* Posts by 93s

7 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Nov 2021

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

93s

not evolution. this was a trick that lots--and i mean lots--of 90s software used. including office. that was back when bloat was increasing at a rate faster than memory prices were dropping.

the cloud gave us back the pros and cons of the mainframe. now were using an kludge-y old strategy to reduce the latency and bloat of cloudy features. lovely.

Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back

93s

Re: Copyright is not IP

It absolutely should be deleted. Maybe it was OK to leave obviously false assertions like this on message boards in the past and rely on downvotes, but now this crap is going to get crawled by "AI" and may become fodder for AI-generated falsehoods.

Also, not cool that it's the top comment, notwithstanding almost exclusively downvotes. It's unambiguously wrong, and it should neither waste anyone's time nor give the impression that it's a point that can be debated in good faith.

Wing Commander III changed how the copy hotkey works in Windows 95

93s

Re: Lost in translation

The best rationalization I could come up with is that the Ctrl-C handler is only installed if paste _handler_ is active. But that wouldn't make sense, because then you couldn't copy from read-only text fields. So I have no idea what the article is trying to say.

The many derivatives of the CP/M operating system

93s

Re: Yeah, no

There's lots of confusion about the implications of a right to "derivative" works in the (US) copyright sense both in this post and the article.

In your comment above it's not clear whether you're saying QDOS and 86-DOS are both "derivatives," but let's be very clear that the "_design_" bit doesn't fit US copyright. Copyright protects original* expression not design or function. Design and function are the domain of patent law.

Neither QDOS or 86-DOS would be a "derivative" within the meaning of the copyright law if they were just functionally "compatible" systems based on manuals (i.e., information about their design) because the particular way they were expressed (i.e., literally written) was not copied.

More fundamentally, the article is misleading because an infringing* derivative work isn't forfeited entirely to the copyright holder. For example, the rights to prepare* and distribute* derivative works are separate from the rights about actual copying. A derivative work will typically have material owned by the underlying work's copyright holder and, separately, material that's still owned by the derivative work's author (namely, the original* and protectable* expression that the derivative work author added). You always have to think about those rights and their remedies separately, because that's how copyright works--it's not a single unitary "copyright" but a bundle of rights.

The underlying work's copyright holder remedy is _not_ any sort of automatic right to the infringing derivative work's protected expression. And infringing derivative works aren't punished by making them public domain. (In general, copyright law is not meant to be punitive, even if that's sometimes the result.)

* indicates legal jargon; like the word "derivative" they indicate legal conclusions that can't be reached until various requirements, doctrines, and exceptions have been applied. As with the word "derivative," it would be a serious mistake to assume their meaning is obvious without an understanding of copyright law.

Disclaimer: I happen to be a lawyer, but this is just my personal opinion. It's not legal advice and should not be relied on for any purpose. You shouldn't believe anything you read online, anyway.

Only Microsoft can give open source the gift of NTFS. Only Microsoft needs to

93s

Re: nothing to do with OS/2

The original 16-bit HPFS may have been a joint MSFT-IBM product, but Microsoft created HPFS386 (the 32-bit version with integrated SMB), and owned HPFS386 after the divorce. Microsoft has admitted that early versions of HPFS are based on NTFS (though they've never been entirely clear how much of that basis was 'conceptual' versus literal code identity). The low level structures of the original NTFS and HPFS are pretty similar.

Intel updates mysterious 'software-defined silicon' code in the Linux kernel

93s

Re: Some things never change

"Customers also lost value as the 'golden screwdriver' enhanced vendors' ability to price discriminate. Customer purchased the machine at the market cost, and then later, if and when they needed the additional capacity, they paid more money for the same hardware. Pure revenue to the vendor with no cost-based justification."

FTFY.

The consumer doesn't benefit, unless you believe that vendors would forgo profitable sales so they could maintain higher standardized pricing. And you shouldn't believe that because vendors that try such a forgoing-sales strategy will lose to competitors who will trade volume for margin. That's of course what ultimately happened with commodity PCs.

Apple is beginning to undo decades of Intel, x86 dominance in PC market

93s

"Apple transitioned much more quickly than anyone expected," McCarron said . . . .

Apple transitioned on the timeline they've been signaling for over a year. "Anyone" = people who read too many Mac rumor sites before hiding under a rock last year.

"It's not so much [Intel] are lagging; AMD went from a modestly competitive to a more significant competitive," McCarron said.

Intel's product performance is behind or on par with AMD's (depending on the job) and well behind Apple. That's called lagging. Does anyone know what a "significant competitive" [sic] is?

Can we please either not center stories around consultants' drivel or find the unicorn consultant who can use words competently? Thx.