The "fast track" option is provided for exactly this case. Since the MS case is almost certainly going to go to the Supreme Court anyway, and since significant harm to consumers may happen (and on the basis of past evidence, is likely to happen) while we wait on the whole appeals process, it makes sense to take antitrust cases directly to the highest court in the land. A quick resolution is good for consumers and the judicial system, but not so good for Microsoft, which is why they're fighting it tooth and nail.
I would hardly call Microsoft the best company with the best products, either. Best marketing and lawyers, maybe:)
See, it was an OK movie (as in, I wouldn't see it again) if you don't try to connect it to the book. It was a totally different story than the book. But I'd rather they change everything and get a halfway OK movie, rather than try to match the book, only get 80% of the way there, and be disappointed in the result.
So, as long as you don't think about the book, the movie was OK (i.e. high-budget B-grade sci-fi). Just don't try to relate the two.
I was amazed how King totally avoided even thinking about the actual law. I mean really, what color is the sky on his planet? The law specifically states that the plaintiff must provide the ISP with specific circumstances. Don't lawyers read the laws anymore?
When I think of Howard King and the RIAA, a quote comes to mind:
When that clue finally arrives, it will be like a fist through the screen. - Doc Searles
I don't think that's going to accomplish much - the mp3s are downloaded from other client machines, not from Napster.com. So you slow down song searches but not the actual mp3 traffic.
This might work better for mp3.com, which actually does host some mp3s through Beam-It and so forth.
Yeah, it's too bad that very few sci-fi movies can live up to the potential of sci-fi literature. For example, I'd love to see Benford's "In the Ocean of Night" series on the big screen, but I'm sure once it made it's way through Hollywood it would resemble "Lost in Space" a whole lot more than the original books. Other candidates for "please, don't make a movie of these" include Simmons' Hyperion series and Wingrove's Chung Kuo series.
One of the few sci-fi books that sort-of made a good movie was "Starship Troopers". Not that it was much like the book, but at least it was both recognizable as being based on the movie but also watchable. It was just lacking the whole political understory that was really the moral of the book.
As a side note for anyone watching recent Olympic coverage on NBC, do the "Log on now to find out more" bars that they put on the bottom of the screen remind anyone else of the "Would you like to know more?" buttons from Starship Troopers? Life imitating art (such as it were) a little, I think.
True. The score to the original Batman movie (not the CD with Prince!) was and remains a classic. My favorite part was the uncharacteristically positive theme used for the last scene when the sun finally comes out on Gotham city. Lots of ascending major scales, with a return to the minor Batman theme at the end where he's silhouetted against the rising sun. That is one of the most moving moments I've seen in a movie, where the music and the filmmaking together create something much more than the sum of their parts.
Not that the techno theme to (fr'instance) The Matrix didn't fit - those really did match the movie pretty well. But there really is a place for the full orchestral sound in movies still, and a lot of the time it still affects people more than the faster-paced dance music.
Maybe it would have been better to go with KParts or CORBA (warning: not sure of exactly the right buzzword here) to start with, rather than trying to graft it on now. That way Mozilla could have gained a lot from the defined interfaces you would get from that, and it would be simple to release first the browser, then an app that includes browser+mail client, then add a newsreader, etc.
Of course, Mozilla already made a major change when they threw out the original codebase, so perhaps asking them to stake it all on CORBA back in '98 would have been a little over the top. I think it would have paid off by now, though - they would already be done.
Some standards bodies will consider a patented algorithm for the standard, as long as the company is willing to make the patents available for everyone's use for a reasonable royalty. Not to defend Fraunhofer, but their royalty charges probably are reasonable to an old-school closed company, which would presumably rake in enough money per mp3 encoder (IIRC, only encoding is patented, decoding is not) to pay for the patent license. Of course, the royalties just aren't workable for freely-distributable software which normally has little-to-no revenue.
Now waiting until it became the widespread standard to enforce the patent and extract royalties - that does seem indefensible (albeit probably legal) to me. In effect, Fraunhofer artificially sweetened the allure of the mp3 format for encoder writers (both pay and free), just to get them hooked. Perhaps the ISO should adopt some rules so that you can't arbitrarily raise royalties or expand patent enforcement significantly above the rates set when the standard was enacted?
The really neat thing seems to be that Yggdrasil is also releasing the software they used to create the DVD to the community, according to the press release. They compare it to the past release of mkisofs and cdwrite that led to the move of Linux distros onto CDs; can anybody who remembers back that far comment? Was it really impossible to burn DVDs under Linux prior to this?
Intel is really pushing AMD with a Tulatin
at 1.26GHz. and a Pentium4 at 2GHz shipping Q3 of 2001.
...considering their past problems above 1 GHz. Maybe they should get their current chips working right in quantity first, m'kay? This is more vaporware from Chipzilla - don't believe it until you see it.
Of course, since they requested everyone to use HTTP, Hemos cleverly used an FTP link on the/. front page instead. Boy, do I pity their server right about now:)
But that was authorized - the hacker sent an HTTP request for a listing, and your server granted the request and sent the requested information. If you don't want people to get that information, and they ask for it, the correct thing to do is not give it to them.
I'm not defending most types of evil hacking (especially the case of the article above, which I only glanced at), but I feel the same way as I do about "deep linking" in the "web server directory" case: if you don't want people to have certain information, the perfectly correct (and easy to implement) solution is to not give it to them. If this situation were in Real Life (tm), that would be the way things would be expected to work, and any legal representations to the contrary would be laughed out of court.
Or, in other words, "ya can't blame a guy for asking":)
I have to ask - what's a "senerco"? I've consulted my handy/. table of common misspellings, but I'm utterly at a loss to come up with an explanation for that one.
"century", "scenario" (actually, that one looks likely), "county"? Even with the help of context I don't get it.
I'm extremely happy Rambus isn't pursuing the SDRAM market (and they don't sound like they
will, but maybe they'll change their tune) and instead only the DDRDRAM market. At least you
CAN still buy a decent computer cheaply, and they're apparently not even making the DDRDRAM
licensing rates terribly ridiculous, or those companies wouldn't be settling so easily.
Ah, but they are going after SDRAM, with intent to shut down the entire market. Using their (possibly invalid) patents, they are jacking up the price of SDRAM so that RDRAM becomes cheaper and the industry moves to RDRAM. The companies that are settling are doing so based on their past use of SDRAM, not RDRAM. RAMBUS' intent is to destroy the SDRAM market by force of patent, rather than conquering it by making RDRAM a better product.
...don't buy RDRAM, it's completely not worth it and ridiculously expensive.
Sure it's expensive, but if RAMBUS gets its way, RDRAM will be the cheaper of the two. The article at Lost Circuits was an eye-opener for me; maybe you should read it?
If you're using Netscape, you can go to the Netscape Search page and set up Google to always be your search engine. In Netscape 4.x, this is the flashlight icon on the tool bar. Then you can do Google searches by typing '? search terms' in the Location: box. It's very convenient and skips having to go to any other page.
Slashdot Mirror
The "fast track" option is provided for exactly this case. Since the MS case is almost certainly going to go to the Supreme Court anyway, and since significant harm to consumers may happen (and on the basis of past evidence, is likely to happen) while we wait on the whole appeals process, it makes sense to take antitrust cases directly to the highest court in the land. A quick resolution is good for consumers and the judicial system, but not so good for Microsoft, which is why they're fighting it tooth and nail.
I would hardly call Microsoft the best company with the best products, either. Best marketing and lawyers, maybe :)
(with apologies to Kliban...)
See, it was an OK movie (as in, I wouldn't see it again) if you don't try to connect it to the book. It was a totally different story than the book. But I'd rather they change everything and get a halfway OK movie, rather than try to match the book, only get 80% of the way there, and be disappointed in the result.
So, as long as you don't think about the book, the movie was OK (i.e. high-budget B-grade sci-fi). Just don't try to relate the two.
I was amazed how King totally avoided even thinking about the actual law. I mean really, what color is the sky on his planet? The law specifically states that the plaintiff must provide the ISP with specific circumstances. Don't lawyers read the laws anymore?
When I think of Howard King and the RIAA, a quote comes to mind:
I don't think that's going to accomplish much - the mp3s are downloaded from other client machines, not from Napster.com. So you slow down song searches but not the actual mp3 traffic.
This might work better for mp3.com, which actually does host some mp3s through Beam-It and so forth.
Yeah, it's too bad that very few sci-fi movies can live up to the potential of sci-fi literature. For example, I'd love to see Benford's "In the Ocean of Night" series on the big screen, but I'm sure once it made it's way through Hollywood it would resemble "Lost in Space" a whole lot more than the original books. Other candidates for "please, don't make a movie of these" include Simmons' Hyperion series and Wingrove's Chung Kuo series.
One of the few sci-fi books that sort-of made a good movie was "Starship Troopers". Not that it was much like the book, but at least it was both recognizable as being based on the movie but also watchable. It was just lacking the whole political understory that was really the moral of the book.
As a side note for anyone watching recent Olympic coverage on NBC, do the "Log on now to find out more" bars that they put on the bottom of the screen remind anyone else of the "Would you like to know more?" buttons from Starship Troopers? Life imitating art (such as it were) a little, I think.
True. The score to the original Batman movie (not the CD with Prince!) was and remains a classic. My favorite part was the uncharacteristically positive theme used for the last scene when the sun finally comes out on Gotham city. Lots of ascending major scales, with a return to the minor Batman theme at the end where he's silhouetted against the rising sun. That is one of the most moving moments I've seen in a movie, where the music and the filmmaking together create something much more than the sum of their parts.
Not that the techno theme to (fr'instance) The Matrix didn't fit - those really did match the movie pretty well. But there really is a place for the full orchestral sound in movies still, and a lot of the time it still affects people more than the faster-paced dance music.
Plus, Elfman wrote the theme to the Simpsons :)
Maybe it would have been better to go with KParts or CORBA (warning: not sure of exactly the right buzzword here) to start with, rather than trying to graft it on now. That way Mozilla could have gained a lot from the defined interfaces you would get from that, and it would be simple to release first the browser, then an app that includes browser+mail client, then add a newsreader, etc.
Of course, Mozilla already made a major change when they threw out the original codebase, so perhaps asking them to stake it all on CORBA back in '98 would have been a little over the top. I think it would have paid off by now, though - they would already be done.
Oooh! Oooh! I know - it's the comma after green, isn't it? Did I spot it?
Some standards bodies will consider a patented algorithm for the standard, as long as the company is willing to make the patents available for everyone's use for a reasonable royalty. Not to defend Fraunhofer, but their royalty charges probably are reasonable to an old-school closed company, which would presumably rake in enough money per mp3 encoder (IIRC, only encoding is patented, decoding is not) to pay for the patent license. Of course, the royalties just aren't workable for freely-distributable software which normally has little-to-no revenue.
Now waiting until it became the widespread standard to enforce the patent and extract royalties - that does seem indefensible (albeit probably legal) to me. In effect, Fraunhofer artificially sweetened the allure of the mp3 format for encoder writers (both pay and free), just to get them hooked. Perhaps the ISO should adopt some rules so that you can't arbitrarily raise royalties or expand patent enforcement significantly above the rates set when the standard was enacted?
The really neat thing seems to be that Yggdrasil is also releasing the software they used to create the DVD to the community, according to the press release. They compare it to the past release of mkisofs and cdwrite that led to the move of Linux distros onto CDs; can anybody who remembers back that far comment? Was it really impossible to burn DVDs under Linux prior to this?
...considering their past problems above 1 GHz. Maybe they should get their current chips working right in quantity first, m'kay? This is more vaporware from Chipzilla - don't believe it until you see it.
0, oops no wait I mean 1. AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhh! (*ethereal falls into the chasm*)
Only by comparison to my previous post...
8 if they're skinny, 4 if they're fat (with apologies to Charles Schulz :)
It's official: I'm a moron. Time for some more coffee...
Of course, since they requested everyone to use HTTP, Hemos cleverly used an FTP link on the /. front page instead. Boy, do I pity their server right about now :)
Wow, a self-fulfilling post. Either /. is approaching GEB-like levels of self-referentiality, or you're just using one of your other accounts :).
Don't learn from your mistakes, do you? :) I assume you mean the <BLINK> tag?
Sorry, I really didn't want to make a spelling flame, I just couldn't tell what you were getting at :) It makes much more sense now.
But that was authorized - the hacker sent an HTTP request for a listing, and your server granted the request and sent the requested information. If you don't want people to get that information, and they ask for it, the correct thing to do is not give it to them.
I'm not defending most types of evil hacking (especially the case of the article above, which I only glanced at), but I feel the same way as I do about "deep linking" in the "web server directory" case: if you don't want people to have certain information, the perfectly correct (and easy to implement) solution is to not give it to them. If this situation were in Real Life (tm), that would be the way things would be expected to work, and any legal representations to the contrary would be laughed out of court.
Or, in other words, "ya can't blame a guy for asking" :)
I have to ask - what's a "senerco"? I've consulted my handy /. table of common misspellings, but I'm utterly at a loss to come up with an explanation for that one.
"century", "scenario" (actually, that one looks likely), "county"? Even with the help of context I don't get it.
Ah, but they are going after SDRAM, with intent to shut down the entire market. Using their (possibly invalid) patents, they are jacking up the price of SDRAM so that RDRAM becomes cheaper and the industry moves to RDRAM. The companies that are settling are doing so based on their past use of SDRAM, not RDRAM. RAMBUS' intent is to destroy the SDRAM market by force of patent, rather than conquering it by making RDRAM a better product.
Sure it's expensive, but if RAMBUS gets its way, RDRAM will be the cheaper of the two. The article at Lost Circuits was an eye-opener for me; maybe you should read it?
Methinks I've been one-upped :) I'll have to get me some of that Mozilla stuff.
If you're using Netscape, you can go to the Netscape Search page and set up Google to always be your search engine. In Netscape 4.x, this is the flashlight icon on the tool bar. Then you can do Google searches by typing '? search terms' in the Location: box. It's very convenient and skips having to go to any other page.