Heh, I maintain my sisters windows machine (among others but thats work related).. the deal is simple, I maintain it, period. (yeah, she will check with me when installing crap eh software) Guess that sometime soonish she is going to see an X/KDE desktop with OOo on it tho..
But all in all it has been workign quite well, 2 small adware incidents and no virus in some 5 years time..
Of course it helps that we happen to live in the same house, makes it a lot easier to ask..
Seems a bit of browsing and some ActiveX funnies can get you that indeed and no firewall is really gonna help against it either, you'll still need virus/worm/malware scanner/remover software to keep the PC clean.
Its funny how MS is now going to include such stuff.. seems their innovation has other priorities then making their products usable most of the time...
This all should not be a problem initially however for installing a windows machine beind a firewall and trying to run update.. tho I rather prefer making an update CD for such cases (and use it untill the next worm or whatever that requires no user actions to become active)
First of all, there were indeed IP entanglements and agreements regardign using eachothers code datign back from before IBM and MS fell out over OS/2. A better known one is the slightly changed and rebuilt win31 versions IBM bundled with later OS/2 versions (win-os2 in 2.x and later)
In the early 90s, there was quite a bit of doubt about the i386 when compared to the MIPS r3000 and early r4000 chips (and heh, having a few r4k based machiens from SGI, I can tell that that cpu runs circles around anything intel produced till the 2nd half of the 90s)
A workstation market was estaboilshing itself around (depending on where you come from) DECStations (mips r3k), SGI Indigo and Indy, and the lower priced SPARCStations.
GIven that at that time there was also some level of standarisation in MIPS firmware, it was not weird to think that low-end workstations might enter the mid-high range PC workstation market, and both IBM and MS were playing with that option.
NT has been available in non x86 version, OS/2 not really, but a PowerPC version of it has been seen outside IBM, and the reason for its existance was no different from what I recall.
Heh, there are a few operating systems for it tho, including Unix variations.. (heh, I still have the AT&T SYSTEM V ABI reference guide for it)
I happen to have the u860 board from IBM (Microchannel.....) and the machien to stick it into including all the support software and compilers (metaware.. bit limited but nice code)
It was the first piece of hardware I had at home that managed to generate 800x600x256 mandelbrot images at a rate high enough to make realtime animations (yeah, the code thta did that took quite some shortcuts tho not as 'bad' as Xaos, think more in the line of loop detection and making use of already calculated data from previous frames)
I'm still trying to figure out what the hell they were smoking when they made that CPU tho.. its way cool and yet its just too weird and impractical to make any real use of it for general purpose computing.
Very interestng piece of hardware tho, thanks for bringing back some nice memories;)
Pfft. put a fine on disturbing such events with cellphones, should teach people to turn them to silent I'd think.
I have been 'on call' duty for quite a bit, but that always involved me getting text messages and beign able to deal with them remotely, without even needign to make a call.
The answer for people like me to things like this is simple, yet another reason to not goto theatees and restaurants etc.
My cellphone is on silent by default unless I have a very good reason to change it.. There are better reasons for jamming them during thigns like final exams tho (gotta love full internet access through it;P
> So it won't be too hard to program the controls to sense the gas level in the tank and not let you take off until you have enough fuel to get to your destination.
Well.. technically true of course, but seeing how people already have a lot of trouble 'programming' their video to display something else then a blinking 0:00 (or 12:00 dependign on model) I doubt they are going to be able to put in a destination so that the car could calculate if it has enough fuel..
Well, besides prior art.. this patent seems to fail a more basic requirement.
The thing is that it is completely obvious and always has been once the concept of a window was there, that once it was technically feasable to make translucent and semi translucent window backgrounds, that it would be done.
Are they trying to get a patent on a specific way fo using that to dramatically enhance the way a user interacts with the computer? That might just be stuff for a valid patent, but at first glance, this isn't since it fails the non-obvious to a practiser of the field requirement.
They don't coem without macrovision by default, they just include the instruictions for disabling it alltogether.. it is you as the consumer who does it, and they tell you how. For as far as legitimate claims go, the DVD consortium might have a contract case..and a dmca case against resellers actively selling the stuff on such 'features'. At any rate, I've seen peopel scream dmca over more farfetched stuff.
> Could Linux companies counter sue from an anti-trust angle if Microsoft sued them over patents?
I don't know, but the norm seems to be that you can always sue, no matter how outlandish your claim;)
I guess that they might even have a case, but is it a usefull thing to do? I'd doubt it..
Seems that fighting that specific fight is gonna take 10 years of your life or company and is gonna make you end up with very little result and a lot of frustration.
As a defensive tactic it might be usefull tho, but I'd expect such a thing to end in enforced indiscriminate licencing once more, but now of any possible bit of technology they have or such.
Because those supposedly serve a specific purpose, connecting a video/dvd player to a projector.
For as far as the DVD consortium goes it should be in every player however as a means of copy prevention, and manufacterors of digital TVs are supposed to jump through hoops to get rid of it afterward. You really think they would if you could buy DVD players without macrovision ?:)
I'm not sayign the case would have merrit, I'm just saying that selling a DVD player without it is likely to get you a DCMA claim in the USA. Unless maybe you make it so expensive that its out of reach of the normal consumer anyway and you can sell it as a specialist home theatre player for progressive mode projectors only.
On another note, there can be a substantial difference between a DVD that is played on a player that simply refuses to pass through the macrovision signals, and the same dvd on the same player with macrovision and a good analog defeater. Not havign the distortion there to begin with and such...
While at their time, Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake were more or less ground breaking as a game also (tho Quake less so already, it was a bit more about technology there),
It is interesting that this is one from the Doom series, one that has so far been ruled by 'pseudo 3d' engines as opposed to Quake series real 3d engines.
At any rate, in the last half decade or so, ID's main market seems to have been resellign its engine to others who build cool content for it (Return to Castle WOlfenstein comes to mind), which finally resulted in onw of the 3 games so far that has managed to keep my attention for more then a few months, Enemy Territory (thanks again for giving away this superb game, Activision, Spashdamage and all others involved, and thanks to all the great mapmakers out there;)
The cool stuff is not Quake 3 itself but its engine, and in a way that has been true ever since Doom II. Somehow I have little doubt that this will prove true for Doom III as well.
On another note, does that mean we are gonna get a GPLed Q3 engine? that would rock.. seeign what people are doing with maps (and mods not that the ET sources are available) makes me wonder what peopel can do when they have the engine.. oh, and I want a native FreeBSD version;)
Hmm, IBM pushed quite a fee onto SUN for entering the workstation market if I'm not mistaken.. I wouldn't call that defensive.
They do however limit such things to direct competition, and only when they have a decent chance of getting what they want.
Somewhere in the 80s, they decided it was undoable to go after a whole bunch of patents regarding the isa bus and pc hardware, and after a few futile attempts turned onto something else.
At any rate, they seem to want money for real inventions, not for silly stuff. I dare you to build and sell an elecrto tunneling microscope without licensing their IP:P Use DMA in your whatever oddball piece of hardware and unless you piss them off I doubt they are gonna bother at all (if that one didn't expire by now anyway)
If you are interested in IBM and iP, they and Phillips probably have the best IP management and leverage policies around... I know the later of the two more or less lives from it (and yeah, they do invent things, CD anyone? They are also pretty strict with their IP usually, with soemtimes rather good effects.. it took expiration of their CD patents for CD copyprotection to appear on a larger scale for example and their copiers still undo virtually all of it since those 'protected' cds are just malformatted ones that need correction in their eyes;)
> Who's to say Microsoft can't sit on some patents and then pull the rabbit out of the hat when they feel the time is right.
They will try, they kinda suggested it also in memos that were leaked (?)
In the end.. IBM and Novell seem to have more to gain from a freely developed Linux then one that is bogged down my MS and their IP. I'm pretty sure that among them they have enough material to make MS think twice before actually trying it themselves (as opposed as through a proxy as they are doing right now)
> Well, we should put this in context though. Sure, the US only makes up 4-5% of the world, but the largest portion of the people in the world are thinking about how they are going to get their next meal, and don't even have any devices with any form of video playback, so they could care less about codecs.
While true, Europeans often do.. just so you know, theres quite a few more of those then there are people in the USA really.
> China's attempt at a next-generation DVD format, for instance, has a license agreement with On2 for VP6... They really don't have any need for it in China, since they can just tell On2 to get lost, but they do need it to sell the players in the USA.
When lookign at DVD hardware... I happen to have an Apex 1100wb DVD player.. there is also a virutally identical model in the USA, but theres some relevant differences also.
The European version turns out to play SVCD disks, and is sold overhere together with a sheet of paper explainign how to turn of regio locking, macrovision etc, and how to enable vcd playback...
I bet that doing that would be a violation of the DMCA in the USA eh?
At any rate, the simple consequence is that there is a market out there larger then the USA that for now doesn't care about those things. The USA is only soem 4% of the world, quite a bit more in economical power, but still completely and utterly dwarfed with regards to market size by both Europe and for example places like India and CHina.
To add a bit to this, how do peopel think they can get the source for things like libavcodec, mpeg2enc, lame and all those others that use patented mpeg technology among other things?
Why are most of those not included in binary distributions of Linux for example?
Somehow that is the way any computerized consumer product seems to go...
Can anyone explain me what the use is of this built in karaoke feature anyway? I'd hope it also comes with earphones for all participants? that would at least be a usefull feature;)
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, I maintain my sisters windows machine (among others but thats work related).. the deal is simple, I maintain it, period. (yeah, she will check with me when installing crap eh software) Guess that sometime soonish she is going to see an X/KDE desktop with OOo on it tho..
But all in all it has been workign quite well, 2 small adware incidents and no virus in some 5 years time..
Of course it helps that we happen to live in the same house, makes it a lot easier to ask..
When spending that amoubnt of money, buy yourself a decent DSL router with builtin firewall or something.
Seems a bit of browsing and some ActiveX funnies can get you that indeed and no firewall is really gonna help against it either, you'll still need virus/worm/malware scanner/remover software to keep the PC clean.
Its funny how MS is now going to include such stuff.. seems their innovation has other priorities then making their products usable most of the time...
This all should not be a problem initially however for installing a windows machine beind a firewall and trying to run update.. tho I rather prefer making an update CD for such cases (and use it untill the next worm or whatever that requires no user actions to become active)
First of all, there were indeed IP entanglements and agreements regardign using eachothers code datign back from before IBM and MS fell out over OS/2. A better known one is the slightly changed and rebuilt win31 versions IBM bundled with later OS/2 versions (win-os2 in 2.x and later)
In the early 90s, there was quite a bit of doubt about the i386 when compared to the MIPS r3000 and early r4000 chips (and heh, having a few r4k based machiens from SGI, I can tell that that cpu runs circles around anything intel produced till the 2nd half of the 90s)
A workstation market was estaboilshing itself around (depending on where you come from) DECStations (mips r3k), SGI Indigo and Indy, and the lower priced SPARCStations.
GIven that at that time there was also some level of standarisation in MIPS firmware, it was not weird to think that low-end workstations might enter the mid-high range PC workstation market, and both IBM and MS were playing with that option.
NT has been available in non x86 version, OS/2 not really, but a PowerPC version of it has been seen outside IBM, and the reason for its existance was no different from what I recall.
Heh, there are a few operating systems for it tho, including Unix variations.. (heh, I still have the AT&T SYSTEM V ABI reference guide for it)
;)
I happen to have the u860 board from IBM (Microchannel.....) and the machien to stick it into including all the support software and compilers (metaware.. bit limited but nice code)
It was the first piece of hardware I had at home that managed to generate 800x600x256 mandelbrot images at a rate high enough to make realtime animations (yeah, the code thta did that took quite some shortcuts tho not as 'bad' as Xaos, think more in the line of loop detection and making use of already calculated data from previous frames)
I'm still trying to figure out what the hell they were smoking when they made that CPU tho.. its way cool and yet its just too weird and impractical to make any real use of it for general purpose computing.
Very interestng piece of hardware tho, thanks for bringing back some nice memories
Hmm.. comparign pc servers to mainframes has been a amrketign trend ever since the 386 is around...
> Why do cell phone companies even sell cell phones with audible ringers?
Hmm... judging from whats happenign in your average public place.. because peopel want to 'showoff' with their ringtones?
(mumbles something about his sister walking around with a portable sobnd machine that seems to be a phone also)
Pfft. put a fine on disturbing such events with cellphones, should teach people to turn them to silent I'd think.
I have been 'on call' duty for quite a bit, but that always involved me getting text messages and beign able to deal with them remotely, without even needign to make a call.
The answer for people like me to things like this is simple, yet another reason to not goto theatees and restaurants etc.
My cellphone is on silent by default unless I have a very good reason to change it.. There are better reasons for jamming them during thigns like final exams tho (gotta love full internet access through it ;P
> So it won't be too hard to program the controls to sense the gas level in the tank and not let you take off until you have enough fuel to get to your destination.
Well.. technically true of course, but seeing how people already have a lot of trouble 'programming' their video to display something else then a blinking 0:00 (or 12:00 dependign on model) I doubt they are going to be able to put in a destination so that the car could calculate if it has enough fuel..
You usually cannot afford such things when you just throw away your money...
Yep, thats pretty neat indeed.
And eh.. this is slashdot.. since when is it required to read articles? (besides the fact that the server its on is usually slashdotted anyway)
Well, besides prior art.. this patent seems to fail a more basic requirement.
The thing is that it is completely obvious and always has been once the concept of a window was there, that once it was technically feasable to make translucent and semi translucent window backgrounds, that it would be done.
Are they trying to get a patent on a specific way fo using that to dramatically enhance the way a user interacts with the computer? That might just be stuff for a valid patent, but at first glance, this isn't since it fails the non-obvious to a practiser of the field requirement.
Peopel managed to get their computers infected withotu havign net access.. so nogo there.
I see 2 possible solutions..
1 become deaf
2 fix Microsoft
failing both means you'll have to hear it.
They don't coem without macrovision by default, they just include the instruictions for disabling it alltogether.. it is you as the consumer who does it, and they tell you how. For as far as legitimate claims go, the DVD consortium might have a contract case..and a dmca case against resellers actively selling the stuff on such 'features'. At any rate, I've seen peopel scream dmca over more farfetched stuff.
> Could Linux companies counter sue from an anti-trust angle if Microsoft sued them over patents?
;)
I don't know, but the norm seems to be that you can always sue, no matter how outlandish your claim
I guess that they might even have a case, but is it a usefull thing to do? I'd doubt it..
Seems that fighting that specific fight is gonna take 10 years of your life or company and is gonna make you end up with very little result and a lot of frustration.
As a defensive tactic it might be usefull tho, but I'd expect such a thing to end in enforced indiscriminate licencing once more, but now of any possible bit of technology they have or such.
Because those supposedly serve a specific purpose, connecting a video/dvd player to a projector.
:)
For as far as the DVD consortium goes it should be in every player however as a means of copy prevention, and manufacterors of digital TVs are supposed to jump through hoops to get rid of it afterward. You really think they would if you could buy DVD players without macrovision ?
I'm not sayign the case would have merrit, I'm just saying that selling a DVD player without it is likely to get you a DCMA claim in the USA.
Unless maybe you make it so expensive that its out of reach of the normal consumer anyway and you can sell it as a specialist home theatre player for progressive mode projectors only.
On another note, there can be a substantial difference between a DVD that is played on a player that simply refuses to pass through the macrovision signals, and the same dvd on the same player with macrovision and a good analog defeater. Not havign the distortion there to begin with and such...
Disablign amcrovision is disabling a technical copy protectiobn measure of a digital medium, I'd say that is DMCA material ;P
The quality will be the engine, not the game.
;)
;)
While at their time, Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake were more or less ground breaking as a game also (tho Quake less so already, it was a bit more about technology there),
It is interesting that this is one from the Doom series, one that has so far been ruled by 'pseudo 3d' engines as opposed to Quake series real 3d engines.
At any rate, in the last half decade or so, ID's main market seems to have been resellign its engine to others who build cool content for it (Return to Castle WOlfenstein comes to mind), which finally resulted in onw of the 3 games so far that has managed to keep my attention for more then a few months, Enemy Territory (thanks again for giving away this superb game, Activision, Spashdamage and all others involved, and thanks to all the great mapmakers out there
The cool stuff is not Quake 3 itself but its engine, and in a way that has been true ever since Doom II. Somehow I have little doubt that this will prove true for Doom III as well.
On another note, does that mean we are gonna get a GPLed Q3 engine? that would rock.. seeign what people are doing with maps (and mods not that the ET sources are available) makes me wonder what peopel can do when they have the engine.. oh, and I want a native FreeBSD version
Hmm, IBM pushed quite a fee onto SUN for entering the workstation market if I'm not mistaken.. I wouldn't call that defensive.
:P Use DMA in your whatever oddball piece of hardware and unless you piss them off I doubt they are gonna bother at all (if that one didn't expire by now anyway)
;)
They do however limit such things to direct competition, and only when they have a decent chance of getting what they want.
Somewhere in the 80s, they decided it was undoable to go after a whole bunch of patents regarding the isa bus and pc hardware, and after a few futile attempts turned onto something else.
At any rate, they seem to want money for real inventions, not for silly stuff. I dare you to build and sell an elecrto tunneling microscope without licensing their IP
If you are interested in IBM and iP, they and Phillips probably have the best IP management and leverage policies around... I know the later of the two more or less lives from it (and yeah, they do invent things, CD anyone? They are also pretty strict with their IP usually, with soemtimes rather good effects.. it took expiration of their CD patents for CD copyprotection to appear on a larger scale for example and their copiers still undo virtually all of it since those 'protected' cds are just malformatted ones that need correction in their eyes
> Who's to say Microsoft can't sit on some patents and then pull the rabbit out of the hat when they feel the time is right.
They will try, they kinda suggested it also in memos that were leaked (?)
In the end.. IBM and Novell seem to have more to gain from a freely developed Linux then one that is bogged down my MS and their IP. I'm pretty sure that among them they have enough material to make MS think twice before actually trying it themselves (as opposed as through a proxy as they are doing right now)
> Well, we should put this in context though. Sure, the US only makes up 4-5% of the world, but the largest portion of the people in the world are thinking about how they are going to get their next meal, and don't even have any devices with any form of video playback, so they could care less about codecs.
While true, Europeans often do.. just so you know, theres quite a few more of those then there are people in the USA really.
> China's attempt at a next-generation DVD format, for instance, has a license agreement with On2 for VP6... They really don't have any need for it in China, since they can just tell On2 to get lost, but they do need it to sell the players in the USA.
When lookign at DVD hardware... I happen to have an Apex 1100wb DVD player.. there is also a virutally identical model in the USA, but theres some relevant differences also.
The European version turns out to play SVCD disks, and is sold overhere together with a sheet of paper explainign how to turn of regio locking, macrovision etc, and how to enable vcd playback...
I bet that doing that would be a violation of the DMCA in the USA eh?
At any rate, the simple consequence is that there is a market out there larger then the USA that for now doesn't care about those things. The USA is only soem 4% of the world, quite a bit more in economical power, but still completely and utterly dwarfed with regards to market size by both Europe and for example places like India and CHina.
To add a bit to this, how do peopel think they can get the source for things like libavcodec, mpeg2enc, lame and all those others that use patented mpeg technology among other things?
Why are most of those not included in binary distributions of Linux for example?
Somehow that is the way any computerized consumer product seems to go...
;)
Can anyone explain me what the use is of this built in karaoke feature anyway? I'd hope it also comes with earphones for all participants? that would at least be a usefull feature