Articles



Supreme's rule for copyright extension

The Supreme Court of the US has decided that it is OK for the congress to extend copyright protection (as it had in a law in 1998) to 95 years for works for hire and life+70 for works made by individuals. Hailed as a victory for the movie and …

Let's look at the IBM 970

I was interesting in figuring out what the effect of Apple moving to an IBM 970 CPU would have on their product line. Although they are not shipping (expected 2Q-2H 2003), there is some information about them available in the market based on test samples and presentations that IBM has …

Copyright Accord Missing Key Players

An article on CNet details some of the varying opinions about the future of copyright protections and enforcement. In particular, conspicuously absent from the announcements by the BSA and RIAA yesterday were the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the CEA (Consumer Electronics Association).

Chimera config changes increase speed

From Mikel:If you've used Chimera on the Mac, and you haven't tweaked it already, you must enable pipelining. Quit Chimera cd ~/Library/Application Support/Chimera/Profiles/default/.slt/ Append these lines to prefs.js: user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true); user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true); Restart Chimera The …

Good ACM article on reverse-engineering

Admittedly, I should probably have read it before today, but I am still digging out from too much travel. For those with access, you're looking for "Legally Speaking:Reverse Engineering Under Siege" in the October issue of Communications of the ACM. (If you're not a member, consider joining at the …

RIAA Hacking You Back

The Register has an article about the RIAA using a group of hackers to create a "monitoring hydra" to report to the RIAA what music you may have on your PC. Ed. Note: CNET now reports that an spokesperson from RIAA is calling this a HOAX. I'm leaving the rest …

First Monthly MovieFest set for Sunday 1/19 14:00

I've set the date for what will be a monthly series of movies shown at the house. Friends are encouraged to RSVP, so that we will know that there is sufficient seating. If you have suggestions for future movies, please drop me an email and I'll try to put them …

Apple objects to California/Microsoft settlement

As announced yesterday, Microsoft has reached a tentative agreement with the State of California to settle outstanding anti-trust claims made by the state against the company. Apple Computer has taken the bold step of opposing this settlement on the grounds that it may actually benefit Microsoft, due to the manner …


PalmSource to move from Graffiti to Graffiti 2

According to an article on Brighthand, PalmSource will stop putting Graffiti into future PalmOS systems in deference to Graffiti 2 (which is based on Jot--I think that's the same one as Windows CE uses). The problem is a judgment against the company and in favor of Xerox.



Big batch of LD's going on auction

I'm putting up over 400 LD's for auction in the next week. If you're interested, tell me now :-). I am expecting to put them up on EBay as one big lot. However, if somebody has a better idea, please let me know, I'm very open.

Press: SCO may press Linux Patent Claims

An article in Linux Business Week's online edition is claiming to have seen an SCO press release about requiring a royalty payment of $96/CPU for all servers running non-SCO brands of Linux. They apparently claim that the license is required due to UNIX patents acquired by the company from …

PlayStation 3 write-up at Inquirer

Sounds more like a supercomputer than a game machine, but here are the basics:"...the computers are made of cells, each one containing a CPU, which will probably be a PowerPC, and eight APUs (vector processors) each with 128K of memory. It will run at 4GHz, producing a not inconsiderable …



FavIcons (those bookmark icons)

This morning I decided I wanted little icons for my web pages, so I set out to put them online. There's information on the web, but some of the tools have gone missing. Here are my hints What is a favicon? Favicons are those little icons that show up in …

IBM #1 in patents Again

According to a CNet article, IBM will be announcing today that they have been issued over 3200 patents, putting them firmly in the #1 spot for 2003, in front of Canon (the #2 at just under 2000 patents).