Yes, but the rest of the DVD system is covered by a million patents. And the only way to get a licence is to agree to include CSS.
IP Licencing is the largest cost that goes into a DVD player. Anyone trying to avoid the DVDCCA would be facing down either a hugely expensive patent lawsuit or a contract suit like the company in the story.
It's not really a seperate issue. Executive-types generally don't want to hold every email discussion in their head and very often want the reply history included. This is especially important when you are trying to get someone to agree to something, and it helps to have it all out in black-n-white so they can write "I agree" at the top and go on with life.
Usenet style quoting works very well for Usenet or listservs. Corporate mail is a different ball of wax.
PJ's work at debunking SCO's claims have little or nothing to do with her involvement with OSRM.
If I put on my tinfoil hat, I'd had to disagree -- SCO and OSRM seem to be two forks of the same "Linux IP FUD" strategy -- SCO focusing on the Unix roots, and OSRM focusing on patents. And thus in a perverse sense, SCO and OSRM are in competition to see who can profit from Linux's downfall, so it's understandable that someone could see a conflict of interest -- "No, Linux doesn't have THOSE IP problems, it has THESE IP problems."
Anyway, if MSFT was financially related to OSRM, it wouldn't really shock me, even if it meant PJ was playing the dupe.
Actually, I read it. It was just a point about how journalism tends to filter out the 'wobble words' to make a snappy headline, and that's not necessarily an indication of bias towards anything other than selling ad views. (Offtopic, this is one reason that Kerry had trouble in the presidential campaign -- his style has so many mitigators and citations that it was difficult for people to understand what he was saying.)
But I think your point is correct. OSRM needed to emphasize the potentially, because without it, they didn't have the U in FUD, and had nothing to sell.
An example of this can be seen in the above quote and the claim that "OSRM has claimed that the Linux kernel infringes 283 unidentified patents" despite the fact that OSRM has been very public in stressing that this is a POTENTIAL number
But, I'll ask you, why would a company issue a press release about (potential) patent infringement, especially when they stand to make money from it, if not to stir Fear, Uncertaintity, and Doubt?
Companies don't issue press releases to articulate nuances, they do it to hype and sell. When Steve Ballmer started running around repeating the 283 Patents number, that was a huge marketing victory for OSRM.
Ultimately it's very odd that PJ or her allies feel that the OSRM thing is a "systematic SCO smear" or a conspiracy among tech journalists. Many well-meaning people on Groklaw and Slashdot warned that OSRM would end up serving as a FUD machine.
You might not like it, but Windows 2000 is going to be around for a very long time. Most users are very happy with it, it does everything they need it to, and Microsoft has extended the support window to 2010.
In retrospect, Win 2000 has proven to be incredibly more mature than the Linux OSes from the same period. Some day there will be a Linux Distro that people will WANT to run for 10 years.
Shouldn't be modded as funny. Unlike Apache WebDAV, IIS impersonates users and therefore WebDAV files have the expected permissions/ownership. However, I don't know how cleanly quotes are handled.
(IIS being designed for "intranets" while Apache is designed for internet sites.)
Your absolutely right on a technical level, but remember that in this timeperiod Mozilla was eating up 50MB of memory and crashing left and right even though it was years over schedule. I can understand any reluctance to include that in the AOL client just because it was buzzword-compliant. I suppose if they'd only given them another year or two...
Politics surely played a big role, but Netscape was still churning out technology that had huge potential but poor product packaging. Had XUL come from Sun or Microsoft, I'm sure it would have been a huge hit. But instead it was a side OSS project from AOL, and thus lack[s|ed] the GUI designer support, the documentation, the marketing, etc.
The problem was that Netscape was making Mozilla the open source world and not for their corporate masters at AOL. They five or six years dinking around writing UI toolkits and bugbases and pontificating on standards, and when they finally released something (NS 6), it was a pile of ass.
Slash techies can see the value in Gecko, XUL, etc, but Netscape never positioned this stuff as something that the mothership would want to use. They were building "technology" for a company that could only understand packaged products. Frankly, if it wasn't for the Microsoft Antitrust lawsuit, Netscape would have been closed down long before Mozilla got usable.
WinAmp may have been similar: Their player was designed for their hard-core traditional userbase, but never expanded to be something useful to AOL.
Now, ultimately this was AOL's fault for having these pseudo-independent dev houses and not setting their priorities correctly. But maybe both Netscape and WinAmp should have been more conscious of who was signing their paychecks.
The AOL client feature requirements and schedule dictates what goes ahead.
AOL Client is a revenue stream. Netscape and Winamp never got past being Internet Freebies.
My problem is with the Microsoft lovers....They can't seem to be able to wrap their brains arround the fact that a community developed web browser could ever be better than what the mighty Microsoft has produced.
First, cool your jets. Firefox only went 1.0 yesterday, and before then there hasn't been a free, production-level browser that appealed to IE users. Windows techies have been trying various versions of Mozilla/Netscape for the last 3-4 years, and up to recently they haven't liked them.
Second, wrap your mind around the fact that "IE works just fine..." really is true for most users (except for some corner-cases).
If your attitude is that it is mainfestly obvious that IE sucks, your experience differs from most people's and it is no wonder they won't listen to you. Face it, the sell of FireFox is "Like IE... but better". (Anyway, you must be a hoot, pushing "bad advocacy" on people and then blaming your victims when they tune you out.)
Finally, I see the exact same attitude almost daily in the Mozilla Lovers community. People complained for years about how bloated the AppSuite is, and the response was basically "Is Not".
Funny that you put this in the past tense, as if a bunch of promised vaporware is reality or something.
Novell's main source of revenue comes from NetWare-based products. They bought a money-losing SuSE, but haven't done much to reposition it or sell it to their current customer base, yet. They bought Ximain, but haven't articulated any clear plan for the "desktop" or developer tools (Mono). They haven't even put the SuSE (KDE) people and the Ximain people on the same page.
I only say this because Novell has a history of schizophrenic strategy changes every few years. They might become a "Linux Shop" in the future, but I wouldn't count these chickens before they hatch.
> Apple adds about 3 million new Macs to their base each year. I guess that about 1 million old Macs get tossed,
So the missing 2 Million Macs per year just run indefinitely? That's retarded. (Oh, wait, I have a Quadra 950 sitting in my junk room. I guess I'm that's part of your "installed base":P)
Second, the Macintosh installed base of computer is around 15-25% (don't confuse this with marketshare, which is the total percentage of Macs sold in comarison to the rest of the computer market)
The size of the entire installed base is irrelevant to this discussion. Nobody's going to be buying AA games for their 6 year old 333Mhz iMac running OS 8.6.
Look at it this way: What's the installed base of Apple machines that have enough horsepower to play Doom 3? You're talking about G5s only, so it's pretty miniscule at this point. Thus Doom3 for Mac gets delayed for a while until enough iMacs get sold.
(It's also ridiclous that sub-5% marketshare numbers for the last several years somehow translate into 25% of the installed base. You must think that everyone's still using their Performa 5200s and every sub-Pentium4 PC has been thrown away. As if that sounds good for Apple. But whatever.)
It is true Apple has a much higher marketshare among home users. And Mac users tend to purchase software. Both of which helps them quite a bit.
The point here is that Linux really needs a single, standard widget toolkit... Everything else should change to use the chosen one
Neither Windows nor Mac use a single widget toolkit. What they do do is theme and provide consistant style guides for applications. I don't hear people complaining that Firefox does not use native Win32 widgets.
While you guys are off fighting Widget War III (The Chosen One), there are reasonable solutions that could be put in place tomorrow.
Just implement a centralized settings file or database or -erm- registry. Just dump all the UI / Key command settings there and every application can adapt to using them. (Put MIME types and Default Browser/Mailer settings there as well while you are at it.)
I could care less if every application has the exact same size buttons. The problem is that every application is a different shade of gray/beige. Also, if I say I want my menus to be Purple 20 point Times Roman font on a Pink background, I should only have to do it once and every app should pick it up.
This is not how the ALT is to be used which is why FF does not do it
Where do the standards say that showing a tooltip for ALT text is illegal? It doesn't in your link.
AFAICT, IE does implement both TITLE and ALT properly, so therefore it is conformant to the standards. Showing a tooltip for ALT (when TITLE doesn't exist) seems to be an optional feature that is a matter of taste only. And the fact is a lot of pages seem to rely on that legacy behavior.
His point is that Apache is the "most popular"(which it is)
For some pigheaded reason, the entire Linux community seem to be set on misreading these statistics.
Apache is only most popular among sites with domainnames that are included in the Netcraft Survey. Since every install of Windows 2000 fires up IIS by default, there's vast number of uncounted IIS boxes to be used as wormfood.
For automated-type attacks, you do need a certain concentration of common configurations. Therefore it follows that as Linux finds its way into the hands of home users and incompetant administrators, the likelyhood of a "Nimbda" style attack increases greatly.
Yes, but Oracle's current multicore customers are using high-end Unix systems and are used to paying top-dollar for everything.
Intel/AMD have come out and said so, but it's a pretty sure bet that they will be selling dual-core CPUs for the same price as single core CPUs today. That means the customer who buys a $2500 2-way Xeon/Opteron today will be buying a 4-way system for the same $2500 next year. Oracle is in for a shock if they think they can get away with doubling a Dell customer's licensing costs.
There's at least a few IE rendering issues which relate to Mosaic-compatibility (" " for example). But that's probably intentional.
I suspect it is mainly due to the fact that IE4 was targetting Netscape 3.0, and Microsoft put a massive QA effort into making sure that every garbage htmlsoup legacy page that NS3 could render could also be handled by IE.
IE might not be fully standards-compliant, but it is a "modern" engine that supports DOM/CSS and probably has very little Mosaic code left in it.
XPI also has no sandbox at all and can bind to all local components, "safe for scripting" or not. Once again you commit falsehoods by pointing out a problem in IE and implying that it does not exist with XPI. Good day.
As I said, ActiveX and XPI are very similar, as XPI is a clone of ActiveX functionality. The difference mainly lies in the policy mechanisms, and even there they are very similar.
You make a point elsewhere that a user has to "click a link" to install XPI, so I suspect that's what you mean by "embedding". Well, a few months ago (before the whitelist appeared), there were pages that attempted to install malicious XPIs that were "embedded" (when the page loaded). I didn't View Source and see how they worked, but someone figured out how to do it.
(I suspect they used the installTrigger() javascript function in such a way to bypass normal preventions.)
Even so, getting the user to click a link isn't a huge challenge. The whitelist is a much bigger barrier.
Slashdot Mirror
> Not realy. There is no patent on CSS.
Yes, but the rest of the DVD system is covered by a million patents. And the only way to get a licence is to agree to include CSS.
IP Licencing is the largest cost that goes into a DVD player. Anyone trying to avoid the DVDCCA would be facing down either a hugely expensive patent lawsuit or a contract suit like the company in the story.
It's not really a seperate issue. Executive-types generally don't want to hold every email discussion in their head and very often want the reply history included. This is especially important when you are trying to get someone to agree to something, and it helps to have it all out in black-n-white so they can write "I agree" at the top and go on with life.
Usenet style quoting works very well for Usenet or listservs. Corporate mail is a different ball of wax.
PJ's work at debunking SCO's claims have little or nothing to do with her involvement with OSRM.
If I put on my tinfoil hat, I'd had to disagree -- SCO and OSRM seem to be two forks of the same "Linux IP FUD" strategy -- SCO focusing on the Unix roots, and OSRM focusing on patents. And thus in a perverse sense, SCO and OSRM are in competition to see who can profit from Linux's downfall, so it's understandable that someone could see a conflict of interest -- "No, Linux doesn't have THOSE IP problems, it has THESE IP problems."
Anyway, if MSFT was financially related to OSRM, it wouldn't really shock me, even if it meant PJ was playing the dupe.
Actually, I read it. It was just a point about how journalism tends to filter out the 'wobble words' to make a snappy headline, and that's not necessarily an indication of bias towards anything other than selling ad views. (Offtopic, this is one reason that Kerry had trouble in the presidential campaign -- his style has so many mitigators and citations that it was difficult for people to understand what he was saying.)
But I think your point is correct. OSRM needed to emphasize the potentially, because without it, they didn't have the U in FUD, and had nothing to sell.
An example of this can be seen in the above quote and the claim that "OSRM has claimed that the Linux kernel infringes 283 unidentified patents" despite the fact that OSRM has been very public in stressing that this is a POTENTIAL number
Noted Anti-Linux FUD site slashdot.org had a very similar headline: Linux Violates 283 Patents, says Insurance Company
But, I'll ask you, why would a company issue a press release about (potential) patent infringement, especially when they stand to make money from it, if not to stir Fear, Uncertaintity, and Doubt?
Companies don't issue press releases to articulate nuances, they do it to hype and sell. When Steve Ballmer started running around repeating the 283 Patents number, that was a huge marketing victory for OSRM.
Ultimately it's very odd that PJ or her allies feel that the OSRM thing is a "systematic SCO smear" or a conspiracy among tech journalists. Many well-meaning people on Groklaw and Slashdot warned that OSRM would end up serving as a FUD machine.
You might not like it, but Windows 2000 is going to be around for a very long time. Most users are very happy with it, it does everything they need it to, and Microsoft has extended the support window to 2010.
In retrospect, Win 2000 has proven to be incredibly more mature than the Linux OSes from the same period. Some day there will be a Linux Distro that people will WANT to run for 10 years.
Shouldn't be modded as funny. Unlike Apache WebDAV, IIS impersonates users and therefore WebDAV files have the expected permissions/ownership. However, I don't know how cleanly quotes are handled.
(IIS being designed for "intranets" while Apache is designed for internet sites.)
Microsoft also licenced their implementation from Sun. Sun wouldn't have had much a case without a license.
And the real reason Microsoft lost is that their java complier emitted illegal opcodes (for C#-like delegates) that would crash other JVMs.
Your absolutely right on a technical level, but remember that in this timeperiod Mozilla was eating up 50MB of memory and crashing left and right even though it was years over schedule. I can understand any reluctance to include that in the AOL client just because it was buzzword-compliant. I suppose if they'd only given them another year or two...
Politics surely played a big role, but Netscape was still churning out technology that had huge potential but poor product packaging. Had XUL come from Sun or Microsoft, I'm sure it would have been a huge hit. But instead it was a side OSS project from AOL, and thus lack[s|ed] the GUI designer support, the documentation, the marketing, etc.
Netscape made Mozilla & Gecko.
The problem was that Netscape was making Mozilla the open source world and not for their corporate masters at AOL. They five or six years dinking around writing UI toolkits and bugbases and pontificating on standards, and when they finally released something (NS 6), it was a pile of ass.
Slash techies can see the value in Gecko, XUL, etc, but Netscape never positioned this stuff as something that the mothership would want to use. They were building "technology" for a company that could only understand packaged products. Frankly, if it wasn't for the Microsoft Antitrust lawsuit, Netscape would have been closed down long before Mozilla got usable.
WinAmp may have been similar: Their player was designed for their hard-core traditional userbase, but never expanded to be something useful to AOL.
Now, ultimately this was AOL's fault for having these pseudo-independent dev houses and not setting their priorities correctly. But maybe both Netscape and WinAmp should have been more conscious of who was signing their paychecks.
The AOL client feature requirements and schedule dictates what goes ahead.
AOL Client is a revenue stream. Netscape and Winamp never got past being Internet Freebies.
My problem is with the Microsoft lovers. ...They can't seem to be able to wrap their brains arround the fact that a community developed web browser could ever be better than what the mighty Microsoft has produced.
... but better". (Anyway, you must be a hoot, pushing "bad advocacy" on people and then blaming your victims when they tune you out.)
First, cool your jets. Firefox only went 1.0 yesterday, and before then there hasn't been a free, production-level browser that appealed to IE users. Windows techies have been trying various versions of Mozilla/Netscape for the last 3-4 years, and up to recently they haven't liked them.
Second, wrap your mind around the fact that "IE works just fine..." really is true for most users (except for some corner-cases).
If your attitude is that it is mainfestly obvious that IE sucks, your experience differs from most people's and it is no wonder they won't listen to you. Face it, the sell of FireFox is "Like IE
Finally, I see the exact same attitude almost daily in the Mozilla Lovers community. People complained for years about how bloated the AppSuite is, and the response was basically "Is Not".
> Novell has reinvented itself as a Linux shop.
Funny that you put this in the past tense, as if a bunch of promised vaporware is reality or something.
Novell's main source of revenue comes from NetWare-based products. They bought a money-losing SuSE, but haven't done much to reposition it or sell it to their current customer base, yet. They bought Ximain, but haven't articulated any clear plan for the "desktop" or developer tools (Mono). They haven't even put the SuSE (KDE) people and the Ximain people on the same page.
I only say this because Novell has a history of schizophrenic strategy changes every few years. They might become a "Linux Shop" in the future, but I wouldn't count these chickens before they hatch.
> Apple adds about 3 million new Macs to their base each year. I guess that about 1 million old Macs get tossed,
:P)
So the missing 2 Million Macs per year just run indefinitely? That's retarded. (Oh, wait, I have a Quadra 950 sitting in my junk room. I guess I'm that's part of your "installed base"
Second, the Macintosh installed base of computer is around 15-25% (don't confuse this with marketshare, which is the total percentage of Macs sold in comarison to the rest of the computer market)
The size of the entire installed base is irrelevant to this discussion. Nobody's going to be buying AA games for their 6 year old 333Mhz iMac running OS 8.6.
Look at it this way: What's the installed base of Apple machines that have enough horsepower to play Doom 3? You're talking about G5s only, so it's pretty miniscule at this point. Thus Doom3 for Mac gets delayed for a while until enough iMacs get sold.
(It's also ridiclous that sub-5% marketshare numbers for the last several years somehow translate into 25% of the installed base. You must think that everyone's still using their Performa 5200s and every sub-Pentium4 PC has been thrown away. As if that sounds good for Apple. But whatever.)
It is true Apple has a much higher marketshare among home users. And Mac users tend to purchase software. Both of which helps them quite a bit.
The point here is that Linux really needs a single, standard widget toolkit ... Everything else should change to use the chosen one
Neither Windows nor Mac use a single widget toolkit. What they do do is theme and provide consistant style guides for applications. I don't hear people complaining that Firefox does not use native Win32 widgets.
While you guys are off fighting Widget War III (The Chosen One), there are reasonable solutions that could be put in place tomorrow.
Just implement a centralized settings file or database or -erm- registry. Just dump all the UI / Key command settings there and every application can adapt to using them. (Put MIME types and Default Browser/Mailer settings there as well while you are at it.)
I could care less if every application has the exact same size buttons. The problem is that every application is a different shade of gray/beige. Also, if I say I want my menus to be Purple 20 point Times Roman font on a Pink background, I should only have to do it once and every app should pick it up.
This is not how the ALT is to be used which is why FF does not do it
Where do the standards say that showing a tooltip for ALT text is illegal? It doesn't in your link.
AFAICT, IE does implement both TITLE and ALT properly, so therefore it is conformant to the standards. Showing a tooltip for ALT (when TITLE doesn't exist) seems to be an optional feature that is a matter of taste only. And the fact is a lot of pages seem to rely on that legacy behavior.
ActiveX/COM was ported to the classic MacOS by MS for IE/Office. At one time there was a couple Internet plugins that used it.
Apparently Apple themselves support COM on OS X.
His point is that Apache is the "most popular"(which it is)
For some pigheaded reason, the entire Linux community seem to be set on misreading these statistics.
Apache is only most popular among sites with domainnames that are included in the Netcraft Survey. Since every install of Windows 2000 fires up IIS by default, there's vast number of uncounted IIS boxes to be used as wormfood.
For automated-type attacks, you do need a certain concentration of common configurations. Therefore it follows that as Linux finds its way into the hands of home users and incompetant administrators, the likelyhood of a "Nimbda" style attack increases greatly.
XPI downloads can call Win32. YOUR (sic) WRONG. Expletive!
Solution: stop being wrong all the time. (And I agree, attempting to talk to you is lame.)
I'm trying to think of a product that failed because of "too much advertising" ... Nope. Sorry.
Yes, but Oracle's current multicore customers are using high-end Unix systems and are used to paying top-dollar for everything.
Intel/AMD have come out and said so, but it's a pretty sure bet that they will be selling dual-core CPUs for the same price as single core CPUs today. That means the customer who buys a $2500 2-way Xeon/Opteron today will be buying a 4-way system for the same $2500 next year. Oracle is in for a shock if they think they can get away with doubling a Dell customer's licensing costs.
There's at least a few IE rendering issues which relate to Mosaic-compatibility (" " for example). But that's probably intentional.
I suspect it is mainly due to the fact that IE4 was targetting Netscape 3.0, and Microsoft put a massive QA effort into making sure that every garbage htmlsoup legacy page that NS3 could render could also be handled by IE.
IE might not be fully standards-compliant, but it is a "modern" engine that supports DOM/CSS and probably has very little Mosaic code left in it.
XPI also has no sandbox at all and can bind to all local components, "safe for scripting" or not. Once again you commit falsehoods by pointing out a problem in IE and implying that it does not exist with XPI. Good day.
As I said, ActiveX and XPI are very similar, as XPI is a clone of ActiveX functionality. The difference mainly lies in the policy mechanisms, and even there they are very similar.
You make a point elsewhere that a user has to "click a link" to install XPI, so I suspect that's what you mean by "embedding". Well, a few months ago (before the whitelist appeared), there were pages that attempted to install malicious XPIs that were "embedded" (when the page loaded). I didn't View Source and see how they worked, but someone figured out how to do it.
(I suspect they used the installTrigger() javascript function in such a way to bypass normal preventions.)
Even so, getting the user to click a link isn't a huge challenge. The whitelist is a much bigger barrier.
Uses insults instead of their brain
:)
Right, you are a condesending ignoramous with his facts wrong. And you started it
ActiveX controls are embedded in the page and download automatically.
This is just factually incorrect. (Unless you mess with the settings, but this is also true of FireFox.)