>Most of the Microsoft Word files that we downloaded, for example, did not use mathematics, outlines, tracking changes, or other such features.
>>Right there is where most problems will occur.
And that's where MSOffice loses it too, but not necessarily in the less-used features. It is possible for a user to create a document that clashes with the default settings and fonts of the other version/user and fall apart whren it is opened... as a tech writer I can spend a lot of time cleaning out the version-specific crap. I worked with a sales guy whose PPT presentaitons were so wierd that not even another user of the same version could make them look good. We had a problem with PPT 2000 not being able to import a couple of standard PPT 97 effects.
"That sounds remarkably like a "document control" regime, which has been quite common in businesses and government agencies with strict confidentiality policies for ages."
Yes, it does. I have worked with several of those document control regimes, and they are an administrative PITA. They were great at locking things down, but keeping the lists up to date with who has rights to access what was never easy. And a couple times a week someone would create something with permissions that no one could open, print, or delete.
Oh wow... given the numbers of PHBs who already password protect presentations and send them out without the password, which they promptly forgot, this should be a productivity enhancer.
The critical presentation EXPIRES the night before you need it.
The only person with the rights to open a document is sick and didn't make the meeting.
The BIG customer tells you that they are not about to upgrade their servers and corporate software just to read your documents and tells you to provide material they can read or forget it.
They will have to have FULL-TIME rights managers, who track who is entitled to read whose documents.
And a full-time Search and Rescue team to retrieve lost documents, crack lost passwords, etc.
There was a slashdot story on a "distributed library"... people sharing books person-to-person that might be useful. People can list what they have to share/sell and others can search.
They aren't really "domesticated", just captured in the wild and kept in a container, such as a terrarium. A couple of crickets a week keeps them fed. There is one spider farm locally, collecting venom for research and anti-venin production. They use plastic refrigerator containers, and have well-sealed buildings. They have a small group of collectors - instead of raising the spiders, they buy mature females as needed.
I have an old microscope repair manual that explained how one gets the silk from the spider... if I recall you put the spider in a rather large container, with a tiny shelter at the top. They will run a long strand from the shelter down to the bottom of the container and make their messy trap web there, of sticky strands. You harvest the long strand on a loop of wire and then lay the strand onto the glass reticule, usin gan alignment jig. It's sticky enough to cling to the glass.
Welcome to your nightmare, come true. Spiders WERE farmed by Zeiss, Bausch & Lomb and others, and black widows had the best silk
http://us.expasy.org/spotlight/articles/sptlt024.html
"Spider silk is 40 times finer than human hair and right up to World War II, it was used for crosshairs in optical devices such as microscopes, guns and bomb-guiding systems. In fact, though crosshairs are now etched or made with metal filaments, some military facilities still keep a domesticated black widow spider as a silk provision for old instruments. To this day, Australian aborigines use the silk of a giant spider for fishing lines."
Knowing how to collect Black Widow silk is essential if you are repairing and restoring old microscopes and other optical equipment. They are not aggressive, and live a long time, and are content in a very small container.
I think the OSS movement should get nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize - getting China to cooperate with Japan is not easy.
I spent some frustrating months trying to swap files back and forth with a Japanese company. If we had been able to convince our respective corporate IT departments to use Linux, it would have been a lot easier.
"I decided to create some image browsing software to sell on the web and, perhaps later, in stores. Unfortunately, besides competing with hundreds of other similar shareware and freeware products"... "I am running low on cash and am on the brink of giving up, but I know that the product is good."
If you had checked the market before starting, you would have saved yourself a lot of time... a latecomer to a crowded market can't be "good", it has to be superb. The pirated copies aren't losing you any sales... if you had made it absolutely hack-proof, the pirates would be distributing someone else's hacked software.
Cut your losses, consider it programming experience and start hunting up a job.
"We have some other ideas such as something called behavior blocking that will obviate the need in many cases to use patches."
Like applying a 200,000 volt ZAP from the mouse whenever the user clicks on an executable in email or starts to download malware from a website? That's what it would take to make some users learn. I have friends who are repeatedly infested with spyware, popup ad servers, and viruses... but they have never seen cute cursor software or a game site that they could resist.
" The GPL is an agreement so I do not claim copyright infringement but violation of this agreement."
That becomes a violation of a contract, which has to be done in something highre than a small claims court.
Re:Suing SCO in small claims court?
on
SCO Roundup
·
· Score: 1
1. Can this be done through small claims court because it's a contract breach?
No... it becomes copyright violation, which is fereral, and "small claims" courts don't do breach of contract
2. If I'm outside US can a lawyer do this?
Yes, but it's expensive.
Re:business vs tech presss
on
SCO Roundup
·
· Score: 2, Informative
" The fact that SCO stock increased while there case was shown to suck, really shows we are not kicking SCO in the right place. We need to hit them where it hurts. "
The price of SCO's stock has NOTHING to do with the merits of their case. It's getting heavy attention from day traders, speculators, and what appears to be careful manipulation... most of the rises happen on very light volume, and may be "painting the tape" (fake transactions at small volume done just to advance the price)
Para 141 merely establishes that Sequent has an agreement with whover was the vendor du jour of UNIX, and makes a claim about the terms of theocntract... Rob and Eric are only commenting on those parts where they have knowledge and expertise, not on the interpretation of contracts.
IBM's reply says it all:
141 Denies the averments of paragraph 141, except refers to the referenced document for its contents. [that's legalese for "that copntract don't mean what you claim it means]
142 Denies the averments of paragraph 142.
[legalese for "we'll take about this in court, and not sooner"]
Right. The first thing that should happen in an infringement suit is to do whatever it takes to get it stopped - usually it's a formal notificaiton letter.
There have been cases where copyright holdres kept mum and were denied damages because they didn't try to mitigate the damages.
" As far as I recall, The original SCO complaint revoked IBMs license to use and distribute AIX as well (before aiming at Linux also). What has happened since then? "
In their answer to the SCO complaint, IBM denied that SCO has any right to revoke anything and filed a counterclaim involving violating the GPL, four infringed patents and a couple of violations of federal business laws... you really should read it.
See http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween9.htm l for a detailed dissection of SCO's claims.
Chris Sontag, senior vice president and general manager of the company's SCO source business, added: "There is no warranty for infringement of intellectual property [in the GPL], so all of the liability ends up with end users." Not under reading of any copyright law I can find. If your copyright material is clearly infringed upon by a penniless bum, you are SOL, and are better off sending a C&D letter and forgetting it. Suing the rich guy who happened to buy a copy of the infringing material has no basis in law.
Mark Heise, of law firm Boies Schiller and Flexner, representing SCO against IBM, believes SCO is entitled to pursue users based on its claims. "End users are improperly using this copyrighted material, and under copyright law SCO is entitled to damages and injunctive relief," he said.... SCO first has to FILE for such damages and relief, which means showing, in open court, the code they claim to have copyright over, and show exactly how Linux code infringes on it. [NOTE: they can't claim copyright AND trade secret over the same set of lines.] There is no section in USC17 that allows collection of damages and imposition of injunctive relief until after the case is decided. Heise appears to have slept through his copyright classes.
"I have noticing that their stock price has risen lately - even though their disclosed "violations" have proven to be a farce. Any theory's why that is?"... the eternal optimism of fools, activity of day traders, and what looks like some massive manipulation.
Stock price charts only record the latest sale, which may have been a transaction for 100 shares... which leads to a practice called "painting the tape", so the rising on tiny volumes could be various persons buying and selling small lots just to get the price back up to where they can unload another big chunk onto the clamoring mass of day traders.
Also see http://www.in-the-money.com/glossarynet/painting.h tm and
http://www.andrewtobias.com/bkoldcolumns/010720.ht ml
" Another question are identities of purchasers of stock public record?"Big ones, yes... check the link called "insider" on Yahoo's charts.
"There whole plan was to sabotage open source all along."... if they released their "stolen code" they could set Linux back decades. Most of the developers would break their necks falling out of their chairs laughing.
"freedom of choice, freedom of source code, and freedom to alter applications, are not the goals of the average user." What I want is applications where I don't have to guess what symbol they are using this time for the "close this window" button. I want a given icon to have the same meaning and occupy the same relative position on all the screens within that application. I don't want the same icon to have two different meanings ON THE SAME SCREEN!
Much of the percieved difficulty in using Linux is the lack of consistency not only between applications, but between parts of the same application. The user can't "learn" the system, because there are too many exceptions in location, icons used, etc. The benefit of having a standard interface is that the programmers can just use the standard templates and not have to come up with their own from scratch: it lets you get right to the fun part of coding.
It's perhaps time for the entire OSS/GNU/Linux movement to fork. Those who actually care about users can get together and develope a standard for the GUIs. Those who think that their freedom to program is being trampled by any suggestion that maybe their software is not as user-friendly as it should be can fork off.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Right there is where most problems will occur.
And that's where MSOffice loses it too, but not necessarily in the less-used features. It is possible for a user to create a document that clashes with the default settings and fonts of the other version/user and fall apart whren it is opened ... as a tech writer I can spend a lot of time cleaning out the version-specific crap. I worked with a sales guy whose PPT presentaitons were so wierd that not even another user of the same version could make them look good. We had a problem with PPT 2000 not being able to import a couple of standard PPT 97 effects.
Yes, it does. I have worked with several of those document control regimes, and they are an administrative PITA. They were great at locking things down, but keeping the lists up to date with who has rights to access what was never easy. And a couple times a week someone would create something with permissions that no one could open, print, or delete.
One, as of March 4, 2003. Number 6,529,784
They probably blamed it on someone uploading an old page.
http://www.communitybooks.org/ has the software
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/24/1257 213&mode=thread&tid=185
Pantyhose of the spider silk would be a close approximation to a steel chastity belt.
They aren't really "domesticated", just captured in the wild and kept in a container, such as a terrarium. A couple of crickets a week keeps them fed. There is one spider farm locally, collecting venom for research and anti-venin production. They use plastic refrigerator containers, and have well-sealed buildings. They have a small group of collectors - instead of raising the spiders, they buy mature females as needed.
I have an old microscope repair manual that explained how one gets the silk from the spider ... if I recall you put the spider in a rather large container, with a tiny shelter at the top. They will run a long strand from the shelter down to the bottom of the container and make their messy trap web there, of sticky strands. You harvest the long strand on a loop of wire and then lay the strand onto the glass reticule, usin gan alignment jig. It's sticky enough to cling to the glass.
http://us.expasy.org/spotlight/articles/sptlt02
"Spider silk is 40 times finer than human hair and right up to World War II, it was used for crosshairs in optical devices such as microscopes, guns and bomb-guiding systems. In fact, though crosshairs are now etched or made with metal filaments, some military facilities still keep a domesticated black widow spider as a silk provision for old instruments. To this day, Australian aborigines use the silk of a giant spider for fishing lines."
Knowing how to collect Black Widow silk is essential if you are repairing and restoring old microscopes and other optical equipment. They are not aggressive, and live a long time, and are content in a very small container.
I want run-proof stockings and sexy lingerie out of this stuff.
I think the OSS movement should get nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize - getting China to cooperate with Japan is not easy.
I spent some frustrating months trying to swap files back and forth with a Japanese company. If we had been able to convince our respective corporate IT departments to use Linux, it would have been a lot easier.
If you had checked the market before starting, you would have saved yourself a lot of time ... a latecomer to a crowded market can't be "good", it has to be superb. The pirated copies aren't losing you any sales ... if you had made it absolutely hack-proof, the pirates would be distributing someone else's hacked software.
Cut your losses, consider it programming experience and start hunting up a job.
Like applying a 200,000 volt ZAP from the mouse whenever the user clicks on an executable in email or starts to download malware from a website? That's what it would take to make some users learn. I have friends who are repeatedly infested with spyware, popup ad servers, and viruses ... but they have never seen cute cursor software or a game site that they could resist.
That becomes a violation of a contract, which has to be done in something highre than a small claims court.
No
2. If I'm outside US can a lawyer do this?
Yes, but it's expensive.
The price of SCO's stock has NOTHING to do with the merits of their case. It's getting heavy attention from day traders, speculators, and what appears to be careful manipulation ... most of the rises happen on very light volume, and may be "painting the tape" (fake transactions at small volume done just to advance the price)
Para 141 merely establishes that Sequent has an agreement with whover was the vendor du jour of UNIX, and makes a claim about the terms of theocntract ... Rob and Eric are only commenting on those parts where they have knowledge and expertise, not on the interpretation of contracts.
IBM's reply says it all:
141 Denies the averments of paragraph 141, except refers to the referenced document for its contents. [that's legalese for "that copntract don't mean what you claim it means]
142 Denies the averments of paragraph 142. [legalese for "we'll take about this in court, and not sooner"]
No. Whoever hired them will be on the hook, just as if they had done it themselves from inside the states.
There have been cases where copyright holdres kept mum and were denied damages because they didn't try to mitigate the damages.
In their answer to the SCO complaint, IBM denied that SCO has any right to revoke anything and filed a counterclaim involving violating the GPL, four infringed patents and a couple of violations of federal business laws ... you really should read it.
See http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween9.htm l for a detailed dissection of SCO's claims.
Unfortunately, brokers have already loaned out all the stock that is in street name ... it's almost impossible to get shares to short.
Chris Sontag, senior vice president and general manager of the company's SCO source business, added: "There is no warranty for infringement of intellectual property [in the GPL], so all of the liability ends up with end users." Not under reading of any copyright law I can find. If your copyright material is clearly infringed upon by a penniless bum, you are SOL, and are better off sending a C&D letter and forgetting it. Suing the rich guy who happened to buy a copy of the infringing material has no basis in law. Mark Heise, of law firm Boies Schiller and Flexner, representing SCO against IBM, believes SCO is entitled to pursue users based on its claims. "End users are improperly using this copyrighted material, and under copyright law SCO is entitled to damages and injunctive relief," he said. ... SCO first has to FILE for such damages and relief, which means showing, in open court, the code they claim to have copyright over, and show exactly how Linux code infringes on it. [NOTE: they can't claim copyright AND trade secret over the same set of lines.] There is no section in USC17 that allows collection of damages and imposition of injunctive relief until after the case is decided. Heise appears to have slept through his copyright classes.
Stock price charts only record the latest sale, which may have been a transaction for 100 shares ... which leads to a practice called "painting the tape", so the rising on tiny volumes could be various persons buying and selling small lots just to get the price back up to where they can unload another big chunk onto the clamoring mass of day traders.
Also see http://www.in-the-money.com/glossarynet/painting.h tm and
http://www.andrewtobias.com/bkoldcolumns/010720.ht ml
" Another question are identities of purchasers of stock public record?"Big ones, yes ... check the link called "insider" on Yahoo's charts.
"There whole plan was to sabotage open source all along." ... if they released their "stolen code" they could set Linux back decades. Most of the developers would break their necks falling out of their chairs laughing.
"freedom of choice, freedom of source code, and freedom to alter applications, are not the goals of the average user." What I want is applications where I don't have to guess what symbol they are using this time for the "close this window" button. I want a given icon to have the same meaning and occupy the same relative position on all the screens within that application. I don't want the same icon to have two different meanings ON THE SAME SCREEN!
Much of the percieved difficulty in using Linux is the lack of consistency not only between applications, but between parts of the same application. The user can't "learn" the system, because there are too many exceptions in location, icons used, etc. The benefit of having a standard interface is that the programmers can just use the standard templates and not have to come up with their own from scratch: it lets you get right to the fun part of coding.
It's perhaps time for the entire OSS/GNU/Linux movement to fork. Those who actually care about users can get together and develope a standard for the GUIs. Those who think that their freedom to program is being trampled by any suggestion that maybe their software is not as user-friendly as it should be can fork off.