The offical name of those products is Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, etc. Even the shortcuts installed all follow that same pattern, probably because they'd not be able to register a trademark simply as "Word."
True, but a mark does not need to be an EXACT replice of an existing trademark to be problematic. It is often enough to be substantially similar, e.g. "Lindows" vs. "Microsoft Windows", "Grand Theft Scratchy" vs. "Grand Theft Auto", etc.
Often, but not always: apparently "Office" isn't unique enough to be protected, since we've had products named "Corel Office Suite", "OpenOffice.org", etc.
I think copyright is a silly idea and a peculiar recent Western European innovation that most of the world rightly rejects
163 of the world's 194 (or so; depends on who's counting) countries are parties to the Berne Convention; several more are parties to other multilateral copyright treaties.
I'm not sure how you figure that less than 15% of the world (by number of countries; by population or by economic power, the percentage is far, far lower) constitutes "most of the world".
32-bit integers are kind of the default, so most people wouldn't worry about it. So why are they doing this?
Publicity, mainly.
For the price of under a gigabyte of disk, they have made themselves the talk of Slashdot and every other geek aggregation site, and mainstream tech reporters will then pick up on the trend, and report it in the newspapers and cable news networks. It's cheap advertising -- but it's a strategy that can only be used once, ever.
why the fuck would I want a locked down platform that goes out of its way to restrict my usage?
Yeah! Why would I want my cable company's dodgy set-top box, when the industry has done everything in its power to weaken the CableCard mandate that would have given us more freedom?
Oh, were you talking about the X360? Half a dozen of one...
Legacy support is important to many business Windows customers; some of them are still using 16-years-old custom software that needs to run on whatever desktop OS their employees are running.
Then let them have a "Microsoft Windows 7 Legacy Regressive Edition" that contains all the cruft needed for them to continue running their old MS-DOS applications, and let the rest of us have a clean, modern version of Windows optimized for people who live in the present.
I shouldn't have to suffer just because some suit in 1993 assumed that 16-bit Windows APIs would be around forever.
once they reach 10.9, they have the option of pissing in the face of basic number representation and call the next version 10.10, then 10.11...
But those figures have a data type of "release", not "number". The dot is not as a decimal point, but rather a separator between major and minor release number.
If they were plain numbers, then major.minor.fix representations like 10.2.15 would not be possible.
Piracy is theft. Offering an item at optional cost does not allow for it to be stolen.
Of course, piracy is not ACTUALLY theft; it is copyright infringement.
Copyright law is that which gives the author of a creative work (or their proxies) the exclusive RIGHT to determine how COPIES of the work are distributed. If Radiohead has decided that the only channel for legally distributing the album is through their official site, than anyone distributing it by other means -- via P2P networks, or via burning copies and handing them out to friends -- is in violation of the copyright.
Whether the content can be or has been monetized don't enter into it.
To get ahead of all the others already using meta tags, you have to trash your site to increase your Google ranking beyond that.
Amen to that. The only person I'd pay to advise me about best practices for search engine placement would be someone with "Senior Developer, Google.com PageRank division" on their CV, and all of those people are either still working at Google or bound to the terms of an NDA.
"the punishment is so high because we want to send a message that this is a bad thing to do... mmmmKay..." Which...::cough cough:: is against our Constitution in America.
Nonsense. The United States legal system has a tradition of "punitive damages" that goes back centuries. If that were in violation of the Constitution, the courts would have ruled as such by now.
The US constitution grants the vast majority of American's rights and freedoms
No, the Constitution affirms a number of rights and freedoms which all people innately have, and defines bounds on the extent to which government may restrict those rights and freedoms.
In this particular case, the most applicable passage from the Constitution would likely be Amendment XIII: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
The law, as written, allows copyright holders to collect statutory fines from infringers far greater than actual damages. But if the appeals court finds that such statutory fines can meet the Constitutional standard of "excessive", then the law providing for such fines will be found in violation of the Constitution, and overturned.
If she was aware that she was breaking the law, she probably didn't think the punishment would be so ridiculous.
If she was aware that her actions were unlawful, then she could have researched the statutory damages that she would be on the hook for if found guilty. And if she didn't do that, her lawyer SHOULD have, once she got the RIAA Letter and had to decide whether to settle or go to court.
Arguing that her counsel was incompetent may be the best chance the woman has of being granted and winning an appeal.
30 seconds later had a picture about 80-90% as good as the one they're waving about as being the result of some super secret methodology.
Yes, but that extra 10-20% of quality could mean the difference between making a positive ID and letting a monster go free. Worth the extra effort, no?
now crims will just use better techniques for blurring themselves out.
Criminals who let their faces be photographed in the act are pretty stupid to begin with.
I'd much prefer that HOV violators are detected by camera and mailed tickets than stopped by a police car.
I'd much prefer that HOV lanes be done away with entirely, allowing motorists to use the full available bandwidth of the highway system, and for the police not to waste any resources on counting people and issuing HOV violations.
I mean, when NEW JERSEY has scrapped a traffic control initiative, you know it has to be a bad idea.
I don't think that the forefathers ever thought that people would give up habius corpus, or require national IDs to get into federal parks.
As to the first point, the Founding Fathers surely did foresee certain situations where habeas corpus would need to be suspended; they even wrote it into the Constitution (Article 1, Section 9).
As the the second point, there is no such thing as a "national ID" (yet...), so federal parks cannot be requiring them as a condition of access.
I found this part of the technology to be especially clever: the system uses the strings themselves to send the signal.
Clever, yes, but unnecessary. If they had put the tuning servos behind the bridge, inside the guitar body, there would be no need to send signals up the neck to the headstock.
But I guess the traditionalists at Gibson couldn't stomach the idea of a Les Paul with missing or decorative-only tuning pegs at the end of the neck, so the developers had to figure out a workaround.
I think this would be more appropriate for the likes of Joe Satriani or Steve Vai when in a concert they use a different tuning for some different songs...
I don't think it would, unless all the alternate tunings are very similar to each other.
Getting the best sound out of a guitar using a specific tuning is not only a function of the tension on each string, but also the gauge and wrap of the strings. Take a guitar in normal EADGBE with medium-gauge strings and tune the bottom string down a step to D, and it'll still sound pretty close to ideal; but tune everything down a fourth to BEADF#B, and the sound will be thin and lifeless. You'll need to switch to heavier strings to play with that dropped tuning.
Besides which, half of the fun of a Steve Vai show is to check out all the different guitar models he has. There's his standard Jem, and there's the one with the brilliant blue LEDs inlaid into the fret markers, and there's the enormous heart-shaped guitar with three necks...
if this Gen of consoles were really the HD-era, then every game should be able to do 60fps at 1080p, period.
Where did you get your assumption that "high definition" should be defined as "1920x1080 native resolution, progressive scan, 60 frames per second"?
Linguistically, anything of a better format than "standard definition" (to us North Americans, that would be a roughly 640x480, interlaced, 19.97fps NTSC signal) can be considered HD. So Halo 3's internal framebuffer resolution should surely qualify.
the record companies are going to be darned sure to sign new bands to perpetual contracts to prevent this kind of defection in the event of success.
Just like the passengers on La Amistad had neen signed to perpetual labor contracts?
A contract that lacks clear and attainable conditions under which the contract may be terminated is almost certainly unenforceable, not to mention immoral.
Remember how you lost the OS war to Microsoft? Its because Windows had more apps, and it didn't matter that it sucked.
You must be thinking of how IBM lost the OS war to Microsoft. Apple lost the OS war because fifteen years ago, their hardware was locked-down and cost twice as much as a similar-performing WinDOS/2-compatible Intel box.
I'm glad somebody tagged this story with "!januaryfirst".
Now, when I browse the Slashdot archives trying to find stories where somebody mistakenly thought something what January 1 when it actually was not, this one will come up.
you could just wait for an xbox360 emulator to come out, and then run it on linux. Should be sometime in Q1 2025.
In all seriousness, I doubt it will take that long. Desktop PCs were able to emulate the 16-bit console generation (SNES, Genesis, et al) fairly accurately within a decade of the original hardware being released, and that lag seems to be getting smaller and smaller; the PS3 and Xbox 360 both use software emulation of their predecessors, released only 5 or 6 years prior, and some DS emulators have already reached 1.x releases, before the device's 3rd birthday.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a fully-functional 360 emulator by 2012.
Slashdot Mirror
The offical name of those products is Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, etc. Even the shortcuts installed all follow that same pattern, probably because they'd not be able to register a trademark simply as "Word."
True, but a mark does not need to be an EXACT replice of an existing trademark to be problematic. It is often enough to be substantially similar, e.g. "Lindows" vs. "Microsoft Windows", "Grand Theft Scratchy" vs. "Grand Theft Auto", etc.
Often, but not always: apparently "Office" isn't unique enough to be protected, since we've had products named "Corel Office Suite", "OpenOffice.org", etc.
I think copyright is a silly idea and a peculiar recent Western European innovation that most of the world rightly rejects
163 of the world's 194 (or so; depends on who's counting) countries are parties to the Berne Convention; several more are parties to other multilateral copyright treaties.
I'm not sure how you figure that less than 15% of the world (by number of countries; by population or by economic power, the percentage is far, far lower) constitutes "most of the world".
32-bit integers are kind of the default, so most people wouldn't worry about it. So why are they doing this?
Publicity, mainly.
For the price of under a gigabyte of disk, they have made themselves the talk of Slashdot and every other geek aggregation site, and mainstream tech reporters will then pick up on the trend, and report it in the newspapers and cable news networks. It's cheap advertising -- but it's a strategy that can only be used once, ever.
There was no lowering of prices, the meals were eliminated in an attempt to raise profits.
Profits? In the airline industry?
More likely, most carriers have eliminated meals from flights in an attempt to reduce losses.
Do you actually miss that dry turkey sandwich, or is it just resentment that your perceived value is less now than it was before?
why the fuck would I want a locked down platform that goes out of its way to restrict my usage?
Yeah! Why would I want my cable company's dodgy set-top box, when the industry has done everything in its power to weaken the CableCard mandate that would have given us more freedom?
Oh, were you talking about the X360? Half a dozen of one...
"Our firm has handled 252 legal matters in the past two years"
Three more cases to go and they'll gain a temporary geek credebility booster.
Yeah, but then if they take one more case after that, they'll overflow and go back to zero.
Which is unexpected, because this story leads me to believe they are a two-bit operation, not 8-bit.
Legacy support is important to many business Windows customers; some of them are still using 16-years-old custom software that needs to run on whatever desktop OS their employees are running.
Then let them have a "Microsoft Windows 7 Legacy Regressive Edition" that contains all the cruft needed for them to continue running their old MS-DOS applications, and let the rest of us have a clean, modern version of Windows optimized for people who live in the present.
I shouldn't have to suffer just because some suit in 1993 assumed that 16-bit Windows APIs would be around forever.
once they reach 10.9, they have the option of pissing in the face of basic number representation and call the next version 10.10, then 10.11 ...
But those figures have a data type of "release", not "number". The dot is not as a decimal point, but rather a separator between major and minor release number.
If they were plain numbers, then major.minor.fix representations like 10.2.15 would not be possible.
Piracy is theft. Offering an item at optional cost does not allow for it to be stolen.
Of course, piracy is not ACTUALLY theft; it is copyright infringement.
Copyright law is that which gives the author of a creative work (or their proxies) the exclusive RIGHT to determine how COPIES of the work are distributed. If Radiohead has decided that the only channel for legally distributing the album is through their official site, than anyone distributing it by other means -- via P2P networks, or via burning copies and handing them out to friends -- is in violation of the copyright.
Whether the content can be or has been monetized don't enter into it.
To get ahead of all the others already using meta tags, you have to trash your site to increase your Google ranking beyond that.
Amen to that. The only person I'd pay to advise me about best practices for search engine placement would be someone with "Senior Developer, Google.com PageRank division" on their CV, and all of those people are either still working at Google or bound to the terms of an NDA.
"the punishment is so high because we want to send a message that this is a bad thing to do... mmmmKay..." Which... ::cough cough:: is against our Constitution in America.
Nonsense. The United States legal system has a tradition of "punitive damages" that goes back centuries. If that were in violation of the Constitution, the courts would have ruled as such by now.
The US constitution grants the vast majority of American's rights and freedoms
No, the Constitution affirms a number of rights and freedoms which all people innately have, and defines bounds on the extent to which government may restrict those rights and freedoms.
In this particular case, the most applicable passage from the Constitution would likely be Amendment XIII: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
The law, as written, allows copyright holders to collect statutory fines from infringers far greater than actual damages. But if the appeals court finds that such statutory fines can meet the Constitutional standard of "excessive", then the law providing for such fines will be found in violation of the Constitution, and overturned.
If she was aware that she was breaking the law, she probably didn't think the punishment would be so ridiculous.
If she was aware that her actions were unlawful, then she could have researched the statutory damages that she would be on the hook for if found guilty. And if she didn't do that, her lawyer SHOULD have, once she got the RIAA Letter and had to decide whether to settle or go to court.
Arguing that her counsel was incompetent may be the best chance the woman has of being granted and winning an appeal.
30 seconds later had a picture about 80-90% as good as the one they're waving about as being the result of some super secret methodology.
Yes, but that extra 10-20% of quality could mean the difference between making a positive ID and letting a monster go free. Worth the extra effort, no?
now crims will just use better techniques for blurring themselves out.
Criminals who let their faces be photographed in the act are pretty stupid to begin with.
We had a guy who got the local electric company to lay a dedicated cable from the main copper in the road direct to his HiFi.
Because Lord knows there's no power source cleaner or more pure than a United States residential high-voltage line...
I'd much prefer that HOV violators are detected by camera and mailed tickets than stopped by a police car.
I'd much prefer that HOV lanes be done away with entirely, allowing motorists to use the full available bandwidth of the highway system, and for the police not to waste any resources on counting people and issuing HOV violations.
I mean, when NEW JERSEY has scrapped a traffic control initiative, you know it has to be a bad idea.
I don't think that the forefathers ever thought that people would give up habius corpus, or require national IDs to get into federal parks.
As to the first point, the Founding Fathers surely did foresee certain situations where habeas corpus would need to be suspended; they even wrote it into the Constitution (Article 1, Section 9).
As the the second point, there is no such thing as a "national ID" (yet...), so federal parks cannot be requiring them as a condition of access.
I found this part of the technology to be especially clever: the system uses the strings themselves to send the signal.
Clever, yes, but unnecessary. If they had put the tuning servos behind the bridge, inside the guitar body, there would be no need to send signals up the neck to the headstock.
But I guess the traditionalists at Gibson couldn't stomach the idea of a Les Paul with missing or decorative-only tuning pegs at the end of the neck, so the developers had to figure out a workaround.
I think this would be more appropriate for the likes of Joe Satriani or Steve Vai when in a concert they use a different tuning for some different songs...
I don't think it would, unless all the alternate tunings are very similar to each other.
Getting the best sound out of a guitar using a specific tuning is not only a function of the tension on each string, but also the gauge and wrap of the strings. Take a guitar in normal EADGBE with medium-gauge strings and tune the bottom string down a step to D, and it'll still sound pretty close to ideal; but tune everything down a fourth to BEADF#B, and the sound will be thin and lifeless. You'll need to switch to heavier strings to play with that dropped tuning.
Besides which, half of the fun of a Steve Vai show is to check out all the different guitar models he has. There's his standard Jem, and there's the one with the brilliant blue LEDs inlaid into the fret markers, and there's the enormous heart-shaped guitar with three necks...
if this Gen of consoles were really the HD-era, then every game should be able to do 60fps at 1080p, period.
Where did you get your assumption that "high definition" should be defined as "1920x1080 native resolution, progressive scan, 60 frames per second"?
Linguistically, anything of a better format than "standard definition" (to us North Americans, that would be a roughly 640x480, interlaced, 19.97fps NTSC signal) can be considered HD. So Halo 3's internal framebuffer resolution should surely qualify.
the record companies are going to be darned sure to sign new bands to perpetual contracts to prevent this kind of defection in the event of success.
Just like the passengers on La Amistad had neen signed to perpetual labor contracts?
A contract that lacks clear and attainable conditions under which the contract may be terminated is almost certainly unenforceable, not to mention immoral.
Remember how you lost the OS war to Microsoft? Its because Windows had more apps, and it didn't matter that it sucked.
You must be thinking of how IBM lost the OS war to Microsoft. Apple lost the OS war because fifteen years ago, their hardware was locked-down and cost twice as much as a similar-performing WinDOS/2-compatible Intel box.
I'm glad somebody tagged this story with "!januaryfirst".
Now, when I browse the Slashdot archives trying to find stories where somebody mistakenly thought something what January 1 when it actually was not, this one will come up.
you could just wait for an xbox360 emulator to come out, and then run it on linux. Should be sometime in Q1 2025.
In all seriousness, I doubt it will take that long. Desktop PCs were able to emulate the 16-bit console generation (SNES, Genesis, et al) fairly accurately within a decade of the original hardware being released, and that lag seems to be getting smaller and smaller; the PS3 and Xbox 360 both use software emulation of their predecessors, released only 5 or 6 years prior, and some DS emulators have already reached 1.x releases, before the device's 3rd birthday.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a fully-functional 360 emulator by 2012.
Pirated music is typically of better quality (bitrate, encoder, etc) than any "legal" music store on earth.
A compact disc bought at retail is guaranteed to have equal or better quality than any pirated digital copy.
It also won't have "[di5tribut3d by l33tgr00p]" crammed into every goddamn ID3 tag, as pirate files often do.