"A coding flaw allowed Microsoft to collect information about unique computer-identifying information."
Apparently. Oh that's what it was, was it? 'A coding flaw' that just happened to send information back to a database, after assigning everyone a unique ID?
It seems strange that the media keep confusing the issues - the NSA backdoor turned out probably not to be an NSA backdoor, but the security problems in MS products hardly stem solely from malicious attempts to allow people into the computers - the article seems to miss the fact that MS products just tend to be less secure, as is their security model...
Interestingly enough... If you look at the bottom right of the babelfish page you'll probably see the little 'h2g2, home of the babelfish' icon. Click it and it takes you to h2g2.com - Douglas Adams site which seeks to build the HHGttG!
I'm not trying to start a flame war, but isn't it quite clear that this guy is a racist? I'm not sure exactly how his argument works, and perhaps he does have a point, but the way he presents it seem only to be appealing to racists insincts. I thought saying things like 'Not only does this harm us, but most of all it harms the children' and then pointing a finger at some external group was sniffed at since we learnt what harm this sort of thing can do in the hands of hard-liners such as fascists.
Frankly, the thing this article does to me isn't to make me worried about this change in patenting law, or even the opposite - I just find it very scary.
There is a great deal of difference in someone owning a patent and wielding it when they shouldn't be. I think whilst we live in a world where there are software patents it is a good idea for google to make sure that they have the one for the technology they created, rather than let some ignorant person manage to give it to a competitor, who might use it against Google.
I know that's a bit unlikely, but do you really think Barnes and Noble were thinking 'AHA! we've pulled a swift one on Amazon - they won't realise we've stolen their technology? Of course not, they were just using an obvious idea - the fact that they didn't get the patent process started quick enough must be the only reason Amazon got the patent and not them.
So rather than let someone else try and get it, Google should get it themselves, but not be aggressive with it...
The article is entitled 'Gold Diggers' which I've always thought of as a rather pejorative phrase suggesting that they're only after the money without actually having earned it (I mean you'd call someone that marries for money a 'gold digger'), but then goes on to say how clever Amazon are and how stupid Wired are for missing out.
There may not be any central body to enforce the GPL, but if it comes to it and there's a clear cut case where someone is infringing it then even the big companies had better watch out - with the recent IPOs there are a lot of very wealthy geeks, many of which have already stated that if it came to it they'd happily use some of their money on lawyers for the big fight...
To be fair, we weren't quite 'invading' since I'm a long time Linux user / watcher, and was more than happy to leave the expo behind.
But you are right - we were welcomed very nicely!
BTW, are there/any/ pictures of Steve Blood on the net - just that he is the spitting image of the person I went with (to a scary extent) and I have to get a picture to put next to the one of my friend;-)
Someone is trying to sue Microsoft (a very large corporation) about some obvious 'technology' - surely there is no debate. Small companies are not allowed to sue Microsoft, and this rebellion must be crushed, or maybe a large conglomerate might suffer?
I happened on The Bazaar completely by accident after my friend had dragged my to the ebusiness conference upstairs. Having found that terribly boring, and thought the people all really boring we wandered downstairs.
The success was that my friend, a Microsoft Certified Professional, was incredibly impressed by how un-phony everyone was, and found himself arguing with himself, unable to accept all the old reasons why Free Software won't work, and why the model will fall. I definitely think we have a convert (Which I must say, I wasn't expecting) - he'll certainly be keeping a close eye on various developments, particularly what Miguel De Icaza does next...
It would be better if someone actually got round and decided that patenting DNA itself isn't reasonable or legal - it's not like this produces a precendent against other DNA patents. This doesn't sound even to be particularly tech-related, simply that the patent was obtained fraudulently...
Why don't they just declare the patent belonging to God - only then I guess they'd probably decide you had to pay the church royalties every time you wanted to use anything vaguely genetic.....
...but presuming Bill has any intelligence (which, I'm afraid, I'm sure he does) he knew why he needed to use the dirty monopoly tricks that he did, and will probably realise that without them Micro$oft may well be doomed.
They've already shown themselves to be pretty worried about this little Open Source OS called Linux, and if they aren't able to bundle, etc. Netscape and all the other should come back to haunt them...
Before people get into the usual debates about whether the break up of Micro$oft will be the solution or not, I think this certainly shows a step in the right direction. The DOJ are obviously making sure they know what the options are, and rather than going 'Yeah, I think it'll be a good idea', they're investigating, and finding out whether the consequences will actually be god for the consumers (create real competition) or bad (if you break us up, we will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!).
Overall that they're making absolutely sure of their options and the consequnces, must be a good thing.
Good to have an apology and a retraction, but perhaps there should also be an update to the original artice, since if someone searches the archives they might find that article and assume it was true, if they didn't read around it.
Let's hope that the word actually gets out that such a thing as Quake 3 for Linux exists. Games are (sadly) one of the major blocks for people from moving to Linux, and if they realise that they can still play the best FPS they'll be one step closer!
(Who cares about spreadsheets, when you have Quake?)
...you're not going to get the truly inter-planetary hitch-hikers wearing this thing. Fine it may do the job, but does it have the style, the finesse, of sticking a fish in your ear?
Curious how internet news items continue to say things like 'The NSA isn't allowed to spy within the USA', clearly with the implication that 'that's okay then'... Do they really not realise that people outside the US will be reading stuff and that, whilst they may not think such efforts important if they left out the US (i.e. if US emails didn't cross borders) other people do?
...and how much independent source code? i.e. how much of the windows 9x and NT code will be seen if windows CE is open-sourced? Surely Bill would never allow any part of a product to be opensourced if it gave away too much about other products. It might reveal stuff about the API and -shock-horror- might allow other people to write other programs that might even (even bigger shock-horror) use an open document type that could actually allow things to be transfered from CE 'boxen' to other computers....
This a day after 'Would Linux survive if Solaris was free'.... That article seemed to be concentrating on free beer, but the response was mainly that free speech was more important, and now it seems to be happening.
But 'Copying Linux's success?' - surely this is more like copying BSD's success, because of the way the Sun Community license works.
Should we be worried? From the way hackers have reacted to other Sun Community releases, I doubt it - the open source community seemed, and continues to seem severely underwhelmed by Sun's have-hearted effort to go open-source. When they GPL stuff, then we should be worried - or conversely we needed be worried at all, because ultimately if the Open Source community can use stuff from Solaris and vice versa freely, everybody wins - that's the point of Open Source.
Erm to be fair that's to do with everyone using miles per hour, and that being how people perceive speed. And it's not like kilometres per hour is terribly metric - how far do you go in 2 hours, 20 minutes....?
That is kinda still true - most people would recognise gallons more easily - but petrol stations do have to quote prices per litre (sometimes they do this as well as per gallon), and usually count up in litres...
What does 'english measurements' mean? Here in England, since metrication everything is in metres, kilograms, etc. As far as I know the only non-metric unit officially used is time. Do they mean imperial units? If so, surely that's American measurements - they seem the only people who are still using them.
...and wasn't the Mars Orbitor supposed to be an international effort????
I hope this doesn't sound insensitive, but surely in the general scheme of nuclear disasters this isn't really an enormous catastrophy. There are warnings that it might yet cause a meltdown. If that happens then it will be a terrible, terrible, terrible event, but as it is it sounds like they've survived well and been lucky. Surely nobody thinks that 19 people injured (even killed) is a disaster of true nuclear disaster proportions?
Slashdot Mirror
"A coding flaw allowed Microsoft to collect information about unique computer-identifying information."
Apparently. Oh that's what it was, was it? 'A coding flaw' that just happened to send information back to a database, after assigning everyone a unique ID?
It seems strange that the media keep confusing the issues - the NSA backdoor turned out probably not to be an NSA backdoor, but the security problems in MS products hardly stem solely from malicious attempts to allow people into the computers - the article seems to miss the fact that MS products just tend to be less secure, as is their security model...
Interestingly enough... If you look at the bottom right of the babelfish page you'll probably see the little 'h2g2, home of the babelfish' icon. Click it and it takes you to h2g2.com - Douglas Adams site which seeks to build the HHGttG!
I'm not trying to start a flame war, but isn't it quite clear that this guy is a racist? I'm not sure exactly how his argument works, and perhaps he does have a point, but the way he presents it seem only to be appealing to racists insincts. I thought saying things like 'Not only does this harm us, but most of all it harms the children' and then pointing a finger at some external group was sniffed at since we learnt what harm this sort of thing can do in the hands of hard-liners such as fascists.
Frankly, the thing this article does to me isn't to make me worried about this change in patenting law, or even the opposite - I just find it very scary.
So you're saying that Amazon obviously had prior art on something blindingly obvious, which justifies their having a one-click patent?
There is a great deal of difference in someone owning a patent and wielding it when they shouldn't be. I think whilst we live in a world where there are software patents it is a good idea for google to make sure that they have the one for the technology they created, rather than let some ignorant person manage to give it to a competitor, who might use it against Google.
I know that's a bit unlikely, but do you really think Barnes and Noble were thinking 'AHA! we've pulled a swift one on Amazon - they won't realise we've stolen their technology? Of course not, they were just using an obvious idea - the fact that they didn't get the patent process started quick enough must be the only reason Amazon got the patent and not them.
So rather than let someone else try and get it, Google should get it themselves, but not be aggressive with it...
The article is entitled 'Gold Diggers' which I've always thought of as a rather pejorative phrase suggesting that they're only after the money without actually having earned it (I mean you'd call someone that marries for money a 'gold digger'), but then goes on to say how clever Amazon are and how stupid Wired are for missing out.
Bit of a confusion or contradiction, isn't it?
There may not be any central body to enforce the GPL, but if it comes to it and there's a clear cut case where someone is infringing it then even the big companies had better watch out - with the recent IPOs there are a lot of very wealthy geeks, many of which have already stated that if it came to it they'd happily use some of their money on lawyers for the big fight...
To be fair, we weren't quite 'invading' since I'm a long time Linux user / watcher, and was more than happy to leave the expo behind.
/any/ pictures of Steve Blood on the net - just that he is the spitting image of the person I went with (to a scary extent) and I have to get a picture to put next to the one of my friend ;-)
But you are right - we were welcomed very nicely!
BTW, are there
Isn't this case totally clear cut?
Someone is trying to sue Microsoft (a very large corporation) about some obvious 'technology' - surely there is no debate. Small companies are not allowed to sue Microsoft, and this rebellion must be crushed, or maybe a large conglomerate might suffer?
I MEAN - Who do they think they are?!?!?!?!?
I happened on The Bazaar completely by accident after my friend had dragged my to the ebusiness conference upstairs. Having found that terribly boring, and thought the people all really boring we wandered downstairs.
The success was that my friend, a Microsoft Certified Professional, was incredibly impressed by how un-phony everyone was, and found himself arguing with himself, unable to accept all the old reasons why Free Software won't work, and why the model will fall. I definitely think we have a convert (Which I must say, I wasn't expecting) - he'll certainly be keeping a close eye on various developments, particularly what Miguel De Icaza does next...
It would be better if someone actually got round and decided that patenting DNA itself isn't reasonable or legal - it's not like this produces a precendent against other DNA patents. This doesn't sound even to be particularly tech-related, simply that the patent was obtained fraudulently...
Why don't they just declare the patent belonging to God - only then I guess they'd probably decide you had to pay the church royalties every time you wanted to use anything vaguely genetic.....
...but presuming Bill has any intelligence (which, I'm afraid, I'm sure he does) he knew why he needed to use the dirty monopoly tricks that he did, and will probably realise that without them Micro$oft may well be doomed.
They've already shown themselves to be pretty worried about this little Open Source OS called Linux, and if they aren't able to bundle, etc. Netscape and all the other should come back to haunt them...
Before people get into the usual debates about whether the break up of Micro$oft will be the solution or not, I think this certainly shows a step in the right direction. The DOJ are obviously making sure they know what the options are, and rather than going 'Yeah, I think it'll be a good idea', they're investigating, and finding out whether the consequences will actually be god for the consumers (create real competition) or bad (if you break us up, we will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!).
Overall that they're making absolutely sure of their options and the consequnces, must be a good thing.
If Windows did release their own distribution of Linux, do you think they'd call it 'Open Windows'?
And more importantly, is Windows in France called French Windows???
;-)
Good to have an apology and a retraction, but perhaps there should also be an update to the original artice, since if someone searches the archives they might find that article and assume it was true, if they didn't read around it.
Let's hope that the word actually gets out that such a thing as Quake 3 for Linux exists. Games are (sadly) one of the major blocks for people from moving to Linux, and if they realise that they can still play the best FPS they'll be one step closer!
(Who cares about spreadsheets, when you have Quake?)
...you're not going to get the truly inter-planetary hitch-hikers wearing this thing. Fine it may do the job, but does it have the style, the finesse, of sticking a fish in your ear?
I think not!!!
Curious how internet news items continue to say things like 'The NSA isn't allowed to spy within the USA', clearly with the implication that 'that's okay then'... Do they really not realise that people outside the US will be reading stuff and that, whilst they may not think such efforts important if they left out the US (i.e. if US emails didn't cross borders) other people do?
...and how much independent source code? i.e. how much of the windows 9x and NT code will be seen if windows CE is open-sourced? Surely Bill would never allow any part of a product to be opensourced if it gave away too much about other products. It might reveal stuff about the API and -shock-horror- might allow other people to write other programs that might even (even bigger shock-horror) use an open document type that could actually allow things to be transfered from CE 'boxen' to other computers....
This a day after 'Would Linux survive if Solaris was free'.... That article seemed to be concentrating on free beer, but the response was mainly that free speech was more important, and now it seems to be happening.
But 'Copying Linux's success?' - surely this is more like copying BSD's success, because of the way the Sun Community license works.
Should we be worried? From the way hackers have reacted to other Sun Community releases, I doubt it - the open source community seemed, and continues to seem severely underwhelmed by Sun's have-hearted effort to go open-source. When they GPL stuff, then we should be worried - or conversely we needed be worried at all, because ultimately if the Open Source community can use stuff from Solaris and vice versa freely, everybody wins - that's the point of Open Source.
Erm to be fair that's to do with everyone using miles per hour, and that being how people perceive speed. And it's not like kilometres per hour is terribly metric - how far do you go in 2 hours, 20 minutes....?
Ah, but bear in mind that British pints are a different size from American pints... so that's okay then...
That is kinda still true - most people would recognise gallons more easily - but petrol stations do have to quote prices per litre (sometimes they do this as well as per gallon), and usually count up in litres...
What does 'english measurements' mean? Here in England, since metrication everything is in metres, kilograms, etc. As far as I know the only non-metric unit officially used is time. Do they mean imperial units? If so, surely that's American measurements - they seem the only people who are still using them.
...and wasn't the Mars Orbitor supposed to be an international effort????
I hope this doesn't sound insensitive, but surely in the general scheme of nuclear disasters this isn't really an enormous catastrophy. There are warnings that it might yet cause a meltdown. If that happens then it will be a terrible, terrible, terrible event, but as it is it sounds like they've survived well and been lucky. Surely nobody thinks that 19 people injured (even killed) is a disaster of true nuclear disaster proportions?
(And yes, I know, that did sound insensitive...)