Oops. Typo at the start. 90,000 bpi, not 30,000. So 11,250 bytes per square inch in 8 colour, 46,250 bytes per square inch in 256 colour. That works out to about 8MB per page 8-colour, 36MB at 256-colour.
600x600 would quadruple that to a peak of 144MB, and 1200x1200 would boost it to 578MB.
Improving colour discrimination to 4 bits per colour jet (presume 3), and you have a total of 12 colour adding another 50% over the 256 colour scheme.
The problem is the smaller the pixels and finer the colour discrimination, the greater the chance for ink bleed, alignment errors, colour fading, and other issues. You'd end up having to put more and more data into error detection and correction, drastically reducing the effectiveness of such techniques.
Presume 300x300 dpi with only an 8-color system providing an additional 3 bits. For sake of argument, presume the 3 bits added by colour are used for error correction (11 bits/byte vs. the 10 bits/byte that is the more common average for simple CRCs.) 30,000 bits per square inch, or 3,750 bytes.
Presuming an 8x10 print area on 8.5x11 inch stock (which allows for "barrier" regions that provide "alignment" for the scan), that's 800 x 3750 or 3,000,000 raw bytes of data per sheet.
Adding in compression might boost that a bit, but not by too much, and it's an unfair measure of a storage medium to presume compression.
If your ideal of 256 colours is involved, that's 8 bits of discrimination instead of 3, or 5 times as much potential storage for 15,000,000 bytes or a little over 14MB.
There are rare occasions where a patentable algorithm crops up. Distasteful though it was, the GIF patent was a valid definition of a specific data structure and accompanying algorithm descriptions for it's use.
On the contrary, a recent patent about double-linked lists of images is ludicrous. Double-linked lists are a very old general purpose data structure. The fact that they happen to be used for a general or specific image format is nothing new.
Had they come up with a new image compression algorithm dealing with n-space fractals or something, that would be a potential software patent.
Software does not suffer from the "workability" issues of hardware. You can implement solutions that cannot complete a computation using modern hardware, for example. Most of the graphics algorithms and techniques implemented by modern hardware were born as software 20 years ago. The fact that no one could afford to use those software implementations does not make them any less effective at describing the algorithms, data structures, and data flows required to implement the approach.
I suggest using code to express the algorithms because there are several modern programming languages that clearly express such algorithms and structures, not because it will necessarily run to completion in under a thousand years on a modern PC.
Unfortunately the publication would mean that nations which ignore foreign patent policies would easily and happily rip the source code from the archives, use it, and thumb their noses at the fool who thought a foreign legal policy would stop them.
I believe it was "Dr. Dobb's Journal" that used to publish code that could be scanned, sort of a variant on barcodes.
Printed at the higher resolutions available to printers and scanners 15-20 years later, how much data could you store using that encoding format on paper? We've gone from about 100dpi to 600-1200, which actually means at least 36 times the data storage per square inch.
I fail to see how a binary pixel can fail to take less space than a printed geometric shape. You can squirt an ink dot a lot smaller than you can a recognizable microscopic shape.
Colour filtering to provide "layers" of data is a form of bonding or multi-frequency processing. Even CMY alone triples the storage potential; the colour discrimination of the scanner is the only limit to the potential bandwidth multiplier (plus data loss due to fading.)
In other words, it sounds a lot more original than it actually is. Odds are the creator is too young to have even heard of Dr. Dobbs, much less have played with the code scanners to save typing time.
Were the code republished in such a fashion to ban US use in the event that Microsoft lobbed a patent at the Linux kernel or other GNU software, Novell/SuSE would still not have the rights to continue distribution in the US market. They'd probably have to use an overseas division (e.g. Novell/SuSE Germany) to continue distribution to other markets.
Ok, so under Section 8 (Klinger? 'dat you?), the GPL variants can still apply to code that is in dispute.
However, that still requires that the Author/Owner republish the code with the updated license terms.
I also have a personal moral issue with Section 8 vs. the general intent of the GPL to make code available to everyone. Like the misguided attempt to enforce personal views on media and encryption in v3 instead of dealing with copyright courts, Section 8 allows people to discriminate against nations. The entire populace of a nation should not be penalized for the idiocy of the company or individual claiming IP infringement.
Either the software infringes or it does not. If it does, international theft is still theft, and there are treaties and procedures for dealing with it. There is no way to properly defend any source license against a rogue IP legal system, or a valid one that is being abused.
If a nation were to consistently be raising IP issues that other nations do not, then I would say it's reasonable to explicitly update the official GPL variants (not just one code module) to ban that nation's participation. That way the onus is on nations to ensure that their IP courts are acting in a resonable fashion to encourage innovation instead of to stifle competition.
For software, there are some aspects of "obvious" that aren't applicable to physical device patents.
Any combination of a data object and a general purpose algorithm, data transport, data storage mechanism, or framework/library features should be declared obvious. For example, email transfers over IP. Any data transport can implement the IP functionality; using a particular transport (such as wireless) is not innovation. It's using tools the way they were designed by programmers and companies that encourage reuse -- something that is taught to first year students. Only lawyers and patent leeches can even try to argue that point with a straight face.
Reimplementing an existing solution in another language is not creating new technology, unless the languages are radically different (which would need expert opinion to determine how different programming languages are. I'm thinking in terms of procedural vs. functional.)
Any implementation using a technique, algorithm, or approach published in a textbook or research journal is not innovation. There may be a lack of research on the part of the development team if they didn't know about it, but that doesn't mean they came up with something "new" and patentable.
I firmly believe that software patents should require a functional implementation be submitted within 2 years of an initial application. Hardware patents require engineering diagrams; software patents should require very specific algorithm and data descriptions that are more easily expressed as code. The code in question should not be published by the patent office, but kept in archives to assist with any future dispute resolution by the courts.
Defense of a software patent may require comparison of implementation code. The patent holder making the accusation should be required to provide access to their development archives for the court's experts (not public.) Failure to provide a reasonable history archive should be considered sufficient to prove the patent holder did not take reasonable steps to protect their copyright implementation of the patent.
Like a trademark, failure to defend should result in loss of a patent, and it's previously protected content should become public.
Most important of all, the onus should be on the patent holder to demonstrate that they attempted a "good faith" negotiation to resolve their claim before filing with the courts. That includes demonstrating that they have prepared their evidence BEFORE court, not used the court as a fishing expedition to gain access to evidence that may or may not prove their allegations. The multi-year nightmare of SCO is a disgrace.
"Good faith" also implies the discussion of reasonable licensing terms for the patent, not using them to try to acquire, take over, or bankrupt the purportedly infringing legal entity.
I believe they are talking about a philosophical model, treating a national compute infrastructure as a synthetic memory extension, not a wetwired biological interface. It's a colourful metaphore, not a literal description.
Another way of viewing the Third Brain project might be the application of biological healing and load balancing aspects to a compute fabric. Muscles strengthen with use, the grid increases the measured capacity with need. Stop using them, and the proteins get reabsorbed and reallocated, causing the muscles to weaken and shrink.
IBM has been doing similar work for their mainframes, Sun has their system monitoring and dynamic configuration hooks, so does HP, and I would guess, Microsoft. This is just building out another layer of management infrastructure, treating distributed clusters and nodes as a national or international compute fabric. I would presume that the major vendors use their own technologies to manage their international operations, providing a real-life proof-of-concept deployment to show customers their implementations work.
China treating it as a national rather than corporate focus is just one of those little mindset/cultural differences.
Computing described as biology, nothing more.
Primeur: I can understand that technically: if you have a capability machine you can run capacity jobs, too. But it is more expensive than using a capacity machine. Is that true with your machine, too?
Steve Chen:Not necessarily. That is why we have a single cost-effective but very balanced architecture that can suit intensive I/O, or intensive data, or intensive computation: we can decompose the system anyway we want. So when we detect, for instance, that we need to do more capacity or we need more capability from the continuous self-learning intelligent analysis, we just bring those pieces together when we need them. When your application is running on the system we are learning. It is just like a Brain. But we need a lot of middleware to do that, linked to built-in hardware monitoring.
Primeur: Is the machine that you have out already doing that?
Steve Chen:To some extent it does, but not to the higher levels. In the lower level it does so statically, not yet dynamically. So, if you say, "Today I want to partition the machine in three different ways with so many processors, so many disks, etc.", we can do it. Yet, to reach the higher levels, we need more intelligence to be integrated into the system. We need machine learning, human-machine interaction, artificial intelligence, intelligent search and pattern recognition.
Primeur: Who is working on these new parts? Is that done in a company, or in a project?
Steve Chen:In a company based in the USA and China, called HCOM, which has established the"THIRD-BRAIN Research Institute"where the core development is done. It is a long term and international effort to design a new generation of Supercomputers beyond Petaflop/s. The overall sponsoring company is calledAHA!Ventures based in the USA. They are the one providing the funding as well as collaborating on the development and deployment of large-scaleIntegral Gridprojects worldwide.
The license does not specify the jurisdiction to be considered.
I would presume the primary jurisdiction to be that of the author/owner of the purportedly infringing code.
This is one reason the US has been pushing to have their patent database accepted as a global standard. That would bring all software and hardware patents under the same legal jurisdiction -- the US.
Personally I don't like that idea at all. Their patent database contains too much bad data (invalid patents), has too vague a definition of "patentable" to be viable without restricting innovation, and the implication that any foreigner with a problem needs to present a case to a US court is not reasonable. The expenses of the US court system are far too high, especially for a foreign legal entity.
In addition, the US has repeatedly detained people on international flights. What is to prevent an "erroneous" addition of a foreign person to some unpublished watch list, preventing them from even filing their case?
People need to read their licenses in detail. Even under GPLv2, the license expressly and explicitly states that if there is an IP conflict, the software in question may not be distributed or used under the GPL. You must use another license. Only the owner/author can relicense the source code accordingly, unless the IP violation can be corrected by rewriting segments of the code in question.
2.b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
parties under the terms of this License.
All direct or derived GPL source is subject to the GPL.
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program
except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt
otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is
void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.
However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under
this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such
parties remain in full compliance.
If there are licensing problems with the software, you do not have permission to use or distribute it.
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent
infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues),
conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or
otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not
excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot
distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this
License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you
may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent
license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by
all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then
the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to
refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
If there are problems with IP conflicts, the GPL explicitly does not apply to the source code in question.
That means NO ONE has the right to distribute that software except the AUTHOR/OWNER, and they must use a license other than the GPL to do so.
YouTube claims to host entertainment, not news. The content should have waivers, the same as any other published media.
Unless the laws in Canada have changed, you cannot even take a picture of an individual or group without their express or implicit permission. People in the public eye like politicians have given tacit approval to the press (job requirement), but private citizens have not.
If this situation required some disciplinary action, the video should have been provided to local authorities (school board, principal, city council.) Publishing it in this fashion is a smear campaign, and I think the parents of kids doing all these postings need to consider whether they can afford to be sued.
Everyone has skeletons in their closet. Unless it's a major public figure, I think it's way out of line to treat every potential misconduct as entertainment or news. People have a fundamental right to privacy, guaranteed in most constitutions.
You're right. I don't understand Perens' point at all.
The indemnification contract between Microsoft and Novell does not alter any GPLv2 software. It does not change the ownership of the software. It does not determine whether or not the distro software has any IP violations that would lead to it being yanked from GPL status.
Quite frankly, it does nothing useful that I can see for or against Linux. But it may affect some proprietary components of SuSE, or allow Novell to implement proprietary software for Linux that interoperates better with Vista than OSS will be able to (e.g. access to use proprietary protocols, or reimplement some software stacks.)
My worst environment was starting a contract two weeks before the furniture was delivered. We had monitors propped on towers, keyboards in our laps, and mice on spare visitor chairs from other parts of the building.
My chair itself was one of those ancient wooden swivel types.
The furniture delivery made life much easier, but we were still working in the rumble of a data center.
Home editions are preinstalled on consumer boxen. I have never, ever worked for a company that ran home editions of Windows, especially after the networking nightmare with XP.
I can understand a home hacker wanting to run a virtualized system, but I don't see the retail market value for a software product being built to run on HE. The product should run the same whether under a virtualized OS or not. You don't make direct calls to the virtualization layers.
MicroSoft cannot use Xenix as a defense, as that was among the IP that became SCO. (I helped do remote driver debugging for the initial Xenix/386 releases on one of the first IBM PS/2 model 80's.:) )
Novell got cash. Needed cash.
Perens claim that Novell will be stuck maintaining old code makes no sense. Why would Novell have an issue and RedHat not? Indemnification deals are customer insurance at most, and do not affect the actual IP ownership.
If it turned out that MicroSoft had a valid patent violation to defend/attack Linux, Novell still would not own the rights to the software in question. Any component under a GPL variant that proves to have IP issues is yanked from all distros. Even though Novell and their customers would be protected against a lawsuit, they would no longer have a license to the source module in question under the GPL variants. As they didn't write or own the original software, they still wouldn't be able to continue distribution.
Good luck finding the individual users of packages.
Guess I forgot another bullet point:
Ballmer and Gates go insane, and hire the *AA to harass individual users. Microsoft drains their cash reserve on lawyers and private investigators, leaving them with nothing to fight the lawsuit they started.
It's not an "American", "Canadian" or any other nation's "thing".
Some companies just don't treat their staff with any respect or dignity.
But the whining about open offices is just that -- whining. I've worked in cubes, offices, data centers, and most recently, an open office exactly like the article complains about.
People were quiet, respectful, we had good communications, and excellant equipment (Reserve America.) It was also one of the most skilled teams I worked with over the years.
During those years, I've run into no shortage of "experts" whining about their desks, their chairs, their monitors, their computers, the contents of vending machines, the brand of coffee, etc. There is just no pleasing some people, so their contracts don't get renewed. They aren't good enough to be worth the hassle.
If it by some miracle turns out that Microsoft has a valid patent that some Linux code infringes, there are few potential impacts to the average business or developer:
You have a budget like IBM's, suitable for lobbying an ICBM of lawyers back at Microsoft.
You have sufficient budget to fight the patent and ride it out.
Your budget is so small Microsoft couldn't be bothered suing you.
You just use OSS and the problem is up to your distro packager.
I wish. It'd beat the current 0 revenue of unemployment.
But I did spend many years of my career working with Northern Telecom, Bell Canada, BCE, and CBIS/Convergys over the years. I have just a bit more understanding of the technology and regulations involved than most people.
Any city or even reasonable sized town in this province is served by both SaskTel and Access. There are also local ISPs and wireless co-ops set up by smaller communities. Hardly a "monopoly."
Your service disruptions are surprising. You're the second person in 5-10 years that's complained about it being "unreliable." You're the ONLY person I've ever heard try to tie the "problem" to their account changes.
What's really interesting is the data/ISP systems and departments are seperate from the voice and cell service divisions of SaskTel. It's very interesting that changing your voice line info automagically affects physically seperate management systems.
Mind you, the shimmer of flies buzzing around fresh bovine excrement is "interesting", too.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops. Typo at the start. 90,000 bpi, not 30,000. So 11,250 bytes per square inch in 8 colour, 46,250 bytes per square inch in 256 colour. That works out to about 8MB per page 8-colour, 36MB at 256-colour.
600x600 would quadruple that to a peak of 144MB, and 1200x1200 would boost it to 578MB.
Improving colour discrimination to 4 bits per colour jet (presume 3), and you have a total of 12 colour adding another 50% over the 256 colour scheme.
The problem is the smaller the pixels and finer the colour discrimination, the greater the chance for ink bleed, alignment errors, colour fading, and other issues. You'd end up having to put more and more data into error detection and correction, drastically reducing the effectiveness of such techniques.
Presume 300x300 dpi with only an 8-color system providing an additional 3 bits. For sake of argument, presume the 3 bits added by colour are used for error correction (11 bits/byte vs. the 10 bits/byte that is the more common average for simple CRCs.) 30,000 bits per square inch, or 3,750 bytes.
Presuming an 8x10 print area on 8.5x11 inch stock (which allows for "barrier" regions that provide "alignment" for the scan), that's 800 x 3750 or 3,000,000 raw bytes of data per sheet.
Adding in compression might boost that a bit, but not by too much, and it's an unfair measure of a storage medium to presume compression.
If your ideal of 256 colours is involved, that's 8 bits of discrimination instead of 3, or 5 times as much potential storage for 15,000,000 bytes or a little over 14MB.
Or maybe investors need to realize that blue-chip stocks in a stable market don't produce dot-bomb growth rates.
There are rare occasions where a patentable algorithm crops up. Distasteful though it was, the GIF patent was a valid definition of a specific data structure and accompanying algorithm descriptions for it's use.
On the contrary, a recent patent about double-linked lists of images is ludicrous. Double-linked lists are a very old general purpose data structure. The fact that they happen to be used for a general or specific image format is nothing new.
Had they come up with a new image compression algorithm dealing with n-space fractals or something, that would be a potential software patent.
Software does not suffer from the "workability" issues of hardware. You can implement solutions that cannot complete a computation using modern hardware, for example. Most of the graphics algorithms and techniques implemented by modern hardware were born as software 20 years ago. The fact that no one could afford to use those software implementations does not make them any less effective at describing the algorithms, data structures, and data flows required to implement the approach.
I suggest using code to express the algorithms because there are several modern programming languages that clearly express such algorithms and structures, not because it will necessarily run to completion in under a thousand years on a modern PC.
Unfortunately the publication would mean that nations which ignore foreign patent policies would easily and happily rip the source code from the archives, use it, and thumb their noses at the fool who thought a foreign legal policy would stop them.
I believe it was "Dr. Dobb's Journal" that used to publish code that could be scanned, sort of a variant on barcodes.
Printed at the higher resolutions available to printers and scanners 15-20 years later, how much data could you store using that encoding format on paper? We've gone from about 100dpi to 600-1200, which actually means at least 36 times the data storage per square inch.
I fail to see how a binary pixel can fail to take less space than a printed geometric shape. You can squirt an ink dot a lot smaller than you can a recognizable microscopic shape.
Colour filtering to provide "layers" of data is a form of bonding or multi-frequency processing. Even CMY alone triples the storage potential; the colour discrimination of the scanner is the only limit to the potential bandwidth multiplier (plus data loss due to fading.)
In other words, it sounds a lot more original than it actually is. Odds are the creator is too young to have even heard of Dr. Dobbs, much less have played with the code scanners to save typing time.
Were the code republished in such a fashion to ban US use in the event that Microsoft lobbed a patent at the Linux kernel or other GNU software, Novell/SuSE would still not have the rights to continue distribution in the US market. They'd probably have to use an overseas division (e.g. Novell/SuSE Germany) to continue distribution to other markets.
Ok, so under Section 8 (Klinger? 'dat you?), the GPL variants can still apply to code that is in dispute.
However, that still requires that the Author/Owner republish the code with the updated license terms.
I also have a personal moral issue with Section 8 vs. the general intent of the GPL to make code available to everyone. Like the misguided attempt to enforce personal views on media and encryption in v3 instead of dealing with copyright courts, Section 8 allows people to discriminate against nations. The entire populace of a nation should not be penalized for the idiocy of the company or individual claiming IP infringement.
Either the software infringes or it does not. If it does, international theft is still theft, and there are treaties and procedures for dealing with it. There is no way to properly defend any source license against a rogue IP legal system, or a valid one that is being abused.
If a nation were to consistently be raising IP issues that other nations do not, then I would say it's reasonable to explicitly update the official GPL variants (not just one code module) to ban that nation's participation. That way the onus is on nations to ensure that their IP courts are acting in a resonable fashion to encourage innovation instead of to stifle competition.
For software, there are some aspects of "obvious" that aren't applicable to physical device patents.
Any combination of a data object and a general purpose algorithm, data transport, data storage mechanism, or framework/library features should be declared obvious. For example, email transfers over IP. Any data transport can implement the IP functionality; using a particular transport (such as wireless) is not innovation. It's using tools the way they were designed by programmers and companies that encourage reuse -- something that is taught to first year students. Only lawyers and patent leeches can even try to argue that point with a straight face.
Reimplementing an existing solution in another language is not creating new technology, unless the languages are radically different (which would need expert opinion to determine how different programming languages are. I'm thinking in terms of procedural vs. functional.)
Any implementation using a technique, algorithm, or approach published in a textbook or research journal is not innovation. There may be a lack of research on the part of the development team if they didn't know about it, but that doesn't mean they came up with something "new" and patentable.
I firmly believe that software patents should require a functional implementation be submitted within 2 years of an initial application. Hardware patents require engineering diagrams; software patents should require very specific algorithm and data descriptions that are more easily expressed as code. The code in question should not be published by the patent office, but kept in archives to assist with any future dispute resolution by the courts.
Defense of a software patent may require comparison of implementation code. The patent holder making the accusation should be required to provide access to their development archives for the court's experts (not public.) Failure to provide a reasonable history archive should be considered sufficient to prove the patent holder did not take reasonable steps to protect their copyright implementation of the patent.
Like a trademark, failure to defend should result in loss of a patent, and it's previously protected content should become public.
Most important of all, the onus should be on the patent holder to demonstrate that they attempted a "good faith" negotiation to resolve their claim before filing with the courts. That includes demonstrating that they have prepared their evidence BEFORE court, not used the court as a fishing expedition to gain access to evidence that may or may not prove their allegations. The multi-year nightmare of SCO is a disgrace.
"Good faith" also implies the discussion of reasonable licensing terms for the patent, not using them to try to acquire, take over, or bankrupt the purportedly infringing legal entity.
a) It's far too easy to edit digital video.
b) It's far too easy to dub audio.
c) It's far too easy to take snippets of a situation and selectively include only those segments that make someone look bad.
d) Kids can be very creative and tend to find the "hard" things about computers as easy as breathing.
I believe they are talking about a philosophical model, treating a national compute infrastructure as a synthetic memory extension, not a wetwired biological interface. It's a colourful metaphore, not a literal description.
Another way of viewing the Third Brain project might be the application of biological healing and load balancing aspects to a compute fabric. Muscles strengthen with use, the grid increases the measured capacity with need. Stop using them, and the proteins get reabsorbed and reallocated, causing the muscles to weaken and shrink.
IBM has been doing similar work for their mainframes, Sun has their system monitoring and dynamic configuration hooks, so does HP, and I would guess, Microsoft. This is just building out another layer of management infrastructure, treating distributed clusters and nodes as a national or international compute fabric. I would presume that the major vendors use their own technologies to manage their international operations, providing a real-life proof-of-concept deployment to show customers their implementations work.
China treating it as a national rather than corporate focus is just one of those little mindset/cultural differences.
Computing described as biology, nothing more.
The license does not specify the jurisdiction to be considered.
I would presume the primary jurisdiction to be that of the author/owner of the purportedly infringing code.
This is one reason the US has been pushing to have their patent database accepted as a global standard. That would bring all software and hardware patents under the same legal jurisdiction -- the US.
Personally I don't like that idea at all. Their patent database contains too much bad data (invalid patents), has too vague a definition of "patentable" to be viable without restricting innovation, and the implication that any foreigner with a problem needs to present a case to a US court is not reasonable. The expenses of the US court system are far too high, especially for a foreign legal entity.
In addition, the US has repeatedly detained people on international flights. What is to prevent an "erroneous" addition of a foreign person to some unpublished watch list, preventing them from even filing their case?
Remember "Innocent until proven guilty"?
It is up to an appropriate disciplinary board to determine the guilt and any penalties, not a witch hunt by 13 and 14 year olds.
God knows, their temperaments are far too volatile to be making decisions about people's lives and careers.
People need to read their licenses in detail. Even under GPLv2, the license expressly and explicitly states that if there is an IP conflict, the software in question may not be distributed or used under the GPL. You must use another license. Only the owner/author can relicense the source code accordingly, unless the IP violation can be corrected by rewriting segments of the code in question.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=208292&cid=169 83934
From GPL v2:
All direct or derived GPL source is subject to the GPL.
If there are licensing problems with the software, you do not have permission to use or distribute it.
If there are problems with IP conflicts, the GPL explicitly does not apply to the source code in question. That means NO ONE has the right to distribute that software except the AUTHOR/OWNER, and they must use a license other than the GPL to do so.
YouTube claims to host entertainment, not news. The content should have waivers, the same as any other published media.
Unless the laws in Canada have changed, you cannot even take a picture of an individual or group without their express or implicit permission. People in the public eye like politicians have given tacit approval to the press (job requirement), but private citizens have not.
If this situation required some disciplinary action, the video should have been provided to local authorities (school board, principal, city council.) Publishing it in this fashion is a smear campaign, and I think the parents of kids doing all these postings need to consider whether they can afford to be sued.
Everyone has skeletons in their closet. Unless it's a major public figure, I think it's way out of line to treat every potential misconduct as entertainment or news. People have a fundamental right to privacy, guaranteed in most constitutions.
You're right. I don't understand Perens' point at all.
The indemnification contract between Microsoft and Novell does not alter any GPLv2 software. It does not change the ownership of the software. It does not determine whether or not the distro software has any IP violations that would lead to it being yanked from GPL status.
Quite frankly, it does nothing useful that I can see for or against Linux. But it may affect some proprietary components of SuSE, or allow Novell to implement proprietary software for Linux that interoperates better with Vista than OSS will be able to (e.g. access to use proprietary protocols, or reimplement some software stacks.)
Do you seriously think a customer targetted by such a lawsuit isn't going to turn it into a class action against the distributor?
My worst environment was starting a contract two weeks before the furniture was delivered. We had monitors propped on towers, keyboards in our laps, and mice on spare visitor chairs from other parts of the building.
My chair itself was one of those ancient wooden swivel types.
The furniture delivery made life much easier, but we were still working in the rumble of a data center.
Gotta love noise-reduction headphones. :)
I fail to see the issue.
Home editions are preinstalled on consumer boxen. I have never, ever worked for a company that ran home editions of Windows, especially after the networking nightmare with XP.
I can understand a home hacker wanting to run a virtualized system, but I don't see the retail market value for a software product being built to run on HE. The product should run the same whether under a virtualized OS or not. You don't make direct calls to the virtualization layers.
MicroSoft cannot use Xenix as a defense, as that was among the IP that became SCO. (I helped do remote driver debugging for the initial Xenix/386 releases on one of the first IBM PS/2 model 80's. :) )
Novell got cash. Needed cash.
Perens claim that Novell will be stuck maintaining old code makes no sense. Why would Novell have an issue and RedHat not? Indemnification deals are customer insurance at most, and do not affect the actual IP ownership.
If it turned out that MicroSoft had a valid patent violation to defend/attack Linux, Novell still would not own the rights to the software in question. Any component under a GPL variant that proves to have IP issues is yanked from all distros. Even though Novell and their customers would be protected against a lawsuit, they would no longer have a license to the source module in question under the GPL variants. As they didn't write or own the original software, they still wouldn't be able to continue distribution.
Good luck finding the individual users of packages.
Guess I forgot another bullet point:
It's not an "American", "Canadian" or any other nation's "thing".
Some companies just don't treat their staff with any respect or dignity.
But the whining about open offices is just that -- whining. I've worked in cubes, offices, data centers, and most recently, an open office exactly like the article complains about.
People were quiet, respectful, we had good communications, and excellant equipment (Reserve America.) It was also one of the most skilled teams I worked with over the years.
During those years, I've run into no shortage of "experts" whining about their desks, their chairs, their monitors, their computers, the contents of vending machines, the brand of coffee, etc. There is just no pleasing some people, so their contracts don't get renewed. They aren't good enough to be worth the hassle.
If it by some miracle turns out that Microsoft has a valid patent that some Linux code infringes, there are few potential impacts to the average business or developer:
Yep.
It's FUD.
I wish. It'd beat the current 0 revenue of unemployment.
But I did spend many years of my career working with Northern Telecom, Bell Canada, BCE, and CBIS/Convergys over the years. I have just a bit more understanding of the technology and regulations involved than most people.
Any city or even reasonable sized town in this province is served by both SaskTel and Access. There are also local ISPs and wireless co-ops set up by smaller communities. Hardly a "monopoly."
Your service disruptions are surprising. You're the second person in 5-10 years that's complained about it being "unreliable." You're the ONLY person I've ever heard try to tie the "problem" to their account changes.
What's really interesting is the data/ISP systems and departments are seperate from the voice and cell service divisions of SaskTel. It's very interesting that changing your voice line info automagically affects physically seperate management systems.
Mind you, the shimmer of flies buzzing around fresh bovine excrement is "interesting", too.