Slashback: Membership, Quarkiness, Audioggogy

Slashback this fine tax-day evening (you did remember, right?) brings you updates on Gentoo Linux, Mike Myer's brush with the Humor Police, Microsoft's spin on the waning Hailstorm, and more. Read on for the details.

A tornado's worth of spin control. telstar writes "The Code Report is reporting that last week's story from the New York Times concerning the death of Hailstorm was not entirely accurate. A Microsoft spokesperson has stated that Microsoft is shifting from a model in which MSN was the sole operator to a model where the operation of these services is available to multiple operators."

Onan Meets Midas. daoine writes: "Reversing the outcome of an earlier argument, boston.com is reporting that MGM and New Line Cinema have reached an agreement that permits New Line to continue with the Goldmember name. It also stipulates that further satirical names must be approved by MGM."

Does dishes, saves gas, freshens your breath, cleans your pets ... Apparently, Gentoo Linux is contagious. JigSaw writes: "OSNews features an interesting review of Gentoo Linux 1.0 and they call it 'the fastest loading, fastest-operating Linux distribution to date.' Gentoo may be the fastest Linux for a workstation today, but according to the review, it still has some problems, most notably, annoying bugs. However, it still manages to score a glowing 8.2 out of 10 overall."

Reader sckevyn also points to the Gentoo PowerPC page for those equipped different.

First steps always seem small. camusflage writes "Yahoo has a story from ZDNet about TheKompany's recent release of tkcPlayer for the Zaurus, which is being billed as the first portable Ogg Vorbis player. A player for a format not many people are using on a platform even fewer people are using. Admirable, but not likely to be a commercial success."

Honey, your quark is showing. ngrier writes "As a quick follow-up to the story posted here a few days ago regarding the potential quark star, the NASA APOD today is a picture of the aforementioned star."

Comments

Errr, what happened to the law?

[NanoGator]

"It also stipulates that further satirical names must be approved by MGM."

Since when do they need permission to use a parodized name? I thought that parody law not only allowed one to use a similar name ('Goldmember' is not THAT similar...), but also their original artwork could be closely mimicked.

Anybody remember reading about that guy who put up an 'aolsucks.com' site? AOL attempted to sue him because he used their artwork to parodize him. His lawyer said he was well within his rights because it was a pardoy/criticism of the company.

Question: Wouldn't the same logic be applied as it was for this guy, or is there a variable I'm not considering?

Re:Errr, what happened to the law?

[outlier]

Sort of... MGM and New Line joined a club (MPAA). One of the rules of the club is that you can sort out disagreements within the club.

MGM convinced the club to rule against New Line. However, MGM also said that wouldn't have a problem with New Line if New Line would do MGM some favors.

At any point, New Line could've said "Screw you, these are our rights. You're not the boss of me." and refused to abide by the MPAAs initial ruling. At that point, MGM could have sued New Line (And probably lost), wasting valuable $$, raising anamosity within the industry, and possibly establishing a(nother) precedent that could come back and bite New Line on the ass when someone else tried to use a New Line-like title for their film. Instead, New Line (probably) agreed to show some MGM trailers before the film, and MGM agreed to let them use the title.

On one hand we have an industry group making the Wrong Decision (TM) initially in supporting MGM's petition against New Line. That's bad.

But on the other hand, we have an industry group policing itself -- not relying on the legal system to resolve disputes. That's not that bad.

NY Times was wrong on hailstorm, move on

[Ars-Fartsica]

People I know who are close to this product were puzzled the day these reports came out.

They're moving to a federated model, meaning MS will not be the only one providing the services.

Nothing to add - the original article was just wrong.

Re:NY Times was wrong on hailstorm, move on

[_Sprocket_]

They're moving to a federated model, meaning MS will not be the only one providing the services.

...which means the same stellar history of secure code, but with more people to blame for individual incidents!

More or less the same business model present in the current IT Industry.

Re:It's only tax day..

[robkore]

in the U.S. - ah no it isn't! *cue wailing and gnashing of teeth*

Wow, two of my biggest pet peeves in one post. First of all, Slashdot is an American site. Deal with it, or start a slashdot.(your country code here). And damn, can't you people use the subject line for a subject and not for the first half of your first sentence? At the very least, repeat your pseudo subject in the message body. Moderate me down for being off topic or flamebait or whatever, I don't care.

Re:Oops...

[emag]

Why not give me the check instead? Since you seem to be willing to give someone an interest-free loan, make it someone who can use it and benefit from it. :-)

Re:.NET

[BurritoWarrior]

From the article:
"Don't confuse an expansion of the operator strategy with any kind of de-commitment from the idea of user-centric web services that help create a more personalized, more consistent experience across the different technologies in an individual's life."

Let me paraphrase the MicroSpeak:
"We are still committed to the idea of controlling all aspects of people's lives beyond the PC. Once we get widespread adoption of .net technologies with the many varied devices out there, we will introduce subtle incompatibilities into the .net product line so that competing companies' products will break or function less efficiently.

Since users have already committed too much time and effort (much like word .doc's), they will then be forced to dump their for the competing MS one. This is how we will leverage our way out from just making the servers to trying to make every single device you use a Microsoft one."

If I am wrong, I will eat my shoes.

Sharp Zaurus

[jred]

A player for a format not many people are using on a platform even fewer people are using. Admirable, but not likely to be a commercial success.

Ok, everyone who keeps saying that they refuse to buy a player that doesn't support Ogg Vorbis needs to step up to the plate. Heck, you get the added bonus of it running on Linux. If *you* don't, who will? Then when it fails, everyone will say it's because the people *want* closed source, proprietary products...

Re: globalization and websites

[(outer-limits)]

You appear to be ignorant of the fact that half the articles on /. refer to non US sites, eg, the register, Toms, Linux Distros, etc.