Posts by BoyModernist

Bored with patent trolls? Small fry - prepare for the Design Trolls

Re: haha, good one

Why should they spend £72,000 and get nothing in return?

In return they get a world-class education and qualification.

Never mind your little brother - happy 10th birthday, H.264

Re: My. Brain. Hurts.

I used to use Cshow. It fit on a bootable floppy and used VESA modes to display pretty much any image on pretty much any PC. That and Vernon Buerg's List are among my all-time favourite programs.

Pure says two of the four tiers of storage are set to disappear

Nonsense!

Flash is not going to displace spinning rust, which is not going to displace tape any time soon. It's just another memory/cache/storage tier.

SRAM: fast but expensive.

DRAM : cheaper, larger, slower.

(non-volatile)

Flash: cheaper, larger, slower.

Disk: cheaper, larger, slower. Good for near-line storage. Not designed or suitable for archival.

Tape: cheaper, larger, Very high latency. Good for archival.

Flash has largely displaced high-rpm disks, and small hard drives, but otherwise each tier still has a solid place in systems and the market.

This is unlikely to change until new technologies emerge, such as holographic storage or memristors.

May threatens ban on 'hate-inciting' radicals, even if they don't promote violence

Re: Reinterpreting a Robin Williams line from good morning Vietnam

You sir have made my day. Thank you :)

Toshiba reveals spin transfer RAM

God does not use an iPad

God is omnipotent, and so has no need for clumsy, polluting, criminal devices. Jobs has no opportunity to interact with God as he is in hell for his crimes.

China strikes blow for property rights, British move to collectivism

Orphan Works - a precedent

I am Not A Lawyer. Orphan works are where the Google book-scanning project got stuck for a while.

Most of the works they make available are out of copyright, and a few are still within, but they have agreement and licence from the copyright holder.

If they can't identify or contact the copyright holder within a reasonable time and effort, they make the work available provisionally, with a link on the page for the copyright holder to contact them.

They got sued, and eventually the judgement was that they had to establish a fund, and place the revenue share that would have gone to the copyright holder into it; revenue from things like in-line ads and links to buy printed versions.

When they are contacted by a copyright holder, they offer the choice to take down the work, or to hand over a share of that fund.

It's not perfect, but a good first step toward a working solution; to balance the needs of the utility of public access to the work, and the right of the copyright holder to be compensated for use of the work.

Files aren’t property, says US government

not property

Legally, data is not property. It is a different area of law. You can't legally disclose secrets because they are protected from disclosure. You can't legally sell a copy of a dvd because the content is subject to a copyright.

Come on people, property is easy to understand and explain, but does not apply to non-tangible things. You do a dis-service to your audience when you confuse property rights with creators' monopolies and official secrets.

So, just what is the ultimate bacon sarnie?

Re: you bastards

How can you mention McVomit's in the same post as bacon sandwches?!? Please wash ot your mouth with soap and then go stand in the corner and think about what you've done.