Coming out of a screaming six-G dive, Pilot Spiff unleashes the terrible firepower of his P51 Mustang's six .50-caliber machine guns. Blam! Blooey! Two critical struts weakened, the Eiffel Tower totters for a horrifying second and then crashes to the Paris streets in a heap of twisted steel.
Yep. Donald Hill's P51 Mustang Flight Simulator is a fine cathartic. Now on to the mailbag.
First, a big thank you to all of you who have written in to say that you agreed with me about writers' responsibility for the quality and accuracy of their work. I'm especially grateful for all those examples of typos, misspellings, factual errors, and general evidence of senility that you found in my recent columns and were kind enough to send along for my edification, often with witty annotations of your own. You can stop now.
Here are the patches: In the February "Flames," replace "Kerouak" with "Kerouac," "National" with "Notional" (the National Science Foundation does not in fact belong to author Nick Herbert), "Sometimes" with "Some time," and move the comma after "ecliptic" outside the parentheses. In the March "Programming Paradigms," replace "PC Magazin" with "Design Elektronik" globally. Jurgen Fey was miffed that I couldn't remember what magazine he worked for.
"Typos Hapen" is a bumpersticker I haven't seen but would gladly buy. In fact, I'd buy two and give one to an editor friend of mine who begged me not to mention his name in my column this month. No, its not Jurgen. But it wasn't typos that I had in mind when I announced my intention a few months ago to point out egregious uses of words and figures in the computer press, but bits like these from a recent Microsoft Word 4.0 ad:
"...startling, cutting-edge technology." (And it holds the road like a dream.)
"...features as dynamic and diverse as its users." (OK, maybe Microsoft researched this one.)
"And, software fans...." (Oh, you crazy word processor groupies.)
"...practically the only thing it can't do for you is think. Yet." (Or write. Evidently.)
Microsoft wasn't so funny back when Tyler Sperry was writing copy for them. Poor Tyler. Last I heard he was sleeping in the streets or editing Embedded Systems Programming, something like that.
Speaking of embedded things, which I do with some trepidation, considering the keen linguistic sensitivity of some readers of this column, reminds me of the subject still languishing at the bottom of the mailbag: fighting software piracy by embedding machine serial numbers in ROM. Several readers wrote in about the subject, all cogently and politely trashing the scheme.
Peter Aitkin of Durham, North Carolina, stated the basic objection: "Each software package that I purchase is installed on all of my computers; the manuals are schlepped back and forth as needed. No one but me ever uses any of these machines. Surely such an arrangement is within the spirit, if not the letter, of software licensing agreements." After all, it is the person, not the computer, who pays for the software. Shouldn't it be the person, rather than the computer, to whom it is licensed?
Aitkin also pointed out that tying the software to a serial number in ROM makes it impossible for the user to upgrade the hardware while keeping the old software.
Diehl Martin of Huntsville, Alabama, sent a thoughtful dissertation on the two issues of copyright protection and copy protection. Among other points, he opines that software developers are no better than anyone else when it comes to copying software. "Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," Diehl says, "what wonderful things we must be saying about each others' work!"
Tim Deardeuff of Provo, Utah, nicely demonstrated that the ROM scheme affords no greater protection than any software copy protection scheme, since all the user has to do to defeat it is to copy the disk before installing the software on the target machine. The developer could always make the disk difficult to copy, but this reduces to the old discredited scheme of software copy protection, and the serial number in ROM buys the developer nothing extra while inconveniencing the user.
Did the critical clause of the non-competition contract between Steve Jobs and Apple Computer expire? The machine that would be sold Only to Higher Education can now be ordered at Businesslands everywhere. What a surprise.
And just as the courts informed Microsoft that its license from Apple doesn't go beyond Windows 1.0, the company that managed the Beatles informed Apple that its agreement on the use of the name Apple explicitly excludes use in any music-related activity. I dunno; maybe litigation is funnier than publishing.
Copyright © 1989, Dr. Dobb's Journal