| ??? 10/04/09 04:46 Read: times |
#169390 - Published spec's are in the public domain Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Andy Neil said:
Richard Erlacher said:
All these questions rely on spec's ... spec's often no longer available, hence requiring guesswork if the original spec isn't on hand.
That's what I had in mind. Very true. But keeping the specs for one's own use is very different to publishing those specs for others to use... I don't disagree ... fundamentally ... though I am concerned that you seem to believe there's an ethical issue here. That information to which I globally refer as published spec's doesn't belong to the publisher, once published in an open form, which the www certainly is. Hence, whoever has a copy, owns that copy and can do with it as he wishes. Aside from the library maintenance task itself, the ethics, if that's what concerns you, are simple. The work was published, but, having found a way to extract pecuniary reward simply for "putting it out there" for people to use, the authors have decided to remove the material from public view, having chosen, instead to make it available on a paid basis rather than at no charge. Since it was published, it's now in the public domain. The authors of the SD spec' for example, have not published their later work in the same way, but, rather, demand payment and NDA for access to it. Here's a link to a recent microSD spec ... it's apparently welcome, as it's found a number of new homes. http://www.sparkfun.com/datasheet...D_Spec.pdf I have recently acquired a full-sized SD adapter to these and they work exactly like the full size cards once in the adapter. Since they cost very little, around $5US for a 2GB card, I think they're as good as the original. Here's another fairly complete one that's only recently popped up in my searches. http://www.mikrocontroller.net/attachmen...08G7B7.pdf and here's another ... note the clock frequency is 50 MHz now ... http://www.tecsys.de/fileadmin...c_v1.5.pdf One thing you might find interesting is that this one refers to what appears to be an internal 8051 with "enhanced features" and also to a transfer rate of 30 Mbytes/second, albeit only for read. This spec is for an SD Card controller ... http://www.tairom.com/exe/Secur...20Card.pdf I can't find the couple I've seen that were incomplete but referred to a 100 MHz clock, which would lead to a theoretical 50 MBps. I've even seen what was probably more from marketing than from engineering, referring to a 480 Mbps upper limit on transfers ... apparently referring to Firewire and USB2 compatibility. I should have saved 'em ... but I figured they were marketing stuff ... RE |
