Your example is totally different. Unisys never hid their patent. Patents, unlike trademarks, do not have to be continually defended.
Unisys had up until the day before the patent expired before they had to do anything. It's up to the people creating potentially infringing technology to do patent searches and make sure they are not stepping on any toes. The excuse of, "people forgot about it" doesn't work.
1) WebWasher (www.webwasher.de). It blocks cookies, scripts animations, web bugs, referer URLs, images, and a whole host of other things. It is highly configurable can be used as a proxy server if you have an in-house LAN connected to a shared broadband connection, and is much more powerful than Guidescope (which Junkbuster recommends for use under Windows).
2) Ad-Aware 5.6 (www.lavasoftusa.com). Run this at least once a week. It will find any ad tracking cookies, spy-ware and various other privacy invading data/programs that get left on your machine. The new version scans your memory, your registry, and your entire HD (very quickly). It finds and removes everything privacy invasion related.
Their Force RS, RS Shifter, and Performance Pedals make a home PC racing peripheral setup that rivals anything in the arcades.
Total cost for all three pieces is ~$300. You can buy the pieces separately, so you can spread the cost out over time.
Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed at 1280x1024 on a 21" monitor with that setup easily bests any driving game I've seen in the arcade in the past 2 years.
It's not duplication to MS. It's an exit strategy from the DoJ's ongoing lawsuit.
Make the X-Box a game console to get it into homes. People don't buy "internet appliances" and they don't buy WebTV. They do buy game consoles in droves, though. Consoles go beyond the reach of WebTV, TiVO, or PCs. Game consoles are almost ubiquitous.
Microsoft got their TiVO knockoff in production to get the bugs ironed out of the program listing software and recording hardware.
Microsoft Revamped MSN explorer to look good at lower res (640x480 or TV) res. They designed it full of NTSC safe colors and patterns.
After the X-Box gets to a certain penetration point (3 million? 5 million?) I see MS simultaneously releasing the Ultimate TV HD recorder addition for it and the MSN Explorer software for it.
BAM! In one fell swoop MS has gotten the biggest toehold ever in the "set top box" market. They control not only the content, but the most often used delivery mechanism for that content...your TV.
Yeah! Too bad there isn't some sort of global network tying everyone together. That way people could play games of UT and Q3A with each other without having to move their computers into the same room!
Wouldn't that be grand?
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Every post in this thread, nay every post on Slashdot is redundant. I read them all in Pi yesterday.
EA.COM and AOL share a namespace (i.e. your EA.com login can be your AIM handle). Majestic uses a custom chat-client that hosts both players and game AI. While it looks similar to AIM, it is not AIM.
Yeah, that'll work... I'm sorry, but Slashdot's record on activisim is pretty damn weak. For instance, Slashdot tried to institute a boycott against the MPAA and all of it's products. Yet, every week we have JonKatz acting as a paid wind-bag and reviewing every piece of tripe that is coming out of Hollywood.
I wouldn't expect Slashdot to support a boycott of anything.
At Game Developers Conference 2000 MS was openly telling people that the XBOX would ship with just enough of an OS to initialize the hardware and start reading the DVD. Everything else necessary to run the game will come from the DVD. This allows them to update libraries, drivers, whatnot and have the developers distribute them as a part of their product. The end user never has to worry about system maintenence.
So, no. I don't think any NDA was broken by the mention of no driver updates and a small base OS.
How are Canadians getting DTV receivers and dishes, then? I understand the Canadian law, but it could very well bite them in the tuckas if they don't do more to protect against it. By legally allowing Canadians to watch DTV for free, and not prohibiting the import and sale of receivers into the country, the Canadian government has gone exactly against the law they are trying to uphold. If I'm Canadian, am I going to pay a Canadian cable company (MuchMusic...no thank you) or am I going to watch DTV for free? So, now a major US media congolomorate (well, maybe a mid level one) is stealing customers from a Canadian provider.
The services they provide are beamed to you whether you want them or not, they're on your property, so it should not be legal to make viewing the signals, no matter how, illegal.
Old argument, new context. There is legal precident against what you just said. For years people have tried to use the, "The signals are being beamed at me, I have a right to know what is passing through my body." defense when they get busted for using a radar detector in a state (VA, CN, etc...) where they are illegal. The defense doesn't work.
It's been a lot longer than that since scientists started trying to figure out how the Egyptions moved and righted some of their obelisks.
Really? I thought that exploration into the ideas of how the pyramids were built was a new area of science. Thank goodness I have Slashdot, that bastion of excellent journalism, to straighten me out.
...US because the US (with their obviously perfect legal system) will have to follow other countries rules.
Our legal system is far from perfect. Any sane person in the US will tell you that.
But, that has absolutely nothing to do with this.
Under the US Constitution I, as a US citizen, have certain inalienable rights pertaining to free speech (among other things). I should not be held to the laws of another country if they don't like what I've said on my web page. A treaty that (may be) signed that I have had no say in can not over rule the laws I live by.
It's interesting (and sad, really) how you took this discussion and tried to turn it into a diatribe as to how the US is trying to force their 'perfect' laws on everyone in the EU.
Duh..@home is a pay service. This isn't about how you would run a news-server. Here's a clue---scant few people could really care less about how you would run any server.
Air Warrior, a massively multiplayer 3D WWII online air combat simulation, has been running in various forms on various commercial services and on various client architectures (Mac, Amiga, Atari ST, EGA, VGA, SVGA, Windows 3.11, Windows 9x) since 1987.
Your history about the advances the military have made in distributed 3D simulation environments is false.
Laserdiscs (remember those?) suffer from what most people call "Laserdisc Rot". If you don't store them properly the surface degrades and the disc becomes unuseable. I wonder if it is similar to this.
You get the hacks at www.theregister.co.uk to stop writing about Parliament, the BBC, British Telecom, AOL Europe, et. al. and we'll forget the whole Tea Tax thing, ok?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry. I should've put that in the present tense. "Unisys has up until the day before their patent expires before they have to do anything."
IIRC their patent on LZW compression has not expired yet.
Your example is totally different. Unisys never hid their patent. Patents, unlike trademarks, do not have to be continually defended.
Unisys had up until the day before the patent expired before they had to do anything. It's up to the people creating potentially infringing technology to do patent searches and make sure they are not stepping on any toes. The excuse of, "people forgot about it" doesn't work.
1) WebWasher (www.webwasher.de). It blocks cookies, scripts animations, web bugs, referer URLs, images, and a whole host of other things. It is highly configurable can be used as a proxy server if you have an in-house LAN connected to a shared broadband connection, and is much more powerful than Guidescope (which Junkbuster recommends for use under Windows).
2) Ad-Aware 5.6 (www.lavasoftusa.com). Run this at least once a week. It will find any ad tracking cookies, spy-ware and various other privacy invading data/programs that get left on your machine. The new version scans your memory, your registry, and your entire HD (very quickly). It finds and removes everything privacy invasion related.
http://www.act-labs.com/
Their Force RS, RS Shifter, and Performance Pedals make a home PC racing peripheral setup that rivals anything in the arcades.
Total cost for all three pieces is ~$300. You can buy the pieces separately, so you can spread the cost out over time.
Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed at 1280x1024 on a 21" monitor with that setup easily bests any driving game I've seen in the arcade in the past 2 years.
Didn't Intel buy their way back into the XBox? I thought there was an annoucement a while back (6-8 months) that Intel would be supplying the CPUs.
It's not duplication to MS. It's an exit strategy from the DoJ's ongoing lawsuit.
Make the X-Box a game console to get it into homes. People don't buy "internet appliances" and they don't buy WebTV. They do buy game consoles in droves, though. Consoles go beyond the reach of WebTV, TiVO, or PCs. Game consoles are almost ubiquitous.
Microsoft got their TiVO knockoff in production to get the bugs ironed out of the program listing software and recording hardware.
Microsoft Revamped MSN explorer to look good at lower res (640x480 or TV) res. They designed it full of NTSC safe colors and patterns.
After the X-Box gets to a certain penetration point (3 million? 5 million?) I see MS simultaneously releasing the Ultimate TV HD recorder addition for it and the MSN Explorer software for it.
BAM! In one fell swoop MS has gotten the biggest toehold ever in the "set top box" market. They control not only the content, but the most often used delivery mechanism for that content...your TV.
The Linksys router occupies approximately 6"x8"x1". It's not a big piece of equipment. I've seen them as low as $69.99 online.
It's a wonderful fix to the PPPoE situation. It also gives you a firewall, a 4 port 10/100 switch, and a proxy server.
I've developed online games for over six years. I understand lag.
If you really are Nostradamus (or at least his eyes), you should've seen that I was going to write a saracastic comment long before I acutally did.
Yeah! Too bad there isn't some sort of global network tying everyone together. That way people could play games of UT and Q3A with each other without having to move their computers into the same room!
Wouldn't that be grand?
Every post in this thread, nay every post on Slashdot is redundant. I read them all in Pi yesterday.
is it a bit odd to be reporting on the disappearance of items that never existed in the first place?
No. But it is odd to be reporting on Battle.net security/stability like it is a rare occurance.
Not entirely true.
EA.COM and AOL share a namespace (i.e. your EA.com login can be your AIM handle). Majestic uses a custom chat-client that hosts both players and game AI. While it looks similar to AIM, it is not AIM.
So I bolited, skipped illegally across the hallways of the megaplex to write a weekly wrap-up instead.
Way to go, JK. You're really stickin' it to em now!!
What total and utter crap....
Yeah, that'll work... I'm sorry, but Slashdot's record on activisim is pretty damn weak. For instance, Slashdot tried to institute a boycott against the MPAA and all of it's products. Yet, every week we have JonKatz acting as a paid wind-bag and reviewing every piece of tripe that is coming out of Hollywood.
I wouldn't expect Slashdot to support a boycott of anything.
At Game Developers Conference 2000 MS was openly telling people that the XBOX would ship with just enough of an OS to initialize the hardware and start reading the DVD. Everything else necessary to run the game will come from the DVD. This allows them to update libraries, drivers, whatnot and have the developers distribute them as a part of their product. The end user never has to worry about system maintenence.
So, no. I don't think any NDA was broken by the mention of no driver updates and a small base OS.
How are Canadians getting DTV receivers and dishes, then? I understand the Canadian law, but it could very well bite them in the tuckas if they don't do more to protect against it. By legally allowing Canadians to watch DTV for free, and not prohibiting the import and sale of receivers into the country, the Canadian government has gone exactly against the law they are trying to uphold. If I'm Canadian, am I going to pay a Canadian cable company (MuchMusic...no thank you) or am I going to watch DTV for free? So, now a major US media congolomorate (well, maybe a mid level one) is stealing customers from a Canadian provider.
The services they provide are beamed to you whether you want them or not, they're on your property, so it should not be legal to make viewing the signals, no matter how, illegal.
Old argument, new context. There is legal precident against what you just said. For years people have tried to use the, "The signals are being beamed at me, I have a right to know what is passing through my body." defense when they get busted for using a radar detector in a state (VA, CN, etc...) where they are illegal. The defense doesn't work.
It's been a lot longer than that since scientists started trying to figure out how the Egyptions moved and righted some of their obelisks.
Really? I thought that exploration into the ideas of how the pyramids were built was a new area of science. Thank goodness I have Slashdot, that bastion of excellent journalism, to straighten me out.
...US because the US (with their obviously perfect legal system) will have to follow other countries rules.
Our legal system is far from perfect. Any sane person in the US will tell you that.
But, that has absolutely nothing to do with this.
Under the US Constitution I, as a US citizen, have certain inalienable rights pertaining to free speech (among other things). I should not be held to the laws of another country if they don't like what I've said on my web page. A treaty that (may be) signed that I have had no say in can not over rule the laws I live by.
It's interesting (and sad, really) how you took this discussion and tried to turn it into a diatribe as to how the US is trying to force their 'perfect' laws on everyone in the EU.
Duh..@home is a pay service. This isn't about how you would run a news-server. Here's a clue---scant few people could really care less about how you would run any server.
Your history about the advances the military have made in distributed 3D simulation environments is false.
Laserdiscs (remember those?) suffer from what most people call "Laserdisc Rot". If you don't store them properly the surface degrades and the disc becomes unuseable. I wonder if it is similar to this.
Please expand your horizons a bit more, and learn the difference between truth, and marketing.
Only if you promise to expand your horizons and get a sense of humor. Or, did you really think we are still upset about the tea tax for the colonies?
You get the hacks at www.theregister.co.uk to stop writing about Parliament, the BBC, British Telecom, AOL Europe, et. al. and we'll forget the whole Tea Tax thing, ok?
You forgot raging about the MPAA, asking us to boycott movies, and then providing us with useless Katz reviews of movies *every* week.