Comment Re:So not a big deal (Score 1) 147
Or a variant that's closer to Ebola Reston. Airborne, 100% fatality rate (so far only in a couple species of monkeys. So far...)
Comment Author seems unclear on music technology. (Score 3, Informative) 18
"Despite the limitations of the 1993-era sound card drivers,"
The Gravis Ultrasound ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), as well as other soundcards which *USED WAVETABLE SYNTHESIS* were available.
Yeah, FM-synthesis sounds like a robot. The SNES SPC-7000 was wavetable. The Sega Genesis used a Z80 for FM synthesis. A GUS card was supperior to the SPC-7000.
If you want to know how good the music is, either run DOOM in DOSBOX with a correct GUS Wavetable patch set (which will let you know how *ACTUALLY GOOD* the music is). Alternatively, the Doom & Doom 2 remaster on Steam has an actual band covering the actual tracks. That also sounds awesome.
Lol; I guess the author wasn't aware of the state of the art in 1993 if that's what they wrote.
Submission + - CERN Open Sources Its KiCad Component Libraries
ewhac writes: CERN, a long-time Open Source pioneer, has made several contributions over the years to KiCad ("KEE-kad"), an Open Source EDA (Electronic Design Automation) package widely used in the hobbyist and professional electronics communities. It's gotten so widely used that users can now submit their KiCad design files directly to several electronics fabricators (rather than the traditional step of converting the layouts to Gerber files). Over the years, CERN have also developed their own symbol and footprint libraries to support their own internal electronic designs. Last week, CERN released those KiCad component libraries, containing over 17,000 symbols, under the CERN Open Hardware License (permissive version).
Comment Re:Isn't this fraud? (Score 3, Informative) 88
"Hey, what's the big deal? We used to append 'P.S. I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail' to every outgoing email way back in the day, and no one ever had a problem with that..."
Comment eBay is Now eStop! (Score 1) 97
Welcome to the all-new eStop! We know you have concerns, so let us put them to rest straight away.
The site will not change. We respect the investment you've made in learning and navigating the site. However, if you're feeling curious or adventurous, feel free to check out our [new site design prototype]. (This design will become the default landing page in mid-2027; the old site UI will enter maintenance mode for only the most critical bugs.)
To thwart LLMs and other bots, new default limits on bidding have been imposed. Accounts may only bid on a given item no more frequently than once every 20 minutes. If your circumstances require more frequent bidding, have a look at our [eStop Pro Membership Plan] for only $9.95/month (billed annually; no pro-rated refunds), which will allow unlimited bidding frequency. And for members who want to have more than 20 items on sale simultaneously, take some time to review our [eStop Bulk Vendor Programs], charging only 25% of gross sales, or $3600/year + 20% of gross sales.
And to help with "doomscrolling" for that one specific thing you're looking for, we've also partnered with Anthrop\c and X's Grok to help curate your buying experience, surfacing the items most likely to interest you.
(All terms are subject to change without notice.)
Comment ISDN: It Still Does Nothing (Score 1) 95
(a/k/a Innovation Subscribers Don't Need)
It still amazes me that, as late as the 1990's, and well after 56kbit modems were prolific, ISDN was being offered up by the ILECs as "broadband," at metered rates that made Ma Bell's long distance charges look like spare change.
Happily, it wasn't too long before ISDN was put out of everyone's misery when DSL showed up. And now, finally, after fifty years of pissing about, fiber is finally being pulled to the premises.
If you really need ongoing ISDN support, you can pull the source code from an old Git commit and update it. But I feel quite comfortable in opining: ISDN support will not be missed.
Comment When I saw the re-releases of Dogma and Holy Grail (Score 1) 152
Both ran without preceding ads. At both, just before the films started, I was thinking the theaters were awfully empty. Then, about 20 minutes in, people started coming in.
Comment "Oh, dear. Anyway..." (Score 2) 113
...My installation of minidlna still works fine, is Free Software, and doesn't phone home or exfiltrate my metadata.
Comment Re:I thought it was the DG Eclipse (Score 2) 39
Aaak. I think it was. That'll teach me to work off of decade old memories...
Well, it probably won't teach me.
Submission + - Tracy Kidder, Author of "The Soul of a New Machine", has died.
wiredog writes: Tracy Kidder, author of "The Soul of a New Machine" has died at the age of 80.
"The Soul of a New Machine" is about the people who designed and built the Data General Nova, one of the 32 bit superminis that were released in the 1980's, just before the PC destroyed that industry. It was excerpted in The Atlantic.
"I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."
"The Soul of a New Machine" is about the people who designed and built the Data General Nova, one of the 32 bit superminis that were released in the 1980's, just before the PC destroyed that industry. It was excerpted in The Atlantic.
"I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."
Comment A Surprising Result From This Crew (Score 1) 91
Given that the Roberts Court is one of the most corporate-friendly in history, this decision comes as something of a surprise.
Nonetheless, it appears to be largely concordant with the so-called "Betamax case" from the early 1980's which established the principle of significant non-infringing uses as a defense and, despite passage of the DMCA, still largely informs the contours of contributory infringement.
Comment Re:Hey Canada, here's a hint (Score 4, Insightful) 108
Choosing it to sell to someone whose administration is actively trying to undermine you, would be self-defeating.
This isn't about business. The US is burning its bridges, well, let's burn this one too. Trade is for people you can trust and rely on.
Submission + - Python `chardet` Package Replaced with LLM-Generated Clone, Re-Licensed
ewhac writes: The maintainers of the Python package `chardet`, which attempts to automatically detect the character encoding of a string, announced the release of version 7 this week, claming a speedup factor of 43x over version 6. In the release notes, the maintainers claim that version 7 is, "a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet." Problem: The putative "ground-up rewrite" is actually the result of running the existing copyrighted codebase and test suite through the Claude LLM. In so doing, the maintainers claim that v7 now represents a unique work of authorship, and therefore may be offered under a new license. Version 6 and earlier was licensed under the LGPL. Version 7 claims to be available under the MIT license.
The maintainers appear to be claiming that, under the Oracle v. Google decision which found that cloning public APIs is fair use, their v7 is a fair use re-implementation of the `chardet` public API. However, there is no evidence to suggest their re-write was under "clean room" conditions, which traditionally has shielded cloners from infringement suits. Further, the copyrightability of LLM output has yet to be settled. Recent court decisions seem to favor the view that LLM output is not copyrightable, as the output is not primarily the result of human creative expression — the endeavor copyright is intended to protect. Spirited discussion has ensued in issue #327 on `chardet`s GitHub repo, raising the question: Can copyrighted source code be laundered through an LLM and come out the other end as a fresh work of authorship, eligible for a new copyright, copyright holder, and license terms? If this is found to be so, it would allow malicious interests to completely strip-mine the Open Source commons, and then sell it back to the users without the community seeing a single dime.
The maintainers appear to be claiming that, under the Oracle v. Google decision which found that cloning public APIs is fair use, their v7 is a fair use re-implementation of the `chardet` public API. However, there is no evidence to suggest their re-write was under "clean room" conditions, which traditionally has shielded cloners from infringement suits. Further, the copyrightability of LLM output has yet to be settled. Recent court decisions seem to favor the view that LLM output is not copyrightable, as the output is not primarily the result of human creative expression — the endeavor copyright is intended to protect. Spirited discussion has ensued in issue #327 on `chardet`s GitHub repo, raising the question: Can copyrighted source code be laundered through an LLM and come out the other end as a fresh work of authorship, eligible for a new copyright, copyright holder, and license terms? If this is found to be so, it would allow malicious interests to completely strip-mine the Open Source commons, and then sell it back to the users without the community seeing a single dime.
Comment Riiiiiiiggghht..... (Score 1) 29
OpenAI is amending its Pentagon contract after CEO Sam Altman acknowledged it appeared "opportunistic and sloppy." [
... ]
Well, if there's anyone who would know about slop...
Comment Yet Another Reason to Leave Discord (Score 1) 82
Sounds like Micros~1 doesn't want to deal with actual people, much less the consequences of their own boneheaded decisions.
Of course, if Discord had a backbone (and ethics), they would summarily remove the filters, and smack Micros~1 for making them look bad. And if Micros~1 gave them any back-talk about it, they could reply, "Well, it sounds like you should set up your own rules on your own globally accessible chat network. I hear you already have something along those lines. Something called... Teams, I think?. Knock yourselves out..."
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1000 pains = 1 Megahertz
