Are there some reliable browser metrics out there? Your own site stats don't count
Well, yes, there is an admitted standard, put out by a company that's a huge backer of open source. The Google Zeitgeist.
Unfortunately for your thesis, the zeitgeist tends to support what your marketers are teling you: Mozilla doubled all the way to 2%! Not important at the start, and very likely gone next month.
It isn't a missing or currpted Windows file, it is a report of a missing file named 'winserv.exe'. That file isn't a part of Windows but rather spyware with a (surprise) deceptive name. It shouldn't be on the system at all.
As to the famous "3 out of 5" comment, this post explains that problem better than I can. Basically, the guy who published the original article appears to have installed spyware on his system, and then he's blaming MS because his spyware doesn't work.
Actually, you can prevent them from installing this. Pocket PC devices can be configured to block all software installation except for programs already installed. Wouldn't that solve your problem?
Umm, no, not quite. Civil decisions can have a chilling effect on free speech, and so the power to sue is circumscribed by first amendment protection, too. He can sue, yes, but he may not get his day in court.
In this case, though, the suit is not about what was said, but rather about whether Yahoo did or did not make a good faith effort to suppress slandar after it was informed that the slandar had taken place. When you subscribe to their message boards, you click a standards of use contract. It binds Yahoo to remove certain postings. If Yahoo does not actually remove those posting, then there's a question of fraud and/or breach of contract, not first amendment rights.
Ah, but my point was that the thirteen-year-old got raked over the coals...and then had to flatten and rebuild the box himself. ANd a lot of people have someone who will gladly rake them over the coals for installing spyware on their box.
You don't understand what "support" we get for an install like this. We get an e-mail from JimA or BrianV with a pointer and a request to install both at work and at home. That's all. The only case when anything special happens is if an install blows up -- and the special thing there is a couple of requests: "Please send us your configuration and recent activity. And can we run this software inventory tool on the box, please?"
Meanwhile, the company runs huge install fests around Redmond, recruiting as many non-employees as we can, trying to ferret out all the errors we can.
The only case where I've had a problem is on the kids' gaming machine. One of them had installed something which came with a "present" attached without asking me first. He got to oversee the fun of flattening the machine down to the ground and rebuilding it.
The relevance of these allegations to a claim of misappropriation of information is pretty clear. If true, this would be a completely acceptable basis for extending the lawsuit.
And as for this:
you cannot share with the world information you found in confidence during discovery...Darl is going to be found in contempt.
Nope. He didn't reveal any information that was released in confidence -- he revealed that they have such information. That's a completely different thing.
Answer me this:
If I choose some convient/simple software patent, and I then proceed to in fact execute that software through pure thought, have I committed patent violation? Were my thoughts a violation of the law?
No -- and therein lies the crux of the argument. Go to any software patent and look at the claims. You'll see they all refer to "method and system for"...
This is the key point: You can't patent an algorithm. You can only patent a device. So, for instance, running through RSA on the blackboard was never violating their patent; only if you implemented the RSA algorithm on a calculating device would it be a violation. (And, yes, "calculating device" is defined in excruciating detail in every patent that refers to one.)
The parent (which is AC, so invisible by default) says:
you don't seem to understand that europe still has a chance to stop software patents if they act NOW. the greens of munich are doing the best thing anyone could to to opensource at the moment.
On the contrary, I know the European patent situation pretty well. The Greens are still shooting themselves in the foot.
Let's suppose that the threat of the patents in question is real, instead of fake. So, open source is hurt by those patents -- but, by exactly the same token, the firms and people who took those patents out had, in fact, done innovative work which has direct economic value. That's what patents are designed to protect -- not just earth-shattering discoveries, but equally incremental improvements which make things faster, cheaper, and more efficient.
The Greens are explicitly showing that the failure of the European Union to permit enforcement of those patents has prevented people from collecting royalties for their creativity, exactly as the advocates of software patents have been saying. As the patent advocates were alone in saying that, they could be discounted as misstating the truth on their own behalf. That's not possible any more, thanks to the Greens and the FFII, and it makes arguing against patentability that much harder.
What the greens are doing in this case is rising awareness about a very important issue for the OS/FS community.
That may be what the Greens meant to do, but what they did do was take a very large gun, point it at their foot, and pull the trigger. No one has sued, yet the Greens and the FFII appear to have managed to kill their own pet project for computing, and to do it in such a way that any future projects of the same flavor now have a far higher bar to cross.
Why is it underhanded? It forces Microsoft to show that it's worth the money. (Telstra's prices aren't out of line for a large customer. They're still paying $87(US)/seat-year. That's not to far from what an OEM pays for XP + OXP + W2k3 + E2k3.)
In fact, far from "bad news for M$", this is yet another instance of the problem Linux has been facing. The only major wins Linux has been getting against Microsoft have been political ones like Munich. They haven't won the business case for any large account. (Even IBM is only "thinking" about migrating so far. Hardly a vote of confidence.)
The big difference is that the IronPython guys have a release the you can test yourself. The python on parrot guys aren't close to that -- they couldn't even get parrotbench to run on their implementation.
No, there are a slough of top-flight hackers at Microsoft. Graham just doesn't know what he's talking about.
Graham wants the "very model" of a master hacker to be...Paul Graham. (Go read his article on Hacker and Painters if you don't think so.) He seems to suffer from Raymond-itis, in my opinion -- he wants so much to be a "part of the community" that he simply makes the best of "the community" a bunch of people like himself.
But that's the point -- the X Prize was established as a step towards making manned spaceflight stand on its own by reducing the costs to a sustainable level. Great, and I hope that works. In fact, I'd pay for a trip myself if I could afford it. Problem is, that's not the same thing as spending billions of dollars of tax money using people as human cannonballs for the sake of high-school science projects. In that regard, van Allen is right -- there's no good political or economic justification for manned flight right now, and until there is, we should be looking askance at the NASA budget for this week's politically expedient bureaucracy protection plan.
Well, actually, in the Hanford case, the goverment spent billions of dollars (10% of the 1945 GDP, for instance) producing this stuff...and then they put the waste products into steel drums. At the time, they weren't rusty.
Of course, that *was* sixty years ago. Unsurprisingly, those drums are rusty now, given that they contain corrosive materials. Ditto for the tanks -- they were sealed then, they aren't now. And the dry waste areas. They were fine then, and had they been conventional waste, they'd have been cleaned up long since. Unfortunately, they weren't conventional waste...
SCO(Caldera) says the ELF format [...] But SCO(SCO) was on the TISC
Actually, that's the key point. SCO(SCO) didn't have the Unix rights. SCO(Caldera) claims to have done so. SCO(Caldera) argues that SCO(SCO) didn't have the rights to release ELF. If SCO(Caldera) is right about holding the Unix SysV copyrights, then TISC's license wasn't valid, and the subsequent purchase didn't make it so.
As to the argument about header files, the author's simply wrong. The one case cited doesn't handle the question of organized name-value pairs, merely an operational interface.
In short, the Groklaw article is more bunko than debunk.
The headline isn't right; there is no second break-in. This is a different crowd of people involved in the same breakin that was discussed earlier. The previous arrest was of the guy who actually broke into the FTP server; this is the arrest of a spammer who used that data.
When you purchase a PS2, under traditional law, you purchase the item itself; at that point, it is yours to use and abuse, however you see fit,
assuming you break no laws in the process. [Emphasis mine.]
Fine, but that doesn't refute what I wrote. The key point is in the emphasized section. The High Court has decided that the installation of a modchip does break a law; thus, an individual may not add one, capitalism or no. There's no natural rights argument left; a statutory question was asked, and answered.
If you want to extend a natural rights argument, then by all means do that. It's just very hard to do so, given that we all know that the primary purpose of modchips is exactly what Sony's attorneys showed them to be in early court appearances. All natural rights arguments come down to balancing the cost of abuse against the loss of opportunity. It's very hard to make that argument stand up in the case of a modchip.
Uh, well, actually...no, that's nonsense. The rights of no citizens are being infringed upon, as they never had the "right" to install a modchip in their PS2's. A PS2 is a device for playing licensed PS2 games on. It has other legal uses (bookend and paperweight come to mind), just as it has certain other illegal uses (murder weapon and cocaine dispenser, for instance). The High Court has now concluded that the installation of a mod chip is an illegal use.
The buy back of 30B in shares is over the next 4 years. the $3 dividends is in december
Microsoft has 10.7G shares outstanding right now. The holder of each of those shares gets $3/share. That's $32.1G as a block in December.
More than that, the $3 is a one-time distribution. It's not appropriate to view it as an annuity, 'cause it aint. It's just a transfer of funds from the company to the shareholders, no more, no less.
No. It was explicitly not a finding that there was any evidence that Microsoft had acquired its monopoly in operating systems illegally. That's an important point: governments break up illegally acquired monopolies, independent of whether it will harm the companies involved or not. Judge Jackson's decision overreached, in part, because he used the wrong standard for considering the costs of the breakup to Microsoft. Since the monopoly was not illegally obtained, its fruits weren't illegal. Only the fruits of the illegal commingling of IE with the OS could be taken by the court -- and the government wasn't able to show that any of those existed.
You're confusing the buyback with the dividend. The dividend happens in December, all at once. After that is payed out, the company will have approx. $30G in the bank.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately for your thesis, the zeitgeist tends to support what your marketers are teling you: Mozilla doubled all the way to 2%! Not important at the start, and very likely gone next month.
It isn't a missing or currpted Windows file, it is a report of a missing file named 'winserv.exe'. That file isn't a part of Windows but rather spyware with a (surprise) deceptive name. It shouldn't be on the system at all.
No.
As to the famous "3 out of 5" comment, this post explains that problem better than I can. Basically, the guy who published the original article appears to have installed spyware on his system, and then he's blaming MS because his spyware doesn't work.
Actually, you can prevent them from installing this. Pocket PC devices can be configured to block all software installation except for programs already installed. Wouldn't that solve your problem?
Umm, no, not quite. Civil decisions can have a chilling effect on free speech, and so the power to sue is circumscribed by first amendment protection, too. He can sue, yes, but he may not get his day in court.
In this case, though, the suit is not about what was said, but rather about whether Yahoo did or did not make a good faith effort to suppress slandar after it was informed that the slandar had taken place. When you subscribe to their message boards, you click a standards of use contract. It binds Yahoo to remove certain postings. If Yahoo does not actually remove those posting, then there's a question of fraud and/or breach of contract, not first amendment rights.
Ah, but my point was that the thirteen-year-old got raked over the coals...and then had to flatten and rebuild the box himself. ANd a lot of people have someone who will gladly rake them over the coals for installing spyware on their box.
You don't understand what "support" we get for an install like this. We get an e-mail from JimA or BrianV with a pointer and a request to install both at work and at home. That's all. The only case when anything special happens is if an install blows up -- and the special thing there is a couple of requests: "Please send us your configuration and recent activity. And can we run this software inventory tool on the box, please?"
Meanwhile, the company runs huge install fests around Redmond, recruiting as many non-employees as we can, trying to ferret out all the errors we can.
The only case where I've had a problem is on the kids' gaming machine. One of them had installed something which came with a "present" attached without asking me first. He got to oversee the fun of flattening the machine down to the ground and rebuilding it.
And as for this:Nope. He didn't reveal any information that was released in confidence -- he revealed that they have such information. That's a completely different thing.
This is the key point: You can't patent an algorithm. You can only patent a device. So, for instance, running through RSA on the blackboard was never violating their patent; only if you implemented the RSA algorithm on a calculating device would it be a violation. (And, yes, "calculating device" is defined in excruciating detail in every patent that refers to one.)
Let's suppose that the threat of the patents in question is real, instead of fake. So, open source is hurt by those patents -- but, by exactly the same token, the firms and people who took those patents out had, in fact, done innovative work which has direct economic value. That's what patents are designed to protect -- not just earth-shattering discoveries, but equally incremental improvements which make things faster, cheaper, and more efficient.
The Greens are explicitly showing that the failure of the European Union to permit enforcement of those patents has prevented people from collecting royalties for their creativity, exactly as the advocates of software patents have been saying. As the patent advocates were alone in saying that, they could be discounted as misstating the truth on their own behalf. That's not possible any more, thanks to the Greens and the FFII, and it makes arguing against patentability that much harder.
Why is it underhanded? It forces Microsoft to show that it's worth the money. (Telstra's prices aren't out of line for a large customer. They're still paying $87(US)/seat-year. That's not to far from what an OEM pays for XP + OXP + W2k3 + E2k3.)
In fact, far from "bad news for M$", this is yet another instance of the problem Linux has been facing. The only major wins Linux has been getting against Microsoft have been political ones like Munich. They haven't won the business case for any large account. (Even IBM is only "thinking" about migrating so far. Hardly a vote of confidence.)
The big difference is that the IronPython guys have a release the you can test yourself. The python on parrot guys aren't close to that -- they couldn't even get parrotbench to run on their implementation.
Consumer electronic devices have a lot of programmatic ways to reduce battery drain.
shrug
Maybe he's right, but I doubt it.
But that's the point -- the X Prize was established as a step towards making manned spaceflight stand on its own by reducing the costs to a sustainable level. Great, and I hope that works. In fact, I'd pay for a trip myself if I could afford it. Problem is, that's not the same thing as spending billions of dollars of tax money using people as human cannonballs for the sake of high-school science projects. In that regard, van Allen is right -- there's no good political or economic justification for manned flight right now, and until there is, we should be looking askance at the NASA budget for this week's politically expedient bureaucracy protection plan.
Well, actually, in the Hanford case, the goverment spent billions of dollars (10% of the 1945 GDP, for instance) producing this stuff...and then they put the waste products into steel drums. At the time, they weren't rusty.
Of course, that *was* sixty years ago. Unsurprisingly, those drums are rusty now, given that they contain corrosive materials. Ditto for the tanks -- they were sealed then, they aren't now. And the dry waste areas. They were fine then, and had they been conventional waste, they'd have been cleaned up long since. Unfortunately, they weren't conventional waste...
As to the argument about header files, the author's simply wrong. The one case cited doesn't handle the question of organized name-value pairs, merely an operational interface.
In short, the Groklaw article is more bunko than debunk.
(Ob disc. I have family that works for Axciom.)
The headline isn't right; there is no second break-in. This is a different crowd of people involved in the same breakin that was discussed earlier. The previous arrest was of the guy who actually broke into the FTP server; this is the arrest of a spammer who used that data.
Fine, but that doesn't refute what I wrote. The key point is in the emphasized section. The High Court has decided that the installation of a modchip does break a law; thus, an individual may not add one, capitalism or no. There's no natural rights argument left; a statutory question was asked, and answered.
If you want to extend a natural rights argument, then by all means do that. It's just very hard to do so, given that we all know that the primary purpose of modchips is exactly what Sony's attorneys showed them to be in early court appearances. All natural rights arguments come down to balancing the cost of abuse against the loss of opportunity. It's very hard to make that argument stand up in the case of a modchip.
Uh, well, actually...no, that's nonsense. The rights of no citizens are being infringed upon, as they never had the "right" to install a modchip in their PS2's. A PS2 is a device for playing licensed PS2 games on. It has other legal uses (bookend and paperweight come to mind), just as it has certain other illegal uses (murder weapon and cocaine dispenser, for instance). The High Court has now concluded that the installation of a mod chip is an illegal use.
Linspore? Priceless. Now we have the triumvirate of commercial distros properly named: Dead Rat, Sues, and Linspore.
More than that, the $3 is a one-time distribution. It's not appropriate to view it as an annuity, 'cause it aint. It's just a transfer of funds from the company to the shareholders, no more, no less.
No. It was explicitly not a finding that there was any evidence that Microsoft had acquired its monopoly in operating systems illegally. That's an important point: governments break up illegally acquired monopolies, independent of whether it will harm the companies involved or not. Judge Jackson's decision overreached, in part, because he used the wrong standard for considering the costs of the breakup to Microsoft. Since the monopoly was not illegally obtained, its fruits weren't illegal. Only the fruits of the illegal commingling of IE with the OS could be taken by the court -- and the government wasn't able to show that any of those existed.
You're confusing the buyback with the dividend. The dividend happens in December, all at once. After that is payed out, the company will have approx. $30G in the bank.