Nope, I don't think that they should have a right to sue in that case, because it's the same thing. AIM is a strong trademark, given the installed base. Does that mean AOL should have the right to sue the Aim Recording Company
No. AIM isn't that strong. Such strengths are generally reserved for trademarks such as AMERICA ONLINE®, WARNER BROS.®, NINTENDO®, POKEMON®, MICROSOFT®, DISNEY®, STAR WARS®, and other marks along those lines where use of a trademark by a company in a related field would be considered endorsement of the new business by the existing TM owner. For example, Israel's Supreme Court overturned a registration for "BAKARDI" brand jeans because it was too similar to BACARDI® brand liquor. The Republic of China, based on the island Taiwan, also has a law about famous trademarks. And here's some information about the Federal Trademark Dilution Act of 1995, which sets guidelines for protection of famous trademarks in the U.S.
But remember Tetrisgate? The Tetris Company was found not to have a copyright or patent on the game of falling tetraminoes but merely a trademark on TETRIS®; the cloners simply changed the names of their games, all of which had been clean-room from the start. Nevertheless, the findings didn't stop a quality control consulting firm based out of Edmonton, Alberta, from calling itself Tetris Management Group. Guess the TETRIS trademark isn't that strong in Canada.
Government-granted monopolies[?] are easiest to deal with when problems are solved before they escalate; that's why trademark law (unlike US copyright and patent law) requires TM owners to react in a speedy manner, that is, either license or sue would-be infringers.
TROFF: The story of a computer program transported to the real world.
I see you've grasped the true origin of the name of TRON (trace on). But the story of a computer program embodied in a real world entity has already been done... by Warner Bros. Pictures, a division of AOL.
Every minute we waste is another minute we spend evolving (or not). It is predicted that by the year 802,701, the human race will have evolved into something resembling Precious Moments figurines. We only have 800,700 years to make sure that the carnivorous ant people don't come down from space, enslave us, and eventually farm us for food.
Maybe someday we'll see RFCs in HTML - that way we there can be links instead of footnotes. Now that would be progress.
I'm sure that it would be straightforward to write a filter program in a text processing language such as Ruby, Python, or Perl to translate the plain text format of RFCs into HTML markup. However, it would be a little tougher to resolve bibliographic references to a printed work into links to the book's BN Fatbrain page.
/48 means that an ISP assigns a customer a 48 bit address prefix, letting the customer assign the other 80 bits however e wants. An IPv6 address, written in hexadecimal, looks like pppp.pppp.pppp.ssss.hhhh.hhhh.hhhh.hhhh where each letter represents four bits of address: p is the prefix (assigned by ISP), s is the subnet (assigned by user), and h is the host (assigned by user).
Lucas has 1 trademark for the term "light saber", number 1126220. It's stated very carefully that it is a toy sword, and it is categorized under toys and recreation... Minrad has one trademark application for the term "light saber", filed in April of 2000. It's categorized under medical equipment. Not anything remotely connected to toys.
It's true that trademarks usually are restricted to one domain of goods and services, but sufficiently strong trademarks can gain protection across trademark domains. For example, if a surgical tools company called its new tool "LEGO", don't you think the LEGO Group would have a right to sue?
The question here is whether LIGHT SABER® is strong enough and famous enough to cross domains.
DISCLAIMER: Most of the "armchair lawyers" on Slashdot are full of sh*t, myself included.
Am I the only one who still sees "DDR RAM" and thinks "dance dance revolution random access memory?"
Am I the only one who still sees "DDR RAM" and thinks "RAM made in what used to be East Germany[?]"?
Easy way to generate noise; fractal dimension
on
The Sound of Safety?
·
· Score: 1
The creator of the sound said that it contains a "massive amount of frequencies..." Shouldn't a sound like this be hard to reproduce effectively on computer speakers?
Easy way to generate white noise: cat/dev/random >/dev/audio (I forget the dd syntax used to generate short bursts). I can also do it easily from Cool Edit, and even an old NES console can do it through a 15-bit LFSR. Can you say "prior art"? I know you can.
Other noises include brown noise[?] (named after Brownian motion; integral of white noise; falls off at 6 dB per octave, that is, it contains an equal amount of amplitude in each octave) and pink noise[?] (named after Pink Floyd; sum of white noises bandpassed to octaves; falls off at 3 dB per octave, that is, it contains an equal amount of energy in each octave). It's also possible to make "in-between" noises using simple fractal methods; as falloff and fractal dimension are two ways of measuring the same thing, brown/pink/white noise becomes a mere special case.
if a friend emails you a suspicious.exe, you create a phony account with no permissions then run it from that account. This is also possible in Win2K
Most home users would rather be 0wn3d than spend $200 to upgrade.
and Windows XP.
This virus is here now, and Windows XP isn't in stores yet. Besides, most home users would rather be 0wn3d than spend $1000 to upgrade to a new computer that counteracts the effects of Gates' Law[?] that makes each operating system release run twice as slow and take up twice as much disk space as the one 18 months before.
The DMCA is about tools for defeating protection schemes to gain access to a copy-protected work.
Say we have a protection scheme. Call it a "share." There are copyrighted (but legitimately licensed) works on this share, but the system requires an authentication step to access the works. Now, if a fellow figures out how to get into a share without the information necessary to authenticate, he has violated the letter of the DMCA.
It is highly likely that at the next report of a hole in Windows shares, Bugtraq will be sued for disseminating information on how to get w4r3z from an unsuspecting user who has shared the C: drive.
simply viewing some GPL'ed code to get the general idea of how something is done and then writing you own stuff?
The GNU General Public License's definition of "derivative work" is the same as that of United States copyright law, and that definition is not crystal clear. Read about how computer BIOS programs were reverse-engineered and cloned to see the lengths that companies such as Compaq have to go through to make sure that they don't "accidentally" create a derivative work. You're going to have to translate the source code into English and "summarize" it down to an API, and somebody with whom you have never met face-to-face (and thus has never had a chance to see the actual code) will have to actually implement the API. This works because United States copyright law recognizes the possibility of independently arriving at the same copyrighted work. Copyrights are not patents.
DISCLAIMER: Nothing you read on Slashdot is legal advice; only your attorney can provide that.
"That if you sue anyone over patents that you think may apply to the Software for a person's use of the Software, your license to the Software ends automatically." Hmmm, this is different.
No it isn't. Section 7 of the GNU GPL provides that "For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."
"That your rights under the License end automatically if you breach it in any way." Very different from the GPL!
Wrong again. GPL section 4: "You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License."
The biggest differences I see are lack of copyleft and prohibition against use for commercial purposes. Would "downloading the source and compiling it so that you earn back the money that you would otherwise have spent on licensing Microsoft binaries (hereinafter 'Profit')" be considered a commercial purpose because Microsoft couldn't sell an academic license?
Mail programs don't respond to the "From" address, they respond to the "Reply-To" address.
But humans respond to the From: address, not the Reply-To: address. Another poster mentioned that small businesses don't want to have an amateurish "From: foo@verizon.net; Reply-To: webmaster@whatevercompany.com" in their headers.
When you buy a car from Ford do you have to use a Ford stereo? Is there a component in the stereo which is used by your anti-lock brakes, so that if you don't own a Ford(tm) stereo your ABS will not work?
Replace "anti-lock brakes" with "heater and air" and you describe exactly how a Ford Taurus works. The Taurus's climate controls are built into the same oval-shaped part that houses the car stereo.
stop the presses! to benefit users, Microsoft has created a new performance metric: Average Distance Between Bytes!
You bring up a good point. Microsoft could have done this because profiling the code showed that locating some functions in some DLLs increased the locality of code in the cache, thereby boosting IE's performance by a couple percent.
I've been using Windows 2000 for some time not and I haven't noticed the same instabilities that plagued Windows 98.
By "Windows" in my comment, I meant "Windows 9x operating systems" because most users aren't willing to spend $200 to upgrade to an NT-based system such as Win2k. Perhaps what I said at the end about Windows XP being more reliable should have clarified that this is because Microsoft is moving to an NT kernel for operating systems in the $150 price range.
I'm not a student, I work for a living doing a very specific type of job that doesn't require that I know the OS and doesn't leave me with a lot of spare time to learn.
In that case, could you donate money to the netfilter project and earmark it for a better setup wizard?
Because some users only have a minimal DJGPP or
MinGW32 compiler installed on their system and
not the full set of GNU/DJGPP or Cygwin tools
(namely, GNU textutils) that contains 'tr'.
Here's something I hacked up in an hour last year:
/* ROT.C by Damian Yerrick
Rotates the ASCII letters in foo.txt forward by n letters.
Copyright (C) 2000 Damian Yerrick
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You can find a copy of the GNU General Public License at
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
Mail Damian Yerrick from his web site
http://pineight.com/mail.htm
Use examples:
rot 13 < foo.txt
echo HAL | rot 1
*/
/* in C because slashdot's lameness filter rejects Perl code as a 'junk character post' */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int chrrotate(int letter, int rot)
{
if(letter >= 'A' && letter <= 'Z')
{
letter += rot;
if(letter > 'Z')
letter -= 26;
}
else if(letter >= 'a' && letter <= 'z')
{
letter += rot;
if(letter > 'z')
letter -= 26;
}
return letter;
}
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
int rotn = 13;
if(argc >= 2)
rotn = atoi(argv[1]);
/* get rotn above 0 but under 26 */
rotn = (rotn + 26 * (rotn / 26 + 1)) % 26;
/*
printf("rot%d\n", rotn);
*/
The average user doesn't give a rat's ass about how secure/stable/l337/whatever an OS is. They just want something that behaves in a reliable, predictable manner
Do you mean "a reliable, predictable manner" that the computer won't crash or freeze or hang or let some 13-year-old delete all your files, or do you mean the "reliable, predictable manner" of Windows 9x that that under a good-sized workload, it's "reliable" and "predictable" that the computer will put up a blue screen of death? To me, a reasonable amount of stability and security is necessary for reliability.
There's a reason there's so many jokes about the clock on VCR's.
Even without the auto clock set feature on modern VCRs, the clocks on most VHS VCRs I've touched (manufactured 1988 and later) are no harder to set than a $10 alarm clock from Wal*Mart. The problem here is with users that can't be bothered to read one page of quick-start documentation.
My favorite example is the automatic transmission. I know it works reasonably well, and know when it's broken.
The analogy breaks down when you realize that you can take an automobile into any transmission shop to get a blown tranny fixed, but for a proprietary operating system, you have to wait for a patch from the single point of failure more commonly known as the OS publisher.
Meanwhile, MS and Apple are trying to make computers easier for the masses.
I'll give Apple credit for Mac OS X, but until this year with the reliability improvements that come with the release of Windows XP, Microsoft hasn't deserved it.
As you said, you installed it for them. You took all the learning curve out. They just have to use WindowMaker. For them, this was a "push one button" porcess. If everybody had a cousin handy to set-up their Linux with the apps they want to use, then I'm sure more people would use it. But this isn't the case for most.
s/cousin/OEM/g and you have described the current situation. Have you tried installing Windows on a bare hard drive? Most people haven't; they rely on their system builder to create a half-working Windows system. (Even OEMs sometimes have trouble getting it right every time; when I first unpacked and turned on my Dell Dimension box with Windows ME pre-loaded, it blue-screened: "Windows protection error. You need to restart your computer. System halted.")
I would expect that these people should be willing to pay to download music, and it shouldn't matter whether it's in a proprietary format, unless players are not made widely available.
If a song is published only in a proprietary format with access controls, nobody in the industry will care whether the song is playable on Solaris. Or BSD. Or BeOS. Or Linux. Or any workstation operating system other than Windows or Mac OS. Or any non-workstation operating system such as embedded firmware for car stereos.
In fact, I would expect that users who really want to pay for downloadable music should be largely indifferent as to whether the format is proprietary or not (again, assuming availability of players).
This assumption is WAY too important to just gloss over as you do. MP3 players (and soon, Ogg Vorbis players) fit in a fellow's pants pocket; computers running RealPlayer, QuickTime, and WiMP don't.
And then there's the issue of the access control. "No, you may not play this in your car. No, you may not play this more than three times without re-buying it. No, you may not play this on a multiuser operating system because the song is not licensed for commercial use. No, you may not play this to a speaker with analog connections or unencrypted digital connections, or to a speaker that hasn't been tamper-proofed."
I own patent 4711/12345 "A method of movement by moving one foot in front of the other to get from a place to another place, regardless of the pace with which this method is applied".
I'll play along: The developers of GNU, PNG, and Ogg Vorbis have worked together to produce another way of getting from one place to another without using feet or legs at all.
I mean really what's the difference between grabbing a.html and a.zip, just beause one is displayed immediately and one is stored doesn't change the fact that they are both downloaded.
That's precisely the difference. The patent refers to an "information manufacturing machine," i.e. a removable storage device.
In reply to "What will imaging professionals use instead of Photoshop?": bring out the gimp!
No. GIMP does NOT support CMYK process colors or PANTONE colors. Imaging professionals use PANTONE colors, and most of the good algorithms for going between RGB, CMYK, and PANTONE are patented. No, inverting the RGB components and subtracting the minimum does not count, as CMYK is highly nonlinear.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, I don't think that they should have a right to sue in that case, because it's the same thing. AIM is a strong trademark, given the installed base. Does that mean AOL should have the right to sue the Aim Recording Company
No. AIM isn't that strong. Such strengths are generally reserved for trademarks such as AMERICA ONLINE®, WARNER BROS.®, NINTENDO®, POKEMON®, MICROSOFT®, DISNEY®, STAR WARS®, and other marks along those lines where use of a trademark by a company in a related field would be considered endorsement of the new business by the existing TM owner. For example, Israel's Supreme Court overturned a registration for "BAKARDI" brand jeans because it was too similar to BACARDI® brand liquor. The Republic of China, based on the island Taiwan, also has a law about famous trademarks. And here's some information about the Federal Trademark Dilution Act of 1995, which sets guidelines for protection of famous trademarks in the U.S.
But remember Tetrisgate? The Tetris Company was found not to have a copyright or patent on the game of falling tetraminoes but merely a trademark on TETRIS®; the cloners simply changed the names of their games, all of which had been clean-room from the start. Nevertheless, the findings didn't stop a quality control consulting firm based out of Edmonton, Alberta, from calling itself Tetris Management Group. Guess the TETRIS trademark isn't that strong in Canada.
Government-granted monopolies[?] are easiest to deal with when problems are solved before they escalate; that's why trademark law (unlike US copyright and patent law) requires TM owners to react in a speedy manner, that is, either license or sue would-be infringers.
Oh, and by the way, according to Lego^H^H^H^H Elgo Irrigation's web site, there was a recent name change.
TROFF: The story of a computer program transported to the real world.
I see you've grasped the true origin of the name of TRON (trace on). But the story of a computer program embodied in a real world entity has already been done... by Warner Bros. Pictures, a division of AOL.
A.I.: The Story of a Robot Who Is Even More Obsessed With Pinocchio Than I Am
You took up 2 precious minutes
Every minute we waste is another minute we spend evolving (or not). It is predicted that by the year 802,701, the human race will have evolved into something resembling Precious Moments figurines. We only have 800,700 years to make sure that the carnivorous ant people don't come down from space, enslave us, and eventually farm us for food.
Maybe someday we'll see RFCs in HTML - that way we there can be links instead of footnotes. Now that would be progress.
I'm sure that it would be straightforward to write a filter program in a text processing language such as Ruby, Python, or Perl to translate the plain text format of RFCs into HTML markup. However, it would be a little tougher to resolve bibliographic references to a printed work into links to the book's BN Fatbrain page.
What does /48 mean?
Lucas has 1 trademark for the term "light saber", number 1126220. It's stated very carefully that it is a toy sword, and it is categorized under toys and recreation ... Minrad has one trademark application for the term "light saber", filed in April of 2000. It's categorized under medical equipment. Not anything remotely connected to toys.
It's true that trademarks usually are restricted to one domain of goods and services, but sufficiently strong trademarks can gain protection across trademark domains. For example, if a surgical tools company called its new tool "LEGO", don't you think the LEGO Group would have a right to sue?
The question here is whether LIGHT SABER® is strong enough and famous enough to cross domains.
DISCLAIMER: Most of the "armchair lawyers" on Slashdot are full of sh*t, myself included.Am I the only one who still sees "DDR RAM" and thinks "dance dance revolution random access memory?"
Am I the only one who still sees "DDR RAM" and thinks "RAM made in what used to be East Germany[?]"?
The creator of the sound said that it contains a "massive amount of frequencies..." Shouldn't a sound like this be hard to reproduce effectively on computer speakers?
Easy way to generate white noise: cat /dev/random > /dev/audio (I forget the dd syntax used to generate short bursts). I can also do it easily from Cool Edit, and even an old NES console can do it through a 15-bit LFSR. Can you say "prior art"? I know you can.
Other noises include brown noise[?] (named after Brownian motion; integral of white noise; falls off at 6 dB per octave, that is, it contains an equal amount of amplitude in each octave) and pink noise[?] (named after Pink Floyd; sum of white noises bandpassed to octaves; falls off at 3 dB per octave, that is, it contains an equal amount of energy in each octave). It's also possible to make "in-between" noises using simple fractal methods; as falloff and fractal dimension are two ways of measuring the same thing, brown/pink/white noise becomes a mere special case.
if a friend emails you a suspicious .exe, you create a phony account with no permissions then run it from that account. This is also possible in Win2K
Most home users would rather be 0wn3d than spend $200 to upgrade.
and Windows XP.
This virus is here now, and Windows XP isn't in stores yet. Besides, most home users would rather be 0wn3d than spend $1000 to upgrade to a new computer that counteracts the effects of Gates' Law[?] that makes each operating system release run twice as slow and take up twice as much disk space as the one 18 months before.
The DMCA is about tools for defeating protection schemes to gain access to a copy-protected work.
Say we have a protection scheme. Call it a "share." There are copyrighted (but legitimately licensed) works on this share, but the system requires an authentication step to access the works. Now, if a fellow figures out how to get into a share without the information necessary to authenticate, he has violated the letter of the DMCA.
It is highly likely that at the next report of a hole in Windows shares, Bugtraq will be sued for disseminating information on how to get w4r3z from an unsuspecting user who has shared the C: drive.
simply viewing some GPL'ed code to get the general idea of how something is done and then writing you own stuff?
The GNU General Public License's definition of "derivative work" is the same as that of United States copyright law, and that definition is not crystal clear. Read about how computer BIOS programs were reverse-engineered and cloned to see the lengths that companies such as Compaq have to go through to make sure that they don't "accidentally" create a derivative work. You're going to have to translate the source code into English and "summarize" it down to an API, and somebody with whom you have never met face-to-face (and thus has never had a chance to see the actual code) will have to actually implement the API. This works because United States copyright law recognizes the possibility of independently arriving at the same copyrighted work. Copyrights are not patents.
DISCLAIMER: Nothing you read on Slashdot is legal advice; only your attorney can provide that."That if you sue anyone over patents that you think may apply to the Software for a person's use of the Software, your license to the Software ends automatically." Hmmm, this is different.
No it isn't. Section 7 of the GNU GPL provides that "For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."
"That your rights under the License end automatically if you breach it in any way." Very different from the GPL!
Wrong again. GPL section 4: "You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License."
The biggest differences I see are lack of copyleft and prohibition against use for commercial purposes. Would "downloading the source and compiling it so that you earn back the money that you would otherwise have spent on licensing Microsoft binaries (hereinafter 'Profit')" be considered a commercial purpose because Microsoft couldn't sell an academic license?
Mail programs don't respond to the "From" address, they respond to the "Reply-To" address.
But humans respond to the From: address, not the Reply-To: address. Another poster mentioned that small businesses don't want to have an amateurish "From: foo@verizon.net; Reply-To: webmaster@whatevercompany.com" in their headers.
When you buy a car from Ford do you have to use a Ford stereo? Is there a component in the stereo which is used by your anti-lock brakes, so that if you don't own a Ford(tm) stereo your ABS will not work?
Replace "anti-lock brakes" with "heater and air" and you describe exactly how a Ford Taurus works. The Taurus's climate controls are built into the same oval-shaped part that houses the car stereo.
stop the presses! to benefit users, Microsoft has created a new performance metric: Average Distance Between Bytes!
You bring up a good point. Microsoft could have done this because profiling the code showed that locating some functions in some DLLs increased the locality of code in the cache, thereby boosting IE's performance by a couple percent.
I've been using Windows 2000 for some time not and I haven't noticed the same instabilities that plagued Windows 98.
By "Windows" in my comment, I meant "Windows 9x operating systems" because most users aren't willing to spend $200 to upgrade to an NT-based system such as Win2k. Perhaps what I said at the end about Windows XP being more reliable should have clarified that this is because Microsoft is moving to an NT kernel for operating systems in the $150 price range.
I'm not a student, I work for a living doing a very specific type of job that doesn't require that I know the OS and doesn't leave me with a lot of spare time to learn.
In that case, could you donate money to the netfilter project and earmark it for a better setup wizard?
> Why waste time with C programs?
/* get rotn above 0 but under 26 */
Because some users only have a minimal DJGPP or
MinGW32 compiler installed on their system and
not the full set of GNU/DJGPP or Cygwin tools
(namely, GNU textutils) that contains 'tr'.
Here's something I hacked up in an hour last year:
/* ROT.C by Damian Yerrick
Rotates the ASCII letters in foo.txt forward by n letters.
Copyright (C) 2000 Damian Yerrick
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You can find a copy of the GNU General Public License at
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
Mail Damian Yerrick from his web site
http://pineight.com/mail.htm
Use examples:
rot 13 < foo.txt
echo HAL | rot 1
*/
/* in C because slashdot's lameness filter rejects Perl code as a 'junk character post' */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int chrrotate(int letter, int rot)
{
if(letter >= 'A' && letter <= 'Z')
{
letter += rot;
if(letter > 'Z')
letter -= 26;
}
else if(letter >= 'a' && letter <= 'z')
{
letter += rot;
if(letter > 'z')
letter -= 26;
}
return letter;
}
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
int rotn = 13;
if(argc >= 2)
rotn = atoi(argv[1]);
rotn = (rotn + 26 * (rotn / 26 + 1)) % 26;
/*
printf("rot%d\n", rotn);
*/
while(!feof(stdin))
putchar(chrrotate(getchar(), rotn));
return 0;
}
The average user doesn't give a rat's ass about how secure/stable/l337/whatever an OS is. They just want something that behaves in a reliable, predictable manner
Do you mean "a reliable, predictable manner" that the computer won't crash or freeze or hang or let some 13-year-old delete all your files, or do you mean the "reliable, predictable manner" of Windows 9x that that under a good-sized workload, it's "reliable" and "predictable" that the computer will put up a blue screen of death? To me, a reasonable amount of stability and security is necessary for reliability.
There's a reason there's so many jokes about the clock on VCR's.
Even without the auto clock set feature on modern VCRs, the clocks on most VHS VCRs I've touched (manufactured 1988 and later) are no harder to set than a $10 alarm clock from Wal*Mart. The problem here is with users that can't be bothered to read one page of quick-start documentation.
My favorite example is the automatic transmission. I know it works reasonably well, and know when it's broken.
The analogy breaks down when you realize that you can take an automobile into any transmission shop to get a blown tranny fixed, but for a proprietary operating system, you have to wait for a patch from the single point of failure more commonly known as the OS publisher.
Meanwhile, MS and Apple are trying to make computers easier for the masses.
I'll give Apple credit for Mac OS X, but until this year with the reliability improvements that come with the release of Windows XP, Microsoft hasn't deserved it.
As you said, you installed it for them. You took all the learning curve out. They just have to use WindowMaker. For them, this was a "push one button" porcess. If everybody had a cousin handy to set-up their Linux with the apps they want to use, then I'm sure more people would use it. But this isn't the case for most.
s/cousin/OEM/g and you have described the current situation. Have you tried installing Windows on a bare hard drive? Most people haven't; they rely on their system builder to create a half-working Windows system. (Even OEMs sometimes have trouble getting it right every time; when I first unpacked and turned on my Dell Dimension box with Windows ME pre-loaded, it blue-screened: "Windows protection error. You need to restart your computer. System halted.")
I would expect that these people should be willing to pay to download music, and it shouldn't matter whether it's in a proprietary format, unless players are not made widely available.
If a song is published only in a proprietary format with access controls, nobody in the industry will care whether the song is playable on Solaris. Or BSD. Or BeOS. Or Linux. Or any workstation operating system other than Windows or Mac OS. Or any non-workstation operating system such as embedded firmware for car stereos.
In fact, I would expect that users who really want to pay for downloadable music should be largely indifferent as to whether the format is proprietary or not (again, assuming availability of players).
This assumption is WAY too important to just gloss over as you do. MP3 players (and soon, Ogg Vorbis players) fit in a fellow's pants pocket; computers running RealPlayer, QuickTime, and WiMP don't.
And then there's the issue of the access control. "No, you may not play this in your car. No, you may not play this more than three times without re-buying it. No, you may not play this on a multiuser operating system because the song is not licensed for commercial use. No, you may not play this to a speaker with analog connections or unencrypted digital connections, or to a speaker that hasn't been tamper-proofed."
but since bandwidth is cheap (if you have high speed access then each marginal byte you send is virtually free)
But there are still fixed costs involved, such as $200,000 to move house to an area where non-draconian broadband is available.
Suppose you could get Acme Office (100% similar product) for free
People would just go to OpenOffice.org and download it. That's what the Dutch are doing.
I own patent 4711/12345 "A method of movement by moving one foot in front of the other to get from a place to another place, regardless of the pace with which this method is applied".
I'll play along: The developers of GNU, PNG, and Ogg Vorbis have worked together to produce another way of getting from one place to another without using feet or legs at all.
(Demonstration)
I mean really what's the difference between grabbing a .html and a .zip, just beause one is displayed immediately and one is stored doesn't change the fact that they are both downloaded.
That's precisely the difference. The patent refers to an "information manufacturing machine," i.e. a removable storage device.
In reply to "What will imaging professionals use instead of Photoshop?": bring out the gimp!
No. GIMP does NOT support CMYK process colors or PANTONE colors. Imaging professionals use PANTONE colors, and most of the good algorithms for going between RGB, CMYK, and PANTONE are patented. No, inverting the RGB components and subtracting the minimum does not count, as CMYK is highly nonlinear.