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| Notice: GeekPress is back up and running, thanks to Paul! It's still a not-so-serious tech news blog, but the format is significantly looser. Diana, having given up programming for philosophy, has her own philosophical blog NoodleFood. More of her work can be found at DianaHsieh.com. |
| "Abandoned" games kept alive illegally |
| 1:20:38 am mst / 17 March 2001 found by paul / filed in games / source Washington Post 177 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| Interesting article on "abandonware" sites, where old games that aren't available anymore can be downloaded for free. The issue is complicated by the fact that the games are still copyrighted, and hence this sort of distribution is illegal. |
| Under the legal doctrine of "adverse possession", if one person abandons a plot of land for a certain period of time and a second person makes productive use of it, the second person gets legal title. Perhaps a similar version of this rule should apply to software copyrights. (Or as an alternative, perhaps the games should go into the public domain if they've been abandoned for more than, say, 10 years.) |
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| Better double-check the spelling |
| 8:02:45 am mst / 17 March 2001 found by paul / filed in internet / source Register 53 hits / 1 comment / 0 e-mails |
| The people at the Experts Exchange website (for IT professional collaboration) were probably wondering why they were getting lots of traffic from aspiring transsexuals. That's what happens when one doesn't double-check how one's domain name would appear to web surfers. Apparently, browsers can't the difference between "ExpertsExchange.com" and "ExpertSexchange.com". |
| Not quite as bad as the acronym for "City University at Newcastle-upon-Tyne"... |
| read 1 comment |
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| Translator phone |
| 1:15:44 pm mst / 17 March 2001 found by paul / filed in inventions / source Ananova 43 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| German programmers are working on a mobile phone that translates between users speaking two different languages. (Link via Geeknews.net.) |
| Unfortunately it's not quite a real-time device, like the "Universal Translator" in Star Trek. But maybe in a few years... |
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| The prerogatives of innovation |
| 8:15:27 pm mst / 17 March 2001 found by diana / filed in culture / source ZDNet 55 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| Bob Frankston argues, among other things, that programming is not just for experts. Simple programming languages can allow users to do do what they want with their technology, rather than having "solutions" forced down their throats. |
| An interesting, if not entirely coherent, article. |
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