The vast majority of people don't care anymore unless they get a letter from (a) lawyer(s). They may have assumed incorrectly in this case, but IMO the PCI-SIG was just cutting to the chase.
<sarcasm>Fair enough. Mind sending me your address? I'd like to have my lawyer respond to your post.</sarcasm>
Well, given that this is/., I'll forgive you that you didn't read the C&D letter. PCI-SIG's beef with Jim's site is that his "...use of PCI-SIG's trademarked name and logo on [his] website is likely to cause confusion in the marketplace..." All they ask is that he stops using the name PCI, the logo, and similar designations.
Well, given that I did read the letter and the site:
Jim's beef with the PCI-SIG is that they didn't have the courtesy to contact him before resorting to lawyers. I think that's reasonable. Perhaps instead of responding to your post, I should hire someone to knock on your door tomorrow morning at 5:30am and scream "Your post was ignorant!". See the difference?
In any case, after ignoring his prior offers of assistance and insulting him, the PCI-SIG needs to offer to buy the list from him, say for about the amount of money he's spent hosting it all these years.
There's the metro north also, I can take a train to just about any place in the state of NY for a few dollars.
Metro North serves much more of CT than NY. And the majority of NY state might as well be Idaho as far as train service goes.
You cannot get a few dollar train from NYC to Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Binghamton, Watertown, Ithaca, Auburn, Oneonta, Oswego, (need I continue?). You can get a slow, expensive, unreliable Amtrak to Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo.
As per usual, you residents of the five boroughs think that western CT and northern NJ(*) are part of NY State, and that the far greater land mass of the state doesn't exist.
You could build a system that cancels for a small target area from a distance, but it's going to produce twice the sound in other places.
Well, actually, if you could combine this with one of the audio spotlights from http://web.media.mit.edu/~pompei/spotlight/ you'd have the perfect device for dealing with people like my neighbor who thinks it's his job to open the window and DJ for the entire neighborhood on sunny days...
(Hey, pal, JC Superstar, the Ike & Tina soundtrack, and Bruce Springsteen are okay, but not the same three in rotation over and over and over, okay?)
The claims at the link are not quite true. Might be similar, but not the same.
I'm typing this on a Dell Inspiron 5000e. It has a beautiful UXGA+ (1600x1200) display. The knockoffs apparently only get up to the 1400x1050 displays. This means they aren't the same as a 5000e.
I suspect that even if M$ opened the Office file formats, we wouldn't want them.
The Office file formats keep changing because they very closely follow the object implementations within the applications themselves.
This means that these files tend to mix the distinctions between the actual content, the formatting, and the representation used by the application.
Maintaining this distinction was part of the early appeal of HTML (before it got corrupted with format oriented stuff). XML, with it's explicit separation of content-representation, and formatting (style sheets), has much more promise.
Each successive version of the MS Office formats (and HTML for that matter) places more and more constraints on the internal model that any application using them may use.
Although Jon makes some good points, I find his piece overgeneralized and somewhat alarmist. These are good traits for triggering discussions, and I suspect he does it intentionally.
I'd like to suggest that there are many types of filters; here are some points on the spectrum:
Machine filters from commercial companies - the NetNannies, etc.
Machine filters you configure yourself - a killfile
Human filters from propoganda sources - www.microsoft.com
Human filters from mainstream society - www.abcnews.com
Human filters from [alleged] countercultures - www.drudgereport.com
Human filters from true countercultures - www.gnu.org
Human filters from people you trust as peers - www.slashdot.org
Human filters from people you know - those damn emails of stuff that was on slashdot last month.
Which filters you gravitate towards can be construed to be a measure of your skepticism / gullibility. Personally, I'm much heartened by the development of filters in the last four categories above, because they reduce the amount of dreck I have to wade through in order to keep up with what's important to me.
If I wrote prose full time for a living, I'd probably be interested in consuming as much information as I could, so I wouldn't filter. I don't. I write code, so I want a friend to drop me a note every now and again with perfectly accurate, well attributed information on the latest free vs commercial debates.
While I once depended on a network of friends to do that, more and more we depend on services like/. Would I be happy with mandatory NetNanny? Hell no. But I don't see a general problem with filters; they're simply the analogue of choosing who you talk with over lunch.
P.S. Those web pages above are illustrative of concepts. The links ain't s'posed to work, and further, I make no representation about their quality. Except/.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent point. Now, do you/we consider this to be reasonable behavior? Particularly since there is a pre-existing conversation?
<sarcasm>Fair enough. Mind sending me your address? I'd like to have my lawyer respond to your post.</sarcasm>
Well, given that I did read the letter and the site:
Jim's beef with the PCI-SIG is that they didn't have the courtesy to contact him before resorting to lawyers. I think that's reasonable. Perhaps instead of responding to your post, I should hire someone to knock on your door tomorrow morning at 5:30am and scream "Your post was ignorant!". See the difference?
In any case, after ignoring his prior offers of assistance and insulting him, the PCI-SIG needs to offer to buy the list from him, say for about the amount of money he's spent hosting it all these years.
A quibble:
There's the metro north also, I can take a train to just about any place in the state of NY for a few dollars.
Metro North serves much more of CT than NY. And the majority of NY state might as well be Idaho as far as train service goes.
You cannot get a few dollar train from NYC to Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Binghamton, Watertown, Ithaca, Auburn, Oneonta, Oswego, (need
I continue?). You can get a slow, expensive, unreliable Amtrak to Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo.
As per usual, you residents of the five boroughs think that western CT and northern NJ(*) are part of NY State, and that the far greater land mass of the state doesn't exist.
(*) Yeah, I know you try to disown it.
Well, actually, if you could combine this with one of the audio spotlights from http://web.media.mit.edu/~pompei/spotlight/ you'd have the perfect device for dealing with people like my neighbor who thinks it's his job to open the window and DJ for the entire neighborhood on sunny days
(Hey, pal, JC Superstar, the Ike & Tina soundtrack, and Bruce Springsteen are okay, but not the same three in rotation over and over and over, okay?)
The claims at the link are not quite true. Might be similar, but not the same.
...
I'm typing this on a Dell Inspiron 5000e. It has a beautiful UXGA+ (1600x1200) display. The knockoffs apparently only get up to the 1400x1050 displays. This means they aren't the same as a 5000e.
Makes one suspicious
The M$ support site referred to speaks of "129,000 vistors per day" and "2.3 Million Page hits".
A quick glance at the HTML coming out of the site shows that the 17 or so hits-per-visitor that this implies is quite consistent with 2-3 true pages.
So, I bet that the 2.3 million is the actual number of http requests responded to.
I suspect that even if M$ opened the Office file formats, we wouldn't want them.
The Office file formats keep changing because they very closely follow the object implementations within the applications themselves.
This means that these files tend to mix the distinctions between the actual content, the formatting, and the representation used by the application.
Maintaining this distinction was part of the early appeal of HTML (before it got corrupted with format oriented stuff). XML, with it's explicit separation of content-representation, and formatting (style sheets), has much more promise.
Each successive version of the MS Office formats (and HTML for that matter) places more and more constraints on the internal model that any application using them may use.
I'd like to suggest that there are many types of filters; here are some points on the spectrum:
Machine filters from commercial companies - the NetNannies, etc.
Machine filters you configure yourself - a killfile
Human filters from propoganda sources - www.microsoft.com
Human filters from mainstream society - www.abcnews.com
Human filters from [alleged] countercultures - www.drudgereport.com
Human filters from true countercultures - www.gnu.org
Human filters from people you trust as peers - www.slashdot.org
Human filters from people you know - those damn emails of stuff that was on slashdot last month.
Which filters you gravitate towards can be construed to be a measure of your skepticism / gullibility. Personally, I'm much heartened by the development of filters in the last four categories above, because they reduce the amount of dreck I have to wade through in order to keep up with what's important to me.
If I wrote prose full time for a living, I'd probably be interested in consuming as much information as I could, so I wouldn't filter. I don't. I write code, so I want a friend to drop me a note every now and again with perfectly accurate, well attributed information on the latest free vs commercial debates.
While I once depended on a network of friends to do that, more and more we depend on services like /. Would I be happy with mandatory NetNanny? Hell no. But I don't see a general problem with filters; they're simply the analogue of choosing who you talk with over lunch.
P.S. Those web pages above are illustrative of concepts. The links ain't s'posed to work, and further, I make no representation about their quality. Except /. ;-)