Yeah, when you are living in the US that is probably true, but the world is a bit bigger. Here in the Netherlands there is no DCMA (yet) and copyright law contains a clause explicitly permitting reverse enginering of software for compatibility reasons. One could easily claim DeCSS falls under that clause (it provides DVD playback compatibility to my linux PC). Afaik this has not been tested court in anyway, so to me it's status is 'likely legal, but yet sure'.
Surely, but this will make the status of any software implemented based in that information somewhat difficult and therefore likely unsuitable for business use. This is indeed just like DeCSS, which still has a not entirely clear legal status. There are clearly legal solutions for linux available, but afaik there is no solution which is both clearly legal and open source.
Whether or not that actually matters depends largely on the terms that come with the documents. If they can be republished it really will be a one time fee after which the documents will end up on some public website. In that case, someone (or some group) will come up with the money and all will be well. If the documents cannot be republished there will probably be some open source lib_ms_protocols you can use in your project. (If creating that library under an OSS license is not possible MS didn't actually implement the verdict and this will go into a next round.)
Define 'American way of life'. Is it caring about what is right an just? Or is it sitting on the couch watching TV and wining about about how oil prices make driving your ridiculus more expensive.
America used to mean freedom and democracy, now it means war, stupid consumers and a democracy which consist of choosing between getting screwed and getting fucked by politicians. In my book any country with a voter turnout
The USA is basically ruled by the rich elite, I suggest you start changing job titles. Senator becomes Duke, CEO becomes Bishop.
The whole concept of 1-click ordering is an idea, not a device.
I wouldn't care if Amazon's implementation of this got patented (they'd be better of with copyright anyway). But they managed to patent something like 'Transporting people between A and B really fast' (obvious) or 'Moving people from A to B in exactly 34592804723.2 seconds' (not obvious), an idea. This is the prime example of why so called software patents (I have yet to see one actually containing software) are bad.
As far as I'm concerned Sony Music == Sony Electronics, they both hide behind the same www.sony.com, and more importantly, they feed the same shareholders.
So what is it, did they screw up on there DRM scheme once again or did they finally make one properly usable device?
Not that it matters much, it will take a lot more before I start buying Sony again. For starters, I'm not going to spend a single cent on a company that calls me a thief for making a legal copy of legally acquired music. That's just sponsering an upcoming lawsuit against myself, which to me seems really stupid.
In GTA you run around breaking the law, consorting with whores and fellons, and killing people in bloody episodes. Didn't Moses do the same thing? Don't know about the other ones, but he sure broke the law:
So Moses anger became hot, and he cast the tablets (containing the ten commandments) out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=2&chapter=32&version=50
I'm under the impression that the old testament is not very popular amongst american evangelicals (but I'm not even american, so it's all just my impression), however there seems to be a strong tradition of tithing, giving a tenth of your income away. This come from an old testament rule, here is what you are suppossed to do with that 10% if your income:
"But if the journey is too long for you, so that you are not able to carry the tithe, or if the place where the LORD your God chooses to put His name is too far from you, when the LORD your God has blessed you, 25 then you shall exchange it for money, take the money in your hand, and go to the place which the LORD your God chooses. 26 And you shall spend that money for whatever your heart desires: for oxen or sheep, for wine or similar drink, for whatever your heart desires; you shall eat there before the LORD your God, and you shall rejoice, you and your household. " http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deut%2014:22-27;&version=50;
There it is, 'thou shall have at least one good party, with lots of food and drinks, in your church every year'.
That doesn't go against all the warnings against excessive drinking habits, but there is a huge difference between drinking a lot at a party and being druk all the time.
If only it where indeed 'very few patent trolls'. Sad fact is there are more and more of them out there, and they are flourishing. If your MRI story proves anything it's that the system once worked, it does nothing to disprove it's currently totally f*cked up. At the moment the patent system has become a tool used by big corps to kill the competition, as such it kills innovation and we'd be better of without it. The patent system needs a huge fix really soon or it will be FUBAR.
I don't live in the US, but I wouldn't dare to start a software company investing heavily in R&D overthere. Thats largely because of software patents and the ability of large companies to kill you with lawyers. I guess i'm not the only one feeling that way and i'm fairly sure it's holding back a lot of innovation.
As said by others, thats requirement exists for trademarks. I do believe it would be a huge improvement if such a requirement would be added to patent law.
Preferably i'd go one step further, a requirment to actually make use the technology in the patent. That is, any patent which is not actively used (either by the inventor or licensees) withing say, 18 months after fileing it is voided automatically. And I mean automatically, e.g. the patent expires after 18 months unless you prove it is actually used. That will nicely clean the patent database of all the totally useless crap in there and will make sure that all this 'innovation' (thats what patents are suppossed to promote right?) is actualy benificial to society.
If you were to choose between spending money on one or the other you may well be right, however for people like me, the ones with a big box of old hardware bur never enough memory it may well be a cheaper solution.
Swap is for people who can't afford any more memory, and are willing to take a massive performance hit to avoid said expense. Cheapskate! Ram is for people who can't afford any more Level 2 cache, and are willing to take a massive performance hit to avoid said expense.
In fact, Level 2 cache is for... Oh well, nevermind.
After so many years you still believe those 'religious wars' where about religion?
Do you believe the war in Iraq is about the 'war on terror'? Do you believe there ever were serious amounts of WMD's in Iraq, about to be handed out to those same terrorist that set-up 9/11?
Let me ask you again, do you believe that all those 'religious wars' were about religion?
I'm not entirely sure about the situation in France, but I guess their laws are not that far appart from the Dutch laws, as they are likely both based on the same EU directives. Overhere it is perfectly legal to sell a phone together with a contract, Apple can perfectly sell the iPhone together with a 5 year contract just like they do in the US. What they cannot do is lock the iPhone to a work only specific provider, it's a GSM phone, ot should work with any GSM network.
This allows you to pay the phone, swallow the monthly fees of the contract and still use it with another provider. But mostly it allows you to switch to an other provider when your current contract ends, ensuring fair competition. All of this still doesn't prevent providers from even giving away phones for free with a contract, they will still be paid at least the monthly fees for the period contract.
My employer has implemented PeopleSoft and it's been nothing but a nightmare. Inaccurate accounts, never quote being sure how much money you have in an account, and the web interface.... It's like something out of 1997! This is 2007, and if Google and other companies can make sleek AJAX interfaces, you'd think on a multi-million dollar system like PeopleSoft they could at least build one that looks as though it's from this decade!
No they cannot just build another UI on top off their system. There is no such thing as a seperate UI in these old (mostly 4GL) systems, a new UI generally means either somthing which isn't much more than a new skin on the same UI or, to do it right, a complete rewrite of the whole system. And when you talk about an ERP system which took about a decade to build you can guess how much enthousiasm you will find within your management when you propose a rewrite.
I often wonder, if I knew more about accounting, I bet I could put together a startup and make a piece of software which cleans their clocks. It is complex, but doable, without interfaces out of last century and authentication protocols which depend upon the eccentricities of different versions of an operating system. If someone took on this challenge they could be very, very, very rich just by building a usable system that doesn't require millions in consulting fees.
You probably can, I'm sure I can. But it will take at the very least 5 years to get close to the functionality offered by the big ERP systems. And when you're done, you will have a 5 year old interface to start with, someone else will have beaten you to it and at least one or two of the current ERP suppliers will have found a way the clean up there act an provide better usability. It's not like all these ERP vendors don't know these issues, SAP partners with Adobe for UI stuff, INFOR is putting everything they bought into one SOA architecture allowing customers to pick either simple or more complex components depending on there need. The whole ERP bussiness is talking about nothing but usability, TCO, time to implement and midmarket right now. By the time you are done, they will have it figured out and you will have lost a few years, only to run into a filled market and presumably (at least in the USA) a shitload of patents.
Your best bet, build a specific component which cleanly interoperates with other software and hope one the big ERP vendors buys your company one day. Bussiness Object (aka Crystal Reports) was just bought by SAP for 4,8 billion euro...
As an IT guy in a big organisation, via the marvels of SMS2003 I've been shown to have Firefox on my machine. I've been asked to remove it on grounds of security...sigh.
Your boss calls you an IT guy, but doesn't trust you with a computer? Does he also send you to customers? "Hey, I won't trust him with one of my PC's but you can hire this briliant IT guy for $500/h".
After all, until Firefox implements some kind of MSHTML.DLL replacement scheme (would this be so difficult, really?), it is not possible to completely remove Internet Explorer from a standard Windows system (WinXP Lite etc. notwithstanding) and have it still function the same way.
Someone should port the Wine MSHTML.DLL back to Windows.. and have it use Gecko, in order that we completely reduce the requirement of Windows on the obvious things.
Shouldn't MS be the one fixing the problems in MS software? I can see why there aren't many people volunteering to solve what is not their problem in the first place.
Yeah, digital is different, but that doesn't mean there isn't anything between on and off in all uses. I really don't know the details of HDMI interfaces, but it's more then likely it will perfectly cope with a certain amount off data loss, just like most internet streaming media do. And no, that doesn't become impossible when encryption is used, corrupted encrypted data will simply result in corrupted data when decrypted.
There is however a very clear, measurable point where the quality of the cable is good enough and the data will be reproduced with 100% accuracy. When you reach that point it will not get better, no matter how much you spend. And yes, mostly you will reach that point long before you need gold plated connectors, but in some cases (very long cables mostly) this may just be the extra bit needed to get there.
Try this one, rip a full length audio cd to wav files, then try to burn these files onto a cd-recordable. It won't fit, go and find out why and you may learn a lot about what digital really means.
Webradio would be a good answer to that problem for most of the time (e.g. at home). DAB could also provide relativly cheap terestrial radio because the costs of broadcasting can be shared across more stations. No guess who are really busy right now either preventing or controlling both of them?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, when you are living in the US that is probably true, but the world is a bit bigger. Here in the Netherlands there is no DCMA (yet) and copyright law contains a clause explicitly permitting reverse enginering of software for compatibility reasons. One could easily claim DeCSS falls under that clause (it provides DVD playback compatibility to my linux PC). Afaik this has not been tested court in anyway, so to me it's status is 'likely legal, but yet sure'.
Surely, but this will make the status of any software implemented based in that information somewhat difficult and therefore likely unsuitable for business use. This is indeed just like DeCSS, which still has a not entirely clear legal status. There are clearly legal solutions for linux available, but afaik there is no solution which is both clearly legal and open source.
Whether or not that actually matters depends largely on the terms that come with the documents. If they can be republished it really will be a one time fee after which the documents will end up on some public website. In that case, someone (or some group) will come up with the money and all will be well. If the documents cannot be republished there will probably be some open source lib_ms_protocols you can use in your project. (If creating that library under an OSS license is not possible MS didn't actually implement the verdict and this will go into a next round.)
Define 'American way of life'. Is it caring about what is right an just? Or is it sitting on the couch watching TV and wining about about how oil prices make driving your ridiculus more expensive.
America used to mean freedom and democracy, now it means war, stupid consumers and a democracy which consist of choosing between getting screwed and getting fucked by politicians. In my book any country with a voter turnout The USA is basically ruled by the rich elite, I suggest you start changing job titles. Senator becomes Duke, CEO becomes Bishop.
Wonderfull, at this rate they might even manage to understand irony somewhere in my liftime.
Thats cool, even I could be included. I just wrote a line of text and it's on a webpage...
The whole concept of 1-click ordering is an idea, not a device.
I wouldn't care if Amazon's implementation of this got patented (they'd be better of with copyright anyway). But they managed to patent something like 'Transporting people between A and B really fast' (obvious) or 'Moving people from A to B in exactly 34592804723.2 seconds' (not obvious), an idea. This is the prime example of why so called software patents (I have yet to see one actually containing software) are bad.
As far as I'm concerned Sony Music == Sony Electronics, they both hide behind the same www.sony.com, and more importantly, they feed the same shareholders.
So what is it, did they screw up on there DRM scheme once again or did they finally make one properly usable device?
Not that it matters much, it will take a lot more before I start buying Sony again. For starters, I'm not going to spend a single cent on a company that calls me a thief for making a legal copy of legally acquired music. That's just sponsering an upcoming lawsuit against myself, which to me seems really stupid.
There it is, 'thou shall have at least one good party, with lots of food and drinks, in your church every year'.
That doesn't go against all the warnings against excessive drinking habits, but there is a huge difference between drinking a lot at a party and being druk all the time.
If only it where indeed 'very few patent trolls'. Sad fact is there are more and more of them out there, and they are flourishing. If your MRI story proves anything it's that the system once worked, it does nothing to disprove it's currently totally f*cked up. At the moment the patent system has become a tool used by big corps to kill the competition, as such it kills innovation and we'd be better of without it. The patent system needs a huge fix really soon or it will be FUBAR.
I don't live in the US, but I wouldn't dare to start a software company investing heavily in R&D overthere. Thats largely because of software patents and the ability of large companies to kill you with lawyers. I guess i'm not the only one feeling that way and i'm fairly sure it's holding back a lot of innovation.
As said by others, thats requirement exists for trademarks. I do believe it would be a huge improvement if such a requirement would be added to patent law.
Preferably i'd go one step further, a requirment to actually make use the technology in the patent. That is, any patent which is not actively used (either by the inventor or licensees) withing say, 18 months after fileing it is voided automatically. And I mean automatically, e.g. the patent expires after 18 months unless you prove it is actually used. That will nicely clean the patent database of all the totally useless crap in there and will make sure that all this 'innovation' (thats what patents are suppossed to promote right?) is actualy benificial to society.
If you were to choose between spending money on one or the other you may well be right, however for people like me, the ones with a big box of old hardware bur never enough memory it may well be a cheaper solution.
In fact, Level 2 cache is for... Oh well, nevermind.
So, they got it implemented faster. Doesn't invalidate the original point that the ideas where lifted of Vista (and OSX, which was released in 2001).
After so many years you still believe those 'religious wars' where about religion?
Do you believe the war in Iraq is about the 'war on terror'? Do you believe there ever were serious amounts of WMD's in Iraq, about to be handed out to those same terrorist that set-up 9/11?
Let me ask you again, do you believe that all those 'religious wars' were about religion?
I'm not entirely sure about the situation in France, but I guess their laws are not that far appart from the Dutch laws, as they are likely both based on the same EU directives. Overhere it is perfectly legal to sell a phone together with a contract, Apple can perfectly sell the iPhone together with a 5 year contract just like they do in the US. What they cannot do is lock the iPhone to a work only specific provider, it's a GSM phone, ot should work with any GSM network.
This allows you to pay the phone, swallow the monthly fees of the contract and still use it with another provider. But mostly it allows you to switch to an other provider when your current contract ends, ensuring fair competition.
All of this still doesn't prevent providers from even giving away phones for free with a contract, they will still be paid at least the monthly fees for the period contract.
No they cannot just build another UI on top off their system. There is no such thing as a seperate UI in these old (mostly 4GL) systems, a new UI generally means either somthing which isn't much more than a new skin on the same UI or, to do it right, a complete rewrite of the whole system. And when you talk about an ERP system which took about a decade to build you can guess how much enthousiasm you will find within your management when you propose a rewrite.
I often wonder, if I knew more about accounting, I bet I could put together a startup and make a piece of software which cleans their clocks. It is complex, but doable, without interfaces out of last century and authentication protocols which depend upon the eccentricities of different versions of an operating system. If someone took on this challenge they could be very, very, very rich just by building a usable system that doesn't require millions in consulting fees.
You probably can, I'm sure I can. But it will take at the very least 5 years to get close to the functionality offered by the big ERP systems. And when you're done, you will have a 5 year old interface to start with, someone else will have beaten you to it and at least one or two of the current ERP suppliers will have found a way the clean up there act an provide better usability. It's not like all these ERP vendors don't know these issues, SAP partners with Adobe for UI stuff, INFOR is putting everything they bought into one SOA architecture allowing customers to pick either simple or more complex components depending on there need. The whole ERP bussiness is talking about nothing but usability, TCO, time to implement and midmarket right now. By the time you are done, they will have it figured out and you will have lost a few years, only to run into a filled market and presumably (at least in the USA) a shitload of patents.
Your best bet, build a specific component which cleanly interoperates with other software and hope one the big ERP vendors buys your company one day. Bussiness Object (aka Crystal Reports) was just bought by SAP for 4,8 billion euro...
Your boss calls you an IT guy, but doesn't trust you with a computer? Does he also send you to customers? "Hey, I won't trust him with one of my PC's but you can hire this briliant IT guy for $500/h".
Shouldn't MS be the one fixing the problems in MS software? I can see why there aren't many people volunteering to solve what is not their problem in the first place.
I think there is a grammar error in there somewhere. I'm not quite sure though.
Yeah, digital is different, but that doesn't mean there isn't anything between on and off in all uses. I really don't know the details of HDMI interfaces, but it's more then likely it will perfectly cope with a certain amount off data loss, just like most internet streaming media do. And no, that doesn't become impossible when encryption is used, corrupted encrypted data will simply result in corrupted data when decrypted.
There is however a very clear, measurable point where the quality of the cable is good enough and the data will be reproduced with 100% accuracy. When you reach that point it will not get better, no matter how much you spend. And yes, mostly you will reach that point long before you need gold plated connectors, but in some cases (very long cables mostly) this may just be the extra bit needed to get there.
Try this one, rip a full length audio cd to wav files, then try to burn these files onto a cd-recordable. It won't fit, go and find out why and you may learn a lot about what digital really means.
Webradio would be a good answer to that problem for most of the time (e.g. at home). DAB could also provide relativly cheap terestrial radio because the costs of broadcasting can be shared across more stations. No guess who are really busy right now either preventing or controlling both of them?