The international immunity thing only works in nations that are either uncapable or unwilling of defending themselves against Blackwater thugs. Like Iraq, which formally has its own government but is de facto still under US occupation.
In China, I guess their "immunity" would be exactly zero because the Chinese government would not want to share control of the country with anyone.
Windows XP ------------- 80.77 % Windows Vista --------- 15.08 % Windows Vista 64 bit - 2.68 % Windows 2003 64 bit - 0.70 % Windows 2000 ---------- 0.61 % Other -------------------- 0.15 %
So even in Windows Gamer Country, Vista has reached only 15% market share...
Have you checked the prices for external harddisk drives recently? Those have even lower prices per GB and USB 2.0 is already widespread.
About making the optical disk form factor obsolete: that would be a flash memory based disk or USB stick. Still a bit expensive at the moment - currently a 8GB USB Flash drive costs around $30 in the US. But if the prices come down further, the optical disks will really become extinct.
First, software that cannot handle pay changes (unless the state controller just makes this up, as some posters suggested)
Second, cutting pay for all employees. Even if it is legal to do, that's a good reason for those with more marketable skills to leave.
Third, that an update will cost $177 million (from TFA) and has been tried for a decade. I find it difficult to imagine the problem can be THAT complex.
Don't expect too much resistance on the part of some European governments. In particular the government of Great Britain, but also Germany, Spain and Poland are not known for putting up much resistance to US wishes. Just to name some that I noticed for being particularly subserviant in recent years.
What I expect to happen instead is that European businesses stop carrying sensitive data on their laptops when travelling to the USA. Those might then be loaded from an encrypted VPN as necessary.
It will be interesting to see what happens if they start suing. Because several not-so-small organizations rely on Open Source enough to put up a fight. For instance, IBM with Linux.
Some people claim that SCO vs. IBM was really Microsoft vs. IBM, with SCO as a sockpuppet. Now SCO is pretty much dead, and IBM will probably not get much money from its counterclaims. But if Microsoft vs. IBM really happens, I'm looking forward to IBM's lawyers digging out that prior art and attacking Microsoft's patents en masse;-)
You may be joking, but I think something similar to WINE might be Microsoft's best approach to fixing Windows: Redesign/clean up the OS without too much regard for backwards compatibility, then put a WINE-like compatibility layer on top.
No matter how many people continue to use Xerox as a verb, no matter for how long, it will not cease to be a trademark (assuming Xerox continue to renew it)
Depends on jurisdiction. AFAIK your statement is correct for Europe but not for the US, where "enough" colloquial use can invalidate a trademark.
Back on topic: Dell tries to hijack an already established term, while Xerox actually created a new class of product and the term was derived from that. So one can argue that Xerox deserve their trademark, while Dell is simply trying to monopolize established language and should fail.
But not every drive/OS seems to really use it. Some anecdotal evidence:
Back in the Windows 9x days, I helped a friend of mine to reinstall Windows (98 IIRC). After copying files to the HD and restarting, the newly installed system always crashed. There was no error message that indicated there was a problem with reading the data from the CD-ROM (a Liteon which was known to be a bit dodgy).
We finally tried another drive and it worked on the first try. I conclude that there were unreported errors reading from the CD-ROM drive we tried first and the files written to the HD were corrupted. So either the CD-ROM drive or the Windoze installer failed to detect and report the errors.
A conservative is someone who believes in continuing whatever is already shown to work.
A liberal is someone who believes that new problems, or problems that do not respond to conservative measures, should be solved in a new way.
In principle, you are right in saying those these terms are not mutually exclusive. But good luck getting both sides to agree on what is shown to work and what is not.
Typical conservatives will rarely agree that their conservative measures have failed. Tage drug prohibition in general as an example: The alcohol prohibition in the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States) was not very successful, overall it has probably worsened the situation. Today's attempts at suppressing drugs seem not very successful either. But conservative politicians still insist on a "War On Drugs".
On the other hand, you still have some liberals who would try building a socialist utopia with little regard for the lessons you can derive from history (hint: it does not work). This amounts to not recognizing that this problem is old and their proposed solution has failed before.
So even if the liberal/conservative positions are compatible in theory, in practice I don't see the dichotomy disappearing anytime soon.
At least from the perspective of an EU customer, copyright gets in the way of buying where it is cheapest. Because our equivalent of the first-sale doctrine (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_of_rights) does only count inside the EU. As a consequence, copyright holders can use copyright to block parallel imports from the USA.
The EU could change this by changing its legislation, but so far I see no sign of that happening.
Frequently companies have tried to charge different prices in different parts of the EU. In some cases, they have tried to keep dealers from selling across borders inside the EU. Which is illegal and leads to news like this: http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_43/b3652195.htm
Alright -- tell me how I can "simply" and feasibly make it impossible for a player to peek around a corner in a 3d MMO, or prevent him from seeing through a wall, or make enemies more visible by changing their textures to bright pink. I'd love to know how to do this without calculating the clip buffers for every client with every potential object in the same zone as him (which is of course O-n^2 complexity).
Against the wallhacks you'd need a server-side visibility calculation. I guess it could be somewhat simplified compared to the full calculation (occasional false positives would be tolerable - in those cases the wallhack would still work), but it would still be O-n^2. If this is doable is an interesting question: In the mid-90s, games like Doom and Duke Nukem pulled it off with much weaker hardware for single player, which means a complexity of O-n. So if modern hardware is n times faster, it could work. On the upside, you could save some bandwidth from not transmitting positions of hidden objects.
Against the changed textures I don't think there is a 100% hack-proof software solution. Game consoles with serious hardware based DRM might be able to prevent it, but nothing else. I guess that Open Source MMOs will end up with things like built-in target highlighting and auto-aiming, just to give the honest players the same advantages as the cheaters. Sad but inevitable.
Nice example, and some games have far more drastical limitations: In Day Of Defeat: Source (a HL2 mod) admins can set a "maximum ping" in the millisecond range. I often see messages like "Player X was auto-kicked for breaking the 150 ms latency limit".
In the case of game consoles, it is necessary due to the business model of selling the console cheap and cash in on the games (which is questionable in itself, but as long as it persists the consoles need to be closed).
In the case of smartphones, I don't quite understand it. Those you get for "free" are typically coupled with a 2-year-contract that will make sure you pay the phone through the monthly fee. I don't see how locking up the platform is necessary for those vendors.
APIs for stinking video cards, however, have a few exceptions. Most notably AMD/ATI who are releasing specs these days. Intel at least provide an Open Source driver for their integrated graphics. Between those two, you should find documented graphics hardware for most scenarios.
The best an MMO can do is to keep as much as reasonably possible on the server, on the assumption that the client will be hacked but the server is reasonably safe from the users. In particular -the item database and the transaction logic for acquiring and trading stuff -the hit and damage calculations. This may be difficult for FPS-type games that require a lot of CPU for ahalfway decent ballistics simulation.
It would still work for PvP-heavy games like EvE Online. Because the fixed quests/missions are less important. Much of the game dynamics comes from player interaction (to a large part in the form of players trying to take others' territory).
Not that I think CCP will open source EvE soon... they are still making a nice amount of money as it is.
Yet many Linux kernel hackers are sponsored by Linux companies. Taking a long-term view on development is not frivoulous, it merely means that you won't see the results within the next quarter. And overall Linux seems in pretty good shape, so it works.
Intriguing how Linux was already the best, and yet working on improvement when the competition hasn't even considered the problem yet.
Working on improvements "just" to see one's program run better seems to be typical for Open Source projects, while the commercial competition tends to invest the man-hours only when there is an immediate need. Mostly for new features, sometimes for performance (but the latter only if customers are complaining).
I've had it made clear by my boss at work that we don't rework our programs unless there is a project for it. Which happens only when our customer are complaining, see above. Something like the repeated rewrite of the Linux scheduler, while the previous version already yields reasonable performance, would be unthinkable in this environment.
Other countries probably have even better rates. AT&T needs competition. REAL competition.
So does Apple. The iPhone may be pretty good, but as long as people want an iPhone and nothing else, they will end up paying inflated prices for the hardware. Either upfront or hidden in the monthly fees (the latter is how most "free" phones are actually paid for).
Usually, problems with Windows only arise when: You download Malware and install it, or you are trying to do something most people won't do.
In my experience, frequent installing and uninstalling of software is enough to create problems, even if you don't have the bad luck of installing outright malware. Sooner or later, some sloppy setup program will destroy an important system setting or replace a DLL. Boom. Or if you are less unlucky, the system will "only" become gradually more unstable.
I even remember one case in which Microsoft itself was at fault: Installing Office 2000 disabled a RTF-based help system my colleagues had developed on NT4. It turned out that the Office 2000 setup replaced the RTF.dll, the new one did not fully support our program anymore.
On the other hand, I've seen Windows run very reliably if you stick to a small set of known good applications. Even Windows9x can do well in that scenario, and it is common for non-technical users.
Patents should give a significant contribution to the state of the art, in exchange for the temporary monopoly granted to the patent owner. I think you have a patent-worthy "implementation" when your description is
1)detailed enough that someone who knows the field in general can build the item without further instruction. For your example, that would be the average guy with a degree in CS.
2)not obvious in the sense that said average software engineer would come up with it within a few hours when asked for a solution to the problem. If it is likely that people would come up with the solution that fast, it is a routine engineering job, not a "significant contribution to the state of the art". In this case, I think the full description of Tetris in 6. (barely) qualifies as "not obvious".
Also (and unrelated to your and GP's post), I think it makes sense to limit patents to areas where the innovation actually benefits society as a whole. That is usually not a case if it is merely a method for better marketing - that does not improve the products the customer gets for his money. This brings us to 3) No patents on business methods. Games look questionable to me in that regard......not sure if the above should have received a patent.
Overall, the USPTO (and in some cases the courts) have neglected all three of the above items. Which has led the patent system to its current sorry state. On 2) the Supreme Court has introduced somewhat higher standards in 2007, see http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6180220.html. But I doubt if that is sufficient to turn the patent system back into a useful institution.
As hairyfeet wrote: "I hope Blizzard enjoyed it,because that is the last red cent they are getting from me." Seems he has made his choice for the future. Personally, I'm drifting in the same direction: Software makers that annoy me with stupid DRM, copy protection and EULAs are increasingly unlikely to sell something to me. The same goes for companies that are overly aggressive in asserting their copyright. Blizzard is among the latter category, not so much because of the current lawsuit (which I consider somewhat justified) but because of the BnetD ligitation. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_v._BnetD. In that case, I disagree with the courts and for starting that lawsuit Blizzard is on my boycott list.
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The international immunity thing only works in nations that are either uncapable or unwilling of defending themselves against Blackwater thugs. Like Iraq, which formally has its own government but is de facto still under US occupation.
In China, I guess their "immunity" would be exactly zero because the Chinese government would not want to share control of the country with anyone.
From the latest Valve survey (Windows only):
Windows XP ------------- 80.77 %
Windows Vista --------- 15.08 %
Windows Vista 64 bit - 2.68 %
Windows 2003 64 bit - 0.70 %
Windows 2000 ---------- 0.61 %
Other -------------------- 0.15 %
So even in Windows Gamer Country, Vista has reached only 15% market share...
Have you checked the prices for external harddisk drives recently? Those have even lower prices per GB and USB 2.0 is already widespread.
About making the optical disk form factor obsolete: that would be a flash memory based disk or USB stick. Still a bit expensive at the moment - currently a 8GB USB Flash drive costs around $30 in the US. But if the prices come down further, the optical disks will really become extinct.
First, software that cannot handle pay changes (unless the state controller just makes this up, as some posters suggested)
Second, cutting pay for all employees. Even if it is legal to do, that's a good reason for those with more marketable skills to leave.
Third, that an update will cost $177 million (from TFA) and has been tried for a decade. I find it difficult to imagine the problem can be THAT complex.
Don't expect too much resistance on the part of some European governments. In particular the government of Great Britain, but also Germany, Spain and Poland are not known for putting up much resistance to US wishes. Just to name some that I noticed for being particularly subserviant in recent years.
What I expect to happen instead is that European businesses stop carrying sensitive data on their laptops when travelling to the USA. Those might then be loaded from an encrypted VPN as necessary.
It will be interesting to see what happens if they start suing. Because several not-so-small organizations rely on Open Source enough to put up a fight. For instance, IBM with Linux.
Some people claim that SCO vs. IBM was really Microsoft vs. IBM, with SCO as a sockpuppet. Now SCO is pretty much dead, and IBM will probably not get much money from its counterclaims. ;-)
But if Microsoft vs. IBM really happens, I'm looking forward to IBM's lawyers digging out that prior art and attacking Microsoft's patents en masse
You may be joking, but I think something similar to WINE might be Microsoft's best approach to fixing Windows:
Redesign/clean up the OS without too much regard for backwards compatibility, then put a WINE-like compatibility layer on top.
Depends on jurisdiction. AFAIK your statement is correct for Europe but not for the US, where "enough" colloquial use can invalidate a trademark.
Back on topic:
Dell tries to hijack an already established term, while Xerox actually created a new class of product and the term was derived from that. So one can argue that Xerox deserve their trademark, while Dell is simply trying to monopolize established language and should fail.
But not every drive/OS seems to really use it. Some anecdotal evidence:
Back in the Windows 9x days, I helped a friend of mine to reinstall Windows (98 IIRC). After copying files to the HD and restarting, the newly installed system always crashed. There was no error message that indicated there was a problem with reading the data from the CD-ROM (a Liteon which was known to be a bit dodgy).
We finally tried another drive and it worked on the first try. I conclude that there were unreported errors reading from the CD-ROM drive we tried first and the files written to the HD were corrupted. So either the CD-ROM drive or the Windoze installer failed to detect and report the errors.
A conservative is someone who believes in continuing whatever is already shown to work.
A liberal is someone who believes that new problems, or problems that do not respond to conservative measures, should be solved in a new way.
In principle, you are right in saying those these terms are not mutually exclusive. But good luck getting both sides to agree on what is shown to work and what is not.
Typical conservatives will rarely agree that their conservative measures have failed. Tage drug prohibition in general as an example:
The alcohol prohibition in the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States) was not very successful, overall it has probably worsened the situation. Today's attempts at suppressing drugs seem not very successful either.
But conservative politicians still insist on a "War On Drugs".
On the other hand, you still have some liberals who would try building a socialist utopia with little regard for the lessons you can derive from history (hint: it does not work). This amounts to not recognizing that this problem is old and their proposed solution has failed before.
So even if the liberal/conservative positions are compatible in theory, in practice I don't see the dichotomy disappearing anytime soon.
At least from the perspective of an EU customer, copyright gets in the way of buying where it is cheapest. Because our equivalent of the first-sale doctrine (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_of_rights) does only count inside the EU. As a consequence, copyright holders can use copyright to block parallel imports from the USA.
The EU could change this by changing its legislation, but so far I see no sign of that happening.
Frequently companies have tried to charge different prices in different parts of the EU. In some cases, they have tried to keep dealers from selling across borders inside the EU. Which is illegal and leads to news like this:
http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_43/b3652195.htm
I just tried to doublecheck the results for "cuil pronunciation" (sic!) with "cuil pronounciation".
What I got was
Against the wallhacks you'd need a server-side visibility calculation. I guess it could be somewhat simplified compared to the full calculation (occasional false positives would be tolerable - in those cases the wallhack would still work), but it would still be O-n^2. If this is doable is an interesting question:
In the mid-90s, games like Doom and Duke Nukem pulled it off with much weaker hardware for single player, which means a complexity of O-n. So if modern hardware is n times faster, it could work.
On the upside, you could save some bandwidth from not transmitting positions of hidden objects.
Against the changed textures I don't think there is a 100% hack-proof software solution. Game consoles with serious hardware based DRM might be able to prevent it, but nothing else.
I guess that Open Source MMOs will end up with things like built-in target highlighting and auto-aiming, just to give the honest players the same advantages as the cheaters. Sad but inevitable.
Nice example, and some games have far more drastical limitations:
In Day Of Defeat: Source (a HL2 mod) admins can set a "maximum ping" in the millisecond range.
I often see messages like "Player X was auto-kicked for breaking the 150 ms latency limit".
True for game consoles and smartphones.
In the case of game consoles, it is necessary due to the business model of selling the console cheap and cash in on the games (which is questionable in itself, but as long as it persists the consoles need to be closed).
In the case of smartphones, I don't quite understand it. Those you get for "free" are typically coupled with a 2-year-contract that will make sure you pay the phone through the monthly fee. I don't see how locking up the platform is necessary for those vendors.
APIs for stinking video cards, however, have a few exceptions. Most notably AMD/ATI who are releasing specs these days. Intel at least provide an Open Source driver for their integrated graphics. Between those two, you should find documented graphics hardware for most scenarios.
The best an MMO can do is to keep as much as reasonably possible on the server, on the assumption that the client will be hacked but the server is reasonably safe from the users. In particular
-the item database and the transaction logic for acquiring and trading stuff
-the hit and damage calculations. This may be difficult for FPS-type games that require a lot of CPU for ahalfway decent ballistics simulation.
It would still work for PvP-heavy games like EvE Online. Because the fixed quests/missions are less important. Much of the game dynamics comes from player interaction (to a large part in the form of players trying to take others' territory).
Not that I think CCP will open source EvE soon... they are still making a nice amount of money as it is.
Yet many Linux kernel hackers are sponsored by Linux companies. Taking a long-term view on development is not frivoulous, it merely means that you won't see the results within the next quarter. And overall Linux seems in pretty good shape, so it works.
Working on improvements "just" to see one's program run better seems to be typical for Open Source projects, while the commercial competition tends to invest the man-hours only when there is an immediate need. Mostly for new features, sometimes for performance (but the latter only if customers are complaining).
I've had it made clear by my boss at work that we don't rework our programs unless there is a project for it. Which happens only when our customer are complaining, see above. Something like the repeated rewrite of the Linux scheduler, while the previous version already yields reasonable performance, would be unthinkable in this environment.
If GP was right about lots of the web design originally being exact copies, the lawsuit comes a bit late.
Because stolen HTML code is a clear copyrigt violation, while "look and feel" is a lot less clear-cut.
So does Apple. The iPhone may be pretty good, but as long as people want an iPhone and nothing else, they will end up paying inflated prices for the hardware. Either upfront or hidden in the monthly fees (the latter is how most "free" phones are actually paid for).
In my experience, frequent installing and uninstalling of software is enough to create problems, even if you don't have the bad luck of installing outright malware. Sooner or later, some sloppy setup program will destroy an important system setting or replace a DLL. Boom. Or if you are less unlucky, the system will "only" become gradually more unstable.
I even remember one case in which Microsoft itself was at fault: Installing Office 2000 disabled a RTF-based help system my colleagues had developed on NT4. It turned out that the Office 2000 setup replaced the RTF.dll, the new one did not fully support our program anymore.
On the other hand, I've seen Windows run very reliably if you stick to a small set of known good applications. Even Windows9x can do well in that scenario, and it is common for non-technical users.
Patents should give a significant contribution to the state of the art, in exchange for the temporary monopoly granted to the patent owner. I think you have a patent-worthy "implementation" when your description is
1)detailed enough that someone who knows the field in general can build the item without further instruction. For your example, that would be the average guy with a degree in CS.
2)not obvious in the sense that said average software engineer would come up with it within a few hours when asked for a solution to the problem. If it is likely that people would come up with the solution that fast, it is a routine engineering job, not a "significant contribution to the state of the art".
In this case, I think the full description of Tetris in 6. (barely) qualifies as "not obvious".
Also (and unrelated to your and GP's post), I think it makes sense to limit patents to areas where the innovation actually benefits society as a whole. That is usually not a case if it is merely a method for better marketing - that does not improve the products the customer gets for his money. This brings us to ...not sure if the above should have received a patent.
3) No patents on business methods. Games look questionable to me in that regard...
Overall, the USPTO (and in some cases the courts) have neglected all three of the above items. Which has led the patent system to its current sorry state. On 2) the Supreme Court has introduced somewhat higher standards in 2007, see http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6180220.html. But I doubt if that is sufficient to turn the patent system back into a useful institution.
As hairyfeet wrote: "I hope Blizzard enjoyed it,because that is the last red cent they are getting from me."
Seems he has made his choice for the future. Personally, I'm drifting in the same direction:
Software makers that annoy me with stupid DRM, copy protection and EULAs are increasingly unlikely to sell something to me. The same goes for companies that are overly aggressive in asserting their copyright.
Blizzard is among the latter category, not so much because of the current lawsuit (which I consider somewhat justified) but because of the BnetD ligitation. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_v._BnetD. In that case, I disagree with the courts and for starting that lawsuit Blizzard is on my boycott list.