Since Sony admits that their product is designed to cause damage to your
computer system, almost anyone would likely have a good lawsuit against
them.
Do you
realise that, if someone were to read that, sue Sony and fail, they could hold you liable?
Great!
I wanted to sue Sony but I wasn't sure if
I can win (I'm ANAL) and I was actually counting
on Sony losing all of their money in
my lawsuit. But now
I can't lose!
If I won't get any money from Sony,
then I will from
the new-day-has-come dept.
Thanks Flarners for your legal advice.
Touche, but things were different then. If the environment were the same--
computers used mostly in academic institutions and mostly by enthusiasts-- then the
model would work. Except it isn't.
Maybe it doesn't work for you,
but it works for me just fine, thank you.
Grandmothers use laptops now. My boss thinks himself an expert because he knows
how to use Windows 98 Internet Connection Sharing. The world is a different place.
The keyword is preinstalled.
Grandmothers shouldn't have to
install systems (Windows, Debian, OS X
- doesn't matter which one),
they should have them preinstalled
and preconfigured
(by the way, being grandmother
doesn't mean being stupid or
computer illiterate, you know).
Applying the free software model to a big environment like this one sounds...
improbable in the extreme.
Grandmothers with laptops or
experts on Windows connection sharing
(whatever it is)
is not that
big environment in my opinion...
GNU, Perl, CPAN, Python, PHP,
Apache, PostgreSQL, MySQL,
Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, Exim, ProFTPD,
X11, BIND,
- now, that's
what I call a big environment.
It's all about the motivations of free software
developers.
They're not motivated with only
numbers of people who'd use different tools,
but with their own needs and opinions.
It's more important for them
to have a great OS's,
great text editors, great languages,
compilers, development tools, libraries,
open protocols and APIs or
great Web servers, than to have
few other bells and whistles.
But don't worry,
we'll also see bells and whistles.
[...] A new kind of model that
has never been done before.
And whenever anybody talks about an entirely new model for a system-- one that has
never been tried before-- I'm skeptical.
It's not
an entirely new model,
this is how the hacker community used
to look like in pre-1980 era.
Uh, I count 31 instances of "free" or "freedom" in that interview.
[...]
Perhaps the FSF could consider coming up with a new angle.
[...]
There are other words, and other concepts that represent the FSF's ideals. Open.
Shared. Community. Perhaps we could embroider some of those words onto our flag
for a while, just until the Freedom Fad blows over.
First someone
complained
that RMS is not ESR.
Now you're complaining that FSF is not OSI.
That's the actual main.cpp from the downloadable file.
The whole thing is a joke.
Mod up for totally wasting
a great April Fools joke?
Would you also shout to mod someone up
as informative, if he told everyone
how some great new book or movie ends?
The problem with websites is often
much more serious than with small monitors.
It's easier to set up a text editor or xterm
to display large fonts, but with websites
things are much more difficult,
thanks to incompetent web designers,
that's why I'll focus on websites.
There are thousands of webmasters
out there, for whom
a good website looks like this:
...
<body>
<font size="-1000000">
everything goes here
</font>
</body>
...
This is a serious problem.
You can't set your default base font size to
1000 points, just to have 30 points fonts on
most websites, because the correctly designed
websites (i.e. those which use
the default, user defined font size
for main text) will have fonts larger than a screen.
Sometimes even the website is nearly unusable
when you're using larger fonts,
because
you have to horizontally scroll reading
every line of text.
A quite obvious
solution would be to use text mode
Lynx
browser
in xterm window (or dos box in MS-Windows),
using 40x20 characters,
with very large fonts, so the window
takes the whole screen.
Unfortunately, most of websites don't work in
text mode,
not to say about being usable using lines
shorter than 80 characters.
Read My own web design rules
(my comment to
What Makes a Good Web Design Slashdot article,
which was not very popular when I wrote it,
but is in my opinion very important),
especially the points entitled:
Remember about people with disabilities
Fonts
User defaults
Those are in my opinion the most important points
to this discussion, but take a look also on:
Valid HTML
HTML is not a typesetting language
Remember about other browsers than yours
Colors
If webmasters while making their websites
were only following these few simple rules,
there would be no problem.
Even the 14 inch screen is big enough to display
very large and readable characters
using e.g. 40x20, or even 20x10 characters,
full-screen windows.
The problem is that most of the Web becomes
completely unusable
in 20x10 characters text mode.
Let me quote to sentences of
Tim Berners-Lee,
inventor of the World Wide Web:
"The power of the Web is in its
universality. Access by everyone
regardless of disability is an essential
aspect."
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web
page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had
very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another
word processor, or another network."
Unfortunately, most of
web designers don't understand that at all.
They are one of the main reasons, why people with
poor eyesight have to buy gigantic, expensive
monitors.
What do you think about
three stripes of Adidas?
Or about the fact that Peugeot owns
every single x0y number? Yes, every
3-digit number with 0 in the middle
is their property.
Every one of these numbers:
101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109,
201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209,
301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309,
401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 407, 408, 409,
501, 502, 503, 504, 505, 506, 507, 508, 509,
601, 602, 603, 604, 605, 606, 607, 608, 609,
701, 702, 703, 704, 705, 706, 707, 708, 709,
801, 802, 803, 804, 805, 806, 807, 808, 809,
901, 902, 903, 904, 905, 906, 907, 908 and 909
is owned by Peugeot.
No, not just Peugeot x0y,
Any-brand x0y!
Do you know that Porsche 911 was first named
Porsche 901 but had to be renamed,
because Peugeot "owns" numbers with
zero in the middle?
Search Google for
porsche 901 911 peugeot
to see what I mean.
Otherwise everyone would surely confuse
this beauty with Peugeot (they wish!).
I don't even know if there ever was any
Peugeot 901! But who cares?
It's their "intellectual property"
and it's wrong to steal property, right?
Amen.
My DSL looks like this:
I have their magic box with RJ-45 socket,
to which I can connect anything speaking
IP over Ethernet. That's it.
They don't care what software I use,
they only route my IP packets.
Now, if it only was ten times cheaper...
I usually type in root@127.0.0.1 as the email address... let 'em clog up their own mail
server.
root@127.0.0.1 is not a valid address.
Sending email to such address usually gives
some error like
unrouteable mail domain "127.0.0.1"
because there's no MX record in DNS
for 1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa
(but I'm not sure if it would work even
if there was such record,
I'm too lazy to test it).
Use
root@[127.0.0.1]
if you want email to literal ip address
bypassing the standard MX resolving
(see RFC 822).
But the mail server can be configured to
reject them, and e.g. my server
will give you this error:
root@[127.0.0.1] domain literals not allowed.
So the root@localhost is probably the the best choice (but it still sometimes
may not work as you expect,
if the "localhost" is not set as local domain
of SMTP server).
But remember that even when you make them spam
local root mailbox, it's usually their own
account, not the one of their ISP.
When I have to ever register with working email
I make alias like spam-from-yahoo.com@my.domain
so I always know who sends spam and I can
always deactivate such alias.
But I have yet to see anyone selling my spam-from-their.domain@my.domain address to anyone.
After you save and confirm the email address where you'd like
to receive messages, you can give out self-destructing
disposable email addresses whenever you want as follows:
someword.x.user@spamgourmet.com
where someword is a word you haven't used before, x is the
number of email messages you want to receive at the address
(up to 20), and user is your username. For example, if your
username is 'spamcowboy', and you give this address to
somebody (or, more probably, some thing):
spamelope.2.spamcowboy@spamgourmet.com
the address will be created here the first time it is used, and
you'll receive at most two messages (forwarded to the email
address you specify above) on the address. The rest will be
indelicately consumed.
That's it. You won't ever have to come back here.
I don't use it because I have my own
mail server and I can do whatever I want
(or whatever I can) with my mail address,
but spamgourmet
seems to be
great if you just have one mailbox somewhere
like most of the people.
Given that there are only about 30,000 ways to
combine four notes in the Western music theory (reply if you want a more detailed
explanation of the math)
How do you count it? Using only 13 sounds?
It's quite off-topic, but interesting.
Could you explain your math and
especially why is it
Western-specific?
Stallman is well known among free software fans as the writer of
the GNU Public Licence, the licensing model used by most
open-source software writers
to ensure that their software
remains in the public domain.
The whole idea of GPL and Copyleft
in general is to not
put the software in the public domain.
Read What Is Copyleft,
my emphasis:
Copyleft is a general method for making a program free software and requiring all modified and
extended versions of the program to be free software as well.
The simplest way to make a program free is to put it in the
public domain,
uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program and their improvements, if they are so minded.
But it also allows uncooperative people to convert the program into
proprietary software. They can make changes, many or few, and distribute the result as a proprietary product.
People who receive the program in that modified form do not have the freedom that the original author
gave them; the middleman has stripped it away.
In the GNU project, our aim is to give all users the freedom to redistribute and change GNU software. If
middlemen could strip off the freedom, we might have many users, but those users would not have
freedom. So instead of putting GNU software in the public domain, we ``copyleft'' it. Copyleft says that
anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further
copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that every user has freedom.
[...]
What I find funny is you guys look at people using MSFT by choice as a problem.
Aren't OSS/linux cult people by nature pro-freedom-choice. So if a user CHOOSES
to use windows isn't that a good thing? I thought the gloves only come off when they
have no choice?
Once I was talking with one of my friends
and I asked him:
- Why do you use Windows?
- Well, isn't it the best choice?
- he replied, so I asked him:
- How many different operating systems have you
tried, so you can say which one is the best?
He said:
- None, but everyone I know
told me to use Windows.
So I asked:
- How many different operating systems have
everyone you know
tried, so they can say which one is the best?
After few seconds of silence, he asked me:
- Can you help me installing Linux?
He had no problem with understanding my point
because he's a musician composing, playing and
listening to technically very difficult music,
while most of people listens to pop music,
so he knows that
whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause
and reflect.
Some time after that, he convinced his father
to try using Linux and Apache on one of his
company's servers, then went the MySQL in the place of MS-SQL and even large part of the
desktops were switched to diskless X terminals.
The choice was obvious because of the lower
cost (licenses, maintenance, backups,
uptime, hardware requirements, etc.)
but he didn't know he had that
choice in the first place,
no one had ever told him and that was
the problem.
The problem is that I don't know many people
who've chosen Windows,
they usually just wanted a PC.
I have yet to see anyone who can't work on
my Debian boxes with
Window Maker
and Mozilla or Galeon.
My parents use it and my sister uses it
(now she has in her resume
that she has experience with
GNU/Linux and X11 environments,
it looks very impressive to employers).
So that's what I do,
I just give them a choice.
And don't tell me that most of people can't
install and configure
Debian, because most of people can't install
and configure Windows either,
they bought it preinstalled.
We could talk about the choice you fight for,
when I can go to a large computer store and
buy a preinstalled working Debian box.
Until then, please don't tell me about choice.
That about sums it up. Most corporations are not in the software business; they have
IT staff, but not programming and development staff....just guys that maintain and
secure the servers and networks.
Most corporations are not in the car business,
still I prefer
to have a choice who can fix my car.
You know how expensive are even the simplest
things in brand authorized car service companies,
now only imagine how much more expensive would
it be if you were not
even allowed to fix your car
anywhere else.
These guys aren't going to desk-check all the code for
buffer overflows and the like, they just want to install it, configure it, and apply security
patches that the software developers wrote.
That's funny, because that's exactly what I do
with my
Debian boxes. Well, almost.
I install them, configure,
and I don't apply security patches, I just
run apt-get upgrade.
Don't fool yourself, you don't have to check
for buffer overflows when you use Debian and
you don't have to check
for buffer overflows when you use Windows
(well, you can't anyway, so let's just say you don't have to).
The difference is when you want to
customize the software.
You can even use one of your
guys that maintain and
secure the servers and networks
if the customizations you need are easy enough.
Remember how Apache httpd internals are deigned.
The most fancy customization is usually
just a simple mod_perl module.
The same is with
ASP versus Perl,
MS-SQL versus MySQL,
MSVC++ versus GCC,
et cetera.
Using free software
is
smarter from the business standpoint
than using proprietary software,
it's only the transition that's difficult, once you've
got into the mess of
proprietary file formats, protocols and
"standards".
As for layering in general. Well it works for the most part (e.g 3DES) although there
are caveats (2DES would not be safe).
That's correct.
Once I wanted to make ROT13 stronger, so I decided
to encrypt the message twice,
but I discovered that 2ROT13 was
actually less safe than ROT13.
I finally used 3ROT13 and even 5ROT13
for the most sensitive data,
however I'm not sure how
much more secure is 5ROT13 than
3ROT13, but what the hell, the overhead is not
very high.
It doesn't matter to the MPAA and RIAA. They think you should have to go out and
buy another copy if yours goes belly-up.
When I first read about the DVDs I thought:
"What?!
Haven't they learned anything with
scratched CDs?!
Why the hell doesn't they have shields
like 3.5" floppies?!"
The answer is that it's a great thing to have
a media which is very easy to scratch.
The CDs or DVDs are unbreakable when used
with caution.
The laser light won't scratch the surface
even after 10 years of continuous playing.
Every damage is caused by improper handling.
But why is it so easy to
handle improperly?
People learned from 5.25" floppies that it's
easy to damage them, so the 3.5" ones was
made with a protection.
Why not DVDs?
Was it so important for DVD players to
play CDs? I don't think so.
If it was, there could be very simple adapters
and it wouldn't be any problem to play CDs in
DVD player.
So yes, they want us to buy a new expensive copy
every time we destroy the media.
And they made media which is very
easy to destroy.
Please, young people, stop trying to treat dictionaries as manuals that legislate the rules
of a language, when what they in fact do is describe (and sometimes misdescribe)
common usage.
Winnetou in his comment
didn't say that piracy doesn't mean
copying without permission.
He just showed the original meaning and
said that
pirate is
"A rather strong word to describe people who copy copyrighted works",
which is 100% correct.
Remember that the words pirate, piracy, theft of intellectual property, etc. are used only for one reason,
to make the act of duplicating information
sound like a crime.
A guy copying Swan Lake for his girlfriend
to show her the beauty of Tchaikovsky's music
doesn't sound dangerous for most of
intelligent people,
but a pirate stealing
the intellectual property
is evil criminal with no doubt
and should be thrown into jail.
The
movie industry sure needs Congress and a Gestapo to protect themselves from this
guy, don't they? Ironically, the 2001 Oscars are on tonight...and it's been the most
profitable year in movie history...
And the most important:
Who pays for it? The movie industry?
No, the tax payers.
The same thing as with fighting the software
piracy:
I'm a programmer. I write software.
I don't want people who copy my programs to be
imprisoned.
I don't think copying bits
should be a crime.
Most of my own programs are free software.
Still, part of my taxes is used
to protect the richest man on Earth.
And of course, the article fails to mention that the LOTR and Ali bootlegs were
videotaped in the theater, and that is why they were available before the movies were
released on video or DVD.
[...]
You'd think they'd want to make sure we all knew that this
stuff was bootlegged with a camcorder in the movie theatre, not ripped off the
production line by one of their own.
Yeah, but people would think:
"Wait a minute... It'll always
be possible to record a movie with a
camcorder!
Copy-protecting DVDs makes no sense at all!"
And that's something they probably do
not want people to think...
"Pirates seek to profit off the enormous popularity of DVDs by using the latest in
technology to illegally manufacture DVD copies of Hollywood films, and again dupe
consumers into purchasing a wholly inferior product," MPAA Chief Executive Jack
Valenti said in a statement.
Could someone please explain to me how a digital copy could be "wholly inferior" to
the original media?
I think Jack Valenti was talking about
the quality of Hollywood films, not the media.
Slashdot Mirror
Great! I wanted to sue Sony but I wasn't sure if I can win (I'm ANAL) and I was actually counting on Sony losing all of their money in my lawsuit. But now I can't lose! If I won't get any money from Sony, then I will from the new-day-has-come dept. Thanks Flarners for your legal advice.
Maybe it doesn't work for you, but it works for me just fine, thank you.
The keyword is preinstalled. Grandmothers shouldn't have to install systems (Windows, Debian, OS X - doesn't matter which one), they should have them preinstalled and preconfigured (by the way, being grandmother doesn't mean being stupid or computer illiterate, you know).
Grandmothers with laptops or experts on Windows connection sharing (whatever it is) is not that big environment in my opinion... GNU, Perl, CPAN, Python, PHP, Apache, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, Exim, ProFTPD, X11, BIND, - now, that's what I call a big environment. It's all about the motivations of free software developers. They're not motivated with only numbers of people who'd use different tools, but with their own needs and opinions. It's more important for them to have a great OS's, great text editors, great languages, compilers, development tools, libraries, open protocols and APIs or great Web servers, than to have few other bells and whistles. But don't worry, we'll also see bells and whistles.
It's not an entirely new model, this is how the hacker community used to look like in pre-1980 era.
First someone complained that RMS is not ESR. Now you're complaining that FSF is not OSI.
Oh, the CLiT3100, great machine.
And what if it uses spare cycle time to process and report back your habits?
Mod up for totally wasting a great April Fools joke? Would you also shout to mod someone up as informative, if he told everyone how some great new book or movie ends?
The problem with websites is often much more serious than with small monitors. It's easier to set up a text editor or xterm to display large fonts, but with websites things are much more difficult, thanks to incompetent web designers, that's why I'll focus on websites. There are thousands of webmasters out there, for whom a good website looks like this:
This is a serious problem. You can't set your default base font size to 1000 points, just to have 30 points fonts on most websites, because the correctly designed websites (i.e. those which use the default, user defined font size for main text) will have fonts larger than a screen. Sometimes even the website is nearly unusable when you're using larger fonts, because you have to horizontally scroll reading every line of text.
A quite obvious solution would be to use text mode Lynx browser in xterm window (or dos box in MS-Windows), using 40x20 characters, with very large fonts, so the window takes the whole screen. Unfortunately, most of websites don't work in text mode, not to say about being usable using lines shorter than 80 characters.
Read My own web design rules (my comment to What Makes a Good Web Design Slashdot article, which was not very popular when I wrote it, but is in my opinion very important), especially the points entitled:
Those are in my opinion the most important points to this discussion, but take a look also on:
If webmasters while making their websites were only following these few simple rules, there would be no problem. Even the 14 inch screen is big enough to display very large and readable characters using e.g. 40x20, or even 20x10 characters, full-screen windows. The problem is that most of the Web becomes completely unusable in 20x10 characters text mode.
Let me quote to sentences of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web:
Unfortunately, most of web designers don't understand that at all. They are one of the main reasons, why people with poor eyesight have to buy gigantic, expensive monitors.
What do you think about three stripes of Adidas? Or about the fact that Peugeot owns every single x0y number? Yes, every 3-digit number with 0 in the middle is their property. Every one of these numbers: 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 407, 408, 409, 501, 502, 503, 504, 505, 506, 507, 508, 509, 601, 602, 603, 604, 605, 606, 607, 608, 609, 701, 702, 703, 704, 705, 706, 707, 708, 709, 801, 802, 803, 804, 805, 806, 807, 808, 809, 901, 902, 903, 904, 905, 906, 907, 908 and 909 is owned by Peugeot. No, not just Peugeot x0y, Any-brand x0y! Do you know that Porsche 911 was first named Porsche 901 but had to be renamed, because Peugeot "owns" numbers with zero in the middle? Search Google for porsche 901 911 peugeot to see what I mean. Otherwise everyone would surely confuse this beauty with Peugeot (they wish!). I don't even know if there ever was any Peugeot 901! But who cares? It's their "intellectual property" and it's wrong to steal property, right?
Amen. My DSL looks like this: I have their magic box with RJ-45 socket, to which I can connect anything speaking IP over Ethernet. That's it. They don't care what software I use, they only route my IP packets. Now, if it only was ten times cheaper...
root@127.0.0.1 is not a valid address. Sending email to such address usually gives some error like unrouteable mail domain "127.0.0.1" because there's no MX record in DNS for 1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa (but I'm not sure if it would work even if there was such record, I'm too lazy to test it). Use root@[127.0.0.1] if you want email to literal ip address bypassing the standard MX resolving (see RFC 822). But the mail server can be configured to reject them, and e.g. my server will give you this error: root@[127.0.0.1] domain literals not allowed.
So the root@localhost is probably the the best choice (but it still sometimes may not work as you expect, if the "localhost" is not set as local domain of SMTP server). But remember that even when you make them spam local root mailbox, it's usually their own account, not the one of their ISP.
When I have to ever register with working email I make alias like spam-from-yahoo.com@my.domain so I always know who sends spam and I can always deactivate such alias. But I have yet to see anyone selling my spam-from-their.domain@my.domain address to anyone.
If you can't easily edit /etc/aliases on
your mail server
(and if you're not your own
postmaster, it's usually true)
check out
spamgourmet self-destructing disposable email addresses:
I don't use it because I have my own mail server and I can do whatever I want (or whatever I can) with my mail address, but spamgourmet seems to be great if you just have one mailbox somewhere like most of the people.
How do you count it? Using only 13 sounds? It's quite off-topic, but interesting. Could you explain your math and especially why is it Western-specific?
The whole idea of GPL and Copyleft in general is to not put the software in the public domain. Read What Is Copyleft, my emphasis:
It's GNU General Public License, by the way.
Once I was talking with one of my friends and I asked him:
- Why do you use Windows?
- Well, isn't it the best choice? - he replied, so I asked him:
- How many different operating systems have you tried, so you can say which one is the best?
He said:
- None, but everyone I know told me to use Windows.
So I asked:
- How many different operating systems have everyone you know tried, so they can say which one is the best?
After few seconds of silence, he asked me:
- Can you help me installing Linux?
He had no problem with understanding my point because he's a musician composing, playing and listening to technically very difficult music, while most of people listens to pop music, so he knows that whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Some time after that, he convinced his father to try using Linux and Apache on one of his company's servers, then went the MySQL in the place of MS-SQL and even large part of the desktops were switched to diskless X terminals. The choice was obvious because of the lower cost (licenses, maintenance, backups, uptime, hardware requirements, etc.) but he didn't know he had that choice in the first place, no one had ever told him and that was the problem.
The problem is that I don't know many people who've chosen Windows, they usually just wanted a PC. I have yet to see anyone who can't work on my Debian boxes with Window Maker and Mozilla or Galeon. My parents use it and my sister uses it (now she has in her resume that she has experience with GNU/Linux and X11 environments, it looks very impressive to employers).
So that's what I do, I just give them a choice.
And don't tell me that most of people can't install and configure Debian, because most of people can't install and configure Windows either, they bought it preinstalled. We could talk about the choice you fight for, when I can go to a large computer store and buy a preinstalled working Debian box. Until then, please don't tell me about choice.
Most corporations are not in the car business, still I prefer to have a choice who can fix my car. You know how expensive are even the simplest things in brand authorized car service companies, now only imagine how much more expensive would it be if you were not even allowed to fix your car anywhere else.
That's funny, because that's exactly what I do with my Debian boxes. Well, almost. I install them, configure, and I don't apply security patches, I just run apt-get upgrade.
Don't fool yourself, you don't have to check for buffer overflows when you use Debian and you don't have to check for buffer overflows when you use Windows (well, you can't anyway, so let's just say you don't have to). The difference is when you want to customize the software.
To customize IIS you have to hire Microsoft (good luck with that). To customize Apache you can hire someone from The Apache Software Foundation, you can hire someone from Apache Support Webring, you can hire someone from Covalent Technologies, Red Hat, Thawte, Dana Point Communications, or you can hire me - as we all have the source, we all know the internal API and we all have a right to customize Apache.
You can even use one of your guys that maintain and secure the servers and networks if the customizations you need are easy enough. Remember how Apache httpd internals are deigned. The most fancy customization is usually just a simple mod_perl module.
The same is with ASP versus Perl, MS-SQL versus MySQL, MSVC++ versus GCC, et cetera. Using free software is smarter from the business standpoint than using proprietary software, it's only the transition that's difficult, once you've got into the mess of proprietary file formats, protocols and "standards".
This discussion reminds me something.