Slashdot Mirror


User: darkonc

darkonc's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
2,047
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 2,047

  1. I'm Putting Up a Free Ringtone Site. on Apple, the RIAA, and Ringtones · · Score: 1
    I think that the RIAA just shot themselves in the foot here.

    If ringtones aren't derivative works, then the RIAA companies aren't the only group that is allowed to put up ringtones.

    anybody can put together ringtones from their favorite song and make them available on the 'net (or anywhere else that suits their fancy).

  2. Re:Big Iron on GPS Transitions to New Control System · · Score: 2, Insightful
    They didn't want to continue using the old software -- and, given that they wanted a complete rewrite of the old code, staying with {a seriously crufty old mainframe OS that considers terminals to be wierdass cardreader/cardpunch units} would be just silly.

    The other nice thing about doing things this way is that, if the new UNIX code turns out to have nasty bugs, they can always failover to the old system. If the new system is based on an entirely new architecture, then the probability of simultaneous bugs is pleasantly low.

  3. SCO is solvent on SCO Blames Linux For Bankruptcy Filing · · Score: 5, Informative
    SCO is solvent -- unless you include the money that they {claim that they don't,} owe to Novell. . . but even if they end up owing half of the $24M that Novell claims they owe, that would be more than enough to put them into the red.

    Thus, . . . even if you accept that competition from Linux has hurt them, what really cooked their goose was suing Novell and, thus, forcing Novell to counter-sue. (Once SCO sued Novell, if Novell hadn't countered with the demand for payment of owed royalties, they might have been permanently barred from suing SCO for that $20M at a later date).

    Of course, in their bankruptcy filings, SCO doesn't acknowledge that they owe Novell anything ... presumably under the premise that nothing is owing until the judge declares so in the trial (that is now being held in limbo by the Chapter 11 request). The problem that SCO may have, however, is that -- until, and unless Novell's royalties are declared (or acknowledged) owing, SCO is actually solvent, which means that the bankruptcy court may actually deny their request to go into chapter 11.

    On the other hand, admitting that they owe all of this money to SCO would defeat the probable purpose of the filing -- which appears to be keeping Novell off of the list of top creditors. (I'm not going to link to groklaw, here, because their servers are SOOO snowed under by all this sudden attention -- and that just after they upgraded!).

    The reason why SCO probably fears Novell being on their list of top creditors is that Novell would then lead a board of creditors which would have an incredibly wide-ranging ability to look into the recent actions of SCO from the inside -- and given how much SCO has been dancing to prevent certain disclosures in court, I expect that they'll be very unhappy to see Novell lawyers walking into the office to pull that very same information out of SCO's files in person.
    And then there's the question of how much 'encouragement' Microsoft provided for the lawsuit against Linux in the first place.

    Yeppers. I expect that there's gonna be a whole lot of hand-wringing in Utah over the next week or so... possibly even for over the next couple of years.

  4. Perhaps he Should Avoid Windows, as well. on Walt Mossberg Reviews Ubuntu · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I just used a friend's Vista laptop, and I also had problems with the touchpad doing stupid things to me. I understand that many other people are also having problems with it's sound support, and it takes a $45 software add-on for people to view commercial DVDs on XP (haven't tried on Vista) -- which is more expensive than a low-end set-top hardware DVD player.

    But open source is a two-edged sword. While it draws on smart developers from many places, nobody is ultimately responsible for the quality of the product, . . . [[TFA]] and he has obviously never read Microsoft's EULAs.
  5. Re:This isn't justice: too little, too late on Microsoft Loses EU Anti-Trust Appeal · · Score: 1

    Liberals may not win any elections, but they sure won one part of the "small, powerless government" agenda, and it ain't the "small" one. You are, I think confuse liberals with libertarians. The fight to 'get governments out of the way of large megacorps like Microsoft which would happily chew up even medium-sized competitors and spit their not-so-juicy leftovers out on the sidewalk' is one area where libertarians and conservatives seem to be in alliance. It's also one area where liberals don't want to see things go.

    These people will often site Adam Smith as the grandfather of Laissez-faire capitalism and the principle of 'free market'. If you take a closer look at his work, however, it becomes apparent that he saw "big business" as being just as corruptive on the economy as "big government" -- some people would even say that he saw them as roughly equivalent. In both cases you have people at a far-away headquarters ('capital') making decisions about what's going to happen in my quarter of the world -- and often with no real care for what happens to the 'little people' like me.

    I mean, from the point of view of the average bloke, how is 'big business' really any better than 'big government'?

  6. Re:ahem.... are you sure? on Retailer Refuses Hardware Repair Due To Linux · · Score: 1

    did you see anything on the case to indicate Linux capable? Yeah ... A keyboard.

    Now, before you flamebusters get your shorts in a knot, yeah, I know that you don't need a keyboard for a networked Linux box, but we're talking about the case here, so I doubt that you can see the CPU without ripping the entire system wide open (which would, of course, give the anal retentive warranty manager a grand maul seizure).

    "Those who take me seriously, deserve to!" -- Shane Conolley

  7. A Perfect Test Case on Retailer Refuses Hardware Repair Due To Linux · · Score: 1
    Call the local EFF equivalent and ask them about who can help you with this case.

    This is almost the perfect test case. As far as I'm aware, tying one product to another is supposed to be illegal -- I.E. they can't force you to buy one product if you purchase another. Forcing you to not only buy but use Microsoft software to keep the warranty on your computer case is about as obvious a case as I can think of.

    Sue their ass off and do not settle unless they promise, in writing, to provide full support for purchases without Windows and hardware support with alternate OSs -- and that it's their responsibility to prove that a problem is software (as opposed to hardware) related.
    I doubt that we'll ever find a better case than this for separating Windows from the hardware.

    The stupid thing about this is that it may ultimately result in an increase in their business if they get a reputation for being an early supporter of Open source, but it's often been said that "The legal system has nothing to do with justice." ...

  8. It's "shared", not "opened". on QNX "Opens" Source Code · · Score: 3, Informative
    Don't drink the PR Cool-Aid(tm) boys. Distinguish this PR hype from reality and call it what it really is -- "Shared Source". It's not Open Source(tm), and it's not "Free".

    You need licenses to do things like release your own version, and that puts it in the same ballpark as Microsoft's shared source initiative.

  9. Re:That's easy on No More TV Listings For MythTV Users · · Score: 1
    It should also be noted, that the intent of the GPL is to allow the sale of services ancillary to the software. Something like paying for the service of compiling TV schedules on an ongoing basis certainly strikes me as an ancilliary service that it would be more than appropriate to be paying for within the GPL moral space (as well as legal).

    Not paying for the service doesn't hobble the software per se. It simply doesn't provide something that the software can use. I should also note that users who don't want to pay are more than free to do the compilation work themselves and use it and/or distribute it with no effective loss to the capability of the software.

  10. I think I saw him... on Steve Fossett Missing · · Score: 5, Funny
    I think he went to Burning Man

    Last I saw him, some chick in a crotchless monkey suit had gotten him totally pissed and convinced him to rip the antenna off of his aircraft to roast wieners over the coals of The Man.

  11. Re:Because - Social Contract - Not acting the Ass on Man Arrested for Refusing to Show Drivers License · · Score: 1
    He's not a dick. He's a concerned citizen protecting his (and our) civil rights from erosion

    Stores have a right to prevent me from shoplifting -- and they're free to ban me from ever returning if I refuse to be strip-searched on leaving the store. I do, however, have the right, in the US, to be free from unreasonable search -- and compulsory searches just because you're walking out a door classivy as unreasonable searches.

    If an employee had followed him through the store, and saw him slip an I-Pod into his pocket as he went through the store -- then didn't see any sign of him pulling it out of his pocket to pay for it as he went through the checkout, then he would have been completely within his/her rights to institute a citizens arrest -- or (being more polite about it) give him an opportunity to produce a reciept and/or show that he'd put the I-Pod back down before arresting him.

    Going from targeted requests to compulsive searches is where the store crossed the line.

    A security droid is free to ask me for a receipt, but if I'm in a rush (say, to catch my bus), I'm also free to refuse, and I will exercise that right -- if I'm in a rush, if I'm simply not in the mood to be bothered, or if I'm in a mood to assert my legal rights. If the droid has real reasons to believe that I have shoplifted beyond my refusal of an unconstitutional search then (s)he's free to place me under arrest -- but there had better be more than a hunch to back up that arrest.

  12. Re:Nevermind on If This Was a Month Ago, OOXML Would Be Over · · Score: 1

    The only real purpose that Microsoft has for Standards is providing something for them to undermine. To the extent to which ISO is undermined, this is good for Microsoft, because when someone points out that Software X doesn't follow ISO standard Y, they can go, "Oh, yeah, ISO. Well you know what they're like...."
    end of argument.

  13. Re:Committee stuffing legally different from lobby on If This Was a Month Ago, OOXML Would Be Over · · Score: 2, Insightful
    That's an interesting question. If they've tried to stuff the US standards bodies, then you don't have to look at actions outside the US, and the legal landscape gets a bit simpler.

    However, it could be argued that these are (foreign) subisidiaries of Microsoft acting to help Microsoft (US) maintain their monopoly in the US. As such, because they are minions of a US corporation acting to protect a US monopoly, it might be appropriate to US antitrust action. (I am not a lawyer -- much less a judge).

  14. Re:OOXML has failed, but it isn't over. on If This Was a Month Ago, OOXML Would Be Over · · Score: 5, Interesting
    From what I can tell, it started with Massachusetts's decision to limit their next office product purcase to products which support "Open" and "XML-based" Document protocols. At that time, Open Document Format (which was based on the Open Office XML document format) was the only open document format available. This meant that Microsoft would either have to bow to using a format defined and controlled by somebody else, or somehow make their own closed format into something acceptable by Microsoft.

    They went about this by following two tracks:

    • On one track, they made life unbearable for the CIO at Massachusetts -- and also his successor, who also understood the issues at hand ... until they finally ended up with a CIO who would swallow.
    • On the other track they suddenly decided to submit their XMLish document format to ECMA to make it an 'open' standard. ... but huge chunks of the 'XML-standard' were actually embeded binary chunks who's documentation consisted of "Uhm, reverse engineer Office-97 to figure this out, OK?". Even with these huge chunks effectively MIA, their 'standard' still consisted of over 6000 pages -- in part, because OOXML eschews international standards in favour of entrenching 20 years of MS bugs (like thinking that 1900 was a leap year, and encoding language types in wonky ways)

      More problmatically, Microsoft made supporting some of these odities 'optional', which means that

      1. You could end up with a nominally OOXML implementation which didn't support these chunks,
      2. Implementations of these chunks wouldn't be protected by Microsoft's patent grants for the ECMA standard,
      3. Microsoft could (and did) then promote these undocumented and unprotected features as 'critical aspects' of OOXML -- that any competitors who wanted to produce a competing OOXML implementation have a hard time (both technically and legally) implementing.
    In short, OOXML allows microsoft to claim (to technically illiterate political cheque-signers) that Office 2007 uses an Open, XML-based document format -- but do it in a way that pretty much ensures them that nobody that's not a Microsoft lap-dog will be able to legally create an implementation that can actually read most Office 2007 documents. (or -- at the very least -- it will take them years to put something legal together, by which time Ofice 2007 will have squeezed Open Office out of the market).
  15. Re:Why can't they provide a reader? on If This Was a Month Ago, OOXML Would Be Over · · Score: 1

    If Microsoft wants OOXML to be a "standard" they should provide source code to read/render a file.
    I don't see why the standards bodies haven't insisted on this from the beginning. You don't want source code -- especially if it's not well documented and well-written.
    What you really want is a well-designed and a well documented format, so that just about any team can write a reader in the language of their choice.

    Unfortunately, the OOXML standard is neither well designed nor well documented. The way that it's currently defined, doing an open source OOXML reader (especially one which included the features which MS touts as most important) would be both (unnecessarily) technically challenging and a legal minefield.

  16. Re:new use of old trick on New Method To Detect and Prove GPL Violations · · Score: 1
    We're talking about 20 lines of assembly -- probably the equivalent of 5-10 lines of C. There's not a whole lot of room for divergence in 20 lines of assembly. Even 20 lines of C would have been a good bit more surprising.
    Assembly is a reasonably regimented language, and in that kind of space, the only difference would be variable names and jump labels -- and, considering that this code was probably already surrounded by variable name protocols, theres' not going to be that much room to diverge there, either.

    It's still an interesting story -- but far from shocking.

  17. Office Obscene XML on India Decides to Vote "No" For OOXML · · Score: 1

    I think that we should call it "Office O bscene XML". There are two reasons for this:
    1) It breaks the attempted trademark violation against Open Office, and
    2) Their proprietary binary blobs really are an obscenity in the context of XML.

  18. It's not about lost sales. on Latest Music Piracy Study Overstates Effect of P2P · · Score: 1
    The reason why you have these obviously illogical arguments coming out of the music industry is that it's not really about lost sales. The music industry has a hate-on for P2P because it threatens their stranglehold on the artists.

    The reason why the music industry can get artists to sign contracts that can have the artist sell 8 million records (at $15 a pop) and still end up in hock to the record company is that artists feel that the only way to get wide distribution and fame is to get 'a contract'. Now, if P2P allows new artists a way to get world-wide recognition without having to sign away the rights to their work, the record companies are going to start getting non-monopoly pricing for their services.

    It's actually a lot like the Microsoft/Linux battle -- just not as obvious (or quite as organized on the non-monopoly end of the battle).

    (( and, yeah, a starving student with $20 in his pocket for the weekend isn't going to cost the music industry $400 in lost sales by downloading 20 obscure tracks via the Gnutella network -- especially if the downloads eventually mean that he saves up the money to buy 2-3 records because of those 20 downloads. ))

  19. This really may be an improvement. on MS Seeks Patent On Virtual Fuzzy Dice · · Score: 1
    I think that they're talking about a system where, for example,
    When it notices that you've just had an accident (as indicated by a triggered airbag), the speedometer is replaced by a huge 'hazard light' switch..

    If this occurs just as you're reaching for where the hazard light was, then it'll switch the hazard light back to it's usual position -- just as you're reaching for it in the normal speedometer position. ... ad-infinitum, until the ambulance crew shows up and admits you to the psych ward.

  20. OOO, the dilema.... Money vs Morals on Antigua May Be Allowed To Violate US Copyrights · · Score: 1
    And I'll bet you my BMW which one is would win, with bishop Bush in the white-house.

  21. Re:Allowed? on Antigua May Be Allowed To Violate US Copyrights · · Score: 4, Funny

    hard to convince anyone that you need a new war just cause of some pirate DVDs. Just? JUST???!!!

    My god, man, we're talking about pirates here! High seas battles, raped women and children, missing gold, plunder at the bottom of the sea, "arg matey" and worse!

    Those cretins are almost as bad as terrorists.

    Unless you want to have your next sailing trip interrupted by these cannon-toting freaks, you'd better support a war!

    ((Those who take me seriously, deserve to. -- Shane Connoly))
  22. This is Not^w Just an exercise.... on Punchscan Wins Open Source Voting Competition · · Score: 1

    In the North Carolina case, ES&S attributed the problem to a software glitch that caused the machines to falsely sense that their memories were full. Although the machines allowed voters to continue to cast ballots, the votes were not recorded.

    I guess they figured that, for PR reasons, it was better to silently throw out votes than inform the voter that the ballot box was stuffed^w full.

  23. Don't bet that OOXML is dead, just yet. on What Happens Next on the US Vote on OOXML · · Score: 1
    Microsoft had to do some heavy hacking (and stacking of the standards organizations), just to get OOXML this far. Don't presume that they're not continuing their legal footwork behind the scenes to make sure that the people who need to vote for OOXML don't just give up and vote 'yes' to get Microsoft off of their back (or get MS money in their pocket, or whatever it is that MS pushes as a reason to vote for OOXML).

    Watch this situation closely, and if you can put your hand into the process to make sure that it flows properly, I'd suggest that you consider doing just that.

  24. Re:No OOXML; Maybe Not ODF on What Happens Next on the US Vote on OOXML · · Score: 2, Insightful
    The 'standard' is incomplete and includes a bunch of land mines for people who wish to create a true open source implementation.

    Microsoft is pushing the most important part of OOXML being it's ability to include old Office file data as opaque binary chunks (!). Problem is that their documentation of those binary chunks pretty much consists of 'try reverse-engineering old versions of office.' -- which is against the EULA for old versions of office.

    Even if someone manages to figure out how to decode those old chunks properly, Microsoft's patent peace for them doesn't apply because they weren't explicitly described in the ECMA 'standard'. Many of these 'critical' parts of OOXML are also described in the documentation as 'optional', which means that their so-called partners (like Novel and linspire) who are creating readers can create converters that MS can trumpet as 'ecma compliant', but that don't handle the part of OOXML that they are selling to the MA (and other) government as the most usefull aspect of OOXML.

    In other words, this 'standard' explicitly does not do what you see as it's most useful aspect.

    You could easily end up with documents with critical parts readable only by Microsoft software .... and then find that Microsoft has stopped supporting those critical parts 'because they're optional'.

  25. Re:The two are not mutually exclusive on Which Google Should Congress Believe? · · Score: 1
    This is true -- but this isn't like the mythical man-month situation where they're trying to add programmers to an already backlogged project. Google's problem is that they have more projects than they do capable programmers, and -- for some of the most lucrative projects, the people who would be best for the job are unavailable because of H1-B problems.

    As such, Google is finding itself hiring lots of people, some of whom are sub-optimal for the jobs they're doing.

    This problem is a good part of why Microsoft recently opened up a development centre in Vancouver BC. Canada's lighter immigration restrictions apparently allow them to have more of the best people that they can find (overseas), but still have them 'close to home'.