If they really wanted to shut open office out that badly, there's easier ways to do it that patenting something in *new zealand*.
I agree that open office, star office, and all the rest are an eventual threat MSOffice's market dominance and that they need to do something about it (like make office better value for money), but this patent is not going to help one whit.
I never disagreed that it's a crap patent. It is. But it's unenforceable without MS opening itself up to yet more legal challenges over its anti-interoperability tactics.
The problem with this article is that it misses the point. Like any good troll, the author asserts facts and opinions that can't be denied, supporting what is unfortunately a skewed and unfair underpinning perspective.
Yes, the patent is a poor one - although MS did it first (I think), the idea isn't particularly great; it is an obvious idea from just reading the XML RFC.
However, a google search for "microsoft patent case" reveals page after page of results for microsoft being sued for patent infringement. None of the results, as far as I can see, pertain to Microsoft suing someone else.
A great deal of large companies have a strategy of defensive patenting: if you've got the patent, no one else can; plus, if you've got one they (an aggressor) infringe and they've got one you infringe, there's a chance that everyone will just forget all about it.
Microsoft's strategy is consistent with their talk about overhauling the patent system - the system is garbage, but they should hedge their bets and defensive patent in case it (the system) doesn't get changed.
No-one is getting screwed as much as Microsoft over patents. The author is simply picking on an easy target.
...given that refreshing slashdot half the time gives me no article text - and the games page has the side column (with the sections text etc.) overlapping with the main column.
Re:Another example of fantastic journalism from /.
on
Gates Nose-Dives at CES
·
· Score: 0, Troll
How exactly, am I trolling?
Wankers. You disagreeing with me doesn't mean I'm a troll. Disagreeing with the article's premise or quality doesn't make me a troll.
Another example of fantastic journalism from /.
on
Gates Nose-Dives at CES
·
· Score: 0, Troll
So, Bill Gates makes the opening speech at the CES. What does slashdot report?
That his demo wasn't flawless.
Where's the much more sensible and deserving reportage of what Gates' speech contained? About how he's repositioning Microsoft as not just a PC software manufacturer, but is placing more and more emphasis on other devices like consoles (the Xbox), handhelds, personal organisers etc. because the desktop PC is becoming less important in the new, gadget-orientated technology market?
Bill even admitted this in the speech. But we don't talk about that.
We just witter on about how his demo didn't work in a pointless, rodomontade, article.
OK, I'll bite - even though you're blatantly a troll.
Percentage of all crimes in the UK, committed with a firearm: less than 0.5% (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/crime/guncrime/)
Percentage of all violent crimes committed involving a firearm in the US: 7% (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/guns.htm)
We can't directly compare, but (data from http://www.crimestatistics.org.uk/), comparing the fact that 20% of all crime in the UK is violent crime, and assuming that you can only use guns in a violent crime (not true, as defined on the websites), then 0.5% / 20% = 2.5%.
Sharp drop in Australian gun crime following the introduction of new laws: http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/gunaus.htm
Other stats abound on the web, some claiming that you're 50 times less likely to be faced with a criminal and a gun in the UK than in the US.
You're taking truisms (banning guns doesn't get rid of them) and infering facts. Please don't be so stupid.
How the hell do you shield a television? You shield something by putting it in a metal box. Hell yeah, lets shield the TV by putting the tube in a metal box. That'll work well. Only thing is, I won't be able to see it!
A CRT works by glowing when you interfere with the glass end electromagnetically. Hence, you can't shield the glass end, or you can't interfere with it from the inside.
Note that you can shield the tuner, but that won't help completely. Hence even if you've got a shielded tuner, and you stick an unshielded speaker on the top of it, your picture will go funny.
I was going to completely refrain from commenting in this particular thread ("Just ban the GUNS!!!") as I'm British, and hence can't really comment on whether banning guns violates your constitutional rights etc. etc.; plus the water seems muddy enough what with all the problems with it like criminals ignoring a ban and getting guns illegally, gun markets going underground, the difficulty of any transition period, etc. - I don't feel that I can draw knowledge from all the information.
However, you've forced me into it. As you have no such compunction.
Guns have been illegal for decades in Britain. Our murder rate is a fraction of that in American cities. Although gun crime is on the increase in specific areas (e.g. parts of south London below the poverty line, and similar areas of Birmingham), this is in line with a general crime increase in these areas.
You can rape and mug someone without a gun - try walking down Acre Lane in brixton at 2am, looking like the blithering idiot you are; you'll probably get mugged, but the chances of you getting shot are very very low.
Then try the same in the Bronx. Make the world a better place and take yourself out of it.
Whether you like it or not, it being illegal to own guns makes it less likely you'll get shot. Anyone who argues differently is a gibbering idiot.
On a more on-topic note, I wonder how effective this will be as either an enforcement measure or a deterrent? A study came out recently arguing that CCTV in city centres is not a significant deterrent to crime - although it does assist after the fact investigation.
OK, everyone seems a little confused about this - like, why now when the book was published in 2000?
For those that don't RTFA:
- In 2000, this book came out, and Katie Jones asked Dutton (subsidiary of Penguin) to change the title, as she had the domain name and they were hijacking it; as a result of the book title, KJ was receiving emails both detailing peoples abuse at the hands of paedophiles, as well as abusive emails from paedophiles themselves. See here and here. KJ took loads of stuff (including pictures of herself and family) off the site as a result - and Penguin ignored the request. I can't find the original slashdot article, although I'm sure there must have been one. - Now, four years later, Jones gets a nasty letter, and this slashdot story is posted. This is caused by KT doing some thing about teaching kids about online safety (whether for money or altruism I don't know) - and them calling it Katie.com. Source. - It seems the lawyer, one Parry Aftab, has a website.
There's a good summary (almost as good as this one) here, and suprisingly, on CNN.
The reason that BT recommend you keep a normal phone line is that they have to, by law (I think).
This is because if you have no power, your VOIP phone won't work - so you can't call 999 (911).
Apparently, BT Broadband Voice, is more of an effort to compete with cable companies (from here), although being something of a toe in the water as regards VOIP.
However, "the service, at this point, falls short of the feature-rich low- cost offerings by consumer services, such as Vonage" - so not quite before anyone else.
Interestingly however, their solution uses Metaswitch as their class 5 switch - as does Fujitsu's effort.
99.9% of the comments so far have been critical. I find this pathetic.
Would everyone please read and digest the article. This is NOT simply sorting by conversation topic, which a number of people are suggesting (Mozilla already does this, yadda, yadda yadda).
To the goon who suggested that outlook 2000 already does what the article is talking about - it doesn't! Sorting "by Conversation Topic" is basically just a threaded view, sorted by subject.
What the article is talking about is separating the conversations from the emails, and displaying them in a time ordered, colour-coded fashion. So, if an email thread splits into two separate conversations, this will be visible in the UI. Sorting by subject will not achieve this.
I'm not suggesting by the way, that this is a new idea; I'm simply explaining what the article is about to those of you (most of the posters) who can't be fucked to read the article.
I expect to be modded down for suggesting that people get a clue, and for suggesting that MS have had an idea which isn't bad.
"[ENISA] will help educate the public about viruses, hacker attacks and other security problems.
It will also act as a co-ordinator for Europe-wide investigations into virus outbreaks or electronic attacks."
Seems clear enough to me: virus writers, denial of service attackers, but not spammers.
A million monkeys were originally hired to conduct this study, but the combined might of animal rights activists and the high costs of bananas prevented it.
Contrary to popular belief, you have to pay bananas, not peanuts, to get monkeys.
Three new Canadian towns had their naming ceremonies today! The three new towns - Paris, Berlin and Moscow - have all night festivities planned with beer, beer and pig-tipping (like cow-tipping but easier on the back).
Mr. Orig Anal, a bar steward from Berlin, Manitoba, said: "We're mighty proud of our brand new town's name, we came up with all of it ourselves".
Seriously - why would you call a place London? I mean really. Not even a perfunctory 'New' on the front.
I'd like to be able to apply the same principles to it as I can with word documents and macros - have a moderate security setting which lets me choose whether I can see them (the attachments) in this email or not, before it's opened by the client.
I don't think whether or not I like a particular feature in an application indicates how mature I am - so please, keep the 'grow up' comments for trolls.
There is a further annoyance. Try sending someone an.exe file (such as a self-extracting archive for example), and the recipient will find they cannot open it - it's been removed.
There's no client side setting to change this security feature to 'off', so you end up having to ask the sender to rename the file to something other than.exe.
There's a whole host of other extensions it doesn't work with either, such as.js and.bat.
I think, on reflection, this may also effect earlier versions of outlook which have been patched, but I'm not sure.
I thought slashdot was supposed to be full of people who knew what they were on about? More than half of this thread is rubbish! "Doomed, we're all Doomed!"
Saying that SIP is dead is like saying that, ooh, UDP will never take off.
It's been around for ages, and it's not just used for phones; it's a generic session establishing protocol.
Essentially, you want to set up some kind of media session between two endpoints; what you do is you send a SIP INVITE message through proxies etc. and attach another kind of protocol message (such as SDP) which describes the requirements for the session. The endpoint receives this, and establishes the session directly (without the proxies etc. in the loop). In very short.
It's just another protocol, like DAP.
SIP phones have been around for ages too - Pingtel's offering is probably the best one.
That said, I don't see SIP phones as taking off in the home, or for personal use; they're much more suited to being used in small enterprises etc.; much lower cost than a PBX. You'd have to have some kind of PSTN interface with the outside world - perhaps phone companies will start providing softswitch capabilities so that people can make their VoIP network speak to the outside world?
What you CAN do at the moment is have a mixed network - VoIP which talks via a router (Cisco 2600 for example) which then talks to the PBX which talks to the PSTN in the usual fashion.
A recent fosters advert on UK television had a robot in it. Check it out here. Note that it's about a third of the way down (find the word fosters) - I didn't want to link directly to the movie as he specifically requested people not to...
Certainly when the events of September 11th took place, for those of us at work in the UK without a television at hand the only way to keep up with events was via the web.
News sites failed to cope with the load - millions of people trying to access the same sites meant that no amount of bandwidth could cope with demand.
For this reason, I don't think that the web is going to replace television as a source of live news coverage anytime soon.
Everyone knows that the aliens have amazing scientific know-how, and are thus invisible to our primitive technology.
We don't have anything to worry about though; they'll just come to a planet that is two-thirds water (even though they have a severe allergy to it), and try and whup our butts in hand to hand inside of using their vaporizers.
Offtopic I know, but: In Europe, there's generally an 'open border' thing going on - you just go between different countries with no customs.
EC members have the same taxes - and sales taxes all sort of go into one big fund which gets divvied up according to some set of rules - I think.
The thing is though, is that the UK doesn't subscribe to this. Mainly because there are a lot of things on mainland Europe which the UK doesn't want - Rabies being the main one. So there are very tight restrictions about what you can bring in, and how much of other stuff which you can bring in.
The UK government has a large tax on cigarettes for example - and so people go to Europe to buy things because of the lower rate of duty. There are restrictions in place which amount to "personal use" - you can go to France from the UK and buy cigarettes but if you buy so many that they think you are going to sell them instead of smoking them all yourself - in effect, smuggling - they get very upset.
The only difference really is the way the question is asked: "show me what you are importing" rather than "how much did you spend".
Slashdot Mirror
THIS IS NOT FLAMEBAIT; IT'S OPINION - Mods, Just because you don't agree, doesn't mean you should mod it down.
I agree that open office, star office, and all the rest are an eventual threat MSOffice's market dominance and that they need to do something about it (like make office better value for money), but this patent is not going to help one whit.
Look at this: Sun pushes open office standard, specifically talking about an open document standard using XML - basically the OASIS format format.
I never disagreed that it's a crap patent. It is. But it's unenforceable without MS opening itself up to yet more legal challenges over its anti-interoperability tactics.
The problem with this article is that it misses the point. Like any good troll, the author asserts facts and opinions that can't be denied, supporting what is unfortunately a skewed and unfair underpinning perspective.
Yes, the patent is a poor one - although MS did it first (I think), the idea isn't particularly great; it is an obvious idea from just reading the XML RFC.
However, a google search for "microsoft patent case" reveals page after page of results for microsoft being sued for patent infringement. None of the results, as far as I can see, pertain to Microsoft suing someone else.
A great deal of large companies have a strategy of defensive patenting: if you've got the patent, no one else can; plus, if you've got one they (an aggressor) infringe and they've got one you infringe, there's a chance that everyone will just forget all about it.
Microsoft's strategy is consistent with their talk about overhauling the patent system - the system is garbage, but they should hedge their bets and defensive patent in case it (the system) doesn't get changed.
No-one is getting screwed as much as Microsoft over patents. The author is simply picking on an easy target.
...given that refreshing slashdot half the time gives me no article text - and the games page has the side column (with the sections text etc.) overlapping with the main column.
How exactly, am I trolling?
Wankers. You disagreeing with me doesn't mean I'm a troll. Disagreeing with the article's premise or quality doesn't make me a troll.
So, Bill Gates makes the opening speech at the CES. What does slashdot report?
That his demo wasn't flawless.
Where's the much more sensible and deserving reportage of what Gates' speech contained? About how he's repositioning Microsoft as not just a PC software manufacturer, but is placing more and more emphasis on other devices like consoles (the Xbox), handhelds, personal organisers etc. because the desktop PC is becoming less important in the new, gadget-orientated technology market?
Bill even admitted this in the speech. But we don't talk about that.
We just witter on about how his demo didn't work in a pointless, rodomontade, article.
No, I'm not new here. I'm just fed up.
OK, I'll bite - even though you're blatantly a troll.
Percentage of all crimes in the UK, committed with a firearm: less than 0.5% (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/crime/guncrime/)
Percentage of all violent crimes committed involving a firearm in the US: 7% (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/guns.htm)
We can't directly compare, but (data from http://www.crimestatistics.org.uk/), comparing the fact that 20% of all crime in the UK is violent crime, and assuming that you can only use guns in a violent crime (not true, as defined on the websites), then 0.5% / 20% = 2.5%.
Sharp drop in Australian gun crime following the introduction of new laws: http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/gunaus.htm
Other stats abound on the web, some claiming that you're 50 times less likely to be faced with a criminal and a gun in the UK than in the US.
You're taking truisms (banning guns doesn't get rid of them) and infering facts. Please don't be so stupid.
How the hell do you shield a television? You shield something by putting it in a metal box. Hell yeah, lets shield the TV by putting the tube in a metal box. That'll work well. Only thing is, I won't be able to see it!
A CRT works by glowing when you interfere with the glass end electromagnetically. Hence, you can't shield the glass end, or you can't interfere with it from the inside.
Note that you can shield the tuner, but that won't help completely. Hence even if you've got a shielded tuner, and you stick an unshielded speaker on the top of it, your picture will go funny.
Note that you CAN shield speakers.
Excuse me?
I was going to completely refrain from commenting in this particular thread ("Just ban the GUNS!!!") as I'm British, and hence can't really comment on whether banning guns violates your constitutional rights etc. etc.; plus the water seems muddy enough what with all the problems with it like criminals ignoring a ban and getting guns illegally, gun markets going underground, the difficulty of any transition period, etc. - I don't feel that I can draw knowledge from all the information.
However, you've forced me into it. As you have no such compunction.
Guns have been illegal for decades in Britain. Our murder rate is a fraction of that in American cities. Although gun crime is on the increase in specific areas (e.g. parts of south London below the poverty line, and similar areas of Birmingham), this is in line with a general crime increase in these areas.
You can rape and mug someone without a gun - try walking down Acre Lane in brixton at 2am, looking like the blithering idiot you are; you'll probably get mugged, but the chances of you getting shot are very very low.
Then try the same in the Bronx. Make the world a better place and take yourself out of it.
Whether you like it or not, it being illegal to own guns makes it less likely you'll get shot. Anyone who argues differently is a gibbering idiot.
On a more on-topic note, I wonder how effective this will be as either an enforcement measure or a deterrent? A study came out recently arguing that CCTV in city centres is not a significant deterrent to crime - although it does assist after the fact investigation.
Looks like the mods don't get the joke either.
OK, everyone seems a little confused about this - like, why now when the book was published in 2000?
For those that don't RTFA:
- In 2000, this book came out, and Katie Jones asked Dutton (subsidiary of Penguin) to change the title, as she had the domain name and they were hijacking it; as a result of the book title, KJ was receiving emails both detailing peoples abuse at the hands of paedophiles, as well as abusive emails from paedophiles themselves. See here and here. KJ took loads of stuff (including pictures of herself and family) off the site as a result - and Penguin ignored the request. I can't find the original slashdot article, although I'm sure there must have been one.
- Now, four years later, Jones gets a nasty letter, and this slashdot story is posted. This is caused by KT doing some thing about teaching kids about online safety (whether for money or altruism I don't know) - and them calling it Katie.com. Source.
- It seems the lawyer, one Parry Aftab, has a website.
There's a good summary (almost as good as this one) here, and suprisingly, on CNN.
... is the 'w' in 'Dworkin' silent?
This is because if you have no power, your VOIP phone won't work - so you can't call 999 (911).
Apparently, BT Broadband Voice, is more of an effort to compete with cable companies (from here), although being something of a toe in the water as regards VOIP.
However, "the service, at this point, falls short of the feature-rich low- cost offerings by consumer services, such as Vonage" - so not quite before anyone else.
Interestingly however, their solution uses Metaswitch as their class 5 switch - as does Fujitsu's effort.
99.9% of the comments so far have been critical. I find this pathetic.
Would everyone please read and digest the article. This is NOT simply sorting by conversation topic, which a number of people are suggesting (Mozilla already does this, yadda, yadda yadda).
To the goon who suggested that outlook 2000 already does what the article is talking about - it doesn't! Sorting "by Conversation Topic" is basically just a threaded view, sorted by subject.
What the article is talking about is separating the conversations from the emails, and displaying them in a time ordered, colour-coded fashion. So, if an email thread splits into two separate conversations, this will be visible in the UI. Sorting by subject will not achieve this.
I'm not suggesting by the way, that this is a new idea; I'm simply explaining what the article is about to those of you (most of the posters) who can't be fucked to read the article.
I expect to be modded down for suggesting that people get a clue, and for suggesting that MS have had an idea which isn't bad.
The article says:
Seems clear enough to me: virus writers, denial of service attackers, but not spammers.A million monkeys were originally hired to conduct this study, but the combined might of animal rights activists and the high costs of bananas prevented it.
Contrary to popular belief, you have to pay bananas, not peanuts, to get monkeys.
Three new Canadian towns had their naming ceremonies today! The three new towns - Paris, Berlin and Moscow - have all night festivities planned with beer, beer and pig-tipping (like cow-tipping but easier on the back).
Mr. Orig Anal, a bar steward from Berlin, Manitoba, said: "We're mighty proud of our brand new town's name, we came up with all of it ourselves".
Seriously - why would you call a place London? I mean really. Not even a perfunctory 'New' on the front.
No, you can't.
I'd like to be able to apply the same principles to it as I can with word documents and macros - have a moderate security setting which lets me choose whether I can see them (the attachments) in this email or not, before it's opened by the client.
I don't think whether or not I like a particular feature in an application indicates how mature I am - so please, keep the 'grow up' comments for trolls.
There is a further annoyance. Try sending someone an .exe file (such as a self-extracting archive for example), and the recipient will find they cannot open it - it's been removed.
.exe.
.js and .bat.
There's no client side setting to change this security feature to 'off', so you end up having to ask the sender to rename the file to something other than
There's a whole host of other extensions it doesn't work with either, such as
I think, on reflection, this may also effect earlier versions of outlook which have been patched, but I'm not sure.
I thought slashdot was supposed to be full of people who knew what they were on about? More than half of this thread is rubbish! "Doomed, we're all Doomed!"
Saying that SIP is dead is like saying that, ooh, UDP will never take off.
It's been around for ages, and it's not just used for phones; it's a generic session establishing protocol.
Essentially, you want to set up some kind of media session between two endpoints; what you do is you send a SIP INVITE message through proxies etc. and attach another kind of protocol message (such as SDP) which describes the requirements for the session. The endpoint receives this, and establishes the session directly (without the proxies etc. in the loop). In very short.
It's just another protocol, like DAP.
SIP phones have been around for ages too - Pingtel's offering is probably the best one.
That said, I don't see SIP phones as taking off in the home, or for personal use; they're much more suited to being used in small enterprises etc.; much lower cost than a PBX. You'd have to have some kind of PSTN interface with the outside world - perhaps phone companies will start providing softswitch capabilities so that people can make their VoIP network speak to the outside world?
What you CAN do at the moment is have a mixed network - VoIP which talks via a router (Cisco 2600 for example) which then talks to the PBX which talks to the PSTN in the usual fashion.
A recent fosters advert on UK television had a robot in it. Check it out here. Note that it's about a third of the way down (find the word fosters) - I didn't want to link directly to the movie as he specifically requested people not to...
Certainly when the events of September 11th took place, for those of us at work in the UK without a television at hand the only way to keep up with events was via the web.
News sites failed to cope with the load - millions of people trying to access the same sites meant that no amount of bandwidth could cope with demand.
For this reason, I don't think that the web is going to replace television as a source of live news coverage anytime soon.
Everyone knows that the aliens have amazing scientific know-how, and are thus invisible to our primitive technology.
We don't have anything to worry about though; they'll just come to a planet that is two-thirds water (even though they have a severe allergy to it), and try and whup our butts in hand to hand inside of using their vaporizers.
Death by plant spray.
Least, that's what they said in Signs, anyway.
Offtopic I know, but: In Europe, there's generally an 'open border' thing going on - you just go between different countries with no customs.
EC members have the same taxes - and sales taxes all sort of go into one big fund which gets divvied up according to some set of rules - I think.
The thing is though, is that the UK doesn't subscribe to this. Mainly because there are a lot of things on mainland Europe which the UK doesn't want - Rabies being the main one. So there are very tight restrictions about what you can bring in, and how much of other stuff which you can bring in.
The UK government has a large tax on cigarettes for example - and so people go to Europe to buy things because of the lower rate of duty. There are restrictions in place which amount to "personal use" - you can go to France from the UK and buy cigarettes but if you buy so many that they think you are going to sell them instead of smoking them all yourself - in effect, smuggling - they get very upset.
The only difference really is the way the question is asked: "show me what you are importing" rather than "how much did you spend".