...I bet the actual citizens of the EU won't see a 0.01 of any actual money the EU fines.
True, but the whole purpose of the fines is to force Microsoft to do something that's in the interest of all the citizens who use MS products. If the fines do as they're intended then not only will EU citizens be better off, but ultimitely all users of MS products around the world will be better off.
Also interestingly: What happens if MS refuse to pay? I can't imagine there being much chance of them refusing, but would the EU have powers to strongarm MS's bank to pay up on behalf of Microsoft?
I doubt that'd happen as well. If MS were to refuse it could result in economic and political ramifications between the EU and the US. Bottom line is that MS could get pressure from the US government to pay up. Beyond that, MS undoubtedly has interests (offices, software inventory, etc) in the EU that could be targeted for siezure in an extreme case. And if they were stupid enough to let it go that far you can imagine what sort of response that would get from other countries where MS has interests.
The practicality of sending a probe to the surface of a far-flung moon for remote experimentation or return payload for terrestrial experimentation aside, the worry with such a procedure would be contamination.
But why not just do something similar to the Mars rovers? Have a self-contained laboratory that can do all the necessary analysis there. It'd probably be a lot cheaper than trying to retrieve a sample and return it here, and you wouldn't have to worry about contamination, etc.
Existing models already [do] everything a user could want
Really? How do I record HD channels and display them in HD on my HDTV? How do I attach external storage without having to hack the unit? How do I record 2 channels at the same time?
You obviously don't know a whole lot about MythTV. Yes, you need to buy a tuner card, but at the same time you can display it on a regular TV. In fact I have mine hooked up to my 42" HDTV and the display looks great.
The risks are well known. It's like putting a revolver to your head, but you know what? 5 out of 6 times, that hammer's just going to click and nothing's going to happen.
But how many times are you going to put the gun to your head and pull the trigger? It seems we've already hit that live round a couple of times. TMI and Chernobyl certianly come to mind.
Sure, you can argue that they aren't as "rich" as Word, PDF et al, but they're standard and they're open.
You just answered your own question. ODF is meant to provide a way of encapsulating all the metadata for office-style documents. Meaning it's specifically designed for word processor documents, spreadsheets, presentation graphics, etc. These are highly rich formats just like Word, PDF, etc.
On the other hand, a single mega corp like GM, dying from the head downward though it may be, probably represents a market of roughly equal magnitude to all the 30- person businesses in the country.
True, but in this day in age it's also important to keep in mind where the next GM-sized companies are likely to come from. Startups are a lot more likely to use FOSS tools like linux, mysql, etc. to get their ideas off the ground than they are to spend many thousands of dollars up front on licenses from Oracle, Microsoft, Sun, etc. Eventually the successful start-up might start migrating to Oracle, etc. once they reach a point that justifies such a move, and the Oracles of the world need to recognize that this is a roadmap that smaller companies are likely to follow. True it may take some time, but that's where their future customers are likely to come from.
Damn right! My 30-person company considers the mysql databases that power its product to be mission critical. Without them we wouldn't have a product, and without a product we wouldn't have a business. Doesn't get any more mission critical than that.
Well lets see, I finally broke down and upgraded to Windows XP about a month ago when I decided to upgrade my old PIII 800 Mhz machine. Given that, I figure I'll upgrade to Vista about 5 years or so after it's been out.
Porn in hi-def on large format screens is NOT something you want to watch... trust me!
I know I wouldn't want to, but between what shows up in my spam filters and what you stumble across by simply misspelling a TLD in your browser I'm sure there'd be plenty of sickos who would love to see every sweaty pour, etc. in glorious high definition.
I think we all know the stories about how the porn industry helped make both VHS and DVD a pretty common household product. Given how Sony lost the Betamax/VHS wars I wonder if they might try a rather novel approach to winning the HD video wars. Any chance they might offer low-cost (free?) Blu-Ray production equipment to major porn producers/distributors in an attempt to create a massive HD porn foothold?
Why the "next" dvd jon? I'd be willing to bet that the original dvd jon takes aim at blu-ray DRM sooner or later. (hopefully sooner) But whether or not he is the one that cracks it, like you said, it's only a matter of time.
As I think we've all learned long since, in this arms race the trolls and spammers of the world always eventually show more imagination and perseverence than the filter writers.
It takes a hell of a lot of more imagination for filter writers to ensure their filters don't cause any collateral damage, as both the Allah & breast cancer examples demonstrate. It reminds me of the late '90s when I was working for a search technology startup. One of the first projects I worked on was a porn filter. We found out very quickly that trying to rely on the string 'XXX' was completely unacceptable when we discovered that websites dedicate to Super Bowl XXX, any sites that displayed copyright dates as Roman numerals (or any other sites with Roman numerals), etc. all got tagged as porn.
...when they banned the term "breast" in all their forums in an a misguided attempt to keep their service as family-friendly as possible. The result was that all the members of a breast cancer support forum had to suddenly start referring to themselves as survivors of "hooter cancer" until AOL finally realized they had f*cked up pretty badly on this one.
Sounds like the guy who created/designed the username filter for Yahoo was hired right out of college with little or no real-world experience, or at least no imagination whatsoever...
Is this the sort of thing that could be used in HUD's in cars? Or what about high-resolution wearable displays? It's probalby now just a matter of time before you see people walking around with their video ipods completely oblivious to everything going on around them (as if they're not now) as they watch porn on the subway while going to/from work.
At this point, Jos Gebruiker will claim that indeed, a friend had asked him to make a copy for private use, which is perfectly legal under Dutch copyright law. So, what will your lawyers do now?
Probably claim that US copyright law takes prescedence since the RIAA and all the landsharks are located in the US, get a default judgement against Jos Gebruiker, then claim victory over yet another evil file trader.
Since when would RIAA landsharks care? After all, they've targeted grandmothers who don't even have network access, 8 year old kids, etc. They'll simply haul Joe User into court and claim that they're responsible for letting their computer get infested with trojans/viruses/spyware. After all, the RIAA wants to insure that its intellectual property is properly protected. Right?
I'm not a lawyer but I'd be willing to bet that recording industry lawyers would be able/willing to pressure people into admitting fault in this kind of case...
"You DID click on the 'I Agree' link when you downloaded, did you not? You did read the license agreement before you clicked on it, didn't you? You see the part that says you will not make the file available to anybody on any sort of a network, did you not?" and so on...
In theory it lets the distributor figure out who the source of the piracy was. Joe User logs into their site and downloads the latest hit DRM_SUX.mpeg. Unknown to him it has a unique watermark in it that identifies him as the one who downloaded this particular file. Six months later the Copyright Kops find a copy of DRM_SUX.mpeg floating around on P2P networks. They analyze the file and discover the watermark points to Joe User, so they then sick their landsharks^M^M^M^M lawyers on him.
I'm sure it won't be long until Watermark Bob creates a "cleanser" program to detect anything unusual, and maybe even remove it.
Good point. All you'd really need is two or more copies of a given file, each with their own watermarks. Do a relatively straightfoward binary diff on the files and you'd quickly spot the watermarks. Normalize the diffs based on the similarities between the multiple file copies, and voila! Instant un-watermarked file.
Agreed. I might be tempted to use it for my personal domains, but given their desire to store and archive EVERYTHING I would never recommend it for corporate use if they plan to do this. The issue of e-mail trails in litigation alone would be enough to keep most organizations away from their service.
What I was told when I was first introduced to the Akamai NOCC was that they felt that they were a NOC that delt mainly with other NOC's, which wasn't all that common when Akamai first got off the ground. They wanted a way to differentiate themselves from the NOC's that they dealt with, so they coined the term "Network Operations Control Center" or NOCC. There's a multimedia tour available on their website.
Slashdot Mirror
...I bet the actual citizens of the EU won't see a 0.01 of any actual money the EU fines.
True, but the whole purpose of the fines is to force Microsoft to do something that's in the interest of all the citizens who use MS products. If the fines do as they're intended then not only will EU citizens be better off, but ultimitely all users of MS products around the world will be better off.
Also interestingly: What happens if MS refuse to pay? I can't imagine there being much chance of them refusing, but would the EU have powers to strongarm MS's bank to pay up on behalf of Microsoft?
I doubt that'd happen as well. If MS were to refuse it could result in economic and political ramifications between the EU and the US. Bottom line is that MS could get pressure from the US government to pay up. Beyond that, MS undoubtedly has interests (offices, software inventory, etc) in the EU that could be targeted for siezure in an extreme case. And if they were stupid enough to let it go that far you can imagine what sort of response that would get from other countries where MS has interests.
The practicality of sending a probe to the surface of a far-flung moon for remote experimentation or return payload for terrestrial experimentation aside, the worry with such a procedure would be contamination.
But why not just do something similar to the Mars rovers? Have a self-contained laboratory that can do all the necessary analysis there. It'd probably be a lot cheaper than trying to retrieve a sample and return it here, and you wouldn't have to worry about contamination, etc.
Existing models already [do] everything a user could want
Really? How do I record HD channels and display them in HD on my HDTV? How do I attach external storage without having to hack the unit? How do I record 2 channels at the same time?
You obviously don't know a whole lot about MythTV. Yes, you need to buy a tuner card, but at the same time you can display it on a regular TV. In fact I have mine hooked up to my 42" HDTV and the display looks great.
The risks are well known. It's like putting a revolver to your head, but you know what? 5 out of 6 times, that hammer's just going to click and nothing's going to happen.
But how many times are you going to put the gun to your head and pull the trigger? It seems we've already hit that live round a couple of times. TMI and Chernobyl certianly come to mind.
We have 100 percent reproducible
100% success or 100% failure?
Sure, you can argue that they aren't as "rich" as Word, PDF et al, but they're standard and they're open.
You just answered your own question. ODF is meant to provide a way of encapsulating all the metadata for office-style documents. Meaning it's specifically designed for word processor documents, spreadsheets, presentation graphics, etc. These are highly rich formats just like Word, PDF, etc.
On the other hand, a single mega corp like GM, dying from the head downward though it may be, probably represents a market of roughly equal magnitude to all the 30- person businesses in the country.
True, but in this day in age it's also important to keep in mind where the next GM-sized companies are likely to come from. Startups are a lot more likely to use FOSS tools like linux, mysql, etc. to get their ideas off the ground than they are to spend many thousands of dollars up front on licenses from Oracle, Microsoft, Sun, etc. Eventually the successful start-up might start migrating to Oracle, etc. once they reach a point that justifies such a move, and the Oracles of the world need to recognize that this is a roadmap that smaller companies are likely to follow. True it may take some time, but that's where their future customers are likely to come from.
Damn right! My 30-person company considers the mysql databases that power its product to be mission critical. Without them we wouldn't have a product, and without a product we wouldn't have a business. Doesn't get any more mission critical than that.
Well lets see, I finally broke down and upgraded to Windows XP about a month ago when I decided to upgrade my old PIII 800 Mhz machine. Given that, I figure I'll upgrade to Vista about 5 years or so after it's been out.
Porn in hi-def on large format screens is NOT something you want to watch ... trust me!
I know I wouldn't want to, but between what shows up in my spam filters and what you stumble across by simply misspelling a TLD in your browser I'm sure there'd be plenty of sickos who would love to see every sweaty pour, etc. in glorious high definition.
I think we all know the stories about how the porn industry helped make both VHS and DVD a pretty common household product. Given how Sony lost the Betamax/VHS wars I wonder if they might try a rather novel approach to winning the HD video wars. Any chance they might offer low-cost (free?) Blu-Ray production equipment to major porn producers/distributors in an attempt to create a massive HD porn foothold?
the next dvd jon
Why the "next" dvd jon? I'd be willing to bet that the original dvd jon takes aim at blu-ray DRM sooner or later. (hopefully sooner) But whether or not he is the one that cracks it, like you said, it's only a matter of time.
Don't you mean it's been 30 years since NASA's moon landing hoax? ;-)
As I think we've all learned long since, in this arms race the trolls and spammers of the world always eventually show more imagination and perseverence than the filter writers.
It takes a hell of a lot of more imagination for filter writers to ensure their filters don't cause any collateral damage, as both the Allah & breast cancer examples demonstrate. It reminds me of the late '90s when I was working for a search technology startup. One of the first projects I worked on was a porn filter. We found out very quickly that trying to rely on the string 'XXX' was completely unacceptable when we discovered that websites dedicate to Super Bowl XXX, any sites that displayed copyright dates as Roman numerals (or any other sites with Roman numerals), etc. all got tagged as porn.
...when they banned the term "breast" in all their forums in an a misguided attempt to keep their service as family-friendly as possible. The result was that all the members of a breast cancer support forum had to suddenly start referring to themselves as survivors of "hooter cancer" until AOL finally realized they had f*cked up pretty badly on this one.
Sounds like the guy who created/designed the username filter for Yahoo was hired right out of college with little or no real-world experience, or at least no imagination whatsoever...
Is this the sort of thing that could be used in HUD's in cars? Or what about high-resolution wearable displays? It's probalby now just a matter of time before you see people walking around with their video ipods completely oblivious to everything going on around them (as if they're not now) as they watch porn on the subway while going to/from work.
At this point, Jos Gebruiker will claim that indeed, a friend had asked him to make a copy for private use, which is perfectly legal under Dutch copyright law. So, what will your lawyers do now?
Probably claim that US copyright law takes prescedence since the RIAA and all the landsharks are located in the US, get a default judgement against Jos Gebruiker, then claim victory over yet another evil file trader.
Since when would RIAA landsharks care? After all, they've targeted grandmothers who don't even have network access, 8 year old kids, etc. They'll simply haul Joe User into court and claim that they're responsible for letting their computer get infested with trojans/viruses/spyware. After all, the RIAA wants to insure that its intellectual property is properly protected. Right?
I'm not a lawyer but I'd be willing to bet that recording industry lawyers would be able/willing to pressure people into admitting fault in this kind of case...
"You DID click on the 'I Agree' link when you downloaded, did you not? You did read the license agreement before you clicked on it, didn't you? You see the part that says you will not make the file available to anybody on any sort of a network, did you not?" and so on...
OK, so you tag downloads. Now what?
In theory it lets the distributor figure out who the source of the piracy was. Joe User logs into their site and downloads the latest hit DRM_SUX.mpeg. Unknown to him it has a unique watermark in it that identifies him as the one who downloaded this particular file. Six months later the Copyright Kops find a copy of DRM_SUX.mpeg floating around on P2P networks. They analyze the file and discover the watermark points to Joe User, so they then sick their landsharks^M^M^M^M lawyers on him.
I'm sure it won't be long until Watermark Bob creates a "cleanser" program to detect anything unusual, and maybe even remove it.
Good point. All you'd really need is two or more copies of a given file, each with their own watermarks. Do a relatively straightfoward binary diff on the files and you'd quickly spot the watermarks. Normalize the diffs based on the similarities between the multiple file copies, and voila! Instant un-watermarked file.
Agreed. I might be tempted to use it for my personal domains, but given their desire to store and archive EVERYTHING I would never recommend it for corporate use if they plan to do this. The issue of e-mail trails in litigation alone would be enough to keep most organizations away from their service.
Until somebody writes a plugin to Mozilla to disable this "feature"?
What I was told when I was first introduced to the Akamai NOCC was that they felt that they were a NOC that delt mainly with other NOC's, which wasn't all that common when Akamai first got off the ground. They wanted a way to differentiate themselves from the NOC's that they dealt with, so they coined the term "Network Operations Control Center" or NOCC. There's a multimedia tour available on their website.