Only if they owned the domain and were assigning the user.subdomain portion. If, however, I signed up for a somedomain.net account and got given a website at http://adrianbaugh.somedomain.net then I couldn't be sued because it wasn't me that assigned adrianbaugh.somedomain.net, it was the admin software belonging to somedomain.net; they would have to be sued.
Given your friend ran for office in 2000 and this patent was filed in 1999 that doesn't constitute prior art. It just means that your friend might have been violating the patent.
I think it's stupid and it sucks but that's the worst-thought-out "reason" for having a patent overturned I've heard since... well, for a good few days at least.
If you really have no experience you might find it easier to start by building some Doom levels. There are plenty of level editors, node builders etc. available. It seems a good place to start because you only have to worry about 2-and-a-bit dimensions for the actual structure of the level, allowing you to concentrate on placement of enemies, create good secret areas, place keys to make an interesting mission etc. You can arrange for different placement of items depending on multi/single player and learn about the differences between good single-player levels and good deathmatch levels. There's also a pretty large community of Doom players who could give you feedback on your levels. (I will, if you have anything ready before 24 February.)
I don't see why the two are necessarily contradictory. After all, the bits to support enterprise class hardware can easily be omitted from compiling an embedded or desktop platform: if they can make a kernel with modular scheduler and tunable latency (which was the way it seemed to be heading with Con Kolivas' patch set) then the enterprise boys can increase the latency for minimum kernel CPU usage, the desktop people can knock it down for good responsiveness and the embedded folks can plug in an alternative scheduler to suit their own particular needs.
And really, if you're writing a document complicated enough to require an automatic bibliography your time would far better be spent learning LaTeX or hunting down KLyX than trying to do the job with a conventional wordpro. The right tool for the job..
Probably the easiest way is to back up/home then track down a copy of that debianifier application that was mentioned a few days ago. apt-get install kde/unstable will then be your friend. I suspect it wasn't what you were hoping for though, so:
Have you checked to see if there are Mandrake or PLD rpms available? Those distributions seem pretty prompt with rpm support for KDE, though I doubt you'll find 3.2beta rpms yet, and often the rpms seem droppable into RedHat distributions. Alternatively you could try their new tool, "Konfigure" or "Kompile" or whatever that apparently automates the build process to a degree (don't think it rpmifies things though..)
They might still have a reason to support it, if only to damage people's dependency on Microsoft products. If the average person were less tied to their MS Office computer they might be a little more inclined to investigate the competition as regards operating systems too. I don't say they'll do it, but there might be a little more at stake here than profit.
How is their standard not free? (I don't mean their particular application; I don't care one way or the other about that.) I didn't see any particular gotchas in the license; they say they want it to catch on as widely as possible, that they want as many applications to use it as possible and that they don't care if you want to make your application open source. The only possible thing I can think of is a hidden patent, but using XML to represent discrete events (notes) would seem kind of obvious, no? There must be tons of prior art.
Or is there some kind of zealots' vendetta going on, of which I was not previously aware?
I think we have different definitions of "too expensive". You're right in that it's not too expensive for the companies to make some profit from the devices; I'm right in that they're still too expensive to become truly commonplace - the "lots" of people who are buying them are the same kind of people who read slashdot, build their own PCs etc., or just care a lot about their entertainment. It's still a big majority who don't have mp3 players and that will remain the case until the price becomes comparable to alternative methods of playing back music. That means $30 portable CD players and walkmans, and that isn't going to happen for a while.
I've already got one (a 15gig iPod). They're too expensive for the mass market (which means the people on the run-down estates who still use their walkman): citing people on slashdot who buy mp3 players doesn't prove your argument as this crowd always seems desperate to the the first to have any new gadget.
Not everything seems expensive - I'm perfectly happy to shell out 500 for a camera lens or (hopefully this summer) a few k for a motorboat. But going by the standards of equivalent products in the industry you have to say that all mp3 players, at the moment, are too expensive. They won't reach a true mass market until they are similar in price to portable CD players or walkmans, and that won't happen until the technology comes down in priced.
I never said they were unreasonably priced (for today's market), after all the companies have to make a profit. But there's nothing out there that doesn't scream "first generation! early adopters only!"
No, it just means that they can sell enough at that price to make a profit. It's a good start for them - just like the first-generation DVD writers that cost unreal amounts were "worth it" for the manufacturers. There are always a few early-adopters, but the proportion of people who own mp3 players at the moment is not high. When they can get the price down to a level where mass adoption (ie where there are as many people with mp3 players as there were with walkmans in the early '90s) then the price will be right.
At the moment consumers, by and large, are not spending for the product (save a few geeks and technophiles here and there) and we haven't yet reached a mass-adoption threshold. So I stand by my point: they're still too expensive.
Surely they can't all be planning to enter the Paris-Dakar rally (after picking up the kids from school)? Even if they were, for about the price of a Hummer you could get a Bowler Wildcat, which really sounds a lot more fun!
Thanks for that, that's a cool review. But the bit that really got me thinking: the last line. It's absolutely spot-on! Peter Jackson making an A-Team movie, how cool would that be?
> Hard to pick any single outstanding "oscar moment" though.
That's a good thing. Films that get awards for one particular scene often have little more to them than that one particular scene.
In general I'd much rather see something like RotK where all the acting is consistently good than something (no names!) where the one excellent performance just illustrates how badly the others suck. If I'm noticing that there's acting going on at all I'm not immersed in the director's world anymore. It's the other side of the coin to why I was glad that, by and large, PJ picked less well known actors for LOTR. Most of the time the really big stars just make it harder to immerse yourself properly in the film as you keep noticing the actor, not the character.
That's good - but it should be the case for all fines, for everyone. I'm quite impressed with the examples of German and Finnish traffic laws in other replies - that's cool. While it does mean Bill Gates might get fined $1E6 for speeding, that isn't a bad thing. It means that people can't negate the impact of breaking the law just by being rich: that $1M fine on BG would (in theory) have just the same effect on him as a $50 fine on a college student: it would piss him off quite a lot, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.
> Extend the lifespan to six months and drop the cost to under $60 bucks, and people will pay $10/month for disposable e-books.
More's the pity. I suppose Joe and Jenny Idiot have to have their gadgets, but such horrendously disposable items will lead to a lot of unpleasant waste. That might be fair enough for low-volume (eg military) applications but I'd hope the general public would hold out for something a bit less environmentally unpleasant.
A fine of a few billion might:-) Why can't we have define fines as a proportion of the defendant's wealth or income or something, so that they hurt everybody just as much regardless of how rich they are?
Don't they realise that cack is a euphemism for "shit" or "godawful"? While naming libcaca was quite appropriate in a self-deprecating ironic way, cacko is not a good name for a distribution you want to be taken seriously.
The units really ought to be renamed "American" units - no English engineer I know has used them for a long time. (Regardless, the proper term is "Imperial" units...)
My dad would have done the same - so I didn't tell him. I made lilo wait for 2 seconds at bootup, no prompt - he never noticed the delay (or the small decrease in the size of his hard disk;-)) and all I had to do was press L-Shift "linux" and I was away. It was extremely useful later on when I had to recover some data for him...
That's going to get very complicated if you require a system where the certificate can be associated either with an email address or with a particular cybercafe (what would it associate with? potentially variable IP address(es)? mailserver? (what if they don't run one?) I hope someone does come up with a solution that we can all look at and say "of course... why didn't we think of that?", but I don't think I've heard that solution yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if they owned the domain and were assigning the user.subdomain portion. If, however, I signed up for a somedomain.net account and got given a website at http://adrianbaugh.somedomain.net then I couldn't be sued because it wasn't me that assigned adrianbaugh.somedomain.net, it was the admin software belonging to somedomain.net; they would have to be sued.
Given your friend ran for office in 2000 and this patent was filed in 1999 that doesn't constitute prior art. It just means that your friend might have been violating the patent.
I think it's stupid and it sucks but that's the worst-thought-out "reason" for having a patent overturned I've heard since... well, for a good few days at least.
If you really have no experience you might find it easier to start by building some Doom levels. There are plenty of level editors, node builders etc. available. It seems a good place to start because you only have to worry about 2-and-a-bit dimensions for the actual structure of the level, allowing you to concentrate on placement of enemies, create good secret areas, place keys to make an interesting mission etc. You can arrange for different placement of items depending on multi/single player and learn about the differences between good single-player levels and good deathmatch levels. There's also a pretty large community of Doom players who could give you feedback on your levels. (I will, if you have anything ready before 24 February.)
I don't see why the two are necessarily contradictory. After all, the bits to support enterprise class hardware can easily be omitted from compiling an embedded or desktop platform: if they can make a kernel with modular scheduler and tunable latency (which was the way it seemed to be heading with Con Kolivas' patch set) then the enterprise boys can increase the latency for minimum kernel CPU usage, the desktop people can knock it down for good responsiveness and the embedded folks can plug in an alternative scheduler to suit their own particular needs.
And really, if you're writing a document complicated enough to require an automatic bibliography your time would far better be spent learning LaTeX or hunting down KLyX than trying to do the job with a conventional wordpro. The right tool for the job..
Probably the easiest way is to back up /home then track down a copy of that debianifier application that was mentioned a few days ago. apt-get install kde/unstable will then be your friend. I suspect it wasn't what you were hoping for though, so:
Have you checked to see if there are Mandrake or PLD rpms available? Those distributions seem pretty prompt with rpm support for KDE, though I doubt you'll find 3.2beta rpms yet, and often the rpms seem droppable into RedHat distributions.
Alternatively you could try their new tool, "Konfigure" or "Kompile" or whatever that apparently automates the build process to a degree (don't think it rpmifies things though..)
They might still have a reason to support it, if only to damage people's dependency on Microsoft products. If the average person were less tied to their MS Office computer they might be a little more inclined to investigate the competition as regards operating systems too.
I don't say they'll do it, but there might be a little more at stake here than profit.
How is their standard not free? (I don't mean their particular application; I don't care one way or the other about that.) I didn't see any particular gotchas in the license; they say they want it to catch on as widely as possible, that they want as many applications to use it as possible and that they don't care if you want to make your application open source. The only possible thing I can think of is a hidden patent, but using XML to represent discrete events (notes) would seem kind of obvious, no? There must be tons of prior art.
Or is there some kind of zealots' vendetta going on, of which I was not previously aware?
I think we have different definitions of "too expensive". You're right in that it's not too expensive for the companies to make some profit from the devices; I'm right in that they're still too expensive to become truly commonplace - the "lots" of people who are buying them are the same kind of people who read slashdot, build their own PCs etc., or just care a lot about their entertainment. It's still a big majority who don't have mp3 players and that will remain the case until the price becomes comparable to alternative methods of playing back music. That means $30 portable CD players and walkmans, and that isn't going to happen for a while.
I've already got one (a 15gig iPod). They're too expensive for the mass market (which means the people on the run-down estates who still use their walkman): citing people on slashdot who buy mp3 players doesn't prove your argument as this crowd always seems desperate to the the first to have any new gadget.
Not everything seems expensive - I'm perfectly happy to shell out 500 for a camera lens or (hopefully this summer) a few k for a motorboat. But going by the standards of equivalent products in the industry you have to say that all mp3 players, at the moment, are too expensive. They won't reach a true mass market until they are similar in price to portable CD players or walkmans, and that won't happen until the technology comes down in priced.
I never said they were unreasonably priced (for today's market), after all the companies have to make a profit. But there's nothing out there that doesn't scream "first generation! early adopters only!"
No, it just means that they can sell enough at that price to make a profit. It's a good start for them - just like the first-generation DVD writers that cost unreal amounts were "worth it" for the manufacturers. There are always a few early-adopters, but the proportion of people who own mp3 players at the moment is not high. When they can get the price down to a level where mass adoption (ie where there are as many people with mp3 players as there were with walkmans in the early '90s) then the price will be right.
At the moment consumers, by and large, are not spending for the product (save a few geeks and technophiles here and there) and we haven't yet reached a mass-adoption threshold. So I stand by my point: they're still too expensive.
The fact that Apple's product is too expensive isn't excused by the fact that all its competitors are too expensive too.
> driving their modified military vehicles.
Surely they can't all be planning to enter the Paris-Dakar rally (after picking up the kids from school)? Even if they were, for about the price of a Hummer you could get a Bowler Wildcat, which really sounds a lot more fun!
Thanks for that, that's a cool review. But the bit that really got me thinking: the last line. It's absolutely spot-on! Peter Jackson making an A-Team movie, how cool would that be?
> Hard to pick any single outstanding "oscar moment" though.
That's a good thing. Films that get awards for one particular scene often have little more to them than that one particular scene.
In general I'd much rather see something like RotK where all the acting is consistently good than something (no names!) where the one excellent performance just illustrates how badly the others suck. If I'm noticing that there's acting going on at all I'm not immersed in the director's world anymore.
It's the other side of the coin to why I was glad that, by and large, PJ picked less well known actors for LOTR. Most of the time the really big stars just make it harder to immerse yourself properly in the film as you keep noticing the actor, not the character.
That's good - but it should be the case for all fines, for everyone. I'm quite impressed with the examples of German and Finnish traffic laws in other replies - that's cool. While it does mean Bill Gates might get fined $1E6 for speeding, that isn't a bad thing. It means that people can't negate the impact of breaking the law just by being rich: that $1M fine on BG would (in theory) have just the same effect on him as a $50 fine on a college student: it would piss him off quite a lot, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.
> Extend the lifespan to six months and drop the cost to under $60 bucks, and people will pay $10/month for disposable e-books.
More's the pity. I suppose Joe and Jenny Idiot have to have their gadgets, but such horrendously disposable items will lead to a lot of unpleasant waste. That might be fair enough for low-volume (eg military) applications but I'd hope the general public would hold out for something a bit less environmentally unpleasant.
A fine of a few billion might :-)
Why can't we have define fines as a proportion of the defendant's wealth or income or something, so that they hurt everybody just as much regardless of how rich they are?
Don't they realise that cack is a euphemism for "shit" or "godawful"? While naming libcaca was quite appropriate in a self-deprecating ironic way, cacko is not a good name for a distribution you want to be taken seriously.
> When you want to catch a wolf, do you send a sheep? No, you send another wolf.
That way you've got a 50% chance of just making lots more wolves. Personally I'd send a man with a gun.
The units really ought to be renamed "American" units - no English engineer I know has used them for a long time. (Regardless, the proper term is "Imperial" units...)
It's probably a sketchpad though, or a mac.
My dad would have done the same - so I didn't tell him. I made lilo wait for 2 seconds at bootup, no prompt - he never noticed the delay (or the small decrease in the size of his hard disk ;-)) and all I had to do was press L-Shift "linux" and I was away.
It was extremely useful later on when I had to recover some data for him...
That's going to get very complicated if you require a system where the certificate can be associated either with an email address or with a particular cybercafe (what would it associate with? potentially variable IP address(es)? mailserver? (what if they don't run one?)
I hope someone does come up with a solution that we can all look at and say "of course... why didn't we think of that?", but I don't think I've heard that solution yet.