Maybe not technically, but you have intimidated and gotten stuff pulled by threat. So, while your statement may be true to actions, it certainly isn't true by the spirit of what you're trying to insinuate.

Jaz

Ug... I'm also in the medical device field and you had to go and mix my hobby and my profession by throwing around terms like SOUP. I come here to get AWAY from work... THANKS ALOT!!

Jaz

IF that response that asay posted is truly Mastergeek's response, then he must have an idiot for a lawyer (ie: representing himself). The link there for the US section 412 of the code points to a non-legal source at Cornell (ie: an internet link which has no legal standing whatsoever). In fact, it's pretty funny since the last line of the link on Cornell's site says this..
"LII has no control over and does not endorse any external Internet site that contains links to or references LII."

Too funny...

Jaz

I think it's actually one step further. What I read is (point 27) "The product was not for sale at the time the alleged acts happened, and continues to be unavailable, therefore no damages can be claimed since no sales were actually lost."

Remember, this is a civil case (ie: not criminal), so you need to prove that the alleged actions actually resulted in damages. So, in addition to saying that "We can't infringe on copyright that BGP didn't have", he's saying "they suffered no damages even if we did infringe".

That's how I read it anyway.
Keith

I got very lucky as well. Right now, Nucore is a total mess right now unless you have a working system and it stays that way.

Around this time last year, the hard drive (spinning platter) in my Nucore system crapped out and would no longer boot. So, I said OK, I have all the disks and I should be fine right? WRONG.

I bought a new hard drive and pulled all my disks and instructions out. I went back and downloaded the latest from the BGP pinball site figuring that would be the best way to load stuff. Well, the latest and greatest failed. It was not possible to build the system from scratch. I also tried to load from scratch using the original disks and that wasn't possible either. The problem is that the Linux version they used at the time is simply no longer available and the stuff you need to install is NOT actually located on the install disk. By design, it is setup to go out to the web and download the files it needs as it goes. I understand this might be the "Linux way", but for an application like this... epic fail.

I then tried Pinbox. (edit: I don't have any issues personally (nor see any) since I am a fully paid, licensed user of the real stuff. It would be like me using a MAME for a MAME when I own the original ROMs for the machine). Epic fail there as well. Despite multiple attempts, no dice.

So, BGP tried hard to help me out. I give Don a lot of credit. He worked with me and gave me a number of things to try and tried to get it to work. But, to no avail.

At this point, I had spent substantial hours (around 15 hours) trying to get a product I paid for working. VERY frustrating.

My saving grace was that I was able to use and offline repair and cloning utility to clone my original hard drive. If that hadn't worked, I'm not sure I'd be working even today. The real issue though is, what if some of my other hardware had failed. For example, if I need to replace my motherboard or CPU, I think I'd be hosed. I've seen reference to the current Nucore build not working with USB3.0 ports (which is pretty much what everything has now). That may not be true, but may be. BUT, I know that the drivers loaded on my hard drive would likely not support the motherboard chipsets on a new board for USB and parallel port use.

I just hope they get this crap sorted out and can get back to selling and supporting a current version of Linux and hardware. I know I will be building a backup system (let's face it, PC hardware is dirt cheap so having duplicate pieces ready to go shouldn't be bad) so I can swap it out in the future if necessary.

Jaz

Spoken by someone who truly doesn't understand the technical challenges of the task nor the real timing involved. Windows is not a real-time operating system. For that matter, neither is Linux. But, at least with Linux you have the source code and can get into the nitty-gritty to make it do what you need.

Jaz

The system would need to be written to support it (ie: USB-to-parallel converter). The timing requirements of those communications are very tight and it might not work.

The bigger technical issue (at least as I see it) is that the Raspberry Pi 2 is ARM based and what they've done to date is x86 based. If they had wanted to support ARM, they could have done it a long time ago on the BeagleBone platform. The Raspberry Pi is just now getting horsepower to compete with that and it has been out for a long time.

For example, the BeagleBone is what some manufacturers of devices are going into production with (ie: in the pinball world, MMr for example). It's a pretty awesome little board. I've got a few sitting here at my desk in fact...

Jaz

Actually, older ARM processors were also LE. However, current generation ARM processors are bi-endian. So, that shouldn't be an issue.

Jaz