For example, take a look at the list of other product names [lindows.com] that have "Windows" or something similar in them. All of these products run on Windows. They aren't a competitor to Microsoft's core operating system business; rather, they enhance that market by providing valuable third-party add-ons to Windows.
Lindows, on the other hand, is obviously capitalizing on the popularity of Windows.
Yep. The keys is that trademarks are supposed to only apply a specific market. So I can start a business called 'Apple' and unless it's a computer company Steve Jobs can't do a thing about it.
What Microsoft will try to argue in this case is that all those other programs don't infringe because those products are not operating systems while Lindows is. That might not work though as Lindows can argue that the market is software, operating systems is too specialised to be considered a separate market. They will argue that you can't defend your trademark against company A because they are a competitor and not defend it against companies B through Z becuase they aren't competitors. You must defend a trademark consistantly.
Of course this whole "help us get a list" thing is pretty amateurish. They should be paying lawyers to build their case, not begging the public to do it.
Unlike the other major CD standards company Sony, Philips has no content business so they probably have very little interest in protecting CDs, especially if it's going to increase the cost of making the hardware. Copy protection is not something that Philips object to out of general prinicples or "the goodness of their collective hearts", they object to it because it can only hurt their hardware sales.
What's different between Philips and the other players we've heard from so far is that Philips are technically astute - they know that perfect copy prevention is technically impossible and any copy protection will annoy consumers. The others we've heard from are all media companies (only Sony has a hardware business). Their interest is only protecting their "rights", but more importantly they don't recognise the futility of what they are trying to do.
For example, menus at the top of the screen (ala MacOS) worked well because a user's motor memory it trained to select items. The functions become motor program - like learning to play a piano.
Unfortunately, this is broken if the menus change (e.g. MS's idea of hiding items and them bringing them back, moving them around etc.). It also doesn't work for menus on window titles - as you need to overload your visual system to select the menu to begin with. Only context and screen top menus retain the original design a pros of menus these days.
Actually screen top (or bottom, or side) menus work well because effectively they are infinitely high (or wide) so they're easy to aim at. I think the reason Windows doesn't use them is because they didn't want to give Apple more ammunition for their look and feel lawsuit. It's also possible that Apple have a patent on screen top menus - I know Commodore-Amiga owned a patent on auto-hiding screen top menus.
Can you really call a list of artist/album/track info "Intellectual Property"??
I'm sure most people here would agree that it's not. The point is that whether it is IP or not it plays against Gracenote. If it isn't IP then they can't stop FreeDB duplicating the service and they can't stop someone like Roxio switching to FreeDB. If it is IP then it shouldn't be owned by Gracenote anyway since they didn't produce it and no-one assigned them the rights.
different to the current laws of libel (remember, it's not slander; it's written)
I thought that there had been a ruling somewhere that concluded that email was bascially a conversation and therefore slander laws would apply. Unfortunately I'm too lazy to go looking for it now. Anyway I don't know if you could argue that in the case where you sent the same email to 35,000 people.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" At least thats what the constitution [usconstitution.net] says.
That section of the constitution gives Congress the power to enact laws for that purpose, it's not the law itself. Specifically, while the aim of patent law may be to "promote the progress..." the patent law itself protects invention.
Still I never claimed to be an expert in US law. I'm just going by what the people who hand these damn things out claim.
wonder if I can patent the patent process... now that'd be funny.
It might take something similarly disruptive for legislators to realise what a mess the system is in. The obvious candidate is BT's claim on hyperlinking. I'm sure someone in power would notice if the US Internet economy took a big hit due to hyperlink license fees.
Would you say that polaroid's patent on self-developing film is a "common idea", just because everyone knows how it works?
Polaroid's patents on instant cameras would be design patents protecting the specific design of the film and camera, not a patent on an idea at all. These software patents are an entirely different thing, they are utility patents on a process. In the language of patent law a patent can be granted to anyone who "invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof". Originally "new and useful process" meant manufacturing process, not computer (or mathematical) algorithm. The law's being applied to cases it wasn't envisioned for.
Protecting ideas is the whole point of patents.
No, protecting inventions is the point of patents. In this case it seems (and I haven't studied the patent in detail) that the ideas are fairly obvious as the first draft of the (allegedly) infringing standard was developed within a similar timeframe to the patent. The problem is that through all that obfuscating language it's difficult to determine exactly what is being patented, let alone whether it's novel and non-obvious.
I can see blocking the adult usenet groups, but how do you block the other stuff? Ban file-sharing programs and FTP access? Not likely...
It'd be very difficult technically to ban p2p sharing but Optus (one of the two cable providers in Australia) has fired the first shot by throttling traffic to ports 6700-6702. It might be possible to filter at the protocol level if they needed to ban something outright. Are any of the p2p systems using an encrypted protocol yet?
isn't one of the big "selling points" about Linux the fact that there aren't branches and forks everywhere?
No. None of the major distributions ship with a plain Linus or -ac kernel. They all apply different patches in order to pass their own test suites. And from the point of view of the vast majority of users the kernel doesn't matter anyway - it is the distribution as a whole that they see, and there are literally hundreds of different distributions. As far as corporations are concerned it's a good thing. It lets them choose the distribution and kernel patches that they feel is the best.
Boeing submited an unsolicited proposal to the USAF to re-engine the remaining B52s. The proposal was to replace the eight TF-33 turbofans with four RB211-535 turbofans, the same engines that are used in most 757s. They produce 37,000lb - 43,000lb thrust which is an improvement over the 34,000lb produced by two TF-33s but nowhere near the output of the Trent 800s used in the 777. Details are on the Boeing site.
2) Rail about security through obscurity. Ignore similar [slashdot.org] linux issues [slashdot.org].
3) Rail about how long a bug has been open. Ignore similar linux issues [slashdot.org].
How exactly are they ignoring similar Linux issues? All your links are to slashdot articles - pretty strange sort of ignoring. If you mean they've ignored Linux in the this article then so what? It's an article about IE not Linux.
4) Ignore the linked article, and claim something stupid. In this case that MS isn't in a hurry to release a patch when in fact they have been testing a patch.
It's been a month, without a work around or even a warning. I don't know if they're in a hurry but it's certainly taking a while.
According to the article (you read the article?) they are using Linux on 40-50 workstations, primarily for Alias/Wavefront's Maya character animation software and Nothing Real's Shake compositing system.
Good point. What constitutes distribution? Certainly letting someone else use your computer in a one off situation clearly doesn't constitute distribution of the software on it. It's a bit more murky in the case of a company providing access to employees though. For one thing, in a company users would generally be using personal accounts and I think it would be difficult to argue that the software hasn't been distributed to those users in that situation. Think of software that has a click through agreement when first run by a new user. Deleting software from a company machine would be covered by the companies use of computers policy and isn't relevant here.
The way you're intepreting the GPL anyone could bypass it by simply saying that they are "lending access" to the software. Eg. I have a license to use some software, I install it on your machine, I'm still the license holder so I haven't distributed the software to you, I'm just letting you use the software temporarily. I doubt the FSF would agree with that interpretation.
I do believe you're incorrect here...that could be done with proprietary closed source, the license doesn't matter.
If an employee (or anyone for that matter) posts a companies proprietary source code publicly they could be accused of industrial espionage. Revealing trade secrets is a serious offense, and of course it would be a copyright violation as well. Certainly an employee would be dismissed, and I'd expect a lawsuit to 'recover damages'. But the main protection many companies use to is not let most employees have access to the source.
Therefore, the app is GPL...however, anybody seeing the binary can also get to the source (ie employees only).
The GPL circumvents both of the companies defenses: they must provide the source code to all users who want it and they cannot apply additional restrictions to the license so anyone with the source can legally redistribute it in anyway they choose and the company can do nothing about it. Not many companies would be happy with that situation.
this is computer programing. I know people who tought themselves Basic in a morning. I belive that I can learn any computer language you wish me to program in, in under a week. I can read well written programs in most lanuages without any learning time. I'm not special, any compitent programer can do it.
Yes it is easy to pick up a new language. Languages are not the problem, it's the libraries. If the multi-language apps are all using the same libraries or are fairly self contained, then fine. Otherwise there's a lot of knowledge invested in the different libraries each langauges is supported by.
Meet the Feebles was the second film made by Peter Jackson (director of Lord of the Rings). One of the writers, Fran Walsh, also co-wrote the Lord of the Rings adaption with Jackson. But Meet the Feebles is not Jackson's goriest. You'll be wanting to check out Braindead (aka Dead Alive in the US). IMDB's user comments tell the story: "Overall I give this cinematic masterpiece the highest review, me throwing up in the bathroom afterwards from absolute disgust."
I can only assume that someone got confused and reported $5B as the loss instead of the sales. There's something funny with the RIAA's numbers though: look at the cassette single units shipped: -0.8M. Are they claiming they had 800,000 more cassingles returned than where sold in the first place?
I mean, gee, does it occur to them that decreased CD sales are due to a not-so-hot economy, where people will tend to first cut spending on discretionary products like CDs?
Of course they know what the real factors are, but they can get political mileage out of it so naturally they blaim the Net. After all the numbers don't lie *snort*. A similar 7% decrease in CD sales occured in the '97, I love in know what they blaimed that on.
For every story of "this stupid PHB who didn't understand his business at all," I can point you to at least 2 or 3 "engineers" who picked up enough ASP or javascript at a summer internship that they knew all the buzzwords to put in a resume, and were TOTALLY out of their depth in a real job.
The sad fact is that there are a lot of mediocre people around, and some of them are engineers, and some have MBAs.
This doesn't change the fact that, to run an engineering shop, you really do need someone who knows the business end of things.... This is a person we call a "manager," and he/she is not always evil and stupid.
You're right, but if that manager is any good at all they will leave the engineering decisions to the engineers. The point about this discussion is that in the case of websites the engineers are more likely to know what works and what doesn't because they are more likely to be heavy web users.
If it counts, i'm another happy user of the CrossOver Plugin. What got me to jump on board and fork over cash for the 1.0 release? Easy. truth in advertising.
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What Microsoft will try to argue in this case is that all those other programs don't infringe because those products are not operating systems while Lindows is. That might not work though as Lindows can argue that the market is software, operating systems is too specialised to be considered a separate market. They will argue that you can't defend your trademark against company A because they are a competitor and not defend it against companies B through Z becuase they aren't competitors. You must defend a trademark consistantly.
Of course this whole "help us get a list" thing is pretty amateurish. They should be paying lawyers to build their case, not begging the public to do it.
What's different between Philips and the other players we've heard from so far is that Philips are technically astute - they know that perfect copy prevention is technically impossible and any copy protection will annoy consumers. The others we've heard from are all media companies (only Sony has a hardware business). Their interest is only protecting their "rights", but more importantly they don't recognise the futility of what they are trying to do.
You forgot The West Island, aka Australia.
Still I never claimed to be an expert in US law. I'm just going by what the people who hand these damn things out claim.
No. None of the major distributions ship with a plain Linus or -ac kernel. They all apply different patches in order to pass their own test suites. And from the point of view of the vast majority of users the kernel doesn't matter anyway - it is the distribution as a whole that they see, and there are literally hundreds of different distributions. As far as corporations are concerned it's a good thing. It lets them choose the distribution and kernel patches that they feel is the best.
Boeing submited an unsolicited proposal to the USAF to re-engine the remaining B52s. The proposal was to replace the eight TF-33 turbofans with four RB211-535 turbofans, the same engines that are used in most 757s. They produce 37,000lb - 43,000lb thrust which is an improvement over the 34,000lb produced by two TF-33s but nowhere near the output of the Trent 800s used in the 777. Details are on the Boeing site.
According to the article (you read the article?) they are using Linux on 40-50 workstations, primarily for Alias/Wavefront's Maya character animation software and Nothing Real's Shake compositing system.
The way you're intepreting the GPL anyone could bypass it by simply saying that they are "lending access" to the software. Eg. I have a license to use some software, I install it on your machine, I'm still the license holder so I haven't distributed the software to you, I'm just letting you use the software temporarily. I doubt the FSF would agree with that interpretation.
I saw it in New Zealand in it's full uncut glory. Apparently the UK and Australian versions were also uncut.
Oh, I liked it. Right from the rabid monkey. We had quite a few people leaving the theatre though.
Meet the Feebles was the second film made by Peter Jackson (director of Lord of the Rings). One of the writers, Fran Walsh, also co-wrote the Lord of the Rings adaption with Jackson. But Meet the Feebles is not Jackson's goriest. You'll be wanting to check out Braindead (aka Dead Alive in the US). IMDB's user comments tell the story: "Overall I give this cinematic masterpiece the highest review, me throwing up in the bathroom afterwards from absolute disgust."