You can even burn it onto a dedicated chip and patent the device (although still not the software I should hope).
Bingo, you've hit the magic point! Someone, lets say NickFortune, comes up with a genuinely new method of encrypting data. Suppose it's totally unpatentable as a piece of software or any form of set of instructions for coverting the data stream. Now NickFortune goes and takes a load of common basic unpatentable hardware and adds a burnt chip which does the actually en/decryption. What do you have a patent on? What can be done without licensing? If someone can create an independent software method of doing the encryption is that covered? Can they then burn their own chip of their method?
If I write the laws then NickFortune's patent is little more then a copyright on the design of the burnt chip but it sounds like you believe in a system where embodying anything which can be reduced to software in hardware prevents others from doing the same thing a different way. I can never see an encryption algorithym as protectable unless there is absolutely only one way to do it, in which case copyright alone provides the protction required. As long as someone can come up with a different set of instructions on how to convert the datastream (not simply using hex instead of binary or decimal to write it down or anything similarly non-significant) then a patent is worthless as it provides no protection beyond copyright.
If you come up with just a new method of manipulating data, no choice of setting or field of use should allow this to become patentable and hence protected from competition. This is analogeous to regular patents, where you can protect a specific implementation of how to make a coin holder, but you cannot prevent others from making coin holders a different way, just like you could protect a triggering method for releasing coins from the device, but could not prevent others from designing alternative coin triggering devices.
I can just use whatever crap my mobo manufacturer put on it in OSX
If that's what you want from Linux, buy your computers (and hence motherboards) from a company bundling them together. It's not a fair comparison as Apple only have to support the few motherboards they've chosen in the first place. Linux will try and support anything!
I appreciate that everyone (afaik) drafting patent laws initially had clear exeptions for things like mathematics and mind games. I don't appreciate that these limits have been circumvented imho clearly against the spirit of the law. I for one think the idea of protecting the processing of data is abhorent and against the basic fundamentals of freedom of expression. I ask you if you believe light processing (film patents) and audio processing (music patents) should also be treated the same way? Should I have been allowed to patent the process of displaying an image on a screen in monochrome except for allowing certain areas (perhaps chosen by original colour) to feature one or more other chromatic values? Should I be allowed to patent a chess manouever and refuse to license my opponents if they try and use it against me? Do you draw a line anywhere?
I'm surprised nobody has mention Software in the Public Interest as a possible distributor. They have everything in place and while the association with Debian is strong, I would be very surprised if they would not be able to allocate these funds to important projects without being accussed of simply funneling it into Debian.
Twain meet Kanotix. Why would you want to do it? Well how about if you actually want to know if your hardware will work with a distro without having to install it!
Well captive-ntfs is a dead project and is hard to use on a Windows XP SP2 ntfs drive (I think you can download about 100M from Microsoft to get the files you need, otherwise you need access to a pre SP2 XP to get the files). The end result is that yes captive-ntfs has been removed from Knoppix.
I think the fact is that Open Source developers are more likely to work on flash blocking then a re-implementation of flash, not because of some piece of non-cost software but because flash is rarely used in any way productively.
apt-get dist-upgrade MEPIS is NOT recommended. Also as it is based on testing it generally will not have security support (unless Mepis does their own which I have never heard of). If you really want a quick desktop/laptop Debian based distro without compatibility problems and with security support use Kanotix which is based on Debian sid/unstable. Some people dist-upgrade it daily.
I have done updates from woody to sarge (and older updates in the past). Yes, things change, usually you will find only a very small handful of things you have to fix (these will be related to things you already setup/changed on your system) and you will be warned about most/all of these changes during the update. If you have a large debian install, then you most likely have a clue what you are doing and hence 12 months should be an over an order of magnitude more then the amount of time you will actually need to do the update leaving you plenty of time to mull over any decisions and put have some test systems running for a while. In fact, thanks to debian's development model, anyone who has a large debian installation should already have those machines running and know all the problems they will face (bar changes made from now to release which should be very minimal), any issues they will have they should have reported as bugs and they will probably have the answer by now (either a fix or a good work-around).
I've a friend who's English and has lived in Ireland for a long time and he's now an Irish Civil Servant. I keep trying to get him to refuse to work until he can have his work software in Irish. If you know any Irish Civil servants who need some time off please pass on the idea as I think my friends complete lack of any Irish vocabulary whatsoever is discouraging him:-)
But again we arrive at some Linux faults. One is the instseance on source drivers to work properly
There is no insistence on source drivers, it's just that if you do not release Open Source drivers you should not expect the Open Source community to do all the hard work of making your drivers work properly on all the systems they are meant to be designed for. If the barrier to some company is truly dependence on external code, surely that code can usually be put into a seperate more flexible module and if not then it is the problem of the hardware manufacturer (who may not care about the Linux market).
Another Linux problem is that of distros.... However for Linux in addition to different kernel and X version, you also have to worry about different distros
If your a developer then yes these are concerns, if you are not a developer then the question is "does my distro support my hardware, or does my hardware company support my distro", if the answer to both of these is no, then either you should be a developer or be using different hardware/distro! This is my point, Kanotix goes the extra mile to make it so installing ati/nvidia binary drivers is simple and others could also do this! If you choose to tweak you own kernel (something you cannot do in anything like the same way with Windows) then you must accept responsibility for the fact you can't get the drivers to work. If you did some binary hacking on your Windows kernel and broke your Video drivers, who would you blame?
if you have 2000 and XP support, you are covered for all modern systems.
Rubbish! How about 64bit Windows XP? Windows 2003? Let alone different Service Packs for windows (you try getting Bluetooth drivers onto XP SP2, not the crippled new MS ones mind). I'm assuming btw you missed the word Windows again between modern and systems? How's the Media Center edition for driver support, or any of the cut down versions (be they cheap starter versions or derivatives of Windows CE for handhelds or "embedded" machines)?
Shameless plug but one of the many ways Kanotix has gotten things spot on is to have a simple install of these sorts of drivers. With the latest versions you can even install them while running from cd just as easily. No, you don't have to go to ati's site the complete instructions are:
Be online
run "update-scripts-kanotix.sh" to ensure you have the latest kanotix scripts
[Alt] + [Ctrl] + [F1] --> login as root
run "install-radeon-debian.sh" to do everything
So who's fault is your problem? Ati for not supporting your distros choices, your distro for not making it easy for you to use ati's drivers or yours for having an Ati card and wanting to run their binary driver (I assume your card is not based on some kind of r2x0 chip like 8500 - 9200 which has a free accelerated driver as if so fedora has even bigger problems). All my cards are r2x0 based so I use the free driver, but I have on a number of occassions tackled with trying to install ati's drivers. Only Kanotix, of the few I tried, made me think it was something simple and straight forward. I imagine some others must have it easy too though? Can nobody write an equivalent script for Fedora releases or will nobody?
I'm glad I actually took a minute to figure out what the music was meant to be. I guess even on slashdot a parody of Particle Man by They Might Be Giants was a bit optimistic!
Games aren't bootable and therefore some other random use of your general purpose computer may break your games... or vice-versa! Even if they were bootable, you would have to be sure that a game which did work on your hardware continued to after a hardware upgrade or else you might have lost that game. Even if all that was ok, who do you blame if the game isn't running perfectly (at the minute you can rightly scream at the game developer if your console isn't broken)? And if a game developer managed to jump through all those hoops, how well optimised would it be for your hardware? All that said, some games still suit the PC better due to input/output options though I wonder if this will continue for much longer.
If it's legal to share stuff you've legally attained (say you buy a DVD), hasn't someone who you share it with also gotten it legally and hence they can also legally share it to others? If not how do you draw a line? If I record a program from tv have I attained it legally? Does that depend whether the broadcaster produced the content and whether or not I pay them or have any contractual arangements with them or anyone else?
I'll agree Finding Nemo is a mediocre film, but I honestly think Shrek and Toy Story both have a good chance of standing the test of time. We will see...
The Ring trilogy... I just don't know. I still think that LOTR will be made again in my lifetime, but next time they won't cut the beginning and ending to make a film (leaving it with no context) but instead will film the lot, or drop some of the more ditchable sections (do we really need to see every battle being fought, no, just follow the hobbits FROM BEGINNING TO END if you can't find the budget for everything). The only good thing is at least the world won't all know the real story when someone finally makes it:-) Having said all that they could still make it into my top 100 films of all time!
Nagel's response was that they're thinking about porting their Eclipse toolkit to Linux. No one wants or cares about it.
I want their Palm OS Developer Suite (eclipse kitted out as a full Palm OS ide) on Linux. I have the sources and their patches but haven't been able to put aside the time yet to see how far I get and what problems I hit. In fact, their desire to maintain their own Free Software based ide was a significant factor for choosing Palm for our product. I'm not complaining about PalmSource not having done this work already, they have done it a free software way so their work is there to pick up.
they don't do enough to make it easy to develop for Palm OS
It may only be available for Windows (90% of the market?) but how much easier do you want then PODS? A complete, Free software based ide, using standard tools, register as a developer (basically to get access to device roms), download one file and install it, you know have a small cygwin setup with all the command line tools, plus a kitted up eclipse to act as a full ide (including Palm documentation).
You say that you asked why tools for developing Palm OS apps on Linux are neglected, but you mention pilot-link as an example. pilot-link is a hot-sync program, not used at all to develop programs (though perhaps to transfer them to a device for testing, or to test conduits under Linux).
Note that I am not trying to refute any arguments you make about the history or levels of co-operation, I don't know enough to say anything sensible about it.
You forget that it is just as important to ensure that the wages levels (and hence standard of living) is going up in the less wealthy economies to close the gap. Encourage them to insist on equally strong social provisions (from social welfare and healthcare to workers rights), ensure that while they may be cheaper, the companies aren't seeing most of the savings, as the savings are taken in by the local economy. The problem as of now is that the poorest countries are selling each other out and hence gifting the savings to the corporations.
My nephew was over today, he's just turned 8 and saw it yesterday with his little brother of about 5 with their dad. They both loved it, no sob stories today or tails of nightmares. I would have to also mention that I would expect these kids to be amongst the least desensitised kids of their ages around (no games, little tv/video, plenty of supervision) so it's not cause their veterans of lots of horror films. Does this mean you should bring your kids? No! But you know your kids best.
Has anyone discovered if this can be used with wine and IE on Linux? If not, such an extension could actually be useful to provide the catch all support for a browser on Linux. Of course to actually use this legally you have to have a legal copy of IE and a desire to ever let the code onto your machine, but if your online banking (or some other personally _vital_ site) won't work any other way would it not be better to be able to enable the working rendering engine in your normal browser, rather then firing up a seperate browser or changing browser for one site? Of course the best solution is to ensure all sites stop depending on specific browsers and doing something like the above may actually be counter productive to that at this stage.
The _only_ real piece of information in your post was that you did not have a service charge for your MCE box
You say it is free, when in fact it is simply included in your initial purchase price.
Now in your reply you have taken another tangent to astroturf, in fact a continuation of the more subtle attack in the original post ("MCE... it's cool and it works" i.e. MythTV doesn't work), now you are randomly spraying shots about how you don't want to get involved in Open Source development. What does this, have to do with anything? Why do you talk about looking at the code for Amazon and Google?
Bottom line is that I have no problem with Microsoft employees and count a couple amongst my friends, but I do have a problem with campaigns of disinformation. You have basically implied that MCE is somehow cheaper then MythTV as it has a free TV Guide which is rubbish! You also implied MCE works and MythTV doesn't (more rubbish, especially if you purchase both as prebuilt machines). Next up you drag in the implication that Myth faces the same issue of an upfront cost when in fact it bears zero resemblence to RHEL and contains nothing which requires licensing. You say your "not interested in substituting my program guide source" which means you don't mind if your MCE stops working if/when the MS guide service does, nice of you to dismiss my point, remember it when your guide data isn't updated and suddenly your Alias and 24 don't record.
It's your choice of misleading tangents you walk down that just leaves me feeling that all I am doing is countering subversive MS marketing.
So I presume the each military will get some manufacturer to build custom bluetooth chips (operating on military frequencies), then fit everything of note with these. Finally have your flocks of servers moving the data around and creating/maintainging redundant communication links (perhaps ferrying meta-data across the prime network, data on demand and delivering drops of data at other times perhaps literally with cards), providing intelligence on the ground and back to base. I can also forsee these being exteremly useful in crowd control situations, for example you could fly a swarm in a stadium, programmed to keep everyone in sight at all times while being directable to focus on particular areas. Maybe you could even get some truly spectaulr sporting footage if their awareness and collission control systems were good enough (hovering around the net in tennis, eye-level following/looking back at a football/hockey player with the ball or even landing on cars in motorsports races). Whatever sorts of uses they ever get, you can be sure the military is funding plenty of work into this sort of area.
YOU may not pay or have paid directly for your Media Center Program Guide but:
People must pay to buy Windows Media Center
People may be asked to pay any amount, at any time for any future upgrades (which may or may not be required)
People may not be at liberty to substitute alternative guide sources (for redundancy/specialised listings perhaps)
People pay in the long run by continously promoting the idea that providing MS only compatible media is an option (we already have audio discs which cannot be played on a computer without Windows Media Player).
So in summary you have been modded +4 interesting for being an MS employee who told us they find a MS product suits them and that it doesn't have a monthly charge.
One question, have you read all your terms and conditions and licenses? Do you understand them? Is there any minimum life on your Media Center before you (or rather a regular customer) could be forced to pay for updates? Are you guaranteed security support for any length of time?
I'd love you bring you in on a great new servive I'm offering. If you buy a bfreeBox from me, I'll send you $10000/month free for the rest of your life! You can't go wrong with a deal like that! In fact, that offer is open to anyone who reads this, I'm feeling generous today.
The question is can someone make a new style of printer... perhaps one with a page wide head (just to try and flesh out the example) so it actually prints a line at a time (not scanned). Now they need to get the data from the original source to the print head as it prints each line, in the correct format. To me, the wording should be such that no matter what method(s) is chosen and named in the patent, no piece of software can ever infringe. A company who wants to build printers would have to examine the patent to ensure their hardware didn't infringe, but they can add any software level glue they require however and wherever they want. Anyone who wants to use one of these printers, or adapt the idea to another field, simply has to worry about the physical aspects of the patent knowing that if software can be written to make it work, patents will not apply to the software.
In your specific example above, the algorithm in the printer driver has no physical impact, it simply converts the data format so the printer has the format it needs (and prints correctly instead of rubbish or "crashing"). Of course where the lines divide is the problem and so far I have seen few/no clear proposals.
Slashdot Mirror
Bingo, you've hit the magic point! Someone, lets say NickFortune, comes up with a genuinely new method of encrypting data. Suppose it's totally unpatentable as a piece of software or any form of set of instructions for coverting the data stream. Now NickFortune goes and takes a load of common basic unpatentable hardware and adds a burnt chip which does the actually en/decryption. What do you have a patent on? What can be done without licensing? If someone can create an independent software method of doing the encryption is that covered? Can they then burn their own chip of their method?
If I write the laws then NickFortune's patent is little more then a copyright on the design of the burnt chip but it sounds like you believe in a system where embodying anything which can be reduced to software in hardware prevents others from doing the same thing a different way. I can never see an encryption algorithym as protectable unless there is absolutely only one way to do it, in which case copyright alone provides the protction required. As long as someone can come up with a different set of instructions on how to convert the datastream (not simply using hex instead of binary or decimal to write it down or anything similarly non-significant) then a patent is worthless as it provides no protection beyond copyright.
If you come up with just a new method of manipulating data, no choice of setting or field of use should allow this to become patentable and hence protected from competition. This is analogeous to regular patents, where you can protect a specific implementation of how to make a coin holder, but you cannot prevent others from making coin holders a different way, just like you could protect a triggering method for releasing coins from the device, but could not prevent others from designing alternative coin triggering devices.
I appreciate that everyone (afaik) drafting patent laws initially had clear exeptions for things like mathematics and mind games. I don't appreciate that these limits have been circumvented imho clearly against the spirit of the law. I for one think the idea of protecting the processing of data is abhorent and against the basic fundamentals of freedom of expression. I ask you if you believe light processing (film patents) and audio processing (music patents) should also be treated the same way? Should I have been allowed to patent the process of displaying an image on a screen in monochrome except for allowing certain areas (perhaps chosen by original colour) to feature one or more other chromatic values? Should I be allowed to patent a chess manouever and refuse to license my opponents if they try and use it against me? Do you draw a line anywhere?
I'm surprised nobody has mention Software in the Public Interest as a possible distributor. They have everything in place and while the association with Debian is strong, I would be very surprised if they would not be able to allocate these funds to important projects without being accussed of simply funneling it into Debian.
Twain meet Kanotix. Why would you want to do it? Well how about if you actually want to know if your hardware will work with a distro without having to install it!
Well captive-ntfs is a dead project and is hard to use on a Windows XP SP2 ntfs drive (I think you can download about 100M from Microsoft to get the files you need, otherwise you need access to a pre SP2 XP to get the files). The end result is that yes captive-ntfs has been removed from Knoppix.
I think the fact is that Open Source developers are more likely to work on flash blocking then a re-implementation of flash, not because of some piece of non-cost software but because flash is rarely used in any way productively.
apt-get dist-upgrade MEPIS is NOT recommended. Also as it is based on testing it generally will not have security support (unless Mepis does their own which I have never heard of). If you really want a quick desktop/laptop Debian based distro without compatibility problems and with security support use Kanotix which is based on Debian sid/unstable. Some people dist-upgrade it daily.
I have done updates from woody to sarge (and older updates in the past). Yes, things change, usually you will find only a very small handful of things you have to fix (these will be related to things you already setup/changed on your system) and you will be warned about most/all of these changes during the update. If you have a large debian install, then you most likely have a clue what you are doing and hence 12 months should be an over an order of magnitude more then the amount of time you will actually need to do the update leaving you plenty of time to mull over any decisions and put have some test systems running for a while. In fact, thanks to debian's development model, anyone who has a large debian installation should already have those machines running and know all the problems they will face (bar changes made from now to release which should be very minimal), any issues they will have they should have reported as bugs and they will probably have the answer by now (either a fix or a good work-around).
I've a friend who's English and has lived in Ireland for a long time and he's now an Irish Civil Servant. I keep trying to get him to refuse to work until he can have his work software in Irish. If you know any Irish Civil servants who need some time off please pass on the idea as I think my friends complete lack of any Irish vocabulary whatsoever is discouraging him :-)
There is no insistence on source drivers, it's just that if you do not release Open Source drivers you should not expect the Open Source community to do all the hard work of making your drivers work properly on all the systems they are meant to be designed for. If the barrier to some company is truly dependence on external code, surely that code can usually be put into a seperate more flexible module and if not then it is the problem of the hardware manufacturer (who may not care about the Linux market).
If your a developer then yes these are concerns, if you are not a developer then the question is "does my distro support my hardware, or does my hardware company support my distro", if the answer to both of these is no, then either you should be a developer or be using different hardware/distro! This is my point, Kanotix goes the extra mile to make it so installing ati/nvidia binary drivers is simple and others could also do this! If you choose to tweak you own kernel (something you cannot do in anything like the same way with Windows) then you must accept responsibility for the fact you can't get the drivers to work. If you did some binary hacking on your Windows kernel and broke your Video drivers, who would you blame?
Rubbish! How about 64bit Windows XP? Windows 2003? Let alone different Service Packs for windows (you try getting Bluetooth drivers onto XP SP2, not the crippled new MS ones mind). I'm assuming btw you missed the word Windows again between modern and systems? How's the Media Center edition for driver support, or any of the cut down versions (be they cheap starter versions or derivatives of Windows CE for handhelds or "embedded" machines)?
Shameless plug but one of the many ways Kanotix has gotten things spot on is to have a simple install of these sorts of drivers. With the latest versions you can even install them while running from cd just as easily. No, you don't have to go to ati's site the complete instructions are:
- Be online
- run "update-scripts-kanotix.sh" to ensure you have the latest kanotix scripts
- [Alt] + [Ctrl] + [F1] --> login as root
- run "install-radeon-debian.sh" to do everything
So who's fault is your problem? Ati for not supporting your distros choices, your distro for not making it easy for you to use ati's drivers or yours for having an Ati card and wanting to run their binary driver (I assume your card is not based on some kind of r2x0 chip like 8500 - 9200 which has a free accelerated driver as if so fedora has even bigger problems). All my cards are r2x0 based so I use the free driver, but I have on a number of occassions tackled with trying to install ati's drivers. Only Kanotix, of the few I tried, made me think it was something simple and straight forward. I imagine some others must have it easy too though? Can nobody write an equivalent script for Fedora releases or will nobody?I'm glad I actually took a minute to figure out what the music was meant to be. I guess even on slashdot a parody of Particle Man by They Might Be Giants was a bit optimistic!
Games aren't bootable and therefore some other random use of your general purpose computer may break your games ... or vice-versa! Even if they were bootable, you would have to be sure that a game which did work on your hardware continued to after a hardware upgrade or else you might have lost that game. Even if all that was ok, who do you blame if the game isn't running perfectly (at the minute you can rightly scream at the game developer if your console isn't broken)? And if a game developer managed to jump through all those hoops, how well optimised would it be for your hardware? All that said, some games still suit the PC better due to input/output options though I wonder if this will continue for much longer.
If it's legal to share stuff you've legally attained (say you buy a DVD), hasn't someone who you share it with also gotten it legally and hence they can also legally share it to others? If not how do you draw a line? If I record a program from tv have I attained it legally? Does that depend whether the broadcaster produced the content and whether or not I pay them or have any contractual arangements with them or anyone else?
I suspect the second you make a cent directly or indirectly from your trade it would no longer be regarded as personal use.
I'll agree Finding Nemo is a mediocre film, but I honestly think Shrek and Toy Story both have a good chance of standing the test of time. We will see ...
The Ring trilogy ... I just don't know. I still think that LOTR will be made again in my lifetime, but next time they won't cut the beginning and ending to make a film (leaving it with no context) but instead will film the lot, or drop some of the more ditchable sections (do we really need to see every battle being fought, no, just follow the hobbits FROM BEGINNING TO END if you can't find the budget for everything). The only good thing is at least the world won't all know the real story when someone finally makes it :-) Having said all that they could still make it into my top 100 films of all time!
I want their Palm OS Developer Suite (eclipse kitted out as a full Palm OS ide) on Linux. I have the sources and their patches but haven't been able to put aside the time yet to see how far I get and what problems I hit. In fact, their desire to maintain their own Free Software based ide was a significant factor for choosing Palm for our product. I'm not complaining about PalmSource not having done this work already, they have done it a free software way so their work is there to pick up.
It may only be available for Windows (90% of the market?) but how much easier do you want then PODS? A complete, Free software based ide, using standard tools, register as a developer (basically to get access to device roms), download one file and install it, you know have a small cygwin setup with all the command line tools, plus a kitted up eclipse to act as a full ide (including Palm documentation).
You say that you asked why tools for developing Palm OS apps on Linux are neglected, but you mention pilot-link as an example. pilot-link is a hot-sync program, not used at all to develop programs (though perhaps to transfer them to a device for testing, or to test conduits under Linux).
Note that I am not trying to refute any arguments you make about the history or levels of co-operation, I don't know enough to say anything sensible about it.
You forget that it is just as important to ensure that the wages levels (and hence standard of living) is going up in the less wealthy economies to close the gap. Encourage them to insist on equally strong social provisions (from social welfare and healthcare to workers rights), ensure that while they may be cheaper, the companies aren't seeing most of the savings, as the savings are taken in by the local economy. The problem as of now is that the poorest countries are selling each other out and hence gifting the savings to the corporations.
My nephew was over today, he's just turned 8 and saw it yesterday with his little brother of about 5 with their dad. They both loved it, no sob stories today or tails of nightmares. I would have to also mention that I would expect these kids to be amongst the least desensitised kids of their ages around (no games, little tv/video, plenty of supervision) so it's not cause their veterans of lots of horror films. Does this mean you should bring your kids? No! But you know your kids best.
Has anyone discovered if this can be used with wine and IE on Linux? If not, such an extension could actually be useful to provide the catch all support for a browser on Linux. Of course to actually use this legally you have to have a legal copy of IE and a desire to ever let the code onto your machine, but if your online banking (or some other personally _vital_ site) won't work any other way would it not be better to be able to enable the working rendering engine in your normal browser, rather then firing up a seperate browser or changing browser for one site? Of course the best solution is to ensure all sites stop depending on specific browsers and doing something like the above may actually be counter productive to that at this stage.
The main points of my argument were ...
- You are a MS employee
- The _only_ real piece of information in your post was that you did not have a service charge for your MCE box
- You say it is free, when in fact it is simply included in your initial purchase price.
Now in your reply you have taken another tangent to astroturf, in fact a continuation of the more subtle attack in the original post ("MCEBottom line is that I have no problem with Microsoft employees and count a couple amongst my friends, but I do have a problem with campaigns of disinformation. You have basically implied that MCE is somehow cheaper then MythTV as it has a free TV Guide which is rubbish! You also implied MCE works and MythTV doesn't (more rubbish, especially if you purchase both as prebuilt machines). Next up you drag in the implication that Myth faces the same issue of an upfront cost when in fact it bears zero resemblence to RHEL and contains nothing which requires licensing. You say your "not interested in substituting my program guide source" which means you don't mind if your MCE stops working if/when the MS guide service does, nice of you to dismiss my point, remember it when your guide data isn't updated and suddenly your Alias and 24 don't record.
It's your choice of misleading tangents you walk down that just leaves me feeling that all I am doing is countering subversive MS marketing.
So I presume the each military will get some manufacturer to build custom bluetooth chips (operating on military frequencies), then fit everything of note with these. Finally have your flocks of servers moving the data around and creating/maintainging redundant communication links (perhaps ferrying meta-data across the prime network, data on demand and delivering drops of data at other times perhaps literally with cards), providing intelligence on the ground and back to base. I can also forsee these being exteremly useful in crowd control situations, for example you could fly a swarm in a stadium, programmed to keep everyone in sight at all times while being directable to focus on particular areas. Maybe you could even get some truly spectaulr sporting footage if their awareness and collission control systems were good enough (hovering around the net in tennis, eye-level following/looking back at a football/hockey player with the ball or even landing on cars in motorsports races). Whatever sorts of uses they ever get, you can be sure the military is funding plenty of work into this sort of area.
YOU may not pay or have paid directly for your Media Center Program Guide but:
- People must pay to buy Windows Media Center
- People may be asked to pay any amount, at any time for any future upgrades (which may or may not be required)
- People may not be at liberty to substitute alternative guide sources (for redundancy/specialised listings perhaps)
- People pay in the long run by continously promoting the idea that providing MS only compatible media is an option (we already have audio discs which cannot be played on a computer without Windows Media Player).
So in summary you have been modded +4 interesting for being an MS employee who told us they find a MS product suits them and that it doesn't have a monthly charge.One question, have you read all your terms and conditions and licenses? Do you understand them? Is there any minimum life on your Media Center before you (or rather a regular customer) could be forced to pay for updates? Are you guaranteed security support for any length of time?
I'd love you bring you in on a great new servive I'm offering. If you buy a bfreeBox from me, I'll send you $10000/month free for the rest of your life! You can't go wrong with a deal like that! In fact, that offer is open to anyone who reads this, I'm feeling generous today.
The question is can someone make a new style of printer ... perhaps one with a page wide head (just to try and flesh out the example) so it actually prints a line at a time (not scanned). Now they need to get the data from the original source to the print head as it prints each line, in the correct format. To me, the wording should be such that no matter what method(s) is chosen and named in the patent, no piece of software can ever infringe. A company who wants to build printers would have to examine the patent to ensure their hardware didn't infringe, but they can add any software level glue they require however and wherever they want. Anyone who wants to use one of these printers, or adapt the idea to another field, simply has to worry about the physical aspects of the patent knowing that if software can be written to make it work, patents will not apply to the software.
In your specific example above, the algorithm in the printer driver has no physical impact, it simply converts the data format so the printer has the format it needs (and prints correctly instead of rubbish or "crashing"). Of course where the lines divide is the problem and so far I have seen few/no clear proposals.