The size issue you bring up is, I suppose (currently) valid.
However, tracking is a real problem. The obvious place to put an RFID reader is in a store doorway, just to act as a second check to avoid shoplifting.
More and more stores do this. Cheap and effective.
Now, every time you walk in or out of a door, you tell the people running the store of all the items you're walking around with. That goes into a database, perhaps forever.
Once you wear a couple of items, it becomes easy to "taint" new items. Wearing a tagged pair of jeans? Now folks know that you also own your tagged sweater. Now there's a log of where you go WRT commercial establishments anywhere, forever.
I gotta say that *I*'m not comfortable with it. I'd like to see (a) European-style privacy laws placing limits on what RFID data can be used for, and how long kept, and (b) laws made for retailers forcing them to destroy tags at the time of purchase. If it's so easy to destroy tags, it shouldn't cost them anything to blow 'em away at checkout. Normally, I really dislike government regulation of information handling -- however, the consequences of corprate data gathering using RFID is really disturbing.
Yes, Blackboard (web-based package for student-teacher interaction, used by a number of universities) is a web-based POS. I have no idea how they managed to sell so many copies of it. However, use of Blackboard does not imply use of proprietary formats, either.
Do US citizens understand what Democracy actually means? As far as I can see many US citizens seem to think that Democracy means you agree with them.
No. US leadership has been using "democracy" as a sexy buzzword to let them run wild ever since the Cold War, when fighting political gains of communism became a major goal. "Protecting democracy" became a powerful phrase.
Here are Microsoft's arguments against Open Office usage:
1. "OpenOffice is free" Licence cost makes up only a small portion of the total cost of ownership. More significant costs include:
* Installation and deployment
Yes. Guess what? With OO, you don't need to worry about activation keys, whether you have enough licenses, going through a requisition process for a computer, or anything. You can just download the thing and install it.
* Data migration and testing (especially if customer uses Access database)
It's already been established that Access is a POS. If a customer is stuck using Access, they should be migrating to a DB that isn't liable to eat their data the next time Access feels like corrupting it.
Document conversion and rewriting macros (OpenOffice does not support Office macros)
And macros are one of the primary causes of document breakage and security problems out there already. Many people block or remove attached macros to avoid macro virus problems.
User support such as training (OpenOffice UI, although similar in many ways to Office, is not the same and users may require "retraining")
I don't get why "retraining" is quoted, but okay. There is likely some transition cost, though for the overwhelming masses of Office users, the used featureset is identical on both platforms. The same is true, though, of switching Word versions. This paper gives education users as an example -- I know one elementary school that uses an *ancient* version of Word on Windows 3.11. They have no reason to upgrade -- it works fine. Moving to a newer version is going to entail retraining costs no matter what.
Additionally, OpenOffice does not have an email client, so customers may incur a licensing cost associated with buying an e-mail application
Err...why? There are numerous excellent email clients out there that don't cost a penny. Outlook is a notoriously *bad* email client, famous for security problems.
2. "I only need basic features. OpenOffice is good enough."
In today's networked, highly collaborative world, businesses do not operate in a vacuum; basic feature functionality that enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a small business needs.
There are no concrete problems included in this section with something that Office can handle and something that OpenOffice cannot. As others have pointed out, the "virus" issues is particularly ridiculous -- when OpenOffice *has* a reputation for being used as a virus vector as Office does, *then* it might be a concern. "Create sales and marketing material that portrays the business in a professional manner"? What? How can OpenOffice not do this?
OpenOffice 1.1 is an open source alternative.
OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support team. Consequently, if bugs go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by scouring through numerous community sites and chat rooms.
As opposed to the current Microsoft approach? This is aimed at "value" customers. Microsoft is not going to care in the least if they complain about a bug. There just isn't enough money involved for Microsoft to care about actually doing support. If it were Dell, say, they might take an interest. Open Source systems are generally *much* easier to get bugs fixed in and get issues to the developers. Let's take a look at MSIE -- it's been *how* many years of complaints from the Internet at large, and PNG support is still broken?
4. "OpenOffice is compatible with Microsoft Office."
OpenOffice offers limited compatibility with Microsoft Office. Formatting, document integration, dynamic links to data, macros, and customer applications will be lost.
Versions of Microsoft Office itself frequently break said compatibility with previous versions. I've seen instances where OpenOffice correctly imported a document from an old ver
While I agree that the Start menu is a poor substitute for the Apple menu, the Apple menu had a similar problem -- throw it into the corner, and you're horizontally past the edge of the Apple menu.
Those are some tenacious Finns. That device has been insulted, chewed on, and bashed in just about every forum out there. Not only did they *keep* pushing it and doing ads for it, but now they're putting out another.
No. Hypothesis does go to theory, but a law is a very basic observation that always happens as far as we've seen. A theory is an "explanation". See here for details.
No scientist would say that a law is written in stone, in any event. You can find something that breaks a law -- perhaps on Mars, gravity operates differently. Doesn't seem real likely, but nothing preventing it from happening.
Well, yes. Technically, we *know* very, very little about the world around us. So far things fall down when you drop them, so we *think* gravity will keep operating tomorrow, but we don't really *know*.
That page is a collection of ignorant ravings. Among other things:
All packages need to be build in/usr/src/rpm which needs all people rebuilding packages to have write access in that directory which might give clashes if 2 developers try to build the same package.
False. I build RPMs as a regular user in a directory in my home directory. The actual situation is *entirely* opposite the claim -- most distros do *not* go out of their way (or have not in the past) to ensure that RPMs build as non-root.
The Kernel package contains (As of RedHat 7.2) only kernel 2.4.9 but with 269 individual patches which are not all submitted for inclusion into the main kernel which is not a nice behaviour as an open source company.
I'm not sure whether this claim is correct or not. At the worst, they are sitting right there, are GPLed, and are nicely sliced up into small patches for anyone that wants to merge them. RH has submitted many kernel patches.
Most of the stuff on the page is trivial, incorrect, or biased.
I've never had programs randomly segfault immediatly after an install. It seems like a regular occourence on Red Hat systems.
No idea how you're managing this. It's certainly not the norm. I remember GNOME 1.0 was flaky (it was flaky for *everyone*), and that was packagged with some RH.
First, Red Hat hasn't exactly been friendly to the Linux community. They write kernel patches all the time for Red Hat and don't submit them to kernel.org That doesn't seem like very friendly community behavior to me.
Absurd. RH has been one of the heaviest contributors back into the community. I'm unfamiliar with what politics you're thinking of about the patches, but the patches are diced up and available in their source RPMs, and could certainly be merged in if someone wanted them. RH has been a major contributor to the kernel, gcc, and a ton of other crucial stuff.
I really hate to see SuSE, of all the other distros, taking RH's place, though. SuSE is one of the less-free distros (I'm quite irritated over the fact that unlike Red Hat, they don't put out ISOs of their releases as soon as they release them), and RH has just moved to work better with the community with Fedora, whereas the recent SuSE CEO interview I read was talking about how more "reasonable" people that didn't expect everything to be free. RH has been rabid about keeping things as libre as possible, tossing out Navigator before Mozilla was really ready, and being a major GNOME contributor to try to avoid Qt (I swear to God I want Qt dead, and this just makes it harder...)
What needs to be done is establish and enforce international free-competition standards via the WTO. Then, if a US company is found to be breaking these, the problem can be addressed to the right place, namely the US government.
What are you, nuts? That'd just give it back to the Bush administration DoJ, which would let Microsoft off the hook again.
Okay, of the types of IP there are (at least in the US -- I don't know European law, unfortunately):
* Patent law. This is probably Microsoft's best bet, but it's terribly thin. You patent a process, a way of doing something. Even software/algorithm patents get a lot of criticism, though they're still a process. An API is static. There are not changes involved, nothing to patent.
* Trademark law. Well, Microsoft *might* requre people not to call their "DirectX" implementation "DirectX", but they can't go any further than that.
* Copyright. You may be able to copyright the specific representation of the API that you put out -- but you can't copyright a list of facts (like what values need to be passed to what functions) -- just the presentation. If someone types up their own API docs/headers, they're in the clear.
* Trade Secret. Won't work. Microsoft already tried doing exactly this with the Kerberos-in-CIFS attempt earlier -- trade secrets need to be *secrets*. They can't be published and handed out and still recieve trade secret status. If the EU forces Microsoft to publish their APIs, Microsoft automatically loses all trade secret protection on those APIs that they might potentially have had. (There are other reasons this might not work, like reverse engineering IP exemptions, but I believe that this is enough to blow away their protection already).
Re:Arguments in favour of manned spaceflight
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 1
The decision states that "to the extent that any of this interface information might be protected by intellectual property in the European Economic Area, Microsoft would be entitled to reasonable remuneration".
Interfaces and formats aren't protected, which is why WINE and Samba can and have been using them for years. I remember Microsoft getting in a tiff over WINE using the same header files, but backed down.
This doesn't seem to grant anything to Microsoft that they didn't already have. No biggie.
Big and complicated projects have generally not done all that well in the past with respect to gaining major open source effort, because they're complicated and hard to jump into.
Again, I'm not sure what the point of open-sourcing DB2 would be. We have more than enough databases to hack on already that *are* open source.
Slashdot Mirror
1950s:
"Communist!"
- Career is ruined.
2004:
"Terrorist!"
- Career is ruined.
That's like saying that there's a huge difference between someone from Maine and someone from Canada.
Might not be significant in Ukranian.
I'll bet there are a lot of innocent US licese plates that come off as terribly funny or ironic to speakers of other languages.
If that's uranium slag, wouldn't it expose the film, preventing the picture from being taken?
This topic has been absolutely done to death.
It's pretty clear that neither form of gaming is going to "die".
The size issue you bring up is, I suppose (currently) valid.
However, tracking is a real problem. The obvious place to put an RFID reader is in a store doorway, just to act as a second check to avoid shoplifting.
More and more stores do this. Cheap and effective.
Now, every time you walk in or out of a door, you tell the people running the store of all the items you're walking around with. That goes into a database, perhaps forever.
Once you wear a couple of items, it becomes easy to "taint" new items. Wearing a tagged pair of jeans? Now folks know that you also own your tagged sweater. Now there's a log of where you go WRT commercial establishments anywhere, forever.
I gotta say that *I*'m not comfortable with it. I'd like to see (a) European-style privacy laws placing limits on what RFID data can be used for, and how long kept, and (b) laws made for retailers forcing them to destroy tags at the time of purchase. If it's so easy to destroy tags, it shouldn't cost them anything to blow 'em away at checkout. Normally, I really dislike government regulation of information handling -- however, the consequences of corprate data gathering using RFID is really disturbing.
If you like taking everything you buy and running it through a microwave, yeah.
Carnegie Mellon University (unfortunately) uses it in many classes, especially non-technical ones.
The old existing bboard (think newsgroups via IMAP) system is still prefered by a lot of tech profs.
I've seen nothing with the thing but bugs, poor performance, etc. I can't figure out how so many schools bought the Blackboard package.
Use of Blackboard does not imply use of Word or any proprietary formats, however.
Yes, Blackboard (web-based package for student-teacher interaction, used by a number of universities) is a web-based POS. I have no idea how they managed to sell so many copies of it. However, use of Blackboard does not imply use of proprietary formats, either.
Do US citizens understand what Democracy actually means? As far as I can see many US citizens seem to think that Democracy means you agree with them.
No. US leadership has been using "democracy" as a sexy buzzword to let them run wild ever since the Cold War, when fighting political gains of communism became a major goal. "Protecting democracy" became a powerful phrase.
Here are Microsoft's arguments against Open Office usage:
1. "OpenOffice is free"
Licence cost makes up only a small portion of the total cost of ownership. More significant costs include:
* Installation and deployment
Yes. Guess what? With OO, you don't need to worry about activation keys, whether you have enough licenses, going through a requisition process for a computer, or anything. You can just download the thing and install it.
* Data migration and testing (especially if customer uses Access database)
It's already been established that Access is a POS. If a customer is stuck using Access, they should be migrating to a DB that isn't liable to eat their data the next time Access feels like corrupting it.
Document conversion and rewriting macros (OpenOffice does not support Office macros)
And macros are one of the primary causes of document breakage and security problems out there already. Many people block or remove attached macros to avoid macro virus problems.
User support such as training (OpenOffice UI, although similar in many ways to Office, is not the same and users may require "retraining")
I don't get why "retraining" is quoted, but okay. There is likely some transition cost, though for the overwhelming masses of Office users, the used featureset is identical on both platforms. The same is true, though, of switching Word versions. This paper gives education users as an example -- I know one elementary school that uses an *ancient* version of Word on Windows 3.11. They have no reason to upgrade -- it works fine. Moving to a newer version is going to entail retraining costs no matter what.
Additionally, OpenOffice does not have an email client, so customers may incur a licensing cost associated with buying an e-mail application
Err...why? There are numerous excellent email clients out there that don't cost a penny. Outlook is a notoriously *bad* email client, famous for security problems.
2. "I only need basic features. OpenOffice is good enough."
In today's networked, highly collaborative world, businesses do not operate in a vacuum; basic feature functionality that enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a small business needs.
There are no concrete problems included in this section with something that Office can handle and something that OpenOffice cannot. As others have pointed out, the "virus" issues is particularly ridiculous -- when OpenOffice *has* a reputation for being used as a virus vector as Office does, *then* it might be a concern. "Create sales and marketing material that portrays the business in a professional manner"? What? How can OpenOffice not do this?
OpenOffice 1.1 is an open source alternative.
OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support team. Consequently, if bugs go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by scouring through numerous community sites and chat rooms.
As opposed to the current Microsoft approach? This is aimed at "value" customers. Microsoft is not going to care in the least if they complain about a bug. There just isn't enough money involved for Microsoft to care about actually doing support. If it were Dell, say, they might take an interest. Open Source systems are generally *much* easier to get bugs fixed in and get issues to the developers. Let's take a look at MSIE -- it's been *how* many years of complaints from the Internet at large, and PNG support is still broken?
4. "OpenOffice is compatible with Microsoft Office."
OpenOffice offers limited compatibility with Microsoft Office. Formatting, document integration, dynamic links to data, macros, and customer applications will be lost.
Versions of Microsoft Office itself frequently break said compatibility with previous versions. I've seen instances where OpenOffice correctly imported a document from an old ver
patents != to innovation.
A company with many patents is not necessarily innovative, and one that is innovative does not necessarily have many patents.
While I agree that the Start menu is a poor substitute for the Apple menu, the Apple menu had a similar problem -- throw it into the corner, and you're horizontally past the edge of the Apple menu.
Those are some tenacious Finns. That device has been insulted, chewed on, and bashed in just about every forum out there. Not only did they *keep* pushing it and doing ads for it, but now they're putting out another.
If nothing else, they get an 'A' for effort.
Hypothesis -> Theory -> Law
No. Hypothesis does go to theory, but a law is a very basic observation that always happens as far as we've seen. A theory is an "explanation". See here for details.
No scientist would say that a law is written in stone, in any event. You can find something that breaks a law -- perhaps on Mars, gravity operates differently. Doesn't seem real likely, but nothing preventing it from happening.
Well, yes. Technically, we *know* very, very little about the world around us. So far things fall down when you drop them, so we *think* gravity will keep operating tomorrow, but we don't really *know*.
The first few paragraphs
/usr/src/rpm which needs all people rebuilding packages to have write access in that directory which might give clashes if 2 developers try to build the same package.
That page is a collection of ignorant ravings. Among other things:
All packages need to be build in
False. I build RPMs as a regular user in a directory in my home directory. The actual situation is *entirely* opposite the claim -- most distros do *not* go out of their way (or have not in the past) to ensure that RPMs build as non-root.
The Kernel package contains (As of RedHat 7.2) only kernel 2.4.9 but with 269 individual patches which are not all submitted for inclusion into the main kernel which is not a nice behaviour as an open source company.
I'm not sure whether this claim is correct or not. At the worst, they are sitting right there, are GPLed, and are nicely sliced up into small patches for anyone that wants to merge them. RH has submitted many kernel patches.
Most of the stuff on the page is trivial, incorrect, or biased.
I've never had programs randomly segfault immediatly after an install. It seems like a regular occourence on Red Hat systems.
No idea how you're managing this. It's certainly not the norm. I remember GNOME 1.0 was flaky (it was flaky for *everyone*), and that was packagged with some RH.
First, Red Hat hasn't exactly been friendly to the Linux community. They write kernel patches all the time for Red Hat and don't submit them to kernel.org That doesn't seem like very friendly community behavior to me.
Absurd. RH has been one of the heaviest contributors back into the community. I'm unfamiliar with what politics you're thinking of about the patches, but the patches are diced up and available in their source RPMs, and could certainly be merged in if someone wanted them. RH has been a major contributor to the kernel, gcc, and a ton of other crucial stuff.
I really hate to see SuSE, of all the other distros, taking RH's place, though. SuSE is one of the less-free distros (I'm quite irritated over the fact that unlike Red Hat, they don't put out ISOs of their releases as soon as they release them), and RH has just moved to work better with the community with Fedora, whereas the recent SuSE CEO interview I read was talking about how more "reasonable" people that didn't expect everything to be free. RH has been rabid about keeping things as libre as possible, tossing out Navigator before Mozilla was really ready, and being a major GNOME contributor to try to avoid Qt (I swear to God I want Qt dead, and this just makes it harder...)
SuSE is less interested in keeping things as free as possible, though -- the lag in putting up their ISOs is one example.
SuSE is more a Microsoft than Red Hat when it comes to where it counts -- leveraging their position.
What needs to be done is establish and enforce international free-competition standards via the WTO. Then, if a US company is found to be breaking these, the problem can be addressed to the right place, namely the US government.
What are you, nuts? That'd just give it back to the Bush administration DoJ, which would let Microsoft off the hook again.
Ah, for Janet Reno to be back again...
Okay, of the types of IP there are (at least in the US -- I don't know European law, unfortunately):
* Patent law. This is probably Microsoft's best bet, but it's terribly thin. You patent a process, a way of doing something. Even software/algorithm patents get a lot of criticism, though they're still a process. An API is static. There are not changes involved, nothing to patent.
* Trademark law. Well, Microsoft *might* requre people not to call their "DirectX" implementation "DirectX", but they can't go any further than that.
* Copyright. You may be able to copyright the specific representation of the API that you put out -- but you can't copyright a list of facts (like what values need to be passed to what functions) -- just the presentation. If someone types up their own API docs/headers, they're in the clear.
* Trade Secret. Won't work. Microsoft already tried doing exactly this with the Kerberos-in-CIFS attempt earlier -- trade secrets need to be *secrets*. They can't be published and handed out and still recieve trade secret status. If the EU forces Microsoft to publish their APIs, Microsoft automatically loses all trade secret protection on those APIs that they might potentially have had. (There are other reasons this might not work, like reverse engineering IP exemptions, but I believe that this is enough to blow away their protection already).
Try justifying the teaching of history.
The decision states that "to the extent that any of this interface information might be protected by intellectual property in the European Economic Area, Microsoft would be entitled to reasonable remuneration".
Interfaces and formats aren't protected, which is why WINE and Samba can and have been using them for years. I remember Microsoft getting in a tiff over WINE using the same header files, but backed down.
This doesn't seem to grant anything to Microsoft that they didn't already have. No biggie.
GTK is LGPL -- there is no legal problem.
DB2 is big and complicated.
Big and complicated projects have generally not done all that well in the past with respect to gaining major open source effort, because they're complicated and hard to jump into.
Again, I'm not sure what the point of open-sourcing DB2 would be. We have more than enough databases to hack on already that *are* open source.