The point is, though, that the fact that some corporations have trademarks on common words doesn't actually prevent the rest of us from using them at all. It prevents other people from setting up businesses that rely on selling products in a similar field with names that are confusingly similar.
Hell, there's even a glazier in my local area called Windows 2000. And I happen to know that Microsoft's UK trademark agents are based not far away, so they're probably well and truly aware of the existence of this company.
You know what... most of those venture capitalists actually made a profit. How? By selling all those ridiculous startups off to other suckers before the end came. A few were still holding on at the end, but most of them had wised up.
Rather, I would suggest that once cognitive science has duplicated a cat, tacked on a logic unit and a speech unit, and gotten it down to mobile size, it will have created one scary smart and dangerous robot.
and once glibc can be replaced with a user version that doesn't bother checking signatures on new binaries, the whole TCPA/DRM lockdown comes apart
Frankly, I think the entire thing's doomed to failure anyway, because it relies on vendors of DRM data being able to verify a combination of (a) the software you're using to play the media, (b) all the drivers that are in the chain of drivers between that software and output, (c) your operating system kernel, (d) any additional software that's running in priveleged mode on your computer and could therefore theoretically snoop the data from your drivers, (e) your BIOS, and (f) any hypervisor that may or may not be running on your computer. Unless vendors are going to start listing required harware & driver versions to use their media files (e.g. you MUST have an ATI x1300 graphics card with driver version 12.5.63 or whatever) this just cannot work. Upgrade your video card driver, all your media will stop playing. Install the latest MS patch before your media provider has a chance to update their database, all your media will stop playing. The idea that consumers will put up with that kind of shit is a joke. Yes. Remote attestation for DRM is a joke.
The only way remote attestation can be used effectively is in a controlled environment, to identify a specific computer that is under your control, and to make sure that none if its software has been messed with. Or for monitoring the machines on your network so you can tell when one of them has a rootkit on it.
It's fair to say that Linux might well not even exist without the work that RMS and his cohorts did in the first years of the FSF's existence.
I don't believe that's entirely true. It would be fair to say that Linux would not be what it is today without the GNU codebase to draw upon. But there was already a large codebase of BSD software that could have been used instead.
We all use the GNU compiler, GNU tools & the vast body of GNU software. Who is using the OSI compiler, OSI tools and the vast body of OSI software? Nobody - because it doesn't exist.
That's because the two projects have fundamentally different goals: GNU exists to create a free replacement for Unix. The OSI exists to promote the use of existing FOSS software, with emphasis on use in business enviornments. I'd say we'd need both to cause the revolution you're talking about.
Microsoft technically supports file forks in NT but has made no effort to use them or encourage their use
Not true. The data from the "summary" tab of explorer is stored in this way in XP. I also believe the information that causes explorer to pop up a warning before running a program that was downloaded from the Internet is stored in the same way.
Otherwise, a great post. Thanks for the summary.:)
Indeed. This is very much like the arguments I see occasionally that the 386SX was a 16-bit processor. No, it was a 32-bit processor with a 16-bit bus. Unless you think the Pentium was a 64-bit processor.
If this was the thing holding Linux back from being a massive success, Linspire would be selling millions of copies. That they aren't says something.
Well, there are a few things holding Linux back, at least:
Multimedia support, as discussed: there are solutions, but most distributions are a little leary of including them due to their potential for patent violations, and in some cases reliance on non-free code that is somebody else's copyright
Hardware support: no working solutions yet for many issues, including any support better than adequate for large quantities of current graphics hardware, and no support at all for much present-generation wireless networking hardware. People don't want to build their computer so Linux can work with it; they want to take a computer and put Linux onto it and have it work, yet at the moment you need to work your way through hardware compatibility lists and shit like that when you're buying your components. This isn't the way to achieve popularity.
Lack of support from third parties, e.g. ISPs
Lack of support for applications people are familiar with (e.g. Photoshop might work in Wine, but how well...?)
Persistent rumours of major difficulties: if you hear somebody talking about Linux, it's often about how they struggled to make X, Y or Z feature work. Even if they did get there in the end, this is offputting to most users. And even when a distribution works out-of-the-box, people will still be hearing user stories about other distributions that aren't as friendly, and equating one with the other.
Better support of proprietary software can help to solve the first and second of these issues. It is already helping to solve the fourth. Once these problems are solved the fifth will start to drop away. The third would naturally cease to be a problem when larger numbers of people started adopting Linux, which should happen as the others cease being an issue. Then we merely have inertia to overcome. And that's where free-as-in-beer helps.
As other posters have said, verizon will need a court order before they can hand out this information.
But: there's little to stop you from getting one yourself. File a claim for recovery of property against an unknown party. Put a motion before the judge asking for an order that verizon disclose any and all information they have about that IP address, including an explanation of how you know that the IP address is involved. This is as much information as the RIAA have when they make their claims -- you should be able to do exactly the same thing as they're doing.
Then, once the party is identified, they'll be served with all the relevant documentation. You go to court, claim they have property that belongs to you, and request an order that it is returned, along with compensation for your loss of use of it in the interrim.
If you do your homework, you shouldn't even need a lawyer for a case this simple.
Disclaimer: I know little about US civil procedure. What I describe would be possible in the UK, and I understand based on a little reading that procedure is roughly similar in US courts.
It's quite clear that Sony's plan is to set up a pay-to-download P2P network, possibly with the get-paid-to-upload feature that I heard suggested a while back. This kind of information tracking would be essential for such a network.
(N.b. it would be trivially easy to transfer file and metadata under separate hashes to allow multihomed downloads to work with such a system; you'd have to determine some set of rules for how to merge the multiple different metadata records into s single consolidated record, but I guess this will just be by adding up the total on the bill).
His claim is that he owns the trademark and has a product (if he has one is irrelevant, at least for the law) by that name
I don't believe this is true. My understanding of trademark law is that registration is not enough: you have to show actual use of the trademark. This may be different in Germany, but I don't suspect so.
I've read quite a few news sources on this event. I've read a lot of blogs talking about it. Only the latter seem to be talking about mixing the explosives on the plane. Any idea where this idea originated? Because I'm pretty sure it was nowhere official. It's just a stupid meme that's propogated from one site to another until people started analysing it and destroying it. No, that was never the plan. The plan was to mix the explosives in advance and smuggle them onto flights in drink bottles with false bottoms. The *detonators* were to be constructed in flight, but that's a substantially easier process.
Well you can wake me up when iTunes displays song lyrics on the fly, pulls up Wikipedia entries on the artist, sorts music in a sane manner, does not phone home on your music collection for an "enhanced" buying experience, is fully skinable so you can get rid of that 1900 Ford mentality of "They can have it look however they want as long as it is this shitty minimalist skin", and supports ALL the music file formats i want to use like.ogg
Oh, hell, wake *me* up when iTunes lets you just plug an iPod into the machine, drag and drop the songs you want on it from your filesystem onto an icon for the device, unplug the iPod, and start playing the songs.
That's how every other hardware MP3 player works. That's how every other software media player works. But not iTunes. iTunes wants you to create a library, drag and drop the files into the library, then drag them from the library to the iPod. I mean why?
Strange. I've never noticed my desktop MP3 applications suffering from this problem, despite them having no cache of such information. And before you say the iPod doesn't have the horsepower to do this, look up the specs of the CPU it's using. It has a dual ARM7 cores running at 90MHz. That's substantially more powerful than the 133MHz pentium I've successfully run Winamp on. And its flash memory is probably much faster than the quad-speed CDROM drive I used to play MP3s from on a regular basis.
Well said. That's why the articles we see about xxx company considering Linux desktops every now and then are important, and why efforts to produce commercial-style software for Linux are key. OpenOffice is probably the most important free software project at the moment because it is working on a small group of applications that most businesses need to work & need to work well. Firefox adoption by intranet developers is also key: there are too many businesses that have IE-only intranets out there, and we need to work to reduce those numbers.
What Linux really needs is a compelling product that will allow businesses to save noticeable amounts of money (even when you take into account the fact that they've probably already paid their Windows tax when buying their computers). It would have to be something Windows can't do, and somewhere MS would struggle to follow. Perhaps it can be done. It'll be interesting finding out.
I have a friend who uses Linux on the desktop for only one application: managing his iPod. He reckons it's easier to work with than iTunes, which just tries to be too clever all the time. He just wants to drag & drop the songs he wants onto the device, unplug it, and go.
You can't legally do this with Windows. The (bulk-licensing) EULA states that you are allowed to install Windows on one computer and one virtual machine *that runs on the same computer*. Moving the image from computer to computer is specifically prohibited, IIRC (yes, I've considered doing this before).
Question: what are the quickbooks licensing terms? Specifically, what are you allowed to do with an installation? I suspect the EULA grants the rights to install on one "computer". A VM is not a computer, it's a simulation of a computer that runs on a computer. This is fine, but if you then move the VM between computers, an additional copy of the software is created that you don't have a license for. You would probably find that legally speaking, you'd need just as many copies anyway.
... if they included some previous questions with their previous results. That way, you could know what these people had done in order to win the prizes they won. Would be much more interesting than a table with apparently meaningless numbers in it.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is, though, that the fact that some corporations have trademarks on common words doesn't actually prevent the rest of us from using them at all. It prevents other people from setting up businesses that rely on selling products in a similar field with names that are confusingly similar.
Hell, there's even a glazier in my local area called Windows 2000. And I happen to know that Microsoft's UK trademark agents are based not far away, so they're probably well and truly aware of the existence of this company.
You know what... most of those venture capitalists actually made a profit. How? By selling all those ridiculous startups off to other suckers before the end came. A few were still holding on at the end, but most of them had wised up.
Rather, I would suggest that once cognitive science has duplicated a cat, tacked on a logic unit and a speech unit, and gotten it down to mobile size, it will have created one scary smart and dangerous robot.
Particularly if it starts hunting down and extracting the neural maps of additional cats to merge into its own consciousness in order to grow more intelligent.
I guess a rat brain in a pilot's uniform doesn't pick up as much skirt though.
I wouldn't be so sure, looking at a representative sample of the members of this site.
and once glibc can be replaced with a user version that doesn't bother checking signatures on new binaries, the whole TCPA/DRM lockdown comes apart
Frankly, I think the entire thing's doomed to failure anyway, because it relies on vendors of DRM data being able to verify a combination of (a) the software you're using to play the media, (b) all the drivers that are in the chain of drivers between that software and output, (c) your operating system kernel, (d) any additional software that's running in priveleged mode on your computer and could therefore theoretically snoop the data from your drivers, (e) your BIOS, and (f) any hypervisor that may or may not be running on your computer. Unless vendors are going to start listing required harware & driver versions to use their media files (e.g. you MUST have an ATI x1300 graphics card with driver version 12.5.63 or whatever) this just cannot work. Upgrade your video card driver, all your media will stop playing. Install the latest MS patch before your media provider has a chance to update their database, all your media will stop playing. The idea that consumers will put up with that kind of shit is a joke. Yes. Remote attestation for DRM is a joke.
The only way remote attestation can be used effectively is in a controlled environment, to identify a specific computer that is under your control, and to make sure that none if its software has been messed with. Or for monitoring the machines on your network so you can tell when one of them has a rootkit on it.
Not DRM. It just won't work in that environment.
It's fair to say that Linux might well not even exist without the work that RMS and his cohorts did in the first years of the FSF's existence.
I don't believe that's entirely true. It would be fair to say that Linux would not be what it is today without the GNU codebase to draw upon. But there was already a large codebase of BSD software that could have been used instead.
We all use the GNU compiler, GNU tools & the vast body of GNU software. Who is using the OSI compiler, OSI tools and the vast body of OSI software? Nobody - because it doesn't exist.
That's because the two projects have fundamentally different goals: GNU exists to create a free replacement for Unix. The OSI exists to promote the use of existing FOSS software, with emphasis on use in business enviornments. I'd say we'd need both to cause the revolution you're talking about.
Microsoft technically supports file forks in NT but has made no effort to use them or encourage their use
:)
Not true. The data from the "summary" tab of explorer is stored in this way in XP. I also believe the information that causes explorer to pop up a warning before running a program that was downloaded from the Internet is stored in the same way.
Otherwise, a great post. Thanks for the summary.
Indeed. This is very much like the arguments I see occasionally that the 386SX was a 16-bit processor. No, it was a 32-bit processor with a 16-bit bus. Unless you think the Pentium was a 64-bit processor.
Hmmm. Note to self: Preview comments when formatting stuff in HTML, in case slashcode's screwed up import filters screw it up.
Well, there are a few things holding Linux back, at least:
Better support of proprietary software can help to solve the first and second of these issues. It is already helping to solve the fourth. Once these problems are solved the fifth will start to drop away. The third would naturally cease to be a problem when larger numbers of people started adopting Linux, which should happen as the others cease being an issue. Then we merely have inertia to overcome. And that's where free-as-in-beer helps.
As other posters have said, verizon will need a court order before they can hand out this information.
But: there's little to stop you from getting one yourself. File a claim for recovery of property against an unknown party. Put a motion before the judge asking for an order that verizon disclose any and all information they have about that IP address, including an explanation of how you know that the IP address is involved. This is as much information as the RIAA have when they make their claims -- you should be able to do exactly the same thing as they're doing.
Then, once the party is identified, they'll be served with all the relevant documentation. You go to court, claim they have property that belongs to you, and request an order that it is returned, along with compensation for your loss of use of it in the interrim.
If you do your homework, you shouldn't even need a lawyer for a case this simple.
Disclaimer: I know little about US civil procedure. What I describe would be possible in the UK, and I understand based on a little reading that procedure is roughly similar in US courts.
It's quite clear that Sony's plan is to set up a pay-to-download P2P network, possibly with the get-paid-to-upload feature that I heard suggested a while back. This kind of information tracking would be essential for such a network.
(N.b. it would be trivially easy to transfer file and metadata under separate hashes to allow multihomed downloads to work with such a system; you'd have to determine some set of rules for how to merge the multiple different metadata records into s single consolidated record, but I guess this will just be by adding up the total on the bill).
Cause they've got a bigger marketing budget, and because they were the first to make the idea fashionable.
Nothing to do with quality of the product, if that's what you're implying.
His claim is that he owns the trademark and has a product (if he has one is irrelevant, at least for the law) by that name
I don't believe this is true. My understanding of trademark law is that registration is not enough: you have to show actual use of the trademark. This may be different in Germany, but I don't suspect so.
I've read quite a few news sources on this event. I've read a lot of blogs talking about it. Only the latter seem to be talking about mixing the explosives on the plane. Any idea where this idea originated? Because I'm pretty sure it was nowhere official. It's just a stupid meme that's propogated from one site to another until people started analysing it and destroying it. No, that was never the plan. The plan was to mix the explosives in advance and smuggle them onto flights in drink bottles with false bottoms. The *detonators* were to be constructed in flight, but that's a substantially easier process.
Well you can wake me up when iTunes displays song lyrics on the fly, pulls up Wikipedia entries on the artist, sorts music in a sane manner, does not phone home on your music collection for an "enhanced" buying experience, is fully skinable so you can get rid of that 1900 Ford mentality of "They can have it look however they want as long as it is this shitty minimalist skin", and supports ALL the music file formats i want to use like .ogg
Oh, hell, wake *me* up when iTunes lets you just plug an iPod into the machine, drag and drop the songs you want on it from your filesystem onto an icon for the device, unplug the iPod, and start playing the songs.
That's how every other hardware MP3 player works. That's how every other software media player works. But not iTunes. iTunes wants you to create a library, drag and drop the files into the library, then drag them from the library to the iPod. I mean why?
Strange. I've never noticed my desktop MP3 applications suffering from this problem, despite them having no cache of such information. And before you say the iPod doesn't have the horsepower to do this, look up the specs of the CPU it's using. It has a dual ARM7 cores running at 90MHz. That's substantially more powerful than the 133MHz pentium I've successfully run Winamp on. And its flash memory is probably much faster than the quad-speed CDROM drive I used to play MP3s from on a regular basis.
Well said. That's why the articles we see about xxx company considering Linux desktops every now and then are important, and why efforts to produce commercial-style software for Linux are key. OpenOffice is probably the most important free software project at the moment because it is working on a small group of applications that most businesses need to work & need to work well. Firefox adoption by intranet developers is also key: there are too many businesses that have IE-only intranets out there, and we need to work to reduce those numbers.
What Linux really needs is a compelling product that will allow businesses to save noticeable amounts of money (even when you take into account the fact that they've probably already paid their Windows tax when buying their computers). It would have to be something Windows can't do, and somewhere MS would struggle to follow. Perhaps it can be done. It'll be interesting finding out.
I have a friend who uses Linux on the desktop for only one application: managing his iPod. He reckons it's easier to work with than iTunes, which just tries to be too clever all the time. He just wants to drag & drop the songs he wants onto the device, unplug it, and go.
You can't legally do this with Windows. The (bulk-licensing) EULA states that you are allowed to install Windows on one computer and one virtual machine *that runs on the same computer*. Moving the image from computer to computer is specifically prohibited, IIRC (yes, I've considered doing this before).
Question: what are the quickbooks licensing terms? Specifically, what are you allowed to do with an installation? I suspect the EULA grants the rights to install on one "computer". A VM is not a computer, it's a simulation of a computer that runs on a computer. This is fine, but if you then move the VM between computers, an additional copy of the software is created that you don't have a license for. You would probably find that legally speaking, you'd need just as many copies anyway.
Be careful not to run with editing scissors, you might accidentally disemvowel yourself.
"Firefox users need to install this ActiveX compatibility plugin"
Err... No thanks. The lack of ActiveX is the primary reason I *like* firefox.
... if they included some previous questions with their previous results. That way, you could know what these people had done in order to win the prizes they won. Would be much more interesting than a table with apparently meaningless numbers in it.