If you read some of Apple's statments when they released the iPhone they mention that they're figuring the revenue differently. They said that the revenue from iPhones would be spread out over the term of the service contract.
When Apple said that, they were referring to realizing the revenue for accounting purposes. Apple is spreading the realization of the revenue for the sale of the phone to the customer over a 2 year period. The reason for this is Sarbanes-Oxley.
Due to Sarbanes-Oxley, Apple cannot provide firmware updates to the phone that add features after they realize the full cost of the phone. To avoid a situation like with the 802.11n issue where they had to charge $1 for the update, they spread the revenue over 2 years and can then do firmware updates without running afoul of the law.
The actual price of the phone has nothing to do with this issue and the revenue from the unlocked phones would still have to be realized over 2 years to avoid legal issues with updates.
(basically, Sarbanes-Oxley says you cannot realize revenue for a sale until you have given the customer the entire product. I believe this was in response to Enron's practise of selling its own subsidiary oil, recording a profit from the sale, and never actually shipping the oil. Since they owned the subsidiary, it never complained, and they could turn around and sell the same oil again to someone else.)
My impression was that AT&T was actually paying Apple a share of the monthly service charges.
That is correct. This revenue is not part of the sale of the hardware, though, so it doesn't count with respect to Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.
In the first level you are on a ship, as you walk around, run, and aim, you have to compensate for the roll of the ship. This is one of the first examples of this I've seen - it was a great effect and I'm pretty sure not super easy to do.
I used to know a guy whose father worked for a defense contractor. His dad worked on a system to aid targeting systems in compensating for the roll of ships at sea when firing their guns.
It amuses me that after many years we've finally developed the physics of our games to the point where we've recreated, for fun, the problem he was trying to solve.
This isn't a criticism of the feature or the game. I just found it really amusing.
Besides the obvious "Why?" that this article must prompt in anyone with some common sense, could Apple even afford it?
Adobe has a market cap of 27.36 billion dollars.
Apple has cash reserves of 15 billion dollars and no debt. Apple also made 24 billion dollars in revenue this year (3.5 billion net income). If Apple wanted to buy Adobe, and didn't mind taking on some debt temporarily, they could.
I don't think they will. I also don't think Adobe would be particularly interested in selling. An attempt to do so also might bring in other interested parties (like Microsoft) and create a bidding war for the company.
THANK YOU. I have been trying to say exactly that. Without science, you don't know. You're just guessing. You can't discard bad ideas, because you have no framework to judge them.
Don't thank me just yet. I actually disagree with you.
He wasn't just guessing about the practical stuff. Some of his views (like the balancing the humours stuff) were completely off base, but he did experiment and he did prove a lot of stuff in ways that are very similar to modern science. His method of performing cataract surgery wasn't just guessing. it was developed through examination, experimentation and an understanding of what was causing the sight problems.
The scientific method didn't exist formally, but he was effectively adhering to it in much of what he did. The real problem, and the thing that was missing that kept bad ideas from being discarded was peer review and a level of technological advancement to test those ideas. He became famous because of his success, and the medical world took his positions to be unassailable because he was the authority.
If you take Alhacen as one of the founders of the scientific method (he died in 1039 by the way), you have to acknowledge that the existence of the concepts of the scientific method didn't keep Paracelcus from being wrong about the origins of illness too (though he was miles closer than Galen). The scientific method also didn't keep Newton from wasting time on alchemy or Leibniz from being wrong about monadism. They weren't guessing. They were proposing abstract ideas in the absence of technology to allow them to explore them. As technology advanced, these ideas were proven to be false and fell by the wayside.
To discard all of Galen's work as guessing because he came up with, for his time period, ideas akin to alchemy and monadism is foolish. It's also hypocritical unless you are willing to discard calculus for the same reason.
The scientific method was a codification of best practices. Many people were de-facto practicing some or all of the scientific method for many years prior to its codification. That's how best practices are developed.
I guess somebody should tell Sony about all the devices Sony produces that allow this stealing to occur!
Sony BMG is its own corporate entity that is half owned by Bertelsmann Music Group and Half owned by Sony Corporation of America. It is two steps away from the Sony that produces all of the devices that can be used to rip cds.
Clearly their head of litigation is insane, but she works for a company that is half owned by a company that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony. She doesn't work for Sony.
There's no difference between letting demons out of skulls and what Hippocrates, Galen, Celsus and the Muslims were doing.
Galen was a protoscientist and performed procedures like cataract surgery. He developed the basic designs for many surgical tools still in use today (the scalpel, for example). He also, through experimentation, demonstrated the importance of blood and developed methods of diagnosis based on the pulse. Today we still have a class of drugs and medicines named after him due to his influence on that type of medicine.
Sure, he had some misguided ideas about blood and the nature of illness, but he was an instigator of the inquiry that led to guys like Paracelsus. (Admittedly, he also led to a lot of the misguided notions that guys like Paracelcus were opposing.)
The next 1500 years of medicine built upon some of his experiments and research (he published more than 500 books). Unfortunately, this included the stuff he got wrong as well as the stuff he got right.
If the modern scientific framework had existed in his time, his incorrect ideas could have been caught and purged from medical practise, but a lot of his research and experiments would still have been very important in progressing medical knowledge.
Exactly. When MS or Sony realizes this fact they will destroy the PC gaming market once and for all.
This is probably one of the reasons Microsoft doesn't want keyboards attached to their console. They don't want to move all of the pc games off of the platform they have a monopoly on and onto a platform where there is actually competition.
OK, maybe not destroy, but seriously dampen it. I fully expect next-gen consoles to tout the bundled keyboard/mouse as an advantage, and ship with web browsers in so you can watch YouTube from your XBox 1080 eXtreme console.
You don't have to wait. The PS3 ships with a web browser and you can watch YouTube on it. In fact, on my projector, i can watch YouTube on a 100" screen and it looks crisp and clean. The PS3 also supports any bluetooth enabled keyboard and mouse. Logitech even makes a wireless keyboard that is PS3 branded. (It's an RF keyboard and comes with a USB dongle, though)
Developers will decide on a per-game basis whether to enable the keyboard/mouse combo or restrict players to gamepads.
That is effectively the situation now in the PS3. UT3 will support keyboard and mouse on it.
Most games would be fine on just the gamepad, but a few specialized genres would benefit from the mouse and keyboard. Notably, the RTS market could start shipping games for consoles.
I'm not really a RTS fan, but the more the merrier.
All they need to do is figure out a good way to use the keyboard and mouse while sitting down. One idea that comes to mind is a simple lapboard designed for these uses.
That lapboard the Phantom people came up with would probably have been good for this. I don't know if it is still around though. Realistically, sitting on my floor in front of my coffee table and using the keyboard on the table and the mouse on the floor or table will probably work for me.
If you wanted to be really over the top, you could mount an articulated arm to your couch and have a keyboard/mouse tray attached to it.
This wasn't really intended to be an advertisement for the PS3, it just happens that everything described in the parent post is currently possible with the PS3 (except the RTS part).
Apple is proof positive that MS is not a 100% monopoly. They have a small share of the market, to be sure, but they've had it for decades.
100% market share isn't required to be a monopoly. Apple has held their market share for decades because they are primarily a hardware distributor and provide the platform for their software. They also control their entire distribution channel (no oem deals needed). The loyal fanbase doesn't hurt either.
The anticompetitive tactics Microsoft has been convicted of in the past really don't affect that core market share. It probably did affect their ability to grow marketshare though.
So it would appear that you don't have to have a 100% market share to get slapped for laws relating to monopoly status.
Well, you have to be able to prove that they have enough control over the market that they can exert monopoly control of it. Having 72% of the market and having lots of competitors , and having new competitors enter the market fairly easily is not a monopoly.
In the absence of a monopoly, their actions with respect to iTunes store integration with the iPod and locking out 3rd parties isn't illegal.
I'm not necessarily a sony fan ( dont feel strongly about them either way, certainly not enough to be considered fanatical). I do have a PS3, though, so here's what i thought of the games i am familiar with.
I played the Motorstorm demo and hated it. (I'm not really into off-road racing so it is probably a good game for which i am not the target market).
F1 Championship Edition is a good game and lots of fun if you like Formula One. The big downside is that if you play career mode, it takes between 2 and 3 hours at a time to play it. You have to do practice, then qualifying, then race before you can save your progress. Because of that, I haven't gotten very far in career mode. Once i'm more familiar with the tracks, i'll probably skip practice and skip a lot of time in qualifying and then it'll take about an hour between save points, but right now i'm not good enough to skip the practice.
Fight Night Round 3 has the same problems it had when i played it on my friend's xbox 360 (the biggest problem being it's a buggy piece of crap). When it behaves, it's pretty fun. When it starts threatening to stop the fight if you dont defend yourself, while your opponent is pinned to the ropes eating punches and tells you that you need to fix your cut, but doesn't show a cut in the repair interface, it will make you want to throw the controller across the room.
Virtua Fighter 5 is fun if you like fighting games. I really like it and it is as good as previous versions were. (i used to play it in arcades...not so much on consoles, so i dont know how the previous ones were on consoles)
I haven't bought it yet, but i did play Warhawk a little bit at a friends house this weekend and it was pretty cool. I really liked flying the fighters. The ground combat sucked, but that has more to do with me hating console interfaces for first person shooter (or 3rd person shooter) type games.
For downloadable games, I liked Blast Factor and flow. They were both pretty good.
However, Super Stardust HD is fantastic and probably my favourite game on the console. I have a rivalry going with a friend of mine on it and it really makes for some good motivation to try and beat each others' high scores.
They also release demos of some of the games in the store so you can try them before you buy them. Another thing i like about the store is that i can choose what i want to buy and when i check out i can put exactly the amount of my purchase in my "wallet" and pay for it. I really like not having to convert cash to points and not having my money tied up in their online system when i'm not actively trying to buy something.
Also, the Zune supports AAC (although it doesn't support having any market share, so i figured you wouldn't accept it as an example.)
The PS3, PSP, Xbox 360, Sansa e200R all support AAC as well. (the sansa apparently requires a firmware update)
As far as your search criteria for your google example goes, you really do need to go take that class if you thought that was a good way to search for portable hardware devices that support AAC.
If you are talking about he guys picked up for having previously been involved in banking for online casinos, I'm pretty sure they weren't extradited. They were picked up on U.S. soil in an airport while making a connection on a trip.
(it is still a stupid law and it was a stupid arrest, but it did happen on U.S. soil)
I'm sure this isn't the worst article ever to grace Slashdot's front page, but this one is pretty ridiculous.
Sony owns a company that provides a copy protection mechanism (just like a bunch of other companies). Bioshock uses their copy protection. Microsoft's rootkit detection program misidentifies it as a root kit.
How does this lead to the conclusion that Sony are the bad guys?
Sure, you might not like the copy protection application and think it's stupid (i feel that way), but I don't fault Sony for it being used on Bioshock. I fault Irrational (or whatever they are called now) and Take 2. I don't fault Sony for Microsoft's rootkit detector returning a false positive. I fault Microsoft for calling things rootkits that aren't.
I also fault the story submitter for being a jackass and the original article's author for writing an intentionally misleading article in an effort to get page views (he even admits that is why he did it.)
Hmm so you have to be near another computer to sync your information as well ? I am trying to think far back enough to when I had a "smart" phone that required that. What if I am away from my PC for a week, or 3 days..how erm 2001
The rest of us have moved on from that desktop sync model years ago.
uh...maybe this is a stupid question, but what device are you syncing information on your phone with?
When it comes to phones, i'm not really a "power user". I make calls and store contact information in mine, but i don't store that info anywhere else so i never have a need to sync it with anything. Other than your computer, what are you syncing your phone's data with?
except that the Samba team would then use the gplv2 code to be able to see both sides of the process and be able to more accurately document the protocol. Then they would reimplement the protocol in their own code under gplv3.
This would do nothing to stop the gplv3 from being adopted by Samba.
I dont think microsoft has any intention of using any version of the gpl. They are trying to get their shared source licenses approved as official open source licenses.
I think the point of this is that open source application development doesn't harm microsoft if they can have it done on their platform and on their terms. I think it's an acknowledgement that open source application adoption for some areas and for some users is inevitable and they are trying to minimize the impact that will have on their monopolies by making the choice to use those applications not necessitate changing platforms.
It is probably also an attempt to take open source developer mindshare away from the things they feel are the real threats in the open source community (the gpl in general; linux and the gnu tools in specific)
Slashdot Mirror
If you read some of Apple's statments when they released the iPhone they mention that they're figuring the revenue differently. They said that the revenue from iPhones would be spread out over the term of the service contract.
When Apple said that, they were referring to realizing the revenue for accounting purposes. Apple is spreading the realization of the revenue for the sale of the phone to the customer over a 2 year period. The reason for this is Sarbanes-Oxley.
Due to Sarbanes-Oxley, Apple cannot provide firmware updates to the phone that add features after they realize the full cost of the phone. To avoid a situation like with the 802.11n issue where they had to charge $1 for the update, they spread the revenue over 2 years and can then do firmware updates without running afoul of the law.
The actual price of the phone has nothing to do with this issue and the revenue from the unlocked phones would still have to be realized over 2 years to avoid legal issues with updates.
(basically, Sarbanes-Oxley says you cannot realize revenue for a sale until you have given the customer the entire product. I believe this was in response to Enron's practise of selling its own subsidiary oil, recording a profit from the sale, and never actually shipping the oil. Since they owned the subsidiary, it never complained, and they could turn around and sell the same oil again to someone else.)
My impression was that AT&T was actually paying Apple a share of the monthly service charges.
That is correct. This revenue is not part of the sale of the hardware, though, so it doesn't count with respect to Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.
In the first level you are on a ship, as you walk around, run, and aim, you have to compensate for the roll of the ship. This is one of the first examples of this I've seen - it was a great effect and I'm pretty sure not super easy to do.
I used to know a guy whose father worked for a defense contractor. His dad worked on a system to aid targeting systems in compensating for the roll of ships at sea when firing their guns.
It amuses me that after many years we've finally developed the physics of our games to the point where we've recreated, for fun, the problem he was trying to solve.
This isn't a criticism of the feature or the game. I just found it really amusing.
he upgraded his laptop as a luxury. I'm guessing the upgraded laptop still had XP on it.
There's no way in hell vista would run on a PII-350 with 300MB ram.
Besides the obvious "Why?" that this article must prompt in anyone with some common sense, could Apple even afford it?
Adobe has a market cap of 27.36 billion dollars.
Apple has cash reserves of 15 billion dollars and no debt. Apple also made 24 billion dollars in revenue this year (3.5 billion net income).
If Apple wanted to buy Adobe, and didn't mind taking on some debt temporarily, they could.
I don't think they will. I also don't think Adobe would be particularly interested in selling. An attempt to do so also might bring in other interested parties (like Microsoft) and create a bidding war for the company.
THANK YOU. I have been trying to say exactly that. Without science, you don't know. You're just guessing. You can't discard bad ideas, because you have no framework to judge them.
Don't thank me just yet. I actually disagree with you.
He wasn't just guessing about the practical stuff. Some of his views (like the balancing the humours stuff) were completely off base, but he did experiment and he did prove a lot of stuff in ways that are very similar to modern science. His method of performing cataract surgery wasn't just guessing. it was developed through examination, experimentation and an understanding of what was causing the sight problems.
The scientific method didn't exist formally, but he was effectively adhering to it in much of what he did. The real problem, and the thing that was missing that kept bad ideas from being discarded was peer review and a level of technological advancement to test those ideas. He became famous because of his success, and the medical world took his positions to be unassailable because he was the authority.
If you take Alhacen as one of the founders of the scientific method (he died in 1039 by the way), you have to acknowledge that the existence of the concepts of the scientific method didn't keep Paracelcus from being wrong about the origins of illness too (though he was miles closer than Galen). The scientific method also didn't keep Newton from wasting time on alchemy or Leibniz from being wrong about monadism. They weren't guessing. They were proposing abstract ideas in the absence of technology to allow them to explore them. As technology advanced, these ideas were proven to be false and fell by the wayside.
To discard all of Galen's work as guessing because he came up with, for his time period, ideas akin to alchemy and monadism is foolish. It's also hypocritical unless you are willing to discard calculus for the same reason.
The scientific method was a codification of best practices. Many people were de-facto practicing some or all of the scientific method for many years prior to its codification. That's how best practices are developed.
I guess somebody should tell Sony about all the devices Sony produces that allow this stealing to occur!
Sony BMG is its own corporate entity that is half owned by Bertelsmann Music Group and Half owned by Sony Corporation of America.
It is two steps away from the Sony that produces all of the devices that can be used to rip cds.
Clearly their head of litigation is insane, but she works for a company that is half owned by a company that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony. She doesn't work for Sony.
There's no difference between letting demons out of skulls and what Hippocrates, Galen, Celsus and the Muslims were doing.
Galen was a protoscientist and performed procedures like cataract surgery. He developed the basic designs for many surgical tools still in use today (the scalpel, for example).
He also, through experimentation, demonstrated the importance of blood and developed methods of diagnosis based on the pulse. Today we still have a class of drugs and medicines named after him due to his influence on that type of medicine.
Sure, he had some misguided ideas about blood and the nature of illness, but he was an instigator of the inquiry that led to guys like Paracelsus. (Admittedly, he also led to a lot of the misguided notions that guys like Paracelcus were opposing.)
The next 1500 years of medicine built upon some of his experiments and research (he published more than 500 books). Unfortunately, this included the stuff he got wrong as well as the stuff he got right.
If the modern scientific framework had existed in his time, his incorrect ideas could have been caught and purged from medical practise, but a lot of his research and experiments would still have been very important in progressing medical knowledge.
Exactly. When MS or Sony realizes this fact they will destroy the PC gaming market once and for all.
This is probably one of the reasons Microsoft doesn't want keyboards attached to their console. They don't want to move all of the pc games off of the platform they have a monopoly on and onto a platform where there is actually competition.
OK, maybe not destroy, but seriously dampen it. I fully expect next-gen consoles to tout the bundled keyboard/mouse as an advantage, and ship with web browsers in so you can watch YouTube from your XBox 1080 eXtreme console.
You don't have to wait. The PS3 ships with a web browser and you can watch YouTube on it. In fact, on my projector, i can watch YouTube on a 100" screen and it looks crisp and clean.
The PS3 also supports any bluetooth enabled keyboard and mouse. Logitech even makes a wireless keyboard that is PS3 branded. (It's an RF keyboard and comes with a USB dongle, though)
Developers will decide on a per-game basis whether to enable the keyboard/mouse combo or restrict players to gamepads.
That is effectively the situation now in the PS3. UT3 will support keyboard and mouse on it.
Most games would be fine on just the gamepad, but a few specialized genres would benefit from the mouse and keyboard. Notably, the RTS market could start shipping games for consoles.
I'm not really a RTS fan, but the more the merrier.
All they need to do is figure out a good way to use the keyboard and mouse while sitting down. One idea that comes to mind is a simple lapboard designed for these uses.
That lapboard the Phantom people came up with would probably have been good for this. I don't know if it is still around though. Realistically, sitting on my floor in front of my coffee table and using the keyboard on the table and the mouse on the floor or table will probably work for me.
If you wanted to be really over the top, you could mount an articulated arm to your couch and have a keyboard/mouse tray attached to it.
This wasn't really intended to be an advertisement for the PS3, it just happens that everything described in the parent post is currently possible with the PS3 (except the RTS part).
How much do you want to bet they leased the office equipment from Yarro-McBride Office Furnishings Inc. for a ridiculous amount of money?
'Truthiness' is not synonymous with 'truthfulness'--it is the antithesis of it.
I wouldn't say it's the antithesis of truthfulness. It is possible for someone to take a dogmatic position that turns out to actually be true.
I think truthiness is more the antithesis of reason.
Apple is proof positive that MS is not a 100% monopoly. They have a small share of the market, to be sure, but they've had it for decades.
100% market share isn't required to be a monopoly. Apple has held their market share for decades because they are primarily a hardware distributor and provide the platform for their software. They also control their entire distribution channel (no oem deals needed). The loyal fanbase doesn't hurt either.
The anticompetitive tactics Microsoft has been convicted of in the past really don't affect that core market share. It probably did affect their ability to grow marketshare though.
So it would appear that you don't have to have a 100% market share to get slapped for laws relating to monopoly status.
Well, you have to be able to prove that they have enough control over the market that they can exert monopoly control of it. Having 72% of the market and having lots of competitors , and having new competitors enter the market fairly easily is not a monopoly.
In the absence of a monopoly, their actions with respect to iTunes store integration with the iPod and locking out 3rd parties isn't illegal.
Considering recent history, they probably suspect the worst case scenario for exposing a U.S. spy satellite is a pardon.
Lufkin is in Angelina County and is part of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.
I'm not necessarily a sony fan ( dont feel strongly about them either way, certainly not enough to be considered fanatical). I do have a PS3, though, so here's what i thought of the games i am familiar with.
I played the Motorstorm demo and hated it. (I'm not really into off-road racing so it is probably a good game for which i am not the target market).
F1 Championship Edition is a good game and lots of fun if you like Formula One. The big downside is that if you play career mode, it takes between 2 and 3 hours at a time to play it. You have to do practice, then qualifying, then race before you can save your progress. Because of that, I haven't gotten very far in career mode. Once i'm more familiar with the tracks, i'll probably skip practice and skip a lot of time in qualifying and then it'll take about an hour between save points, but right now i'm not good enough to skip the practice.
Fight Night Round 3 has the same problems it had when i played it on my friend's xbox 360 (the biggest problem being it's a buggy piece of crap). When it behaves, it's pretty fun. When it starts threatening to stop the fight if you dont defend yourself, while your opponent is pinned to the ropes eating punches and tells you that you need to fix your cut, but doesn't show a cut in the repair interface, it will make you want to throw the controller across the room.
Virtua Fighter 5 is fun if you like fighting games. I really like it and it is as good as previous versions were. (i used to play it in arcades...not so much on consoles, so i dont know how the previous ones were on consoles)
I haven't bought it yet, but i did play Warhawk a little bit at a friends house this weekend and it was pretty cool. I really liked flying the fighters. The ground combat sucked, but that has more to do with me hating console interfaces for first person shooter (or 3rd person shooter) type games.
For downloadable games, I liked Blast Factor and flow. They were both pretty good.
However, Super Stardust HD is fantastic and probably my favourite game on the console. I have a rivalry going with a friend of mine on it and it really makes for some good motivation to try and beat each others' high scores.
They also release demos of some of the games in the store so you can try them before you buy them.
Another thing i like about the store is that i can choose what i want to buy and when i check out i can put exactly the amount of my purchase in my "wallet" and pay for it. I really like not having to convert cash to points and not having my money tied up in their online system when i'm not actively trying to buy something.
Here you go :
Creative Zen supports AAC.
Also, the Zune supports AAC (although it doesn't support having any market share, so i figured you wouldn't accept it as an example.)
The PS3, PSP, Xbox 360, Sansa e200R all support AAC as well.
(the sansa apparently requires a firmware update)
As far as your search criteria for your google example goes, you really do need to go take that class if you thought that was a good way to search for portable hardware devices that support AAC.
ah. ok.
different event. I don't know that i ever heard about that one.
If you are talking about he guys picked up for having previously been involved in banking for online casinos, I'm pretty sure they weren't extradited. They were picked up on U.S. soil in an airport while making a connection on a trip.
(it is still a stupid law and it was a stupid arrest, but it did happen on U.S. soil)
considering porn is a 6 billion dollar a year industry in the U.S. alone, it doesn't seem to be devaluing sex much.
I'm sure this isn't the worst article ever to grace Slashdot's front page, but this one is pretty ridiculous.
Sony owns a company that provides a copy protection mechanism (just like a bunch of other companies). Bioshock uses their copy protection. Microsoft's rootkit detection program misidentifies it as a root kit.
How does this lead to the conclusion that Sony are the bad guys?
Sure, you might not like the copy protection application and think it's stupid (i feel that way), but I don't fault Sony for it being used on Bioshock. I fault Irrational (or whatever they are called now) and Take 2. I don't fault Sony for Microsoft's rootkit detector returning a false positive. I fault Microsoft for calling things rootkits that aren't.
I also fault the story submitter for being a jackass and the original article's author for writing an intentionally misleading article in an effort to get page views (he even admits that is why he did it.)
As i understand it, Scientology is run by a board of directors (like a company) and none of the members of the board are Scientologists.
I have no source to provide for that at the moment. If someone else has one (or something that contradicts it), please post it.
Searching google for sites that have rejection pages for IE doesn't tell you anything.
I tried every one of those sites and they all opened just fine in Safari.
Those are not Firefox only sites, they're "No Internet Explorer Allowed" sites.
Firefox only sites? do you have any examples?
I don't think i've ever run into a firefox only site.
Don't be silly. Being posted on Slashdot doesn't increase their hit count.
Given that nobody reads more than the summary for any of the other articles, what makes you think they clicked on the story on this one?
Hmm so you have to be near another computer to sync your information as well ? I am trying to think far back enough to when I had a "smart" phone that required that. What if I am away from my PC for a week, or 3 days..how erm 2001
The rest of us have moved on from that desktop sync model years ago.
uh...maybe this is a stupid question, but what device are you syncing information on your phone with?
When it comes to phones, i'm not really a "power user". I make calls and store contact information in mine, but i don't store that info anywhere else so i never have a need to sync it with anything. Other than your computer, what are you syncing your phone's data with?
except that the Samba team would then use the gplv2 code to be able to see both sides of the process and be able to more accurately document the protocol. Then they would reimplement the protocol in their own code under gplv3.
This would do nothing to stop the gplv3 from being adopted by Samba.
I dont think microsoft has any intention of using any version of the gpl. They are trying to get their shared source licenses approved as official open source licenses.
I think the point of this is that open source application development doesn't harm microsoft if they can have it done on their platform and on their terms. I think it's an acknowledgement that open source application adoption for some areas and for some users is inevitable and they are trying to minimize the impact that will have on their monopolies by making the choice to use those applications not necessitate changing platforms.
It is probably also an attempt to take open source developer mindshare away from the things they feel are the real threats in the open source community (the gpl in general; linux and the gnu tools in specific)