Maybe they could take heed from the inventor of the Internet, Al Gore, and mutate the name Longhorn into 'Lockbox'. Sounds secure, and they could get Gore to do some advertisements for it too.
I am still waiting for MS to let SCO completely self destruct, then buy their "IP" at a bargain
And if they did, and a hostile government was in the White House how would MS explain that it is not monopolistic? It is not in MS's interest to directly acquire this IP.
I am wondering if they aren't actually saying that, yes, ELF was licensed, but due to X, Y, Z other infringements of SCO-claimed IP that the licensing to some bodies is null and void, and thus using ELF is another infringement after this cancellation of licensing. This seems to be the logic that was used against IBM (i.e. use one thing as a pretext for cancelling the non-revokable licence, then sue based on IBM not having a license, whilst forgetting about the reasons for revoking the license).
"Man, I knew MS were worried about their lacklustre share price performance [cnn.com] compared to Apple [cnn.com], but this is a desperation move if ever I've seen one."
This fits well with what I said in my previous post in a thread above. Apple has been able to captialise on its association with easy to use consumer-based products to bring out the iPod. This has filled a gap in the market, filled it very well, and the share price reflects this. Microsoft is also trying to break into this market too, but whether the Microsoft carries the same brand associations that would allow it to succeed is another matter - only really Sony have the same sort of clout in this area. This having been said, Xbox has been a very successful challenger to Nintendo and Sony in the gaming market, and it would have been hard to predict this 5 years ago.
Microsoft has traditionally had an increasing share price, but this period of price expansion is almost certainly coming to the end. In the West we are almost at software saturation for most large volume items and there will be instead replacement of old software with new in these markets. The emerging markets with money (e.g. South East Asia) seem to be pushing, with government backing, for open source non-Microsoft products, so there probably isn't much of an opportunity there. (This could change, but the governments of the region seem very keen to foster open source alternatives - i.e. there is still a market there, but not one you could guarantee that Microsoft would win). There are other markets without an open source strategy yet, but often they are in areas with little cash to spend on Microsoft products, but it seems that these are the places Microsoft is targeting with its reduce cost windows licensing for recycled and donated PCs, which is a sensible option for Microsoft (get the market used to your products in advance of it coming down on one side of the fence or other).
Microsoft's business will no doubt still increase, but there are less market opportunities for rapid expansion on which a rapidly expanding share price could be based. I.e. in the West the IT industry is becoming a mature one, and other markets are less easy to break into at the moment due to government pressure of lack of finances.
since there will no longer be a rapidly expanding revenue base to drive share prices on there is a risk that large investors with commitments to deliver financial targets might up sticks and look for a new, more rapidly expanding market sector. The Microsoft board has a duty to preserve value in the company, and this includes stabilisation of its share price. Offering to buy back partly achieves this, and offering enhanced dividends may keep the large coroporate investors to stay with in the fold for a long term return.
In the context of the maturation of the Western IT market and the possible lack of opportunities for Microsoft to exploit new markets, the actions Microsoft is taking are sensible.
"The USA has the largest number of super-rich people in the world, and our per-capita GDP is also one of the largest."
Being pedantic, corrrelation does not mean that there is causation nor does it indicate the direction of causality.
" Audio here is great. SB/Live feeding my Logitech THX surround sound system. Music is superb, DVDs are better:)
So I think your hardware or driver is bad. Not the fault of Linux, it's the fault of the hardware manufacturer or the ALSA project."
Sound is flawless with the 2.4 kernel and Windows. If the driver is bad, and it is the one supplied with the distro, then that is somewhat the fault of the distribution. I have read that the problem is a bug in the buffering to the card with the fault lying in the kernel itself.
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thr ea d_id=5033913&forum_id=3040
quote: On current 2.6-based distributions (such as SuSE 9.1 [add yours here]), there are known problems with the userspace thread handling, which will lead to abysmal real-time performance (loads of underruns and even distorted sound).
Same problem with 2.6 on different hardware. No problems revealed by memtest86 (one of the first things I tried!). In any case the audio distortion problems are a known issue with 2.6
"In the office, we run 100% Linux -- have for 6 years. In all that time, we've never had to reboot a system except to upgrade the kernel or move a box from one room to another"
My experience is that Linux is less stable than UNIX. HP-UX 10.20 is the most stable UNIX I've personally used - 9 months up time and the machine only needing to be turned off due to it needing to be removed. Most of the time now, though, machines running UNIX or Linux (2.4 kernel) only need to be shutdown for reasons relating to hardware or if the disks are partitioned/logging set such that a critical disk can be filled up. My experience with the 2.6 kernel has not been positive so far for availability (responsive, but prone to crashes, and also audio is too often distorted).
With the 2.6 kernel on my SuSe 9.1 distribution currently Linux reboots are far too common. Mind you, today I had Windows XP also blue screen on me. With the 2.4 kernel Linux certainly has the edge in stability, but Windows has made considerable strides by moving to the NT kernel structure and the difference, for everyday desktop use, is no longer marked. I am not sure if I'd want to run Windows continuously, though.
"What I've found is that I keep switching back to Windows to work with PSpice or Xilinx software, etc"
Spice and Xilinx tools are both available on Linux. See Linux Journal from around October last year for the latter.
Explaining myself a bit better, I mean that despite descriptions of the kernel process, the writers of the article seem to be confusing Linux (the kernel) with the entire operating system that people often call Linux.
Article title: "Linux kernel: Moving closer to Windows?"
First line: "Tech Ed: Security and the way windowing is handled remain two of the diminishing differences between Linux and Windows, according to one of the main speakers at Microsoft's developer conference"
However, windowing is nothing to do with the kernel. The fact that the writer, supposedly comparing the two systems, isn't aware of this distinction casts doubt on the review methodology and expertise.
The Parliament only gets to approve or not. It is a bit like appointments to the US Supreme Court, I suppose. However, the EP does not get to approve individual members of the EC, just approve the entire slate, or reject it. (Treaty of Nice, articles 214 and 215, ammended). Prior to the Treaty of Nice the EC was purely appointed by the member governments with no EP involvement.
"Less and less is produced in the US each year,"
GDP in the USA is up, although GDP per worker per hour (aka productivity) is only increasing gradually (circa 1.5%/year), but then there are limits to how much people can do. Whether moving the furniture about in a bank helps, I am not sure, but it can probably have an effect on other offices .
Accessing Grid Computing portals to send jobs to a multi-million pound facility. In theory I might be able to do this from my phone too, but it would be considerably harder to work the gui! I did have an ssh client for my phone (3 year old Sagem) but near impossible to enter in passwords.
Listening to BBC radio online
VNC to control my desktop from the living room or garden when it is doing lengthy audio processing, or downloading patches, etc.
With VoIP becoming more dominant, then a PDA and pervasive wireless networking and a bluetooth headset would be close to becoming indistinguishable from the current crop of phones. The PDA isn't so much dying as the phone and the PDA converging.
In the UK I think that people use their mobile phones more for texting (instant messaging) from pubs than voice. A PDA with SMS, a small keyboard attached, and a pub with low cost WiFi and you'd be hard pressed to see the difference in functionality between a phone with a large screen and a PDA with a small screen.
On my phone (broken, never used it much anyway) I could browse and check web mail, pop mailboxes, wap sites. Sort of like a slow wireless PDA connection, with a tiny interface.
The difference at the moment is that the standard phone network is more pervasive than 3G, Wifi, etc., and so the phone wins on connectivity, but is gaining PDA functionality.
If the PDA survives I think it will be as more of
a hub than an item in its own right. You can connect keyboards now. In theory to mine I can connect a display or TV, but the refresh rate leaves something to be desired. But if the refresh rate was better than keyboard, hotel TV, PDA, wireless connection and appplication serving/Grid and I have a handy desktop substitute anywhere I go that can also access all the computing power I need. Add in bluetooth and VoIP and 3G and it's a phone too.
Oh, and I have a Compact Flash VGA adapter for my PDA too. As long as I don't do powerpoint with lots of graphics in (not really my style anyway) it works perfectly well and fits in my pocket.
It gives broadcasters the option to copyright their particular transmission of a work. They do not gain any retereospective copyright over works in the public domain as a whole, simply their transmission of it.
Really this isn't much different from a record company deciding to produce a CD of work so old that it is out of copyright. They would have copyright on the arrangement of bit on the CD, but not on the underlying work. This treaty seems to be an attempt to bring things into line with this, to be honest.
Or alternatively you can take a copy of a Dickens novel and reproduce the words (since they are out of copyright) but you can't simply photocopy a recently printed copy of the novel and distribute that without breaching copyright.
"a computer could compare the information in the patent to existing patents and return a list of possible prior art or patents
This is very difficult without full-blown natural language processing,"
This is true, but you can at least build a search engine based on the way words are used in context in patent literature to allow searches to be more effective than simple plain text searches.
See papers by V. Hodge et. al.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they could take heed from the inventor of the Internet, Al Gore, and mutate the name Longhorn into 'Lockbox'. Sounds secure, and they could get Gore to do some advertisements for it too.
And if they did, and a hostile government was in the White House how would MS explain that it is not monopolistic? It is not in MS's interest to directly acquire this IP.
I am wondering if they aren't actually saying that, yes, ELF was licensed, but due to X, Y, Z other infringements of SCO-claimed IP that the licensing to some bodies is null and void, and thus using ELF is another infringement after this cancellation of licensing. This seems to be the logic that was used against IBM (i.e. use one thing as a pretext for cancelling the non-revokable licence, then sue based on IBM not having a license, whilst forgetting about the reasons for revoking the license).
This fits well with what I said in my previous post in a thread above. Apple has been able to captialise on its association with easy to use consumer-based products to bring out the iPod. This has filled a gap in the market, filled it very well, and the share price reflects this. Microsoft is also trying to break into this market too, but whether the Microsoft carries the same brand associations that would allow it to succeed is another matter - only really Sony have the same sort of clout in this area. This having been said, Xbox has been a very successful challenger to Nintendo and Sony in the gaming market, and it would have been hard to predict this 5 years ago.
Microsoft has traditionally had an increasing share price, but this period of price expansion is almost certainly coming to the end. In the West we are almost at software saturation for most large volume items and there will be instead replacement of old software with new in these markets. The emerging markets with money (e.g. South East Asia) seem to be pushing, with government backing, for open source non-Microsoft products, so there probably isn't much of an opportunity there. (This could change, but the governments of the region seem very keen to foster open source alternatives - i.e. there is still a market there, but not one you could guarantee that Microsoft would win). There are other markets without an open source strategy yet, but often they are in areas with little cash to spend on Microsoft products, but it seems that these are the places Microsoft is targeting with its reduce cost windows licensing for recycled and donated PCs, which is a sensible option for Microsoft (get the market used to your products in advance of it coming down on one side of the fence or other).
Microsoft's business will no doubt still increase, but there are less market opportunities for rapid expansion on which a rapidly expanding share price could be based. I.e. in the West the IT industry is becoming a mature one, and other markets are less easy to break into at the moment due to government pressure of lack of finances.
since there will no longer be a rapidly expanding revenue base to drive share prices on there is a risk that large investors with commitments to deliver financial targets might up sticks and look for a new, more rapidly expanding market sector. The Microsoft board has a duty to preserve value in the company, and this includes stabilisation of its share price. Offering to buy back partly achieves this, and offering enhanced dividends may keep the large coroporate investors to stay with in the fold for a long term return.
In the context of the maturation of the Western IT market and the possible lack of opportunities for Microsoft to exploit new markets, the actions Microsoft is taking are sensible.
"The USA has the largest number of super-rich people in the world, and our per-capita GDP is also one of the largest." Being pedantic, corrrelation does not mean that there is causation nor does it indicate the direction of causality.
" Audio here is great. SB/Live feeding my Logitech THX surround sound system. Music is superb, DVDs are better :)
r ea d_id=5033913&forum_id=3040
So I think your hardware or driver is bad. Not the fault of Linux, it's the fault of the hardware manufacturer or the ALSA project."
Sound is flawless with the 2.4 kernel and Windows. If the driver is bad, and it is the one supplied with the distro, then that is somewhat the fault of the distribution. I have read that the problem is a bug in the buffering to the card with the fault lying in the kernel itself.
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?th
quote:
On current 2.6-based distributions (such as
SuSE 9.1 [add yours here]), there are known
problems with the userspace thread handling,
which will lead to abysmal real-time
performance (loads of underruns and even
distorted sound).
Same problem with 2.6 on different hardware. No problems revealed by memtest86 (one of the first things I tried!). In any case the audio distortion problems are a known issue with 2.6
"In the office, we run 100% Linux -- have for 6 years. In all that time, we've never had to reboot a system except to upgrade the kernel or move a box from one room to another" My experience is that Linux is less stable than UNIX. HP-UX 10.20 is the most stable UNIX I've personally used - 9 months up time and the machine only needing to be turned off due to it needing to be removed. Most of the time now, though, machines running UNIX or Linux (2.4 kernel) only need to be shutdown for reasons relating to hardware or if the disks are partitioned/logging set such that a critical disk can be filled up. My experience with the 2.6 kernel has not been positive so far for availability (responsive, but prone to crashes, and also audio is too often distorted).
With the 2.6 kernel on my SuSe 9.1 distribution currently Linux reboots are far too common. Mind you, today I had Windows XP also blue screen on me. With the 2.4 kernel Linux certainly has the edge in stability, but Windows has made considerable strides by moving to the NT kernel structure and the difference, for everyday desktop use, is no longer marked. I am not sure if I'd want to run Windows continuously, though.
Although the Xscale is a StrongARM chip, i.e. an ARM derivative.
"What I've found is that I keep switching back to Windows to work with PSpice or Xilinx software, etc" Spice and Xilinx tools are both available on Linux. See Linux Journal from around October last year for the latter.
Explaining myself a bit better, I mean that despite descriptions of the kernel process, the writers of the article seem to be confusing Linux (the kernel) with the entire operating system that people often call Linux.
Maybe I am just nitpicking.
Article title:
"Linux kernel: Moving closer to Windows?"
First line:
"Tech Ed: Security and the way windowing is handled remain two of the diminishing differences between Linux and Windows, according to one of the main speakers at Microsoft's developer conference"
However, windowing is nothing to do with the kernel. The fact that the writer, supposedly comparing the two systems, isn't aware of this distinction casts doubt on the review methodology and expertise.
The Parliament only gets to approve or not. It is a bit like appointments to the US Supreme Court, I suppose. However, the EP does not get to approve individual members of the EC, just approve the entire slate, or reject it. (Treaty of Nice, articles 214 and 215, ammended). Prior to the Treaty of Nice the EC was purely appointed by the member governments with no EP involvement.
Or has someone done it already, and I will have to pay a fee if I place a red candle in the northernmost corner of the living room?
"Less and less is produced in the US each year," GDP in the USA is up, although GDP per worker per hour (aka productivity) is only increasing gradually (circa 1.5%/year), but then there are limits to how much people can do. Whether moving the furniture about in a bank helps, I am not sure, but it can probably have an effect on other offices .
EU population was 378 million in 2001, before expansion on 1st May, which has probably pushed the EU population to close to 450 million I would guess.
With VoIP becoming more dominant, then a PDA and pervasive wireless networking and a bluetooth headset would be close to becoming indistinguishable from the current crop of phones. The PDA isn't so much dying as the phone and the PDA converging. In the UK I think that people use their mobile phones more for texting (instant messaging) from pubs than voice. A PDA with SMS, a small keyboard attached, and a pub with low cost WiFi and you'd be hard pressed to see the difference in functionality between a phone with a large screen and a PDA with a small screen. On my phone (broken, never used it much anyway) I could browse and check web mail, pop mailboxes, wap sites. Sort of like a slow wireless PDA connection, with a tiny interface. The difference at the moment is that the standard phone network is more pervasive than 3G, Wifi, etc., and so the phone wins on connectivity, but is gaining PDA functionality. If the PDA survives I think it will be as more of a hub than an item in its own right. You can connect keyboards now. In theory to mine I can connect a display or TV, but the refresh rate leaves something to be desired. But if the refresh rate was better than keyboard, hotel TV, PDA, wireless connection and appplication serving/Grid and I have a handy desktop substitute anywhere I go that can also access all the computing power I need. Add in bluetooth and VoIP and 3G and it's a phone too.
Oh, and I have a Compact Flash VGA adapter for my PDA too. As long as I don't do powerpoint with lots of graphics in (not really my style anyway) it works perfectly well and fits in my pocket.
Really this isn't much different from a record company deciding to produce a CD of work so old that it is out of copyright. They would have copyright on the arrangement of bit on the CD, but not on the underlying work. This treaty seems to be an attempt to bring things into line with this, to be honest.
Or alternatively you can take a copy of a Dickens novel and reproduce the words (since they are out of copyright) but you can't simply photocopy a recently printed copy of the novel and distribute that without breaching copyright.
The requirement for granting a patent is exactly that it should be novel and not obvious to someone skilled in the art.
This is very difficult without full-blown natural language processing,"
This is true, but you can at least build a search engine based on the way words are used in context in patent literature to allow searches to be more effective than simple plain text searches. See papers by V. Hodge et. al.
This would be the database of granted patents."
Quite how a database of granted patents can be a collection of unpatented prior art is beyond me...