Yes, all those kernel developers were so misguided - they should have been writing a source code control system instead. Besides, we all know that programmers don't specialise within the field.
"no longer spread the message that non-free software is a good thing if it's convenient"
So if a task needs doing, and GPL software can't yet do it well - RMS would rather that people ignored that task and pretend it didn't need doing, than to do the task with the best available tools?
The others share some blame for making it too easy, but let's not lose sight of the fact that the perpetrators of the theft have actual malicious intent.
we hold the driver responsible if they ( say ) drive drunk, but the manufactorer responsible if while driving the wheels come off.
Isn't it the driver's responsibility to buy an third-party after-market "wheels don't come off" extras pack for several hundred dollars when they've just spent several thousand on a new car?
Excellent point, why has no-one else noticed this?
How come people can say exactly the opposite of what they mean; and their audience not only understand what is really meant but don't even notice the difference! Oh well, I could care less.
Magnan "Signature" Power Cable and Power Conditioner
This revolutionary power cable dramatically improves all sonic parameters - there is much greater resolution, image focus, dynamics, weight and impact, along with a much quieter background. CD playback is most improved, due to the particular sensitivity of digital timing jitter to noise on AC power.
It sounds too insane to be true. I almost dismissed the entire site as being an elaborate hoax, but searching for "magnan cable" on google produces so many hits in apparently serious places, I can only conclude it is real. Unless the whole high-end audio world is having a laugh at our expense.
The memory chips in the secondary bank of the 48k ZX Spectrum were all faulty 64kbit chips of which either the top or bottom half had failed testing (so they were "cheap as chips" when he bought them - haha.) They were put into the Spectrum, wired up so it only accessed whichever 32kbit actually worked properly, and the defective half was just ignored.
the other Sinclair formats and clones include the QL, SAM Coupe, Timex/Sinclair, ZX81, Z88 etc
Just to be pedantic, the Sam Coupé wasn't manufactured by Sinclair, nor was it exactly a clone as it had many capabilities in excess of what the Spectrum could do. Some links:
SimCoupe - a free and legal Sam emulator for Windows, Linux, MacOS X etc.
To anyone not involved in the scene, it probably seems very odd to be holding a show for such old computers. But I spent very nearly ten years using that old 8-bit computer, which means it lasted longer than any other computer I've bought since at many times the price, and in that time I've met a lot of people who also used it, and who have had much influence on me in various ways. Most obviously, my interest - and now my job - in programming can be traced back to the days I spent trying to squeeze every drop of performance out of the Z80 that I could possibly get (and back then, every t-state counted!)
Obviously it's interesting to go to these shows and see what new things people can still do with the old technology. But even more than that, I'm hoping just to have another friendly chat with a few of the people I've known for about the last decade and a half.
Also with cars coming on to the road. The slip road needs to be long enough for a vehicle to accelerate up to the speed of the lanes - if the road speed is much greater than the nominal speed limit, then the slip road probably wasn't built long enough. Vehicles pulling out onto the road will be moving at significantly less than the speed of other traffic, increasing the speed differential and the severity of potential accidents.
Good point, it takes a lot more energy to change phase (eg. ice to water, water to steam) than it does to simply heat a single phase material a few degrees. The phase change will consume energy before heating will occur again.
That's certainly true going from solid to liquid, the process is endothermic because you need to input energy into the system to break intra-molecular bonds. However, without further data on this new phase change I can't say whether it would have the same properties. Indeed, I rather suspect that, since it seems bonds are being made, the process would be exothermic.
Also, in the usual case, solids are rather better at conducting heat than liquids are (except where convection can be carefully arranged). So a heat shield made from this stuff would probably have quite the wrong effect.
Which law would this be? The one that says solids melt into liquids at higher temperatures? Oh wait, there is no such law - thanks to something called Sublimiation where solids go straight to a gas (like dry ice).
And if you increase the pressure to 6 times atmospheric pressure, what happens when you heat your frozen Carbon Dioxide? It doesn't sublimate - it melts.
And in the case of water, if the pressure is reduced below about.6% atmospheric, ice will sublime to steam.
You see, Carbon Dioxide is not breaking any laws, it is not behaving in a way that is qualitatively different from other materials - there are more general rules which govern the phase change behaviour of materials, it's just that because most people only see the world at about 10^5 Pa, they make generalisations which in a few cases are proved wrong. But it is in restricting the law to one pressure where the generalisation is wrong, not the law itself.
All simple compounds behave broadly like this: consider a system in which Pressure and Temperature can be changed. There is a point, called the triple point, at which solid, liquid, and vapour phases are at equilibrium (i.e. the boiling temperature is the same as the sublimation temperature). Above that pressure, a solid will melt and then evaporate as temperature rises; below that pressure a solid will sublimate as temperature rises. It just happens that Carbon Dioxide has triple point which is above atmospheric pressure, and most other familiar substances have a triple point which is below atmospheric pressure.
The reason the liquid under discussion behaves so differently it because it is a mixture of several compounds - and mixtures are always a bit wacky on phase diagrams, because they are so much more complicated and can arrange themselves in so many forms.
(That's not to say "a solid is a solid is a solid" even for very simple materials, even the atoms of a pure metal will usually find at least two ways to arrange themselves, in most cases leading to grain boundaries between crystals which are big enough to see with a microscope). In this particular case I expect that if you decreased the temperature enough you find it has another solid phase, but probably has an entirely different microstructure to the high temperature solid.
What you said is true for physical goods. But we are talking about IP.
So what? Doesn't stop it from being illegal to run the Music Store on its current terms. Apple have got themselves into a difficult situation where there is no obvious legal solution, except to close it again until they can arrange a cross licensing deal with all the music companies which hold rights in Europe.
This might not be impossible - the law doesn't care if Apple use my geography to work out who gets royalties from a sale. What they aren't legally allowed to do is use my geography to stop me from buying from the French store or the German store. And this is what they are doing.
Do you see CDs from Artist K released by label X from France, label Y from Spain and label Z from the Netherlands, all in the same record store?
That's not the same situation (although it's perfectly possible, and the music companies couldn't legally prevent that shop from buying its stock anywhere within the E.U.). But can that shop prevent French people buying the CD on label Y, or Spanish people from buying the CD on label Z? Certainly not legally!
Apple can't negotitate the price they pay the copyright holders for the music for the whole EU, but have to negotiate with each label in every single country. So I don't see how they could comply with the EU requirements.
Well exactly, they aren't complying with EU requirements, which is the basis of the complaint. It would seem their choices were:
i) bang the music industry's heads together until they can reach a pan-european licensing agreement. ii) don't run the iTunes Music Store in Europe. iii) run the iTunes Music Store in Europe illegally.
I can only assume they're trying to reach option i), and probably the reason it took as long as it did to open the iTMS in Europe was because they didn't want to use option iii). But they have, and at the moment it's still illegal. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Apple fined big-time - I don't think the E.U. will accept Apple's music industry contracts as a defense against breaking the law, because they could always fall back to option ii).
Yes, this is exactly the issue. The E.E.C. *is* supposed to be one Common Market. Apple are breaking the laws by only letting customers buy from the German store if they have an address in Germany, for example.
Wrong. Apple's contracts with the labels prevent this from happening.
What on earth are you talking about? Are you saying an agreement between Apple and the BPI (or whoever) allows Apple to flout E.U. trade law? Because it doesn't.
Don't you think it would be much simpler for Apple to say get contracts signed with, say, French labels and stream the songs to all people in the EU? They don't have to pay lots of money to lawyers and they don't have to wait a long time to open it to Spain, Portugal, Italy, etc..
Yes, it would be much easier to do this, and it is the only way to legally sell to E.U. customers. However, we assume Apple's contract with the record companies does not allow them to do it. This has left Apple in a sticky situation.
The mess is because Apple does observe the local laws.
The mess is because Apple have agreed to run their music store in an illegal way. Finally the OFT have noticed.
I can't believe what I'm reading here. Some important facts haven't come up in the discussion thus far:
To sell things in the E.U. there are certain rules you have to obey. As it stands, Apple are clearly not obeying those rules, and so they will lose any legal action which arises. The problem is not that the tracks in the U.K. store are too expensive, but that Apple are actively preventing U.K. consumers from buying tracks from the French store or the German store.
A company providing goods or services in one E.U. country is not allowed to prevent purchases from people in another E.U. country. This principle of the Common Market exists in E.U. law, and this applies to all those countries which are members of the EU including those which, like the U.K., have not adopted the Euro currency.
To obey the law, Apple must allow people in the U.K. with a U.K. credit card to purchase songs from the French or German stores (or people in France, should they wish to, to buy from the U.K. store, for example).
They do not need to allow anyone in the E.U. to buy from the U.S.A. store. Any price comparison between Europe and the U.S.A. is bogus as far as this discussion is concerned. It is not at issue here because the E.U. rules do not apply to the U.S.A. sales operation.
Apple are being targeted because they have stores selling to the U.K., France and Germany, where the E.U. internal free trade rules apply.
(My guess is that the record companies are charging more for the rights to distribute the music in the U.K. than elsewhere. This may also be illegal under the same rules. However, I don't suppose Apple want to take the music companies to court, lest they in turn revoke Apple's right to distribute anything... 'tis a sticky situation, and no mistake.)
Slashdot Mirror
Irony: you're currently modded insightful.
;))
(Now, anyone who mods me offtopic, don't - it's redundant
Then the Automator program is a geeky software clerk -
You just choose the steps you want performed, and it does all the work.
G&S would never have written that, it only rhymes in American...
But good work otherwise!
Yes, all those kernel developers were so misguided - they should have been writing a source code control system instead. Besides, we all know that programmers don't specialise within the field.
"no longer spread the message that non-free software is a good thing if it's convenient"
So if a task needs doing, and GPL software can't yet do it well - RMS would rather that people ignored that task and pretend it didn't need doing, than to do the task with the best available tools?
The Eastern European gang!
The others share some blame for making it too easy, but let's not lose sight of the fact that the perpetrators of the theft have actual malicious intent.
we hold the driver responsible if they ( say ) drive drunk, but the manufactorer responsible if while driving the wheels come off.
Isn't it the driver's responsibility to buy an third-party after-market "wheels don't come off" extras pack for several hundred dollars when they've just spent several thousand on a new car?
Because it would be easy to feed the entire manual into the xerox feeder and thus easily make copies for free
For free? Tell me more about this copier machine which doesn't need to be kept fed with paper and toner...
Excellent point, why has no-one else noticed this?
How come people can say exactly the opposite of what they mean; and their audience not only understand what is really meant but don't even notice the difference! Oh well, I could care less.
It sounds too insane to be true. I almost dismissed the entire site as being an elaborate hoax, but searching for "magnan cable" on google produces so many hits in apparently serious places, I can only conclude it is real. Unless the whole high-end audio world is having a laugh at our expense.
This guy registered itunes.co.uk. iTunes is an Apple product.
Not at the time he registered it, it wasn't!
Actually it doesn't say whether they had backups or not. But it makes for a better story if we assume they didn't.
Legend has it that one reason his computers were so cheap was that he'd buy defective parts.
More than legend...
Pictures...
The memory chips in the secondary bank of the 48k ZX Spectrum were all faulty 64kbit chips of which either the top or bottom half had failed testing (so they were "cheap as chips" when he bought them - haha.) They were put into the Spectrum, wired up so it only accessed whichever 32kbit actually worked properly, and the defective half was just ignored.
the other Sinclair formats and clones include the QL, SAM Coupe, Timex/Sinclair, ZX81, Z88 etc
Just to be pedantic, the Sam Coupé wasn't manufactured by Sinclair, nor was it exactly a clone as it had many capabilities in excess of what the Spectrum could do. Some links:
The Sam Coupé Scrapbook - all-round comprehensive information
Shameless plugging of my own site - mostly software rather than hardware information
SimCoupe - a free and legal Sam emulator for Windows, Linux, MacOS X etc.
To anyone not involved in the scene, it probably seems very odd to be holding a show for such old computers. But I spent very nearly ten years using that old 8-bit computer, which means it lasted longer than any other computer I've bought since at many times the price, and in that time I've met a lot of people who also used it, and who have had much influence on me in various ways. Most obviously, my interest - and now my job - in programming can be traced back to the days I spent trying to squeeze every drop of performance out of the Z80 that I could possibly get (and back then, every t-state counted!)
Obviously it's interesting to go to these shows and see what new things people can still do with the old technology. But even more than that, I'm hoping just to have another friendly chat with a few of the people I've known for about the last decade and a half.
If you can't find it, try this instead.
Yes, it comes with a load of classical music.
That's odd - mine didn't come with anything.
Maybe it's a regional thing. FWIW I'm in the UK.
Also with cars coming on to the road. The slip road needs to be long enough for a vehicle to accelerate up to the speed of the lanes - if the road speed is much greater than the nominal speed limit, then the slip road probably wasn't built long enough. Vehicles pulling out onto the road will be moving at significantly less than the speed of other traffic, increasing the speed differential and the severity of potential accidents.
"They also said they created their own little soap opera where Shatner pretended to be a jerk to his cast"
Good thing they didn't try to make him act.
Good point, it takes a lot more energy to change phase (eg. ice to water, water to steam) than it does to simply heat a single phase material a few degrees. The phase change will consume energy before heating will occur again.
That's certainly true going from solid to liquid, the process is endothermic because you need to input energy into the system to break intra-molecular bonds. However, without further data on this new phase change I can't say whether it would have the same properties. Indeed, I rather suspect that, since it seems bonds are being made, the process would be exothermic.
Also, in the usual case, solids are rather better at conducting heat than liquids are (except where convection can be carefully arranged). So a heat shield made from this stuff would probably have quite the wrong effect.
Which law would this be? The one that says solids melt into liquids at higher temperatures? Oh wait, there is no such law - thanks to something called Sublimiation where solids go straight to a gas (like dry ice).
.6% atmospheric, ice will sublime to steam.
And if you increase the pressure to 6 times atmospheric pressure, what happens when you heat your frozen Carbon Dioxide? It doesn't sublimate - it melts.
And in the case of water, if the pressure is reduced below about
You see, Carbon Dioxide is not breaking any laws, it is not behaving in a way that is qualitatively different from other materials - there are more general rules which govern the phase change behaviour of materials, it's just that because most people only see the world at about 10^5 Pa, they make generalisations which in a few cases are proved wrong. But it is in restricting the law to one pressure where the generalisation is wrong, not the law itself.
All simple compounds behave broadly like this: consider a system in which Pressure and Temperature can be changed. There is a point, called the triple point, at which solid, liquid, and vapour phases are at equilibrium (i.e. the boiling temperature is the same as the sublimation temperature). Above that pressure, a solid will melt and then evaporate as temperature rises; below that pressure a solid will sublimate as temperature rises. It just happens that Carbon Dioxide has triple point which is above atmospheric pressure, and most other familiar substances have a triple point which is below atmospheric pressure.
The reason the liquid under discussion behaves so differently it because it is a mixture of several compounds - and mixtures are always a bit wacky on phase diagrams, because they are so much more complicated and can arrange themselves in so many forms.
(That's not to say "a solid is a solid is a solid" even for very simple materials, even the atoms of a pure metal will usually find at least two ways to arrange themselves, in most cases leading to grain boundaries between crystals which are big enough to see with a microscope). In this particular case I expect that if you decreased the temperature enough you find it has another solid phase, but probably has an entirely different microstructure to the high temperature solid.
What you said is true for physical goods. But we are talking about IP.
So what? Doesn't stop it from being illegal to run the Music Store on its current terms. Apple have got themselves into a difficult situation where there is no obvious legal solution, except to close it again until they can arrange a cross licensing deal with all the music companies which hold rights in Europe.
This might not be impossible - the law doesn't care if Apple use my geography to work out who gets royalties from a sale. What they aren't legally allowed to do is use my geography to stop me from buying from the French store or the German store. And this is what they are doing.
Do you see CDs from Artist K released by label X from France, label Y from Spain and label Z from the Netherlands, all in the same record store?
That's not the same situation (although it's perfectly possible, and the music companies couldn't legally prevent that shop from buying its stock anywhere within the E.U.). But can that shop prevent French people buying the CD on label Y, or Spanish people from buying the CD on label Z? Certainly not legally!
Apple can't negotitate the price they pay the copyright holders for the music for the whole EU, but have to negotiate with each label in every single country. So I don't see how they could comply with the EU requirements.
Well exactly, they aren't complying with EU requirements, which is the basis of the complaint. It would seem their choices were:
i) bang the music industry's heads together until they can reach a pan-european licensing agreement.
ii) don't run the iTunes Music Store in Europe.
iii) run the iTunes Music Store in Europe illegally.
I can only assume they're trying to reach option i), and probably the reason it took as long as it did to open the iTMS in Europe was because they didn't want to use option iii). But they have, and at the moment it's still illegal. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Apple fined big-time - I don't think the E.U. will accept Apple's music industry contracts as a defense against breaking the law, because they could always fall back to option ii).
Yes, this is exactly the issue. The E.E.C. *is* supposed to be one Common Market. Apple are breaking the laws by only letting customers buy from the German store if they have an address in Germany, for example.
No, because Canada and the US don't have the same Common Market laws as countries within the E.E.C.
Wrong. Apple's contracts with the labels prevent this from happening.
What on earth are you talking about? Are you saying an agreement between Apple and the BPI (or whoever) allows Apple to flout E.U. trade law? Because it doesn't.
Don't you think it would be much simpler for Apple to say get contracts signed with, say, French labels and stream the songs to all people in the EU? They don't have to pay lots of money to lawyers and they don't have to wait a long time to open it to Spain, Portugal, Italy, etc..
Yes, it would be much easier to do this, and it is the only way to legally sell to E.U. customers. However, we assume Apple's contract with the record companies does not allow them to do it. This has left Apple in a sticky situation.
The mess is because Apple does observe the local laws.
The mess is because Apple have agreed to run their music store in an illegal way. Finally the OFT have noticed.
I can't believe what I'm reading here. Some important facts haven't come up in the discussion thus far:
To sell things in the E.U. there are certain rules you have to obey. As it stands, Apple are clearly not obeying those rules, and so they will lose any legal action which arises. The problem is not that the tracks in the U.K. store are too expensive, but that Apple are actively preventing U.K. consumers from buying tracks from the French store or the German store.
A company providing goods or services in one E.U. country is not allowed to prevent purchases from people in another E.U. country. This principle of the Common Market exists in E.U. law, and this applies to all those countries which are members of the EU including those which, like the U.K., have not adopted the Euro currency.
To obey the law, Apple must allow people in the U.K. with a U.K. credit card to purchase songs from the French or German stores (or people in France, should they wish to, to buy from the U.K. store, for example).
They do not need to allow anyone in the E.U. to buy from the U.S.A. store. Any price comparison between Europe and the U.S.A. is bogus as far as this discussion is concerned. It is not at issue here because the E.U. rules do not apply to the U.S.A. sales operation.
Apple are being targeted because they have stores selling to the U.K., France and Germany, where the E.U. internal free trade rules apply.
(My guess is that the record companies are charging more for the rights to distribute the music in the U.K. than elsewhere. This may also be illegal under the same rules. However, I don't suppose Apple want to take the music companies to court, lest they in turn revoke Apple's right to distribute anything... 'tis a sticky situation, and no mistake.)