There is absolutely nothing wrong with a company puting restricitons on the use of software they have developed. Nothing at all.
However, including non-free software as an integral working part of a free software package defeats the purpose of having a free license in the first place. It severely cripples the freedoms granted by the free license. If one is to do that, then why not make the whole license non-free?
In closing, I see nothing wrong with having non-free license software or free license software as long as the two are not fundamentally interdependant. Once the licenses are mixed, freedom is lost.
Re:Beware! The Y2K cabal wants us to rest easy.
on
9/9/99: News? Nein!
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· Score: 1
More to the point, no computer will represent today's date as 9999 internally. Two digits are needed for month and day, yes? So that would be 090999. And there's no "all 9's" magic quality to this number. This is truly a non-event from the code's point of view.
I agree. If I absolutely had to encode a date as two bytes, I would have not used BCD as that would require three. Instead, I would have done the following:
4 bits for the month (max num = 15) 5 bits for the day (max num = 31) 7 bits for the year (max num = 127)
mmmmdddd dyyyyyyy
And end-of-date field marker would thus be all ones in the bit field for a total hex value of $FFFF which would be a date value of 15/31/2029 which is nonsense and thus couldn't be confused with a date. On the other hand, this scheme would have a Y2K-like problem at year 2030, which is why I wouldn't use this scheme unless I absolutely had to such as in a small microcontroller with very limited RAM or something similar.
What I think he meant was "recorded picture quality." Video recorded by your home VCR on the highest setting doesn't approach broadcast quality. On the other hand, I believe the TiVo records video at a much higher quality than a VCR.
On your other counts, it appears you are being overly and perhaps needlessly harsh. The conviences you dismiss out of hand are nice. The price, while currently high will fall just like the price of all maturing technology. You may not have a need for TiVo or a work-alike, but maybe you don't fall into the group they are targeting. On the other hand, I believe the digital VCR like devices are a good thing. I, however, would like to see removable storage eventually be an option.
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There is absolutely nothing wrong with a company puting restricitons on the use of software they have developed. Nothing at all.
However, including non-free software as an integral working part of a free software package defeats the purpose of having a free license in the first place. It severely cripples the freedoms granted by the free license. If one is to do that, then why not make the whole license non-free?
In closing, I see nothing wrong with having non-free license software or free license software as long as the two are not fundamentally interdependant. Once the licenses are mixed, freedom is lost.
I agree. If I absolutely had to encode a date as two bytes, I would have not used BCD as that would require three. Instead, I would have done the following:
And end-of-date field marker would thus be all ones in the bit field for a total hex value of $FFFF which would be a date value of 15/31/2029 which is nonsense and thus couldn't be confused with a date. On the other hand, this scheme would have a Y2K-like problem at year 2030, which is why I wouldn't use this scheme unless I absolutely had to such as in a small microcontroller with very limited RAM or something similar.
What I think he meant was "recorded picture quality." Video recorded by your home VCR on the highest setting doesn't approach broadcast quality. On the other hand, I believe the TiVo records video at a much higher quality than a VCR.
On your other counts, it appears you are being overly and perhaps needlessly harsh. The conviences you dismiss out of hand are nice. The price, while currently high will fall just like the price of all maturing technology. You may not have a need for TiVo or a work-alike, but maybe you don't fall into the group they are targeting. On the other hand, I believe the digital VCR like devices are a good thing. I, however, would like to see removable storage eventually be an option.