Move to less control by Oracle, but keep it selling under the Oracle/Sun umbrella. Oracle WANTS to destroy MS's monopoly, the same as most ppl in our industry. After that, we can have innovation again.
Microsoft has a monopoly on product X as much as Lotus 123 has on spreadsheets.
Their stock price has decreased to about 1/2 of the value 10 years ago. I can't think of a compelling product or service that they have to change that fact. In comparison, Apple's stock is over 10x the price it was 10 years ago.
A monopoly would suggest an opposite trend.
On a different topic, if you can see my.signature, its not a ploy on Microsoft, but rather I find the truth of the statement, err, interesting.
I pay about $1500 for a ruggedized setup like you're talking about -- except it's a pentium class processor with 128MB of RAM and 256MB of flash.
Sounds reasonable. I'm not sure if what the poster is asking is reasonable or necessary. The guy goes from a VM on a laptop, to wanting 100x+ of storage and 2x+ the CPU power with the ability to run on little power and no climate control and quasi portable? Like the tag says, goodluckwiththat.
The closest thing I could think of would be a laptop with external harddrives. Good cost point (COTS), built in UPS, quadcore capable, mobile, low power, disks I guess firewire bus powered??? If not, bus powered, then more power will be needed with UPS. The asker said that they are already using a laptop, so they must work in the environment.
I would think that any "server" class machine will use too much power and the fans would either destroy the thing or self destruct in a short period of time in a dusty environment. The fans would almost be useless if they are pulling in air that is not cooler than the exhaust.
you *do* know that an F5 Big-IP is more than an SSL accelerator? Like, a load balancer with lots of cool features.
Yes, that is true. What this also means is that after spending the big bucks for the front end like this, you will save money in the long run because you now have the ability to throw as many boxes behind the SSL switch/load balancer box up until all of its links are used. You don't have to buy new certificates or wildcard certificates for any of the backend devices and/or worry about name mismatches, or any of the common issues with SSL certs.
I didn't see it on their website, and couldn't really read the site either (marketing/manager speak or some other language I don't know), but many of these devices like the F5 Big-IP also have pretty much tamper proof storage of the private keys for the certificates. These things will zero out the device if tampered with and whatnot, which may or may not be of importance to you. Its likely to be more important to you if you are in a colo setup.
I guess you could duplicate the features of an f5 with nginx and more, but I guess it'd take a developer more than 50k worth of time to do it.
What is almost sad is that the box probably already runs ngix or some variant of Linux and/or SSLeay.
I vaguely remember back then with at least the first release of Windows 95 where if you used a floppy to read or save a file, then you were cursed by having the floppy drive accessed a couple of times every time you would go to open or save a file from either a particular application or however else the "Recently used" file information was shared. It was actually worse if you had a floppy in the drive, because it would then read the contents as well.
Also new in Win95 was that you could read/write to a floppy and barely multitask while waiting for the read/write to finish. Most all OSes sucked at the time in different ways regarding removable media.
I'll take my 2GB USB thumbdrive over a floppy any day. Actually, my 2GB thumdrive is almost 3x the size of my harddisk back then. My how things change.
This intervening is just part of a laundry list of documents regarding the case. If someone finds something specific about this phase of the trial, please chime in. Below is a copy and paste job of the original complaints. The guy is apparently up against fines up to $1 million dollars, so wouldn't it make sense to just settle and get back to school? That is what my parents would of said, and they would have paid (begrudgingly) up to $10k if there was anything near a 5% probability of me having to pay $1,000,000, the downtime from school, legal expenses, social problems, etc.
Unless this guy, a Professor of law at Harvard Law School, and his family are all actually delusional enough to believe he is not expected to have to pay such a $1,000,000 fine to share music with his teenage friends. You know, the same stuff that you and I did as kids because we had more time than money and we really liked the latest music or even some of that older music that we heard on the radio.
Why don't they just legalize music? Or at least decriminalize it.
-hackstraw
This case, like many others now before the Court, is one for copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. Â 106. The Plaintiffs are some of the nation's largest record companies. The Defendants in these consolidated cases are individual computer users -- mainly college students -- who, the Plaintiffs claim, used "peer-to- peer" file-sharing software to download and disseminate music without paying for it, infringing the Plaintiffs' copyrights. Many of the Defendants have defaulted or settled, largely without the benefit of counsel, subject to damages awards between $3,000 and $10,000.
Joel Tenenbaum ("Tenenbaum") is one of the few defendants represented by counsel, Professor Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He has chosen to challenge the action through a Motion to Amend Counterclaims (document # 686), his Opposition to the Plaintiffs' Motion to Dismiss Counterclaims (document # 676), and a Motion to Join the Recording Industry Association of America ("RIAA") (document # 693), all of which will be heard on January 22, 2009. Whether those counterclaims survive or not, he will proceed to a jury trial in this Court currently scheduled for March 30, 2009. While Tenenbaumâ(TM)s Motion to Permit Audio-Visual Coverage by CVN (document # 718) is directed to all proceedings going forward, this Order addresses only the proceeding on January 22, 2009, where legal arguments on the motions above will be heard. In many ways, this case is about the so-called Internet Generation -- the generation that has grown up with computer technology in general, and the internet in particular, as commonplace. It is reportedly a generation that does not read newspapers or watch the evening news, but gets its information largely, if not almost exclusively, over the internet. See generally Martha Irvine, Generation Raised Internet Comes of Age, MSNBC.com, Dec. 13, 2004, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6645963/. Consistent with the nature of these file-sharing cases, and the identity of so many of the Defendants, this case is one that has already garnered substantial attention on the internet.
The Sony Vio brand costs more than the Dell Inspiron brand .
Lets say I'm looking for a brand of computer for basic to advanced use at home, work, or college. This brand of computer must come with software that works with all of the included hardware. This brand might get more consideration if it comes with networking wired and/or wirelessly, internet capable, multi-user capable, being able to access network filesystems, audio/video/media playback and/or manipulation, multi-display capabilities, printing, and having an included development environment would be nice but optional. The ability to run Microsoft Office might be important someday. I would prefer higher-quality hardware over lower-quality that is more likely to break. Cheaper is always better than more expensive at the same level of quality.
Which brand of computer covers the basics and has a good number of the others?
IANAL, but to me I don't see where paying MS would violate the GPL at all.
The gist of the GPL is about distribution, modifications and source availability. I searched for Open Office the other day, and the first link was something like software-openoffice.com. Out of morbid curiosity, I clicked on it and they wanted me to pay like $30-60/year subscription to download OO. For all I know, this is a patented business method or software design or something. Now, OO is LGPL, not GPL, but I've heard here on/. that in Europe these kind of pay sites for GPL stuff are around and they are legal.
To me, the real crime is that 14+ year old technology has the potential to even under a patent.
We already have too many gTLDs. What is the difference between foo.com and foo.net? Most likely foo.com got there first, and then foo.net was the second comer.
Better yet, what is the difference between slashdot.org and slashdot.com? What about wikipedia.org and wikipedia.com?
Where I work, we are under a.org TLD. And another person I work with in IT types in wikipedia.com and never notices that the site is wikipedia.org. What about whitehouse.com vs whitehouse.gov? For those that didn't know,whitehouse.com was a porn site or something. What about usps.com or army.com? The government and military have their own TLDs, yet they opt out of using them for the more user friendly (sic).com.
The point is that 1 gTLD is too many. When the web was young, I guess TLDs made sense on paper, but since its gotten popular, practically 100% of the people ask for your email or something and they already append.com at the end of it.
I used to argue that TLDs made sense for countries. But.fm and.tv has sold their countries' domains away, and very few people use those domains. I think there are domains now that are so long that most people probably can't spell..museum comes to mind.
With junk like.mobi, which is designed for mobile devices, why can't a prefix on a domain work like it has for everything else before cellphones? we have ftp.example.com, www.example.com, mail.example,com (which has cool hooks in DNS and I wish there were more...), what about mobi.example.com? I mean, the introduction of.mobi implies that.com is broken, right?/rant
For a creator, who depends on the creation for income, there is a loss of potential income.
I was a creator of software for a company, and they decided it was in their best interest because the economy was down to let me go so the company would survive. That was a loss of real income which I depended on to eat and have a roof over my head.
I've been kicked out of living arrangements before and I've kicked people out of my house before. Both them and myself depended on someone else at the time for a place to live, which ended up costing the kickee real money each and every time.
In none of these scenarios was anybody sued and it was never considered as far as I know.
Life isn't fair. Shit happens. Nobody is entitled to anything. Hard work and patience and living within your means is a pretty good equation for success.
Yeah, if you use the word "theft" (or "stolen") to mean something completely different, then you can say the copyright infringement is theft. But using this method you can also claim that piracy is "robbery", "treason", "rape" and "murder". So how is "theft" different?
As I understand it there are 3 types of crimes:
1) Crimes against property -- things like murder, rape, trespass, theft, kidnapping, and the like.
2) Crimes against a contract -- things like perjury, violating a contract (eg, not paying your bills), anything where one party explicitly agrees to behave in a certain way, and then they don't behave that way.
3) Nuisance -- things that either a majority of the people consider illegal, or the minority of people consider illegal. These are things like minor traffic violations, being loud and obnoxious, public fornication, drunk in public, illegal drug possession, etc.
Now, which of these three does TPB fit. Not 1. Not 2. Possibly 3.
Now, at least in the US, number 3 is what is filling our prison system. Go search for crime on wikipedia or elsewhere. Look at the data for Incarceration in the US. In a nutshell, crimes in the 1 category have plummeted over the past decade. Things in the 2 category are probably constant. Things in the 3 category are filling up prisons. OK, heres a link for the US, and here are some plots regarding crime in the US.
These plots don't agree.
Now with the Disney "stealing" and getting infinite copyrights for public domain material, there seems to be a trend here. $$$||might == right.
Its nice that crimes of property have gone down. Its a shame that out prisons are full of people that are merely a nuisance. Has nuisance really become that much a burden on society? Are people really suffering because of said nuisances???
No that is just plain wrong, don't support their lie in any way. They absolutely don't want to trade liberty for security, they want to trade 'your' liberty for 'their' control over you.
I believe this is correct. The article mentions that there is anonymous crime out there on the internet. I don't care until it affects me, and I don't think anyone else does either.
By default, telephones are non-anonymous spam magnets. The nanny government went out of their way to make the do-not-call list which asks for your SSN. I pay an extra dollar a month on my phone to have it unlisted. I mean, its 2009, for about the past decade phone books have been useless for trying to lookup an individual. And I'm gaining anonymity and security at the cost of $12/year.
Also, this is on which site? NYTimes? These assholes' website was so obnoxious that bugmenot and other sites had to be created so that we could look at the site anonymously. In 2005, I created an anonymous account via spamgourmet, and they sent me 409 emails. I think they stopped after 1 year or so, but 409 emails just because I wanted to read something on your site? All I can say is thanks spamgourmet.
While we are on spam. People are unwilling to give up the anonymity of email and things like mailing lists even with spam. I fixed my spam problem with spamgourmet.
I fixed my virus problem by using Linux and OS X (this might not be a permanent fix, but so far so good). I fixed my telemarketer problem an unlisted phone number. I fixed my network security problem with a router/firewall. Now, the last one is pretty hard for most people to do, but everything else I do can be done by anyone that can use a computer.
why is there this preconception that linking to content that you know full well is illegal, is acceptable?
i'm yet to see a good defense for this. your an accessory to a crime if you knowingly aid it.
The law is not absolute in terms of geography nor in terms of time nor is the law universally accepted as correct.
Yesterday on slashdot, I saw links to antennae for HDTV. Tomorrow, that could be illegal in some places to show such content. There are tons of sites, books, etc out there that show you how to do illegal things, but none of that is illegal until someone either conspires to perform such an act or does such an act with that information.
Actually, I read where the average 11 year old has seen like 20,000 murders by that age. Last I checked murder was illegal for most of us, but so long as they don't see 20,000 boobies, then murder on TV is OK.
I don't welcome separate but equal, slavery, women's suffrage or any of that. And people broke the laws to change the laws. This is a good thing.
I'm all for the Open Source stuff and all, but every economist that I've read says that ironically, that massive layoffs are the beginning of the end of an economic downturn, and that it appears as though things will be back into shape around the end of 2009 or the beginning of 2010, and none of their arguments are contingent upon a stimulus package. In fact, none mention it.
I think that the spending on the infrastructure and unemployment benefits and the like are sufficient. Both will help in the short term and long term, but tax cuts are BS. Ever since I've been alive every politician has cut taxes, yet they always seem to go up. I'm not complaining. Our taxes are low in the US. I'm stating the facts. The only people that seem to benefit from tax breaks are those that are unaffected by their tax burden or any financial burden whatsoever.
Yes, I voted for Obama, and I don't regret it, but I think the effectiveness of this bill does not warrant the cost.
If it's a truly graphical thing they're after, the Amiga is an example of prior art IIRC.
From reading the patents, it seems to be a graphical thing (which I can't define) and a virtual workspace thing which seems pretty clearly defined.
Wikipedia has an article on Virtual Desktops here. It specifically mentions the patents in this article, as well as
One thing that the virtual desktop article does not mention is switching between users which also appears to violate the patents. UNIX, OS X and Windows have been able to do this for quite sometime. Window managers with explicit virtual desktops/workspaces include GNU screen, FVWM, OLVWM, TVWM, Gnome, KDE, and many many others.
I would also guess that all of the fancy modern websites violate the patent as well. It common to have web sites with windows with things like rss feeds, weather, news and whatnot that are organized and can be rearranged rearranged.
A google search for virtual desktops shows ads from Citrix, Dell, and Dynamix Group trying to sell virtual desktops.
So there appears to be just about any computer system in at least the past 15 years that are violating this patent in some way. When do these things expire anyway?
Personally, I don't believe in filing a patent, doing nothing with it, and then retrosuing over said patent. I give the Xerox PARC people props. They came up with the WIMP interface that we still use today. Shared printers, windows, concurrent applications, and all of that was foreseen by these people, but WTF did they do with these ideas? I have never run Xerox computers or software. Xerox is still around, and they are not doing these lawsuits. Are these people going to sue every software company, or are they going to stop at RedHat and Novell?
Actually, where I work we paid 3x for Windows to run Linux on a machine. 1 for Vista, 2 to change that option to XP, and 3 we have a site license for XP.
Granted some of this was due to stupidity of people here, but the shear fact that we even had to pay beyond our site license for Windows to run Linux makes the phase "Microsoft tax" more than just a saying.
In the case of NFS for instance, hasn't there been a performance improvement? Isn't that the thing that matters?
Right. Actually, I would think that in general more calls between the kernel and a filesystem or any other subsystem is better than fewer. Better granularity for using SMP, multi-core, and/or hyperthreaded systems. Less time in locks. Etc.
Sometimes its ironic how more code is faster than less.
The moral of the story is that in 2009 and beyond its probably best to have hardware continue to be accurate.
Um, no. If we had to choose one or the other, you're right, that's the best choice. But only if first you make the extremely poor choice of insisting it has to be one way or the other rather than the actual best choice, which is, it's best to have hardware be offered in a variety of configurations. The best choice is to offer a choice.
Would you like Starter Accuracy (tm), Basic Home Accuracy (tm), Home Premium Accuracy (tm), Business Accuracy (tm), Or Ultimate Accuracy (tm). 31.983438350 bit or 63.677689235 bit versions of the aforementioned products?
Sorry for the sarcasm, but I couldn't resist. I simply can't think of a market for this kind of processor. When I wrote about the Cray computer, odds are you have one of those in your pocket right now. Yes, cellphones are more powerful than the first couple of Cray supercomputers, and more accurate to boot.
The markets I think of are laptops, servers, space, and supercomputing, where power is important, but none of them can sacrifice accuracy. I don't see this being much of a market for things like smaller portable devices like phones, PDAs or MP3 players because these devices already get up to 3-5 days of battery life, and if they get any smaller you will have to tattoo them on your skin, and then you have an infinite supply of power from body heat. Also, people don't go into the jungle where there isn't power that often. I'm within 5-10 feet of a power source pretty much 24hours every day.
How would you develop code for such a device? You certainly couldn't test for correctness. Today, IEEE floating point is not 100% accuracy, but its consistent across machines, which is a good thing. Computing was a mess before the IEEE spec came about. If someone can think of the killer app for one of these, feel free to reply.
No one is saying that building schools won't employ people. What is being said is, "what happens to those jobs when the schools built?" These are not permanent jobs.
I see your point, and some politicians say the same thing, but the thing is that construction is a cyclic industry. Layoffs of the labor force are common in this industry.
Right now, there are more constructed homes than there are people that can fill them. I don't believe the federal government should be building schools (not their job, its the states' job), but for things like interstate rebuilding that needs to be done anyway, I'm all for that. In 2005 the Association of Civil Engineers gave our infrastructure a D. Today, its a D-. Bridges are collapsing. In some states the highways and bridges are simply falling apart.
So, if there is something that needs to be done, and has needed to be done, and we were too busy "liberating" Iraq to pay attention to these things, why don't we liberate our own country for a while?
Seymour Cray is known for saying "Do you want fast or accurate?" because back then there was no IEEE 754 spec (which is not infinitely precise) for floating point numbers at the time and machines were pretty primitive then and his machine did Newtonian approximations of many numeric calculations that were accurate to a point, just like John Carmack did (in software) with Doom's inverse square root.
The moral of the story is that in 2009 and beyond its probably best to have hardware continue to be accurate. This is why we have digital 1s and 0s instead of some other base of computation.
Now, in software, feel free to make things as sloppy as you want. If your bank (not mine) wants to round 13,000.83 to some other value, then by all means go for it. But I think that most of us are OK with accurate hardware.
But seriously, what difference does it make if apple patents this or not? I mean, no other GUI comes close to Apple's.
An example of this, was that I was not going to finish this post because this stuff is dumb, and people would come back saying that Apples UI is not that great, so I closed the tab. Safari asked if I wanted to close the tab because I was in the middle of filling in this form, with the default being Close (not OK, Cancel, or whatever).
I love multi-touch. I used to like having a mouse on a laptop, but now that multi-touch is here, its simply better than a mouse. Much more intuitive and less of an issue with RSI with a scroll-wheel.
I hate to sound too much like an Apple geek, but their software is so nice, that I'm always finding new things in it. Its almost like being with a person that you like. You are always learning something new about them. And I guess the inverse is true, that when you get bored with them, you find someone else.
I'm done hugging my MacBook:)
Back to multi-touch, I think that it should be allowed to be used by anyone. Its simply nice.
Slashdot Mirror
Move to less control by Oracle, but keep it selling under the Oracle/Sun umbrella. Oracle WANTS to destroy MS's monopoly, the same as most ppl in our industry. After that, we can have innovation again.
Microsoft has a monopoly on product X as much as Lotus 123 has on spreadsheets.
Their stock price has decreased to about 1/2 of the value 10 years ago. I can't think of a compelling product or service that they have to change that fact. In comparison, Apple's stock is over 10x the price it was 10 years ago.
A monopoly would suggest an opposite trend.
On a different topic, if you can see my .signature, its not a ploy on Microsoft, but rather I find the truth of the statement, err, interesting.
I pay about $1500 for a ruggedized setup like you're talking about -- except it's a pentium class processor with 128MB of RAM and 256MB of flash.
Sounds reasonable. I'm not sure if what the poster is asking is reasonable or necessary. The guy goes from a VM on a laptop, to wanting 100x+ of storage and 2x+ the CPU power with the ability to run on little power and no climate control and quasi portable? Like the tag says, goodluckwiththat.
The closest thing I could think of would be a laptop with external harddrives. Good cost point (COTS), built in UPS, quadcore capable, mobile, low power, disks I guess firewire bus powered??? If not, bus powered, then more power will be needed with UPS. The asker said that they are already using a laptop, so they must work in the environment.
I would think that any "server" class machine will use too much power and the fans would either destroy the thing or self destruct in a short period of time in a dusty environment. The fans would almost be useless if they are pulling in air that is not cooler than the exhaust.
you *do* know that an F5 Big-IP is more than an SSL accelerator? Like, a load balancer with lots of cool features.
Yes, that is true. What this also means is that after spending the big bucks for the front end like this, you will save money in the long run because you now have the ability to throw as many boxes behind the SSL switch/load balancer box up until all of its links are used. You don't have to buy new certificates or wildcard certificates for any of the backend devices and/or worry about name mismatches, or any of the common issues with SSL certs.
I didn't see it on their website, and couldn't really read the site either (marketing/manager speak or some other language I don't know), but many of these devices like the F5 Big-IP also have pretty much tamper proof storage of the private keys for the certificates. These things will zero out the device if tampered with and whatnot, which may or may not be of importance to you. Its likely to be more important to you if you are in a colo setup.
I guess you could duplicate the features of an f5 with nginx and more, but I guess it'd take a developer more than 50k worth of time to do it.
What is almost sad is that the box probably already runs ngix or some variant of Linux and/or SSLeay.
I vaguely remember back then with at least the first release of Windows 95 where if you used a floppy to read or save a file, then you were cursed by having the floppy drive accessed a couple of times every time you would go to open or save a file from either a particular application or however else the "Recently used" file information was shared. It was actually worse if you had a floppy in the drive, because it would then read the contents as well.
Also new in Win95 was that you could read/write to a floppy and barely multitask while waiting for the read/write to finish. Most all OSes sucked at the time in different ways regarding removable media.
I'll take my 2GB USB thumbdrive over a floppy any day. Actually, my 2GB thumdrive is almost 3x the size of my harddisk back then. My how things change.
This intervening is just part of a laundry list of documents regarding the case. If someone finds something specific about this phase of the trial, please chime in. Below is a copy and paste job of the original complaints. The guy is apparently up against fines up to $1 million dollars, so wouldn't it make sense to just settle and get back to school? That is what my parents would of said, and they would have paid (begrudgingly) up to $10k if there was anything near a 5% probability of me having to pay $1,000,000, the downtime from school, legal expenses, social problems, etc.
Unless this guy, a Professor of law at Harvard Law School, and his family are all actually delusional enough to believe he is not expected to have to pay such a $1,000,000 fine to share music with his teenage friends. You know, the same stuff that you and I did as kids because we had more time than money and we really liked the latest music or even some of that older music that we heard on the radio.
Why don't they just legalize music? Or at least decriminalize it.
-hackstraw
This case, like many others now before the Court, is one for
copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. Â 106. The Plaintiffs are
some of the nation's largest record companies. The Defendants in
these consolidated cases are individual computer users -- mainly
college students -- who, the Plaintiffs claim, used "peer-to-
peer" file-sharing software to download and disseminate music
without paying for it, infringing the Plaintiffs' copyrights.
Many of the Defendants have defaulted or settled, largely without
the benefit of counsel, subject to damages awards between $3,000
and $10,000.
Joel Tenenbaum ("Tenenbaum") is one of the few defendants
represented by counsel, Professor Charles Nesson of Harvard Law
School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He has
chosen to challenge the action through a Motion to Amend
Counterclaims (document # 686), his Opposition to the Plaintiffs'
Motion to Dismiss Counterclaims (document # 676), and a Motion to
Join the Recording Industry Association of America ("RIAA")
(document # 693), all of which will be heard on January 22, 2009.
Whether those counterclaims survive or not, he will proceed to a
jury trial in this Court currently scheduled for March 30, 2009.
While Tenenbaumâ(TM)s Motion to Permit Audio-Visual Coverage by CVN
(document # 718) is directed to all proceedings going forward,
this Order addresses only the proceeding on January 22, 2009,
where legal arguments on the motions above will be heard.
In many ways, this case is about the so-called Internet
Generation -- the generation that has grown up with computer
technology in general, and the internet in particular, as
commonplace. It is reportedly a generation that does not read
newspapers or watch the evening news, but gets its information
largely, if not almost exclusively, over the internet. See
generally Martha Irvine, Generation Raised Internet Comes of Age,
MSNBC.com, Dec. 13, 2004, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6645963/.
Consistent with the nature of these file-sharing cases, and the
identity of so many of the Defendants, this case is one that has
already garnered substantial attention on the internet.
Apple really make you pay for their branding.
The Sony Vio brand costs more than the Dell Inspiron brand .
Lets say I'm looking for a brand of computer for basic to advanced use at home, work, or college. This brand of computer must come with software that works with all of the included hardware. This brand might get more consideration if it comes with networking wired and/or wirelessly, internet capable, multi-user capable, being able to access network filesystems, audio/video/media playback and/or manipulation, multi-display capabilities, printing, and having an included development environment would be nice but optional. The ability to run Microsoft Office might be important someday. I would prefer higher-quality hardware over lower-quality that is more likely to break. Cheaper is always better than more expensive at the same level of quality.
Which brand of computer covers the basics and has a good number of the others?
IIRC it isn't about FAT, but about using LONG~1.FAT.
Fixed.
Keep reading below and someone actually knows what they are talking about :)
IANAL, but to me I don't see where paying MS would violate the GPL at all.
The gist of the GPL is about distribution, modifications and source availability. I searched for Open Office the other day, and the first link was something like software-openoffice.com. Out of morbid curiosity, I clicked on it and they wanted me to pay like $30-60/year subscription to download OO. For all I know, this is a patented business method or software design or something. Now, OO is LGPL, not GPL, but I've heard here on /. that in Europe these kind of pay sites for GPL stuff are around and they are legal.
To me, the real crime is that 14+ year old technology has the potential to even under a patent.
and that you have set the people in Japan and Wired straight.
Keep up the good work Steve, and take care of yourself.
-hackstraw
At what point does this end though? You can't own a fact.
You can sue over them though, as the Big sports associations have:
This one covers "Hot scores".
Back in 1996 this was apparently a controversial thing. Info here about owning facts here and on the same site here.
And there are still attempts to sue fantasy sports like this one, but I've never heard of this kind of suit being won by the plaintiffs.
Stranger things have been upheld in court.
We already have too many gTLDs. What is the difference between foo.com and foo.net? Most likely foo.com got there first, and then foo.net was the second comer.
Better yet, what is the difference between slashdot.org and slashdot.com? What about wikipedia.org and wikipedia.com?
Where I work, we are under a .org TLD. And another person I work with in IT types in wikipedia.com and never notices that the site is wikipedia.org. What about whitehouse.com vs whitehouse.gov? For those that didn't know,whitehouse.com was a porn site or something. What about usps.com or army.com? The government and military have their own TLDs, yet they opt out of using them for the more user friendly (sic) .com.
The point is that 1 gTLD is too many. When the web was young, I guess TLDs made sense on paper, but since its gotten popular, practically 100% of the people ask for your email or something and they already append .com at the end of it.
I used to argue that TLDs made sense for countries. But .fm and .tv has sold their countries' domains away, and very few people use those domains. I think there are domains now that are so long that most people probably can't spell. .museum comes to mind.
With junk like .mobi, which is designed for mobile devices, why can't a prefix on a domain work like it has for everything else before cellphones? we have ftp.example.com, www.example.com, mail.example,com (which has cool hooks in DNS and I wish there were more...), what about mobi.example.com? I mean, the introduction of .mobi implies that .com is broken, right? /rant
For a creator, who depends on the creation for income, there is a loss of potential income.
I was a creator of software for a company, and they decided it was in their best interest because the economy was down to let me go so the company would survive. That was a loss of real income which I depended on to eat and have a roof over my head.
I've been kicked out of living arrangements before and I've kicked people out of my house before. Both them and myself depended on someone else at the time for a place to live, which ended up costing the kickee real money each and every time.
In none of these scenarios was anybody sued and it was never considered as far as I know.
Life isn't fair. Shit happens. Nobody is entitled to anything. Hard work and patience and living within your means is a pretty good equation for success.
Yeah, if you use the word "theft" (or "stolen") to mean something completely different, then you can say the copyright infringement is theft. But using this method you can also claim that piracy is "robbery", "treason", "rape" and "murder". So how is "theft" different?
As I understand it there are 3 types of crimes:
1) Crimes against property -- things like murder, rape, trespass, theft, kidnapping, and the like.
2) Crimes against a contract -- things like perjury, violating a contract (eg, not paying your bills), anything where one party explicitly agrees to behave in a certain way, and then they don't behave that way.
3) Nuisance -- things that either a majority of the people consider illegal, or the minority of people consider illegal. These are things like minor traffic violations, being loud and obnoxious, public fornication, drunk in public, illegal drug possession, etc.
Now, which of these three does TPB fit. Not 1. Not 2. Possibly 3.
Now, at least in the US, number 3 is what is filling our prison system. Go search for crime on wikipedia or elsewhere. Look at the data for Incarceration in the US. In a nutshell, crimes in the 1 category have plummeted over the past decade. Things in the 2 category are probably constant. Things in the 3 category are filling up prisons. OK, heres a link for the US, and here are some plots regarding crime in the US.
These plots don't agree.
Now with the Disney "stealing" and getting infinite copyrights for public domain material, there seems to be a trend here. $$$||might == right.
Its nice that crimes of property have gone down. Its a shame that out prisons are full of people that are merely a nuisance. Has nuisance really become that much a burden on society? Are people really suffering because of said nuisances???
No that is just plain wrong, don't support their lie in any way. They absolutely don't want to trade liberty for security, they want to trade 'your' liberty for 'their' control over you.
I believe this is correct. The article mentions that there is anonymous crime out there on the internet. I don't care until it affects me, and I don't think anyone else does either.
By default, telephones are non-anonymous spam magnets. The nanny government went out of their way to make the do-not-call list which asks for your SSN. I pay an extra dollar a month on my phone to have it unlisted. I mean, its 2009, for about the past decade phone books have been useless for trying to lookup an individual. And I'm gaining anonymity and security at the cost of $12/year.
Also, this is on which site? NYTimes? These assholes' website was so obnoxious that bugmenot and other sites had to be created so that we could look at the site anonymously. In 2005, I created an anonymous account via spamgourmet, and they sent me 409 emails. I think they stopped after 1 year or so, but 409 emails just because I wanted to read something on your site? All I can say is thanks spamgourmet.
While we are on spam. People are unwilling to give up the anonymity of email and things like mailing lists even with spam. I fixed my spam problem with spamgourmet.
I fixed my virus problem by using Linux and OS X (this might not be a permanent fix, but so far so good). I fixed my telemarketer problem an unlisted phone number. I fixed my network security problem with a router/firewall. Now, the last one is pretty hard for most people to do, but everything else I do can be done by anyone that can use a computer.
couldn't agree more, but the average slashdotter performs amazing mental and moral backflips if it lets him leech free music and movies.
Don't all girls do the same thing?
why is there this preconception that linking to content that you know full well is illegal, is acceptable?
i'm yet to see a good defense for this. your an accessory to a crime if you knowingly aid it.
The law is not absolute in terms of geography nor in terms of time nor is the law universally accepted as correct.
Yesterday on slashdot, I saw links to antennae for HDTV. Tomorrow, that could be illegal in some places to show such content. There are tons of sites, books, etc out there that show you how to do illegal things, but none of that is illegal until someone either conspires to perform such an act or does such an act with that information.
Actually, I read where the average 11 year old has seen like 20,000 murders by that age. Last I checked murder was illegal for most of us, but so long as they don't see 20,000 boobies, then murder on TV is OK.
I don't welcome separate but equal, slavery, women's suffrage or any of that. And people broke the laws to change the laws. This is a good thing.
I'm all for the Open Source stuff and all, but every economist that I've read says that ironically, that massive layoffs are the beginning of the end of an economic downturn, and that it appears as though things will be back into shape around the end of 2009 or the beginning of 2010, and none of their arguments are contingent upon a stimulus package. In fact, none mention it.
I think that the spending on the infrastructure and unemployment benefits and the like are sufficient. Both will help in the short term and long term, but tax cuts are BS. Ever since I've been alive every politician has cut taxes, yet they always seem to go up. I'm not complaining. Our taxes are low in the US. I'm stating the facts. The only people that seem to benefit from tax breaks are those that are unaffected by their tax burden or any financial burden whatsoever.
Yes, I voted for Obama, and I don't regret it, but I think the effectiveness of this bill does not warrant the cost.
If it's a truly graphical thing they're after, the Amiga is an example of prior art IIRC.
From reading the patents, it seems to be a graphical thing (which I can't define) and a virtual workspace thing which seems pretty clearly defined.
Wikipedia has an article on Virtual Desktops here. It specifically mentions the patents in this article, as well as
One thing that the virtual desktop article does not mention is switching between users which also appears to violate the patents. UNIX, OS X and Windows have been able to do this for quite sometime. Window managers with explicit virtual desktops/workspaces include GNU screen, FVWM, OLVWM, TVWM, Gnome, KDE, and many many others.
I would also guess that all of the fancy modern websites violate the patent as well. It common to have web sites with windows with things like rss feeds, weather, news and whatnot that are organized and can be rearranged rearranged.
A google search for virtual desktops shows ads from Citrix, Dell, and Dynamix Group trying to sell virtual desktops.
So there appears to be just about any computer system in at least the past 15 years that are violating this patent in some way. When do these things expire anyway?
Personally, I don't believe in filing a patent, doing nothing with it, and then retrosuing over said patent. I give the Xerox PARC people props. They came up with the WIMP interface that we still use today. Shared printers, windows, concurrent applications, and all of that was foreseen by these people, but WTF did they do with these ideas? I have never run Xerox computers or software. Xerox is still around, and they are not doing these lawsuits. Are these people going to sue every software company, or are they going to stop at RedHat and Novell?
Actually, where I work we paid 3x for Windows to run Linux on a machine. 1 for Vista, 2 to change that option to XP, and 3 we have a site license for XP.
Granted some of this was due to stupidity of people here, but the shear fact that we even had to pay beyond our site license for Windows to run Linux makes the phase "Microsoft tax" more than just a saying.
In the case of NFS for instance, hasn't there been a performance improvement? Isn't that the thing that matters?
Right. Actually, I would think that in general more calls between the kernel and a filesystem or any other subsystem is better than fewer. Better granularity for using SMP, multi-core, and/or hyperthreaded systems. Less time in locks. Etc.
Sometimes its ironic how more code is faster than less.
The moral of the story is that in 2009 and beyond its probably best to have hardware continue to be accurate.
Um, no. If we had to choose one or the other, you're right, that's the best choice. But only if first you make the extremely poor choice of insisting it has to be one way or the other rather than the actual best choice, which is, it's best to have hardware be offered in a variety of configurations. The best choice is to offer a choice.
Would you like Starter Accuracy (tm), Basic Home Accuracy (tm), Home Premium Accuracy (tm), Business Accuracy (tm), Or Ultimate Accuracy (tm). 31.983438350 bit or 63.677689235 bit versions of the aforementioned products?
Sorry for the sarcasm, but I couldn't resist. I simply can't think of a market for this kind of processor. When I wrote about the Cray computer, odds are you have one of those in your pocket right now. Yes, cellphones are more powerful than the first couple of Cray supercomputers, and more accurate to boot.
The markets I think of are laptops, servers, space, and supercomputing, where power is important, but none of them can sacrifice accuracy. I don't see this being much of a market for things like smaller portable devices like phones, PDAs or MP3 players because these devices already get up to 3-5 days of battery life, and if they get any smaller you will have to tattoo them on your skin, and then you have an infinite supply of power from body heat. Also, people don't go into the jungle where there isn't power that often. I'm within 5-10 feet of a power source pretty much 24hours every day.
How would you develop code for such a device? You certainly couldn't test for correctness. Today, IEEE floating point is not 100% accuracy, but its consistent across machines, which is a good thing. Computing was a mess before the IEEE spec came about. If someone can think of the killer app for one of these, feel free to reply.
No one is saying that building schools won't employ people. What is being said is, "what happens to those jobs when the schools built?" These are not permanent jobs.
I see your point, and some politicians say the same thing, but the thing is that construction is a cyclic industry. Layoffs of the labor force are common in this industry.
Right now, there are more constructed homes than there are people that can fill them. I don't believe the federal government should be building schools (not their job, its the states' job), but for things like interstate rebuilding that needs to be done anyway, I'm all for that. In 2005 the Association of Civil Engineers gave our infrastructure a D. Today, its a D-. Bridges are collapsing. In some states the highways and bridges are simply falling apart.
So, if there is something that needs to be done, and has needed to be done, and we were too busy "liberating" Iraq to pay attention to these things, why don't we liberate our own country for a while?
This whole thing is old and silly.
Seymour Cray is known for saying "Do you want fast or accurate?" because back then there was no IEEE 754 spec (which is not infinitely precise) for floating point numbers at the time and machines were pretty primitive then and his machine did Newtonian approximations of many numeric calculations that were accurate to a point, just like John Carmack did (in software) with Doom's inverse square root.
The moral of the story is that in 2009 and beyond its probably best to have hardware continue to be accurate. This is why we have digital 1s and 0s instead of some other base of computation.
Now, in software, feel free to make things as sloppy as you want. If your bank (not mine) wants to round 13,000.83 to some other value, then by all means go for it. But I think that most of us are OK with accurate hardware.
Next question.
But seriously, what difference does it make if apple patents this or not? I mean, no other GUI comes close to Apple's.
An example of this, was that I was not going to finish this post because this stuff is dumb, and people would come back saying that Apples UI is not that great, so I closed the tab. Safari asked if I wanted to close the tab because I was in the middle of filling in this form, with the default being Close (not OK, Cancel, or whatever).
I love multi-touch. I used to like having a mouse on a laptop, but now that multi-touch is here, its simply better than a mouse. Much more intuitive and less of an issue with RSI with a scroll-wheel.
I hate to sound too much like an Apple geek, but their software is so nice, that I'm always finding new things in it. Its almost like being with a person that you like. You are always learning something new about them. And I guess the inverse is true, that when you get bored with them, you find someone else.
I'm done hugging my MacBook :)
Back to multi-touch, I think that it should be allowed to be used by anyone. Its simply nice.