Slashdot Mirror

I agree that open office, star office, and all the rest are an eventual threat MSOffice's market dominance and that they need to do something about it (like make office better value for money), but this patent is not going to help one whit.

Look at this: Sun pushes open office standard, specifically talking about an open document standard using XML - basically the OASIS format format.

I never disagreed that it's a crap patent. It is. But it's unenforceable without MS opening itself up to yet more legal challenges over its anti-interoperability tactics.

They have apparently given in to all the pressure, admitted the wording was bad and are going to rewrite it according to this CNET article. I don't see the changes as of right now though.

And it looks like they are fixing it.

America Online said late Monday that it plans to revise its user agreement in response to concerns that instant messages sent through the company's service could be monitored.

http://news.com.com/AOL+clarifies+IM+privacy+guara ntee/2100-1030_3-5616543.html?tag=nefd.top

A better-established GCC competitor is Intel, whose compilers are recognized to be the gold standard for software running on x86 chips... But in a curious twist, the very same compiler engineers at Intel also help with GCC. That's because GCC is a crucial tool to bring software to Intel's processors. For example, Intel helped adapt GCC so it could produce software for its Itanium processor, Reinders said.

(Emphasis mine.)

Glad to see it all works out for the consumer. ;-)

Now, the question for me is, what is the 64-bit processor of choice for todays servers? I know what my employers are implementing, but what about the rest of the world?

This is Sun's Niagara Design. The more I learn about it, the more I think that it's nothing that exciting.

From the lack of non-Sun-supplied buzz regarding this technology, it would appear that many people aren't finding it very exciting.

Hate replying to self, but found an article about it being changed.
here

672 573 706 891 3357 2997 1328 1870 1063 1154 1376 1142 1054 797
JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC JAN FEB

Sun paid SCO money. More money for SCO means more money to hire sleazy lawyers to try to kill Linux.

Reference: http://news.com.com/2100-1016-1024633.html

Looks like Sun, SCO, and Microsoft are in bed together to try to get rid of Linux.

Right after Apple released the iMac back in 1998, everyone started jumping on the "all-in-one" PC thing again. A new company at the time, eMachines, tried to market a near copy of it called the eOne PC. They were slapped with injunctions in the US and Tokyo shortly after that and later forced to stop production.

The review for the eOne is still up on epinions, along with a stock photo: eOne Photo

Daewoo tried something similar. They both got the smack down. See here.

Do you remember when Cobalt Networks was about to sue Apple over the Cube? Because of Cobalt's Qube design? Only to find out a few months later Apple owned NeXT at that point, which created the original Cube. At that point Cobalt changed their tune and decided suing might not be so smart. Some Cobalt info.

The reason for suing is brand dilution. When you make a look-a-like, you're copying a design that's identified with the product. It's the same reason stores brand soda tries to have similar color schemes to Coke, or Pepsi. You identify the product by the colors, shapes and patterns of the packaging or product itself.

I get what the Taiwanese company is doing. They would have been better off sticking to knock off Nintendo games though. I'd guarantee Apple already knows about the knock off at this point, and we'll probably be seeing lawsuits within a week or two.

It could be just coincidence, but Burst.com is also a company held by Baystar Capital. These are the people responsible for $50 million in funding for the SCO legal case against IBM over Linux. But then you would have to believe that when Microsoft helped Baystar and SCO meet was a coincidence. And don't forget when Microsoft bought $12 million in SCO licenses when they didn't need them.

And who can forget when Sun bought SCO licenses too and then less than a year later, Microsoft and Sun were best friends and settled their lawsuits with each other.

Maybe some of this stuff is a coincidence and then again maybe none of it is. I find it hard to believe that all of it is a coincidence though.

In your mind you have equated the act of publication with the act of libel. This is not black-and-white and was addressed by the court, as well as other courts. The act of libel include the requirement of defamation of character and that took place in Ontario. See, for instance, The 'Lectric Law Library's definition of the act of defamation:

An act of communication that causes someone to be shamed, ridiculed, held in contempt, lowered in the estimation of the community, or to lose employment status or earnings or otherwise suffer a damaged reputation.

The shame, ridicule, contempt, damaged reputation and the community in which it happened were all in Ontario, not Washington. He also lost his employment status and earnings, also not in Washington. This did not set a precedence, in fact the ruling referenced precedence. (Both Dow Jones & Company v. Gutnick and Upper Lakes Shipping Ltd. v. Foster Yeoman Ltd. were used.) The court did consider that the publication occured in D.C., but that the damaged to reputation occured in Ontario, so both forums would be relevant but neither was clearly more appropriate. The ruling didn't claim that Ontario was better, but neither was D.C. Based on precedence in the latter reference, without a clearly more appropriate forum he had to rule that the plaintiff's choice was appropriate. That you consider the location of publication more important than the location of damage is neither legally recognized (certainly not in the U.S., Canada, Australia, or many other countries) nor clearly logical.

"If a Canadian newspaper writes a story on..."
"If I write something here about Olymic athletes as a group..."
"How do you know that YOUR post doesn't violate Uzbekistan law?"

Again, if you actually read my last post, these are all interesting legal questions and are current points of contention in many places. In particular, if you read the article I referenced you'd see that this is an issue at the forefront of internet and the law, and in many cases there is a hyprocrisy (such as the U.S. exerting its laws on copyright violations in other countries while maintaining that it doesn't have to abide by laws of other countries, particularly France as noted in the article and that which you presented in your post).

However, as pointed out in the article and me in my last post, which you seem to have missed or ignored, all of the examples you provide are cases where the act is not illegal in the coutry of production but is in some other country. As I pointed out, the Washington Post case was illegal in both Ontario and D.C. so this is really a non-issue and there is a fairly long history of such cases. The examples you quote are the interesting ones being slowly worked out over time. An even more interesting case might be if I wrote something from one country to Slashdot which "published" it in another country (such as on U.S. servers), and was read in a third country. What if what I said was legal in the first two countries, and not the third. Or if in the first but not the second, or vice versa. There's a whole bunch of interesting cases. The Washington Post one is clear-cut and uninteresting.

"However your example is a reversal of the actual situation. It's people in Ontario "calling" Washington."

No, that's not a reversal, in fact it's a moot semantic. If the people in Ontario called the guy in Washington, and the guy in Washington made the sladerous remark over the speakerphone in Ontario, the defamation would still occur in Ontario. Nobody in Washinton heard it and no damage was done in Washington. Who actually initiated the call would be irrelevent.

One more note, you keep referring to my logic. I a

How about Gator/Claria. Oh right, I forget, instead of being shut down by the government they've been appointed to the Department of Homeland Security's "privacy board" [sic].

I wonder if the FTC can take down Homeland Security, or for that matter I wonder if they can take down the whole Bush administration for false advertising, deception etc. For example in 2001 George W. promised to keep the giant surplus coming in from our Social Security payroll taxes sacred. He has since proceeded to spend every bit of it on tax cuts for the rich and the war in Iraq, hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars worth. The Social Security "trust fund" is in fact a couple filing cabinets of worthless IOU's from one government agency to another and will in fact never probably be repaid. If our payroll taxes had been saved and conservatively invested it would be 2042 before it ran out of money. Instead it will in fact run out of money 2018 or so, leading to either slashing benefits or raising payroll taxes, which punish low and middle income people the most. The Bush administration, being the cynical manipulators that they are, are helping drive Social Security in to bankruptcy, declaring it to be a crisis and then proposing private accounts as the solution. Well private accounts would prevent the government from spending our Social Security money, but THE BUSH ADMINSTRATION IS THE WORST OFFENDER FOR SPENDING IT.

MS isn't going to create a new Windows release for April 1-14, but they could schedule their own press event for that period extolling the feature set of the Longhorn beta to steal some (or all) of Apple's thunder. They've done it before.

If you want to avoid reading up on common law and international law, try a news.com article that talks about some of the issues. You'll see that breaking laws across borders is very old. It's not like telephones, international transactions, or import/export are new. The web offers one major twist in that it is passive so it is hard to prove active will to perform the act as in the previous cases, and this is an area of contention when it comes to breaking laws that only exist in foreign countries (like in your example). These cases are the ones that are of interest. The current one on the Washington Post involves breaking a civil law that exists almost everywhere, including Canada and the U.S., not to mention that the Washington Post is exported to Canada (though the specific issue in question was web-based). This is a boring, old, "been-done-before", and accepted outcome. Again, nothing to see here.

Does the ensuing release mean they'll stop suing people that revealed details about Tiger prematurely?

It reminds me of what SUN was talking about in this.

Jonathan Schwartz must be happy to see that finally, his idea of selling cpu time is being realised (and how much he loves IBM ;))

Anyway, even if, I guess, the price will be lot higher than Jimi Hendrix (and that's something), the few people getting access to some of the best performing supercomputers is really nice.

To sum up : nice business plan.

(Note: More coverage in this news.com story)

This judge has clearly shown that he has a grasp of the fundamental issues surrounding this case, and has realized that this is not a case about whether online sites are "journalists" or about the "right to blog". It's about when it's about when the dissemination of information in the public interest clearly overrides any other legal concerns or contracts and entitles journalists to not reveal their sources - and when it clearly doesn't.

And if you're not going to RTFA, here is some of the jugde's ruling:

"Unlike the whistleblower who discloses a health, safety or welfare hazard affecting all, or the government employee who reveals mismanagement or worse by our public officials, [the enthusiast sites] are doing nothing more than feeding the public's insatiable desire for information.[1]

[...]

Defining what is a 'journalist' has become more complicated as the variety of media has expanded. But even if the movants are journalists, this is not the equivalent of a free pass.

[...]

The journalist's privilege is not absolute. For example, journalists cannot refuse to disclose information when it relates to a crime.

[...]

[The information about Apple's unreleased products] is stolen property, just as any physical item, such as a laptop computer containing the same information on its hard drive [or not] would be. The bottom line is there is no exception or exemption in either the [Uniform Trade Secrets Act] or the Penal Code for journalists--however defined--or anyone else.

[...]

The public has had, and continues to have, a profound interest in gossip about Apple. Therefore, it is not surprising that hundreds of thousands of 'hits' on a Web site about Apple have and will happen. But an interested public is not the same as the public interest."

Note that the judge did not say that Think Secret and other online sites weren't journalists; indeed, he tacitly acknowledged that they, and many others, may in fact be "journalists". But that fact is, correctly, irrelevant. In other words, online sites or bloggers may in fact be journalists; this isn't about "the right to blog". However, being a "journalist" does not automatically mean the mechanisms of obtaining information, the information itself, and the sources of the information are automatically protected by journalist shield laws and exempt from discovery, especially when otherwise applicable laws (such as the UTSA) may have been violated. In other words, when a crime may have been committed (and the burden of whether or not this information constitutes a "trade secret" still rests on Apple, even after this ruling).

Further, the judge makes no distinction between online publications and mainstream newspapers, simply a distinction that any and all information gathering mechanisms are not necessarily protected if other laws are violated. The assertion on the part of some that "these subpoenas wouldn't exist if it was the New York Times or salon.com" is baseless at best.

No doubt someone will find issue with what is or isn't "public interest" and the fact that the courts (i.e. the "government") must make such a determination and is simply shifting the importance of whether someone can be considered a "journalist" to another consideration, essentially allowing the government to decide what is "acceptable" to be leaked and what isn't, and will make arguments that this will make it easier for corporations and/or the government to hide abuses, stop whistleblowers, etc. However, all of these arguments are red herrings. The court clearly acknowledged that sources information in the clear public interest must indeed be protected. Further note that the court DID NOT rule on the merits of Apple's claim itself, i.e., that the information was in fact a trade secret: "The order of this court does not go beyond the questions necessary t

You might be interested in TDK's protective coating that is currently in place for (expensive) DVDs and will be available on BDs as well. It's a coating that's factory applied and has to meet DVD/BD specs, so no worry about it flying apart in your optical drive. From what I understand they're tough enough to withstand a child with a screwdriver, and also have a bit of UV protection.

Autoplay sues Microsoft, regarding a patent on automatically executing installation programs on CD-ROMs and other devices.

Timeline Inc. successfully sues Microsoft over breach of licence for three patents concerning SQL Server. Timeline actually threatened to sue third party developers and customers using Microsoft's product. Fortunately, they never followed through on those threats.

Microsoft settles with Intertrust, after losing a preliminary ruling to Intertrust. The lawsuit was based on Intertrust's DRM patent portfolio.

Um, Apple backed -R
And -R as you saw was half the price, though they were slower

The reason +R survived was because everyone created +/- drives, as you say.

So if BluRay is like -R, it will be cheaper and more widely available and the only reason HD-DVD will survive is because dual format players will exist.

Apple DVD-R variation

Apple finally adds DVD+R support in 2003

If it is civil, there's nothing that says you can't file a countersuit, no? And the whole preponderance of evidence bit does cut both ways doesn't it? To date, they have sued a dead woman, a Mac using grandmother for downloading hardcore rap on Kazaa, and a college professor for uploading his work on radio-selected quasars to his ftp host. That seems like a pretty good preponderance of evidence that their tracking and logging is sloppy and error prone.

"One of the basic premises of the Xbox is to put the power in the hands of the artist," Blackley said, which is why Xbox developers "are achieving a level of visual detail you really get in 'Toy Story.'

"Gates said the 3-D chips in the Xbox would be three times faster than anything on the market and offer nearly unlimited graphical visuals. "We're approaching the level of detail seen in Toy Story 2," he said, referring to the computer-generated kids film from Disney/Pixar. "Game developers will finally be able to develop games as they can visualize it in their minds, without having restrictions placed on them due to performance."

You're right. Microsoft has never been named in a lawsuit and is clearly the safer choice in that respect.

or: "Since we can no longer copy new builds of Tiger, work on new features has ground to a halt."

If American cable companies have their way, you'll be right. Just because Americans are stuck buying little plastic disks doesn't mean Japan or Korea will though. How long has 1-3 Mb/s been considered "high speed" in America now? How many YEARS? What happened to progress? By the time average Americans get to 10 Mb/s, the rest of the civilized world will be getting gigabit connections.

and would cost over $1000 if they did sell it in America. Proven wrong. Not sold in America because Americans are too poor to afford something so nice. Don't worry though! By the time this phone is a year old, Motorola will have a pitiful 1.3 megapixel iTunes phone for Americans to buy and enjoy, along with America's pitiful excuse for broadband.

use this new network for *GASP* playing VIOLENT GAMES! http://news.com.com/Illinois+seeks+to+restrict+vio lent+games/2100-1043_3-5593248.html

You guys don't understand how the sales tax would work. CNet describes how it works in Canada:

"The regulators cited a long-standing rule in Canada, in which most copying for personal use was allowed. To repay artists and record labels for revenue lost by this activity, the government imposes a fee on blank tapes, CDs and even hard disk-based MP3 players such as Apple Computer's iPod, and distributes that revenue to copyright holders."

Far from forcing DRM on unsuspecting PC-buyers, this policy means that in Canada, unrestricted p2p file sharing is 100% legal.

Personally, I see the music industry as very similar to that other enterprise of freely-sharable information, academia. Federal and state governments pay scientists and other academics to publish information that then becomes freely available to anyone with access to a library. (Undergraduate students pay too, but the point is still the same: no individuals would ever pay directly for that information.)

So what's wrong with the federal government also funding musicians? Certainly, far more people listen to even obscure artists than read most academic journals. And there's nothing stopping bands from continuing to release CDs, or from touring. It's just stupid that something as obviously unstoppable as p2p music downloading should be illegal or even immoral, when there's a better solution, that has already been implemented, and works great.

There's a really obvious possibility that you folks are missing. What if the DOJ had instead used that $13.2mil over 5 years to contract with Sun/OpenOffice.org to hire a bunch of top programmers and perfect OpenOffice. Same budget, but much better outcome for themselves and for society.

Precisely! Instead of spending gobs of money to basically tread water (by buying one static software package), a government could spend the same amount of money to contract for improvements to existing, functional, useful FOSS software (ongoing improvements), thus benefiting both themselves (better software, same budgets) and their citizenry at large (better software). Any silliness about "but that would be using MY tax dollars to support something that's free, that's communist!" etc. is simply that -- silliness -- for how is spending public funds on FOSS any worse than spending those same funds on (potentially) overpriced proprietary software? At least with FOSS, you know the code inside and out, and short of a compromised compiler, you know you've got no back doors. If I remember rightly, that's part of the Chinese government's argument against using proprietary software; this prompted MS to let them see (some of) its code.

Do you realize how tragic it is every time a deal like this goes down? Going with WP instead of MS is better than nothing, but it's a major lost opportunity to move the entire Open Source movement forward.

Thank goodness Munich has some balls. It seems some other governments are also wising up to FOSS benefits. Here's to more public initiatives to use FOSS!

Bloggers at the White House--and in court

FAQ: Blogging on the job

Bloggers at the White House--and in court

FAQ: Blogging on the job

No, Yahoo dumped Google last year.

It seems that the hackers never managed to gain control of the W2K machines, but were able to launch a DOS on it.

If VOIP is really that much of a threat, they should just start offering it themselves, for example as a long-distance option while still using your regular landline.

Eventually I'm sure that is part of the plan. But for now I think they're also trying to protect their existing customer base by not letting people goto third party vendors.

You only think it's legal. That's beside the point though. They aren't being sued for protecting their sources. They are being sued for publishing trade secrets. If you are going to vilify Apple, get the story right.

Trade secrets are protected by the law.

Publishing information you have reason to believe is a trade secret (protected under NDA in this case) is therefore reasonably illegal.

This patent was filed in 2000. Here's prior art from 1998.

I already had my rio. which still works,btw.. (does the patent say something about hd then or something? seems like you can patent just about anything)

The patent for the Music Jukebox's primary claim is as follows:

1. A music jukebox configured for storing a music library therein, said music jukebox comprising: a housing; an audio data receiver arranged to receive audio data from outside the housing; audio output structure located at least partially within the housing for outputting audio signals; data storage memory in the housing for storing audio data received from outside the housing through the audio data receiver, said music jukebox including a user interface comprising a display device located at least partially within the housing, said display device providing a display which is viewable from outside the housing, and a plurality of manually operable function controllers on the housing, said music jukebox configured such that a music library of sound tracks is storable in digital form in the data storage memory as a result of audio data being received from outside the housing through the audio data receiver, said music jukebox configured such that said music library is organizable into a master song list and at least one group of sound tracks wherein each group comprises at least one sound track selected from the master song list, wherein said music jukebox is configured such that indicia of said master song list and indicia of at least one group of sound tracks are displayable on said display, wherein said music jukebox is configured such that said plurality of manually operable function controllers is useable to select a group of sound tracks stored in the data storage memory and operate the music jukebox such that said music jukebox outputs audio signals through said audio output structure.

I think that it's pretty obvious the patent doesn't hold water - the first MP3 player sold in the US was the Eiger Labs MPMan, released in the summer of 1998. It was followed by the Rio, released in late 1998. Both players follow the same general form as the device described in the patent - they receive audio data, store it, and play it back out the headphone jack; they both have a screen where you can select a specific track from your library, and both have controls that allow you to do the selecting.

CNET described these early MP3 players, even tracking down a 6 gig USB based MP3 player with a large screen that was released in 1999.

The IL company doesn't have a hope in the world of defending their patent.

Corel was taken over by Vector Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, in 2003. So the profits from that deal will be coming right back across the border (and I don't mean Taco Bell).

http://pcweb.mycom.co.jp/special/2000/WinMe/images /M-08.jpg
WMP7 Example

http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/int/aol8/scrn.gif
AOL Ugliness.

They're saying, we need you to make a huge investment up front in acquiring skills which we may or may not need later on. People stupid enough to fall for this may believe they're owned something. Most people aren't falling for it anymore. This allows the so called employers to come up with a new argument, Americans are losing (loosing to you spelling challenged) their technological edge. EMC does this a lot. That does smell a little fishy considering the numbers of programmers out of work.

Exactly. There is a real threat to people's rights with respect to blogging, but it's not from companies; it's from the government -- in particular, from Campaign Finance Reform. According to an article at news.com (The coming crackdown on blogging), the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (aka McCain-Feingold) could, for example, make a link from a blog to a candidate's site count as a contribution to that candidate's campaign, and therefore subject to regulation.

Last year the Linux server business did $5 billion dollars revenue for tier one vendors (IBM, HP, Dell, etc.). Free versions of BSD generated no significant tier one revenue -- zilch.

Linux is rapidly taking over that spot, according to IDC it already has in fact

"Rapidly taking over that spot?" Keep on dreaming.

I searched all over IDC's site for this statistic of yours and couldn't find it. Care to cite your link? There are certainly links that show increase in market share usage of Linux (mostly in financial institutions and server markets), but we've also been hearing increases in Apple market share usage since MacWorld 2005.

When searching, I did find out that 6% of iPod users switched to Mac over PC. With iPods accounting for over 60% of the market and growing each year, Apple has all their cards played just how they want to.

c|net: Silicon Valley votes with its wallet (search for "apple" and "microsoft")

Flamebait, here I come!

The reality is that Apple is one of the most closed proprietary companies around.

No, that would actually be Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft -- all of whom attempt to control what programs you run on your machine.

Apple, while maintaining control over the basic platform*, actually publishes 3rd party software (Click the apple on the menu bar, then "Get OSX software") and provides free kernel-level tools to write drivers for add-on hardware. Microsoft uses signed drivers and is considering (through Palladium) to lock out all others.

(*Apple is in a different business than Microsoft - it's also a hardware company. If you saw a game station clone, you'd better believe there will be a lawsuit. If the game-machine analogy seems too thin, then remember that Intel has fought clone makers, too.)

Don't blame the tools, blame the people who misuse them, right?

EFF used to suggest that downloaders get sued -- but as soon as those people get in trouble, it's all about "how dare these big mean companies sue music lovers".

Slippery, sloppy logic.

AMD pioneered the addition of 64-bit extensions to x86 in 2003 with its Opteron. Intel followed suit halfway through 2004. Despite AMD's earlier arrival, more revenue came from servers using Intel's 64-bit Xeon chips, McLaughlin said: $1.3 billion for Xeon servers, compared with $838 million for Opteron servers.

The US and other countries could put pressure on China to get them to clean up their ISPs.

You mean something like this? Remember that politics is a slow process.

WRONG.

http://news.com.com/Telco+agrees+to+stop+blocking+ VoIP+calls/2100-7352_3-5598633.html

This *IS* about port blocking. Telcos can just as easily be ISPs. Most of them are. RTFA.

and you dare give.. _public education_ as your one example? Read this article. Out of "29 industrialized nations" 15 year olds in the US ranked 24th place in math.
No, they don't make 24th place ribbons.