>Wasn't MicroSoft convicted for antitrust violations? Isn't "tying" a violation of antitrust laws?
Yes, and yes. But unfortunately Bush got selected and told the DoJ to play dead, so it doesn't matter. The game is over, thought most don't understand that yet.
Well, since the powers that be on slashdot rejected this as a story, I'll post it here for anyone who cares and happens to look: HB 2892 is effectively dead already. See this article for the details. Oh well, at least it lasted for two weeks.
Morally speaking, it is hypocritical to punish Mitnick, who has served his sentence, when Gates and his lieutenants have yet to receive any punishment for their numerous and much more seriously damaging crimes against the industry (remember: the REMEDY was overturned, the FINDINGS OF FACT remains uncontested) or even express any regret for their actions (unlike Mitnick, who has) and an ex-DoubleClick (which has been convicted of violating privacy laws) executive has just been selected by the government to safegard our privacy. We shouldn't reward people who break the law, but since we do punishing Mitnick is very selective enforcement and obviously unjust -- IMO, anyway. Hopefully you'll get to read this before I'm mismoderated.
And you, sir, are a cowardly moron. I did not SAY Windows keyboards don't work under Linux. I said the Windows Natural keyboard was unnatural and it is. Regarding the insipid "Windows" keys, there are already enough bucky bits with shift, control, and alt and their combinations. The Windows keys are unnecessary unoriginal imitations of the Apple keys on various Macintoshes (which do or at least did need them because they didn't have alt). They're stupid, but they can be turned into Tux keys and/or ignored so I don't really care about them. The real annoyance of modern average keyboards, beyond their typically mushy feel, is the number of extra keys they insist on including in addition to the Windows keys. What's wrong with the scroll wheel is that it makes a poor middle button as other posters have mentioned and some of us use that button and have since before the scroll wheel existed. Whatever my faults, at least I don't hide behind the Anonymous Coward account. Drop dead.
As you can tell from the other comments, most lusers like Microsoft's scroll wheel abomination. Of course, lots of them like MS's Unnatural Keyboard too so you know they're idiots. I'm still using the three button non-optical Logitech mouse I bought in 2000 and I have a backup waiting in the box in case I need a replacement. What really worries me is what I'm going to do when my IBM PC AT keyboard wears out and I'm forced to buy one of the 'Windows enhanced' pieces of shit they make now or shell out $100 or so for a Happy Hacking or other real keyboard. In short, you're probably SOL on the mouse because the Masses are Asses and that's who the vendors cater to. Your best bet is probably to do like the commenter who disabled the scrolling function. Always remember: If you like something, buy a lot of it because they'll stop making it.
(Back from revisiting the MPlayer home page.) Wow, you're right. And cleverly done, too. Thanks for the update. By "latest version", do you mean CVS as suggested by the codecs page Sorenson notes or will the latest non-CVS release (0.90) work?
Shrug. I can't see the trailer, since my top end machine runs Linux and my low end machine that runs Windows but is too slow to play QuickTime and lacks a sound card. Of course, like all serious anti-DMCAers I haven't seen a movie in the theater since the MPAA started persecuting the author of DeCSS, so it doesn't matter much. I'll see it when I can rent it. They can take their Windows/Mac Only trailer and stick in their biowaste vent.
It's quite well documented. See the books "Undocumented DOS", "Undocumented Windows", as well as the findings of the anti-trust trial. See also this to know why it probably isn't quite as well documented as it used to be.
Gee, you mean a competitor's product that has to use the public interfaces to Windows performs poorly compared to Microsoft's version with private hooks into the operating system? Wow, never heard of that before. Of course, Microsoft's "Java" VM doesn't support _Java_, but you can't have everything.
What's really too bad is that the issue isn't being settled on the moral merits. Microsoft agreed to support Java while the DoJ case regarding Netscape was still alive for the PR value: "see, we're playing nicely with a competitor" and hopefully distracting people from the near daily testimony about the illegal methods [1] it used to destroy Netscape -- how it really plays with competitors. Microsoft has since used every legal and disputedly illegal means to avoid honoring the Java agreement, becoming bolder in its methods as the DoJ case dies [2]. The judge in the Java case was quite certain of his findings [3] and the remedy he proposed was extremely lenient given the damage Microsoft's behavior had on the cross platform viability and hence success of Java. Microsoft should not be able to escape this token punishment by appealing it until it wins.
1. Jackson's Findings of Fact stands, only his remedy was overturned. 2. First came the incompatible extensions and IDEs, then conflicting implementations, and lastly not shipping a JVM at all now that the DoJ case is circling the drain. 3. Unlike Jackson, however, he kept his outrage in check. Doesn't seem to have made that much difference.
Here's a prediction: MS will not be required to carry Java. Here's another:.NET will obliterate Java in almost all environments in the US (the 95% of the market that uses Windows) in a year or less. The "battle" was over when Bush was "elected" and told the DoJ to let MS off the hook.
The most important things to communicate about programming are the central concepts -- variables, expressions, conditional branching, looping, etc. Use whatever language you (or whoever is doing the teaching) are most comfortable with. Using an emulated C64 would not be that bad, aside from the primitiveness of line numbering by today's standards -- BASIC is not a bad TRAINING language, just a bad production one:-), but Perl or Python or BASH would be just as good or better depending on your religious views. I think making sure you start slowly and go at the student's pace will be most important. Begin with Hello World and procede from there to classics like Guess The Number. I was very lucky to have gone to junior and high school when computer classes taught how to write programs instead of use them. Good luck to you and your siblings!
I'm not aware of much 6502 coding going on anymore, but I remember the C64 Macro Assembler with much fondness. The basic thing you missed was a very stupid ruling during the Reagan administration (big surprise) that allowed the patenting of software and mathmatical algorithms. Prior to this ruling, they were unpatentable. Software patents are not like normal patents -- a software patent doesn't cover any specific code, it covers a concept. Yes, this is a complete violation of what patents are supposed to be used for, and as you can see if you look around has led to a lot of IP law abuse -- those with deep pockets hiring lawyers and patenting things they never invented and have been in the public domain for years or even decades. The US patent office is staffed with morons who do not bother to check if the filer (who has no incentive what-so-ever to be honest) has really checked for prior art. Since only rich people and corporations can afford to fight a patent lawsuit, no matter how invalid the patent itself is, these stupid patents are increasingly being used to destroy the small players on the Net. The real outrage is that since software was previously unpatentable, nobody worried about preserving prior art from the 1950s to 1980s, when most things in programming were "invented" -- with the result that the previously mentioned IP law abusers can gain patents on things invented decades ago, frequently at the public expense at universities, etc. To answer your question, GIF _is_ patented, which is why it was/is the subject of a boycott and led to the creation on the PNG format. Hope this helps explain the situation. As I'm telling it like it is, I'm sure this post will get mismoderated so I hope you read it before it goes below 0.
There are a lot of moderators who abuse their privilege by ranking comments they don't agree with as "troll" or "redundant" so you can consider those rankings to really mean "controversial". MS has a lot of apologists, so any anti-MS comment is bound to be mismoderated fairly rapidly. Yeah, this move by MS is not a surprise to anyone who remembers their past behavior. It will be "amusing" to see how long Linux/*BSD's minor advances into the desktop world last once Office 2003 becomes the Windows standard and its documents are once again unusable by anything else.
Unless your "burstable billing" agreements spell out that you cannot bill for abusive inbound connections (i.e.: from virus infected hosts), you can probably legally make your customers pay (at least until they leave). I think a better approach would be to forward the costs back to the networks that relayed the connections for further relaying until the charges reach the infected pcs or at least their connection providers. Your isp could also offer bandwidth caps on the burstable agreements so people can take advantage of the concept without exposing themselves to bankruptcy. I would also think that an isp could easily block identified sources of infectioned connection attempts to all of its customers, and that such defensive action is a reasonable customer expectation.
Gee, how nice to know our taxes are now going to pay for thugs to carry out the bidding of giant corporations. The DMCA not withstanding (being unconstitutional), the bypassing of region encoding (which is a violation of anti-trust and free trade laws and agreements) is not a crime and it is a moral outrage that the DoJ is abusing US citizens for the "crime" of wanting to play imported games. Also annoying is the inaccurate press coverage that fails to mention this justifiable use. Disgusting. "Land of the Free" my ass.
As informed people are aware, the polygraph is another example of officially endorsed psuedo-science. What ought to be outlawed is its use, not documentation that it is a fraud. For anyone who needs to know: to defeat a polygraph test, put a tack in your shoe and jab your toe with it for every other question or so. Anyone who tells you the polygraph is a useful device is either ignorant or part of the scam -- polygraph operators make a lot of money compared to most crackpots. Rather pathetic that the DoD is depending on it for our security, though not surprising.
MS's true concern (lack thereof) for user privacy is covered in http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/26/132023 1&mode=thread&tid=109&tid=158 which refers to the spyware built into Windows Update. Those who trust MS are fools. The only secure Windows box is one behind a firewall that prohibits it from making connections to the Internet.
You could always go back to the right way to do web applications -- keep the processing on the servers where it belongs. Clients should be served clickable image maps. This isn't trendy, though.
This has to be the first time I agree with a IP lawyer. While I would protest if they were objecting to the use of google as a verb in its strict sense (i.e.: to google: to search for something using the google search engine), I do think defining it to mean any search engine (to google: to search for something using a search engine) is wrong. Mainly because it's inaccurate. Google is the highest quality search engine on the Internet. Most of the rest are garbage. If someone told me 'I googled for X and found no information' and I later found out they'd used Sam's Search Site I'd consider them to have lied. Google means google. Of course, I'm pretty sure pissing off the user community by harrassing an obscure site author who's only refering to already existing abusive use is not a very good way to help their cause. I would ask that those who want to sound hi-tech refer to "greping" vs "googling" when a generic search engine is involved.
Sure would be nice if the utterly incompetent morons in the patent office got fired. SCCS predates this patent by over 15 years at least and there is no excuse for them not knowing that. And then there's RCS. Not that it matters, since IP law is decided on by money and lawyers vs truth. Is there a point to posting these stories anymore? Pathetic.
Given the failure of the DOJ and other cases against Microsoft (no meaningful penalties, technically incompetent judge overseeing DOJ case, requirement to support Java in IE endlessly held up in court) and the continuing wide-spread abuse of IP law to monopolize cyberspace (patents on obviously invalid claims -- decades of prior art, etc.), do you think Free Software (and it's more "popular" spin-off Open Source) has any chance of long term surival in the United States or it is just a matter of time before it is crushed?
Um, so I found out -- got emailed notice of the later case. Pardon my ignorance, I must have missed that being automated when I read the moderation guidelines.
No, I didn't inherit my low UID. I was surfing the Internet before the "web" existed. I'd have a lower ID, but I was content to remain an Anonymous Coward for awhile.
My comments are on topic. I'm not going to "get over it" until the issues are addressed, and I will comment every time the "Apple is Linux's friend" hype is mentioned on Slashdot. If the grinding of this axe bothers you so much, don't read my posts.
Um, first off, you are not supposed to moderate threads you are commenting on -- lack of objectivity and all that. Someone should revoke your moderator privilege. The making of statements you don't agree with is not trolling. If bad language is grounds for being a troll, your "Boo Fucking Hoo" comment makes your response one as well (however "Insightful" your fellow Mac users think it is). Is it just me, or is the phrase "get over it" only used by jerks? I really look forward to MS deciding the DOJ case is over and revoking Office support for Mac. Then you can "get over" that.
Secondly, none of your blather negates the fact that the listed behavior is Linux hostile and not the actions of a "friend". I didn't say Apple "owed" anyone anything. FWIW, Mozilla is a lot more functional than Safari is -- that is, it stands on its merits at least as well as Safari does. Likewise, your claim that "X11 caters for a minority" is asinine -- X11 is the standard GUI on ALL Unix platforms (except MacOS X) and OpenVMS, and is usable on Windows and MacOS (X and pre) as well. MacOS X's proprietary replacement, however, works nowhere else or ever will.
Anyway, I stand by my statement: Apple is Not Linux's Friend and never will be.
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>Wasn't MicroSoft convicted for antitrust violations? Isn't "tying" a violation of antitrust laws?
Yes, and yes. But unfortunately Bush got selected and told the DoJ to play dead, so it doesn't matter. The game is over, thought most don't understand that yet.
Well, since the powers that be on slashdot rejected this as a story, I'll post it here for anyone who cares and happens to look: HB 2892 is effectively dead already. See this article for the details. Oh well, at least it lasted for two weeks.
Morally speaking, it is hypocritical to punish Mitnick, who has served his sentence, when Gates and his lieutenants have yet to receive any punishment for their numerous and much more seriously damaging crimes against the industry (remember: the REMEDY was overturned, the FINDINGS OF FACT remains uncontested) or even express any regret for their actions (unlike Mitnick, who has) and an ex-DoubleClick (which has been convicted of violating privacy laws) executive has just been selected by the government to safegard our privacy. We shouldn't reward people who break the law, but since we do punishing Mitnick is very selective enforcement and obviously unjust -- IMO, anyway. Hopefully you'll get to read this before I'm mismoderated.
And you, sir, are a cowardly moron. I did not SAY Windows keyboards don't work under Linux. I said the Windows Natural keyboard was unnatural and it is. Regarding the insipid "Windows" keys, there are already enough bucky bits with shift, control, and alt and their combinations. The Windows keys are unnecessary unoriginal imitations of the Apple keys on various Macintoshes (which do or at least did need them because they didn't have alt). They're stupid, but they can be turned into Tux keys and/or ignored so I don't really care about them. The real annoyance of modern average keyboards, beyond their typically mushy feel, is the number of extra keys they insist on including in addition to the Windows keys. What's wrong with the scroll wheel is that it makes a poor middle button as other posters have mentioned and some of us use that button and have since before the scroll wheel existed. Whatever my faults, at least I don't hide behind the Anonymous Coward account. Drop dead.
As you can tell from the other comments, most lusers like Microsoft's scroll wheel abomination. Of course, lots of them like MS's Unnatural Keyboard too so you know they're idiots. I'm still using the three button non-optical Logitech mouse I bought in 2000 and I have a backup waiting in the box in case I need a replacement. What really worries me is what I'm going to do when my IBM PC AT keyboard wears out and I'm forced to buy one of the 'Windows enhanced' pieces of shit they make now or shell out $100 or so for a Happy Hacking or other real keyboard. In short, you're probably SOL on the mouse because the Masses are Asses and that's who the vendors cater to. Your best bet is probably to do like the commenter who disabled the scrolling function. Always remember: If you like something, buy a lot of it because they'll stop making it.
(Back from revisiting the MPlayer home page.) Wow, you're right. And cleverly done, too. Thanks for the update. By "latest version", do you mean CVS as suggested by the codecs page Sorenson notes or will the latest non-CVS release (0.90) work?
Shrug. I can't see the trailer, since my top end machine runs Linux and my low end machine that runs Windows but is too slow to play QuickTime and lacks a sound card. Of course, like all serious anti-DMCAers I haven't seen a movie in the theater since the MPAA started persecuting the author of DeCSS, so it doesn't matter much. I'll see it when I can rent it. They can take their Windows/Mac Only trailer and stick in their biowaste vent.
It's quite well documented. See the books "Undocumented DOS", "Undocumented Windows", as well as the findings of the anti-trust trial. See also this to know why it probably isn't quite as well documented as it used to be.
Gee, you mean a competitor's product that has to use the public interfaces to Windows performs poorly compared to Microsoft's version with private hooks into the operating system? Wow, never heard of that before. Of course, Microsoft's "Java" VM doesn't support _Java_, but you can't have everything.
What's really too bad is that the issue isn't being settled on the moral merits. Microsoft agreed to support Java while the DoJ case regarding Netscape was still alive for the PR value: "see, we're playing nicely with a competitor" and hopefully distracting people from the near daily testimony about the illegal methods [1] it used to destroy Netscape -- how it really plays with competitors. Microsoft has since used every legal and disputedly illegal means to avoid honoring the Java agreement, becoming bolder in its methods as the DoJ case dies [2]. The judge in the Java case was quite certain of his findings [3] and the remedy he proposed was extremely lenient given the damage Microsoft's behavior had on the cross platform viability and hence success of Java. Microsoft should not be able to escape this token punishment by appealing it until it wins.
1. Jackson's Findings of Fact stands, only his remedy was overturned.
2. First came the incompatible extensions and IDEs, then conflicting implementations, and lastly not shipping a JVM at all now that the DoJ case is circling the drain.
3. Unlike Jackson, however, he kept his outrage in check. Doesn't seem to have made that much difference.
Here's a prediction: MS will not be required to carry Java. Here's another: .NET will obliterate Java in almost all environments in the US (the 95% of the market that uses Windows) in a year or less. The "battle" was over when Bush was "elected" and told the DoJ to let MS off the hook.
The most important things to communicate about programming are the central concepts -- variables, expressions, conditional branching, looping, etc. Use whatever language you (or whoever is doing the teaching) are most comfortable with. Using an emulated C64 would not be that bad, aside from the primitiveness of line numbering by today's standards -- BASIC is not a bad TRAINING language, just a bad production one :-), but Perl or Python or BASH would be just as good or better depending on your religious views. I think making sure you start slowly and go at the student's pace will be most important. Begin with Hello World and procede from there to classics like Guess The Number. I was very lucky to have gone to junior and high school when computer classes taught how to write programs instead of use them. Good luck to you and your siblings!
I'm not aware of much 6502 coding going on anymore, but I remember the C64 Macro Assembler with much fondness. The basic thing you missed was a very stupid ruling during the Reagan administration (big surprise) that allowed the patenting of software and mathmatical algorithms. Prior to this ruling, they were unpatentable. Software patents are not like normal patents -- a software patent doesn't cover any specific code, it covers a concept. Yes, this is a complete violation of what patents are supposed to be used for, and as you can see if you look around has led to a lot of IP law abuse -- those with deep pockets hiring lawyers and patenting things they never invented and have been in the public domain for years or even decades. The US patent office is staffed with morons who do not bother to check if the filer (who has no incentive what-so-ever to be honest) has really checked for prior art. Since only rich people and corporations can afford to fight a patent lawsuit, no matter how invalid the patent itself is, these stupid patents are increasingly being used to destroy the small players on the Net. The real outrage is that since software was previously unpatentable, nobody worried about preserving prior art from the 1950s to 1980s, when most things in programming were "invented" -- with the result that the previously mentioned IP law abusers can gain patents on things invented decades ago, frequently at the public expense at universities, etc. To answer your question, GIF _is_ patented, which is why it was/is the subject of a boycott and led to the creation on the PNG format. Hope this helps explain the situation. As I'm telling it like it is, I'm sure this post will get mismoderated so I hope you read it before it goes below 0.
There are a lot of moderators who abuse their privilege by ranking comments they don't agree with as "troll" or "redundant" so you can consider those rankings to really mean "controversial". MS has a lot of apologists, so any anti-MS comment is bound to be mismoderated fairly rapidly. Yeah, this move by MS is not a surprise to anyone who remembers their past behavior. It will be "amusing" to see how long Linux/*BSD's minor advances into the desktop world last once Office 2003 becomes the Windows standard and its documents are once again unusable by anything else.
Unless your "burstable billing" agreements spell out that you cannot bill for abusive inbound connections (i.e.: from virus infected hosts), you can probably legally make your customers pay (at least until they leave). I think a better approach would be to forward the costs back to the networks that relayed the connections for further relaying until the charges reach the infected pcs or at least their connection providers. Your isp could also offer bandwidth caps on the burstable agreements so people can take advantage of the concept without exposing themselves to bankruptcy. I would also think that an isp could easily block identified sources of infectioned connection attempts to all of its customers, and that such defensive action is a reasonable customer expectation.
Friend of Open Source, ha! Another one for the list.
Gee, how nice to know our taxes are now going to pay for thugs to carry out the bidding of giant corporations. The DMCA not withstanding (being unconstitutional), the bypassing of region encoding (which is a violation of anti-trust and free trade laws and agreements) is not a crime and it is a moral outrage that the DoJ is abusing US citizens for the "crime" of wanting to play imported games. Also annoying is the inaccurate press coverage that fails to mention this justifiable use. Disgusting. "Land of the Free" my ass.
As informed people are aware, the polygraph is another example of officially endorsed psuedo-science. What ought to be outlawed is its use, not documentation that it is a fraud. For anyone who needs to know: to defeat a polygraph test, put a tack in your shoe and jab your toe with it for every other question or so. Anyone who tells you the polygraph is a useful device is either ignorant or part of the scam -- polygraph operators make a lot of money compared to most crackpots. Rather pathetic that the DoD is depending on it for our security, though not surprising.
MS's true concern (lack thereof) for user privacy is covered in http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/26/132023 1&mode=thread&tid=109&tid=158
which refers to the spyware built into Windows Update. Those who trust MS are fools. The only secure Windows box is one behind a firewall that prohibits it from making connections to the Internet.
You could always go back to the right way to do web applications -- keep the processing on the servers where it belongs. Clients should be served clickable image maps. This isn't trendy, though.
This has to be the first time I agree with a IP lawyer. While I would protest if they were objecting to the use of google as a verb in its strict sense (i.e.: to google: to search for something using the google search engine), I do think defining it to mean any search engine (to google: to search for something using a search engine) is wrong. Mainly because it's inaccurate. Google is the highest quality search engine on the Internet. Most of the rest are garbage. If someone told me 'I googled for X and found no information' and I later found out they'd used Sam's Search Site I'd consider them to have lied. Google means google. Of course, I'm pretty sure pissing off the user community by harrassing an obscure site author who's only refering to already existing abusive use is not a very good way to help their cause. I would ask that those who want to sound hi-tech refer to "greping" vs "googling" when a generic search engine is involved.
Sure would be nice if the utterly incompetent morons in the patent office got fired. SCCS predates this patent by over 15 years at least and there is no excuse for them not knowing that. And then there's RCS. Not that it matters, since IP law is decided on by money and lawyers vs truth. Is there a point to posting these stories anymore? Pathetic.
Given the failure of the DOJ and other cases against Microsoft (no meaningful penalties, technically incompetent judge overseeing DOJ case, requirement to support Java in IE endlessly held up in court) and the continuing wide-spread abuse of IP law to monopolize cyberspace (patents on obviously invalid claims -- decades of prior art, etc.), do you think Free Software (and it's more "popular" spin-off Open Source) has any chance of long term surival in the United States or it is just a matter of time before it is crushed?
Um, so I found out -- got emailed notice of the later case. Pardon my ignorance, I must have missed that being automated when I read the moderation guidelines.
No, I didn't inherit my low UID. I was surfing the Internet before the "web" existed. I'd have a lower ID, but I was content to remain an Anonymous Coward for awhile.
My comments are on topic. I'm not going to "get over it" until the issues are addressed, and I will comment every time the "Apple is Linux's friend" hype is mentioned on Slashdot. If the grinding of this axe bothers you so much, don't read my posts.
Um, first off, you are not supposed to moderate threads you are commenting on -- lack of objectivity and all that. Someone should revoke your moderator privilege. The making of statements you don't agree with is not trolling. If bad language is grounds for being a troll, your "Boo Fucking Hoo" comment makes your response one as well (however "Insightful" your fellow Mac users think it is). Is it just me, or is the phrase "get over it" only used by jerks? I really look forward to MS deciding the DOJ case is over and revoking Office support for Mac. Then you can "get over" that.
Secondly, none of your blather negates the fact that the listed behavior is Linux hostile and not the actions of a "friend". I didn't say Apple "owed" anyone anything. FWIW, Mozilla is a lot more functional than Safari is -- that is, it stands on its merits at least as well as Safari does. Likewise, your claim that "X11 caters for a minority" is asinine -- X11 is the standard GUI on ALL Unix platforms (except MacOS X) and OpenVMS, and is usable on Windows and MacOS (X and pre) as well. MacOS X's proprietary replacement, however, works nowhere else or ever will.
Anyway, I stand by my statement: Apple is Not Linux's Friend and never will be.