Microsoft has asserted that the patent was invalid due to preexisting inventions, but the court refused to let the jury consider the "prior art," or comparable previous technology.
The court refused to let the jury consider the prior art? What is that all about? IANAL, but surely that makes a total mockery of the legal system.
It's a Good Thing that sense was seen in the end, but it should never have got this far in the first place.
Can anyone out there explain why the court might do this?
I've always said that the best (and worst) thing about eBay is that it's full of stupid people. It's not just bad spelling that can get you the bargains, often people under-price their "Buy it now" items, or advertise things incorrectly, i.e. "This laptop has a 500MHz processor", but the model number they've stated suggests it's a 1GHz.
This 'feature' isn't going to go away because the NYT has mentioned it. The problem comes from clueless people, who will still be clueless now! I doubt people deliberately mis-spell items on eBay and now are thinking "perhaps I should spell things correctly from now on"
P.S. Remember to take full advantage, if you find cluelessness on eBay, "View Seller's Other Items" might be your key to many more bargains!
When I last heard, there were 110 episodes missing (This was 10 years ago)
These are mostly Hartnell and Troughton episodes. During the Pertwee era (Colour) the BBC took black & white footage too, and although some colour footage is missing, all the black and white films remain. Additionally, the BBC still has audio recordings of everything.
Since the BBC sold stories to other countries, occasionally, foreign copies are found (Sometimes in the vault of a crypt, somewhere in mid-eastern Europe), but it looks like it's slowing down.
I did have a list of exactly which episodes were missing, if anyone's interested, I could probably dig it up.
For those interested in the cause; as I recall, the BBC had two distinct branches, BBC Worldwide and BBC something-else. Each branch thought the other had the 'master copies' of the films, so junked theirs - they were stopped before all the Doctor Whos (or is that Doctors Who?) were destroyed, but of course, some didn't make it.
Batteries may not have been getting any better, but the devices *are* getting more energy-efficient. When I got my first portable CD player, I could get about 3-4 hours out of 2 AA batteries.
My brother's shiny! new portable CD player lasts for hours on end on the same amount of batteries.
Admittedly, greater capacity batteries would be great, but we're not doing too badly!
In the UK, we've practically already got that. If your mobile phone is more than 6-9 months old, you'll get scoffed at for "having a brick" by all the 9-year-old kids who have newer and trendier phones than you.
In an attempt to convince people to switch to a new tariff, you see up to 50 (~$80) rebate being offered for your old handset when you upgrade.
My phone is 3 years old now, but there's nothing wrong with it, but in today's mobile phone world, that's ancient!
I've still got a bunch of COM port mice kicking about.
I'm using a Dual P133 as my ADSL router, so that's about as old as the computers go, but I do have a VT100 kicking about the place. The thing is manky yellow-brown with age!
True, and on an unlimited budget, you could go out and buy a Sun or SGI solution with over 100 CPUs and many gigabytes of RAM.
Hell, there's always the ever-popular Slashdot reader favourite, the Beowulf cluster!
It's all about off-the-shelf performance, and (AFAIK, Apple Macs are usually more powerful than their OEM PC cousins). And you can always upgrade the Mac using 3rd party solutions!
Indeed, CX domains are also incredibly expensive. It's interesting to note that this is due to popularity with certain sites (goatse.cx) being used by trolls.
Also, could this be the first time that link has been used in an on-topic post?
Ive seen MS build other peoples apps into their products, but never seen them do it to their own. Are they actually going to kill off a profit centre?
I've seen them do it. It's called Internet Explorer in Windows '98. Okay, so it's not exactly as if IE was a major revenue earner (They give it away), but they could still cripple anything they put into their consumer OS - Look at the Remote Desktop stuff in Win XP Pro, it's the same technology used in Windows 2000 Advanced Server to use as a Terminal Server, just licensed to be far less useful, and priced accordingly.
You can achieve this quite nicely with PowerDVD 2.5 under Windows 2000/XP
If you run pDVD as a user rather than an administrator, it can't change the region settings, so each time you put in a DVD, it says "You haven't picked a region, pick one now? 5 changes".
In all fairness, the MS engineers did notice the flaw over a month before anyone exploited it, and patches have been available. My Windows XP machine here was fine throughout.
Maybe you should take them to court for creating 'del' - I imagine that's erased far more files than any virus ever has!
The problem, as ever, is *how* you use something, and it was the virus writers who abused the system.
Then again, maybe you could blame the millions of people out there who failed to keep their computers patched and updated, but that's another story...
The fact is that the people who are downloading music *aren't* the RIAA's customers. The RIAA's customers are the folks who go out and buy CDs, pure and simple.
Yeah, yeah, CDs are overpriced, the recording industry makes craploads of money, we feel ripped off, it's our right to get our own back. Well, no, actaully.
If you think CDs are overpriced, then don't buy them. The problem is that there are still loads of people who will buy CDs.
The average consumer will go down their local high street and buy the media they want, even if it's a copy-protected CD/DVD. If it plays on their home system, why do they care if it won't work on a PC.
The industries went after the p2p networks and invested in securing their IP, but as has been pointed out, p2p and DeCSS et al have legal uses (the DMCA is pointless and wrong, but that's a different story). Now they're beginning to realize where the problem is. The p2p companies are legal (even if founded on an illegal prioncipal), it's the file-sharers who are breaking the law, so they're going after them, which is what they should've done in the first place. In their eyes, sharing their files is just as illegal as selling knock-off CDs at the market.
Okay, so they probably don't have a lot to gain. Most of the/. community who complain about the RIAA have reasonable (if not strictly legal) reasons for using p2p. a) I download songs I can't get on CD, rare stuff that's long since been deleted. b) I download stuff I want to sample and will go out and buy the CD if I like it, and delete the MP3s if I don't. c) I'm not well off and can't afford CDs, I still enjoy the music, and if filesharing wasn't there, I'd not listen to it, rather than buy the CDs. d) I download songs I've already got on CD (I'm too lazy/my computer is too old and crufty) to encode MP3s.
We all know that the RIAA could certainly cater for people in (a) with either CDs or MP3s for download and (b) could be catered for with reasonably easily. (d) was solved quite nicely by Beam It (IIRC, an mp3.com innovation) sadly defunct, and (c) could be solved with a competitively priced system to buy MP3s (people will pay for MP3s, if the price is right)
To be honest, it's probably best that the industry goes down this route, ideally, they'd stop encrypting DVDs and copy-protecting CDs and just deal with te people actually breaking the law, but it's unlikely.
It also seems that they're going after the bigger offenders of file sharing, (they won't go after everyone, just as they didn't go after everyone who ever lent a cassette to their mates.) All in all, history is repeating itself, but this time with digital media rather than analog)
Personally, I don't think we need any more TLDs. In fact, the internet at large would be better off without any of the d*mn things. No American business is using.us as they've all got.com (even if they're not international!).
Then there are countries selling off their TLDs, e.g..to;.tv; and the all-time Slashdot favourite.cx
The point is that TLDs serve very little purpose any more. Just my humble opinion.
Personally, I think I'll wait until they hit 56x. Since ordinary CD-ROM drives maxed out there, I doubt CD-RW will get any faster. That way, I will have the best CD-RW drive available:)
As I recall, at one point, Microsoft's lawyers had a laptop on which they deleted the mouse driver. They took it to some MS retailers and asked if they could help. Anyone who was 'decent' enough to restore the driver was sent letters from the MS legal team threatening them with action for software theft.
I believe that MS didn't condone this action, but still it goes to show the mentality of some lawyers.
The real advantage that the law enforcement agencies get is they can prosecute for illegal decryption.
Say you get raided and have 1000 copies of 'Snow White' on DivX. They can't get you for illegal distribution, but they could arrest you for illegal decryption, as it's more than fair use. We have something similar with Mobile Phones in the UK, it's now illegal to change the serial number (IMEI), the real reason for this is so that poeple suspected of nicking phones can be arrested on another charge.
FWIW, I believe there was a company who were selling an Amiga emulator, they had licensed the ROM images and were distributing them with the emulator. I forget the precise details, but if they've done it before, they might do it again.
Okay, I'm not an expert, but I was under the impression that DVDs were neither PAL or NTSC, they're just encoded MPEG-2. Surely it's the function of the DVD player to output the correct analogue signal. If you buy a DVD player in the US, surely it outputs all DVDs as NTSC (assuming you've modified it to play multi-region). I'm pretty sure all players in the UK output PAL, irrespective of the DVD.
"That 800 dollar imac" is probably one of the new ones, G3 at 500MHz (or thereabouts)
I'm currently running the public beta of OS X on my original 233MHz iMac and it works fine (admittedly, it's got 96MB of RAM, rather than the default 32). You could probably even pick up one of these for $500 these days, and they run OS X great!
It's already out there (for Mac users) - There is a browser called iCab - It smiles if your HTML is valid and frowns if it's got errors in it. You can also click the face and it will list all the errors. I use it to validate all my websites.
It's still in development, and the final version will be shareware.
There must be similar stuff out there for M$ and *nix platforms...
Slashdot Mirror
You say that, but this paragraph bothers me:
Microsoft has asserted that the patent was invalid due to preexisting inventions, but the court refused to let the jury consider the "prior art," or comparable previous technology.
The court refused to let the jury consider the prior art? What is that all about? IANAL, but surely that makes a total mockery of the legal system.
It's a Good Thing that sense was seen in the end, but it should never have got this far in the first place. Can anyone out there explain why the court might do this?
I've always said that the best (and worst) thing about eBay is that it's full of stupid people. It's not just bad spelling that can get you the bargains, often people under-price their "Buy it now" items, or advertise things incorrectly, i.e. "This laptop has a 500MHz processor", but the model number they've stated suggests it's a 1GHz.
This 'feature' isn't going to go away because the NYT has mentioned it. The problem comes from clueless people, who will still be clueless now! I doubt people deliberately mis-spell items on eBay and now are thinking "perhaps I should spell things correctly from now on"
P.S. Remember to take full advantage, if you find cluelessness on eBay, "View Seller's Other Items" might be your key to many more bargains!
BSD is dying... ...in the wonderful world of SCO it will if Darl McBride has anything to say on the matter!
When I last heard, there were 110 episodes missing (This was 10 years ago)
These are mostly Hartnell and Troughton episodes. During the Pertwee era (Colour) the BBC took black & white footage too, and although some colour footage is missing, all the black and white films remain. Additionally, the BBC still has audio recordings of everything.
Since the BBC sold stories to other countries, occasionally, foreign copies are found (Sometimes in the vault of a crypt, somewhere in mid-eastern Europe), but it looks like it's slowing down.
I did have a list of exactly which episodes were missing, if anyone's interested, I could probably dig it up.
For those interested in the cause; as I recall, the BBC had two distinct branches, BBC Worldwide and BBC something-else. Each branch thought the other had the 'master copies' of the films, so junked theirs - they were stopped before all the Doctor Whos (or is that Doctors Who?) were destroyed, but of course, some didn't make it.
Batteries may not have been getting any better, but the devices *are* getting more energy-efficient. When I got my first portable CD player, I could get about 3-4 hours out of 2 AA batteries.
My brother's shiny! new portable CD player lasts for hours on end on the same amount of batteries.
Admittedly, greater capacity batteries would be great, but we're not doing too badly!
In the UK, we've practically already got that. If your mobile phone is more than 6-9 months old, you'll get scoffed at for "having a brick" by all the 9-year-old kids who have newer and trendier phones than you.
In an attempt to convince people to switch to a new tariff, you see up to 50 (~$80) rebate being offered for your old handset when you upgrade.
My phone is 3 years old now, but there's nothing wrong with it, but in today's mobile phone world, that's ancient!
I've still got a bunch of COM port mice kicking about.
I'm using a Dual P133 as my ADSL router, so that's about as old as the computers go, but I do have a VT100 kicking about the place. The thing is manky yellow-brown with age!
True, and on an unlimited budget, you could go out and buy a Sun or SGI solution with over 100 CPUs and many gigabytes of RAM.
Hell, there's always the ever-popular Slashdot reader favourite, the Beowulf cluster!
It's all about off-the-shelf performance, and (AFAIK, Apple Macs are usually more powerful than their OEM PC cousins). And you can always upgrade the Mac using 3rd party solutions!
Indeed, CX domains are also incredibly expensive. It's interesting to note that this is due to popularity with certain sites (goatse.cx) being used by trolls.
Also, could this be the first time that link has been used in an on-topic post?
I've seen them do it. It's called Internet Explorer in Windows '98. Okay, so it's not exactly as if IE was a major revenue earner (They give it away), but they could still cripple anything they put into their consumer OS - Look at the Remote Desktop stuff in Win XP Pro, it's the same technology used in Windows 2000 Advanced Server to use as a Terminal Server, just licensed to be far less useful, and priced accordingly.
You can achieve this quite nicely with PowerDVD 2.5 under Windows 2000/XP
If you run pDVD as a user rather than an administrator, it can't change the region settings, so each time you put in a DVD, it says "You haven't picked a region, pick one now? 5 changes".
Works for me!
In all fairness, the MS engineers did notice the flaw over a month before anyone exploited it, and patches have been available. My Windows XP machine here was fine throughout.
Maybe you should take them to court for creating 'del' - I imagine that's erased far more files than any virus ever has!
The problem, as ever, is *how* you use something, and it was the virus writers who abused the system.
Then again, maybe you could blame the millions of people out there who failed to keep their computers patched and updated, but that's another story...
Must learn to use preview
What I meant to say was 'Insert Beowulf cluster reference here!'
Sorry!
Sorry guys, couldn't resist!
The fact is that the people who are downloading music *aren't* the RIAA's customers. The RIAA's customers are the folks who go out and buy CDs, pure and simple.
/. community who complain about the RIAA have reasonable (if not strictly legal) reasons for using p2p.
Yeah, yeah, CDs are overpriced, the recording industry makes craploads of money, we feel ripped off, it's our right to get our own back. Well, no, actaully.
If you think CDs are overpriced, then don't buy them. The problem is that there are still loads of people who will buy CDs.
The average consumer will go down their local high street and buy the media they want, even if it's a copy-protected CD/DVD. If it plays on their home system, why do they care if it won't work on a PC.
The industries went after the p2p networks and invested in securing their IP, but as has been pointed out, p2p and DeCSS et al have legal uses (the DMCA is pointless and wrong, but that's a different story). Now they're beginning to realize where the problem is. The p2p companies are legal (even if founded on an illegal prioncipal), it's the file-sharers who are breaking the law, so they're going after them, which is what they should've done in the first place. In their eyes, sharing their files is just as illegal as selling knock-off CDs at the market.
Okay, so they probably don't have a lot to gain. Most of the
a) I download songs I can't get on CD, rare stuff that's long since been deleted.
b) I download stuff I want to sample and will go out and buy the CD if I like it, and delete the MP3s if I don't.
c) I'm not well off and can't afford CDs, I still enjoy the music, and if filesharing wasn't there, I'd not listen to it, rather than buy the CDs.
d) I download songs I've already got on CD (I'm too lazy/my computer is too old and crufty) to encode MP3s.
We all know that the RIAA could certainly cater for people in (a) with either CDs or MP3s for download and (b) could be catered for with reasonably easily.
(d) was solved quite nicely by Beam It (IIRC, an mp3.com innovation) sadly defunct, and (c) could be solved with a competitively priced system to buy MP3s (people will pay for
MP3s, if the price is right)
To be honest, it's probably best that the industry goes down this route, ideally, they'd stop encrypting DVDs and copy-protecting CDs and just deal with te people actually breaking the law, but it's unlikely.
It also seems that they're going after the bigger offenders of file sharing, (they won't go after everyone, just as they didn't go after everyone who ever lent a cassette to their mates.) All in all, history is repeating itself, but this time with digital media rather than analog)
Personally, I don't think we need any more TLDs. In fact, the internet at large would be better off without any of the d*mn things. No American business is using .us as they've all got .com (even if they're not international!).
.to; .tv; and the all-time Slashdot favourite .cx
Then there are countries selling off their TLDs, e.g.
The point is that TLDs serve very little purpose any more. Just my humble opinion.
Personally, I think I'll wait until they hit 56x. Since ordinary CD-ROM drives maxed out there, I doubt CD-RW will get any faster. That way, I will have the best CD-RW drive available :)
As I recall, at one point, Microsoft's lawyers had a laptop on which they deleted the mouse driver. They took it to some MS retailers and asked if they could help. Anyone who was 'decent' enough to restore the driver was sent letters from the MS legal team threatening them with action for software theft.
I believe that MS didn't condone this action, but still it goes to show the mentality of some lawyers.
Is it? I thought Outlook Express was a virus-support API. I suspect the fact you can send email with it is a bug. :)
The real advantage that the law enforcement agencies get is they can prosecute for illegal decryption.
Say you get raided and have 1000 copies of 'Snow White' on DivX. They can't get you for illegal distribution, but they could arrest you for illegal decryption, as it's more than fair use. We have something similar with Mobile Phones in the UK, it's now illegal to change the serial number (IMEI), the real reason for this is so that poeple suspected of nicking phones can be arrested on another charge.
Reminds me of when Windows 2000 came out.
Built using New NT Technology!
FWIW, I believe there was a company who were selling an Amiga emulator, they had licensed the ROM images and were distributing them with the emulator. I forget the precise details, but if they've done it before, they might do it again.
Okay, I'm not an expert, but I was under the impression that DVDs were neither PAL or NTSC, they're just encoded MPEG-2. Surely it's the function of the DVD player to output the correct analogue signal. If you buy a DVD player in the US, surely it outputs all DVDs as NTSC (assuming you've modified it to play multi-region). I'm pretty sure all players in the UK output PAL, irrespective of the DVD.
"That 800 dollar imac" is probably one of the new ones, G3 at 500MHz (or thereabouts) I'm currently running the public beta of OS X on my original 233MHz iMac and it works fine (admittedly, it's got 96MB of RAM, rather than the default 32). You could probably even pick up one of these for $500 these days, and they run OS X great!
It's already out there (for Mac users) - There is a browser called iCab - It smiles if your HTML is valid and frowns if it's got errors in it. You can also click the face and it will list all the errors. I use it to validate all my websites. It's still in development, and the final version will be shareware. There must be similar stuff out there for M$ and *nix platforms...