Looks like someone forgot to post anonymously. Given your low UID, is it possible that you are the Methusalah of trolls? Traveling from one era to the next, trusty bag of tired memes in one hand, bucket of spam in the other?
I'm sure damaged blackboxes happen all the time—for those who don't feel like RTFAing, it looks pretty beaten up in the photo, and they've got submersibles scouring a rather large region for more pieces still. (The summary's habit of using the word "part" is kind of adorable, in a Simple English Wikipedia sort of way. What is a memory part, anyway? Is this specialized manufacturing jargon (i.e. part numbers) or just weird writing?)
Yes—tried to pick a country to avoid that. You can't win them all. But you're nitpicking: I'm talking about economically and intellectually stagnant countries versus economically and intellectually progressive countries, e.g. the US versus India or Japan, or even Germany, where they've largely figured out how to remain economically balanced and have moved on to other issues. That kind of progressiveness has a lot more momentum than a single policy, so jumping ship after one bad law is usually going to be hypersensitive, unless of course that law, say, outlaws all other political parties, but that's a matter of poor choice of country to move to.
However, one tip: don't pick a country where they speak English as their primary official language. For some reason, that attracts horrifically shitty ISPs. Pick a country from the northern three quarters of Europe or something.
You should really not be such a jerk. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the trademark is here, and mentions quite clearly that SQL Server is a trademark applicable to a distributed and RDBMS and a manual sold in a box. That implies MS tried to get the directly relevant mark (on just the software) but could not. That's not a leap of logic.
Well, I don't think that "trains not flying off the rails" counts as very surprising, or particularly exclusive to new technology. So you might still be in the clear there.
I'd be more worried about, you know, the owners of the botnet reading this article and taking preventative action? I mean, if it's already too late for that (which past articles assert, it is), then it's not really "crippling", is it?
You're completely right, of course—but that doesn't stop plant biologists from being incredibly boring.
The major issue in question here is really about the dosages of cosmic radiation that seeds can handle; fluctuations in magnetic field are unlikely to have any impact, and obviously, since seeds tumble all the time, simply exposing them to microgravity isn't going to affect their development (until they germinate and start needing to know which way is down.)
Since grass and trees are about as far apart as us and snakes, there's likely to be a pretty significant difference in their radiation coping mechanisms. However, one thing's for certain: it's guaranteed to be about a billion times better than humans, since they have much more non-coding DNA, and a much longer history of being on the surface instead of safely tucked away underwater.
I, um, forget. Google only returns a FreeBSD mailing list post, and I'm pretty sure I haven't read that particular post before. If you're feeling hopeless, the land of GNU maintains a large site of similar humour, which is one of several things I wish they would stop including in emacs's etc directory.
This is more of a "oh god wtf is wrong with the people at the USPTO" weeping than a "we're screwed in the long run" weeping. However, from what I've learned of the US legal system, an untested precedent is not something on which you want to gamble the risk of a lawsuit.
There will always be judges and jurisdictions that can be selected to make the case go against all humanity and reason, in deference to "well, we authorized it in the first place, and we don't want to make the trademark guys look stupid every day."
Crossing your fingers that this won't happen is just encouraging life to be harder for yourself. So in practice, they're name-squatting, and it's perfectly effective.
I see. So you'd have no problem, then, if Apache trademarked "HTTP Server" (or to hit closer to reality, httpd, but I'm not sure if that argument will work out the same way, so let's ignore it), because everyone else calls their product a web server, or hyperlinked document management system? It's still undercutting by claiming that they own the whole show.
Moreover, I think your decision to avoid the term "SQL server" in your regular usage is probably a colloquialism. I know I personally have spoken of SQL servers when talking to clients, to refer to MySQL, Sybase, and MSSQL installations collectively. It's a term that business people recognize as jargon much more readily than the unwieldly (if precise) RDBMS, and it can be avoidable if you need to contrast an SQL-using DB with a non-SQL-based DB.
No one is—but amusingly, Microsoft made the same complaint, and this trademark was presented as a demonstration of hypocrisy. The reality is that most, if not all, big tech companies have a lot of obscene generic trademarks in slightly less literal contexts (e.g. Word, Windows) and we shouldn't bother splitting hairs—unless you made the word up, or it's a compound term that clearly specifies your ownership ("Google Talk" versus "Word") it probably shouldn't be trademark-worthy!
They tried. Oh gods, they tried. Looking at the last story about this one, it looks like Microsoft SQL Server is the only boxed product that includes manuals, distribution media, etc. that can be called "SQL Server".
This has been distorted by poor educational materials, but an alpha is supposed to be the early versions which are built with the deliberate intent to test. What we're seeing now should be called a pre-alpha, and I believe Microsoft actually calls it that. Software enters the beta phase when no more features are planned.
I like it, but it leaves out the angle that the article would probably have never been written if it weren't for the opportunity to pad it. Maybe paddified? Padtastic? Bogopadded? (Bogus + padded)
You aren't. We need a word for this kind of article. I mean, the device in the article is cool on its own, but this is total crap. It should be good enough to just do an article on it; aaaaaaaagh.
You're correct that Microsoft first sold a package called "Office" for the Mac, but Microsoft has never ported the entire Office suite from the Macintosh to Windows. Both the Macintosh and Windows versions of Word, for example, were ported from the original DOS implementation, albeit with the Mac version coming first. In general, this makes far more sense, as porting an x86 program to 68k and back again would be a colossal waste of time; by contrast, porting a DOS program to Windows is as simple as writing a new interface for it. One exception is Word for Mac 6, which was ported directly from Windows (and extremely slow, causing it to die in the marketplace and be replaced again by Mac Word 5.)
Let's change "own content" to "sell content or content licenses", then. I don't think an ISP would sell its own advertisements to its residential customers, so your point is pretty darn irrelevant to the gist of the argument. I would propose, however, making the definition of content to be "any text, image, audio, video, or other representation of information intended to be human-perceivable or to be converted into a human-perceivable form with the intent to inform, entertain, or educate users, excepting documentation and advertisements produced by the organization itself with the express purpose of documenting or advertising its services."
Alternatively, we could just simplify: no business concerned with operating telecommunications infrastructure may sell anything to private individuals, or offer goods or services not directly related to telecommunications infrastructure. And then you'd have to come up with some way to phrase the "don't make contracts with content providers to be exclusive to your customers" thing, but that shouldn't be too hard.
Then jump ship. Emigrate, emigrate, and emigrate until they're all that's left. Then they can have their worthless rustic holy land, and the rest of the world can have a future. Civilization is moving on now. It lacks clarity of thought—as a culture, we've rejected the humanities so severely that we no longer respect one another and will say or do anything to win—but it's still moving on. You're only harming yourself and your descendents by giving the violinist an audience.
One proposal to that dilemma which I have read is to make it illegal to both sell internet access directly to residential consumers and own backbone or content. It's a fairly obvious monopoly magnet, and I think that the model in the aforementioned proposal would work really, really well—but the only force that could make it happen is the complete collapse of the American government, and probably the abolition of money. The businesses are indestructibly fortified with the fruits of their anarchocapitalist attitude toward law (common carrier status, destroying municipal wifi, etc) and would have absolutely no trouble blocking any attempts to use the system to fix the problem. It's too corrupt. You can't save it.
The only thing we have in Canada that isn't worse than in the States, network-wise, is the total absence of effective copyright enforcement. For now, at least. Our infrastructure is much weaker, our cell companies gouge even more aggressively, and small ISPs are constantly under threat of execution by Bell Canada and the cable companies, who are determined to get out of the obligation to resell, or at least find a way to monetize their resellers' customers directly. Fortunately, the trash that was elected when Bush was popular is on its way out—since we can call elections at just about any time—and it's looking that the next government is probably going to be legitimately left-wing and staunchly pro-consumer. So that might help.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like someone forgot to post anonymously. Given your low UID, is it possible that you are the Methusalah of trolls? Traveling from one era to the next, trusty bag of tired memes in one hand, bucket of spam in the other?
I'm sure damaged blackboxes happen all the time—for those who don't feel like RTFAing, it looks pretty beaten up in the photo, and they've got submersibles scouring a rather large region for more pieces still. (The summary's habit of using the word "part" is kind of adorable, in a Simple English Wikipedia sort of way. What is a memory part, anyway? Is this specialized manufacturing jargon (i.e. part numbers) or just weird writing?)
Yes—tried to pick a country to avoid that. You can't win them all. But you're nitpicking: I'm talking about economically and intellectually stagnant countries versus economically and intellectually progressive countries, e.g. the US versus India or Japan, or even Germany, where they've largely figured out how to remain economically balanced and have moved on to other issues. That kind of progressiveness has a lot more momentum than a single policy, so jumping ship after one bad law is usually going to be hypersensitive, unless of course that law, say, outlaws all other political parties, but that's a matter of poor choice of country to move to.
However, one tip: don't pick a country where they speak English as their primary official language. For some reason, that attracts horrifically shitty ISPs. Pick a country from the northern three quarters of Europe or something.
Just once is fine. It's a rhetorical device.
You should really not be such a jerk. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the trademark is here, and mentions quite clearly that SQL Server is a trademark applicable to a distributed and RDBMS and a manual sold in a box. That implies MS tried to get the directly relevant mark (on just the software) but could not. That's not a leap of logic.
Well, I don't think that "trains not flying off the rails" counts as very surprising, or particularly exclusive to new technology. So you might still be in the clear there.
I'd be more worried about, you know, the owners of the botnet reading this article and taking preventative action? I mean, if it's already too late for that (which past articles assert, it is), then it's not really "crippling", is it?
You're completely right, of course—but that doesn't stop plant biologists from being incredibly boring.
The major issue in question here is really about the dosages of cosmic radiation that seeds can handle; fluctuations in magnetic field are unlikely to have any impact, and obviously, since seeds tumble all the time, simply exposing them to microgravity isn't going to affect their development (until they germinate and start needing to know which way is down.)
Since grass and trees are about as far apart as us and snakes, there's likely to be a pretty significant difference in their radiation coping mechanisms. However, one thing's for certain: it's guaranteed to be about a billion times better than humans, since they have much more non-coding DNA, and a much longer history of being on the surface instead of safely tucked away underwater.
I, um, forget. Google only returns a FreeBSD mailing list post, and I'm pretty sure I haven't read that particular post before. If you're feeling hopeless, the land of GNU maintains a large site of similar humour, which is one of several things I wish they would stop including in emacs's etc directory.
This is more of a "oh god wtf is wrong with the people at the USPTO" weeping than a "we're screwed in the long run" weeping. However, from what I've learned of the US legal system, an untested precedent is not something on which you want to gamble the risk of a lawsuit.
There will always be judges and jurisdictions that can be selected to make the case go against all humanity and reason, in deference to "well, we authorized it in the first place, and we don't want to make the trademark guys look stupid every day."
Crossing your fingers that this won't happen is just encouraging life to be harder for yourself. So in practice, they're name-squatting, and it's perfectly effective.
I see. So you'd have no problem, then, if Apache trademarked "HTTP Server" (or to hit closer to reality, httpd, but I'm not sure if that argument will work out the same way, so let's ignore it), because everyone else calls their product a web server, or hyperlinked document management system? It's still undercutting by claiming that they own the whole show.
Moreover, I think your decision to avoid the term "SQL server" in your regular usage is probably a colloquialism. I know I personally have spoken of SQL servers when talking to clients, to refer to MySQL, Sybase, and MSSQL installations collectively. It's a term that business people recognize as jargon much more readily than the unwieldly (if precise) RDBMS, and it can be avoidable if you need to contrast an SQL-using DB with a non-SQL-based DB.
No one is—but amusingly, Microsoft made the same complaint, and this trademark was presented as a demonstration of hypocrisy. The reality is that most, if not all, big tech companies have a lot of obscene generic trademarks in slightly less literal contexts (e.g. Word, Windows) and we shouldn't bother splitting hairs—unless you made the word up, or it's a compound term that clearly specifies your ownership ("Google Talk" versus "Word") it probably shouldn't be trademark-worthy!
It's not that dissimilar from the ISS, either. In The Real World, space stations are (mostly) lattices of flight modules.
Read this, to which I did link. Notice the (R) next to "SQL Server". I think evidence of success counts as an example of an attempt.
They tried. Oh gods, they tried. Looking at the last story about this one, it looks like Microsoft SQL Server is the only boxed product that includes manuals, distribution media, etc. that can be called "SQL Server".
Read and weep.
Speaking about food, hasn't the seed thing been done already?
This has been distorted by poor educational materials, but an alpha is supposed to be the early versions which are built with the deliberate intent to test. What we're seeing now should be called a pre-alpha, and I believe Microsoft actually calls it that. Software enters the beta phase when no more features are planned.
I like it, but it leaves out the angle that the article would probably have never been written if it weren't for the opportunity to pad it. Maybe paddified? Padtastic? Bogopadded? (Bogus + padded)
You aren't. We need a word for this kind of article. I mean, the device in the article is cool on its own, but this is total crap. It should be good enough to just do an article on it; aaaaaaaagh.
Clearly written by an American. 21 C is about as comfortable a temperature as you can get!
You're correct that Microsoft first sold a package called "Office" for the Mac, but Microsoft has never ported the entire Office suite from the Macintosh to Windows. Both the Macintosh and Windows versions of Word, for example, were ported from the original DOS implementation, albeit with the Mac version coming first. In general, this makes far more sense, as porting an x86 program to 68k and back again would be a colossal waste of time; by contrast, porting a DOS program to Windows is as simple as writing a new interface for it. One exception is Word for Mac 6, which was ported directly from Windows (and extremely slow, causing it to die in the marketplace and be replaced again by Mac Word 5.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word#Origins_and_growth:_1981_to_1995
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel#Excel_2.0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Office
The exception to this trend is Powerpoint, which was originally a Mac application.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Powerpoint#History
Let's change "own content" to "sell content or content licenses", then. I don't think an ISP would sell its own advertisements to its residential customers, so your point is pretty darn irrelevant to the gist of the argument. I would propose, however, making the definition of content to be "any text, image, audio, video, or other representation of information intended to be human-perceivable or to be converted into a human-perceivable form with the intent to inform, entertain, or educate users, excepting documentation and advertisements produced by the organization itself with the express purpose of documenting or advertising its services."
Alternatively, we could just simplify: no business concerned with operating telecommunications infrastructure may sell anything to private individuals, or offer goods or services not directly related to telecommunications infrastructure. And then you'd have to come up with some way to phrase the "don't make contracts with content providers to be exclusive to your customers" thing, but that shouldn't be too hard.
I'm not so sure about this one. Chicken fat doesn't really takes like anything except... grossness.
Then jump ship. Emigrate, emigrate, and emigrate until they're all that's left. Then they can have their worthless rustic holy land, and the rest of the world can have a future. Civilization is moving on now. It lacks clarity of thought—as a culture, we've rejected the humanities so severely that we no longer respect one another and will say or do anything to win—but it's still moving on. You're only harming yourself and your descendents by giving the violinist an audience.
One proposal to that dilemma which I have read is to make it illegal to both sell internet access directly to residential consumers and own backbone or content. It's a fairly obvious monopoly magnet, and I think that the model in the aforementioned proposal would work really, really well—but the only force that could make it happen is the complete collapse of the American government, and probably the abolition of money. The businesses are indestructibly fortified with the fruits of their anarchocapitalist attitude toward law (common carrier status, destroying municipal wifi, etc) and would have absolutely no trouble blocking any attempts to use the system to fix the problem. It's too corrupt. You can't save it.
The only thing we have in Canada that isn't worse than in the States, network-wise, is the total absence of effective copyright enforcement. For now, at least. Our infrastructure is much weaker, our cell companies gouge even more aggressively, and small ISPs are constantly under threat of execution by Bell Canada and the cable companies, who are determined to get out of the obligation to resell, or at least find a way to monetize their resellers' customers directly. Fortunately, the trash that was elected when Bush was popular is on its way out—since we can call elections at just about any time—and it's looking that the next government is probably going to be legitimately left-wing and staunchly pro-consumer. So that might help.