Good to know. I can't remember where I head it, but I thought it was actually published somewhere. That certainly doesn't mean it is true though - likely someone just printed it because it sounded plausible.
Although the article does indicate that the automotive companies withhold these features in the US because they are afraid of these kind of lawsuits, whether this particular example is true or not. Maybe they believe in urban legends too, but it is more likely that they have come up with some real lawsuits to support their fears.
Considering that a motor home company got sued by someone who put his vehicle in cruise control, then went to the back to sleep (he won with the defense "the manual didn't tell him he couldn't"), I imagine you're right about this.
It seems the defense "I'm too stupid to live" is quite valid in court nowadays, so you can just see all sorts of lawsuits about how these great new features distracted Joe Blow from paying attention to the f#%!ing road while driving.
Although I think you're somewhat joking, there is more truth to this than you realize.
When AOL signed their deal with MS, they didn't really need the Netscape suite anymore, so they eventually spun off the Mozilla project into the non-profit Mozilla Foundation (and gave them some nice start up money to run with).
With the Mozilla project being further outside the realm of AOL than before, it was possible for Mozilla to shift their attention away from the Mozilla/Netscape suite of internet applications, and towards Firefox and Thunderbird.
Although the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox browser project had been gaining steam on its own, I'm not so sure it would've become the Mozilla project's centrepiece if it were not for the creation of the Mozilla Foundation.
So we should be thankful that AOL let the project go in its own direction, and gave them the means to do it. It freed Netscape/Mozilla from being just a pawn in negotiations between MS and AOL. In the end, both AOL and Mozilla win out, since AOL finally gets some return on its Netscape purchase, and Mozilla Firefox goes on to start a new browser war. The losers are MS and all of AOL's customers stuck on IE.
Do you really think win32 on the and RDP are the same protocol either?
Right now we're basically seeing X.org trying to get a good desktop X distribution, with nomachine providing a great remote desktop solution with it. They'll be integrated, much like MS integrates RDP into Windows.
The fact X11 could do remote display years before MS or Apple just shows how versatile X11 is. Now the OSS community is trying to solve the "does almost everything, but isn't great at any of it" problem that was XFree86. So far it seems to be going pretty well.
Well considering KDE has KMail, it isn't out of line to think Gnome's client could be GMail. Of course Google made sure everyone knew about their GMail with their 1GB offer. Getting large amounts of press can certainly help a brand.
I see the front page for real.com has changed since my last visit. The free player is basically the only thing on the page if you visit from a browser in Linux. In Windows, the free player is still prominant, but they also advertise Rhapsody underneath it, and have some other stuff below that. This is basically what I envisioned when I posted - good work Real.
But my question for robla, kforeman, or Rob Glaser would be this: What would it take for (someone at) Real to come out and say "we're sorry for..., and it won't happen again."
As robla has pointed out earlier, the Helix team can't exactly take responsibility for what other departments have done before and are doing now, so maybe Rob Glaser is the only one qualified to even address this. But I think that addressing it publicly on Slashdot would be a big help for Real. I know it'd be aweful hard for a CEO to publicly say his company has screwed up, especially with shareholders listening. But this is one crowd that would be very good for Real to have on their side.
Remember, there is no "typical slashdotter" that you can just ignore - there are acedemics, coders, and other influential people in IT here alongside the trolls their like. Some of these people could be very useful for an OSS project like Helix. Plus, it just might be useful to have the anti-MS fanatics on your side when you're busy trying to compete with them. It has worked well for Linus and the Linux distributions, that is for sure.
I suppose that is a good point, although Mozilla couldn't have used COM since it wasn't portable, whereas MS could theoretically use XUL, and extend it to include any platform specific stuff. But I supposed on this site they'd get in shit for doing that too.
Instead some MS developers advocate that Mozilla implements the Windows XUL platform specific code using XAML, which might not be all that bad an idea if they are similar enough. The problem is that XUL is already implemented just fine, and it is portable to versions of Windows that won't support XAML.
Very insightful. The exact same thing applies to almost any internet protocol or service. For example, it has been possible for years to do efficient multicast streaming of high quality media to end users, but since many ISPs are owned by companies that are starting to offer this service themselves, there is no way they'll provide an easy means for a 3rd party to do this across the internet.
In fact, for many reasons, a lot of ISPs don't support multicast at all. The only way to get around this right now is through application layer protocols (such as most P2P protocols), which generally aren't as efficient as ISP proviced or network layer services would be. Plus an ISP an always degrade the service levels of such traffic if they really wanted to.
It is a business problem more than a technical one. Many interesting things have been done at the network level on Internet2 and PlanetLab, but they can't easily be commercialized without support from the ISPs. That is why I'm curious to see where Intel is trying to go with their announcement that PlanetLab should become the next internet. How does Intel plan to turn a research project into a commercial one, and how do they intend to make money and get support from (or bypass) the ISPs? Or are they just looking at the technology and saying it'd be a good idea, without actually thinking through the business problems?
Every time a story about Real comes up, it is apparent from the comments that their past history is still getting in the way of them achieving their goals. While they are the only major media company supporting Linux, and they are doing a lot of good OSS and interoperability work, there are some that will always cringe when they hear the name "Real".
I think there are only two ways for them to address this:
1. A buyout and/or namechange. This would be something substantial to indicate the Old Real is gone for good. Something substantial like this might allow them a fresh start, although if bought out by the wrong company, they might lose a lot of the good aspects of the current company. A buyout by an OSS friendly company would be preferrable if this happened.
2. Real addresses the issue head-on, and very publicly. Draft policies that ban the tactics that people object to, and somehow assure everyone that they will be followed no matter what. Make sure RealPlayer 10.1/11 does not ask for registration, does not auto-start by default, and doesn't run any services. Maybe asking on first run or during the install whether services such as "StartCentre" and "Updater" should be run would be appropriate. That way, a default install of RealPlayer does nothing more than play Real files when the user comes across them. Nobody could complain about such simplicity, especially if there were guaranteed assurances from Real that the player would not have intrusive software installed with it in the future. I know the current player is very good and unintrusive, but unfortunately for Real, RealPlayer will be judged by a different standard than other products due to its past. Go further than what should normally be "far enough" in making the player simple.
Since the player is losing ground to Quicktime and MS Media Player, promoting such a free player should be a high priority. The player should be very prominant (if not the most prominent item) on the front page. Real can worry about advertising their for-pay products on pages to do with their music services, and other such popular areas of Real.com.
But getting the free player back on many machines, as well as getting Real to be a trusted brand again, should be priority #1 at Real. Real is doing some great things, and have huge opportunities to make gains in many areas of online media, if they can only get rid of that dirty feeling that techies get when they hear "Real".
While I agree with you, I'm not sure how else he can answer that question. If he doesn't say something to that effect, it is almost like he's willing to admit his company has no niche and no reason for existing. If he doesn't first disagree with the question's assumptions, his answer would look like a weak attempt to distract us by pointing out small areas where Real is doing well. Instead he tackled it head on, even if it wasn't the best move from a PR standpoint.
I'd guess lack of demand for the product. Most Windows users aren't too worried about having a pure OSS media player. Likely the RealPlayer 10 that can play a gazillion file formats would be much more popular on that platform.
A stripped down fully OSS player fares much better on Linux, although it does have some competition on that platform.
This is much more likely than it running OS X. And probably a lot more useful too.
Why is it you have to ask a really dumb question to get a submission posted to/. anyhow? I guess maybe they want to encourage discussion, but in this case, they've encouraged discussion that is off topic. IBM is releasing a POWER 5 Linux machine - lets talk about IBM, Power, and Linux, not Apple.
And if you go with PLF's freetype2, don't use Mandrake's default fonts. Mandrake picked their defaults so they'd look good without the "patented goodness", but once you turn that little algorithm on, their fonts look like crap.
It took me some time after I added the PLF source to figure out why all my fonts suddenly looked terrible.
I find the default Bitstream with the default freetype2 looks just fine. Good enough for demos, and probably less hassle.
As an aside, if you're going to use the PLF sources, don't use their freetype library along with Mandrake's default fonts. The Mandrake default fonts used with the PLF freetype look horrible.
Considering that XAML is basically XUL, and WVG is basically SVG, I think we can safely say this is MS's answer to Mozilla (not that SVG is very integrated into Mozilla yet either, but whaterer).
Too bad they always have to make their own versions of stuff that are 90% similar to the original, but the other 10% of stuff that ties directly into MS products. See J++ and C# for other examples.
So are you saying that you do have signals that you'd classify greater than 1000:1 odds that it is ET (hence the low priority of this)? Or are those the odds that there is even a signal at all, with the more likely event being noise, interference, or equipment problems?
I'm sure you just threw that number out there, but 1000:1 odds is actually not that bad if we're talking about finding ET.
Could be that Nimoy and Shatner didn't want to overshadow James on his big day. They apparently did visit with him earlier, which is more important than the photo op anyhow.
Does anyone else think this is exactly what Napster should've been turned into about 4-5 years ago? A service where users pay $5 a month to get whatever content is available (with the RIAA and MPAA behind it, this would be an enormous library). Too bad they couldn't at the time accept this possibility, because it doesn't milk as much money from people as their overpriced CDs did.
Of course this legal Napster would've been opt-in for individuals, not extortion fees from the universities.
Slashdot Mirror
Good to know. I can't remember where I head it, but I thought it was actually published somewhere. That certainly doesn't mean it is true though - likely someone just printed it because it sounded plausible.
Although the article does indicate that the automotive companies withhold these features in the US because they are afraid of these kind of lawsuits, whether this particular example is true or not. Maybe they believe in urban legends too, but it is more likely that they have come up with some real lawsuits to support their fears.
Considering that a motor home company got sued by someone who put his vehicle in cruise control, then went to the back to sleep (he won with the defense "the manual didn't tell him he couldn't"), I imagine you're right about this.
It seems the defense "I'm too stupid to live" is quite valid in court nowadays, so you can just see all sorts of lawsuits about how these great new features distracted Joe Blow from paying attention to the f#%!ing road while driving.
From the article:
"In many vehicles nowadays, you can check your e-mail, view Web sites, even watch television, from the comfort of your driver's seat."
How can't it be a bad thing if US drivers start watching porn on the TV/web while talking on the cell phone while driving and listening to loud music?
I would think that even if these options started to appear in the US, that insurance for vehicles equipped with them would be expensive.
Although I think you're somewhat joking, there is more truth to this than you realize.
When AOL signed their deal with MS, they didn't really need the Netscape suite anymore, so they eventually spun off the Mozilla project into the non-profit Mozilla Foundation (and gave them some nice start up money to run with).
With the Mozilla project being further outside the realm of AOL than before, it was possible for Mozilla to shift their attention away from the Mozilla/Netscape suite of internet applications, and towards Firefox and Thunderbird.
Although the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox browser project had been gaining steam on its own, I'm not so sure it would've become the Mozilla project's centrepiece if it were not for the creation of the Mozilla Foundation.
So we should be thankful that AOL let the project go in its own direction, and gave them the means to do it. It freed Netscape/Mozilla from being just a pawn in negotiations between MS and AOL. In the end, both AOL and Mozilla win out, since AOL finally gets some return on its Netscape purchase, and Mozilla Firefox goes on to start a new browser war. The losers are MS and all of AOL's customers stuck on IE.
Do you really think win32 on the and RDP are the same protocol either?
Right now we're basically seeing X.org trying to get a good desktop X distribution, with nomachine providing a great remote desktop solution with it. They'll be integrated, much like MS integrates RDP into Windows.
The fact X11 could do remote display years before MS or Apple just shows how versatile X11 is. Now the OSS community is trying to solve the "does almost everything, but isn't great at any of it" problem that was XFree86. So far it seems to be going pretty well.
Well considering KDE has KMail, it isn't out of line to think Gnome's client could be GMail. Of course Google made sure everyone knew about their GMail with their 1GB offer. Getting large amounts of press can certainly help a brand.
And with nomachine's NX, we'll probably see X11 doing just as well as RDP.
I see the front page for real.com has changed since my last visit. The free player is basically the only thing on the page if you visit from a browser in Linux. In Windows, the free player is still prominant, but they also advertise Rhapsody underneath it, and have some other stuff below that. This is basically what I envisioned when I posted - good work Real.
..., and it won't happen again."
But my question for robla, kforeman, or Rob Glaser would be this: What would it take for (someone at) Real to come out and say "we're sorry for
As robla has pointed out earlier, the Helix team can't exactly take responsibility for what other departments have done before and are doing now, so maybe Rob Glaser is the only one qualified to even address this. But I think that addressing it publicly on Slashdot would be a big help for Real. I know it'd be aweful hard for a CEO to publicly say his company has screwed up, especially with shareholders listening. But this is one crowd that would be very good for Real to have on their side.
Remember, there is no "typical slashdotter" that you can just ignore - there are acedemics, coders, and other influential people in IT here alongside the trolls their like. Some of these people could be very useful for an OSS project like Helix. Plus, it just might be useful to have the anti-MS fanatics on your side when you're busy trying to compete with them. It has worked well for Linus and the Linux distributions, that is for sure.
I suppose that is a good point, although Mozilla couldn't have used COM since it wasn't portable, whereas MS could theoretically use XUL, and extend it to include any platform specific stuff. But I supposed on this site they'd get in shit for doing that too.
Instead some MS developers advocate that Mozilla implements the Windows XUL platform specific code using XAML, which might not be all that bad an idea if they are similar enough. The problem is that XUL is already implemented just fine, and it is portable to versions of Windows that won't support XAML.
Since gaim can do multiple connections to MSN and AOL/ICQ at once, one would think they might be able to do the same with Jabber.
But I can't say for sure, as I haven't tried out gaim's Jabber support yet. It is on my todo list though.
Very insightful. The exact same thing applies to almost any internet protocol or service. For example, it has been possible for years to do efficient multicast streaming of high quality media to end users, but since many ISPs are owned by companies that are starting to offer this service themselves, there is no way they'll provide an easy means for a 3rd party to do this across the internet.
In fact, for many reasons, a lot of ISPs don't support multicast at all. The only way to get around this right now is through application layer protocols (such as most P2P protocols), which generally aren't as efficient as ISP proviced or network layer services would be. Plus an ISP an always degrade the service levels of such traffic if they really wanted to.
It is a business problem more than a technical one. Many interesting things have been done at the network level on Internet2 and PlanetLab, but they can't easily be commercialized without support from the ISPs. That is why I'm curious to see where Intel is trying to go with their announcement that PlanetLab should become the next internet. How does Intel plan to turn a research project into a commercial one, and how do they intend to make money and get support from (or bypass) the ISPs? Or are they just looking at the technology and saying it'd be a good idea, without actually thinking through the business problems?
Every time a story about Real comes up, it is apparent from the comments that their past history is still getting in the way of them achieving their goals. While they are the only major media company supporting Linux, and they are doing a lot of good OSS and interoperability work, there are some that will always cringe when they hear the name "Real".
I think there are only two ways for them to address this:
1. A buyout and/or namechange. This would be something substantial to indicate the Old Real is gone for good. Something substantial like this might allow them a fresh start, although if bought out by the wrong company, they might lose a lot of the good aspects of the current company. A buyout by an OSS friendly company would be preferrable if this happened.
2. Real addresses the issue head-on, and very publicly. Draft policies that ban the tactics that people object to, and somehow assure everyone that they will be followed no matter what. Make sure RealPlayer 10.1/11 does not ask for registration, does not auto-start by default, and doesn't run any services. Maybe asking on first run or during the install whether services such as "StartCentre" and "Updater" should be run would be appropriate. That way, a default install of RealPlayer does nothing more than play Real files when the user comes across them. Nobody could complain about such simplicity, especially if there were guaranteed assurances from Real that the player would not have intrusive software installed with it in the future. I know the current player is very good and unintrusive, but unfortunately for Real, RealPlayer will be judged by a different standard than other products due to its past. Go further than what should normally be "far enough" in making the player simple.
Since the player is losing ground to Quicktime and MS Media Player, promoting such a free player should be a high priority. The player should be very prominant (if not the most prominent item) on the front page. Real can worry about advertising their for-pay products on pages to do with their music services, and other such popular areas of Real.com.
But getting the free player back on many machines, as well as getting Real to be a trusted brand again, should be priority #1 at Real. Real is doing some great things, and have huge opportunities to make gains in many areas of online media, if they can only get rid of that dirty feeling that techies get when they hear "Real".
While I agree with you, I'm not sure how else he can answer that question. If he doesn't say something to that effect, it is almost like he's willing to admit his company has no niche and no reason for existing. If he doesn't first disagree with the question's assumptions, his answer would look like a weak attempt to distract us by pointing out small areas where Real is doing well. Instead he tackled it head on, even if it wasn't the best move from a PR standpoint.
I'd guess lack of demand for the product. Most Windows users aren't too worried about having a pure OSS media player. Likely the RealPlayer 10 that can play a gazillion file formats would be much more popular on that platform.
A stripped down fully OSS player fares much better on Linux, although it does have some competition on that platform.
This is much more likely than it running OS X. And probably a lot more useful too.
/. anyhow? I guess maybe they want to encourage discussion, but in this case, they've encouraged discussion that is off topic. IBM is releasing a POWER 5 Linux machine - lets talk about IBM, Power, and Linux, not Apple.
Why is it you have to ask a really dumb question to get a submission posted to
And if you go with PLF's freetype2, don't use Mandrake's default fonts. Mandrake picked their defaults so they'd look good without the "patented goodness", but once you turn that little algorithm on, their fonts look like crap.
It took me some time after I added the PLF source to figure out why all my fonts suddenly looked terrible.
I find the default Bitstream with the default freetype2 looks just fine. Good enough for demos, and probably less hassle.
As an aside, if you're going to use the PLF sources, don't use their freetype library along with Mandrake's default fonts. The Mandrake default fonts used with the PLF freetype look horrible.
Considering that XAML is basically XUL, and WVG is basically SVG, I think we can safely say this is MS's answer to Mozilla (not that SVG is very integrated into Mozilla yet either, but whaterer).
Too bad they always have to make their own versions of stuff that are 90% similar to the original, but the other 10% of stuff that ties directly into MS products. See J++ and C# for other examples.
If only they knew how to play well with others.
Yeah, but it seems to be the only way to get a story accepted. Or at the very least, it does seem to help you get picked above other similar ones.
Another option is to wait a month until they've rejected everyone else's submission. By then it is old news, and they'll run it right away.
Funny how this place works sometimes.
He must be a very slow typer, and not a very fast reader either. Not that it is nice to make fun such things.
I wonder if something like coLinux would allow this to happen, even while inside the Windows operating system?
Might not be too resource efficient though.
So are you saying that you do have signals that you'd classify greater than 1000:1 odds that it is ET (hence the low priority of this)? Or are those the odds that there is even a signal at all, with the more likely event being noise, interference, or equipment problems?
I'm sure you just threw that number out there, but 1000:1 odds is actually not that bad if we're talking about finding ET.
Could be that Nimoy and Shatner didn't want to overshadow James on his big day. They apparently did visit with him earlier, which is more important than the photo op anyhow.
Well you can, it just isn't a very good one.
Does anyone else think this is exactly what Napster should've been turned into about 4-5 years ago? A service where users pay $5 a month to get whatever content is available (with the RIAA and MPAA behind it, this would be an enormous library). Too bad they couldn't at the time accept this possibility, because it doesn't milk as much money from people as their overpriced CDs did.
Of course this legal Napster would've been opt-in for individuals, not extortion fees from the universities.