Wuh? Huh? DDJ is ending AGAIN? Seriously: Is this 1 April? I have the last 3 years up to the last (or first?) time they stopped publishing 10 or so years ago. Never did hear that they resumed. Never saw the mag on any of the racks anywhere since. == jd California, n.: From Latin "calor", meaning "heat" (as in English "calorie" or Spanish "caliente"); and "fornia'" for "sexual intercourse" or "fornication." Hence: Tierra de California, "the land of hot sex." -- Ed Moran --

Oh bugger - what did I hit to send an empty email? Sorry. I was going to say: the last time I bought DDJ was when it ran an article about an embedded OS my company made. That was perhaps five years ago. It was depressing to see how slender a magazine had replaced the robust journal I recalled from the Olden Days. As computing becomes commoditized, there is less and less focus on the hobbyist - the people who created much of this industry in the first place! Amateur radio saw a very similar glide path, IMHO. The difference is that amateur radio still offers a unique social opportunity, while computing per se does not require the same commitment to technical knowledge to provide a social experience. In other words: to be a ham and converse with people in distant lands, you still have to know something about electronics, radio theory and communications law. To surf, email, blog, Twitter, etc., you have to know how to read the numbers on your credit card. The social experiences in computing are gravitating to niche interests - such as ours. I'm not complaining, but it is a touch sad that DDJ, C Users Journal and the like are part of history. It was fun to see people argue about the syntax of some obscure C construct or the virtues of one architecture over another, and even more fun to weigh in. -- Ian ________________________________________ From: Ian King Sent: Monday, January 12, 2009 7:09 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: RE: Dr. Dobbs to cease? ________________________________________ From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of jd [onymouse at garlic.com] Sent: Monday, January 12, 2009 6:15 AM To: General at bakaboy.onymouse.ws; Discussion@ Subject: Re: Dr. Dobbs to cease? Wuh? Huh? DDJ is ending AGAIN? Seriously: Is this 1 April? I have the last 3 years up to the last (or first?) time they stopped publishing 10 or so years ago. Never did hear that they resumed. Never saw the mag on any of the racks anywhere since. == jd California, n.: From Latin "calor", meaning "heat" (as in English "calorie" or Spanish "caliente"); and "fornia'" for "sexual intercourse" or "fornication." Hence: Tierra de California, "the land of hot sex." -- Ed Moran --

In article <496C2895.1020203 at oldskool.org>, Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org> writes: I suppose that depends on which BBS you used; around Utah, the biggest BBS was a multi-line chat system called "Lower Lights" and believe me the minimum intelligence level needed to get on that system was pretty low. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

On Mon, 12 Jan 2009, Jim Leonard wrote: I think this is the case with many of us. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.

I disagree, and that's part of my original comment. That 'mediation' you denigrate is not terribly unlike what academic journals call 'peer review' - not just any goofball could shoot off his mouth. With the 'dead tree magazines' I knew there was some sort of editorial oversight, which raised the signal-to-noise ratio and lowered the waste of my time. And with multiple publications, I could choose my 'filter factor.' By comparison, it isn't at all uncommon for mailing list threads to get hijacked by various forms of distraction, and the blog has nowhere near the level of accountability to, well, anything. The open communication of the 'net and the focused delivery of a publication are two complementary concepts, and I'm sorry to see one of them apparently dying off.

In article <FF6AB92D97A23A409701CDBF66F03FCD2A5AB346 at 505fuji>, Ian King <IanK at vulcan.com> writes: Please don't pretend you know what I'm saying better than I do. I neither praised nor condemned the mediation through a dead tree magazine, I simply stated it as such. There are enough interactions on the net that you can pick and choose the ones that have the signal/noise ratio you like. In fact, comp.lang.c++ is moderated, so you're unlikely to get just any goofball shooting off his mouth. Pretending that the net is *only* unfiltered voices of dubious quality is the kind of retort I'd expect from an idiot like Dan Rather who lambasted all the bloggers "in their pajamas" who caught him red handed trying to pass off a fraud as journalism. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

In discussions I've had with librarians regarding printed vs. online journals, I've been told that the costs of producing the physical artifact are a small fraction of the overall cost. The cost of that staff predominates. However, advertising is an important revenue flow. Once upon a time, I started receiving a magazine to which I had not subscribed. When I asked why, the publisher replied that they were trying to boost their circulation numbers so they could increase their advertising rates. They made more money by giving away their product! (After a while, I realized why they had to give it away and asked them to stop sending it to me, free or not.) -- Ian

Dan Gahlinger wrote: (I know this is off-topic, but as a video content producer who has researched online distribution I'm in a unique position to comment on this, so hopefully it will be tolerated...) Because you can't currently stream *everything* for free. Less than 3% of all major networks' shows are available online from the networks (ie. legally). TV won't die any time soon, but is changing into a quasi-music-industry model. Meaning, pop music artists today hardly make any money off of their CD/online store sales; instead, they make their living from live shows. From the standpoint of the artist, all of the radio play and CD sales are "advertising" to go see the live shows. (This is not the standpoint of the publishers, which I will tastefully not comment on in this message.) So how is TV like that? In the case of television, shows like Heroes, 30 Rock, and CSI are available online from 1-7 days after the broadcast. When you go to watch them online, you are treated to advertising -- but unlike broadcast television, there is no way to skip the advertising as the DRM'd player won't let you. (No doubt hackers will find a way around this, but for now, that's the case.) A single advertisement that you cannot skip is worth a dozen that you *expect* the user to skip. In these shows' cases, the broadcast brings in advertising dollars, but *more* serve to drive the user online, where distribution can be audited (think Neilsen ratings with a much larger sample size), promotion for other company offerings (like DVD sets) can be made without cutting into broadcast time, etc. There is a very large market for DVD sets of shows, and as long as the set contains extra materials (commentary is usually a requirement), the set can sell to a customer even if they have watched all of the shows online. There is a tipping point, but we won't get there until high-speed broadband becomes a utility in every home (ie. 6mbps or greater, enough to support picture quality identical or better to broadcast TV). BTW, do an inventory of all of the shows being offered online and you will find that, almost universally, they are shows that are followed by the technologically savvy. Putting nerd-centric shows like 30 Rock and Heroes online makes sense because that is more of where those shows' viewers are anyway ("I spend more time on the computer than on the couch"). Conversely, putting shows online like talk shows or reruns don't make sense since the viewership of those shows is primarily non-technical or lower-income and wouldn't have broadband. (One of the few exceptions to this are soap operas, because each show of a soap broadcast only once and is not repeated/re-run. Putting them online allows people who missed them a second chance to catch up on the story, which gives the broadcasting company a second chance to earn advertising revenue.) No doubt, then, that your friend is doing this quite illegally. I would like to know what internet/cable/whatever service he is using that not only *provides* but *allows* every show on every network over TCP/IP. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

Jim Leonard wrote: To use your music analogy, I buy DVDs for the same reason I buy CDs. I'm leery of online music and online shows due to the restictions imposed on listening/viewing. I'm not sure I follow this. If this guy uses MythTV to save all the shows to NAS for time-shifted viewing, how is that "illegal"? Jim

Jim Brain wrote: It's not, but that's not what you implied. You implied that he has some special setup with any show on-demand. What he has in reality is regular broadcast television, merely timeshifted. He still gets shows as they are broadcast. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

On Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:07:09 -0600, Jim Brain wrote: Using MythTV or a PVR to time shift is not a problem, but the origional comment was "setup a NAS device and stream everything from online to their systems" and streaming online is a crime, as is distribution to others. "from online to their systems" indicates someone is distributing them to him. Had it been worded "from on air or live to their system" I would not have commented. The other Bob

The question of streaming or distributing ones own or licences content is not a question here. Nor is the greay areas surrounding our hobby is under discussion. Please understand, some of us on this list are very sensitive about licensing, ask anyone in the Broadcast industry, they will tell you there is no such thing as Free Broadcasting someone is always paying the cost. Content producers and broadcasters truely dont care about personal use or "low power" attempts at shareing content, but you do not want to tangle with their lawyers over distribution rights and be wrong! Word of warning, do not leave a back door open to the public internet or the "Bots" WILL find it, and there are Vampire lawyers out there who feast on Bots droppings, leaving their prey very much weeker. Contact me off list if you want a more detailed example or three :) But Lets end it here, please ..... The other Bob On Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:48:39 -0500, Dan Gahlinger wrote:

On Thu, 15 Jan 2009 09:51:26 -0600, Jim Brain wrote: I use a Directv HDDVR with a built in Intell Viiv to access content on my tv, and a second HDDVR to drive a Haua Platinum HD box to "stream" to my computers. http://www.myhava.com/products.html Others I know use SlingBoxes. None of which are on topic here. Feel free to reply off list. The Other Bob

Dan> In an unrelated topic, Dan> I have a bunch of old programs from my University days, back in Dan> the late 70's, early 80's all Vax/VMS code, in various Dan> languages, etc. Dan> In those days we never put "(C)" or copyright notices on code. Dan> I'm just wondering if it's generally "ok" to release this code Dan> to the public? First of all, IANAL. So apply salt to what follows. There's a lot of good stuff in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_copyright_law It depends on the date. It used to be the case that a "work" published without copyright notice was in the public domain. That is no longer true. Also, I'm pretty sure the rules are different for unpublished works. Some early commercial software products tripped over this -- CDC's COS and IBM OS/360 apparently are examples of public domain works. Dan> It's been 30 some years (longer than copyright would apply Dan> anyhow). I have searched for 20 years for some of the authors Dan> and never found anyone. Copyright these days is a LOT longer than 30 years. And even back in the 1940s, it was 28 years initially plus another 28 years if renewed (and if the copyright was still in effect in 1976 then the new long terms would into play, if I understood right) -- so if you have a copyrighted work from 1940, it's in the public domain today if it wasn't renewed, but it's still copyrighted if it WAS renewed. Dan> But another age old question, who has rights to code developed Dan> on the universities equipment? I know it's a common question Dan> these days, but "back in the day" such considerations never Dan> occurred, it was a different era. If the author was an employee, it would be "work for hire" and belong to the employer. Otherwise, it would belong to the author. For example, if you wrote it as a student for a class (as opposed to writing it as a research assistant in exchange for a pay check) it's your property, not the university's. That assumes there wasn't some explicit contract in effect assigning copyright to the university. (That happened occasionally; I remember the University of Illinois did this with PLATO -- but not in any other area that I ran into.) Dan> Everyone from that era has also vanished with the wind, I know, Dan> I've looked. Dan> So is it fairly safely abandoned? Another way to look at it - Dan> If it was your code, some small silly thing you wrote, would you Dan> care? Almost certainly not. But I find it's worth working hard to ask; people are often very willing to say yes, but if blind-sided by someone publishing their work without asking first will get annoyed. (That's particularly true if the publication is without correct credit; it sounds to me like you're careful to avoid that mistake...) paul

to chime in, but not fully involve myself in this... A good example is microsoft basic and possibly some of microsofts earliest works. they were developed on university equipment, and bill gates threw a fit and took out a full page ad just to call everyone thieves because of people copying and using it. On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 4:42 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:

There's also a massive amount of TV shows available FTA (Free To Air), a lot of people may not be interested in the content, but there is a fair bit of it that is really interesting. There's even HDTV FTA, in our area there are something like 23 channels being broadcast this way, you use what looks like an old grid/CB antenna. Going to other countries content (satellite) FTA may be questionable in some cases, but even there, there is a lot of good free (public) content. If you buy a ton of DVDs, and store them on your media server, and watch them in your own home, I think that would be acceptable as well. I still say conventional TV is dead. internet media, streaming is the future. _________________________________________________________________ Drag n? drop?Get easy photo sharing with Windows Live? Photos. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowslive/photos.aspx

yeah, we should take that all off-list. even the "off-topic" header of this list has been stretched :) _________________________________________________________________ Keep in touch and up to date with friends and family. Make the connection now. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowslive/

I personally would be glad to see "traditional" tv die, with such nonsense going on. And if they do DRM it to hell, what will happen will just be what happened with BBSes, they'll drive people to social, personal sites. the commercial content will die because people wont put up with it, or they'll find a way around it, if they can't, it'll drive people away. then the system they setup will die. it's happened before, it'll happen again. _________________________________________________________________

Yes, but... Right. But what's annoying differs, sometimes drastically, from person to person. I, for example, find _any_ piggybacked advertising annoying, even print ads in print magazines. (Provided they stay only mildly annoying, I usually tolerate them, but it's definitely toleration of an annoyance.) I will not tolerate TV unless I can at least mute the ads. And I'm _very_ ad-averse in "online" content (even if not actually online, eg in email), to the point where even things like two-line "free" email footer ads annoy me; I've been known to, when replying to email bearing them, quote them and reply as if I thought the email's author wrote them, as a form of comment on them. Ads are a major fraction of why I don't use the Web to any substantial extent. I wrote Illiad a cheque (after some emailed negotiation) rather than put up with the ads on userfriendly (this was before I discovered xkcd; these days I never even look at userfriendly). When my annoyance tolerance is low I will even do stuff on my computers rather than watch hockey games, because of the bloody annoying ads - and for me ignoring a hockey game really says something. (I don't have a TV, but when visiting my gf on the weekends I sometimes watch hers when there's something I find interesting enough to overcome my general aversion to the medium.) I've had marketing people try to tell me that customers don't mind ads. But - well, for example, I recently saw an ad on a municipal bus trumpeting that some radio station would, for a certain few hours every week, run ad-free; that they thought this worth plugging (despite the irony of an ad trumpeting ad-free-ness) says to me that claims customers don't mind ads are..somewhere on the spectrum between overgeneralization and delusion. Yeah, I know. "Ads pay for content." No they don't - or rather, they do only at the surface level. The truth is more like, the advertiser's customers pay for the content, filtered through (and with a cut skimmed off by) the advertisers' advertising departments. I would _much_ rather pay directly for the content and _not_ pay advertising departments' pounds-of-flesh for damn near everything I buy. (Interestingly enough, the things I buy are almost disjoint from the products being advertised in the ads I see - I've often seen an ad and wished I were in the market for its product so I could avoid that advertiser.) Especially when I'm already nominally paying for the content anyway - eg, a movie ticket, a cable TV subscription, or, to pick an example that's actually closer to reasonable for me, a print magazine. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

No, it's not that it's non-Wintel (hehe). I have problems with Flash on my laptop, especially flash intensive sites - it causes my browser (and sometimes my whole laptop) to slow to a crawl. Whilst a Pentium IIIm (@ 1GHz) is not state-of-the-art, it does everything else perfectly fine. Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk --- On Thu, 15/1/09, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote: From: Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> Subject: Re: OT-ish, adverts was RE: Dr. Dobbs to cease? To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Date: Thursday, 15 January, 2009, 7:56 PM On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 2:30 PM, Gordon JC Pearce MM3YEQ <gordonjcp at gjcp.net> wrote: intellitxt.com ads. I have to block flash... I'm on a Mac w/Firefox, and it started crashing this week when certain flash bits were put up - I finally got control of my magic yo-yo browser by catching the pop-under opening a Flash ad, and closing the window before it could load. I was about to take my machine off-line to let the browser get to a stable state when I finally found the offender. :-P It must be "my fault" for trying to let Flash run on a non-Wintel box. :-/ It seems every few months, some update gets pushed through that causes Flash to completely hose the browser. Flash is annoying. If you try to sell me something with a Flash ad, I'll probably never see it. -ethan

On Wednesday 14 January 2009 11:50:37 am Dan Gahlinger wrote: If it's not going to kill it here, it's going to at least injure it seriously... I myself could care less in terms of most of the over-the-air stuff we get coming in here. With a set of rabbit ears, I've not considered either cable or a dish to be a worthwhile investment in recent years, too much of a time-sink, and I've got better things to do with what limited funds I have available. Other members of the household feel differently about it, but where that ends up remains to be seen since what we're looking at is a bit more than just hooking up a converter box, it seems like it's going to need an antenna as well. Yep, I have some music streaming as I type this, and just got done watching some music videos. Their plans will definitely fail. Same thing with operating systems, too. I spent an absurd amount of time yesterday on a service call because of an attempt at a system restore wasn't working, and although the guy was receptive to the idea of linux I couldn't go there in that context. All this because of m$ and their worries about piracy. I know of a number of folks with such setups. Just so. Yes. There are going to be some major upheavals in the way that business is done. The Cluetrain Manifesto (available for free online) points in some interesting directions. Government trying to maintain the status quo and the sheer size of some large corporations is only going to prolong things, but it *will* change and I suspect that we'll be seeing a lot of those changes happening a lot sooner than most suspect. We're drifting pretty far off the topic of the list here, though. If anybody else wants to take up some of this stuff feel free to join me in my "tech chat" group on yahoo... -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

On Tuesday 13 January 2009 01:45:16 am Richard wrote: Funny, I used to think of Byte as a hardware mag... It was when they drifted away from that I started to lose interest. -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca wrote: I liked the covers too... The island of smalltalk comes to mind. PS. What ever happend to smalltalk as hardware/programing language system?

Smalltalk begat Squeak, which is what the Sugar interface is based on in those new XO laptops. I think that Cycling 74's music software is written in Smalltalk as well. On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 1:44 PM, bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca < bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> wrote:

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 9:43 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: Drats, you're absolutely right. The Sugar GUI does look a bit Squeakish, though.

In article <200901131206.11848.rtellason at verizon.net>, "Roy J. Tellason" <rtellason at verizon.net> writes: More hardware discussion happens on the net nowadays than ever happened in BYTE magazine, even in its heyday. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

In article <496CE3F8.4020401 at oldskool.org>, Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org> writes: And the sun rises in the east. Sorry, but what you just said feels like a tautological statement to me. Yeah, 20 years ago there weren't as many people online. But even 20 years ago (that's 1989), BYTE was already dead (last issue July '98) and DDJ was already declining. There was a point when I regularly went to the newsstand to seek out both of those magazines, but by 1990 that time had already come and gone for both of them. I think I had given up on BYTE a few years before it ceased publication. That DDJ has hung on this long shows some determination on the part of its staff, but having received their last print issue in the mail just the other day, I would say that it was a rather pathetic end to that magazine. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

They deserve to die. The magazine has been worthless for a long, long time. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>