Did I write anything about gmail.com ? Didn't think so. Regarding the trademarks, the name gmail has been in use for several years by the three companies and the Gospel Music Association according to the fine article and several comments in this thread.
If I had been using a trademarkable name for my business activities for some period of time and suddenly some other company announced publicly that they are trying to hijack the name knowingly or not I'll also be rushing to the trademark office to get it registered.
Google didn't do its homework, they didn't research if Gmail was not already taken and also failed to register it in time, so they are now in trouble for their neglicience. End of story.
I'm sure the Gospel Music Association will be shaking in fear of losing your business, as well as the other ones as most of their customers probably don't give a damn about Google, especially if they are not able to do their homework.
Fanboyism for certain companies on Slashdot always was running high, but this is getting ridiculous. You know, Google is neither the Salvation Army nor a religion, they are just a company out to earn money like any other company. Just because they pretend "not to do evil" does not make them holy in any way.
You know, I am in Germany, too, not far from Munich also (Ulm).
I know that it seems to be the thing to do at the moment over here (as well as in other Western countries) if you are a larger employer to go running around demanding all kind of silly stuff and shouting "Do to my bidding, or I will move to Elbonia/fire all my workers and replace them by robots or do something else undesirable". But to be honest, those companies either never put up or they wanted to do those unpopular things in the first place and were just looking for a pretense so the public blames politics and not those companies.
Part of this used to be part of the usual haggling between companies and cities about tax advantages, subsidizing, whatever, and usually both of them got something out of it to show for their efforts. Today some companies (Siemens, Daimler etc.) seem not to understand what is decent and reasonable and what not and I am sure the public will pay them back sooner or later one way or the other.
Regarding Microsoft: If MS really would state to the major of Munich that they would leave the city if Munich does not buy MS they would make themselves look like complete fools. And by that they would basically force the city to decline any offer MS could make, for ever, even if they paid them money to install their software. MS is a lot, but they are neither stupid nor bad tacticians.
That doesn't mean that they don't tell the relevant people "Oh ! Don't buy that hobbyist stuff ! Bad things will happen !" But every company does that when a customer wants to leave (a former co-worker experienced something like that when switching a large project from IBM to Sun some years ago, it must really have been funny), and all those threats and promises do not have any real meaning and value.
I just expressed my respect to those people a minute ago. It takes a lot of courage to do this, having Microsoft Germany in your city and all that...
What do you expect Microsoft to do ? Break their legs ? "Mr Ballmer is very unhappy about all of this..." Move ? Even if this might be a foreign thought for some people here: MS is not the Mafia, it is not the Spanish Inquisition and it is not someone's secret police. They are just a (albeit very big) corporation. Munich is still free to do what they like. Courage, my ass.
"When we contributed to feature A we didn't know someone implemented feature B violating our patent xyz thus damaging our vital business interests on the field of whatever.
2. Would look very silly and incongruent for going against something it uses to make money
There are more than enough examples of companies doing a 180 degree turn in their business strategy, IBM itself being a brilliant example.
Mono can be blown up at any time simply with a patch. Is this confusing any luminaries out there? Is this too deep?
Yeah, by that blowing up truckloads of existing.NET apps, too. Great idea. Also noone forces you to connect to a MS server, you can also write stand-alone programs in Mono, and they can talk to whatever backend you like. So what's your point again ?
So we are lucky. I'll go then and take my great non-infringing Linux kernel to serve files - uhm. Samba. Ok. Then let's surf the... what do you say ? Tabbed browsing ? Oh. Well. Uhm.
The Linux kernel by itself, great as it may be, is mostly useless without userland.
Yeah, and then someone would purchase Mandrake... lather, rinse, repeat.
IBM will have to have a (or two or three, but not more) fixed targets in the Linux world to sell with its services and to maintain. They cannot constantly migrate their Linux customer base to the distro of the day.
I think you would be completely right if not everytime I'm considering a product to do whatever someone jumps at me and screams "Don't use that ! This is evil closed source ! Use the great open source Wroomdongle ! It will do everything you need, is super secure and will cook you coffee !" When I try to install Wroomdongle, I have to fight more often than not with the often inadequate docu, questions are answered with RTFM (great, the TFM is giving me all that headache) or "oh, you are using 1.1, 2.5 is the place to be ! There all the issues you have are fixed. Oh, one thing: The docu on the Web site is outdated, it only covers 1.9).
Either you just code for your personal fun and give the code away so someone can love it or leave it or you really want to create THE solution for whatever problem (and praise it loudly as such) and accept certain obligations. You cannot have both.
Apparently yes. Some years ago a friend of a good friend of mine did an internship on the German South Polar station for about half a year. Apparently they had Internet (my friend IRCed with the guy regularly) but only for a couple of hours apiece because of the satellite.
I agree that something like this can only work if a large percentage of the population takes part in this. Also one has to do an appropriate PR campaign to make clear that this is a political campaign and not a case of widespread doing bank transactions under influence. It is really doubtful if a somewhat esoteric issue (which it is for most people) like the DMCA can rouse the masses in that way. I think the greatest problem is to make clear to the general population that the DMCA (or their counterparts in other nations) are a problem for everybody while I don't think it is a matter to make people understand the issue itself. There were much more complicated things huge masses of people went on the streets against.
Hmm... preview;) Here's what it was supposed to be:
I plead guilty to posting under influence of not enough sleep and too much coffee, you honour;-)
So whatever you do, you always generate that overhead. Which would probably mean that it's considered normal and is already budgeted.
Yes and no. They certainly plan for some overhead. On the other hand they will only plan for a certain percentage of invalid transactions, if you manage to get over this rate considerably it should cause some trouble. Also there are much more people in countries like the US and Germany and I presume that maybe also the Finnish government is perhaps a little more automated than most German agencies currently are (extrapolating to my perception of Finland vs. Germany). However, the other poster is right that this only works if you manage to get a huge amount of people to contribute, else it will only be a minor annoyance. And it certainly has to go hand in hand with appropriate PR campaigns.
I know this was somewhat tongue in cheek; but while not paying your taxes is not an option for most sane people there were some interesting ideas around in the 80s during the prime of the German peace movement to do civil protest by tax payments: Do pay your taxes, but either pay a miniscule amount too low (e.g. 1 USD too low) or even better, a little too much (so they own you and have nothing to hold against you). As at least here in Germany the state has to be very accurate in the payments it gets or receives (ever got one of those "Here is your great tax return of 0,03 EUR"-letters ?) you generate a huge amount of administrative overhead as the state has to remind or repay you for miniscule amounts. If enough people to this one can bring huge bureaucracies to a screeching halt.
Then they can add one before shipping (if it really matters for the market segment they are targetting, SuSE didn't leave out the compiler out of malevolence) or just ship Pro. SuSE/Novell would certainly give them a great discount. If this is needed at all, as the distro is now freely (as in speech) available, so they just could put together their own version of SuSE and ship it (like Fujitsu has been doing for quite some time in Germany).
Which does not mean it's not possible to do nasty stuff anyway. Mobile phone worms anyone ? (yes, there are published and plausible proof-of-concepts and IIRC I read something recently that there are also a handful in the wild)
Ok, the US are large, but compared to the huge size (especially east-west) of Russia they pale in comparison. And still (besides airtravel certainly) railroads seem to be very important there even for long distance trips (a friend of mine travelled last year from Moscow to Ulan-Bator in Mongolia by train. Pretty cool).
Apparently you can. So when people flock to use this or other "prime-time-ready" 0.x products and complain that something does not work or that it fucked up their system or whatever people will say "Duh, it's a beta, what dif you expect ?" (as observed on the various recent Firefox/Thunderbird threads).
It would really be great if people made up their mind if their software is the great super-stable-prime-time-ready-be-all-end-all for everyone and his dog or if it is still-buggy beta software. But doing all this 0.0.Beta.RC.Idontknowifitreallyworksbutitisgreat stuff is just trying to avoid any responsibility for the real-life worth of your creation.
Slashdot Mirror
Did I write anything about gmail.com ? Didn't think so. Regarding the trademarks, the name gmail has been in use for several years by the three companies and the Gospel Music Association according to the fine article and several comments in this thread.
If I had been using a trademarkable name for my business activities for some period of time and suddenly some other company announced publicly that they are trying to hijack the name knowingly or not I'll also be rushing to the trademark office to get it registered.
Google didn't do its homework, they didn't research if Gmail was not already taken and also failed to register it in time, so they are now in trouble for their neglicience. End of story.
I'm sure the Gospel Music Association will be shaking in fear of losing your business, as well as the other ones as most of their customers probably don't give a damn about Google, especially if they are not able to do their homework.
Fanboyism for certain companies on Slashdot always was running high, but this is getting ridiculous. You know, Google is neither the Salvation Army nor a religion, they are just a company out to earn money like any other company. Just because they pretend "not to do evil" does not make them holy in any way.
Oh yes, those nasty emperialistic empires. They are much worse than democratic democracies or dictatorial dictatorships !
You know, I am in Germany, too, not far from Munich also (Ulm).
I know that it seems to be the thing to do at the moment over here (as well as in other Western countries) if you are a larger employer to go running around demanding all kind of silly stuff and shouting "Do to my bidding, or I will move to Elbonia/fire all my workers and replace them by robots or do something else undesirable". But to be honest, those companies either never put up or they wanted to do those unpopular things in the first place and were just looking for a pretense so the public blames politics and not those companies.
Part of this used to be part of the usual haggling between companies and cities about tax advantages, subsidizing, whatever, and usually both of them got something out of it to show for their efforts. Today some companies (Siemens, Daimler etc.) seem not to understand what is decent and reasonable and what not and I am sure the public will pay them back sooner or later one way or the other.
Regarding Microsoft: If MS really would state to the major of Munich that they would leave the city if Munich does not buy MS they would make themselves look like complete fools. And by that they would basically force the city to decline any offer MS could make, for ever, even if they paid them money to install their software. MS is a lot, but they are neither stupid nor bad tacticians.
That doesn't mean that they don't tell the relevant people "Oh ! Don't buy that hobbyist stuff ! Bad things will happen !" But every company does that when a customer wants to leave (a former co-worker experienced something like that when switching a large project from IBM to Sun some years ago, it must really have been funny), and all those threats and promises do not have any real meaning and value.
I just expressed my respect to those people a minute ago. It takes a lot of courage to do this, having Microsoft Germany in your city and all that...
What do you expect Microsoft to do ? Break their legs ? "Mr Ballmer is very unhappy about all of this..." Move ? Even if this might be a foreign thought for some people here: MS is not the Mafia, it is not the Spanish Inquisition and it is not someone's secret police. They are just a (albeit very big) corporation. Munich is still free to do what they like. Courage, my ass.
Welcome to the real word. What IBM might say:
1. Contributed to the linux kernel
"When we contributed to feature A we didn't know someone implemented feature B violating our patent xyz thus damaging our vital business interests on the field of whatever.
2. Would look very silly and incongruent for going against something it uses to make money
There are more than enough examples of companies doing a 180 degree turn in their business strategy, IBM itself being a brilliant example.
Mono can be blown up at any time simply with a patch. Is this confusing any luminaries out there? Is this too deep?
.NET apps, too. Great idea. Also noone forces you to connect to a MS server, you can also write stand-alone programs in Mono, and they can talk to whatever backend you like. So what's your point again ?
Yeah, by that blowing up truckloads of existing
So we are lucky. I'll go then and take my great non-infringing Linux kernel to serve files - uhm. Samba. Ok. Then let's surf the ... what do you say ? Tabbed browsing ? Oh. Well. Uhm.
The Linux kernel by itself, great as it may be, is mostly useless without userland.
Read the FA, then you know.
I tried it, too, completely broke my new Dell !
Yeah, and then someone would purchase Mandrake... lather, rinse, repeat.
IBM will have to have a (or two or three, but not more) fixed targets in the Linux world to sell with its services and to maintain. They cannot constantly migrate their Linux customer base to the distro of the day.
Nothing against the poor animals (which treatment is a real shame), but the main point is finding a treatment for vCJD in men.
I think you would be completely right if not everytime I'm considering a product to do whatever someone jumps at me and screams "Don't use that ! This is evil closed source ! Use the great open source Wroomdongle ! It will do everything you need, is super secure and will cook you coffee !" When I try to install Wroomdongle, I have to fight more often than not with the often inadequate docu, questions are answered with RTFM (great, the TFM is giving me all that headache) or "oh, you are using 1.1, 2.5 is the place to be ! There all the issues you have are fixed. Oh, one thing: The docu on the Web site is outdated, it only covers 1.9).
Either you just code for your personal fun and give the code away so someone can love it or leave it or you really want to create THE solution for whatever problem (and praise it loudly as such) and accept certain obligations. You cannot have both.
Apparently yes. Some years ago a friend of a good friend of mine did an internship on the German South Polar station for about half a year. Apparently they had Internet (my friend IRCed with the guy regularly) but only for a couple of hours apiece because of the satellite.
I agree that something like this can only work if a large percentage of the population takes part in this. Also one has to do an appropriate PR campaign to make clear that this is a political campaign and not a case of widespread doing bank transactions under influence. It is really doubtful if a somewhat esoteric issue (which it is for most people) like the DMCA can rouse the masses in that way. I think the greatest problem is to make clear to the general population that the DMCA (or their counterparts in other nations) are a problem for everybody while I don't think it is a matter to make people understand the issue itself. There were much more complicated things huge masses of people went on the streets against.
Hmm... preview ;) Here's what it was supposed to be:
;-)
I plead guilty to posting under influence of not enough sleep and too much coffee, you honour
So whatever you do, you always generate that overhead. Which would probably mean that it's considered normal and is already budgeted.
Yes and no. They certainly plan for some overhead. On the other hand they will only plan for a certain percentage of invalid transactions, if you manage to get over this rate considerably it should cause some trouble. Also there are much more people in countries like the US and Germany and I presume that maybe also the Finnish government is perhaps a little more automated than most German agencies currently are (extrapolating to my perception of Finland vs. Germany). However, the other poster is right that this only works if you manage to get a huge amount of people to contribute, else it will only be a minor annoyance. And it certainly has to go hand in hand with appropriate PR campaigns.
I know. lets all just stop paying tax ;-)
I know this was somewhat tongue in cheek; but while not paying your taxes is not an option for most sane people there were some interesting ideas around in the 80s during the prime of the German peace movement to do civil protest by tax payments: Do pay your taxes, but either pay a miniscule amount too low (e.g. 1 USD too low) or even better, a little too much (so they own you and have nothing to hold against you). As at least here in Germany the state has to be very accurate in the payments it gets or receives (ever got one of those "Here is your great tax return of 0,03 EUR"-letters ?) you generate a huge amount of administrative overhead as the state has to remind or repay you for miniscule amounts. If enough people to this one can bring huge bureaucracies to a screeching halt.
While somewhat stupid, a lot of vendors have such limitations in their license agreements nowadays. AFAIK Oracle started with this some years back.
Our just download TweakUI from MS where you can do this by unchecking a checkbox.
Then they can add one before shipping (if it really matters for the market segment they are targetting, SuSE didn't leave out the compiler out of malevolence) or just ship Pro. SuSE/Novell would certainly give them a great discount. If this is needed at all, as the distro is now freely (as in speech) available, so they just could put together their own version of SuSE and ship it (like Fujitsu has been doing for quite some time in Germany).
Repeat after me:
RAID is not backup !
RAID is not backup !
RAID is not backup !
[..]
What great inventions?
The transistor (Bell Labs, 1947) ?
The microprocessor (Intel/Grumman Aircraft 1971) ?
Which does not mean it's not possible to do nasty stuff anyway. Mobile phone worms anyone ? (yes, there are published and plausible proof-of-concepts and IIRC I read something recently that there are also a handful in the wild)
Ok, the US are large, but compared to the huge size (especially east-west) of Russia they pale in comparison. And still (besides airtravel certainly) railroads seem to be very important there even for long distance trips (a friend of mine travelled last year from Moscow to Ulan-Bator in Mongolia by train. Pretty cool).
Apparently you can. So when people flock to use this or other "prime-time-ready" 0.x products and complain that something does not work or that it fucked up their system or whatever people will say "Duh, it's a beta, what dif you expect ?" (as observed on the various recent Firefox/Thunderbird threads).
It would really be great if people made up their mind if their software is the great super-stable-prime-time-ready-be-all-end-all for everyone and his dog or if it is still-buggy beta software. But doing all this 0.0.Beta.RC.Idontknowifitreallyworksbutitisgreat stuff is just trying to avoid any responsibility for the real-life worth of your creation.