I do believe Microsoft may be getting a taste of its own medicine!
You make it sound like it's a good thing...
I haven't read the patent, but TFA makes it sound like it applies to any kind of "WYSIWYG" editing of a document that gets saved in a structured format, not only XML ("separating the manipulation of content from the architecture of the document").
Besides the obvious implications for software like OpenOffice, this covers pretty much any type of WYSIWYG editing: spreadsheets, UML diagrams, math formulas, MS's Visio/Project outputs, the list goes on. Hell, all modern browsers support a WYSIWYG HTML editor. Do they infringe this patent?
This is absolutely terrible. The only good thing about it is that Microsoft has the money to overturn this joke of a patent, and can get enough media coverage to point out how broken the U.S. patent system is.
Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Google and its affiliates hereby grant to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this License) patent license for patents necessarily infringed by implementation of this specification. If you institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the implementation of the specification constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses for the specification granted to you under this License shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
Java wasn't opensourced back then. There's a not-so-subtle difference here:
I take your specs for a platform, implement them, and extend them with some proprietary APIs that I make sure are valuable for developers but won't run on your platform. This is meant to kill your product's unique advantage: its ability to run everywhere, which I consider a threat to the monopoly of another product I develop: an operating system. Next, I make my platform the standard on said operating system by bundling and leveraging my monopoly. In the mean time I make sure that products written for your standard platform will break in funny ways when running on mine, so developers will shy away from the technology altogether.
vs.
I take some of your specs, look at your code, and come up with a different product. I never pretend interoperability between our platforms. Then I publish the code under a liberal license, which even allows you to incorporate all my work into your product.
If they are so inclined, Sun, err.. Oracle can take whatever extras Google implemented in Android and make it part of their JVM. It's perfectly legal, and they don't have to pay squat for it.
Comparing this to Microsoft's embrace-extend-extinguish attempt is either trolling, or a severe lack of knowledge of recent history / understanding of licensing / what Android is all about. For the sake of innocence until proven guilty I presume you're not a troll.. but then.. what are you doing on slashdot?
Oh take off your US-manufactured tinfoil hat. From TFA:
The authority has repeatedly ruled against Greece's conservative government and banned the use of street cameras for fighting crime. The cameras were set up as part of elaborate security preparations for the 2004 Olympics in Athens.
It also clashed with the Greek Orthodox Church after it ruled that recording Greek citizens' religion on state ID cards was illegal.
DPA said it wanted clarification from the U.S. Internet company on how it will store and process the original images and safeguard them from privacy abuses
despite
Google's assurances that it would blur faces and vehicle license plates when displaying the images online.
The question is then, does Google store the images with faces and license plates blurred, or that's just post-processing for online display?
Google's statement definitely tends to point at the latter. And I could see a few problems there.
To be fair to Greece's Data Protection Authority, they do have a problem with police videoing people and have stopped the government using street cameras to fight crime as well.
It seems either she, or the person who wrote the article, is confusing mesh networking with power distribution. [...] Those two don't seem to fit well together.
All the guy had to do was ask: "Do you want to whitelist the noscript webpage in adblock? I depend on these ads for revenue." I'd have damn well clicked yes.
It's unfortunate how the sleazy way out seemed appropriate to someone who's supposed to be developing software against malware...
Microsoft's conduct over the last two decades has demonstrated Microsoft's willingness and ability to engage in unlawful conduct to protect and extend its core monopolies. This conduct has caused real harm to consumers, who continue to pay high prices and use lower quality products than would have prevailed in a competitive market. By understanding Microsoft's history of anticompetitive conduct, developers, consumer groups, and government authorities will be better equipped to recognize current and future Microsoft misconduct at an early stage and intervene to prevent Microsoft from using tactics other than competition on the merits. ECIS remains hopeful that the European Commission's latest Statement of Objections addressing Microsoft's misconduct will finally mark the beginning of the end of Microsoft's two decades of anticompetitive behavior and consumer harm.
Stop burning coal. This isn't the industrial revolution. It's 2009 for pete's sake. Breeder reactors. Pull your superstitions out of your brain and your heads out of your asses. B-R-E-E-D-E-R R-E-A-C-T-O-R-S!
This is how it looks in linux: http://paste.ubuntu.com/127979/ IIRC that was the secondary SSD in an eeepc 900. Not sure what the windows variant of this would be.. BSOD?
The story is their communist government cut down the communication tools. Cellphone coverage is off and all media "shutdown" early in the day. The radio / television employees all went home and the buildings are surrounded by the military.
The story is they were left with the internet. Here's a good read.
I see complaints that the engine is "old" and that the graphics aren't up to snuff with more modern games.
Besides, the engine is not "old". For more than a year, DarkPlaces does things that you can't even find in Quake 3: high dynamic range rendering, realtime dynamic lighting, parallax mapping etc.
Yes, 7 years ago the engine was a fork of Quake 1. And the point is?
Ts'o is right: DEs are braindead. I'm a total KDE fanboi, but the way they're managing config files is just asking for trouble.
And IMO the ext3 5 seconds flush default is plain dumb. As an example of what I'm prepared to put up with, here's an excerpt from my fstab: /dev/sda2 / xfs allocsize=128k,logbufs=4 /dev/sda5/var ext3 data=writeback,commit=60 /dev/sda6/home ext3 commit=30
And from sysctl.conf:
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 20
vm.dirty_ratio = 50
vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 6000
vm.dirty_expire_centisecs = 12000
What I don't agree with is his suggestion for a sqlite-like database. No thank you. I want my config files easily readable and editable, not windows registry (or gconf for that matter). All thousands of them.
The problem lies with how all those files are littered all across the $HOME dir. I want a single ~/.config directory that I could mount ext2 sync, or ext3 data=journal,commit=1. Whomever had the bright idea that each app/suite should write its conf in a separate dot file/folder under $HOME should be taken out back and shot.
That chart doesn't make any sense. There's no numbers, but the chart would show that Linux+Apple combined have less than 10% market share, and Linux's is slightly higher than Apple's. Are Net Applications' numbers that severely skewed? I mean, it would make sense to increase Windows' market share at the expense of Linux, but doubling Apple's makes little sense.
If that slide is for real, then both must be messing with the numbers: NetApps throwing Linux to the bin, and Ballmer likely downplaying all their competitors (i.e. unlicensed Windows included) in order to reassure the investors/shareholders.
All in all, Linux is by far a (the?) major thorn in Microsft's side. Apple has a well defined target market: they sell the shiny machine together with the shiny OS, and they proved over and over they don't intend to let the software get detached from the machine, which can only please Microsoft.
On the other hand, Linux runs on all hardware where Windows runs, and then some. That's gotta hurt.
I think the appropriate response from Microsoft would be to stop selling Windows in the EU. The EU wants people to see alternatives, so great. Stop making Windows available until there's a public outcry and reversal of these insane rulings.
Let me take this opportunity to thank you for this great idea. On behalf of all the people of Europe, really, THANK YOU!
And when you're done convincing Microsoft to put a stop on their sales to Europe, please stop by the *AA offices, and stop the Spiderman and Brittney Spears sales as well.
Exhibit B: Webkit. Apple forked khtml and now there are several browsers for windows, linux browsers are based off it. Nothing bad has happened, and I think we can all agree that webkit is a darn fast browser engine.
You mean when they tried perfecting the fine art of embrace-extend-extinguish on a GPL product?
Trying not to troll here, but you need a lesson in history. You probably weren't around during the flamewars caused by apple's effective lock-out of the KHTML team from their improvements (no access to their VCS without and NDA(!), dumps of huge patches along with safari releases).
Ultimately their policy backfired, as other further forked WebKit and didn't submit their improvements upstream -- most notably Nokia, whose fork runs on millions of S60 devices.
So in the end they "opened up". And maybe some would s/extinguish/undermine/. But saying "nothing bad has happened" couldn't be farther from the truth. No, it was not a smooth ride.
So, it's a little disingenuous to portray Apple as completely proprietary: How many open source projects does Microsoft participate in? Yes I agree that Apple does try to lock you into their hardware, and that sucks, but they're not being completely evil.
This is just my opinion, but Microsoft are little kids compared to Apple on the evil scale. The combined lock-in of hardware and software is generations ahead the evilness of Microsoft's lock-in strategy. And then there's this last thing.. the unbelievable manipulation. Whenever I watch the crazed reaction of audiences during Steve Jobs' keynotes I get a sudden feeling of Al Pacino in Devil's Advocate..
From TFA, the first of the "Answers to some predictable comments":
Why didn't you use Firefox 3.1?
We tried using a nightly build of Firefox 3.1 to see how performance might change in the future, but it locked up while running the Dromaeo tests so we opted to leave it for now. To be fair, the browser is still in beta, so it wouldn't really be a good test.
No. Once upon a time there was the Cyrix MediaGX; Cyrix merged with National Semiconductor, who rebranded the MediaGX as Geode, and subsequently sold the design to AMD.
The only involvement VIA had in the business was buying the Cyrix trademark and some of its IP from National. This IP supposedly helped them tremendously in getting Intel off its back. And VIA keeps happily doing business in the x86 world: C3, C7, and now x86-64 with the Nano.
The PC Authority site got slashdotted, but this sounds terribly like Charlie Demerijan's article from 2 days ago.
And while Charlie's articles are terribly fun to read, they don't quite qualify as news. Call them rants, speculation, whatever you wish, but not news. At least unless they get picked up blindly by other publications...
Slashdot Mirror
I do believe Microsoft may be getting a taste of its own medicine!
You make it sound like it's a good thing...
I haven't read the patent, but TFA makes it sound like it applies to any kind of "WYSIWYG" editing of a document that gets saved in a structured format, not only XML ("separating the manipulation of content from the architecture of the document").
Besides the obvious implications for software like OpenOffice, this covers pretty much any type of WYSIWYG editing: spreadsheets, UML diagrams, math formulas, MS's Visio/Project outputs, the list goes on. Hell, all modern browsers support a WYSIWYG HTML editor. Do they infringe this patent?
This is absolutely terrible. The only good thing about it is that Microsoft has the money to overturn this joke of a patent, and can get enough media coverage to point out how broken the U.S. patent system is.
It's this I find most interesting:
Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Google and its affiliates hereby grant to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this License) patent license for patents necessarily infringed by implementation of this specification. If you institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the implementation of the specification constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses for the specification granted to you under this License shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
Java wasn't opensourced back then. There's a not-so-subtle difference here:
I take your specs for a platform, implement them, and extend them with some proprietary APIs that I make sure are valuable for developers but won't run on your platform.
This is meant to kill your product's unique advantage: its ability to run everywhere, which I consider a threat to the monopoly of another product I develop: an operating system.
Next, I make my platform the standard on said operating system by bundling and leveraging my monopoly.
In the mean time I make sure that products written for your standard platform will break in funny ways when running on mine, so developers will shy away from the technology altogether.
vs.
I take some of your specs, look at your code, and come up with a different product. I never pretend interoperability between our platforms.
Then I publish the code under a liberal license, which even allows you to incorporate all my work into your product.
If they are so inclined, Sun, err.. Oracle can take whatever extras Google implemented in Android and make it part of their JVM. It's perfectly legal, and they don't have to pay squat for it.
Comparing this to Microsoft's embrace-extend-extinguish attempt is either trolling, or a severe lack of knowledge of recent history / understanding of licensing / what Android is all about. For the sake of innocence until proven guilty I presume you're not a troll.. but then.. what are you doing on slashdot?
Oh take off your US-manufactured tinfoil hat. From TFA:
The authority has repeatedly ruled against Greece's conservative government and banned the use of street cameras for fighting crime. The cameras were set up as part of elaborate security preparations for the 2004 Olympics in Athens.
It also clashed with the Greek Orthodox Church after it ruled that recording Greek citizens' religion on state ID cards was illegal.
If only more countries had such agencies...
DPA said it wanted clarification from the U.S. Internet company on how it will store and process the original images and safeguard them from privacy abuses
despite
Google's assurances that it would blur faces and vehicle license plates when displaying the images online.
The question is then, does Google store the images with faces and license plates blurred, or that's just post-processing for online display?
Google's statement definitely tends to point at the latter. And I could see a few problems there.
To be fair to Greece's Data Protection Authority, they do have a problem with police videoing people and have stopped the government using street cameras to fight crime as well.
Let's all move to Greece..
It seems either she, or the person who wrote the article, is confusing mesh networking with power distribution. [...] Those two don't seem to fit well together.
Here's someone else's work that seemed to "confuse" the two.
But what she's basically saying is: if it's powered by the grid, put it on the mesh network. And while you're at it do the same for cars.
The Inquirer's ranty Charlie Demerijan was on to this earlier: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1052027/apple-console
And when it comes to education, it's hard to create metrics to accurately measure success.
Simple: have the students rate the teachers.
Until 1 minute ago I had NoScript installed.
All the guy had to do was ask: "Do you want to whitelist the noscript webpage in adblock? I depend on these ads for revenue." I'd have damn well clicked yes.
It's unfortunate how the sleazy way out seemed appropriate to someone who's supposed to be developing software against malware...
The sooner I can download what ever text I want, the better. I hope the governement doesnt stand in the way.
I wouldn't worry about the government standing in your way, I would worry about the author.
I wouldn't worry about the author. I'd worry about the Authors Guild.
Emphasis mine:
VI. CONCLUSION
Microsoft's conduct over the last two decades has demonstrated Microsoft's willingness and ability to engage in unlawful conduct to protect and extend its core monopolies. This conduct has caused real harm to consumers, who continue to pay high prices and use lower quality products than would have prevailed in a competitive market. By understanding Microsoft's history of anticompetitive conduct, developers, consumer groups, and government authorities will be better equipped to recognize current and future Microsoft misconduct at an early stage and intervene to prevent Microsoft from using tactics other than competition on the merits. ECIS remains hopeful that the European Commission's latest Statement of Objections addressing Microsoft's misconduct will finally mark the beginning of the end of Microsoft's two decades of anticompetitive behavior and consumer harm.
Chairs must be flying in Redmond right now.
Stop burning coal. This isn't the industrial revolution. It's 2009 for pete's sake. Breeder reactors. Pull your superstitions out of your brain and your heads out of your asses. B-R-E-E-D-E-R R-E-A-C-T-O-R-S!
Exactly. This is 2009, not the 1950s.
Between then and now all incentive for technological advancement has been swamped in a mess of corporate interests, patents and environmentalism.
Better throttle them to some 20b/s.
This is how it looks in linux: http://paste.ubuntu.com/127979/
IIRC that was the secondary SSD in an eeepc 900. Not sure what the windows variant of this would be.. BSOD?
The story is their communist government cut down the communication tools. Cellphone coverage is off and all media "shutdown" early in the day. The radio / television employees all went home and the buildings are surrounded by the military.
The story is they were left with the internet. Here's a good read.
I see complaints that the engine is "old" and that the graphics aren't up to snuff with more modern games.
Besides, the engine is not "old". For more than a year, DarkPlaces does things that you can't even find in Quake 3: high dynamic range rendering, realtime dynamic lighting, parallax mapping etc.
Yes, 7 years ago the engine was a fork of Quake 1. And the point is?
Ts'o is right: DEs are braindead. I'm a total KDE fanboi, but the way they're managing config files is just asking for trouble.
And IMO the ext3 5 seconds flush default is plain dumb. As an example of what I'm prepared to put up with, here's an excerpt from my fstab:
/dev/sda2 / xfs allocsize=128k,logbufs=4
/dev/sda5 /var ext3 data=writeback,commit=60
/dev/sda6 /home ext3 commit=30
And from sysctl.conf:
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 20
vm.dirty_ratio = 50
vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 6000
vm.dirty_expire_centisecs = 12000
What I don't agree with is his suggestion for a sqlite-like database. No thank you. I want my config files easily readable and editable, not windows registry (or gconf for that matter). All thousands of them.
The problem lies with how all those files are littered all across the $HOME dir. I want a single ~/.config directory that I could mount ext2 sync, or ext3 data=journal,commit=1. Whomever had the bright idea that each app/suite should write its conf in a separate dot file/folder under $HOME should be taken out back and shot.
That chart doesn't make any sense. There's no numbers, but the chart would show that Linux+Apple combined have less than 10% market share, and Linux's is slightly higher than Apple's. Are Net Applications' numbers that severely skewed? I mean, it would make sense to increase Windows' market share at the expense of Linux, but doubling Apple's makes little sense.
If that slide is for real, then both must be messing with the numbers: NetApps throwing Linux to the bin, and Ballmer likely downplaying all their competitors (i.e. unlicensed Windows included) in order to reassure the investors/shareholders.
All in all, Linux is by far a (the?) major thorn in Microsft's side. Apple has a well defined target market: they sell the shiny machine together with the shiny OS, and they proved over and over they don't intend to let the software get detached from the machine, which can only please Microsoft.
On the other hand, Linux runs on all hardware where Windows runs, and then some. That's gotta hurt.
I think the appropriate response from Microsoft would be to stop selling Windows in the EU. The EU wants people to see alternatives, so great. Stop making Windows available until there's a public outcry and reversal of these insane rulings.
Let me take this opportunity to thank you for this great idea. On behalf of all the people of Europe, really, THANK YOU!
And when you're done convincing Microsoft to put a stop on their sales to Europe, please stop by the *AA offices, and stop the Spiderman and Brittney Spears sales as well.
Again, Thank You.
Exhibit B: Webkit. Apple forked khtml and now there are several browsers for windows, linux browsers are based off it. Nothing bad has happened, and I think we can all agree that webkit is a darn fast browser engine.
You mean when they tried perfecting the fine art of embrace-extend-extinguish on a GPL product?
Trying not to troll here, but you need a lesson in history. You probably weren't around during the flamewars caused by apple's effective lock-out of the KHTML team from their improvements (no access to their VCS without and NDA(!), dumps of huge patches along with safari releases).
Ultimately their policy backfired, as other further forked WebKit and didn't submit their improvements upstream -- most notably Nokia, whose fork runs on millions of S60 devices.
So in the end they "opened up". And maybe some would s/extinguish/undermine/. But saying "nothing bad has happened" couldn't be farther from the truth. No, it was not a smooth ride.
So, it's a little disingenuous to portray Apple as completely proprietary: How many open source projects does Microsoft participate in? Yes I agree that Apple does try to lock you into their hardware, and that sucks, but they're not being completely evil.
This is just my opinion, but Microsoft are little kids compared to Apple on the evil scale. The combined lock-in of hardware and software is generations ahead the evilness of Microsoft's lock-in strategy. And then there's this last thing.. the unbelievable manipulation. Whenever I watch the crazed reaction of audiences during Steve Jobs' keynotes I get a sudden feeling of Al Pacino in Devil's Advocate..
From TFA, the first of the "Answers to some predictable comments":
Why didn't you use Firefox 3.1?
We tried using a nightly build of Firefox 3.1 to see how performance might change in the future, but it locked up while running the Dromaeo tests so we opted to leave it for now. To be fair, the browser is still in beta, so it wouldn't really be a good test.
You might be interested in cooperative linux.
It's a linux kernel ported to run (natively) on windows. No virtualization.
No. Once upon a time there was the Cyrix MediaGX; Cyrix merged with National Semiconductor, who rebranded the MediaGX as Geode, and subsequently sold the design to AMD.
The only involvement VIA had in the business was buying the Cyrix trademark and some of its IP from National. This IP supposedly helped them tremendously in getting Intel off its back. And VIA keeps happily doing business in the x86 world: C3, C7, and now x86-64 with the Nano.
The PC Authority site got slashdotted, but this sounds terribly like Charlie Demerijan's article from 2 days ago.
And while Charlie's articles are terribly fun to read, they don't quite qualify as news. Call them rants, speculation, whatever you wish, but not news. At least unless they get picked up blindly by other publications...