Extrapolated Facts » software

What is Available in the Public Domain?

Jim — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 22:26:53 +0000

It is kind of complicated actually.� There is some stuff that is straight forward.� Published before 1923 is public domain. Anything else has other criteria.� Here is a guide.� That is all for the US, so it may be different elsewhere.

Here are a couple sources of Public Domain documents in ready to use electronic format:

Project Gutenberg with 20,000+ books
WikiSource with 56,000+ pages in English

Most of the contents of above are public domain.� Some are not.� Each is clearly marked.

If you have a physical book with a copyright date that puts it in the public domain, then you could have it typed in, or use OCR (optical character recognition) to digitize it.

There are actually other sources beyond Public Domain, depending on what you want to do.� A relatively new movement is the Creative Commons, where things are still copyrighted, but limited use is grated under certain terms.� The use may even include publishing for money.� This is similar to open source, which is mostly confined to software.� Many sites, like Flickr allow people to license their works with Creative Commons for easy sharing.

Most of the contents of the Wikimedia foundation’s websites (including WikiSource above) is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.� It grants you a lot of freedoms with how you use it, but has a number of restrictions.� Mainly if you modify or add to it then you must make your modifications or additions also available under the same license.� It does however allow you to create a print version with certain requirements of front mater inclusion.

There are a lot of straight forward areas, but then some others that are rather gray where you may want to get an attorney.

Luck O’ the Irish LAN

Jim — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 20:42:49 +0000

I am throwing my first large scale LAN party.� Since this Saturday, March 17th is St. Patrick’s Day I am calling it Luck O’ the Irish LAN.� We actually had reserved the room for another purpose, but that didn’t work out, so a last minute change of agenda led to this LAN.� I expect it to be a lot of fun.� Some of the feedback we have gotten has been to focus on older or more obscure games.� What do you think we should play?

Vista Hinders Performance

Jim — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 23:50:33 +0000

Windows Vista Hinders Creative Users� Efficiency Even More than Windows XP Did

From Slashdot. Rather interesting. Basically they say that the mouse precision and menu lag are worse in Vista then they were in XP, which has a negative impact on productivity. From my usage of Vista I can concur. I even turned off the eye candy relating to the mouse cursor and menus and it still seems slower then XP. They claim Mac OS X is far superior in both categories.

It would seem poor mouse accuracy would be a hindrance in games, unless that only applies to the desktop and not when you are in a DirectX environment. It would seem that the whole Aero/Glass thing would blur the line between desktop and DirectX tough. . . . Combine poor mouse accuracy with DirectX10 being exclusive to Vista and that is yet another reason for game developers not to support it.