You may save your company a lot upfront, but be wary of those hidden costs; lots more manpower down the road, no vendor to call, nobody to blame. Plus, you've got to factor in the manpower of doing it.
That's what the Lifetime Subscription really is.
on
TiVo Series 2 Review
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· Score: 1
Problem is, TiVos wouldn't sell at the full price they need to be to make a profit. So they have a subscription plan; most people seem to be more willing to pay $20 a month than an extra $200 up front.
If you want to buy a piece of hardware and not have a monthly subscription, buy the lifetime sub. Just think of it as paying the full cost of the unit up front.
and thus a quite different animal to a criminal prosecution. (BTW, references please?)
My guess would be, if this story is true, that the car's owner simply had a crappy lawyer defending him, or none at all. That won't be the case in criminal court, where the prosecution tend to be fairly good at getting people busted.
They pay much less than the webcaster formula on the table
The record industry then turns around and pays stations to play their music (through various schemes to end-run around payola laws).
Public, non-profit radio stations pay very little money -- while these new webcaster regulations have no accounting for not-for-profit status.
Sell-out bands or not -- under this proposal, unless you have individual, signed contracts from artists or labels that you can prove cover EVERY single thing you play on your webcast station, you need to pay the RIAA. Even if the bands in question or their labels get NOT A PENNY from it.
People seem to manage to avoid points of view they don't agree with QUITE WELL without needing the Internet.
Yes, pre Internet you MIGHT have talked with your neighbor more -- but your neighbor is pretty likely to be similar to you in many respects, and besides, avoiding 'difficult' topics for social politeness is the general norm.
I seem to recall that the software on MSDN was explicitly NOT intended for other uses, and the license says as much. E.g. you can use the MSDN exchange server for developing products that interact with exchange -- but not for your real email. You can use the copy of office for developing, but not for word-processing.
I'm curious -- what actually disqualifies you for a security clearance? What do they actually care about?
Obviously there are different levels of clearance (restricted/secret/top secret etc) but I'm sure somebody here knows a little bit about this.
I heard once that what really matters is not whether you've done anything dubious in your past, most of the time, but whether you admit it BEFORE they find out for themselves. Any truth in this?
that when you quote prior art in a patent, you are explicitly saying that what is covered by the patent is ONLY those things that aren't in the prior art. So to understand what a patent actually covers, you have to research the prior art too.
Even the claims in the patent don't mean a lot without that, because of course a lot of them are describing steps that are also in the prior art.
Most patents are a lot narrower than they seem, at first glance.
One place I worked at had SGI webservers/application servers alongside SUN equivalents. The SGIs had approximately an order of magnitude higher failure rate. Granted, this was their low-end systems, but it wasn't encouraging -- and many sites would try low end systems first to get the feel of a company's products.
It DOES restrict the laws the government can pass, however, including laws that DO restrict what one citizen can do to another.
However, I agree that the constitution is NOT what prevents this kind of thing -- the general legal principle that vigilante justice is not acceptable is.
You're talking about adult gamers who play online -- while the study here was of normal kids playing the whole spectrum of games.
Most games, still, are not this kind of online environment -- for one thing, just about every console game isn't an online game, and often console games are multiplayer.
I would definitely agree that becoming obsessive about online games might reduce your ability to deal with the rest of the world. It's the same as becoming addicted to any online environment; are obsessive online gamers any different than obsessive IRC addicts or IM-heads?
None of this applies to a bunch of kids clustered in front of the Playstation, though.
As a longtime UNIX admin who's used many UNIX systems, I think this is a good thing. I don't mind text printing on startup, but Linux prints so much ABSOLUTE USELESS CRAP to screen.
90% of them are ego-boosting messages by the authors of each chunk of the kernel. These are in particular what Linus seems to have an issue with.
I don't think boot messages should be completely gotten rid of, but they should be put on a rigorous diet. Let's look at the way other Unices do it. FreeBSD, for example, prints stuff, but it's terse and professional looking. Same with Solaris.
On Linux, the messages scroll so damn fast, especially on a speedy modern system, that you can't even read them. That's bad, folks. I can't even tell if the kernel is printing any error messages, because the credits messages scroll it so quick.
Yes, I don't mind a kernel component telling me it's there and the hardware's functional, but don't be so verbose about it!
The NY Times has the right to publish the work in any way that they have agreed with the author that they can. Basic contract & copyright law.
The copyrights to the freelance articles in question were not owned by the media companies -- they were not 'works for hire'. Rather, they bought specific rights, and only those rights, to the works.
The media companies' argument was 'If a new way to use an article we bought comes up, we have an automatic right to use it that way, too, even though we didn't pay for it. The only limits on what we can do with the work were those things thought of at the time that we didn't buy'.
Rambus got into this trouble by ignoring the simple rule that if you're on a standards committee, it's your job to tell that committee if any standard being proposed -- whether by yourself or others -- is a technology you are in the process of patenting.
Quite simply, there are only two possibilities here: Either (a) YOU are fraudulently encouraging others to adopt your technology while patenting it behind their backs, or (b) other people came up with the idea independently -- which really kind of blows that 'obviousness' thing in patent law out of the water, doesn't it!
There are several charges Apple's lawyers are alleging, and they're quite different.
The one about infringing the Lanham act sounds pretty bogus to me. The theme editor in question is no more responsible for a trademark infringement a user of it may choose to commit than a camera manufacturer is if I choose to take photographs of someone's trademarked logo and use it myself. There is to my knowledge no history of camera firms, photocopier manufacturers etc. being held partly responsible for trademark infringement using their products.
Copyright infringement is a very grey area around things like this -- sometimes the makers of tools that can be used to circumvent copyright are liable, sometimes not. However, the theme editor is capable of substantial noninfringing use, which strengthens its case.
The final argument is that, because the API for doing things like this is not documented anywhere, the only way the writers of this tool could have found out how to do it is by reverse engineering Apple's OS, which is prohibited by their click-thru license.
It's a possible infringement, but it would be an uphill task for Apple to prove. Firstly, the authors could have discovered the API through other means. If Apple have told ANYONE about them, then it could have been disclosed through that third party. If, say, Apple told a third party software developer how to do these things, and THEIR license agreement didn't have a 'don't reverse engineer' clause, then the theme editor programmers are in the clear.
Then there's the problem of proving in court that the authors of the editor actually agreed to that click-thru agreement. If they got their hands on the Apple OS second-hand, for example. Sure, the license probably says that if you sell the software, you have to make the buyer agree to the license first -- but what if someone didn't do that? They are liable, not the editor writers.
Then there's the issue as to whether the agreement had any legal binding whatsoever in the first place. The legality of click-thru licenses is somewhat suspect in most states.
Apple have something of a case, but in a fair trial they have no guarantee of victory. It's probably not a risk they want to take -- if I were Apple, I wouldn't want this to go to court. What if I got found against?
Apple are, I'm sure, hoping the editor guys fold before trial because they can't afford to defend themselves.
All the above is ignoring whether it's smart of Apple to do this. From a PR point of view it's a disaster -- Apple really can't afford to be alienating people who'd care about this. The people this hurts are the Apple evangelists and diehard users who are a large part of what keeps the company going.
I would guess that the PR angle was overridden by Apple's fear that, unless they're hyper vigilant, their interface is going to get stolen out from under them. Not by people playing with themes, but by a big player -- Microsoft, or someone else big -- who will use any failure by Apple to enforce their rights in order to get away with cloning the Apple interface.
this would be a major blow. MS doesn't make a lot of money from embedded stuff yet, but it would like to. MS has been trying to crack the embedded market for a while now.
Plenty of faster Sun servers coming down the pike; don't believe that Sun is sitting still. However, Sun's taking forever to get the Ultra III out is hurting them.
PS2 disappointment mostly unavailability
on
XBox Tidbits
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· Score: 1
The PS2 isn't disappointing because of poor game selection, it's been a retail disappointment because STILL, many months after its launch, you can hardly find them in the stores -- there has been slightly better availability in the last month, but you still pretty much never see them. They'd have sold more had they had more.
Hardware performance does not, and cannot, increase as fast as we'd like it to. We always want to do more... and therefore, optimization is one of the tools to use to be ABLE to do more with what we've got.
Nobody sane is advising the writing of whole programs in assembly language -- rather, the writing in assembly of small, frequently used routines whose absolute efficiency is important.
Slashdot Mirror
You may save your company a lot upfront, but be wary of those hidden costs; lots more manpower down the road, no vendor to call, nobody to blame. Plus, you've got to factor in the manpower of doing it.
Problem is, TiVos wouldn't sell at the full price they need to be to make a profit. So they have a subscription plan; most people seem to be more willing to pay $20 a month than an extra $200 up front.
If you want to buy a piece of hardware and not have a monthly subscription, buy the lifetime sub. Just think of it as paying the full cost of the unit up front.
and thus a quite different animal to a criminal prosecution. (BTW, references please?)
My guess would be, if this story is true, that the car's owner simply had a crappy lawyer defending him, or none at all. That won't be the case in criminal court, where the prosecution tend to be fairly good at getting people busted.
Their 'losses' are equivalent, is the point.
People seem to manage to avoid points of view they don't agree with QUITE WELL without needing the Internet.
Yes, pre Internet you MIGHT have talked with your neighbor more -- but your neighbor is pretty likely to be similar to you in many respects, and besides, avoiding 'difficult' topics for social politeness is the general norm.
I seem to recall that the software on MSDN was explicitly NOT intended for other uses, and the license says as much. E.g. you can use the MSDN exchange server for developing products that interact with exchange -- but not for your real email. You can use the copy of office for developing, but not for word-processing.
Maybe it's changed, but that's what I remember.
I'm curious -- what actually disqualifies you for a security clearance? What do they actually care about?
Obviously there are different levels of clearance (restricted/secret/top secret etc) but I'm sure somebody here knows a little bit about this.
I heard once that what really matters is not whether you've done anything dubious in your past, most of the time, but whether you admit it BEFORE they find out for themselves. Any truth in this?
Working on one right now, and it has a builtin gig-e and a 10/100. You're probably right about the bigger stuff, though.
that when you quote prior art in a patent, you are explicitly saying that what is covered by the patent is ONLY those things that aren't in the prior art. So to understand what a patent actually covers, you have to research the prior art too.
Even the claims in the patent don't mean a lot without that, because of course a lot of them are describing steps that are also in the prior art.
Most patents are a lot narrower than they seem, at first glance.
or at least, their reputation for such.
One place I worked at had SGI webservers/application servers alongside SUN equivalents. The SGIs had approximately an order of magnitude higher failure rate. Granted, this was their low-end systems, but it wasn't encouraging -- and many sites would try low end systems first to get the feel of a company's products.
Sure, EBay had its own payment system, but it was a bit slow off the mark. It's that slowness that helped PayPal.
It DOES restrict the laws the government can pass, however, including laws that DO restrict what one citizen can do to another.
However, I agree that the constitution is NOT what prevents this kind of thing -- the general legal principle that vigilante justice is not acceptable is.
The very function of a moderator is bias. A moderator must make value judgments about what should be on the list and what should not be.
What I think you mean by 'unbiased' is 'without biases I don't like'.
"Wahh! I had characters named almost the same in a crappy book I published ages ago that sank without trace! Waaahhh! I want MONEY!!!!"
You're talking about adult gamers who play online -- while the study here was of normal kids playing the whole spectrum of games.
Most games, still, are not this kind of online environment -- for one thing, just about every console game isn't an online game, and often console games are multiplayer.
I would definitely agree that becoming obsessive about online games might reduce your ability to deal with the rest of the world. It's the same as becoming addicted to any online environment; are obsessive online gamers any different than obsessive IRC addicts or IM-heads?
None of this applies to a bunch of kids clustered in front of the Playstation, though.
Can't let a small bit of reading get in the way of being a loser, can we?
Sigh. Don't know why I bother anymore. Oh, I do know why I bother -- I'm bored. Yawn.
As a longtime UNIX admin who's used many UNIX systems, I think this is a good thing. I don't mind text printing on startup, but Linux prints so much ABSOLUTE USELESS CRAP to screen.
90% of them are ego-boosting messages by the authors of each chunk of the kernel. These are in particular what Linus seems to have an issue with.
I don't think boot messages should be completely gotten rid of, but they should be put on a rigorous diet. Let's look at the way other Unices do it. FreeBSD, for example, prints stuff, but it's terse and professional looking. Same with Solaris.
On Linux, the messages scroll so damn fast, especially on a speedy modern system, that you can't even read them. That's bad, folks. I can't even tell if the kernel is printing any error messages, because the credits messages scroll it so quick.
Yes, I don't mind a kernel component telling me it's there and the hardware's functional, but don't be so verbose about it!
The NY Times has the right to publish the work in any way that they have agreed with the author that they can. Basic contract & copyright law.
The copyrights to the freelance articles in question were not owned by the media companies -- they were not 'works for hire'. Rather, they bought specific rights, and only those rights, to the works.
The media companies' argument was 'If a new way to use an article we bought comes up, we have an automatic right to use it that way, too, even though we didn't pay for it. The only limits on what we can do with the work were those things thought of at the time that we didn't buy'.
Rather an iffy argument, that.
Rambus got into this trouble by ignoring the simple rule that if you're on a standards committee, it's your job to tell that committee if any standard being proposed -- whether by yourself or others -- is a technology you are in the process of patenting.
Quite simply, there are only two possibilities here: Either (a) YOU are fraudulently encouraging others to adopt your technology while patenting it behind their backs, or (b) other people came up with the idea independently -- which really kind of blows that 'obviousness' thing in patent law out of the water, doesn't it!
There are several charges Apple's lawyers are alleging, and they're quite different.
The one about infringing the Lanham act sounds pretty bogus to me. The theme editor in question is no more responsible for a trademark infringement a user of it may choose to commit than a camera manufacturer is if I choose to take photographs of someone's trademarked logo and use it myself. There is to my knowledge no history of camera firms, photocopier manufacturers etc. being held partly responsible for trademark infringement using their products.
Copyright infringement is a very grey area around things like this -- sometimes the makers of tools that can be used to circumvent copyright are liable, sometimes not. However, the theme editor is capable of substantial noninfringing use, which strengthens its case.
The final argument is that, because the API for doing things like this is not documented anywhere, the only way the writers of this tool could have found out how to do it is by reverse engineering Apple's OS, which is prohibited by their click-thru license.
It's a possible infringement, but it would be an uphill task for Apple to prove. Firstly, the authors could have discovered the API through other means. If Apple have told ANYONE about them, then it could have been disclosed through that third party. If, say, Apple told a third party software developer how to do these things, and THEIR license agreement didn't have a 'don't reverse engineer' clause, then the theme editor programmers are in the clear.
Then there's the problem of proving in court that the authors of the editor actually agreed to that click-thru agreement. If they got their hands on the Apple OS second-hand, for example. Sure, the license probably says that if you sell the software, you have to make the buyer agree to the license first -- but what if someone didn't do that? They are liable, not the editor writers.
Then there's the issue as to whether the agreement had any legal binding whatsoever in the first place. The legality of click-thru licenses is somewhat suspect in most states.
Apple have something of a case, but in a fair trial they have no guarantee of victory. It's probably not a risk they want to take -- if I were Apple, I wouldn't want this to go to court. What if I got found against?
Apple are, I'm sure, hoping the editor guys fold before trial because they can't afford to defend themselves.
All the above is ignoring whether it's smart of Apple to do this. From a PR point of view it's a disaster -- Apple really can't afford to be alienating people who'd care about this. The people this hurts are the Apple evangelists and diehard users who are a large part of what keeps the company going.
I would guess that the PR angle was overridden by Apple's fear that, unless they're hyper vigilant, their interface is going to get stolen out from under them. Not by people playing with themes, but by a big player -- Microsoft, or someone else big -- who will use any failure by Apple to enforce their rights in order to get away with cloning the Apple interface.
this would be a major blow. MS doesn't make a lot of money from embedded stuff yet, but it would like to. MS has been trying to crack the embedded market for a while now.
Plenty of faster Sun servers coming down the pike; don't believe that Sun is sitting still. However, Sun's taking forever to get the Ultra III out is hurting them.
The PS2 isn't disappointing because of poor game selection, it's been a retail disappointment because STILL, many months after its launch, you can hardly find them in the stores -- there has been slightly better availability in the last month, but you still pretty much never see them. They'd have sold more had they had more.
Hardware performance does not, and cannot, increase as fast as we'd like it to. We always want to do more ... and therefore, optimization is one of the tools to use to be ABLE to do more with what we've got.
Nobody sane is advising the writing of whole programs in assembly language -- rather, the writing in assembly of small, frequently used routines whose absolute efficiency is important.