A number of people have criticized Atlantis as a swipe from Nadia, which was directed by Hideaki Anno (later famous for Evangelion) and based on an original concept by Miyazaki. I'm not sure if the criticism is entirely fair- I've seen Nadia but not Atlantis- but it has been made. In both cases, Disney has claimed with a straight face not to have been familiar with the Japanese work they were alleged to have been stealing from. That seems especially hard to believe in the case of Jungle Emperor Leo, since the first animated version was partially US financed and shown on American TV as Kimba the White Lion.
You can do 2D animation on computers. It's apparently substantially cheaper to do things that way, so most of the studios have gone to doing most or all of their work that way. I think that a big part of the savings comes from reduced "painting" costs. Instead of having to color in the cells with a paintbrush, painters just select a color and click in a region and the computer fills it in with an even color. I find that it makes a lot of the cheaper animation look sort of flat and boring, especially since many studios seem to like using really saturated color, but with some care it can look really good.
If Walt were alive today, he'd fill the studios with Guatemalans and pay them just as little as legally possible.
Nah, he'd just subcontract the inbetween work to cheaper studios in Korea and China. That's what most of the Japanese studios have been doing for the past 10 years or so. Just take a look at the credits for any recent theatrical Anime and you'll see a lot of non-Japanese names and studios listed in the credits.
I really disliked the "take Frodo to Osgiliath" bit, too. One of the things that I really liked about the book is that at one point or another each of the powerful and/or important characters is given the choice of supporting the quest to destroy the Ring or trying to take it. You get to see Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Smeagol, Gandalf, Galadriel, Aragorn, Boromir, and Faramir directly tempted by the ring, and several others (Sauron, Saruman, and Denethor at least) make their choices when the ring is not readily available. Their characters are revealed not just by which way they choose, but also by how the ring tempts them and the way they accept or reject the temptation.
I think that it was important that Faramir resist the temptation. He represents the noble, virtuous core of Gondor that managed to resist the lure of turning into the Dark Lord as a way of fighting him. Without Faramir doing the right thing, Aragorn is the only one of the humans who successfully resists the Ring, which is the wrong message.
That's not correct. See Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. as a counterexample. A parody can take material from a copyrighted work without permission and without paying royalties, so long as it can classify as fair use. Courts are supposed to consider four factors when determining fair use:
The purpose and character of the use (e.g. commercial vs. non-profit educational)
The nature of the work being copied
The amount of the original that's being copied
The effect of the copying on the market for the original
None of these factors is supposed to be determinative by itself. Thus it's possible to make fair use of a work under copyright for your own profit, provided that the use does well under the other three components of the standard. In Campbell v Acuff Rose, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled that 2Live Crew had made fair use of music from "Pretty Woman", even though they were using it for their own profit. Weird Al would have problems because he was doing it for profit and copying all of the music instead of just a portion. (The Court specifically mentioned that 2Live Crew had taken only enough of the original music and lyrics to make their parody recognizable and had added their own material from there.) That puts him in the worst possible position on two of the four measures, and he would also do badly on the nature of the work (since the original is expressive and for profit it gets more protection from commercial copying than a functional not-for-profit work would) and only moderately well on the effect on sales of the original (since the parody might steal market share from the original).
You might be surprised about how bad some translations can be. Think about how many companies try to cut corners when writing documentation. If they're not willing to spring for decent writers in their primary language, what makes you think that they're going to do so when it comes time to do translations?
In fairness, the Japanese have gotten much better on the translation front than they were in the days of Zero Wing. I've purchased a lot of Japanese equipment, and everything that I've bought recently has come with well written and translated documentation. Not so some of the other international stuff I've seen. We recently got some German-made equipment at my work, and the documentation was poorly translated. It is full of German gramatical constructs that don't belong in English, and the overall effect makes it quite difficult to understand. Even though my German is quite rusty, I almost think that I could understand it better if they hadn't translated it at all.
The same goes for most any datacenter - your physical security is awesome, but why?
Because it's much, much easier to do nefarious things to a computer with physical access. If somebody just want to shut you down, he can set off the fire supression system or start smashing machines with an axe. If he wants to steal data, he can plug in a firewire harddrive and start downloading data, or just walk off with your backup tapes. If he wants to hack your system, he can reboot with an untrusted medium (like a KNOPPIX CD) and put in backdoors. It's easy to stop all of these attacks with good physical security.
Besides, when you get down to it physical security isn't that expensive. A couple of handprint scanners are cheap when compared to a redundant power system for the whole datacenter. Security guards are paid a lot less than data security experts. All those costs pale in comparison to the price of having a warm spare ready to go on line if the primary fails, which many of these datacenters have. If you're going to go to that much trouble to keep your computers available, it would be really stupid to try to save a few bucks on physical security.
For the record, what did they sell to SCO, anyway?
As I understand it, Novell had two key bits of Unix, the old SysV codebase and the newer Unixware. SysV wasn't under active development and had mostly been used as a base platform on which companies built their own customized Unix versions. Most of the big Unix vendors had to pay SysV licensing fees to continue selling their Unix variants. (Many other companies had in-house versions of Unix and also had to pay licensing fees. Companies were allowed to buy out their licenses for a lump sum, and I think that most of the big vendors have already done so.) Unixware was an actively developed system that was sold by Novell to end-users as a fully fledged operating system.
SCO (and it's important to note that this was "Old SCO", which is now Tarantella, not the company now calling itself SCO, which was then called Caldera) bought different rights to the two codebases. Unixware was the main point of the sale, and SCO got the essential rights to Unixware. As I understand it, that included the right to all the earnings from sales of Unixware and the right to develop the codebase further. SysV was seen as being something of a dead end, even though companies still had to pay licensing fees for it, so SCO bought much more limited rights to it. SCO collected the licensing revenue, but it then paid all that money straight back to Novell. Novell then turned around and gave 5% of the SysV money back to SCO as an agent's fee.
It seems pretty ludicrous to think that SCO bought full rights to SysV. There would be no reason for them to agree to a 5/95 split with Novell if they were actually buying the SysV codebase lock, stock, and barrel. NewSCO clearly has an uphill battle to convince anyone that the agreement with Novell constitutes a sale of the full rights.
SCO pretty much had to do this. If they didn't, an end user or anyone else they sued could just ask for their case to be postponed whilst SCO and Novell sort out the copyright issue between them.
But filing suit against Novell actually makes the situation worse, rather than better. Before the suit, a Linux user could only point to the possiblility of SCO's ownership being contested as an argument. Now they can point to an actual suit on the issue. There's no way that SCO can possibly sue anyone else until their suit against Novell is concluded.
The only possible legal benefit I can see for SCO from this is a source of potential delay in their suit against IBM. If they can somehow argue that their suit against IBM should be continued eventually but that the ownership issue with Novell has to be cleared up first, they can get another indefinite delay. Since the IBM suit seems likely to run into trouble otherwise, and delay seems to be the name of SCO's game these days, that seems like the only short-term upside.
Of course, IBM has shown evidence that their contract does NOT say otherwise, but SCOldera seems to be hoping that the judge will overlook that tiny detail.:)
Except that's not quite right. The truly pathetic side to this story is that it isn't IBM that produced the evidence that the license doesn't say what SCO claims it does. It was SCO. That's right, they attached the side letter (as Exhibit C) establishing that IBM had rights to their own work to their original complaint. It's still right there on their website. Their own evidence debunks the main theory behind their case!
Partly I try to better document why I make the design decisions I do,
And these are one of the most valuable kinds of comments to make. It's usually fairly easy to figure out what a given piece of well written code does, but it's not always obvious why you're doing that or why you chose a particular approach. A little comment saying "# now we fix broken headers" or "# cache caluculated values for speed" or something similar will save you a lot of time later.
One point that the author seems to miss is that there are better and worse ways of doing a rewrite. Several of the examples he mentions (notably Apache 1 vs 2 and Perl 5 vs 6) are being handled very well. Development on the old versions is continuing while the new versions are being improved essentially in the background. That means that nobody is forced to upgrade until the new version actually provides them with enough tangible benefits that the switch is justified.
Perl is an especially good example because the new version is actually separating the language specification (Perl6) from the Virtual Machine (Parrot). Parrot will be flexible enough to run both the old and new language specifications, so even people who don't want to rewrite their scripts will benefit from the performance enhancements. Combined with continued development of the existing codebase, this makes Perl very future safe, all while offering the potential benefits of a complete code rewrite.
Finland is miserable, that's what. It's insanely cold in the winter and there isn't enough sunlight. Why on Earth would anyone want to live in Finland when they could live in California?
It's possible, if not likely, that some of the spamware authors are doing it for the challenge. Some of those guys are allegedly pretty good programmers, and I suspect that many of them are essentially hackers with no sense of morals. I could easily imagine somebody like that trying to figure out how to bypass spam filters just because it was a challenge, not because he actually expected any particular rewards for it. It's like trying to break into the computers in the Pentagon; it's stupid and illegal but a big enough challenge that some people with more brains than common sense will try it anyway.
I'm pretty sure that the big worry is about third party filtering. If I install a spam filter, that means that I don't want to see spam and am unlikely to buy something advertized therein. If my ISP installs a spam filter, it removes spam to everyone, including the idiots who might actually buy something from a spammer. Since my ISP theoretically might be using the same technology in their filter that I'm using in mine, it would still make sense for the spammer to work on defeating my filter.
Why bother? A decently trained Bayesian filter will be able to recognize a spam that contains a misspelled word or two, or one that contains substitutions of similar characters. Then it will learn that those modified forms are a very strong indicator of spam. As Paul Graham (the main early advocate of Bayesian Filters) has pointed out, there are legitimate reasons why you might see a mention of "Viagra" in your email, but no legitimate reason that you would see "V1agra", "\/iagra", "Vi@gra", or the like. Instead of slipping by my Bayesian filter, those variants actually stand out as particularly strong spam indicators.
It's a valid response to the "which lines are violating", but that's not all they've been asked. If the lines are SysV lines that IBM is alleged to have disclosed, SCO has to say how SCO has a right to them, how they know IBM is responsible, who else might have seen the code, and what steps SCO took to make sure those others kept the code confidential. If they're lines in a Linux file, SCO has to say how and why SCO has a right to them and how they know that IBM is responsible for them being in Linux.
And those are just the questions about IBM's alleged copying. SCO is also supposed to give a full description of all of IBM's other alleged wrongdoings (remember the parts of the suit about unfair trade practices, interference with trade relations, and breach of contract?) and a full inventory of all of their claims of proprietary rights in Linux including the basis for those claims. It's hard to imagine squeezing all that into 60-70 pages.
But it's not sufficient for them to list the lines of code that they think are in violation. They also have to say why they think so, how SCO got the rights to them, what evidence they have that IBM put them into Linux, who else might have seen the code, and what steps SCO has taken to prevent those others from disclosing the code. That's a heck of a lot of information, and that's just about the code disclosures. SCO is also supposed to be answering questions about IBM's alleged unfair competetion, interference with trade relations, and breach of contract. For each of those allegations, SCO has to provide a detailed description of who at IBM did what when. I think that they'd have a hard time putting all of their allegations about one of those topics into 60-70 pages, much less all three and a detailed answer about all of the code that IBM has supposedly misappropriated.
My gut feeling is that the big consequence of this is that SCO will be forced to drop most of their claims. Their only real argument (and this is streching the idea of a real argument pretty far) is that IBM violated the confidentiality provisions of the Software Licensing agreement. IBM's actions in donating RCU and JFS are quite well documented, and would constitute a violation under SCO's reading of the agreement. I have a hard time imagining a judge or jury buying the "All Your Code Are Belong To Us" interpretation, but it's the most reasonable and best supported argument that SCO can make.
And the same thing could be said for Ogg Vorbis. It wasn't until fairly recently that the codec was available for processors without floating point units (the kind used in essentially all portable players) so it hasn't had a huge amount of time to get market penetration. It's getting there, though, with support on the Rio Karma and several players from iRiver. Furthermore, Vorbis support should be cheaper than AAC in the long run because there are no royalties for supporting it. I'd expect that it will be very well supported EVENTUALLY.
have fun with your Ogg files and your 5 pound portable music player....I mean laptop.
You mean my Rio Karma? You're off a bit on the weight, though; it's 5.5 ounces, i.e. 0.1 ounces less than an iPod with the same disk capacity. That and its list price is about $50 less. Oh, and it can connect via Ethernet, has standard RCA jacks in its docking station so it's connected to my stereo system whenever it's recharging, and has a Java-based connection software so it can talk to any operating system with Java support.
You've never tried to take more than 350 pictures in a session before? I was taking pictures at this year's Tournament of Roses Parade, and I would have taken a lot more than that if my camera were more capable. There were 100 entries in this year's parade, and I would have loved to get more than 3 or 4 of each, but A) I was running low on memory and B) my camera takes too long to compress and store images. I could have taken 1000 pictures easily if my camera could have kept up.
Something similar happened to me. One day I noticed that I was downloading at about 2 Mb/sec even though my connection was only supposed to be 768 Kb/sec. About a month later, I got a letter from Charter explaining that they were giving a free 6 month test of a higher grade of service. I'm not sure if I'll pay for the extra speed if/when the free trial period is over, since most of the sources I'm downloading from can't keep up with the pipe anyway, but it is quite handy when I find a source that can manage. I suspect that I won't have to. I happen to be extremely lucky and live in an area where there are actually competing cable companies, so I wouldn't be surprised if the company eventually decided to upgrade the service permanently in order to compete better.
It's not just the mustache, either. Just think about it; when was the last time you met anyone named Adolf who was born after 1945? It used to be a modestly popular name, but now it's all but extinct. 100 years ago, Adolf was about as popular a name as Thaddeus, Winston, or Angus- not tremendously popular, but common enough to be 581 on the Social Security Administration's list of most popular baby names for the 1900's. In the 1950's, though, it didn't even make the top 1000, being pushed out by such winning boys' names as Derwin, Melton, and Vernell. It still can't make the top 1000, being pushed out (for the 1990's) by names like Nikhil, Stetson, and Rohan.
Slashdot Mirror
A number of people have criticized Atlantis as a swipe from Nadia, which was directed by Hideaki Anno (later famous for Evangelion) and based on an original concept by Miyazaki. I'm not sure if the criticism is entirely fair- I've seen Nadia but not Atlantis- but it has been made. In both cases, Disney has claimed with a straight face not to have been familiar with the Japanese work they were alleged to have been stealing from. That seems especially hard to believe in the case of Jungle Emperor Leo, since the first animated version was partially US financed and shown on American TV as Kimba the White Lion.
You can do 2D animation on computers. It's apparently substantially cheaper to do things that way, so most of the studios have gone to doing most or all of their work that way. I think that a big part of the savings comes from reduced "painting" costs. Instead of having to color in the cells with a paintbrush, painters just select a color and click in a region and the computer fills it in with an even color. I find that it makes a lot of the cheaper animation look sort of flat and boring, especially since many studios seem to like using really saturated color, but with some care it can look really good.
Nah, he'd just subcontract the inbetween work to cheaper studios in Korea and China. That's what most of the Japanese studios have been doing for the past 10 years or so. Just take a look at the credits for any recent theatrical Anime and you'll see a lot of non-Japanese names and studios listed in the credits.
I really disliked the "take Frodo to Osgiliath" bit, too. One of the things that I really liked about the book is that at one point or another each of the powerful and/or important characters is given the choice of supporting the quest to destroy the Ring or trying to take it. You get to see Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Smeagol, Gandalf, Galadriel, Aragorn, Boromir, and Faramir directly tempted by the ring, and several others (Sauron, Saruman, and Denethor at least) make their choices when the ring is not readily available. Their characters are revealed not just by which way they choose, but also by how the ring tempts them and the way they accept or reject the temptation.
I think that it was important that Faramir resist the temptation. He represents the noble, virtuous core of Gondor that managed to resist the lure of turning into the Dark Lord as a way of fighting him. Without Faramir doing the right thing, Aragorn is the only one of the humans who successfully resists the Ring, which is the wrong message.
That's not correct. See Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. as a counterexample. A parody can take material from a copyrighted work without permission and without paying royalties, so long as it can classify as fair use. Courts are supposed to consider four factors when determining fair use:
None of these factors is supposed to be determinative by itself. Thus it's possible to make fair use of a work under copyright for your own profit, provided that the use does well under the other three components of the standard. In Campbell v Acuff Rose, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled that 2Live Crew had made fair use of music from "Pretty Woman", even though they were using it for their own profit. Weird Al would have problems because he was doing it for profit and copying all of the music instead of just a portion. (The Court specifically mentioned that 2Live Crew had taken only enough of the original music and lyrics to make their parody recognizable and had added their own material from there.) That puts him in the worst possible position on two of the four measures, and he would also do badly on the nature of the work (since the original is expressive and for profit it gets more protection from commercial copying than a functional not-for-profit work would) and only moderately well on the effect on sales of the original (since the parody might steal market share from the original).
You might be surprised about how bad some translations can be. Think about how many companies try to cut corners when writing documentation. If they're not willing to spring for decent writers in their primary language, what makes you think that they're going to do so when it comes time to do translations?
In fairness, the Japanese have gotten much better on the translation front than they were in the days of Zero Wing. I've purchased a lot of Japanese equipment, and everything that I've bought recently has come with well written and translated documentation. Not so some of the other international stuff I've seen. We recently got some German-made equipment at my work, and the documentation was poorly translated. It is full of German gramatical constructs that don't belong in English, and the overall effect makes it quite difficult to understand. Even though my German is quite rusty, I almost think that I could understand it better if they hadn't translated it at all.
And when was the Trabant ever available in the US?
Because it's much, much easier to do nefarious things to a computer with physical access. If somebody just want to shut you down, he can set off the fire supression system or start smashing machines with an axe. If he wants to steal data, he can plug in a firewire harddrive and start downloading data, or just walk off with your backup tapes. If he wants to hack your system, he can reboot with an untrusted medium (like a KNOPPIX CD) and put in backdoors. It's easy to stop all of these attacks with good physical security.
Besides, when you get down to it physical security isn't that expensive. A couple of handprint scanners are cheap when compared to a redundant power system for the whole datacenter. Security guards are paid a lot less than data security experts. All those costs pale in comparison to the price of having a warm spare ready to go on line if the primary fails, which many of these datacenters have. If you're going to go to that much trouble to keep your computers available, it would be really stupid to try to save a few bucks on physical security.
As I understand it, Novell had two key bits of Unix, the old SysV codebase and the newer Unixware. SysV wasn't under active development and had mostly been used as a base platform on which companies built their own customized Unix versions. Most of the big Unix vendors had to pay SysV licensing fees to continue selling their Unix variants. (Many other companies had in-house versions of Unix and also had to pay licensing fees. Companies were allowed to buy out their licenses for a lump sum, and I think that most of the big vendors have already done so.) Unixware was an actively developed system that was sold by Novell to end-users as a fully fledged operating system.
SCO (and it's important to note that this was "Old SCO", which is now Tarantella, not the company now calling itself SCO, which was then called Caldera) bought different rights to the two codebases. Unixware was the main point of the sale, and SCO got the essential rights to Unixware. As I understand it, that included the right to all the earnings from sales of Unixware and the right to develop the codebase further. SysV was seen as being something of a dead end, even though companies still had to pay licensing fees for it, so SCO bought much more limited rights to it. SCO collected the licensing revenue, but it then paid all that money straight back to Novell. Novell then turned around and gave 5% of the SysV money back to SCO as an agent's fee.
It seems pretty ludicrous to think that SCO bought full rights to SysV. There would be no reason for them to agree to a 5/95 split with Novell if they were actually buying the SysV codebase lock, stock, and barrel. NewSCO clearly has an uphill battle to convince anyone that the agreement with Novell constitutes a sale of the full rights.
But filing suit against Novell actually makes the situation worse, rather than better. Before the suit, a Linux user could only point to the possiblility of SCO's ownership being contested as an argument. Now they can point to an actual suit on the issue. There's no way that SCO can possibly sue anyone else until their suit against Novell is concluded.
The only possible legal benefit I can see for SCO from this is a source of potential delay in their suit against IBM. If they can somehow argue that their suit against IBM should be continued eventually but that the ownership issue with Novell has to be cleared up first, they can get another indefinite delay. Since the IBM suit seems likely to run into trouble otherwise, and delay seems to be the name of SCO's game these days, that seems like the only short-term upside.
Except that's not quite right. The truly pathetic side to this story is that it isn't IBM that produced the evidence that the license doesn't say what SCO claims it does. It was SCO. That's right, they attached the side letter (as Exhibit C) establishing that IBM had rights to their own work to their original complaint. It's still right there on their website. Their own evidence debunks the main theory behind their case!
And these are one of the most valuable kinds of comments to make. It's usually fairly easy to figure out what a given piece of well written code does, but it's not always obvious why you're doing that or why you chose a particular approach. A little comment saying "# now we fix broken headers" or "# cache caluculated values for speed" or something similar will save you a lot of time later.
One point that the author seems to miss is that there are better and worse ways of doing a rewrite. Several of the examples he mentions (notably Apache 1 vs 2 and Perl 5 vs 6) are being handled very well. Development on the old versions is continuing while the new versions are being improved essentially in the background. That means that nobody is forced to upgrade until the new version actually provides them with enough tangible benefits that the switch is justified.
Perl is an especially good example because the new version is actually separating the language specification (Perl6) from the Virtual Machine (Parrot). Parrot will be flexible enough to run both the old and new language specifications, so even people who don't want to rewrite their scripts will benefit from the performance enhancements. Combined with continued development of the existing codebase, this makes Perl very future safe, all while offering the potential benefits of a complete code rewrite.
Finland is miserable, that's what. It's insanely cold in the winter and there isn't enough sunlight. Why on Earth would anyone want to live in Finland when they could live in California?
It's possible, if not likely, that some of the spamware authors are doing it for the challenge. Some of those guys are allegedly pretty good programmers, and I suspect that many of them are essentially hackers with no sense of morals. I could easily imagine somebody like that trying to figure out how to bypass spam filters just because it was a challenge, not because he actually expected any particular rewards for it. It's like trying to break into the computers in the Pentagon; it's stupid and illegal but a big enough challenge that some people with more brains than common sense will try it anyway.
I'm pretty sure that the big worry is about third party filtering. If I install a spam filter, that means that I don't want to see spam and am unlikely to buy something advertized therein. If my ISP installs a spam filter, it removes spam to everyone, including the idiots who might actually buy something from a spammer. Since my ISP theoretically might be using the same technology in their filter that I'm using in mine, it would still make sense for the spammer to work on defeating my filter.
Why bother? A decently trained Bayesian filter will be able to recognize a spam that contains a misspelled word or two, or one that contains substitutions of similar characters. Then it will learn that those modified forms are a very strong indicator of spam. As Paul Graham (the main early advocate of Bayesian Filters) has pointed out, there are legitimate reasons why you might see a mention of "Viagra" in your email, but no legitimate reason that you would see "V1agra", "\/iagra", "Vi@gra", or the like. Instead of slipping by my Bayesian filter, those variants actually stand out as particularly strong spam indicators.
It's a valid response to the "which lines are violating", but that's not all they've been asked. If the lines are SysV lines that IBM is alleged to have disclosed, SCO has to say how SCO has a right to them, how they know IBM is responsible, who else might have seen the code, and what steps SCO took to make sure those others kept the code confidential. If they're lines in a Linux file, SCO has to say how and why SCO has a right to them and how they know that IBM is responsible for them being in Linux.
And those are just the questions about IBM's alleged copying. SCO is also supposed to give a full description of all of IBM's other alleged wrongdoings (remember the parts of the suit about unfair trade practices, interference with trade relations, and breach of contract?) and a full inventory of all of their claims of proprietary rights in Linux including the basis for those claims. It's hard to imagine squeezing all that into 60-70 pages.
But it's not sufficient for them to list the lines of code that they think are in violation. They also have to say why they think so, how SCO got the rights to them, what evidence they have that IBM put them into Linux, who else might have seen the code, and what steps SCO has taken to prevent those others from disclosing the code. That's a heck of a lot of information, and that's just about the code disclosures. SCO is also supposed to be answering questions about IBM's alleged unfair competetion, interference with trade relations, and breach of contract. For each of those allegations, SCO has to provide a detailed description of who at IBM did what when. I think that they'd have a hard time putting all of their allegations about one of those topics into 60-70 pages, much less all three and a detailed answer about all of the code that IBM has supposedly misappropriated.
My gut feeling is that the big consequence of this is that SCO will be forced to drop most of their claims. Their only real argument (and this is streching the idea of a real argument pretty far) is that IBM violated the confidentiality provisions of the Software Licensing agreement. IBM's actions in donating RCU and JFS are quite well documented, and would constitute a violation under SCO's reading of the agreement. I have a hard time imagining a judge or jury buying the "All Your Code Are Belong To Us" interpretation, but it's the most reasonable and best supported argument that SCO can make.
And the same thing could be said for Ogg Vorbis. It wasn't until fairly recently that the codec was available for processors without floating point units (the kind used in essentially all portable players) so it hasn't had a huge amount of time to get market penetration. It's getting there, though, with support on the Rio Karma and several players from iRiver. Furthermore, Vorbis support should be cheaper than AAC in the long run because there are no royalties for supporting it. I'd expect that it will be very well supported EVENTUALLY.
You mean my Rio Karma? You're off a bit on the weight, though; it's 5.5 ounces, i.e. 0.1 ounces less than an iPod with the same disk capacity. That and its list price is about $50 less. Oh, and it can connect via Ethernet, has standard RCA jacks in its docking station so it's connected to my stereo system whenever it's recharging, and has a Java-based connection software so it can talk to any operating system with Java support.
You've never tried to take more than 350 pictures in a session before? I was taking pictures at this year's Tournament of Roses Parade, and I would have taken a lot more than that if my camera were more capable. There were 100 entries in this year's parade, and I would have loved to get more than 3 or 4 of each, but A) I was running low on memory and B) my camera takes too long to compress and store images. I could have taken 1000 pictures easily if my camera could have kept up.
Something similar happened to me. One day I noticed that I was downloading at about 2 Mb/sec even though my connection was only supposed to be 768 Kb/sec. About a month later, I got a letter from Charter explaining that they were giving a free 6 month test of a higher grade of service. I'm not sure if I'll pay for the extra speed if/when the free trial period is over, since most of the sources I'm downloading from can't keep up with the pipe anyway, but it is quite handy when I find a source that can manage. I suspect that I won't have to. I happen to be extremely lucky and live in an area where there are actually competing cable companies, so I wouldn't be surprised if the company eventually decided to upgrade the service permanently in order to compete better.
It's not just the mustache, either. Just think about it; when was the last time you met anyone named Adolf who was born after 1945? It used to be a modestly popular name, but now it's all but extinct. 100 years ago, Adolf was about as popular a name as Thaddeus, Winston, or Angus- not tremendously popular, but common enough to be 581 on the Social Security Administration's list of most popular baby names for the 1900's. In the 1950's, though, it didn't even make the top 1000, being pushed out by such winning boys' names as Derwin, Melton, and Vernell. It still can't make the top 1000, being pushed out (for the 1990's) by names like Nikhil, Stetson, and Rohan.
Better to snort Taco Bell than CmdrTaco, though.