It might be this company is selling some sort of very hardened Linux. If they are, this is exactly the right way to go about it. They are publicly inviiting people to attack it, meaning that if there are any holes, someone is likely to find them. And anyone who hacks on the box can do so with impunity. And if they really can build a bulletproof box then they deserve the rewards they can get by selling one which, on an open and public basis, has taken the worst anyone could throw at it and survived.
about the claimed violation of U.S. Patent No. 5,838,906 may be read from the PDF at this address. I'm kind of curious why, since Microsoft, in Washington State, and the University of California, whose location is left as an exercise to the reader, are both located in the 9th Circuit, that the case was originally tried in Illinois, the 7th Circuit. Probably that's where Eolas is located.
There is no point in optimizing a piece of code that never gets executed. There is little point in optimizing a piece of code that takes 2 seconds longer than it should when it's only executed once in 100,000 executions. You need to know what code is being executed how often, then when you find out what code is being executed the most, find where the code has the bottlenecks that reduce performance, and you target those points for optimization.
It's said in real estate the three most important things are Location, Location, Location. Well, it seems, it's true in optimization too.
On second thought, the three most important things in optimization are Measure, Measure, Measure. You need to measure before you can optimize. If you don't measure, you don't know what really needs to be optimized. You have to profile to properly optimize.
Anything else wastes valuable time. Unless you optimize the parts that are executed the most or which slow down the process the worst, you are "very efficiently wasting time."
Managers handle people as resources, technical people handle code or material as resources. If you can adequately handle people correctly, you can manage any business even if you don't know it. All it takes is some very simple steps.
Don't try to make decisions about a subject before you understand it. Or to a company. That means that for the first few weeks or months - depending on the number of people who report to you - you do nothing but watch what is happening, get out and see what is going on, and ask lots of questions so that you do understand. Even if you're familiar with the particular business, every company runs in a different fashion, and your way of doing things might not work. You want to make decisions in such a way that people follow what you tell them because they respect you as being fair and reasonable even if they do not agree with your decision.
Ask each person who reports to you two questions: "Do you have everything you need to do your job properly?" and "Is there anything I can do to help you be able to do your job properly?" and be willing to listen and take them seriously.
If you have to solve a problem and do not know how, you find out the people who are most impacted by the problem (the ones who have to suffer with the results of the solution) and you give them the problem, explaining that since they have to live with the solution, you'll let them decide how to fix the problem, then you implement the solution they give you.
Basically you have to be willing to trust your people in that presumably they are professionals and are willing to do a good job if you will allow them to do so.
You have to be consistent, and people will try to put their efforts toward what they think you want most. If you talk about product quality once a day but gripe about schedule slippage ten times a day, quality is not going to improve.
You also have to guarantee immunity for bad news. That means you have to be willing to allow anyone to come to you about anything wrong without fear of reprisal. It also means you're willing to correct problems even to the extent of protecting the people who tell you about problems against your boss finding out about the person doing so.
Having been both a working manager in a non-programming position and a non-managing programmer, I've seen it from both sides. Good managers make a place a wonderful place to work. Bad managers make a place into a living hell. Do your job right as a manager and people hardly even notice you're there, until you're not there and they realize how much you do for them.
". . . its (sic) not really that unethical (although it is illegal) . .."
Yes, it is quite illegal. Most states call it the "Theft of Cable" act, or more recently, "Theft of Information Services." In my state, it's a felony that can get you up to five years on the first offense.
The FCC has stated that they alone have exclusive jurisdiction over unlicensed radio frequency spectrum. This means the state does not have jurisdiction to prosecute over the issue of radio frequency use. Now, to argue theft of cable there are several issues involved (1) the cable service is somehow being tapped into; (2) use of the signal by tapping into it reduces the ability of others to use the signal; (3) the supplier of the service is losing some revenue that it can't charge. In the case of tapping into cable, you've made a physical connection to someone else's service. You also, almost certainly, had to tap into a secured connection box.
Now, let's consider that the cable company installs a line into an apartment. The prior customer moves. You move into the apartment as the new tenant. You find a cable TV connection in the apartement. You hook up to it. The connection was totally legal. Are you stealing service? Well, you're not paying for it, but the connection was legally made. They can cut off your service if they want but I do not think they can back bill you for the unpaid time between the last customer and now. And they cannot charge you with theft of service since you're not making any unauthorized connection to their service. Same thing if you use the electricity in the apartment, you can't be charged with theft of service. But if you go out to the meter and tap into it, then you can be charged for theft of electric service.
But, more importantly, you are saying that theft is "not that unethical." Or, to put it another way, "theft is ethical." Okay, so when somebody steals your car you won't press charges because it's ethical?
This presumes connecting to an unpassworded, unsecured network over a wireless connection is somehow a crime. When someone steals your car, they remove its posession from yours, they deprive you of its use. As the victim of a car theft (and they caught the guy who did it so I got my car back) I understand the significance of the difference.
Let's consider, some guy goes out for the evening but leaves their TV on with the curtains open (so you can see it) and their windows open (so you can hear everything), and their VCR is not recording anything (so you're not preventing them from using their signal). You, sitting on the sidewalk, decide to change the channel using a universal remote while they are gone, and when they come back you change the channel back. Have you stolen anything from them or in any way deprived them of their property? Exactly what crime, if any, have you committed against them? Maybe sending a remote control signal into their apartment could considered trespassing, but I find that a little bit of a stretch.
What's that? Not the same thing? I disagree. First of all, both cases of theft are statutorially illegal. Second, you paid for your car (probably still are like most of us), so you should get to decide who uses it.
I think there is a big difference between deprival of use of a physical, nonsharable and nonfungible resource, and someone else's using a fungible, perishable resource (bit time slices used less than capacity are lost whether you use them or not) having no physical existence.
The Cable Companies paid for the infrastructure. Don't they have the right to determine who can use it?
Once they provide a legitimate connection they have no right to determine what you watch as long as you don't take pay-per-view signals through unlawful means. In fact, the law is clear that it's perfectly legal to capture any satellite transmission for view
"I'm Spacey Spacem! The hits from one end of the universe to the other on Galactic Radio, now with over 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts of power!"
You can build a fuel-air explosive a lot easier, or the McVeigh Sandwich of fertilizer and diesel (AMFO) with a lot less trouble and with just as much impact, and it's a hell of a lot harder to prevent or catch someone parking a tractor-trailer truck full of AMFO as opposed to a radiation detector catching a small nuke.
You want to do damage, it's a whole lot easier to buy a truckload of fertilizer, and openly buy 500 gallons or so of diesel fuel from any truck stop for cash, and if you have them delivered to a farm, nobody will notice or even think twice about it as it would be routine, and the chances are excellent you can get away with it and never be caught.
For probably $10,000 you can create a dozen nasty good sized bombs without even having to do anything which in any way looks suspicious or illegal until you set the damn thing off. I doubt that you can go nuclear on less than a million. A million bucks will probably buy you a thousand Oklahoma City-sized bombs, but at best gets you one lousy nuke. Which is going to have more effect for the same amount of money? One spectacular bomb that kills about the same number as the World Trade Center, Second Edition, or a thousand WTC-sized bombs?
Estimates are the WTC attacks cost Al-Qaeda maybe $100,000. Would a nuclear bomb have done better in terms of horror, publicity or terror than two hijacked airliners? Above a certain level it really doesn't matter, you've already made your point, and trying to use even stronger methods doesn't buy you anything more.
Further, you don't have to be a martyr to use ANFO, but you'd better be intending to die if you use a nuke, because otherwise if you drop a nuke, you guarantee they will hunt you down for as long as it takes. And let's not forget that it's possible for a very tiny group (2 people, maybe even just 1) can set up an ANFO bomb. And it doesn't take a whole lot of smarts to do it. It's going to take a lot more people - with intelligence - to set up a usable nuke.
Thieves used to steal cars because you could hot-wire the ignition. Even if the ignition locks you could break it, usually with a screwdriver.
Then they developed the new ignitions that require a key with a transponder chip. (I think this was a demand by auto insurance companies.) So, as a result, instead of stealing cars, thieves are now carjacking people in order to get the car with the key in it, with the resulting increase in danger to the owner. Doesn't matter to the insurer as they are only liable for injuries in the case of an auto accident, not for robbery, unless you have supplemental medical coverage as part of your auto policy, which I suspect most people don't.
If this sort of thing becomes popular, it could trigger thieves cutting people's fingers and stripping the fingerprints. I am reminded of a horrid example in the movie "Fighting Back" where a thief wanted to steal a ring from some woman, but she couldn't get it off her finger. So he used a pair of tin snips and cut her finger off. Can't very well damage the ring, can we?
Probably not a whole lot of competition
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XM and Sirius Merger?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
In addition to running a series of about 60 music channels of their own, Dish Network carries about 68 from Sirius Satellite Network as well. So even if XM and Sirius do merge, Dish Network would still probably carry their channels as well. As long as they don't provide a video service, neither XM nor Sirius is truly any kind of competitor to Dish Network or DirectTV. As Dish Network has realized, an audio service can be a compliment to their offerings, not a competitor. An audio-only service is not a competitor to a video service. Dish Network, DirectTV and your local cable TV franchise are competitors, but XM and Sirius are not.
A lot of companies want to lock-in customers for replacement gear such as chargers and so forth. I found one of my old Nokia analog cell phones and it uses a round connector. My current Samsung Sprint PCS phone uses a round connector with a slightly different fit. Yet both chargers produce almost the same amount of power (6.2v 1A vs. 6.2v 750mA). My brother's Motorola phone for Nextel uses a long two-prong connector, which he's had to go back and get a replacement (which they didn't charge him for) because it would no longer charge his phone. Motorola couldn't have chosen a simple (and cheap) ordinary single plug round connector, noooo, they have to use a proprietary connector that doesn't match anything from anyone else and is a lot easier to break and is more likely not to work.
Generally these manufacturers apparently think they can make a lot of money charging a fortune for car chargers or replacement wall chargers, and thus they do not make charger connectors (or batteries) to be compatible with anything else (or sometimes with their own brands). This is a foolish and wasteful practice because third-party companies will come out with adequate chargers - for less money - very shortly after any model is developed. Unless and until manufacturers decide that competing on the peripheral connectors is not really an advantage to them the problems of so many different cords is going to be a continuing problem not likely to be solved.
This bill, and one that was mentioned elsewhere in comments posted here, SB 1506, are, in effect, attempts by a state to criminalize alleged misuse of copyrighted materials, after the U.S. Congress has already ruled that it has declared itself the exclusive provider of any protections or rights over copyrightable materials. With the exception of most* sound recordings first fixed prior to February 15, 1972, states have no jurisdiction over the use, publication or distribution of copyrighted or copyrightable materials, or any intellectual property.
While I am not a lawyer, I see this type of statute as having no legal authority as it attempts to criminalize conduct which is either potentially legal (as might be in the case of fair use) or which Congress has already set penalties and has specifically pre-empted any form of state protection. I believe these type laws would be found unconstitutional or invalid as having been overridden by Congress. It was made clear by the 1978 law and later changes including the Berne Convention Accession that Congress wanted to eliminate any state control over copyright with the exception of most* sound recordings which were fixed prior to February 15, 1972 which it has declared are not copyrightable (and to which states will have no power to provide any form of copyright protection after February 15, 2047.)
*"Most" being recordings which were not subject to copyright protection under the Urugay Round Agreements Act for materials otherwise subject to copyright in other countries and would have been in the Public Domain here but whose copyright is restored as a result of that act, subject to specific registration under the Urugay agreement, to give those who were legally using material notice that the works now have copyright protection or have had it restored if it lapsed.
A group of people using their employer's equipment to discuss forming a competing company wonder why they got into trouble over it. Duh. I used to think people were stupid sometimes, but now I have evidence to prove it. You know, that's why people used to use pay phones, and why we have our own cell phones and personal e-mail accounts so the employer doesn't have access, control or ownership of the conversations or messages sent.
I don't believe that there is space in the x86 market for another payware OS besides Windows nowadays. I think BeOS and Solaris x86 are proof of that.
I agree; I'm not going to pay money for some inferior operating system with less capacity and applications than Linux or Free BSD; we've already got Windows for a payware-only OS; we don't need more. I'd rather go with something like Syllable or Reactos than with yet another OS having near-zero market penetration that you also have to pay for to obtain as a means of adding insult to injury. A waste of effort as far as I'm concerned.
It's cost of storage, not quantity
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Digital Packrats
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· Score: 2, Insightful
When cost of storage drops to near zero for any item, and quantity of storage becomes near unlimited, it becomes less necessary to delete or remove items than it was when space was precious and/or expensive. It also makes it unnecessary to pick and choose what to take. If your storage system has the capacity to store all of your music, even the stuff you don't listen to very often, why bother choosing? If the system can search, find and organize your collection to allow you to select which songs you want to listen to at a particular time, it's a more effective use of your time to have the system do the picking of what you are going to hear from everything, than bothering to decide what to take.
I have several digital cameras. One takes very tiny photos, about.3 megapixel and average about 30K or less. It's fine for most pictures which are going to be printed or posted on web pages. I had to buy the media for it on eBay because it won't take Smartmedia larger than 8 meg, and the smallest you can buy Smartmedia now is 16. But on one 8 meg cartridge, 1/2 the size of a piece of chewing gum, I can save over 400 pictures before having to change the cartridge. Another camera I have takes about 2MP pictures and on a 64 MB smartmedia I can hold upwards of 200 pictures.
I wanted to increase the amount of space I had on my computer in order to back up the files I have. There was an ad for a 160 GB drive on sale for something like $99.00. Then I find that there is a 200 GB drive on sale for $89 at a different store. At these prices the cost of storing one GB of material is 50c. To read a gigabyte of text would take almost a year (at 1 page/minute), it's the equivalent of 500,000 printed pages. A gigabyte of music files would represent about 800 minutes, 200 songs or about 15 hours.
Case in point, because of compression, songs can be stored at about 1 MB per minute using MP3 or OGG Vorbis, and thus a regular CD goes from holding about 10-15 songs (at 4 minutes each) to capable of holding 100-150 songs. And the equipment is now taking advantage of this: The Bose Radio is now advertised as playing regular or MP3 CDs.
Last Christmas I got a (cheap) DVD player that was advertised as being able to play MP3 CDs. So I took a bunch of MP3s, about 120, collected them to a CD and burned them from a Windows computer. Took the CD over to the DVD player, and it brought up a window listing the songs by file name, and started playing the first one. It treated each song on the CD as if it was a different track on a regular CD. This CD cost 17c and holds over 6 hours of music. The cost of any particular music file on the disc rounds so close to zero as to be almost costless.
Digital files have no weight, use no physical space and the only consideration is the capacity of the storage medium. As storage becomes more compact at lower prices the cost of storing files becomes less and less, and the amount of files one can carry increases exponentially.
The only real problem we have is the use of proprietary formats that cannot be recovered when the medium changes. I used to have 8" diskettes for stuff I had for the PDP-11; I could no longer read those now. I can no longer read 5" diskettes for the PC unless I find an old computer and buy it for the floppy drive. The 3 1/2" diskette is becoming obsolete except as a near-universal exchange medium and for use on older computers without CD drives.
In Alexandria, Virginia on a side street near the Bradlee Shopping Center, Marlee Way forms a T-intersection at Braddock Road. The signal is normally green for Braddock, it having more traffic. But the signal is set up such that:
If you arrive at the signal on Marlee Way, the light will change within 3 seconds
Marlee Way will get a green light for about 5-10 seconds.
If you arrive at the signal on Marlee Way after it has changed, you have to wait about two minutes
This is one of the few places I have ever seen where the traffic signal was set up correctly. Doesn't make Marlee Way wait unnecessarily and gives enough time for most traffic using it to get through. I wish they would fix more traffic signals like this.
I thought that Dan O'Dowd's EE Times article was rather heavily pushing about why he felt Linux was inadequate for use in hard real-time applications, as if he was trying much too hard to argue the point.
I thought that he was trying too strongly to make the case that those that want to use Linux for real-time applications will not buy tools and those that want better performance for hard-real-time will not choose Linux.
It is also obvious that a general-purpose operating system is not going to work as well in a real-time environment as one specially designed for that purpose. It's the reason why, for example, if you are an organization that wants a system to break encryption keys fast, you build a special-purpose machine that includes hardware designed to do quick computations of prime numbers, not commodity hardware with lots of extra features you don't need and won't use, that slow down the primary purpose of breaking codes.
He seemed to be arguing the point far too strongly, as if he had a hidden agenda. Okay, presuming his argument is valid, so what if Linux as a general-purpose O/S is not as good at handling hard-real-time as a specially designed one? He could have argued that in about 1/5th of the space his article uses. What is also interesting is, despite all his talk about how bad Linux is, he seemed to ignore examples where Linux is considered good enough for real-time use in many cases, and was unable to mention any alternative which might be better, such as some open-source alternatives that have been mentioned here on Slashdot.
I had a suspicion but I wasn't sure. And now it's clear: his company sells real-time operating systems in competition with Linux. So he claims Linux is not good enough.
Wherehaveweheardthisbefore?:)
There really is no problem feeding everyone on earth. Most people in industrialized countries have either resources of their own to buy food, can obtain some form of government assistance or private charity to obtain food adequate to sustain life. There are some people who are mentally ill or otherwise unable to do this who can be helped by private charities.
Virtually every country in the world has enough crop land to grow enough food to feed itself and the ones that do not generally have sufficient wealth to afford to import food if it can't grow enough to feed itself.
Poorer countries either have enough tax revenues based upon resources available to provide assistance to the poor, and international relief organizations can assist those in countries where there is extreme poverty so that there in no real reason for anyone to go hungry.
Okay, that's the ideal situation. The real problem is not the capacity to feed anyone hungry, it's the mismanagement of resources, military and government interference in aid programs, corruption, waste and government political interference. Here are a few examples.
Marxist land-planning schemes which obviously will not work, the result being famine.
Draconian government controls on farming making it uneconomical to grow food.
Failure of governments to provide adequate infrastructure to allow farmers to send crops to market.
Refusal of governments to allow private organizations to develop infrastructure where the government cannot or will not.
Starve the populations in some areas through planned famines for political power.
"Punish" areas that are supportive of rebel groups by starving the public.
Denying aid organizations access to the hungry on the specious grounds that feeding starving people aids the cause rebel groups or those who oppose the particular government of that country
Allowing surplus food sold into government price support systems to go to waste instead of allowing it to be donated to international aid organizations because of fears if surplus food is donated it may end up back in the market and depress prices further
Rebel organizations and black marketers stealing relief supplies and selling them.
Government officials demanding bribes and kickbacks to allow donations of food to the hungry by international aid organizations.
Governments refusing to allow international aid organizations to make food available to the hungry because it would look bad.
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These and other reasons are why many countries (mostly in Africa) have masses of starving people dying of hunger (approximately 27,000 people each day), not because of any resource shortages or inability to feed people.
Back in the 1980s, the economist Dr. Thomas Sowell stated in his newspaper column that it is possible to place the entire world population - 6,000,000,000 people - at a density per square mile equal to or less than most American cities, in single-family homes, in an area the size of the state of Texas.* Given that to be the case, it becomes clear that the world has the capacity to feed itself given the small amount of land actually needed to house the entire population. It is mismanagement, politics and corruption that causes famine, not lack of resources or capacity.
Paul Robinson
* I personally have done the math myself and verified Dr. Sowell's conclusion to be correct. For those that wish to check, the size of Texas is about 250,000 square miles, there are 640 acres per square mile, and the population density of Manhattan is 148 persons per acre, for all of New York City it's 52, Chicago is 62, and Los Angeles is 51.
I've never contracted before, so I am in unfamiliar territory. I hear a lot of good things -- 3-day work weeks and crazy amounts of money, but is the lack of stability worth it? I know I need my own health & life insurance, but what else? How do I convert my base salary to a contractor rate? Without a 401k or a 403b, how do I take care of retirement?
This is not legal advice as I'm not a lawyer but I have set up corporations for various purposes. There are many issues you have to be aware of.
As you get closer to being full-time employment the less you have to make over salary BUT there are a number of pitfalls to be aware of.
Generally because of overhead expenses you have to make approximately 2.2 times your regular wage if you're a contractor in order to make the same amount of money as in salary.
You have to pay Federal Income Tax on a quarterly basis as well as file the appropriate quarterly returns
You have state quarterly or monthly returns as well if your state has income taxes
You will have to pay the entire 14% Social Security tax (on the first approximately $75,000), not merely the 7% they collect from your paycheck (half the tax is employer paid).
There is a Federal 1 1/2% Medicare tax with no limit on the amount subject to tax.
Your state may have local employment taxes such as California's Disability Insurance, which is paid by employers; you may have to pay it yourself
You may have to carry worker's compensation insurance (or may be prohibited from obtaining it) and/or short term disability as well as long-term disability. Actually many people need to carry disability insurance anyway but do not.
Your city and/or county may require you to obtain a business license and pay business income tax (as an individual you may be able to ignore this).
Above a certain level, depending on how much you make, your expenses and lifestyle it may be better to start your own corporation or Limited Liability Company (LLC) and become an employee of it. There are additional fees and some paperwork which generally you don't need a lawyer to file (they'll charge you $500 to fill out paperwork that the Secretary of State will give you for free), but there are some benefits you can charge as tax-deductable expenses as a corporate employer that as an individual you have to pay with after-tax income.
There may be additional benefits as a self-employed individual you are allowed to deduct as legitimate expenses that you cannot deduct as an employee.
If you go corporate form with you as the only stockholder you may be considered a "personal service corporation" which loses some protections. Depending on what the rules are you might have your wife either an additional stockholder or make her the owner of the corporation and you just an employee; this IS one place you would need legal advice to structure correctly
If you don't treat the corporation as a separate entity there is a possibility that in some transaction a court may "pierce the corporate veil" and consider the corporation your alter ego which loses you corporate protections. Basically you can't mix corporate and personal funds
You may want to get advice from a lawyer that does corporations and advice from an accountant if you go that route
There may be advantages to using an LLC vs. a Corporation, and you may wish to use an S corporation because of tax rules.
Note that because of bribes^W campaign contributions the tax rules change every year (either to favor those paying or to cripple their competitors), plus politicians like to change the rules in order to collect more in taxes while not making it look like they're collecting more in taxes, so what is the right idea one year can be a tax disaster the next and you may need to change structures on a regular basis.
Some say just go into business and worry about the rules later, if you get caught failing to do something usually you can ju
I didn't say that China did not ratify the treaty ("did not apply") I said that the restrictions do not apply to China. Beyond which, China is the #2 largest generator of Greenhouse gases after the U.S. but is not under any restrictions.
Industrialised countries will have until 2012 to cut their collective emissions of six key greenhouse gases to 5.2% below the 1990 level.
Note the term: Industrialized countries; none of the restrictions of the Kyoto treaty apply to third-world countries like China. They can slash and burn the environment all they want but industrialized countries like the United States are expected to sacrifice and suffer through severe cuts in emissions, but the non-industrialized countries get a free pass without restrictions.
If all the other countries agree to the same restrictions as they are demanding of industrialized countries, then let's talk about a treaty for that purpose. But don't ask for manifest unfairness and sacrifice for a few with nothing required of the rest.
While the research used statistical analysis based on past elections and demographics, how else do you verify that a paperless voting system is working properly?
Short answer: You can't. Accuracy isn't the purpose. Hoodwinking the public is.
Long Answer: The purpose of electronic voting machines is not to provide an inexpensive election - paper ballots counted by hand are the cheapest way to run a secret election - nor is it to provide a guaranteed accurate election - paper ballots with check marks are the gold standard for proof of who voted for whom - but to allow undetectable election fraud. Any election without a real-time unchangeable audit trail - which means a paper log of every vote generated at the same time as voting is done - should be presumed to be intentionally fraudulent.
Back in 1966, Robert A. Heinlein gave the exact formula in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for stealing an election without the public realizing they'd been robbed: have all the votes collected by computer where there is no audit trail and no way to prove the validity of the actual vote versus what is recorded.
And what do electronic voting machines give us? A voting system collected by computer where there is no audit trail and no way to prove the validity of the actual vote versus what is recorded. Why should it surprise anyone that the voting machines are inaccurate; they're intended to efficiently steal elections in a concealed fashion, not necessarily to efficiently count them.
Let's not forget that the head of one of the companies that sell electronic voting machines said that they intended to make sure they got Ohio for a specific candidate in the 2004 election. (No candidate has ever won the presidency without Ohio.)
Has anyone here considered that since it takes 270 electors to win, all that one needs to get elected President is 11 states?
California.... 55
Texas......... 34
New York...... 31
Florida....... 27
Illinois...... 21
Pennsylvania.. 21
Ohio.......... 20
Michigan...... 17
New Jersey.... 15
North Carolina 15
Georgia....... 15
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Total........ 271
Get (or steal) these 11 states and you can forget the other 39.
just write your code and don't worry about patents. If someone approaches you about a patent you are infringing, they are required to have a reasonable license fee.
Actually, they do not have to do so. They can ask for anything and demand any damages (in which case it's up to a jury or the court for non-jury trials), or choose not to license at all and demand a permanent injunction against further infringement, all profit made, plus impounding of all infringing articles and their destruction.
That this is usually unlikely does not mean it cannot happen, but there are some advantages for a small company, unless it's some critical infrastructure you're not likely to be sued as an
So if your program is really successful, and someone forces you, just pay the fee if a patent exists on something you did.
That's probably reasonable given the circumstances, a one-man shop becomes very unlikely to be sued, because unlike a copyright lawsuit, a patent lawsuit is very expensive to make, especially against someone who may potentially be judgement proof.
I personally have used Word Perfect exclusively other than for minor occasions when I've had to handle documents from other people. I have found at times there were special types of formatting (such as changing the page header each time the chapter changed) that I could do very easily in Word Perfect that I found impossible to do in Microsoft Word.
The ability to view the internal coding on a document (which can be used to copy formatting from one part of a document to another as well) is an extremely useful feature of Word Perfect that I find interesting that Microsoft Word has never had available.
But Microsoft Word does have some uses.
One time I generated a book I had in Word Pefect format to RTF so I could see how it would render in Word and the formatting was slightly different (it printed the headers with a horizontal line below them), and I liked how Word had changed it, but I could not figure out how it had done it. However, but duplicating the format in Word Perfect was a trivial operation.
So both word processors do have capabilities, I have just found that I can usually figure out how to do what I want in Word Perfect easier than in Word. The fact also that Word Perfect never supported auto-execute macros makes it much safer than Word.
The true issue is whether the word processor does what you want to do in a way that enhances your ability. Using a word processor should be easier than using a manual typewriter or paper and pen. As far as enhancing my ability to do what I want in an easier form than other methods, I have found that Word Perfect does this for me and Microsoft Word does not.
While some countries have a rule that ownership of a mark comes only by registration, in the U.S. at least, ownership comes only by use. (There are limited exceptions for registration prior to use.) Note that my discussion here only deals with Federal registration, each state has state trademark registration with their own rules which generally are similar.
A party that uses a unique word, device (an image or picture), phrase, sound or color exclusively to identify specific goods or services has the right to exclusively use that mark whether or not they register it. If the mark is truly distinctive they can sue others who use the same or deceptively similar marks even if they do not register the mark.
There are generally two classes of marks, strong marks and weak marks. Strong marks are words that are created and symbols that are so obviously tied to the issuer that even use in an unrelated field can be stopped, such as if someone other than the actual owner started to sell vacuum cleaners under the name Kodak, or sold computer disks under the name Exxon.
Weak marks are marks that generally only protect the product as used by its owner, and not for other goods. The term 'Acme' is a very weak mark, and if someone else was using the same mark unless it is on identical goods or services there are no grounds to go after someone else using even the identical mark. Which is why the people making shirts and the people making staples can both use the term 'Arrow' and neither is infringing on the other.
Most trademarks and servicemarks have varying degrees of being strong or weak depending on how well the mark has been policed, that is, the owner has made an effort to stop others from using the same mark either to refer to the product regardless of the manufacturer ("generic"). The terms 'aspirin', 'escalator', 'laundromat' and 'celophane' lost trademark status because of the manufacturer's failure to adequately police the mark against people using it as a generic term for the product in question. (Note that 'Aspirin' is still a trademark of Bayer in some other countries for salycilic acid.)
Ownership of a mark comes through use and one has the right to stop use of a deceptively similar mark on the same goods or services if the mark is not a weak mark. If the mark is extremely strong, as I indicated, it can even protect against use for other products and services as well. But ownership comes through use of a mark irregardless of registration.
Registration of a mark grants certain additional benefits such as presumption of validity and notice to others (since registered marks are published in the Trademark Register.) Once a mark has been registered continuously for five years it can acquire incontestible status.
The fact that MS has failed to register the mark 'Excel' for many years does not in any way weaken any rights they may have in the mark nor does it excuse anyone else's misuse of the mark. What does weaken their rights or excuse others use is the failure by Microsoft to police their mark and stop any known use of the same or deceptively similar marks to theirs.
The issue is also likelihood of confusion. Unless the general customer who would buy Excel might be confused into thinking TurboExcel was produced by the same company, it doesn't matter how much MS complains or doesn't like it, there is no misuse and Microsoft has no grounds to stop them. M$ would be better off doing what it did to Lindows and pay this company to change the name unless it knows the company can't afford or won't continue to defend the name, then it should probably engage in as much protracted legislation as possible.
Both the accidents where I was hit occurred while I was either parked or stopped. I haven't had an accident in six years. But when I was younger, say about 20 years ago, I realize how bad I was then, I'd be afraid to ride now with the driver I was then.
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It might be this company is selling some sort of very hardened Linux. If they are, this is exactly the right way to go about it. They are publicly inviiting people to attack it, meaning that if there are any holes, someone is likely to find them. And anyone who hacks on the box can do so with impunity. And if they really can build a bulletproof box then they deserve the rewards they can get by selling one which, on an open and public basis, has taken the worst anyone could throw at it and survived.
about the claimed violation of U.S. Patent No. 5,838,906 may be read from the PDF at this address. I'm kind of curious why, since Microsoft, in Washington State, and the University of California, whose location is left as an exercise to the reader, are both located in the 9th Circuit, that the case was originally tried in Illinois, the 7th Circuit. Probably that's where Eolas is located.
It's said in real estate the three most important things are Location, Location, Location. Well, it seems, it's true in optimization too.
On second thought, the three most important things in optimization are Measure, Measure, Measure. You need to measure before you can optimize. If you don't measure, you don't know what really needs to be optimized. You have to profile to properly optimize.
Anything else wastes valuable time. Unless you optimize the parts that are executed the most or which slow down the process the worst, you are "very efficiently wasting time."
- Don't try to make decisions about a subject before you understand it. Or to a company. That means that for the first few weeks or months - depending on the number of people who report to you - you do nothing but watch what is happening, get out and see what is going on, and ask lots of questions so that you do understand. Even if you're familiar with the particular business, every company runs in a different fashion, and your way of doing things might not work. You want to make decisions in such a way that people follow what you tell them because they respect you as being fair and reasonable even if they do not agree with your decision.
- Ask each person who reports to you two questions: "Do you have everything you need to do your job properly?" and "Is there anything I can do to help you be able to do your job properly?" and be willing to listen and take them seriously.
- If you have to solve a problem and do not know how, you find out the people who are most impacted by the problem (the ones who have to suffer with the results of the solution) and you give them the problem, explaining that since they have to live with the solution, you'll let them decide how to fix the problem, then you implement the solution they give you.
- Basically you have to be willing to trust your people in that presumably they are professionals and are willing to do a good job if you will allow them to do so.
- You have to be consistent, and people will try to put their efforts toward what they think you want most. If you talk about product quality once a day but gripe about schedule slippage ten times a day, quality is not going to improve.
- You also have to guarantee immunity for bad news. That means you have to be willing to allow anyone to come to you about anything wrong without fear of reprisal. It also means you're willing to correct problems even to the extent of protecting the people who tell you about problems against your boss finding out about the person doing so.
Having been both a working manager in a non-programming position and a non-managing programmer, I've seen it from both sides. Good managers make a place a wonderful place to work. Bad managers make a place into a living hell. Do your job right as a manager and people hardly even notice you're there, until you're not there and they realize how much you do for them.Paul Robinson
The FCC has stated that they alone have exclusive jurisdiction over unlicensed radio frequency spectrum. This means the state does not have jurisdiction to prosecute over the issue of radio frequency use. Now, to argue theft of cable there are several issues involved (1) the cable service is somehow being tapped into; (2) use of the signal by tapping into it reduces the ability of others to use the signal; (3) the supplier of the service is losing some revenue that it can't charge. In the case of tapping into cable, you've made a physical connection to someone else's service. You also, almost certainly, had to tap into a secured connection box.
Now, let's consider that the cable company installs a line into an apartment. The prior customer moves. You move into the apartment as the new tenant. You find a cable TV connection in the apartement. You hook up to it. The connection was totally legal. Are you stealing service? Well, you're not paying for it, but the connection was legally made. They can cut off your service if they want but I do not think they can back bill you for the unpaid time between the last customer and now. And they cannot charge you with theft of service since you're not making any unauthorized connection to their service. Same thing if you use the electricity in the apartment, you can't be charged with theft of service. But if you go out to the meter and tap into it, then you can be charged for theft of electric service.
This presumes connecting to an unpassworded, unsecured network over a wireless connection is somehow a crime. When someone steals your car, they remove its posession from yours, they deprive you of its use. As the victim of a car theft (and they caught the guy who did it so I got my car back) I understand the significance of the difference.
Let's consider, some guy goes out for the evening but leaves their TV on with the curtains open (so you can see it) and their windows open (so you can hear everything), and their VCR is not recording anything (so you're not preventing them from using their signal). You, sitting on the sidewalk, decide to change the channel using a universal remote while they are gone, and when they come back you change the channel back. Have you stolen anything from them or in any way deprived them of their property? Exactly what crime, if any, have you committed against them? Maybe sending a remote control signal into their apartment could considered trespassing, but I find that a little bit of a stretch.
I think there is a big difference between deprival of use of a physical, nonsharable and nonfungible resource, and someone else's using a fungible, perishable resource (bit time slices used less than capacity are lost whether you use them or not) having no physical existence.
Once they provide a legitimate connection they have no right to determine what you watch as long as you don't take pay-per-view signals through unlawful means. In fact, the law is clear that it's perfectly legal to capture any satellite transmission for view
"I'm Spacey Spacem! The hits from one end of the universe to the other on Galactic Radio, now with over 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts of power!"
You want to do damage, it's a whole lot easier to buy a truckload of fertilizer, and openly buy 500 gallons or so of diesel fuel from any truck stop for cash, and if you have them delivered to a farm, nobody will notice or even think twice about it as it would be routine, and the chances are excellent you can get away with it and never be caught.
For probably $10,000 you can create a dozen nasty good sized bombs without even having to do anything which in any way looks suspicious or illegal until you set the damn thing off. I doubt that you can go nuclear on less than a million. A million bucks will probably buy you a thousand Oklahoma City-sized bombs, but at best gets you one lousy nuke. Which is going to have more effect for the same amount of money? One spectacular bomb that kills about the same number as the World Trade Center, Second Edition, or a thousand WTC-sized bombs?
Estimates are the WTC attacks cost Al-Qaeda maybe $100,000. Would a nuclear bomb have done better in terms of horror, publicity or terror than two hijacked airliners? Above a certain level it really doesn't matter, you've already made your point, and trying to use even stronger methods doesn't buy you anything more.
Further, you don't have to be a martyr to use ANFO, but you'd better be intending to die if you use a nuke, because otherwise if you drop a nuke, you guarantee they will hunt you down for as long as it takes. And let's not forget that it's possible for a very tiny group (2 people, maybe even just 1) can set up an ANFO bomb. And it doesn't take a whole lot of smarts to do it. It's going to take a lot more people - with intelligence - to set up a usable nuke.
Then they developed the new ignitions that require a key with a transponder chip. (I think this was a demand by auto insurance companies.) So, as a result, instead of stealing cars, thieves are now carjacking people in order to get the car with the key in it, with the resulting increase in danger to the owner. Doesn't matter to the insurer as they are only liable for injuries in the case of an auto accident, not for robbery, unless you have supplemental medical coverage as part of your auto policy, which I suspect most people don't.
If this sort of thing becomes popular, it could trigger thieves cutting people's fingers and stripping the fingerprints. I am reminded of a horrid example in the movie "Fighting Back" where a thief wanted to steal a ring from some woman, but she couldn't get it off her finger. So he used a pair of tin snips and cut her finger off. Can't very well damage the ring, can we?
In addition to running a series of about 60 music channels of their own, Dish Network carries about 68 from Sirius Satellite Network as well. So even if XM and Sirius do merge, Dish Network would still probably carry their channels as well. As long as they don't provide a video service, neither XM nor Sirius is truly any kind of competitor to Dish Network or DirectTV. As Dish Network has realized, an audio service can be a compliment to their offerings, not a competitor. An audio-only service is not a competitor to a video service. Dish Network, DirectTV and your local cable TV franchise are competitors, but XM and Sirius are not.
Generally these manufacturers apparently think they can make a lot of money charging a fortune for car chargers or replacement wall chargers, and thus they do not make charger connectors (or batteries) to be compatible with anything else (or sometimes with their own brands). This is a foolish and wasteful practice because third-party companies will come out with adequate chargers - for less money - very shortly after any model is developed. Unless and until manufacturers decide that competing on the peripheral connectors is not really an advantage to them the problems of so many different cords is going to be a continuing problem not likely to be solved.
While I am not a lawyer, I see this type of statute as having no legal authority as it attempts to criminalize conduct which is either potentially legal (as might be in the case of fair use) or which Congress has already set penalties and has specifically pre-empted any form of state protection. I believe these type laws would be found unconstitutional or invalid as having been overridden by Congress. It was made clear by the 1978 law and later changes including the Berne Convention Accession that Congress wanted to eliminate any state control over copyright with the exception of most* sound recordings which were fixed prior to February 15, 1972 which it has declared are not copyrightable (and to which states will have no power to provide any form of copyright protection after February 15, 2047.)
*"Most" being recordings which were not subject to copyright protection under the Urugay Round Agreements Act for materials otherwise subject to copyright in other countries and would have been in the Public Domain here but whose copyright is restored as a result of that act, subject to specific registration under the Urugay agreement, to give those who were legally using material notice that the works now have copyright protection or have had it restored if it lapsed.
A group of people using their employer's equipment to discuss forming a competing company wonder why they got into trouble over it. Duh. I used to think people were stupid sometimes, but now I have evidence to prove it. You know, that's why people used to use pay phones, and why we have our own cell phones and personal e-mail accounts so the employer doesn't have access, control or ownership of the conversations or messages sent.
I have several digital cameras. One takes very tiny photos, about .3 megapixel and average about 30K or less. It's fine for most pictures which are going to be printed or posted on web pages. I had to buy the media for it on eBay because it won't take Smartmedia larger than 8 meg, and the smallest you can buy Smartmedia now is 16. But on one 8 meg cartridge, 1/2 the size of a piece of chewing gum, I can save over 400 pictures before having to change the cartridge. Another camera I have takes about 2MP pictures and on a 64 MB smartmedia I can hold upwards of 200 pictures.
I wanted to increase the amount of space I had on my computer in order to back up the files I have. There was an ad for a 160 GB drive on sale for something like $99.00. Then I find that there is a 200 GB drive on sale for $89 at a different store. At these prices the cost of storing one GB of material is 50c. To read a gigabyte of text would take almost a year (at 1 page/minute), it's the equivalent of 500,000 printed pages. A gigabyte of music files would represent about 800 minutes, 200 songs or about 15 hours.
Case in point, because of compression, songs can be stored at about 1 MB per minute using MP3 or OGG Vorbis, and thus a regular CD goes from holding about 10-15 songs (at 4 minutes each) to capable of holding 100-150 songs. And the equipment is now taking advantage of this: The Bose Radio is now advertised as playing regular or MP3 CDs.
Last Christmas I got a (cheap) DVD player that was advertised as being able to play MP3 CDs. So I took a bunch of MP3s, about 120, collected them to a CD and burned them from a Windows computer. Took the CD over to the DVD player, and it brought up a window listing the songs by file name, and started playing the first one. It treated each song on the CD as if it was a different track on a regular CD. This CD cost 17c and holds over 6 hours of music. The cost of any particular music file on the disc rounds so close to zero as to be almost costless.
Digital files have no weight, use no physical space and the only consideration is the capacity of the storage medium. As storage becomes more compact at lower prices the cost of storing files becomes less and less, and the amount of files one can carry increases exponentially.
The only real problem we have is the use of proprietary formats that cannot be recovered when the medium changes. I used to have 8" diskettes for stuff I had for the PDP-11; I could no longer read those now. I can no longer read 5" diskettes for the PC unless I find an old computer and buy it for the floppy drive. The 3 1/2" diskette is becoming obsolete except as a near-universal exchange medium and for use on older computers without CD drives.
This is one of the few places I have ever seen where the traffic signal was set up correctly. Doesn't make Marlee Way wait unnecessarily and gives enough time for most traffic using it to get through. I wish they would fix more traffic signals like this.
I thought that he was trying too strongly to make the case that those that want to use Linux for real-time applications will not buy tools and those that want better performance for hard-real-time will not choose Linux.
It is also obvious that a general-purpose operating system is not going to work as well in a real-time environment as one specially designed for that purpose. It's the reason why, for example, if you are an organization that wants a system to break encryption keys fast, you build a special-purpose machine that includes hardware designed to do quick computations of prime numbers, not commodity hardware with lots of extra features you don't need and won't use, that slow down the primary purpose of breaking codes.
He seemed to be arguing the point far too strongly, as if he had a hidden agenda. Okay, presuming his argument is valid, so what if Linux as a general-purpose O/S is not as good at handling hard-real-time as a specially designed one? He could have argued that in about 1/5th of the space his article uses. What is also interesting is, despite all his talk about how bad Linux is, he seemed to ignore examples where Linux is considered good enough for real-time use in many cases, and was unable to mention any alternative which might be better, such as some open-source alternatives that have been mentioned here on Slashdot.
I had a suspicion but I wasn't sure. And now it's clear: his company sells real-time operating systems in competition with Linux. So he claims Linux is not good enough. Where have we heard this before? :)
Virtually every country in the world has enough crop land to grow enough food to feed itself and the ones that do not generally have sufficient wealth to afford to import food if it can't grow enough to feed itself.
Poorer countries either have enough tax revenues based upon resources available to provide assistance to the poor, and international relief organizations can assist those in countries where there is extreme poverty so that there in no real reason for anyone to go hungry.
Okay, that's the ideal situation. The real problem is not the capacity to feed anyone hungry, it's the mismanagement of resources, military and government interference in aid programs, corruption, waste and government political interference. Here are a few examples.
- Marxist land-planning schemes which obviously will not work, the result being famine.
- Draconian government controls on farming making it uneconomical to grow food.
- Failure of governments to provide adequate infrastructure to allow farmers to send crops to market.
- Refusal of governments to allow private organizations to develop infrastructure where the government cannot or will not.
- Starve the populations in some areas through planned famines for political power.
- "Punish" areas that are supportive of rebel groups by starving the public.
- Denying aid organizations access to the hungry on the specious grounds that feeding starving people aids the cause rebel groups or those who oppose the particular government of that country
- Allowing surplus food sold into government price support systems to go to waste instead of allowing it to be donated to international aid organizations because of fears if surplus food is donated it may end up back in the market and depress prices further
- Rebel organizations and black marketers stealing relief supplies and selling them.
- Government officials demanding bribes and kickbacks to allow donations of food to the hungry by international aid organizations.
- Governments refusing to allow international aid organizations to make food available to the hungry because it would look bad.
. These and other reasons are why many countries (mostly in Africa) have masses of starving people dying of hunger (approximately 27,000 people each day), not because of any resource shortages or inability to feed people.Back in the 1980s, the economist Dr. Thomas Sowell stated in his newspaper column that it is possible to place the entire world population - 6,000,000,000 people - at a density per square mile equal to or less than most American cities, in single-family homes, in an area the size of the state of Texas.* Given that to be the case, it becomes clear that the world has the capacity to feed itself given the small amount of land actually needed to house the entire population. It is mismanagement, politics and corruption that causes famine, not lack of resources or capacity.
Paul Robinson
* I personally have done the math myself and verified Dr. Sowell's conclusion to be correct. For those that wish to check, the size of Texas is about 250,000 square miles, there are 640 acres per square mile, and the population density of Manhattan is 148 persons per acre, for all of New York City it's 52, Chicago is 62, and Los Angeles is 51.
This is not legal advice as I'm not a lawyer but I have set up corporations for various purposes. There are many issues you have to be aware of. As you get closer to being full-time employment the less you have to make over salary BUT there are a number of pitfalls to be aware of.
Some say just go into business and worry about the rules later, if you get caught failing to do something usually you can ju
I didn't say that China did not ratify the treaty ("did not apply") I said that the restrictions do not apply to China. Beyond which, China is the #2 largest generator of Greenhouse gases after the U.S. but is not under any restrictions.
If all the other countries agree to the same restrictions as they are demanding of industrialized countries, then let's talk about a treaty for that purpose. But don't ask for manifest unfairness and sacrifice for a few with nothing required of the rest.
Long Answer: The purpose of electronic voting machines is not to provide an inexpensive election - paper ballots counted by hand are the cheapest way to run a secret election - nor is it to provide a guaranteed accurate election - paper ballots with check marks are the gold standard for proof of who voted for whom - but to allow undetectable election fraud. Any election without a real-time unchangeable audit trail - which means a paper log of every vote generated at the same time as voting is done - should be presumed to be intentionally fraudulent.
Back in 1966, Robert A. Heinlein gave the exact formula in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for stealing an election without the public realizing they'd been robbed: have all the votes collected by computer where there is no audit trail and no way to prove the validity of the actual vote versus what is recorded.
And what do electronic voting machines give us? A voting system collected by computer where there is no audit trail and no way to prove the validity of the actual vote versus what is recorded. Why should it surprise anyone that the voting machines are inaccurate; they're intended to efficiently steal elections in a concealed fashion, not necessarily to efficiently count them.
Let's not forget that the head of one of the companies that sell electronic voting machines said that they intended to make sure they got Ohio for a specific candidate in the 2004 election. (No candidate has ever won the presidency without Ohio.)
Has anyone here considered that since it takes 270 electors to win, all that one needs to get elected President is 11 states?
- California.... 55
- Texas......... 34
- New York...... 31
- Florida....... 27
- Illinois...... 21
- Pennsylvania.. 21
- Ohio.......... 20
- Michigan...... 17
- New Jersey.... 15
- North Carolina 15
- Georgia....... 15
- -------------
- Total........ 271
Get (or steal) these 11 states and you can forget the other 39.That this is usually unlikely does not mean it cannot happen, but there are some advantages for a small company, unless it's some critical infrastructure you're not likely to be sued as an
That's probably reasonable given the circumstances, a one-man shop becomes very unlikely to be sued, because unlike a copyright lawsuit, a patent lawsuit is very expensive to make, especially against someone who may potentially be judgement proof.The ability to view the internal coding on a document (which can be used to copy formatting from one part of a document to another as well) is an extremely useful feature of Word Perfect that I find interesting that Microsoft Word has never had available.
But Microsoft Word does have some uses.
One time I generated a book I had in Word Pefect format to RTF so I could see how it would render in Word and the formatting was slightly different (it printed the headers with a horizontal line below them), and I liked how Word had changed it, but I could not figure out how it had done it. However, but duplicating the format in Word Perfect was a trivial operation.
So both word processors do have capabilities, I have just found that I can usually figure out how to do what I want in Word Perfect easier than in Word. The fact also that Word Perfect never supported auto-execute macros makes it much safer than Word.
The true issue is whether the word processor does what you want to do in a way that enhances your ability. Using a word processor should be easier than using a manual typewriter or paper and pen. As far as enhancing my ability to do what I want in an easier form than other methods, I have found that Word Perfect does this for me and Microsoft Word does not.
While some countries have a rule that ownership of a mark comes only by registration, in the U.S. at least, ownership comes only by use. (There are limited exceptions for registration prior to use.) Note that my discussion here only deals with Federal registration, each state has state trademark registration with their own rules which generally are similar.
A party that uses a unique word, device (an image or picture), phrase, sound or color exclusively to identify specific goods or services has the right to exclusively use that mark whether or not they register it. If the mark is truly distinctive they can sue others who use the same or deceptively similar marks even if they do not register the mark.
There are generally two classes of marks, strong marks and weak marks. Strong marks are words that are created and symbols that are so obviously tied to the issuer that even use in an unrelated field can be stopped, such as if someone other than the actual owner started to sell vacuum cleaners under the name Kodak, or sold computer disks under the name Exxon.
Weak marks are marks that generally only protect the product as used by its owner, and not for other goods. The term 'Acme' is a very weak mark, and if someone else was using the same mark unless it is on identical goods or services there are no grounds to go after someone else using even the identical mark. Which is why the people making shirts and the people making staples can both use the term 'Arrow' and neither is infringing on the other.
Most trademarks and servicemarks have varying degrees of being strong or weak depending on how well the mark has been policed, that is, the owner has made an effort to stop others from using the same mark either to refer to the product regardless of the manufacturer ("generic"). The terms 'aspirin', 'escalator', 'laundromat' and 'celophane' lost trademark status because of the manufacturer's failure to adequately police the mark against people using it as a generic term for the product in question. (Note that 'Aspirin' is still a trademark of Bayer in some other countries for salycilic acid.)
Ownership of a mark comes through use and one has the right to stop use of a deceptively similar mark on the same goods or services if the mark is not a weak mark. If the mark is extremely strong, as I indicated, it can even protect against use for other products and services as well. But ownership comes through use of a mark irregardless of registration.
Registration of a mark grants certain additional benefits such as presumption of validity and notice to others (since registered marks are published in the Trademark Register.) Once a mark has been registered continuously for five years it can acquire incontestible status.
The fact that MS has failed to register the mark 'Excel' for many years does not in any way weaken any rights they may have in the mark nor does it excuse anyone else's misuse of the mark. What does weaken their rights or excuse others use is the failure by Microsoft to police their mark and stop any known use of the same or deceptively similar marks to theirs.
The issue is also likelihood of confusion. Unless the general customer who would buy Excel might be confused into thinking TurboExcel was produced by the same company, it doesn't matter how much MS complains or doesn't like it, there is no misuse and Microsoft has no grounds to stop them. M$ would be better off doing what it did to Lindows and pay this company to change the name unless it knows the company can't afford or won't continue to defend the name, then it should probably engage in as much protracted legislation as possible.