A ban on mergers would not alleviate the problem of patents for developing countries.
An alternative solution would be to grant patents for the recovery of development and implementation costs plus some markup, a present value of say 20%.
That way the very successful patents would expires quickly, giving others with newer ideas a chance to develop them further.
A problem with fx. software patents is that the length of the patent is designed for manufacturing processes and such where it takes a much longer time to recover costs, but the innovation is still actually useful after the patent expires. This cannot be said of software algorithms.
Re:ok, good point
on
Patent Nonsense
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
OS/2's demise was caused more by bad handling then MS did. It didn't compete with MS on the home or small business desktop, because each iteration demanded the newest hardware available, thus the average user never heard of it, thus "everybody" knew how to use some version of Windows, making it much easier to roll out to a work-force relatively cheaply (both in hardware and training).
If MS had to open the windows source, and keep it open for subsequent releases, a compatible alternative, priced reasonably could very well get a goodly chunk of the pie. That's what happened with the PC.
"Standard" in this case means "runs the programs deemed neccessary", not that there is a start button in the lower left corner.
> >iWhile we're minimizing the threat of wrong-doing, lets not forget to shut down the razor factories, the internet cafes, rental car companies, etc..
> Unfair. This article is really about future nanotech and how best to develop it. It's asking if we want to take another genie out of the bottle.
Of course the article also presupposes that strong encryption was the reason the intelligence community didn't prevent the recent attack. That seems a bit unsubstatiated, wouldn't you say?
>>Actually, oil is not *there* but Chechnya is a much better route for the oil pipe, if that's what you are referring to...
> Get your facts right, there IS OIL in Chechnya
Not much. There is an oil pipeline though. Anyway that isn't the point. If Chechnya is let go, Russia would fall apart. Including some places that do have goodly amounts of oil and whatnot.
>>After 3 houses were demolished in Moscow and Volgodonsk -- do you think Russians were supposed to just stand there and do nothing?
>No proof was offered, no person was blamed. Not much.
No individual was blamed, no. About as much proof was offered as there has been up till now in the WTC case. That might of course soon change according to the BBC.
Well actually, I would think, Saddam wasn't ousted because it's better to have the opponent you know than chance it on the southern rebels or some other unknown successor. The Kurds wouldn't have sat still either, which could have had an impact on Turkey, a "friendly" country.
Don't any of the cocksure americans posting consider anything other than the very shortterm?
Yeah sure you can bomb a little, maybe even catch bin Laden, kill a few thousand afghanis. Then what?
What happens when for example there is an islamic revolution in Pakistan? Probably not done by friends of the US... Pakistan which happens to be a nuclear power...
What then?
So far a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon has been a theoretical possibility. That might become less theoretical.
I doubt many citizens of muslim countries would be endeared to the US after such a shortsighted attack.
The US has already done this (at least) once on the Balkan by bombing then leaving the clean up to Europe. Who will have to clean up in Asia?
It would of course help if CNN sent something other than propaganda at the moment. Maybe if y'all watched BBC World for a bit, y'all might gain some perspective.
You may not have noticed it but the last years the tech-stocks (microsoft and others) have dropped (allot). This is NOT because they are greedy and make too much money, it's because they are having problems making enough money for their business.
Not quite (for MS in any case). It is because they will not be able to make the same huge amounts of money they before.
The stock price reflects expected future earnings per share compared to the price.
MS' whole problem seems to be that people - read Corporates who actually pay for their software - seem less and less inclined to blindly upgrade, unless they see a clear benefit. That is why they need to force them to upgrade or at least pay regularly.
It's the "format c:" type of things that are really bothersome. On a reasonably set up Unix, if one user has all his files deleted, that doesn't mean that everyone else suffers for it too.
Of course the friendly cracker can gain a lot other useful info to get root access by reading all the nice globally readable files on a Linux machine.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you.
Then maybe once people (especially the ones who won't be able to afford it) are weaned off TV by pay-per-view, thus not watching political advertising, they will vote in a more sensible manner.
It is not copyright per se, but the public showing of said copy.
Say Sky One buys x episodes of program y for viewing in the UK for z pounds. Z pounds would be less than exclusive rights to all of Europe. The "owners" of the copyright would want to be able to sell the same episodes to say a danish TV station. If Sky then sold cards in the whole of Europe, the danish station might not be willing to pay the premium for having an exclusive right to broadcast program y in Denmark, and Sky would be sued by the owner for breach of contract.
I assume Sky is not eager for this.
Also non-english stations would be at a disadvantage, as they have to take the time to subtitle or dub anything they buy.
That is rationale, not that I have much sympathy for it.
> I listen to shoutcast radio stations using
> winamp on a windows OS, which I suspect is a
> very common way of listening to online radio
> stations. AFAIK, there is no way of saving the
> low bitrate stream I am currently listening to.
Or you can use the diskwriter plugin to "play" the sound to a wav file.
Of course you won't hear what you're recording, and it'll fill your HD at breakneck speed, so that isn't a very savoury option for most.
I would think the aristocracy said something similar in a feudal economyy, salveowners said the same in a slavery-based economy, etc.
At the moment some form of capitalism seems to work most effectively to manage finite resources, but that will probably not be true in the future, as it wasn't in the past.
Also look at the difference between Europe and the US to see how different capitalism can be.
To get back to the Netscape vs Mozilla discussion: I use Mozilla precisely because of the extrenuous garbage NS has saddled NS6 with. Not only is it useless, it will also ultimately bloat the browser, and introduce more bugs. I don't really need that, now do I. OTOH you have a free choise between Mozilla or Netscape or one of the other Gecko based projects, (I can recommend Galeon if you happen to like Gnome). The main reason for this is Netscapes original choise to open the code. If they can make money with their crap, fine for them. You're not forced to use it.
Of course some of the 997 wouldn't post patches, etc. if they found a hole, but would try to exploit while they can. OTOH a goodly percentage of the aforementioned 997 would, thus hopefully preventing the less trustworthy from exploiting the hole for a long period. This can't be said of closed source. As someone or other said earlier, fewer people could find a hole, but chances are that they wouldn't report it. A bunch of Windows holes are found and reported, but I am always left wondering how many holes aren't reported.
Head and shoulders is maybe going a few dozen tads too far. But Office2000 isn't bad. OTOH the only part of Office I use (rarely) is Outlook, because of the stupid extensions to MAPI that Exchange server has.
WP Office 2000 or StarOffice can do more or less the same for you as MS Office can. Maybe not in exactly the same way, but with the same results anyway. Apart from MS' proprietory stuff, eg. Exchange Server more complicated functions, such as the calender.
On AS/400's you haven't really had the choice to install either Windows or Linux (until recently that is).
So the alternatives are Linux or NT.
Taking into account how many times Mr. Emmet (the ignorant writer of this article) mentions the great successes companies have with their NT clusters, I would think that that is what people are arguing against. Not every business can afford a AS/400, you know.
> But Linux falls apart fundamentally when it
> comes to actual usage...
>
> In fact, I actually wish more GNU software WAS
> binary - statically linked binary, preferably.
> The major thing holding linux/unix down is that
> when someone tries to install new chuffing
> software , they often have to deal with the fact
> that they also need Gtk++4.5.5.6.11p1 or higher,
> Zlib4.5.6.12.3.4a156-1 or higher, as well as
> ncurses7.0.1.6.5.2342314-b, and of course
> Perl5.5.6.6.1....not to mention their libs must
> be installed in $GTK_HOME_DIR_$#*()$*(#&*($#
> blah blah blah.
> Packaging using BSD, RPM, Deb, etc...doesn't
> even help this fact. It's a mess.
>
And Random Program XYZ v.3.7 overwriting system dll abc.dll without asking is better in what way? RPM has served me well so far as far. It would of course be nice if there when an option to retrieve and install dependencies the way the FreeBSD pkg_add utility does.
Of course this might result in DLL hell, I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
OK. I tried this in Galeon, and clicking the secunia link just opens a fourth window with the Citibank index page.
A ban on mergers would not alleviate the problem of patents for developing countries.
An alternative solution would be to grant patents for the recovery of development and implementation costs plus some markup, a present value of say 20%.
That way the very successful patents would expires quickly, giving others with newer ideas a chance to develop them further.
A problem with fx. software patents is that the length of the patent is designed for manufacturing processes and such where it takes a much longer time to recover costs, but the innovation is still actually useful after the patent expires. This cannot be said of software algorithms.
OS/2's demise was caused more by bad handling then MS did. It didn't compete with MS on the home or small business desktop, because each iteration demanded the newest hardware available, thus the average user never heard of it, thus "everybody" knew how to use some version of Windows, making it much easier to roll out to a work-force relatively cheaply (both in hardware and training).
If MS had to open the windows source, and keep it open for subsequent releases, a compatible alternative, priced reasonably could very well get a goodly chunk of the pie. That's what happened with the PC.
"Standard" in this case means "runs the programs deemed neccessary", not that there is a start button in the lower left corner.
> >iWhile we're minimizing the threat of wrong-doing, lets not forget to shut down the razor factories, the internet cafes, rental car companies, etc..
> Unfair. This article is really about future nanotech and how best to develop it. It's asking if we want to take another genie out of the bottle.
Of course the article also presupposes that strong encryption was the reason the intelligence community didn't prevent the recent attack. That seems a bit unsubstatiated, wouldn't you say?
>>Actually, oil is not *there* but Chechnya is a much better route for the oil pipe, if that's what you are referring to...
> Get your facts right, there IS OIL in Chechnya
Not much. There is an oil pipeline though. Anyway that isn't the point. If Chechnya is let go, Russia would fall apart. Including some places that do have goodly amounts of oil and whatnot.
>>After 3 houses were demolished in Moscow and Volgodonsk -- do you think Russians were supposed to just stand there and do nothing?
>No proof was offered, no person was blamed. Not much.
No individual was blamed, no. About as much proof was offered as there has been up till now in the WTC case. That might of course soon change according to the BBC.
Well actually, I would think, Saddam wasn't ousted because it's better to have the opponent you know than chance it on the southern rebels or some other unknown successor. The Kurds wouldn't have sat still either, which could have had an impact on Turkey, a "friendly" country.
<rant>
Don't any of the cocksure americans posting consider anything other than the very shortterm?
Yeah sure you can bomb a little, maybe even catch bin Laden, kill a few thousand afghanis. Then what?
What happens when for example there is an islamic revolution in Pakistan? Probably not done by friends of the US... Pakistan which happens to be a nuclear power...
What then?
So far a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon has been a theoretical possibility. That might become less theoretical.
I doubt many citizens of muslim countries would be endeared to the US after such a shortsighted attack.
The US has already done this (at least) once on the Balkan by bombing then leaving the clean up to Europe. Who will have to clean up in Asia?
It would of course help if CNN sent something other than propaganda at the moment. Maybe if y'all watched BBC World for a bit, y'all might gain some perspective.
<rant>
You may not have noticed it but the last years the tech-stocks (microsoft and others) have dropped (allot). This is NOT because they are greedy and make too much money, it's because they are having problems making enough money for their business.
Not quite (for MS in any case). It is because they will not be able to make the same huge amounts of money they before.
The stock price reflects expected future earnings per share compared to the price.
This NYTimes link has the same story, except it also says that MS will be getting to small businesses with time:c h-microsoft-l.html
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-te
If these licenses can be sold to a third party, maybe the accounting department will be happy.
Otherwise it's a fixed expense, that can't be a huge burden if revenue decreases.
You can fire the workers, but you'll still be paying your Windows licenses. Great.
MS' whole problem seems to be that people - read Corporates who actually pay for their software - seem less and less inclined to blindly upgrade, unless they see a clear benefit. That is why they need to force them to upgrade or at least pay regularly.
Where did the assumption that this was a monthly subscription service including automatic upgrades come from?
AFAI could see, you pat the license fee now, in one lump sum, and if you still want to use the software in 3 years you pay it again.
If you upgrade before you're license ends, you pay a new license fee for the new software, (possibly a reduced fee because of the previous license).
How exactly does this differ from the present situation, other than that you pay MS, whether you choose to upgrade or not?
I use Galeon, which uses Gecko for rendering and fast and stable, and doesn't fuck the layout much, so it's definately getting there.
Mozilla is also becoming nice and fast actually. Surprising really, taking into account it's size. So there is hope.
It's the "format c:" type of things that are really bothersome. On a reasonably set up Unix, if one user has all his files deleted, that doesn't mean that everyone else suffers for it too.
Of course the friendly cracker can gain a lot other useful info to get root access by reading all the nice globally readable files on a Linux machine.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you.
You have a very wide definition of American, it seems. Includes the british now, it seems.
Then maybe once people (especially the ones who won't be able to afford it) are weaned off TV by pay-per-view, thus not watching political advertising, they will vote in a more sensible manner.
No it hasn't yet.
Why are you writing in english, then? Maybe because if you want to maximize your audience it is a good idea, while writing in french would not be.
It is not copyright per se, but the public showing of said copy.
Say Sky One buys x episodes of program y for viewing in the UK for z pounds. Z pounds would be less than exclusive rights to all of Europe. The "owners" of the copyright would want to be able to sell the same episodes to say a danish TV station. If Sky then sold cards in the whole of Europe, the danish station might not be willing to pay the premium for having an exclusive right to broadcast program y in Denmark, and Sky would be sued by the owner for breach of contract.
I assume Sky is not eager for this.
Also non-english stations would be at a disadvantage, as they have to take the time to subtitle or dub anything they buy.
That is rationale, not that I have much sympathy for it.
> I listen to shoutcast radio stations using
> winamp on a windows OS, which I suspect is a
> very common way of listening to online radio
> stations. AFAIK, there is no way of saving the
> low bitrate stream I am currently listening to.
Or you can use the diskwriter plugin to "play" the sound to a wav file.
Of course you won't hear what you're recording, and it'll fill your HD at breakneck speed, so that isn't a very savoury option for most.
I would think the aristocracy said something similar in a feudal economyy, salveowners said the same in a slavery-based economy, etc.
At the moment some form of capitalism seems to work most effectively to manage finite resources, but that will probably not be true in the future, as it wasn't in the past.
Also look at the difference between Europe and the US to see how different capitalism can be.
To get back to the Netscape vs Mozilla discussion:
I use Mozilla precisely because of the extrenuous garbage NS has saddled NS6 with. Not only is it useless, it will also ultimately bloat the browser, and introduce more bugs. I don't really need that, now do I. OTOH you have a free choise between Mozilla or Netscape or one of the other Gecko based projects, (I can recommend Galeon if you happen to like Gnome). The main reason for this is Netscapes original choise to open the code. If they can make money with their crap, fine for them. You're not forced to use it.
Of course some of the 997 wouldn't post patches, etc. if they found a hole, but would try to exploit while they can. OTOH a goodly percentage of the aforementioned 997 would, thus hopefully preventing the less trustworthy from exploiting the hole for a long period.
This can't be said of closed source. As someone or other said earlier, fewer people could find a hole, but chances are that they wouldn't report it.
A bunch of Windows holes are found and reported, but I am always left wondering how many holes aren't reported.
> Oracle, poster child database of the OSS movement...
Huh?
Where can I get the source to Oracle 8i, do tell.
Head and shoulders is maybe going a few dozen tads too far. But Office2000 isn't bad. OTOH the only part of Office I use (rarely) is Outlook, because of the stupid extensions to MAPI that Exchange server has.
WP Office 2000 or StarOffice can do more or less the same for you as MS Office can. Maybe not in exactly the same way, but with the same results anyway. Apart from MS' proprietory stuff, eg. Exchange Server more complicated functions, such as the calender.
Enough of this.
On AS/400's you haven't really had the choice to install either Windows or Linux (until recently that is).
So the alternatives are Linux or NT.
Taking into account how many times Mr. Emmet (the ignorant writer of this article) mentions the great successes companies have with their NT clusters, I would think that that is what people are arguing against. Not every business can afford a AS/400, you know.
> But Linux falls apart fundamentally when it > comes to actual usage... > > In fact, I actually wish more GNU software WAS > binary - statically linked binary, preferably. > The major thing holding linux/unix down is that > when someone tries to install new chuffing > software , they often have to deal with the fact > that they also need Gtk++4.5.5.6.11p1 or higher, > Zlib4.5.6.12.3.4a156-1 or higher, as well as > ncurses7.0.1.6.5.2342314-b, and of course > Perl5.5.6.6.1....not to mention their libs must > be installed in $GTK_HOME_DIR_$#*()$*(#&*($# > blah blah blah. > Packaging using BSD, RPM, Deb, etc...doesn't > even help this fact. It's a mess. > And Random Program XYZ v.3.7 overwriting system dll abc.dll without asking is better in what way? RPM has served me well so far as far. It would of course be nice if there when an option to retrieve and install dependencies the way the FreeBSD pkg_add utility does. Of course this might result in DLL hell, I don't know.