Don't you remember... in StarTrek, one of the standard ways of getting out of a tricky situation would be to 'switch my phaser to overload', throw it round the corner and hide.
Five seconds later, loud bang, and no problem.. er, no wall... and possibly no building.... depending on the charge left in the battery at the time.
Could be someone working on the Microsoft MediaPlayer team knew
of or heard about a small startup company who were producing interesting music,
and suggested using some of their audio files as part of the MediaPlayer package.
The the team at the music company used whatever tools they had available at the time
to put together the audio files.
They may even have used the money they got from selling the audio files to pay for a legit licenced set of tools.
Although this may be embarassing for them, Microsoft will survive.
However, the music company would stand to loose a lot of business, possibly even their company
over this one. If the files did come from an external supplier, Microsoft won't be very happy with them.
As an added twist to the story... what if someone at the music company knows about, or is themselves involved with, the Radium group.
If Microsoft wanted to make an example of them, they might decide to report the music company to the authorities.
An investigation of the music company could end up leading to the arrest of someone in the Radium group.
You never know... it is possible that "DeepOne" decided to go legit and started up a music company
of their own, selling audio files to software companies.... and ended up selling some to Microsoft.
I was wondering about this....
Could someone use uptime figures to identify vulnerable machines ?
If a new security problem is published and a patch is issued, then if someone wanted to find vulnerable machines could they use the netcraft uptime stats to look for hosts that hadn't been restarted since the patch was released.
Is this why Amazon has different sites in each country ?
www.amazon.co.uk quotes prices in GBP
www.amazon.fr quotes prices in EUR
www.amazon.com quotes prices in USD, even though the system knows I live in the UK.
Did Amazon know this patent existed, or is it just the way they designed their business ?
The European Union is considering changes to the EU directive on software patenting which could have an impact on existing Open Source Software. Again the risk should be taken into account when considering Open Source solutions.
Perhaps the UK govenment might realise that allowing software patents in the EU is a bad idea, and vote against it....
How about it SourceForge... PatentForge ?
Could we create patent licences equivalent to the main OpenSpource licences.
The ApachePatentLicence would allow anyone to use the idea, the GNUPatentLicence would require any implementation to be covered by the GPL.
It would be very interesting if someone did post something that became the 'next big idea', and MS had to release a GPL version in order to stay in the running.
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I thought they were supposed to do that.
... in StarTrek, one of the standard ways of getting out of a tricky situation would be to 'switch my phaser to overload', throw it round the corner and hide.
Five seconds later, loud bang, and no problem .. er, no wall ... and possibly no building .... depending on the charge left in the battery at the time.
Don't you remember
Could be someone working on the Microsoft MediaPlayer team knew of or heard about a small startup company who were producing interesting music, and suggested using some of their audio files as part of the MediaPlayer package.
... what if someone at the music company knows about, or is themselves involved with, the Radium group.
... it is possible that "DeepOne" decided to go legit and started up a music company
of their own, selling audio files to software companies .... and ended up selling some to Microsoft.
The the team at the music company used whatever tools they had available at the time to put together the audio files.
They may even have used the money they got from selling the audio files to pay for a legit licenced set of tools.
Although this may be embarassing for them, Microsoft will survive.
However, the music company would stand to loose a lot of business, possibly even their company over this one. If the files did come from an external supplier, Microsoft won't be very happy with them.
As an added twist to the story
If Microsoft wanted to make an example of them, they might decide to report the music company to the authorities. An investigation of the music company could end up leading to the arrest of someone in the Radium group.
You never know
I was wondering about this ....
Could someone use uptime figures to identify vulnerable machines ?
If a new security problem is published and a patch is issued, then if someone wanted to find vulnerable machines could they use the netcraft uptime stats to look for hosts that hadn't been restarted since the patch was released.
Is this why Amazon has different sites in each country ?
www.amazon.co.uk quotes prices in GBP
www.amazon.fr quotes prices in EUR
www.amazon.com quotes prices in USD, even though the system knows I live in the UK.
Did Amazon know this patent existed, or is it just the way they designed their business ?
How about it SourceForge ... PatentForge ?
Could we create patent licences equivalent to the main OpenSpource licences.
The ApachePatentLicence would allow anyone to use the idea, the GNUPatentLicence would require any implementation to be covered by the GPL.
It would be very interesting if someone did post something that became the 'next big idea', and MS had to release a GPL version in order to stay in the running.