They may also be doing it to prevent or reduce somebody else from filing a similar patent against them. IOW, protecting their own ass from stupid lawsuits. Thus, it is kind of hard to assertain the real motivation behind such.
But we can infer based upon prior actions. Microsoft has a long history of taking predatory, underhanded actions against anything they percieve as a threat to their domination of any industry that interests them.
1. How analogous to a PC's BIOS is this abstraction layer? (This may be a subjective assessment and therefore open to litigation.)
I wouldn't think that it was subjective at all. An OS does not link against a BIOS. If Castle's product links against the abstraction layer (which it all most certainly would have to), then it violates the GPL. It's very cut and dried to determine this kind of violation, no matter what Castle feels the layer is "analogous" to.
What you linked to is the.net SDK download... does that include a compiler?
Click the link:
The Microsoft®.NET Framework Software Development Kit (SDK) includes the.NET Framework, as well as everything you need to write, build, test, and deploy.NET Framework applications--documentation, samples, and command-line tools and compilers.
Where exactly are American comics failing? I've been collecting for over twenty years. I trained up as an artist. So I know what I'm talking about when I say that the comics have never been more creative, better written, professionally crafted.
Admitedly, it's tricky to understand the problem. See if you can spot the subtle differences between American comics and Manga:
Manga comes in BIG FUCKING PHONEBOOKS filled with MULTIPLE STORIES printed on CHEAP-ASS PAPER and they DON'T COST MUCH MONEY.
American (Western?) comics come in RAZOR THIN BOOKLETS printed on GLOSSY-ASS PAPER containing a SINGLE STORY and they COST A FUCKING FORTUNE.
In addition to those subtle differences, there's the barrier of entry (acquiring past issues of a story to catch up) to consider:
Back issues of an American comic can easily cost 10x as much as their cover price and are only available in specialty shops that stink of geek sweat, thanks to the artificial scarcity created by the "only run an issue once"-mentality of the major comic houses.
Back issues of Manga can be found in used bookstores in Japan for less than half the price of the original. Succesful Manga will be published into the ground as long as anything resembling a demand still exists for the title.
And finally, there's the variety of genres:
Manga - Pretty much anything (Sports Manga, Buisness-Man Manga, Boy Manga, Girl Manga, Women's Manga, Five-Assed Monkey People Manga, etc, etc)
American Comics - Superheroes. (Unless you want to mortgage your home to try to buy a Graphic Novel, which is where the real story telling is).
So yeah, see if you can get an idea of why Manga is orders of magnitude more popular than American comics. If you look hard enough, you might see the crucial differences.
Given the "publicity" of this hoax, and the widespread rumor-mongering of this deal, I'd say that Microsoft might be using this story as a red herring to make people think that the talks never existed. It's still going on, people, and it's still a very real possibility/threat.
I'm guessing you spend a lot of money on tinfoil, huh?
>Time Warner is gouging us...for basic cable and internet I pay 84 bucks
That sounds like a good deal to me, actually, if you have some sort of broadband connection.
Good deal?! My God, man, I'm paying 64 bucks Canadian for basic cable and broadband internet. If you figure that works out to around 42 dollars US, he's paying twice what I am for exactly the same service. Time Warner is fucking him sideways at that price.
Re:So let me get this straight...
on
Superbowl XXXVII
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· Score: 1
Besides, if it catches on, it'll become perfectly cromulent in time.
Ok, I get it now. Thank you for embiggening the vocabularies of us all.:)
JWZ should learn how to program and work on his own video player, if he's so unhappy.
So, uh, yeah, JWZ wrote XEmacs (Lucid Emacs), the Unix version of Netscape, and was instrumental in getting the Mozilla project up and running. What the fuck have you done, again?
Does anyone actually play video in a resized window? Surely only "normal" size and fullscreen are ever used? By the way, Windows Media Player up to version 6 at least did the same trick.
Oh, I didn't realize that a shitty "feature" is ok, as long as some old version of windows software did the same thing. After all, the point of any free software project isn't to create an excellent program in its own right, its just to emulate the equivalent windows version, flaws and all, right?
Because of course, mplayer is so hard to remember.
He was responding to the "advice" that to make MPlayer truely usable, he should simply not compile in the UI. You've got to admit, thats a truly, painfully shitty comment on the state of MPlayer's interface. It doesn't matter how easy you think the damn keystrokes are to remember, its still a fucking usability nightmare when the best piece of advice you can get is "Don't even bother to compile the UI"
In its early days, Unix was written in nothing but assembly, and was every bit as unportable as VMS was. It was untill Unix was reimplemented in C that it became portable.
Slashdot Mirror
They may also be doing it to prevent or reduce somebody else from filing a similar patent against them. IOW, protecting their own ass from stupid lawsuits. Thus, it is kind of hard to assertain the real motivation behind such.
But we can infer based upon prior actions. Microsoft has a long history of taking predatory, underhanded actions against anything they percieve as a threat to their domination of any industry that interests them.
1. How analogous to a PC's BIOS is this abstraction layer? (This may be a subjective assessment and therefore open to litigation.)
I wouldn't think that it was subjective at all. An OS does not link against a BIOS. If Castle's product links against the abstraction layer (which it all most certainly would have to), then it violates the GPL. It's very cut and dried to determine this kind of violation, no matter what Castle feels the layer is "analogous" to.
1024 is 2^10. Computers operate in binary, and 1024 is an "even" number when you consider binary.
Dude, 1024 is an "even" number when you consider that it's not odd.
In Soviet Russia there is still a Soviet Russia. That's the beauty of it.
What you linked to is the .net SDK download... does that include a compiler?
.NET Framework Software Development Kit (SDK) includes the .NET Framework, as well as everything you need to write, build, test, and deploy .NET Framework applications--documentation, samples, and command-line tools and compilers.
Click the link:
The Microsoft®
If the original author disassembled the code, would it violate the DMCA?
Can you be charged if you're breaking access controls to get to what amounts to something you hold the copyright on?
Where exactly are American comics failing? I've been collecting for over twenty years. I trained up as an artist. So I know what I'm talking about when I say that the comics have never been more creative, better written, professionally crafted.
Admitedly, it's tricky to understand the problem. See if you can spot the subtle differences between American comics and Manga:
Manga comes in BIG FUCKING PHONEBOOKS filled with MULTIPLE STORIES printed on CHEAP-ASS PAPER and they DON'T COST MUCH MONEY.
American (Western?) comics come in RAZOR THIN BOOKLETS printed on GLOSSY-ASS PAPER containing a SINGLE STORY and they COST A FUCKING FORTUNE.
In addition to those subtle differences, there's the barrier of entry (acquiring past issues of a story to catch up) to consider:
Back issues of an American comic can easily cost 10x as much as their cover price and are only available in specialty shops that stink of geek sweat, thanks to the artificial scarcity created by the "only run an issue once"-mentality of the major comic houses.
Back issues of Manga can be found in used bookstores in Japan for less than half the price of the original. Succesful Manga will be published into the ground as long as anything resembling a demand still exists for the title.
And finally, there's the variety of genres:
Manga - Pretty much anything (Sports Manga, Buisness-Man Manga, Boy Manga, Girl Manga, Women's Manga, Five-Assed Monkey People Manga, etc, etc)
American Comics - Superheroes. (Unless you want to mortgage your home to try to buy a Graphic Novel, which is where the real story telling is).
So yeah, see if you can get an idea of why Manga is orders of magnitude more popular than American comics. If you look hard enough, you might see the crucial differences.
Given the "publicity" of this hoax, and the widespread rumor-mongering of this deal, I'd say that Microsoft might be using this story as a red herring to make people think that the talks never existed. It's still going on, people, and it's still a very real possibility/threat.
I'm guessing you spend a lot of money on tinfoil, huh?
>Time Warner is gouging us...for basic cable and internet I pay 84 bucks
That sounds like a good deal to me, actually, if you have some sort of broadband connection.
Good deal?! My God, man, I'm paying 64 bucks Canadian for basic cable and broadband internet. If you figure that works out to around 42 dollars US, he's paying twice what I am for exactly the same service. Time Warner is fucking him sideways at that price.
Besides, if it catches on, it'll become perfectly cromulent in time.
:)
Ok, I get it now. Thank you for embiggening the vocabularies of us all.
You're complaining about the dumbing down of slashdot, while trying to pass dumbification off as a word?
How ironicalific is that?
JWZ should learn how to program and work on his own video player, if he's so unhappy.
So, uh, yeah, JWZ wrote XEmacs (Lucid Emacs), the Unix version of Netscape, and was instrumental in getting the Mozilla project up and running. What the fuck have you done, again?
Does anyone actually play video in a resized window? Surely only "normal" size and fullscreen are ever used? By the way, Windows Media Player up to version 6 at least did the same trick.
Oh, I didn't realize that a shitty "feature" is ok, as long as some old version of windows software did the same thing. After all, the point of any free software project isn't to create an excellent program in its own right, its just to emulate the equivalent windows version, flaws and all, right?
Because of course, mplayer is so hard to remember.
He was responding to the "advice" that to make MPlayer truely usable, he should simply not compile in the UI. You've got to admit, thats a truly, painfully shitty comment on the state of MPlayer's interface. It doesn't matter how easy you think the damn keystrokes are to remember, its still a fucking usability nightmare when the best piece of advice you can get is "Don't even bother to compile the UI"
That's just the planet Venus you saw. It's very bright this time of year.
In its early days, Unix was written in nothing but assembly, and was every bit as unportable as VMS was. It was untill Unix was reimplemented in C that it became portable.
Not really. Vi is a word in several languages, which hugely inflates the results.