When working with documents in any WYSIWYG word processor headers, figures and tables should be prepared separately and only inserted into the document after the every last word is finalised. Otherwise all the formatting of the tables can be lost every time you add or remove a word. If you and your colleagues are working in the way you describe then more time must be spent formatting documents than writing them. If anybody ever wants to waste my time like that I have no problem in saying no. Sort out the content first the formatting last and then you only need it to format correctly on one machine, (i.e. the machine of the person who runs the print job).
That letter reminds me of a poor student essay, lots of buzzwords, no evidence of understanding, and no sign of any original thought. Take the phrase "makes it clear that only software which forms part of a technological process will be patentable." Can anyone tell me of any software that doesn't form part of a technological process. Clue, any piece of software run on a piece computer (i.e. a piece of technological equipment) is transformed into a process.
Now look at this bit, "This will allow European businesses the chance to develop ideas with certainty as to their legal position." WTF patent laws create uncertainty you need to know if your work is already covered by a patent, is that patent valid, and anything which involves courts and the legal system always introduces an element of uncertainty. On the other hand no patent law means absolute certainty, if you can do it you're allowed to do it
Finally look at the phrase, "I and my UK Conservative colleagues support the general line..." which can be translated as ' I do what the party tells me and you as a mere constituent are stuffed because all the major parties are following the same line.' Isn't democracy wonderful.
I may be misunderstanding the situation due to neither being an American nor having lived in that country. However where I come from, Scotland, the argument that a vendor could deny a customer their legal rights through a shrink wrap license is a what you termed 'a zero traction argument'. There is a simple principal that you can not contract out of the law. Further the UK has law that prevents the insertion of unfair clauses in non negotiable contracts, any such clauses are deemed to be invalid.
The situation you describe seems to indicate that a vendor can escape the law, simply by printing on a package that the law doesn't apply to them. This surely raises an issue of sovereignty, and a legal system that allows that is surely in a mess. Especially one that treats precedent as having legal significance. Anyway, good luck in your efforts
He points out that SCO has a long way to go before it can assert broad intellectual property claims against an operating system that was written by thousands of open source programmers worldwide.
In the so called repost this changes to:
He points out that SCO has a long long
shaft up its ass before it can assert broad intellectual property claims against an operating system that was written by thousands of open source programmers worldwide.
But in the meanwhile, Boies et al. are running squarely into the teeth of the most recent Circuit Court case addressing the point, and it won't be pretty for them.
You've just demonstrated that judges are capable of ignoring both law and constitution when it suits them. Although the case you describe could be seen to set a precedent against preemption it is also a case of a much more worrying precedent, that is it is a case of judges coming to a conclusion that flies in the face of the law and logic. Given that it can not be assumed that any ludicrous argument presented for the the GPL being invalid will not be upheld.
Anyone still wondering why MS is under investigation in Europe for using Media Player to extend their monopoly now has their answer. The recording cartel and the OS monopolists have got together to tie up the market for downloadable singles. The result overpriced tracks, low quality, DRM and no choice.
That's why you will start seeing contracts that will say "This contract is governed by the laws of Virginia" as they try to leech.
Like EULA's the only jurisdiction that such a clause will be ruled valid by a judge is in Virginia. A contract is subject to the law where it is made and or applies. In the case of a sale's contract that is the place where the customer bought the goods. I know of no jurisdiction where you can contract out of the law and judges tend to take an extremely dim view of any attempt to do so. After all they want to protect their jobs.
Lastly, to those who say the RIAA is 100% pure evil and I should boycott them, don't forget that the RIAA includes a lot of great labels/artists/music in my opinion. I'm not talking about BoyBand Du Jour, but rather Count Baise, John Coltraine, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Gershwin, Louis Armstrong, Nora Jones, Kurt Elling, Max Roach, Charlie Mingus, pretty much anything from Blue Note Records... You get the idea (and I'm just using Jazz artists as an example). I will continue to support the recording industry as long as they have these artists.
Please tell me how the RIAA has these artists, because to the best of my knowledge most of them are long dead. What the record companies have is the copyrights to recordings that these artists made, in many cases over half a century ago. How many of these artists are seminal musicians, treasures of our musical heritage, most of them. Now think how many of them get any substantial amount of radio play these days, how many of todays kids have even heard the great music they created. The current system is destroying our musical heritage not preserving it nor enriching it, and that is why things must change.
Yes music has value it has a value far greater than can measured in monetary terms. As long as those that control the distribution continue to value music only for the revenue it can generate then the further music will decline
Ritalin {prescribed for hyperactive kids} is a mild upper chemically related to amphetamine {No, I don't understand why give hyper kids uppers either}.
The effects of stimulants and depressants on behaviour are counterintuitive. Stimulants give you energy but make you more reflective, depressants decrease energy but lessen inhibition. If you want to know why they give hyperactive kids an upper think what would happen if you fed them a well known downer called alcohol.
Fair enough, you take the marketing view of OS succession and I take the technical one. Though I would still argue that 2000 is not the successor to the DOS based windows. That accolade belongs to XP home edition which, although it is a big improvement on 98/ME, still sucks. However if you look at the improvement between NT4 and XP professional you would have to say the difference is not that huge, and I would suggest that is progression you should look at if you want to estimate the likely progress in the next version of windows.
Like it or not, Windows is improving all the time, just look at the leap in quality between Windows 98 and 2000 alone. This is a company that is doing some good stuff and getting their act together.
Don't you mean the huge leap in quality between Windows 98 and Windows ME, as if anyone could call ME a quality product. Windows 2000 replaced NT4 a derivitive of VMS, not DOS. 2000 may be reliable in Microsoft terms, but does it yet reach the standards that VMS users were used to? It's certainly not as secure.
You're spot on regarding my musical ability but your reasoning sucks. I'll give you on example. My brother in law is both a talented cabinet maker and a talented fiddler. He chooses to make a living from working with wood, but when he travels he covers his costs by taking the fiddle he made himself into the street and practising.
A good musician can get of a bus in a strange town, find a likely spot and within half a day make enough tips to keep him going for the day. He will make enough to pay for accommodation and food and a bit extra in that time. He'll be able to find a bar that will supply the drinks for him in return for playing in a corner of the bar. By the end of the day he'll usually have an invite to stay at someone's house for a couple of nights.
People can and do travel this way. Good musicians don't starve. If you can't make a living by busking you're not good enough to be a professional musician. Be honest with yourself, could you survive like I've described above. I know several people who have done it, not all of them play music as a profession, but all of them could if they chose to. If you can't survive like that then don't give up the day job.
You fail to recognize the sunk cost of R&D in creating the X-box. All this has to come from somewhere. The measily amount of money made from selling the hardware will not come close to making up the 100s of millions of dollars spent on developing the system.
The X-box is just a low spec PC in an ugly box with an assortment of hardware and software dongles. It's not exactly ground breaking technology. 100's of millions of dollars in R&D, paid for by flying pigs no doubt.
I go to a lot of concerts in small venues and from what I pick up from talking to the musicians the break even point seems to be about fifty or sixty in the audience for each band member. Most of these shows make do with the house lights and the show is watching great musicians at work. Now granted these concerts tend in genres that don't attract huge audiences, but the musicians are usually excellent and frequently include some of the best in the world.
Most of these guys manage to make a decent living and have careers that span decades. So it possible to make a living from touring. Personally I don't want to see a light show unless it's a concert at a big venue where the intimacy of the small concert is lost.
Yep, especially when you tell them that you have to unmount a floppy disk on a Linux system before removing it from the drive. You need to give some explanation of why this is the case, otherwise it's just mysterious mumbo jumbo that they have to get right in order not to break the machine. All I'm trying to say that people are better able to learn how to use a computer if they understand the reason things being like they are.
People coped with filesystems and disk changes on DOS machines, yet those starting out with the supposedly easier and friendlier folder system in Windows Explorer seem to get flummoxed. There seems to be a flaw in the philosophy of treating users like idiots.
I don't think we need to change the metaphor, it's just that the technophobe doesn't understand the metaphor because no one has taken the time to explain that it is a metaphor, and they are considered to be to stupid to be given any concrete understanding of the machine. It's like going from Unix to old style Mac's. Personally I never felt comfortable with the things because I always felt everything was hidden, this gave me the feeling that the machine was in control and I wasn't. I think that is the feeling that technophobes get and it's why become hostile to learning. They're told how to do something but not why doing it that way works.
I've never had a problem with the file system metaphor but then I've never taken it too literally because I've always understood that it was just a metaphor. Most users are never told that it is a metaphor they are presented with a file system and told that this is how the machine works. They are being asked to believe in the metaphor yet they can't quite bring themselves to do so. It's not that we need to change metaphors, we just need to stop pushing so hard with the ones we have.
After years of struggling to understand why people seemed unable to grasp the basics of file systems I finally discovered that for many people the information they had was too dumbed down. The concept of a file often makes no sense because they have nothing to relate it to. Give them a dumbed down programmers view of memory, with diagrams, and things often fall into place. That is explain that memory is like a long row of little boxes each containing a 1 or 0, eight boxes represent a letter and that a text file consists of a contiguous series of these boxes. Finally tell them that a filename is just a means of telling a computer which block of memory you want to access, and watch the light switch on in their head.
Machines need to be user friendly but users need to be educated no amount of the former will ever take away the need for the latter. Give people a little understanding and they will start to learn for themselves, deny them this and the computer becomes a mysterious and intimidating machine that requires too much effort to learn.
What possible reason could there be for a technophobic secretary to need to mount a CD in the works machine. If she's not capable of coming to terms with the mount command then she shouldn't be installing software.
The notion that the restriction of which software you can run on the X-Box is a red herring designed to divert attention from what, in the EU at least, is an illegal restraint of trade. The BIOS protections are there too ensure that no software producer can sell software that runs on the X-Box without handing over a significant proportion of its revenue to Microsoft. By the time the distributor and the retailer have added their markup to this extorted sum the end customer is paying a lot of money for the game, and the profits of the games manufacturer are being squeezed. The piracy issue is irrelevant.
As to the ROM I have every right to modify it long as I don't do so for the purpose of copy-protection circumvention, since the X-Box is designed to run software not to copy it this is a non issue. What I don't have the right to do is to distribute copies of the modified ROM, though I can distribute patches for it.
They do that because it cuts down the amount of music they have to play, hence the station pays less royalties. Yet another example of self defeating practices by the record companies.
Jim Boemler spends time and money to create a database of publicly available information, and this group decides that they want control of this information. So what do they do, the send up a C&D that would never stand up in court. However they also mention:
Your website indicates that you are an employee of IBM, a PCI-SIG member. We therefore request that you work through IBM to investigate the possibility of creating a similar database of PCI Vendor ID numbers which would be available on the official PCI-SIG website. In the meantime, however, be advised that PCI-SIg will not tolerate coexistence with your website in its present form.
In other words hand over your work to us, or we will have your job. Wouldn't it have been easier and more ethical just to offer the guy some money to transfer the database to the new site. Why use a stick when you can use a carrot?
Slashdot Mirror
When working with documents in any WYSIWYG word processor headers, figures and tables should be prepared separately and only inserted into the document after the every last word is finalised. Otherwise all the formatting of the tables can be lost every time you add or remove a word. If you and your colleagues are working in the way you describe then more time must be spent formatting documents than writing them. If anybody ever wants to waste my time like that I have no problem in saying no. Sort out the content first the formatting last and then you only need it to format correctly on one machine, (i.e. the machine of the person who runs the print job).
That letter reminds me of a poor student essay, lots of buzzwords, no evidence of understanding, and no sign of any original thought. Take the phrase "makes it clear that only software which forms part of a technological process will be patentable." Can anyone tell me of any software that doesn't form part of a technological process. Clue, any piece of software run on a piece computer (i.e. a piece of technological equipment) is transformed into a process.
Now look at this bit, "This will allow European businesses the chance to develop ideas with certainty as to their legal position." WTF patent laws create uncertainty you need to know if your work is already covered by a patent, is that patent valid, and anything which involves courts and the legal system always introduces an element of uncertainty. On the other hand no patent law means absolute certainty, if you can do it you're allowed to do it
Finally look at the phrase, "I and my UK Conservative colleagues support the general line..." which can be translated as ' I do what the party tells me and you as a mere constituent are stuffed because all the major parties are following the same line.' Isn't democracy wonderful.
I may be misunderstanding the situation due to neither being an American nor having lived in that country. However where I come from, Scotland, the argument that a vendor could deny a customer their legal rights through a shrink wrap license is a what you termed 'a zero traction argument'. There is a simple principal that you can not contract out of the law. Further the UK has law that prevents the insertion of unfair clauses in non negotiable contracts, any such clauses are deemed to be invalid.
The situation you describe seems to indicate that a vendor can escape the law, simply by printing on a package that the law doesn't apply to them. This surely raises an issue of sovereignty, and a legal system that allows that is surely in a mess. Especially one that treats precedent as having legal significance. Anyway, good luck in your efforts
The original link, second paragraph, states:
In the so called repost this changes to:
Come on folks! Stop modding up these trolls.
You've just demonstrated that judges are capable of ignoring both law and constitution when it suits them. Although the case you describe could be seen to set a precedent against preemption it is also a case of a much more worrying precedent, that is it is a case of judges coming to a conclusion that flies in the face of the law and logic. Given that it can not be assumed that any ludicrous argument presented for the the GPL being invalid will not be upheld.
So that when they get prosecuted for their pump and dump scheme they will be found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Anyone still wondering why MS is under investigation in Europe for using Media Player to extend their monopoly now has their answer. The recording cartel and the OS monopolists have got together to tie up the market for downloadable singles. The result overpriced tracks, low quality, DRM and no choice.
Like EULA's the only jurisdiction that such a clause will be ruled valid by a judge is in Virginia. A contract is subject to the law where it is made and or applies. In the case of a sale's contract that is the place where the customer bought the goods. I know of no jurisdiction where you can contract out of the law and judges tend to take an extremely dim view of any attempt to do so. After all they want to protect their jobs.
IANAL
Lastly, to those who say the RIAA is 100% pure evil and I should boycott them, don't forget that the RIAA includes a lot of great labels/artists/music in my opinion. I'm not talking about BoyBand Du Jour, but rather Count Baise, John Coltraine, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Gershwin, Louis Armstrong, Nora Jones, Kurt Elling, Max Roach, Charlie Mingus, pretty much anything from Blue Note Records... You get the idea (and I'm just using Jazz artists as an example). I will continue to support the recording industry as long as they have these artists.
Please tell me how the RIAA has these artists, because to the best of my knowledge most of them are long dead. What the record companies have is the copyrights to recordings that these artists made, in many cases over half a century ago. How many of these artists are seminal musicians, treasures of our musical heritage, most of them. Now think how many of them get any substantial amount of radio play these days, how many of todays kids have even heard the great music they created. The current system is destroying our musical heritage not preserving it nor enriching it, and that is why things must change.
Yes music has value it has a value far greater than can measured in monetary terms. As long as those that control the distribution continue to value music only for the revenue it can generate then the further music will decline
Ritalin {prescribed for hyperactive kids} is a mild upper chemically related to amphetamine {No, I don't understand why give hyper kids uppers either}.
The effects of stimulants and depressants on behaviour are counterintuitive. Stimulants give you energy but make you more reflective, depressants decrease energy but lessen inhibition. If you want to know why they give hyperactive kids an upper think what would happen if you fed them a well known downer called alcohol.
Fair enough, you take the marketing view of OS succession and I take the technical one. Though I would still argue that 2000 is not the successor to the DOS based windows. That accolade belongs to XP home edition which, although it is a big improvement on 98/ME, still sucks. However if you look at the improvement between NT4 and XP professional you would have to say the difference is not that huge, and I would suggest that is progression you should look at if you want to estimate the likely progress in the next version of windows.
Like it or not, Windows is improving all the time, just look at the leap in quality between Windows 98 and 2000 alone. This is a company that is doing some good stuff and getting their act together.
Don't you mean the huge leap in quality between Windows 98 and Windows ME, as if anyone could call ME a quality product. Windows 2000 replaced NT4 a derivitive of VMS, not DOS. 2000 may be reliable in Microsoft terms, but does it yet reach the standards that VMS users were used to? It's certainly not as secure.
You're spot on regarding my musical ability but your reasoning sucks. I'll give you on example. My brother in law is both a talented cabinet maker and a talented fiddler. He chooses to make a living from working with wood, but when he travels he covers his costs by taking the fiddle he made himself into the street and practising.
People can and do travel this way. Good musicians don't starve. If you can't make a living by busking you're not good enough to be a professional musician. Be honest with yourself, could you survive like I've described above. I know several people who have done it, not all of them play music as a profession, but all of them could if they chose to. If you can't survive like that then don't give up the day job.
Are you serious?
You fail to recognize the sunk cost of R&D in creating the X-box. All this has to come from somewhere. The measily amount of money made from selling the hardware will not come close to making up the 100s of millions of dollars spent on developing the system.
The X-box is just a low spec PC in an ugly box with an assortment of hardware and software dongles. It's not exactly ground breaking technology. 100's of millions of dollars in R&D, paid for by flying pigs no doubt.
I go to a lot of concerts in small venues and from what I pick up from talking to the musicians the break even point seems to be about fifty or sixty in the audience for each band member. Most of these shows make do with the house lights and the show is watching great musicians at work. Now granted these concerts tend in genres that don't attract huge audiences, but the musicians are usually excellent and frequently include some of the best in the world.
Most of these guys manage to make a decent living and have careers that span decades. So it possible to make a living from touring. Personally I don't want to see a light show unless it's a concert at a big venue where the intimacy of the small concert is lost.
Yep, especially when you tell them that you have to unmount a floppy disk on a Linux system before removing it from the drive. You need to give some explanation of why this is the case, otherwise it's just mysterious mumbo jumbo that they have to get right in order not to break the machine. All I'm trying to say that people are better able to learn how to use a computer if they understand the reason things being like they are.
People coped with filesystems and disk changes on DOS machines, yet those starting out with the supposedly easier and friendlier folder system in Windows Explorer seem to get flummoxed. There seems to be a flaw in the philosophy of treating users like idiots.
I don't think we need to change the metaphor, it's just that the technophobe doesn't understand the metaphor because no one has taken the time to explain that it is a metaphor, and they are considered to be to stupid to be given any concrete understanding of the machine. It's like going from Unix to old style Mac's. Personally I never felt comfortable with the things because I always felt everything was hidden, this gave me the feeling that the machine was in control and I wasn't. I think that is the feeling that technophobes get and it's why become hostile to learning. They're told how to do something but not why doing it that way works.
I've never had a problem with the file system metaphor but then I've never taken it too literally because I've always understood that it was just a metaphor. Most users are never told that it is a metaphor they are presented with a file system and told that this is how the machine works. They are being asked to believe in the metaphor yet they can't quite bring themselves to do so. It's not that we need to change metaphors, we just need to stop pushing so hard with the ones we have.
After years of struggling to understand why people seemed unable to grasp the basics of file systems I finally discovered that for many people the information they had was too dumbed down. The concept of a file often makes no sense because they have nothing to relate it to. Give them a dumbed down programmers view of memory, with diagrams, and things often fall into place. That is explain that memory is like a long row of little boxes each containing a 1 or 0, eight boxes represent a letter and that a text file consists of a contiguous series of these boxes. Finally tell them that a filename is just a means of telling a computer which block of memory you want to access, and watch the light switch on in their head.
Machines need to be user friendly but users need to be educated no amount of the former will ever take away the need for the latter. Give people a little understanding and they will start to learn for themselves, deny them this and the computer becomes a mysterious and intimidating machine that requires too much effort to learn.
What possible reason could there be for a technophobic secretary to need to mount a CD in the works machine. If she's not capable of coming to terms with the mount command then she shouldn't be installing software.
The notion that the restriction of which software you can run on the X-Box is a red herring designed to divert attention from what, in the EU at least, is an illegal restraint of trade. The BIOS protections are there too ensure that no software producer can sell software that runs on the X-Box without handing over a significant proportion of its revenue to Microsoft. By the time the distributor and the retailer have added their markup to this extorted sum the end customer is paying a lot of money for the game, and the profits of the games manufacturer are being squeezed. The piracy issue is irrelevant.
As to the ROM I have every right to modify it long as I don't do so for the purpose of copy-protection circumvention, since the X-Box is designed to run software not to copy it this is a non issue. What I don't have the right to do is to distribute copies of the modified ROM, though I can distribute patches for it.
So according to snopes the story must be false because Alastair Campbell, the man who wrote the so called dossier, said so.
They do that because it cuts down the amount of music they have to play, hence the station pays less royalties. Yet another example of self defeating practices by the record companies.
Jim Boemler spends time and money to create a database of publicly available information, and this group decides that they want control of this information. So what do they do, the send up a C&D that would never stand up in court. However they also mention:
In other words hand over your work to us, or we will have your job. Wouldn't it have been easier and more ethical just to offer the guy some money to transfer the database to the new site. Why use a stick when you can use a carrot?
the world has become global.
Really, what was it before? ;^)