It is now official: Contax brand comes to an end. No sale to another, no continuation - the name Contax as a camera brand is gone from the market for now. Maybe Zeiss (who probably own the name Contax themselves and only licensed it) will find someone else for it - the Contax rangefinder camera (not the G series, but the new one based on the Voigtländer device) already has another partner. But the Contax we have known since the late 70s is now history.
Archive 12. April 2005
Dvddisaster is a small program that stores error correction data for DVDs and CDs on an external medium so that a CD or DVD that has problems due to aging can still be read under certain circumstances. For this purpose, control data amounting to approximately 15% of the original data carrier is stored elsewhere.
Suitable from 6 years
Stumbled upon this at Spreeblick: what a game company considers suitable for ages 6 and up:
Your task: rule over your island, where pirates and prisoners reside. These two population groups must be treated completely differently. The pirates want to enjoy an undisturbed life of luxury to recover from their strenuous raids. You can best increase the productivity of the prisoners by spreading fear and terror.
Building brothels (and filling them with female prisoners), random executions, keelhauling - all to amuse the pirates and frighten the prisoners. Great training for the little ones for our wonderful world.
Hey, with politicians, bankers, and business bosses instead of pirates and the unemployed and foreigners instead of the prisoners, it could almost be realistic ...
PostgreSQL 8.0.2 released with patent fix
Just found: PostgreSQL 8.0.2 released with patent fix. PostgreSQL has therefore received a new minor version in which a patented caching algorithm (arc) was replaced with a non-patented one (2Q). The interesting part: this is one of the patents that IBM has released for open source. And why did they switch anyway? Because IBM has released these patents for open source use, but not for commercial use - PostgreSQL, however, is under the BSD license, which explicitly allows completely free commercial use.
For PostgreSQL itself, this would not have been a problem: as long as it remains BSD, the use of the IBM patent would not have caused any problems. Only a later license change - such as when someone chooses BSD software as the basis for a commercial product - would have been excluded.
A nice example of how even liberally handled software patents cause problems. Because medium-sized companies that build commercial products on open source would have lost a previously available basis - solely due to the patented caching algorithm (efficient storage of and efficient access to data - so patentable according to Clements' idea).
In the case of PostgreSQL, it went smoothly: the patented algorithm is not faster or better than its non-patented counterpart. And for the software itself, nothing really world-shattering has changed. But this does not have to (and will not) always go so smoothly. In the field of audio processing and video processing, the patented minefields are much more extensive and therefore much more critical for free projects.
Okay, one might still argue that this would not have happened with a GPL license. But with a GPL license, certain forms of use as they already exist in PostgreSQL today (e.g., companies building special databases on PostgreSQL without making these special databases open source) are not possible. You can take a stand on this as you like - ideology aside - the PostgreSQL project has chosen the BSD license as its basis.
Even well-intentioned patent handling in the context of open source software would therefore be problematic. Exactly this is the reason why I am generally against software patents.