Freedom Day" have been even more fun?
The "when is baseball exciting" patent is clever as all hell. If MSoft can make some bux off it for the next 17 years, so be it, but eventually, your FOSS automatic digital tv-watcher will be able to snippet out game highlights for you for your quick review, in about 17 years. Wanna bet on if the software's actually ready?
Now, if congress starts passing PATENT EXTENSION bills. THEN and only then, does your doom and gloom need to take over.
Well, let's see. My development trees are about 1.2 gig. My documents directories exclusive of photos and music, which I have burned to redundant dvd's is about 100 meg.
But on any given day I only CHANGE a tiny tiny bit of that, so, the copies I spread around to three different servers really result in hourly rsyncs of a few meg at most.
You really have 560 gig of stuff that changes hourly? Wow.
when was the last time I built a system with a floppy drive? yesterday?
And I used a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive last week. And someone brought in an 8 inch ssdd floppy about two months ago with the sad face and the "this is the only copy of my dissertation, can you help me?" story. Which, of course, we did. Went into the back room, pulled the 8" drive out of the anti-static bag, plugged it in copied their files up to the hdd using 22Disk http://www.chez.com/futurs/ETelecharge.html , ran a format converter over it to get plain ascii text... burned a CD and handed it to them. Printed them a fresh copy while we were at it.
Ignoring the fact that this was supremly cheap, that the money would not have funded a season of "Extreme makeover home edition." Much less solved genocide or starvation.
Ignoring the fact that this provided important scientific information about the formation of the solar system. Yeah, ignore that.
_WHERE DO YOU THINK THEY SPENT THE MONEY?_
This is your tax dollars going to continue to fund the lives of thousands of american citizens, businesses large and small.
to run real accounting software, which didn't exist on the Mac.
to run lotus spreadsheets with more than 128K of memory which you could not do on a mac.
to run insurance comapny risk-analysis software.
to run stock market tracking and modeling programs
to run video store rental software.
to attach them to a file server and run shared databases.
and so on and so on and so on. To do the things that let you PAY for buying the computer. The things we spent thousands and thousands of dollars for CP/M Z80 computers for, and now, we could do the same thing, faster and with more ram, and cheaper hard disks.
We were networking Z-80 systems with Zenith and Hazeltine terminals in '79 and '80. Once we got Corvus Omninet cards or Arcnet (!) cards and could network PC's at 1 Mhz and then at 2.5 Mhz, all bets were off. The money flowed like water for a while....
Meanwhile, there were a few long-haird weirdos in the back playing with macs and mice, and making pretty pictures. Which was fun and all, but it didn't pay the bills. Of course, Tim Jensen kept playing with the Radio Shack color computer, and having a darned lot of fun, and he and a couple of other guys were sleeping in the back of their shop working on the early video toaster.... but meanwhile, we were making actual money networking PC's with early versions of Novell when we gave up MP/M and TurboDos and went to all '86 processors.
And Tim _did_ hit it big, but in the meantime, those of us wearing suits and ties and selling pc's to lawyers to replace Wang dedicated word processors and to run conflict-of-interest databases (Many of those available for Macs yet?) or law-office-case-management software (another big mac vertical, right?) or large free-text indexing systems, with at the time (1984 remember?) huge 40 and 80 and _90_ meg hard disk drives managed to make decent money.
The macs, and the Amiga had a problem. All that bit-mapped screen stuff was fun and all, but no court in the country would take dot-matrix printouts seriously. No Daisy wheel support in the mac. C. Itoh and Xerox and NEC were were the $$$ where. Now, _later_ after the lasers showed up, even then, remember that the people PAYING to have the contracts wanted COURIER not some weird Times Roman font they'ed never seen before. And mac lasers were expensive compared to early HP and Canon and Oki lasers.....
You bought a PC in 1984 to do things that EARNED MONEY. You bought a mac to play with pictures.
Even as late as 1997, we still were installing monochrome monitors and text-screens. Why? 'Cause if _all_ you do all day is word-processing, multi-tasking DOESN'T make you any money. Even now, the fancy graphics and fonts and colors do little to enchance the operations of accounts receivable software. The biggest advantage of windows for accounting software is that the big screens allow you to see more of the accounting information at once. It _is_ nice to have AR and AP and GL all open at once.... but uh, the mac had little to do with _that_.
you would -think- that was true, and it is certainly reasonable, but it is simply not how the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act left things.
There is no such thing as a corporation which has no "heirs". At a minimum, if the corporation is dissolved, the debtors (in the case of a bankruptcy) and the stockholders have on-going rights in any intellectual property that existed unless the board of the corporation EXPLICITLY turned the companies intellectual property over to the public domain.
Or, under some circumstances the copyright reverts to the employees who did the work.
You may _consider_ the title abandonware and freely distributable, but that does not mean that it is _legally_ so.
This is why Project Gutenberg has such trouble scanning anything written after 1924. There are a gazillion photographs, magazine articles and so forth where the author can not be found, the PUBLISHER doesn't exist, no one knows if "Mark Trail" was a pseudonym or not, and finding him or her is impossible, but by golly, if we PUBLISHED that photo and made any money out of it, his or her GRANDSON might come after us.
Samething with software. Your position (abandoned) is one the Library of Congress recently asked for comments about. I hope you submitted one.
my partner lives on the wrong side of the road to get a cable modem. She lives 100 feet into the wrong central office district to get dsl, but she lives 1 mile from a sprint cell phone tower.
Yes. I've been installing Xandros on essentially anyone who's computer I got tired of fixing hag ridden copies of windows on.
It installs from a single CD.
It looks and feels a lot like windows
It just works, out of the box. I have yet to have it fail to find and install the correct video, monitor, and sound on any computer which was running win95/98/me or 2000.
It runs just find in 128 meg of ram, and WILL run in 64.
But since I don't give Aunt Bee and Counsin Fred the root password, they can't hopelessly screw it up. OOO, Firefix, T-Bird, GNUCash, and a few other simple tools, and they're set for life.
Works great. Not reccomended for Linux wonks. But for Aunt Bee, it's great stuff.
dosage is 1/2500 of a standard medical x-ray, less than 1/500th of a dental x-ray.
If your job puts you on an airplane _every day_ you end up with the same x-ray dose as seeing your dentist annually. The health risk appears "acceptable." It may well be below the hormesis level and be a HEALTHFUL dose, but we'll argue that somewhere else.
for the question that asks you to find the matching mirror image, tear out the original, flip it over, hold the page up to the light, and find the one that doesn't match. ..
Sat afternoon, the risk assesment was upgraded to Torino 4, the first time ever this has happened, and the chance of impact increased to 1 in 63 based on a re-analysis of the June discovery data. over 160 observations went into the latest orbit analysis.
That's worth paying attention to.
Slashdot Mirror
Sprint _has_ push to talk technology (they call it "Readylink"
Irrespective of how horrific you may think a particular patent is, it runs for only 17 years. If in fact, the GIF patent had been somthing that we had been unable to get around, if we had to suck it up and have overlarge image files for 17 years, would it have been the end of the world, or would "Image Freedom Day" have been even more fun?
The "when is baseball exciting" patent is clever as all hell. If MSoft can make some bux off it for the next 17 years, so be it, but eventually, your FOSS automatic digital tv-watcher will be able to snippet out game highlights for you for your quick review, in about 17 years. Wanna bet on if the software's actually ready?
Now, if congress starts passing PATENT EXTENSION bills. THEN and only then, does your doom and gloom need to take over.
Well, let's see. My development trees are about 1.2 gig. My documents directories exclusive of photos and music, which I have burned to redundant dvd's is about 100 meg.
But on any given day I only CHANGE a tiny tiny bit of that, so, the copies I spread around to three different servers really result in hourly rsyncs of a few meg at most.
You really have 560 gig of stuff that changes hourly? Wow.
when was the last time I built a system with a floppy drive? yesterday?
And I used a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive last week. And someone brought in an 8 inch ssdd floppy about two months ago with the sad face and the "this is the only copy of my dissertation, can you help me?" story. Which, of course, we did. Went into the back room, pulled the 8" drive out of the anti-static bag, plugged it in copied their files up to the hdd using 22Disk http://www.chez.com/futurs/ETelecharge.html , ran a format converter over it to get plain ascii text... burned a CD and handed it to them. Printed them a fresh copy while we were at it.
This never happens to you?
No.
Ignoring the fact that this was supremly cheap, that the money would not have funded a season of "Extreme makeover home edition." Much less solved genocide or starvation.
Ignoring the fact that this provided important scientific information about the formation of the solar system. Yeah, ignore that.
_WHERE DO YOU THINK THEY SPENT THE MONEY?_
This is your tax dollars going to continue to fund the lives of thousands of american citizens, businesses large and small.
to run real accounting software, which didn't exist on the Mac.
to run lotus spreadsheets with more than 128K of memory which you could not do on a mac.
to run insurance comapny risk-analysis software.
to run stock market tracking and modeling programs
to run video store rental software.
to attach them to a file server and run shared databases.
and so on and so on and so on. To do the things that let you PAY for buying the computer. The things we spent thousands and thousands of dollars for CP/M Z80 computers for, and now, we could do the same thing, faster and with more ram, and cheaper hard disks.
We were networking Z-80 systems with Zenith and Hazeltine terminals in '79 and '80. Once we got Corvus Omninet cards or Arcnet (!) cards and could network PC's at 1 Mhz and then at 2.5 Mhz, all bets were off. The money flowed like water for a while....
Meanwhile, there were a few long-haird weirdos in the back playing with macs and mice, and making pretty pictures. Which was fun and all, but it didn't pay the bills. Of course, Tim Jensen kept playing with the Radio Shack color computer, and having a darned lot of fun, and he and a couple of other guys were sleeping in the back of their shop working on the early video toaster.... but meanwhile, we were making actual money networking PC's with early versions of Novell when we gave up MP/M and TurboDos and went to all '86 processors.
And Tim _did_ hit it big, but in the meantime, those of us wearing suits and ties and selling pc's to lawyers to replace Wang dedicated word processors and to run conflict-of-interest databases (Many of those available for Macs yet?) or law-office-case-management software (another big mac vertical, right?) or large free-text indexing systems, with at the time (1984 remember?) huge 40 and 80 and _90_ meg hard disk drives managed to make decent money.
The macs, and the Amiga had a problem. All that bit-mapped screen stuff was fun and all, but no court in the country would take dot-matrix printouts seriously. No Daisy wheel support in the mac. C. Itoh and Xerox and NEC were were the $$$ where. Now, _later_ after the lasers showed up, even then, remember that the people PAYING to have the contracts wanted COURIER not some weird Times Roman font they'ed never seen before. And mac lasers were expensive compared to early HP and Canon and Oki lasers.....
You bought a PC in 1984 to do things that EARNED MONEY. You bought a mac to play with pictures.
Even as late as 1997, we still were installing monochrome monitors and text-screens. Why? 'Cause if _all_ you do all day is word-processing, multi-tasking DOESN'T make you any money. Even now, the fancy graphics and fonts and colors do little to enchance the operations of accounts receivable software. The biggest advantage of windows for accounting software is that the big screens allow you to see more of the accounting information at once. It _is_ nice to have AR and AP and GL all open at once.... but uh, the mac had little to do with _that_.
sorry, missed one. They have now posted the results of their request for comment, tho no conclusions. http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/comments/index.htm l
also, you might check out
http://www.orphanworks.org/
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/14/12 21237&tid=103&tid=123&tid=17
1 4213&tid=192
l
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/28/2
http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2005/70fr3739.htm
Saddly, the deadline was on or before 5 p.m. EST on March 25, 2005
I have seen nothing since about their thoughts from the comments they recieved.
you would -think- that was true, and it is certainly reasonable, but it is simply not how the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act left things.
There is no such thing as a corporation which has no "heirs". At a minimum, if the corporation is dissolved, the debtors (in the case of a bankruptcy) and the stockholders have on-going rights in any intellectual property that existed unless the board of the corporation EXPLICITLY turned the companies intellectual property over to the public domain.
Or, under some circumstances the copyright reverts to the employees who did the work.
You may _consider_ the title abandonware and freely distributable, but that does not mean that it is _legally_ so.
This is why Project Gutenberg has such trouble scanning anything written after 1924. There are a gazillion photographs, magazine articles and so forth where the author can not be found, the PUBLISHER doesn't exist, no one knows if "Mark Trail" was a pseudonym or not, and finding him or her is impossible, but by golly, if we PUBLISHED that photo and made any money out of it, his or her GRANDSON might come after us.
Samething with software. Your position (abandoned) is one the Library of Congress recently asked for comments about. I hope you submitted one.
YES! Books. Both audible, and text. The Gmini has enough screen to READ BOOKS as well as listen to them.
(Thank God for Project Gutenberg and Baen!)
my partner lives on the wrong side of the road to get a cable modem. She lives 100 feet into the wrong central office district to get dsl, but she lives 1 mile from a sprint cell phone tower.
Trust me on this. It was a good deal for her.
Yes. I've been installing Xandros on essentially anyone who's computer I got tired of fixing hag ridden copies of windows on.
It installs from a single CD.
It looks and feels a lot like windows
It just works, out of the box. I have yet to have it fail to find and install the correct video, monitor, and sound on any computer which was running win95/98/me or 2000.
It runs just find in 128 meg of ram, and WILL run in 64.
But since I don't give Aunt Bee and Counsin Fred the root password, they can't hopelessly screw it up. OOO, Firefix, T-Bird, GNUCash, and a few other simple tools, and they're set for life.
Works great. Not reccomended for Linux wonks. But for Aunt Bee, it's great stuff.
dosage is 1/2500 of a standard medical x-ray, less than 1/500th of a dental x-ray.
If your job puts you on an airplane _every day_ you end up with the same x-ray dose as seeing your dentist annually. The health risk appears "acceptable." It may well be below the hormesis level and be a HEALTHFUL dose, but we'll argue that somewhere else.
for the question that asks you to find the matching mirror image, tear out the original, flip it over, hold the page up to the light, and find the one that doesn't match. . .
go read the grand challenge specs.
Your concept is FAR simpler than what is needed.
1) off road
2) random obsticles
3) tunnels and GPS interdiction
4) intentionally obscured terrain
etc. This is hard. YOU might have trouble driving a HMMV along the route.
Clearly, you don't travel much. Get more than 10 or 15 miles from an interstate highway and there is no GSM coverage. Kansas is bad, Nebraska is impossible. Try this map: http://www.rentcell.com/coverage-map-usa-gsm.htm Canadian GSM coverage is, of course, worse. http://www.canadagsm.com/english/html/coverage/fs_ cov_map.htm
If you want digital CDMA coverage, it's not QUITE as bad, but it's not _good_
http://www.rentcell.com/coverage-map-cingular.htm
http://www.rentcell.com/coverage-map-airtouch.htm
Really, for those who need to travel outside the urban core it's an analog world still. A good yagi cut to the center of the analog cell-phone band, a bag or high power car mounted moble phone, and an account with a carrier with good analog rollover gets you the best coverage in the US, but I can't actually CONNECT at some of my customers sites without the yagi.
Sprints analog roam map probebly gives the most accurate summary AMPS coverage available in the US.
http://www1.sprintpcs.com/explore/coverage/Natwide Netwk.jsp?FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=1441749&CURRENT_US ER%3C%3EATR_SCID=ECOMM&CURRENT_USER%3C%3EATR_PCode =None&CURRENT_USER%3C%3EATR_cartState=group&bmUID= 1114732276847
Notice all the white areas? No service. Not even analog. Zip.
You don't get out much do you?
Sat afternoon, the risk assesment was upgraded to Torino 4, the first time ever this has happened, and the chance of impact increased to 1 in 63 based on a re-analysis of the June discovery data. over 160 observations went into the latest orbit analysis. That's worth paying attention to.