They should use the BSD or MIT licenses if they're more interested in releasing code than promoting public policy. It would provide the key functionality they claim to need without dragging their whole process through the muck and mire.
You're really arguing against warrants that may be too narrow and too specific. People don't act that much faster than they did when they had to spend a whole five seconds dialing a phone, they just communicate over more channels. You're really asking for a warrant against a person, not a phone number.
It's not hard to take sides at all. Software patents are bad. Period.
Indeed, I agree with Microsoft on this: "We are very disappointed in the jury verdict. We believe that we do not infringe, that the patent is invalid and that this award of damages is legally and factually unsupported," Microsoft spokesman David Bowermaster said in a statement. But of course that's because ALL such patents, including Microsoft's patent on the FAT file system, are invalid.
I just browsed through Apple's recommendations for me. Out of all hundred odd tracks across all genres, there was precisely one 69c track, and precisely one $1.29 track.
In some cases they're not directly connected to the Internet. The systems I worked on had an EMS (Energy Management System) network, an inner firewall, a DMZ containing database servers with data pushed from the EMS network, another firewall between the DMZ network and the corporate network, and then whatever corporate firewall was in place outside that. Direct connection from the Internet even to the DMZ network was not recommended.
Then they decided they needed the dispatchers to be able to use Internet services, so they set up separate Windows desktops for them, then to save money they used the same desktops instead of the original UNIX Workstations. Then regulatory agencies started putting data up on the Internet so we had to grab that (in most cases using web scraping, because they never bothered with an API). Then the companies started complaining about leased line costs between control centers, so we obliged them with VPN connections...
But when they started adding control access from the Internet, bypassing the DMZ, I don't know, it's been a few years since I've been involved in EMS. But I can't say I'm surprised.
My wife used a subscription service, I bought actual tracks. When I got laid off a couple of years ago, we cut our spending, she turned off her subscription service, I quit buying tracks... but I still had all my music. And Apple's raised the price on some tracks, eh? Doesn't have any effect on the ones I've already bought.
This appears to be a patent on *silently* updating a program.
I don't want any software on my computer, widget or otherwise, silently updating itself. I damn well want it to pop up a dialog and say "There's a new version of me out there, do you want me to update"? I want to be able to say "No, because I just read on Slashdot that the new version might brick my computer".
PCI wasn't introduced until the Pentium in 1993, and new consumer VESA cards were still being introduced until late '94 or early '95.
You could still get support for your PDP-11 controlling your NC lathe/drill from Mentec well into this decade, though they seem to have finally dropped out around 2007.
If I never see a graphical smiley again... it might make me consider giving Symantec some money again.:) was good enough for my generation, it should be good enough for you darn kids.
And, as I noted before, sometimes such things aren't really important to the issues being raised / discussed (i.e. they're good enough points to stand on their own merits). But I think that's a somewhat rare thing.
And I believe that, for obvious pseudonyms that have a long track record, it is *normal and expected* that the identity's track record is more important. And where there really is a hidden agenda that actually matters, knowing the name of a human rather than a pseudonym is not usually going to be important.
I'm pretty sure that there's more people writing online with believable but false names who have really worrying hidden agendas than people using obvious pseudonyms like "Mudflats" or "Publius" or "Speaker for the Dead". The pseudonym itself is a complete red herring.
I'd like to point out again that the issue is that an obvious published agenda isn't always the whole story.
I didn't disagree with that point. My point is that knowing the name of the person who did the publishing doesn't change that... all you have to go on with anyone, whether you know them as "Peter da Silva", "Argent", "Mudflats", or "Sprocket", is their track record.
I should point out that whether PJ is involved with IBM never mattered to me not only because I put little stock in to the claim, but because Groklaw published all its work and made their case publicly.
I assume you're implying that Mudlfats' criticisms were also pretty much stand-alone no matter what their political involvement was?
The evidence that Mudflats had any kind of "hidden agenda" just isn't there, and even Doogan didn't make any such claim, he just went after her for using a pseudonym because he could. There's nothing inherently wrong with using a pseudonym, and NOT using a pseudonym doesn't mean you don't have any hidden bias. I've got a pretty heavy "trail" online, and even if I tossed in my CV and the results of a psychoanalytical exam I suspect that I've got opinions and biases that don't show up on anyone's analysis of all that output. So what? Should you trust me less because you don't know something like... oh, say... I spent a week in San Antonio with the Vice President's secretary...?
Throwing in a 9400 costs Apple a negligible amount of money. The Quadro in the other laptops is multi-hundreds more than the 9800, let alone the 9600. That's a minimum of $300 off the top. And all the quibbling about sale prices is just that, quibbling. That's just part of the game: if you don't get a discount with your big name computer, you paid too much.
And all these kinds of comparisons are pointless. Apple's margins are on the order of 30-40%, regular hardware companies make a few percent. Apple doesn't make these margins with magic, they make them by charging more for their hardware. They might temporarily, right after a new model is announced, get lower margins on particular models... but in general there is no way an Apple can cost as little as a computer from a company that makes 25-30% less profit on it. That's economics.
A big part of this is that the messenger can have a bias that isn't readily apparent by the message. [...] A prime example is people paid to deliver a message.
Astroturfing is a real problem, yes, but there wasn't even an accusation of paid bias here. This isn't even like the Groklaw situation where Pamela Jones was taking an unashamed and deliberate side on a specific case and was accused of being a paid shill by SCO minions long before she was outed. Doogan never claimed any such shenanigans.
Even assuming the bandwidth and latency issues with OnLive can be magically wished away...
As we discussed recently, OnLive is trying to change that by moving a big portion of the hardware requirements to the cloud.
You're mixing up the end-user hardware require to play the game with the cost of developing it. The primary cost of developing a game is NOT the cost of buying the developers enough Playstations to test on.
Most people will do nothing, and therefore get automatic updates.
Unless they're one of the groups that get false positives from WGA, and don't buy new copies of Windows because they don't consider it's their fault that Microsoft messed up.
Slashdot Mirror
They should use the BSD or MIT licenses if they're more interested in releasing code than promoting public policy. It would provide the key functionality they claim to need without dragging their whole process through the muck and mire.
You're really arguing against warrants that may be too narrow and too specific. People don't act that much faster than they did when they had to spend a whole five seconds dialing a phone, they just communicate over more channels. You're really asking for a warrant against a person, not a phone number.
It's not hard to take sides at all. Software patents are bad. Period.
Indeed, I agree with Microsoft on this: "We are very disappointed in the jury verdict. We believe that we do not infringe, that the patent is invalid and that this award of damages is legally and factually unsupported," Microsoft spokesman David Bowermaster said in a statement. But of course that's because ALL such patents, including Microsoft's patent on the FAT file system, are invalid.
You gotta be kidding.
The only one that's on message is the rock-paper-scissors one, and it was still as crazy as a chocolate kettle.
I guess I'm just too Indy for you. I wonder if I can get that added as a slashdot achievement.
* Five Digit ID.
* Modded up.
* Found 69c track on iTunes.
I just browsed through Apple's recommendations for me. Out of all hundred odd tracks across all genres, there was precisely one 69c track, and precisely one $1.29 track.
Because I'm referring to the message from the W3C mailing list, not the article?
In some cases they're not directly connected to the Internet. The systems I worked on had an EMS (Energy Management System) network, an inner firewall, a DMZ containing database servers with data pushed from the EMS network, another firewall between the DMZ network and the corporate network, and then whatever corporate firewall was in place outside that. Direct connection from the Internet even to the DMZ network was not recommended.
Then they decided they needed the dispatchers to be able to use Internet services, so they set up separate Windows desktops for them, then to save money they used the same desktops instead of the original UNIX Workstations. Then regulatory agencies started putting data up on the Internet so we had to grab that (in most cases using web scraping, because they never bothered with an API). Then the companies started complaining about leased line costs between control centers, so we obliged them with VPN connections...
But when they started adding control access from the Internet, bypassing the DMZ, I don't know, it's been a few years since I've been involved in EMS. But I can't say I'm surprised.
My wife used a subscription service, I bought actual tracks. When I got laid off a couple of years ago, we cut our spending, she turned off her subscription service, I quit buying tracks... but I still had all my music. And Apple's raised the price on some tracks, eh? Doesn't have any effect on the ones I've already bought.
And, of course, remember "Plays for Sure"?
Err.. that would be "Played for Sure"...
What does "and excluded claims from the W3C Royalty-Free License commitment" mean, if it doesn't mean "refusing to give [W3C] a license"?
This appears to be a patent on *silently* updating a program.
I don't want any software on my computer, widget or otherwise, silently updating itself. I damn well want it to pop up a dialog and say "There's a new version of me out there, do you want me to update"? I want to be able to say "No, because I just read on Slashdot that the new version might brick my computer".
IRC supports encrypted connections now?
PCI wasn't introduced until the Pentium in 1993, and new consumer VESA cards were still being introduced until late '94 or early '95.
You could still get support for your PDP-11 controlling your NC lathe/drill from Mentec well into this decade, though they seem to have finally dropped out around 2007.
I've turned off just about all the eye candy I can, and I wish I could turn off more (like the score popup).
This is Slashdot, not Facebook. If I want pages where the presentation code is five times the size of the content, I already know where to get it.
If I never see a graphical smiley again... it might make me consider giving Symantec some money again. :) was good enough for my generation, it should be good enough for you darn kids.
And get off my lawn.
And, as I noted before, sometimes such things aren't really important to the issues being raised / discussed (i.e. they're good enough points to stand on their own merits). But I think that's a somewhat rare thing.
And I believe that, for obvious pseudonyms that have a long track record, it is *normal and expected* that the identity's track record is more important. And where there really is a hidden agenda that actually matters, knowing the name of a human rather than a pseudonym is not usually going to be important.
I'm pretty sure that there's more people writing online with believable but false names who have really worrying hidden agendas than people using obvious pseudonyms like "Mudflats" or "Publius" or "Speaker for the Dead". The pseudonym itself is a complete red herring.
I'd like to point out again that the issue is that an obvious published agenda isn't always the whole story.
I didn't disagree with that point. My point is that knowing the name of the person who did the publishing doesn't change that... all you have to go on with anyone, whether you know them as "Peter da Silva", "Argent", "Mudflats", or "Sprocket", is their track record.
I should point out that whether PJ is involved with IBM never mattered to me not only because I put little stock in to the claim, but because Groklaw published all its work and made their case publicly.
Which is basically my point, after all.
I assume you're implying that Mudlfats' criticisms were also pretty much stand-alone no matter what their political involvement was?
The evidence that Mudflats had any kind of "hidden agenda" just isn't there, and even Doogan didn't make any such claim, he just went after her for using a pseudonym because he could. There's nothing inherently wrong with using a pseudonym, and NOT using a pseudonym doesn't mean you don't have any hidden bias. I've got a pretty heavy "trail" online, and even if I tossed in my CV and the results of a psychoanalytical exam I suspect that I've got opinions and biases that don't show up on anyone's analysis of all that output. So what? Should you trust me less because you don't know something like... oh, say... I spent a week in San Antonio with the Vice President's secretary...?
Throwing in a 9400 costs Apple a negligible amount of money. The Quadro in the other laptops is multi-hundreds more than the 9800, let alone the 9600. That's a minimum of $300 off the top. And all the quibbling about sale prices is just that, quibbling. That's just part of the game: if you don't get a discount with your big name computer, you paid too much.
And all these kinds of comparisons are pointless. Apple's margins are on the order of 30-40%, regular hardware companies make a few percent. Apple doesn't make these margins with magic, they make them by charging more for their hardware. They might temporarily, right after a new model is announced, get lower margins on particular models... but in general there is no way an Apple can cost as little as a computer from a company that makes 25-30% less profit on it. That's economics.
I am not claiming Pamela was a paid shill, just that she was accused of being one.
A big part of this is that the messenger can have a bias that isn't readily apparent by the message. [...] A prime example is people paid to deliver a message.
Astroturfing is a real problem, yes, but there wasn't even an accusation of paid bias here. This isn't even like the Groklaw situation where Pamela Jones was taking an unashamed and deliberate side on a specific case and was accused of being a paid shill by SCO minions long before she was outed. Doogan never claimed any such shenanigans.
Even assuming the bandwidth and latency issues with OnLive can be magically wished away...
As we discussed recently, OnLive is trying to change that by moving a big portion of the hardware requirements to the cloud.
You're mixing up the end-user hardware require to play the game with the cost of developing it. The primary cost of developing a game is NOT the cost of buying the developers enough Playstations to test on.
"Outing" the blogger disclosed some of the biases in her accusations.
Dude, we knew more about her biases from what she wrote in her blog than from knowing her real name.
"Mudflats" biases were on worn on her virtual sleeve, not hidden behind her pseudonym.
Most people will do nothing, and therefore get automatic updates.
Unless they're one of the groups that get false positives from WGA, and don't buy new copies of Windows because they don't consider it's their fault that Microsoft messed up.
Crikey, mate, don't overdo it. We don't need them to call out the National Guard AGAIN.