This case is too weak. The problem is Lexmark has completely no foot to stand on - they still could hit the "copyright violation" bell on copying their program (arguably uncopyrightable) - one can change the program AND re-create a new hash to match it, so it's not strictly the only possible "keycode".
But the DMCA claim was completely misplaced. DMCA protects PROTECTION of COPYRIGHTED work. That is you can't circumvent protection of DVD movies, e-books, games, any "work of art" that is copyrightable. This chips circumvents access to measurement of toner, printing with ink, using replacable cartridges. You can PATENT these things but you can't COPYRIGHT them. And DMCA applies only to copyright stuff.
Actually, this means you could try to circumvent DVD protection if the DVD disk didn't contain a movie but, say, set of algorithms or driver to some machine. With special intention not to copy/redistribute the driver, just to control the machine with 3rd party software and the driver...
I think the problem may be rather related to VERY obscure concept of z-index "local context". As I analysed this in an older version of Moz, it looked something like this:
The trick is since z-index of div5 is higher than z-index of div2, everything in div5 is above everything in div2 - in context of div1. And only after this has been sorted out, relations div3-div4 and div6-div7 are resolved, each within their own separate context of div2 and div5... This used to be the case. Now... I don't know.
Yes - Opera handles THAT test flawlessly. Maybe Opera authors took w3schools text too literally - "(eg position:absolute;)!}" - w3.org says only "positioned" and that means "absolute", "fixed" and "relative" - only "static" is not. The case is simple - if all elements are "static", they never overlap, Z-index is completely redundant. You need to move the element in X and Y before moving it in Z starts to make sense.
Okay, Free Software community aside (we already know our answers and reasons) - why should a hardware manufacturer hire a team of experienced coders to write drivers for every platform out there? They can save quite a lot on just releasing a "bare bones" driver i.e. for Windows and providing only some Q/A and help (AND full documentation) and have Linux, BSD etc drivers written for free?:) They make their sales from hardware anyway, drivers are and always (or at least for a very long time) have been available for free and as long as new features in drivers are coming, they just boost card sales.
So... why pay when you can have the same thing for free?
And as to "opening up the design" - add some fast layer of indirection or something alike, just obscure the hardware a -tiny- bit and you're safe - competition won't steal your hardware design - hackers need the API hooks and specs, not internal plans.
The others need to keep a completely separate code base. As to RealVNC, the situation is more tricky - since they are the original authors, they can take certain freedoms...
GPL once applied, can't be removed. That's it. But you can apply it to a specific code branch and it doesn't work backwards. Taking more extreme situation how it works. You start an office suite, as your own "closeware", never releasing. Then around 1.0 you start selling the suite on some proprietary license - a database tool and a text editor. Some people love your database but find the editor unnecessary, so you split the project and keep selling 2.0 database and 2.0 editor. The editor sales go badly, you don't really have time to maintain it but there's a small community who still likes the editor and would like to maintain it if you decide to abandon it. So you release editor 3.0 as GPL. Now since at 1.0 the editor and the database were one and they still contain a lot of common code in the API etc, will the GPL automatically cover the code identical to GNU code parts in the database, and thus automatically cover your database app? Well, no. You decide it's a separate branch and it remains licensed as it is. The moment you "froze" editor 3.0 and GPL'd it, it's free. Database isn't. Now of course if the community improves the API in the editor to a degree where it far exceeds what you had and you'd like to backport the api to your database, you can't - the code is GPL'd and can't be included in a proprietary software. But at any time you can branch a "database viewer" from the database and GPL it while leaving the core app proprietary...
Now transferring to our case: They maintain one source tree which is their own closeware. Then they "branch" it into three trees, differing only with, say, names and license files. "VNC-5.0-closeware", "VNC-5.0-proprietary" and "VNC-5.0-GNU". Apply proper licenses to the two (their own "closeware" allows that, after all they wrote it themselves) and release and mostly abandon the two newly-licensed branches while maintaining and working on the "closeware" trunk. Everyone can download VNC-GNU, buy VNC-proprietary and nobody from outside touches the trunk. When trunk reaches another milestone, another branch is created. The caveat is that if anyone introduces some cool enchancement to the proprietary branch, they can buy/get it and include it in trunk, getting it both to GNU and proprietary. Now if someone modifies the GNU branch, they can only backport the feature to a GNU branch, not to the trunk, so if someone added something cool to 5.0-GNU, they can't add it to trunk - they can only freeze trunk at 6.0 creating proprietary and GNU and THEN add the feature to the GNU branch, leaving the proprietary somewhat crippled. Unless of course they rewrite the feature from scratch in the trunk, keeping just the idea - GNU license covers code, not design...
If the "touch keypad" takes up whole screen width and considerable amount of height (i.e. leaving only enough to display the number) then the keys will be way bigger than in most of modern phones. This thing is not tiny and placing 3 keys in a horizontal row on this screen will make them BIG. And if you still can't get that right, you can use stylus. Or voice dialing. Or PC sync and phonebook entry.
Technical specifications indicate a 65k color TFT display. The display really shines is when it comes to internet browsing
Today TOO early in the morning *or more in the night) alarm in my new phone woke me up. Okay, I can sleep longer but I need to reset the alarm to the right time. And damn, I can't. Damned display shines so brightly that it blinds me...
Finally keeping it far away from myself, getting eyes a bit adjusted to the brightness, tilting and turning it I managed to set the alarm...
The protocol specs are open source. As long as the others write their code from scratch, only conforming to the open specs, instead of just including GPL'd code, it's fine and they can license the code as they wish. Similar to proprietary ShareBear on top of GNUtella network, or MSIE supporting (poorly;) open standard PNG. (with PNG the case is a bit different too, as it's LGPL, so they actually can link against the GNU library, they just have to provide hooks...)
Code sent. (I hope the email you've given here is valid). I'm not opera-hostile, it's an okay browser. I'd like to see it getting better and better too... Sure I won't exchange my Mozilla to some proprietary stuff, but hey! It's not Microsoft! They can't be all bad!
Sorry, maybe that's your impression as a user. For me, as a webmaster, making cross-browser pages that flawlessly run in Opera is hell. The standard stuff is okay, but try anything beyond... Just recently all browsers took the style sheet "z-index" correctly, overlaying the row of buttons over an image map. Only Opera pushed them behind the image. Earlier I've been trying some pull-down menus. Move the mouse over the menu, an invisible DIV with contents becomes visible. Unfortunately Opera's shortcuts caused that only the DIV becomes visible, its contents not.
MSIE passed that problem already. They had that famous bug of which was an invalid NULL pointer. It seems instead of fixing this single bug, they gave a good overhaul to the whole code, fixing all vulnerable places and getting MSIE to swallow any malformed tags. From what I've seen on Bugzilla, I haven't seen Mozilla to have any similar problems. Malformed tags cause misrendering, break pages etc but don't crash it. Or at least, didn't until now. It's just time for Mozilla people to do to Mozilla exactly what Microsoft people did to MSIE.
(about Opera, I'm not surprised. The shortcuts they've taken in DOM to make it "the fastest browser" are more than dangerous...)
Sure it would be useful in all the embedded devices etc. Right. But you want desktop apps.
Never more buffer underruns in non-burn-proof CD writer.
Some "l33t" just hacked you and started a wabbit which not only hogs your CPU 100% and slows your shell down to a crawl, but also corrupts things at random. Launch "realtime shell" and work at full speed, without waiting 40s for killall -9 to execute.
Write an app that's bit-banging data in some obscure protocol like 1-wire Dallas or something, and don't worry about it missing its time frame.
Switch to a console and kill -9 that frozen mplayer NOW.
OO.o is saving your work in the background, while you keep typing with no slowdown at all, saving takes a bit longer but your interactive process has realtime priority.
Surf the web. You open a webpage with 10.000 dancing monkeys. Suddenly each monkey takes a minute to move one animation frame. You click "close". Webpage closed NOW. Not in 5 minutes when the process gets to receive the "close" event and process it.
You're playing Doom. You don't smell smoke. You don't see fire. The system with broken CPU fan has just shut down saving the CPU, due to thermal alert which wouldn't otherwise get through because of the game hogging the CPU.
If Windows had built-in antivirus software, it would be exploited to take over the computer in no time. Monocultures kill safety, security in variety of options. A virus can circumvent 1-2 major antivirus tools, but not ALL of them, and because the market shares between different antivirus manufacturers are similar, the virus authors hardly ever bother.
Probably people would still use 3rd party antivirus software.
On the other hand, if Microsoft made the system SECURE, making the antivirus software redundant, I think nobody except the antivirus and virus authors would mind. But who are we trying to cheat?
Note if your work LAN is connected to the Internet, it IS a part of the Internet. But in the other hand, every boss could shove a paper "I agree for the management to monitor my activity on my work computer" to sign by each employee, if you don't sign, you don't comply to the site security rules (you might be sneaking work secrets to the competition over the net) so, good bye, you're fired. One more signature, one more freedom given up at your work place. One of thousands.
1) see the other poster. 2) Viruses spread on "p2p" rules, where each infected computer becomes a server spreading the virus further. Spyware gets installed from few "central" servers. 3) Virus is written purposedly for malicious purposes. Spyware tries to be mostly harmless for the user. (note "tries" and "mostly")
While camping in the wild, you dig up a small hole not too far away from the camp, then leave all your trash there, and when leaving you just cover the hole with soil.
Why can't they wrap it up in some plastic or something and designate a piece of space, say 500m away from the station and just let the junk float there freely on the same orbit till there's enough to make sense to attach some engines and pull it into atmosphere to burn?
"It used to be such a fine company! Nowadays they try really hard not to be evil, but they fail hopelessly. We wish them best of luck at their attempts, but for now, I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU, HP!"
Slashdot Mirror
Now, now... Pirating flowers, THAT'S original!
This case is too weak. The problem is Lexmark has completely no foot to stand on - they still could hit the "copyright violation" bell on copying their program (arguably uncopyrightable) - one can change the program AND re-create a new hash to match it, so it's not strictly the only possible "keycode".
But the DMCA claim was completely misplaced. DMCA protects PROTECTION of COPYRIGHTED work. That is you can't circumvent protection of DVD movies, e-books, games, any "work of art" that is copyrightable. This chips circumvents access to measurement of toner, printing with ink, using replacable cartridges. You can PATENT these things but you can't COPYRIGHT them. And DMCA applies only to copyright stuff.
Actually, this means you could try to circumvent DVD protection if the DVD disk didn't contain a movie but, say, set of algorithms or driver to some machine. With special intention not to copy/redistribute the driver, just to control the machine with 3rd party software and the driver...
CCDDAAAABBBB
The trick is since z-index of div5 is higher than z-index of div2, everything in div5 is above everything in div2 - in context of div1. And only after this has been sorted out, relations div3-div4 and div6-div7 are resolved, each within their own separate context of div2 and div5...
This used to be the case. Now... I don't know.
Yes - Opera handles THAT test flawlessly. Maybe Opera authors took w3schools text too literally - "(eg position:absolute;)!}" - w3.org says only "positioned" and that means "absolute", "fixed" and "relative" - only "static" is not. The case is simple - if all elements are "static", they never overlap, Z-index is completely redundant. You need to move the element in X and Y before moving it in Z starts to make sense.
Okay, Free Software community aside (we already know our answers and reasons) - why should a hardware manufacturer hire a team of experienced coders to write drivers for every platform out there? They can save quite a lot on just releasing a "bare bones" driver i.e. for Windows and providing only some Q/A and help (AND full documentation) and have Linux, BSD etc drivers written for free? :) They make their sales from hardware anyway, drivers are and always (or at least for a very long time) have been available for free and as long as new features in drivers are coming, they just boost card sales.
So... why pay when you can have the same thing for free?
And as to "opening up the design" - add some fast layer of indirection or something alike, just obscure the hardware a -tiny- bit and you're safe - competition won't steal your hardware design - hackers need the API hooks and specs, not internal plans.
The others need to keep a completely separate code base. As to RealVNC, the situation is more tricky - since they are the original authors, they can take certain freedoms...
GPL once applied, can't be removed. That's it. But you can apply it to a specific code branch and it doesn't work backwards.
Taking more extreme situation how it works.
You start an office suite, as your own "closeware", never releasing. Then around 1.0 you start selling the suite on some proprietary license - a database tool and a text editor. Some people love your database but find the editor unnecessary, so you split the project and keep selling 2.0 database and 2.0 editor. The editor sales go badly, you don't really have time to maintain it but there's a small community who still likes the editor and would like to maintain it if you decide to abandon it. So you release editor 3.0 as GPL. Now since at 1.0 the editor and the database were one and they still contain a lot of common code in the API etc, will the GPL automatically cover the code identical to GNU code parts in the database, and thus automatically cover your database app? Well, no. You decide it's a separate branch and it remains licensed as it is. The moment you "froze" editor 3.0 and GPL'd it, it's free. Database isn't. Now of course if the community improves the API in the editor to a degree where it far exceeds what you had and you'd like to backport the api to your database, you can't - the code is GPL'd and can't be included in a proprietary software. But at any time you can branch a "database viewer" from the database and GPL it while leaving the core app proprietary...
Now transferring to our case:
They maintain one source tree which is their own closeware. Then they "branch" it into three trees, differing only with, say, names and license files. "VNC-5.0-closeware", "VNC-5.0-proprietary" and "VNC-5.0-GNU". Apply proper licenses to the two (their own "closeware" allows that, after all they wrote it themselves) and release and mostly abandon the two newly-licensed branches while maintaining and working on the "closeware" trunk. Everyone can download VNC-GNU, buy VNC-proprietary and nobody from outside touches the trunk. When trunk reaches another milestone, another branch is created.
The caveat is that if anyone introduces some cool enchancement to the proprietary branch, they can buy/get it and include it in trunk, getting it both to GNU and proprietary. Now if someone modifies the GNU branch, they can only backport the feature to a GNU branch, not to the trunk, so if someone added something cool to 5.0-GNU, they can't add it to trunk - they can only freeze trunk at 6.0 creating proprietary and GNU and THEN add the feature to the GNU branch, leaving the proprietary somewhat crippled. Unless of course they rewrite the feature from scratch in the trunk, keeping just the idea - GNU license covers code, not design...
If the "touch keypad" takes up whole screen width and considerable amount of height (i.e. leaving only enough to display the number) then the keys will be way bigger than in most of modern phones. This thing is not tiny and placing 3 keys in a horizontal row on this screen will make them BIG.
And if you still can't get that right, you can use stylus. Or voice dialing. Or PC sync and phonebook entry.
Because nobody has written Linux drivers for 3G network yet? ;)
Technical specifications indicate a 65k color TFT display. The display really shines is when it comes to internet browsing
Today TOO early in the morning *or more in the night) alarm in my new phone woke me up. Okay, I can sleep longer but I need to reset the alarm to the right time. And damn, I can't. Damned display shines so brightly that it blinds me...
Finally keeping it far away from myself, getting eyes a bit adjusted to the brightness, tilting and turning it I managed to set the alarm...
Note to self: Pull contrast control WAY down.
The protocol specs are open source. As long as the others write their code from scratch, only conforming to the open specs, instead of just including GPL'd code, it's fine and they can license the code as they wish. Similar to proprietary ShareBear on top of GNUtella network, or MSIE supporting (poorly ;) open standard PNG. (with PNG the case is a bit different too, as it's LGPL, so they actually can link against the GNU library, they just have to provide hooks...)
Code sent. (I hope the email you've given here is valid).
I'm not opera-hostile, it's an okay browser. I'd like to see it getting better and better too... Sure I won't exchange my Mozilla to some proprietary stuff, but hey! It's not Microsoft! They can't be all bad!
Sorry, maybe that's your impression as a user. For me, as a webmaster, making cross-browser pages that flawlessly run in Opera is hell. The standard stuff is okay, but try anything beyond... Just recently all browsers took the style sheet "z-index" correctly, overlaying the row of buttons over an image map. Only Opera pushed them behind the image. Earlier I've been trying some pull-down menus. Move the mouse over the menu, an invisible DIV with contents becomes visible. Unfortunately Opera's shortcuts caused that only the DIV becomes visible, its contents not.
err, reason of which was invalid NULL pointer.
The bug was based on "<form action crash>" tag.
MSIE passed that problem already. They had that famous bug of which was an invalid NULL pointer. It seems instead of fixing this single bug, they gave a good overhaul to the whole code, fixing all vulnerable places and getting MSIE to swallow any malformed tags.
From what I've seen on Bugzilla, I haven't seen Mozilla to have any similar problems. Malformed tags cause misrendering, break pages etc but don't crash it. Or at least, didn't until now. It's just time for Mozilla people to do to Mozilla exactly what Microsoft people did to MSIE.
(about Opera, I'm not surprised. The shortcuts they've taken in DOM to make it "the fastest browser" are more than dangerous...)
Sure it would be useful in all the embedded devices etc. Right. But you want desktop apps.
Never more buffer underruns in non-burn-proof CD writer.
Some "l33t" just hacked you and started a wabbit which not only hogs your CPU 100% and slows your shell down to a crawl, but also corrupts things at random. Launch "realtime shell" and work at full speed, without waiting 40s for killall -9 to execute.
Write an app that's bit-banging data in some obscure protocol like 1-wire Dallas or something, and don't worry about it missing its time frame.
Switch to a console and kill -9 that frozen mplayer NOW.
OO.o is saving your work in the background, while you keep typing with no slowdown at all, saving takes a bit longer but your interactive process has realtime priority.
Surf the web. You open a webpage with 10.000 dancing monkeys. Suddenly each monkey takes a minute to move one animation frame. You click "close". Webpage closed NOW. Not in 5 minutes when the process gets to receive the "close" event and process it.
You're playing Doom. You don't smell smoke. You don't see fire. The system with broken CPU fan has just shut down saving the CPU, due to thermal alert which wouldn't otherwise get through because of the game hogging the CPU.
If Windows had built-in antivirus software, it would be exploited to take over the computer in no time. Monocultures kill safety, security in variety of options. A virus can circumvent 1-2 major antivirus tools, but not ALL of them, and because the market shares between different antivirus manufacturers are similar, the virus authors hardly ever bother.
Probably people would still use 3rd party antivirus software.
On the other hand, if Microsoft made the system SECURE, making the antivirus software redundant, I think nobody except the antivirus and virus authors would mind. But who are we trying to cheat?
Note if your work LAN is connected to the Internet, it IS a part of the Internet.
But in the other hand, every boss could shove a paper "I agree for the management to monitor my activity on my work computer" to sign by each employee, if you don't sign, you don't comply to the site security rules (you might be sneaking work secrets to the competition over the net) so, good bye, you're fired.
One more signature, one more freedom given up at your work place. One of thousands.
1) see the other poster.
2) Viruses spread on "p2p" rules, where each infected computer becomes a server spreading the virus further. Spyware gets installed from few "central" servers.
3) Virus is written purposedly for malicious purposes. Spyware tries to be mostly harmless for the user. (note "tries" and "mostly")
But in the other hand, IF YOU SEE NOTHING?!
:P
:P
What will the government say, if the landing WAS fake and we manage to prove it?
Yes, yes, there's enough proofs that it was real. Except all of them could've been fabricated...
There's one more extra option: The landing was real. The video was fake
Then they'll claim the whole Internet Telescope is a global spoof.
While camping in the wild, you dig up a small hole not too far away from the camp, then leave all your trash there, and when leaving you just cover the hole with soil.
Why can't they wrap it up in some plastic or something and designate a piece of space, say 500m away from the station and just let the junk float there freely on the same orbit till there's enough to make sense to attach some engines and pull it into atmosphere to burn?
Drempels - a really psychedelic "wallpaper" ('doze only, sorry).
Nope, not optical illusion. Just LSD effects fully animated.
Dislike but still hope.
"It used to be such a fine company! Nowadays they try really hard not to be evil, but they fail hopelessly. We wish them best of luck at their attempts, but for now, I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU, HP!"
Okay, the topic goes on slowly and the question has 99.9% chance of not passing as "ask slashdot" story anyway.
Okay, what decent Free (F, not f) MP3 player would you suggest for use with WinNT4.0 (at work)? Or should I just forget it and go with Winamp?
Mostly the lowest-moderated question for the Bush-Kerry debate passed. Most of the +5 were discarded and at least a few -1 to +1 got through.