Slashdot Mirror

Oh, Yeah. Ray Ozzie.

But really. Windows 7 will be what? Does anybody really want something the don't have in XP?

6-bit dithering displays are inferior in every respect

I fully agree. But the lawsuit at hand claims that Apple is completely lying when it says that 6-bit monitors are capable of "millions" of colors. In terms of perceived colors, 6-bit monitors are capable of it, when you add temporal dithering (which they undoubtably have). Maybe it looks worse than an 8-bit monitor, but that's not the issue: they are suing over a specific marketing claim that frankly they don't understand.

I'm reminded (slightly) of the lawsuits about hard drive capacity: drive manufacturers calculated space based on a pure metric basis (1kb = 1000 bytes) while computers used a binary byte calculation (1kb = 1024 bytes). This could result in a 30gb drive only having 28gb of usable space. Companies settled, and now the measurement methods are printed clearly in the drive specs. Or the lawsuits about viewable area on CRTs -- maybe the glass is physically 14", but you can only actually use 13" -- which changed how manufacturers could describe the size of their monitors. Even if Apple does not lose, I hope this new lawsuit (an iSuit?) somehow forces them and other manufacturers to clearly state the color technology used in a screen.

TrustE is more of an apologist than a regulator. TrustE stopped being serious about privacy in 1997, when they "simplified" their seal program. A TrustE seal doesn't mean that any standard has been met. All it means now is that the company claims to comply with their own privacy statement, whatever it says. That's it.

Even worse, a site with a TrustE seal is more likely to have badware than one without a seal.

TrustE has revoked only two certificates in its ten year history.

There is a difference between public knowledge of an instruction set and Intel actually granting a license to use their design.
It is known that even if nvidia purchased AMD then the x86 chip cross license agreement that AMD carries is none transferable and could not be used in GPU devices.
This leaves only Via with a 10 year license to Intel designs. The terms of that are a little more clouded, but I would hazard it would also be none transferable.

nvidia have their own license to Intel products at the moment, however this does not include the x86 itself.

Intel and Microsoft are still in bed with each other.
the more things change, the more they stay the same.

intel/amd license terms:
http://contracts.corporate.findlaw.com/agreements/amd/intel.license.2001.01.01.html

intel/via news article:
http://www.news.com/Intel,-Via-bury-the-hatchet/2100-1006_3-995845.html

intel/nvidia news:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1729927,00.asp

Regular publishing might have worked well for you but it won't for everyone. Sometimes a book's contents are more important than the presentation and that's where POD is good. The inconvenience of it all is why print is dying.

This ruthless genius of yours is making Amazon suck. I could almost forgive them for the one-click-patent fiasco because they had a real range of goods to chose from. Yes, I'm still angry at them for making shopping everywhere else suck. Then they opted for that second rate search service two years ago. The one that immediately locked out smaller vendors in favor of bigger ones. Not being able to find specialty items drove me right back to ebay and Google itself. The trend continues and Amazon continues down the tube.

If I want a limited choice of goods I'll go to the local brick and mortar store. Amazon used to offer better than that.

By your more recent source MSXML still fails:

If the British Standards Institution (BSI) registers a vote in favor, Office Open XML would pass one of two criteria to becoming a standard, but fail the other.

Worse for them, it's not a given the Policy Panel will switch the vote. The Register did not distinguish between the Technical Committee and the Policy Panel. The policy people don't have to do what the obviously undermined TC says and might not go through the tedious process of changing their previous recommendation.

Further, the lobbying of the TC by Microsoft may be yet another improper move. The members are not supposed to be known much less harassed, bribed and otherwise courted. That they were and came out with such a contradictory statement stinks.

Your other article, by the way, links to same text as the first. Thanks for looking it up.

Ok, so it's the Register. They broke the story, so I linked them. Try

• news.com.com.com
• zdnet.co.uk

If you prefer other sources.

Scientologists always tell you, if you want to know anything go straight to the source, so wikileaks has a copy of theirs that the freezoners pulled together from their collections of OT documents when they left the 'Church'.

Firehose story with more details : http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=591182

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Church_of_Scientology_collected_Operating_Thetan_documents

And just for fun, here's a story on the Church of Scientology trying to make hyperlinks to copyright documents illegal, they lost the court battle : http://www.news.com/Scientology-loss-keeps-hyperlinks-legal/2100-1028_3-5072581.html?tag=txt.1

(Funny they never go to the real source of information when it comes to Psychiatry, they only go to the 'Church' when it comes to that)

"I doubt silicon will be going anywhere anytime soon - its simply too affordable."

Agreed. Besides, they've been saying this since the 90s, that silicon can't possibly get any faster and it'll be replaced very soon.

I call BS. They had 350 gigahertz silicon chips 2 years ago:
"At room temperature, the IBM-Georgia Tech chip operates at 350GHz, or 350 billion cycles per second. That's far faster than standard PC processors today, which range from 3.8GHz to 1.8GHz. But SiGe chips can gain additional performance in colder temperatures....SiGe chips, the scientists theorized, could eventually hit 1 terahertz, or 1 trillion cycles a second."

I think silicon is safe for awhile longer.

Cnet: March 2004
"Apple, Adobe drifting apart"
http://www.news.com/2100-1012-5181434.html

"Adobe's Mac products lately have waned in performance compared to their Windows counterparts. He believes Adobe is gradually withdrawing resources from OS X development in hopes of moving customers to Windows, because it's cheaper to support one platform."

Apple.com: WWDC 2005 -
"Apple to use intel microprocessors by 2007"
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.html

Macworld: Jan 4 2007
"Adobe products return to Mac"
http://www.macworld.com/article/54661/2007/01/premiere.html/

"Specifically, Apple's decision to use Intel-built chips in its hardware gave Adobe the opportunity to start from scratch, Hayhurst said. The company was able to build the type of application it wanted to, instead of porting old code over to the Mac platform. The end result, Hayhurst added, is a fast performer."

Aka, we're using the code from our current PC product (since they're identical), but we want to make our Mac customers feel special.

Seems pretty straight forward. Adobe dumped support for Apple because their PPC chips were underpowered and their market was being cut into too much to be profitable, and once Apple went intel, support came back within a single product cycle.

Windows 95 did. 49.7 days of life.

Oh no, don't lend credence to pay per click ads in PDFs.

If Safari was forced, you might be able to compare Apple and Microsoft. It's not, unless you fail to read the dialog, so charges of leveraging a monopoly position are bullshit. I'm also not aware of any kind of music player contract that forbids makers from supporting other file formats, except from Microsoft.

The law does not forbid monopolies for monopolies sake, it forbids harmful anti-competitive behavior. There's nothing wrong with designing a good OS or even dominating a particular market, so long as you don't get up to dirty tricks. Microsoft got busted when they punished vendors for including the then superior Netscape browser with new computers. By doing this, Microsoft reduced Netscape from 90% market share and prosperity to broke dick in a very short time. Apple including Safari as an option the user can decline is no more a monopolistic practice than Red Hat's including Firefox in it's distribution.

The only thing that raised any eyebrows was that the dialog was a little confusing. Anyone with an IQ better than that of a sponge would understand they were gettin a new browser when they click "OK". As CNet noticed the problem is that,

at some point people became conditioned to downloading anything that shows up from an official source, like Microsoft, Apple, AOL, Yahoo, or whoever.

It's my opinion that people are reduced to this stage by Window's poor package management. There is no central repository in the non free software world, so every vendor is forced to roll their own package manager if they want to keep their customers up to date. So really, this is all about how Microsoft sucks.

Shame on Slashdot for not seeing through this. What better thing could there be for Microsoft than a flame war between Mozilla and Apple?

Even Cnet noted that this is not a mandatory install and that the brew ha ha is because:

... some point people became conditioned to downloading anything that shows up from an official source, like Microsoft, Apple, AOL, Yahoo, or whoever.

That and Microsoft can't stand competition from Apple any more than it will release new versions of IE and Office on OSX. Yes, we can expect Mozilla to not like this, but we can be sure they also hate the way IE is forced on Windows users too. It's too bad that perspective is lost in the Wintel press, isn't it?

There's more perspective missing from this story too. If you dig deeper, you find stories about how Jobs announced his intention to make Safari available on Windows though iTunes. This is exactly what has happened and it was done in a much nicer way than IE8 and Windows itself are forced onto users.

I don't like being critical of Slashdot and Slashdot editors because of all the great work done by the site. Most articles are better researched and though out than this one. Someone is asleep at the wheel this time and I hope this clears the issue up.

http://www.news.com/2100-1025_3-5162749.html

It's legal to make copies of movies for use in your home, so long as you own the movies. You can even decrypt the movies if you would like to.

On the DMCA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act

So long as you don't give anyone else a copy of your decryption software, you're fine. If you gave away the decryption (or let someone use it) software you would violate the DMCA. If you gave away or sold your copies you would violate copyright. IANAL etc, etc, but unless I've forgotten how to read English I think you've made a pretty big ass of yourself today.

Everyone should do the same. Slashdot represents a huge concentration of technical knowledge. We have a responsibility to explain these things to our elected representatives when they display a lack of comprehension:

Senator Kyl, I'm writing to you regarding a recent article I read on tactics the FBI is using in their pursuit of child pornography violators. Please see this link:

http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9899151-38.html?tag=nefd.pop

While I agree that child pornography is a serious problem that requires strong action. The actions of the FBI in this case cannot be condoned. Issues of particularity and the fact that individuals going to the above "honeypot" website aren't actually obtaining illegal material aside. There are several technical reasons why this approach is dangerous for innocent persons.

First and foremost, granting warrants based on an IP address that visits a website borders on criminally negligent. Most ISPs don't assign static IP addresses to users, rather, the IP changes everytime they log on, meaning that a simple slip up in the logs can show a person had that IP address at a time when they really didn't. Result: an innocent person's house gets raided.

Additionally, many people have open wireless access points on their network, where they have little or no control over whom accesses their network. Is this poor security? Yes. Is it illegal or immoral? No. However, if someone uses their network to access one of these sites, the result: an innocent person's house gets raided.

Then there are the issues of the way the web and web browsers are architected. Many web browsers emply a technique called "pre-fetching" where the browser automatically begins retrieving text, images, etc from pages that are LINKED from the current one. What this means is, a person doesn't even necessarily have to go to the FBIs entrapment page for their IP to show up as having accessed it, simply going to a page that has a link to it would be enough. This includes search engines such as Google. Result: an innocent person's house gets raided.

Beyond these simple technical problems (there are others). There can be issues with malevolent usage such as websites redirecting to the honeypot website, website operators embedding links to images from the website, etc. All good ways to get your enemies in trouble with the law.

In short, I believe the FBIs actions in this matter are reckless and demonstrate both a lack of technical understanding of the web in general and a lack of respect for the rights of American citizens. I think that you should immediately take action to obtain information about the FBIs actions and whether or not they constitute a threat to innocent Americans.

What's really exciting to me is OLED lighting. Imagine entire walls, floors, and/or ceilings of light.

I like to have really bright lighting, but I hate that it comes from a few small points. Looking at a "bulb" (whether incandescent, CFL, or LED) is unpleasant and painful to my eyes. With OLED lighting, I can have much more light without any single point being too bright.

Mass availability of OLED lighting is still a way off, but it sure looks promising:
Start-up creates flexible sheets of light

Nintendo doesn't yet have a monopoly with the Wii, so bundling Wii Sports is not a problem.

Yup, but more than that we don't know that they ever will have a monopoly in the future.

When Apple introduced the iPod, they obviously didn't have a monopoly, so bundling iTunes was not a problem.

Correct; so long as you pay attention to the tense.

Are you saying, now, seven years later, that bundling iTunes is a problem?

Yes, because while it is fine that Apple shipped them bundled, if Apple is declared to have a monopoly, then Apple should (theoretically) be ordered to stop bundling them for future sales.

I'm not 100% sure if a monopoly is in of itself illegal in Europe, but again the point is that when iTunes was first bundled, neither iPod nor iTunes store was even close to a monopoly.

Having a monopoly is not illegal in Europe. You're missing the point that bundling isn't illegal, bundling when you know or should be reasonably expected to know you have a monopoly is. Think of it like this. Shooting a firearm is not illegal. Shooting a person with a firearm is illegal. If John went to the range an legally fired a gun at a target, does that make him immune to prosecution if he goes outside and fires a lot of rounds in the air. Does it make him immune to prosecution if he shoots the gun while he knows it is likely to hit another person?

Just because Apple's bundling in the past was legal, does not mean continuing to bundle in the future is legal, or even bundling while they have a reasonable suspicion that they have a monopoly is legal.

Also, I thought the EU investigation regarding Apple was due to non-uniform prices across each store, and had nothing to do with bundling, monopoly, or anti-trust.

That was a different investigation entirely one in which Apple was mentioned, but the courts were considering fining only the music industry companies. Apple was investigated in the US in 2006, which went nowhere. Then they were investigated by the EU beginning in October of 2007, and just recently they are being investigated again in the US (as of Jan 2008)

Also, I thought the EU investigation regarding Apple was due to non-uniform prices across each store, and had nothing to do with bundling, monopoly, or anti-trust. As best I can tell, the case was brought up by Novell in 1993 (more here) because Microsoft extracted a license fee for every PC shipped even if Windows was not installed on the system.

The original complaint was from Novell and they were paid compensation. Additional complaints from Apple and RealNetworks addressed bundling the media player, and statements from Sun with regard to tying of their server OS also were included in the remedy. Here's a link about the media player ruling. The releveant excerpt is:

The decision, handed down by European Competition Commissioner Mario Monti on Wednesday, requires Microsoft to offer two versions of its Windows operating system: one with the Media Player audio/video software and one without it. The ruling is intended to prevent Microsoft from shutting out rivals in the media software market, including RealNetworks and Apple Computer, by bundling its Media Player software with an operating system that is used on more than 90 percent of the world's PCs.

You'll note it specifically mentions the bundling of media player and Windows.

Later a ruling was made that said Microsoft had to offer an unbundled version of XP so competitors (like Apple!) could create their own products that OEMs could bundle, instead.

That was part of the same case, as noted above. It has also been widely viewed as a useless measure that has not addressed the problem. RealNetworks is expected to soon file suit in the

The MS Office system includes components not to be found in OpenOffice.org. Outlook is simply the most visible example.

I know. Yet still some organisations seem to think they can get on quite allright without those components. cf. Ernie Ball, Bristol City Council and Munich Council.

I accept that these cases are the exception, not the rule. But the OP's question was "what's in it for me?". My answer is "One or two things, but probably not if you've already gone out and bought Office" and that is what it remains.

At this stage in the game, the music industry feels it is entitled to something.

Razor1911 has also released a re-pack pirated version of Halo 2 that should run better than the original Vista DVD, which included the patch with it.

Oh yah, it also seems like you were wrong about Halo II being Vista only....

Explain this then, liar: http://www.news.com/Microsoft-pulls-Vista-SP1-update/2100-1016_3-6231299.html?tag=ne.fd.mnbc [news.com]

Microsoft has stopped automatically distributing a prerequisite piece of software for Vista Service Pack 1, following some customer complaints that it had caused system problems

Then how do you explain this? http://www.news.com/Microsoft-pulls-Vista-SP1-update/2100-1016_3-6231299.html?tag=ne.fd.mnbc

Explain this then, liar: http://www.news.com/Microsoft-pulls-Vista-SP1-update/2100-1016_3-6231299.html?tag=ne.fd.mnbc

One of the biggie things to tell your boss that seems to be missed.

It's much less a legal risk.

http://www.news.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html

Having nothing to do with the BSA, WGA, DRM, and a whole alphabet soup of legal problems is a good reason to tell your boss.

I don't disagree with most of your points, and my few disagreements have been addressed by others. What I have is a link to a CNET article about cellulosic ethanol production which is much more efficient than most others. "Is vinegar the secret ingredient for biofuels?"http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9891603-54.html?%5E$/

A fitting tribute to Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of Eliza, who passed away last week.

No, my logic is perfectly sound. It is you have it backwards. iPhone owners are in possession of a free iPod. And given it is an iPod, it will play all the tunes sold from the second largest US music retailer behind Wal-Mart, and by far, the dominant player in online music sales. Yet that offers iPhone no advantage over other phone manufacturers to whom Apple steadfastly refuses to license Fairplay? I'm surprised we haven't seen an antitrust suit already.

This guy is going to kick ass in the experimental class.

The rules are here, if you don't mind pdfs.

Weapon types that aren't allowed in the normal class include electricity and electromagnetic weapons (no EMP or Tesla coils), weapons that require significant cleanup (sand, oil, liquids, ball bearings), weapons intended to obscure vision (smoke, strobe lights), thermal weapons (no explosives or cutting torches, although you can use explosives to, say, drive a piston), mechanism fouling weapons (nets, tarps, caltrops), and no mutually destructive mechanisms.

There are also restricted weapons. Projectiles are allowed, but must be on a tether of no more than 8' in length. Covering weapons are allowed, but must be rigid and controllable. Airbags are allowed, but must conform to the rules for pneumatics, and can't be used as mechanism fouling weapons when deflated. Flywheels need to be installed properly, so that they don't fly off or apart while spinning. Large springs (20 lbs of force to extend or compress) need to be armed by the bot, not manually, and need to be able to be released manually without causing damage to the person doing the releasing.

The situation in the US is not the way you are portraying it. Foreign workers are well paid (by definition, given the kind of visa they need to enter the country) so they are not driving salaries down

Except that you're wrong.

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9890124-7.html?

Sony/ATV who owns most of the Beatles publishing licenses, says they haven't made any deal.

You mean like what these guys are trying to do??

Survey: Are domain registrars free-speech friendly?

Personally, I prefer Gandi.net; they have an excellent reputation.

In general, it's probably not safe to host a controversial domain or registration within the United States.

It's OK for Scrabulous to essentially copy Scrabble because you can't copyright or patent game rules, but it's not OK to copy this game?

Actually, Scrabulous is likely to be removed soon. You do have some degree of copyright protection over game rules, and people do patent the damned things all the time. See also: KC Munchkin.

If you want to sign up to your own ID card system, fine, I have no problem with that whatsoever.

The problem is, if I don't want to sign up with your system, you get to put me in jail.
This is downright wrong and against the basic right that all human beings have to stay silent about their personal information.

Not to mention, any time in human history where ID schemes and mandatory databases have been misused they used exactly the same "what could go wrong/what have you got to hide" reasoning as they are using now.

Godwin's law be damned, how do you think the Nazi government knew where all the jews lived when they started handing out arm bands and shipping them to concentration camps?

The point isn't what today's government in today's climate will do with it. The point is that no organization should be given that much unchecked power to mandate citizens to give up their private information when it has never been proven that a government is immune to corruption and incompetence.

Governments have proven themselves untrustworthy with this level of information on the general public.

The UK government lost 28 million peoples private information LAST YEAR alone.

But the government has proven itself competent and reliable in every other aspect of its business so I guess we should trust it on this one.....

yeesh

Sources :

http://www.betanews.com/article/UK_government_loses_data_on_as_many_as_25_million_people/1195687877
http://www.news.com/U.K.-government-loses-data-on-driving-test-candidates/2100-1029_3-6223292.html
http://www.news.com/U.K.-government-loses-pensioner-data/2100-1029_3-6223493.html

If you want to sign up to your own ID card system, fine, I have no problem with that whatsoever.

The problem is, if I don't want to sign up with your system, you get to put me in jail.
This is downright wrong and against the basic right that all human beings have to stay silent about their personal information.

Not to mention, any time in human history where ID schemes and mandatory databases have been misused they used exactly the same "what could go wrong/what have you got to hide" reasoning as they are using now.

Godwin's law be damned, how do you think the Nazi government knew where all the jews lived when they started handing out arm bands and shipping them to concentration camps?

The point isn't what today's government in today's climate will do with it. The point is that no organization should be given that much unchecked power to mandate citizens to give up their private information when it has never been proven that a government is immune to corruption and incompetence.

Governments have proven themselves untrustworthy with this level of information on the general public.

The UK government lost 28 million peoples private information LAST YEAR alone.

But the government has proven itself competent and reliable in every other aspect of its business so I guess we should trust it on this one.....

yeesh

Sources :

http://www.betanews.com/article/UK_government_loses_data_on_as_many_as_25_million_people/1195687877
http://www.news.com/U.K.-government-loses-data-on-driving-test-candidates/2100-1029_3-6223292.html
http://www.news.com/U.K.-government-loses-pensioner-data/2100-1029_3-6223493.html

Get rid of cd keys, license terms, eulas, and stop suing your customers!!!

http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9834495-38.html

So yes, case law does back it up.

Actually, I'm surprised someone hasn't introduced force feedback into mice yet. It would be interesting to get some sort of feedback when the cursor hits the edge of the screen, and even more interesting to implement it in games. Perhaps nobody has done it because the mouse would just start vibrating all over the desk.

What about the recent case where the driver got to investigate all source code for the breathalyzer? I had heard (perhaps wrongly) that several such cases are dropped because the breathalyzer companies don't want to present the evidence. http://www.news.com/Police-Blotter-Breathalyzer-code-must-be-disclosed/2100-1030_3-6227951.html Dunno what weight this has between jurisdictions but it may be useful.

How can evidence be considered valid if the source of how it is obtained is not disclosed?
If this was anything except technology, the judge would laugh them out of the court.

Policeman: "He was going 11MPH above the speed limit."
Judge: "How were you able to do that?"
Policeman: "Sorry, but that's proprietary information. If leaked, it would damage our ability to catch speeders.

This has been tested on a slightly different case. Florida police can't use breathalyzers without providing the source. Unless you can show that there is no trickery in your technology, it shouldn't be held admissible in a court of law.

cellphone cameras w/ instant uploading are far more intrusive than streetview.
i mean, the fbi can turn on your cellphone microphone for a listen. that's a bit more 1984.
i wonder if they can take photos discreetly from a cellphone too?
http://www.news.com/2100-1029_3-6140191.html