Meh. Lock-in across product lines is older than dirt. Its practice doesn't make a company "monopolistic" (though its practice by a monopoly can sometimes be illegal, which may be why you associate the two things).
Anyway, you appear to be wishing for legal action based on how much you like each company's actions rather than on any legal facts; which means you're also not looking at an accurate picture of the costs and outcomes if legal action does occur.
I won't speculate on the issues that would matter in a court case (such as whether any trade secrets were utilized by the ex-Apple engineers that allegedly made this work), but I will say that without knowing the details of those issues, I wouldn't be begging anyone to start casting legal stones.
A lot of tools can "do" linearization. That's not the question. The question is, once you've "done" linearization, and you browse to the resulting file, will the Adobe plug-in handle page-on-demand requests properly? In other words, if I jump straight to page 1,000 will I immediately download the byte range for page 1,000 (the correct behavior linearization was designed to support), or will I have to wait while pages 1 through 999 download first?
With files produced in Acrobat, it works fine. With files produced by anything but Adobe tools, I've never seen the reader behave "correctly". At best it downloads all pages in order and is nice enough to display any page it's gotten to. As of 5 years ago, Adobe would not help with this matter, because they did not want tools other than their own authoring PDF. This is not speculation - it is what they told us. Nor were any of the "experts" we could find outside Adobe knowledgable enough to solve the problem at the time.
So does pdfopt actually work 100% properly? I don't know, if I get a chance to test it I will. Maybe the spec is in better shape today than 5 years ago, or maybe someone figured out the secret and/or got lucky.
None of which has anything to do with the point: Adobe's fast-and-loose understanding of "open" is very, very old news.
Ok, one more time for the people in the cheap seats:
Unless they have improved the detail of the spec considerably in the past 5 years, you can write a program that produces documents that conform fully to the spec, yet which Acrobat Reader will not treat properly. Hence the de facto definition of PDF as understood by most of the business world (interoperability with Acrobat) is a subset of the "standard" definition in the published spec. According to my conversations with their tech support, this is by design, as they only want you to use the spec to write PDF reader applications.
Does that mean the ISO document is not the complete spec? Define "complete spec".
"Microsoft were competing unfairly long before they became a monopoly, and this is also illegal"
Citation needed.
The example you gave is not illegal unless you wield undue market clout (such as that held by a monopoly). That is the case with any "unfair competition" law I've heard of - it's only unfair if competition in your market is limited (e.g. because you're a monopoly or because you and a few other players collude to maintain a collective strangle-hold on the market).
"And there are many people I know that hold two contradictory views at the same time -- I do myself"
When writing for a comment format, I keep my text concise, so you would do well to pay attention to each word's function.
I didn't say that a person can't hold contradictory views. I said a corporation can hold contradictory views in a way most people cannot. If you hold contradictory views in the same sense that a corporation can, you should seek professional help.
I agree that you're being cynical, but you partially have a point.
What I should have said is, you can never rely on a corporation to stick to a promise. There are people I trust; there are not corporations I trust in that sense. Corporate inconsistency isn't like a person "changing his mind"; a corporation can hold two contradictory views concurrently in a way most people cannot, because it is not a single person with a single mind.
As for promissary estoppel... against a corporation? I do wish you luck with that, but I don't hold out much hope.
Ok. You're wrong. PDF is an Adobe proprietary format. There are other readers because (as I noted above) they publish enough spec to let you write readers. Acrobat Reader is the canonical reader implementation, and other Acrobat products are the canonical software for writing PDF.
Because there are other readers, and because those readers presumably don't know whatever magic incantation makes Acrobat Reader recognize linearization (which is a not an extension but rather is a core part of the spec), you could write PDF-producing software that might work 100% well with those other readers. But in the corporate world, that's not good enough; when a business publishes something as PDF, it needs to work wtih Acrobat.
Regardless of the legal merits (or lack thereof) of their claims, and regardless of the general sleeze factor, there's really one lesson we should all learn if we didn't know it already:
A corporation, legal euphamisms aside, is not a person. You can't rely on its sense of honor, even if you think it believed it was making a true promise. You can't rely on it to have a single, consistent mind on any given issue. In short, a "promise" from a corporation means zero (perhaps less if the "promise" was in a press release). Licenses and contracts (in verifiable form - i.e. written and signed) can mean something, but without one you have no shield from liability if the company decides it didn't really promise what you think it promised.
Maybe so, but this isn't new behavior on Adobe's part.
They make a big deal of publishing the PDF spec, but (at least as of five years ago) they publisehd only enough information in the spec that you can write a good PDF reader. They leave out details that you would need to make their reader respond correctly to optimizations like linearized PDF (which you really need to do lengthly web-delivered documents "right") in documents you create, and when you call them on it they say they don't support development of applications that write PDF.
In other words, it's "open" enough to encourage broader use of the format, while maintaining lock-in as the only suitable producer of content in that format.
Well, I believe you're correct, but it doesn't matter unless someone actually stands up to fight the point.
MySQL or Adobe or anyone else can take whatever legal stand they like, no matter how bizarre. They issue a DMCA take-down notice, and there's a process for conteseting it. But even if the notice is completely invalid, if the other guy compiles and doesn't challenge them, then they get all benefit and no cost for their action.
Unless and until trial, it doesn't matter what the law says; it matters who blinks.
Cell phones don't use the phone number as a method of authentication. Cell phone users use the phone number as a method of identification (when they place a call or send a message to the number).
The network "looks for" the identified phone so it can deliver the message. Rather, the network looks for a phone that has authenticated as a match for the phone number.
The process by which the phone authenticates may well be flawed, but this has nothing to do with the end-user simplicity of "phone numbers"; the process is already decoupled from that simplicity as the phone # is not the information used to authenticate the phone on the network.
"Women were excluded, and therefore any gene not on the Y chromosome would have been excluded from being affected."
Yet another case of a perfectly good post, soiled by over-reaching in the last paragraph.
Men have an X chromoxome as well. They pass the information on this chromosome on to any daughters they might have. The impact on genes from the Y chromosome would be greater, but not exclusive.
You might think it doesn't matter because negative traits tend to be recessive, so the unaffected pool of women's X chromosomes would keep things in balance. Even if this tendency were absolute, it wouldn't eliminate the impact of the men's X chromosomes; it could delay it (at most) 1 generation. A disproportionate number of females in the next generation would be carriers for the recessive trait.
There are any number of reasons why a breathalyzer might be better for field use than another test, yet that other test would serve as a perfectly good baseline for lab testing / calibration of the breathalyzer.
For example, you can't take and analyze a urine sample road-side during a traffic stop. A breathalyzer doesn't involve drawing blood, or require a lab or a technician's time to analyze each reading.
Those are the "pro"s. Proper testing would tell us whether there's a "con" to offset them -- that being a loss of accuracy.
That's an interesting definition of "it works". By any chance are you in our QA department?
"Can the defense prove that the code was written so haphazardly that it ignores some data or does it round incorrectly like Excel does? These things do and can happen with sloppy code."
These things can be and are detected by proper testing.
Infering that they might have happeend because the code is sloppy and sloppy code might do that, is a bit like infering that Johny might have stolen a CD because Johny is a teenager and teenagers might do that.
The issue isn't the quality of the code; the issue is the absence of proper testing requirements around these devices.
"Calibration and testing won't reveal all the edge cases that might cause errors"
Then you aren't testing correctly.
"I can see a way that badly-written code would turn that into an average speed of 106 MPH "
You may need to revisit the legal definition of "reasonable doubt". Being able to contemplate a scenario where the evidence could be wrong is not sufficient to overturn the evidence.
Regardless, if the testers don't know that "an input suffered overflow or underflow" is an edge case they need to test, then they aren't testers.
Yes, but to GP's point - if the code had been subjected to proper tests, then it wouldn't matter how hard it was to maintain. Either the maintainers overcame that difficulty and it passed the test, or they didn't and it failed.
Of course, with poorly written code, it's hard to show whether or not the code ultimately works by examination of the code.
Then again, proving that the code works (which should be the standard when the code is analyzed in court) by code examination is very difficult even for well-written code.
Perhaps a better approach would be documented, repeatable testing of the device. When I challenge a radar gun, I get to ask about its calibration documents, but I don't think I get to debate the blueprints from which it was built.
My personal opinion - and before getting on an "innocent until proven guilty" kick bear in mind that I'm not a part of the court system in this case - is that the defense realizes that almost all software systems look awful and are trying to game their way out of a conviction they've probably earned.
That said, if for no other reason then to eliminate such gaming, there should be standards for testing and documenting the proper function of these devices. Any device that can't be calibrated and tested with sufficient certainty should be banned from use as evidence in court. If the device passes the test, then exactly how it does it shouldn't really matter.
Yes... but so what? I assume you're challenging my thinking about why the cable company didn't assert fair use?
I'm not saying that a company doesn't have fair use rights, but I am saying that (1) it is very possible that neither a company nor an individual could assert fair use to justify time-shifting on someone else's behalf, particularly on a commercial basis; and (2) the fair use criteria are complex enough that they may not apply the same way to a company as they apply to you or me.
Slashdot Mirror
Meh. Lock-in across product lines is older than dirt. Its practice doesn't make a company "monopolistic" (though its practice by a monopoly can sometimes be illegal, which may be why you associate the two things).
Anyway, you appear to be wishing for legal action based on how much you like each company's actions rather than on any legal facts; which means you're also not looking at an accurate picture of the costs and outcomes if legal action does occur.
I won't speculate on the issues that would matter in a court case (such as whether any trade secrets were utilized by the ex-Apple engineers that allegedly made this work), but I will say that without knowing the details of those issues, I wouldn't be begging anyone to start casting legal stones.
A lot of tools can "do" linearization. That's not the question. The question is, once you've "done" linearization, and you browse to the resulting file, will the Adobe plug-in handle page-on-demand requests properly? In other words, if I jump straight to page 1,000 will I immediately download the byte range for page 1,000 (the correct behavior linearization was designed to support), or will I have to wait while pages 1 through 999 download first?
With files produced in Acrobat, it works fine. With files produced by anything but Adobe tools, I've never seen the reader behave "correctly". At best it downloads all pages in order and is nice enough to display any page it's gotten to. As of 5 years ago, Adobe would not help with this matter, because they did not want tools other than their own authoring PDF. This is not speculation - it is what they told us. Nor were any of the "experts" we could find outside Adobe knowledgable enough to solve the problem at the time.
So does pdfopt actually work 100% properly? I don't know, if I get a chance to test it I will. Maybe the spec is in better shape today than 5 years ago, or maybe someone figured out the secret and/or got lucky.
None of which has anything to do with the point: Adobe's fast-and-loose understanding of "open" is very, very old news.
Ok, one more time for the people in the cheap seats:
Unless they have improved the detail of the spec considerably in the past 5 years, you can write a program that produces documents that conform fully to the spec, yet which Acrobat Reader will not treat properly. Hence the de facto definition of PDF as understood by most of the business world (interoperability with Acrobat) is a subset of the "standard" definition in the published spec. According to my conversations with their tech support, this is by design, as they only want you to use the spec to write PDF reader applications.
Does that mean the ISO document is not the complete spec? Define "complete spec".
Hm... did you miss the reason I chose that phrasing? Because missing the joke is the essence of pure evil.
Also, just to get ahead of this one: suggesting that my actions are evil, is the essence of pure evil.
So by way of example, whenever you earn money you keep just enough to live and give the rest to local charity?
Oh, but you clearly have access to a computer, so that's probably not true.
Get off your high horse about "right action". Hypocrisy is the essence of pure evil.
"Microsoft were competing unfairly long before they became a monopoly, and this is also illegal"
Citation needed.
The example you gave is not illegal unless you wield undue market clout (such as that held by a monopoly). That is the case with any "unfair competition" law I've heard of - it's only unfair if competition in your market is limited (e.g. because you're a monopoly or because you and a few other players collude to maintain a collective strangle-hold on the market).
"And there are many people I know that hold two contradictory views at the same time -- I do myself"
When writing for a comment format, I keep my text concise, so you would do well to pay attention to each word's function.
I didn't say that a person can't hold contradictory views. I said a corporation can hold contradictory views in a way most people cannot. If you hold contradictory views in the same sense that a corporation can, you should seek professional help.
I agree that you're being cynical, but you partially have a point.
What I should have said is, you can never rely on a corporation to stick to a promise. There are people I trust; there are not corporations I trust in that sense. Corporate inconsistency isn't like a person "changing his mind"; a corporation can hold two contradictory views concurrently in a way most people cannot, because it is not a single person with a single mind.
As for promissary estoppel... against a corporation? I do wish you luck with that, but I don't hold out much hope.
"Correct me if I'm wrong"
Ok. You're wrong. PDF is an Adobe proprietary format. There are other readers because (as I noted above) they publish enough spec to let you write readers. Acrobat Reader is the canonical reader implementation, and other Acrobat products are the canonical software for writing PDF.
Because there are other readers, and because those readers presumably don't know whatever magic incantation makes Acrobat Reader recognize linearization (which is a not an extension but rather is a core part of the spec), you could write PDF-producing software that might work 100% well with those other readers. But in the corporate world, that's not good enough; when a business publishes something as PDF, it needs to work wtih Acrobat.
Regardless of the legal merits (or lack thereof) of their claims, and regardless of the general sleeze factor, there's really one lesson we should all learn if we didn't know it already:
A corporation, legal euphamisms aside, is not a person. You can't rely on its sense of honor, even if you think it believed it was making a true promise. You can't rely on it to have a single, consistent mind on any given issue. In short, a "promise" from a corporation means zero (perhaps less if the "promise" was in a press release). Licenses and contracts (in verifiable form - i.e. written and signed) can mean something, but without one you have no shield from liability if the company decides it didn't really promise what you think it promised.
Maybe so, but this isn't new behavior on Adobe's part.
They make a big deal of publishing the PDF spec, but (at least as of five years ago) they publisehd only enough information in the spec that you can write a good PDF reader. They leave out details that you would need to make their reader respond correctly to optimizations like linearized PDF (which you really need to do lengthly web-delivered documents "right") in documents you create, and when you call them on it they say they don't support development of applications that write PDF.
In other words, it's "open" enough to encourage broader use of the format, while maintaining lock-in as the only suitable producer of content in that format.
Well, I believe you're correct, but it doesn't matter unless someone actually stands up to fight the point.
MySQL or Adobe or anyone else can take whatever legal stand they like, no matter how bizarre. They issue a DMCA take-down notice, and there's a process for conteseting it. But even if the notice is completely invalid, if the other guy compiles and doesn't challenge them, then they get all benefit and no cost for their action.
Unless and until trial, it doesn't matter what the law says; it matters who blinks.
Cell phones don't use the phone number as a method of authentication. Cell phone users use the phone number as a method of identification (when they place a call or send a message to the number).
The network "looks for" the identified phone so it can deliver the message. Rather, the network looks for a phone that has authenticated as a match for the phone number.
The process by which the phone authenticates may well be flawed, but this has nothing to do with the end-user simplicity of "phone numbers"; the process is already decoupled from that simplicity as the phone # is not the information used to authenticate the phone on the network.
"Women were excluded, and therefore any gene not on the Y chromosome would have been excluded from being affected."
Yet another case of a perfectly good post, soiled by over-reaching in the last paragraph.
Men have an X chromoxome as well. They pass the information on this chromosome on to any daughters they might have. The impact on genes from the Y chromosome would be greater, but not exclusive.
You might think it doesn't matter because negative traits tend to be recessive, so the unaffected pool of women's X chromosomes would keep things in balance. Even if this tendency were absolute, it wouldn't eliminate the impact of the men's X chromosomes; it could delay it (at most) 1 generation. A disproportionate number of females in the next generation would be carriers for the recessive trait.
There are any number of reasons why a breathalyzer might be better for field use than another test, yet that other test would serve as a perfectly good baseline for lab testing / calibration of the breathalyzer.
For example, you can't take and analyze a urine sample road-side during a traffic stop. A breathalyzer doesn't involve drawing blood, or require a lab or a technician's time to analyze each reading.
Those are the "pro"s. Proper testing would tell us whether there's a "con" to offset them -- that being a loss of accuracy.
That's an interesting definition of "it works". By any chance are you in our QA department?
"Can the defense prove that the code was written so haphazardly that it ignores some data or does it round incorrectly like Excel does? These things do and can happen with sloppy code."
These things can be and are detected by proper testing.
Infering that they might have happeend because the code is sloppy and sloppy code might do that, is a bit like infering that Johny might have stolen a CD because Johny is a teenager and teenagers might do that.
The issue isn't the quality of the code; the issue is the absence of proper testing requirements around these devices.
"Calibration and testing won't reveal all the edge cases that might cause errors"
Then you aren't testing correctly.
"I can see a way that badly-written code would turn that into an average speed of 106 MPH "
You may need to revisit the legal definition of "reasonable doubt". Being able to contemplate a scenario where the evidence could be wrong is not sufficient to overturn the evidence.
Regardless, if the testers don't know that "an input suffered overflow or underflow" is an edge case they need to test, then they aren't testers.
Yes, but to GP's point - if the code had been subjected to proper tests, then it wouldn't matter how hard it was to maintain. Either the maintainers overcame that difficulty and it passed the test, or they didn't and it failed.
My first thought as well.
Of course, with poorly written code, it's hard to show whether or not the code ultimately works by examination of the code.
Then again, proving that the code works (which should be the standard when the code is analyzed in court) by code examination is very difficult even for well-written code.
Perhaps a better approach would be documented, repeatable testing of the device. When I challenge a radar gun, I get to ask about its calibration documents, but I don't think I get to debate the blueprints from which it was built.
My personal opinion - and before getting on an "innocent until proven guilty" kick bear in mind that I'm not a part of the court system in this case - is that the defense realizes that almost all software systems look awful and are trying to game their way out of a conviction they've probably earned.
That said, if for no other reason then to eliminate such gaming, there should be standards for testing and documenting the proper function of these devices. Any device that can't be calibrated and tested with sufficient certainty should be banned from use as evidence in court. If the device passes the test, then exactly how it does it shouldn't really matter.
"Your frame of reference *IS* the universe"
No, it isn't.
"or at least how you measure it"
Correct. A ruler is how I measure a piece of wood, but the ruler is not the piece of wood.
Fixed in your frame of reference. Not fixed in the Universe.
Yes... but so what? I assume you're challenging my thinking about why the cable company didn't assert fair use?
I'm not saying that a company doesn't have fair use rights, but I am saying that (1) it is very possible that neither a company nor an individual could assert fair use to justify time-shifting on someone else's behalf, particularly on a commercial basis; and (2) the fair use criteria are complex enough that they may not apply the same way to a company as they apply to you or me.
No, your arbitrary choice does not make the point "fixed", even within the context of your calculation. It merely makes it a reference.
"flying through space at 17,200 MPH, 300 miles above the Earth's surface. " Not impressive.
Then let's see you do it.
"relative to some arbitrarily fixed point in the universe"
I think you just made Einstein cry.
And in a post about the importance of relative measurements, no less.
There is no such thing as a "fixed point in the universe".