Inasmuch as that can be separated from any "IP" hooks, that's encouraging.
You still have the albatross of supporting "special effects" around your neck, though. Are there a few very popular special effects which you could emulate directly?
Not long (year or two) after they came out, a local newspaper (The Sunday Times) ran a radio ad (!) touting the quality of their transcription, in which a dude tries to sell his Commodore and gets it listed as a commode (which his friend informs him is "a kind of a toilet"), and within weeks I heard a send-up of it on a different radio station in which the advertiser is trying to sell his toilet and gets it mis-labelled as a Commodore (which his friend informs him is "a kind of a car").
They also have a reputation for being easy to steal, in case you hadn't guessed from my first par. (-:
Sorry, I was so busy responding to the first aprt of your post that the second didn't sink in.
MS has not to my knowledge abused it's patent portfolio against pretty much anyone
OK, so they've been a little indirect here, paying to keep someone afloat so that the someone can abuse their (purported) "IP" portfolio against Linux rather than Microsoft suing Linux people themselves, but I think the point is made.
Another tangential approach is suing Lindows for having a name like those glass panels you find built into many peoples' walls.
They've also been a bit unkind to the SaMBa people from time to time, although Tridge and crew are too gentlemanly to mention it much. No doubt if you had the time you could turn up dozens of other examples. There's no question but that they've been fairly firm with their "IP" against other competitors, so why not us?
Contrast this with Novell, IBM or SGI, who are giving away and/or freely licencing assorted rights for FOSS projects hand over fist.
...you might also have W32.Icky virus. To remove it, you will need to clean off (delete) some of the files it leaves around, like C:\WINNT\KERNEL32.EXE and C:\WINNT\RUNDLL32.EXE (the location may vary depending upon your version of MS-Windows and who installed it).
I'm reading between the lines here, and possibly reading more than can safely be interpolated, but what you appear to be explaining is that the.NET spec itself is not portable, so that every.NET implementation ever made will require some degree of MS-Windows emulation in order to be functional.
One reason that I'm fairly confident in this between-the-lines interpretation is because it follows the pattern of many things which Microsoft has consistently done since they bought QDOS and renamed it MS-DOS.
That's bad enough on its face, but what you also appear to be saying here...
Most GUI special effects are achieved in this way, and most third-party libraries that you can download from the network will call into the Win32 layer, skipping the Windows.Forms API.
...is that many developers are going beyond even that level of tainting to call MS-Windows stuff directly, outside the.NET spec, and that in order to make things work you're following them there.
The tendency I'm seeing across the board here is towards.NET as an MS-Windows only platform, which comes as no surprise given its originator. I mis-typed their name as "Mirosoft" but maybe my fingers knew what they were doing. Mire-O-Soft is about right. It's not as if Microsoft are inexperienced in the patents/copyrights/trademarks game, but such a direct coding commitment really does open any.NET-ish developer to a whole new easy-to-access range of control/abuse from Mire-O-Soft.
This is why religion and politics need to be kept separate. You can't have the same people who control a situation competing in it.
Is there any substantial reason why I shouldn't rate this grand and noble ambition "-1, Doomed to fail" and move along to something less entangled?
Lots of browsers (Opera, Konqueror, Mozilla-and-derivatives) allow you to lie about your browser ID. Many people do, so stuff like internet banking works flawlessly for them where if they confessed to not using Exploder it would tll them to take a hike, unsupported browser, yadda yadda. While many browsers allow you to configure this per-site (Konqueror, for example), many of the people who bother to white-lie about their browser at all just set it globally. Which of course completely buggers up the statistics.
What we need is a RealUserAgent HTTP header, which lists the browser's real name first, then the browsers it emulates (with version number ranges), which would allow people coding for specific versions to fairly easily decide how to accomodate a new one. I'd also like to see the Accept headers expanded to include stuff like Flash and Java, along with some way of indicating that you can't or won't add a particular capability (or any capability) - or in other words, "no, I don't want to be redirected to a Macromedia download once for every Flash object on the page".
However, given that my two desktop machines are both nForce2 based, I take your point. I added Radeon 9200 video cards, which has helped both reliability and performance considerably, but Apple only makes hardware that dodgy for their portable audio players.
The other point is, the screen on the 1547 is a big letdown. 1024x768 is OK for wordprocessing but for anything seriously graphical it just sucks. Also, they keyboard seems to be wearing out fast and nobody knows anything about the (apparently, I've not dismembered the thing and looked) WinBond card-reader chip in it. TANSTAAFL, I guess.
On the bright side I get well over 3 hours out of a charge and it paid for itself (AUD$1860 inc GST, 2.4GHz 512MB 40GB) in less than two months in work I did on it when otherwise I would have been idle (on transport, waiting for appointments and similar, during a power blackout, etc).
Microsoft would own some marketing rights, that's all. Unix is owned by The Open Group. System V and UnixWare (at least) and the vast majority of corresponding copyrights and patents (except those held by OG) are owned by Novell. Oh, and Microsoft would also own a truckload of incoming lawsuits. How.. attractive.
The court's findings on details like that are trumped by Novell's instructions to The SCO Group to waive their claims against IBM. Any SCO wailing-and-gesticulation after that is kind of pointless, at least in legal terms.
IBM is free to donate whatever it pleases out of Dynix and AIX to whomever it pleases, as long as that code was not in the original System V codebase.
But... the original System V code is based on code which in the earlier USL-vs-BSD case was in the judge's opinion Public Domain, so even if code was copied from System V, there is still an obligation on SCO to prove that any copied bit wasn't in the Public Domain anyway, and that they didn't release it themselves.
The SCO Group really are seriously up the creek in a barbed-wire nowey sans paddle. And the counterclaims haven't been addressed yet.
In... let me see... 1982? I dealt with a PDP-11/23 running RSX-11-M-PLUS which autostarted backups and things when you inserted media (e.g. 1600BPI magtape into a Cypher F880(?) tape drive). We also had monstrous great two megabyte removable hard disks the size of a sombrero, and the system would auto-start things when the correct one of those was inserted. It had been doing these things for many years before I arrived on the scene.
A local Fight'o'net BBS operator I know, back in the same era, had a process auto-start when you inserted a tape cartridge (snail-mailed from the 'states) full of downloadables in your '286.
So they're just being SCOlets, pump-n-dump barratrous assholes. It seems to be trendy these days.
...who must run MS-Word full screen as Administrator (and no screen-saver because even a blank one slows it down) in order to print out faxes.
I recently explained the "headless" command-line switch of OpenOffice to their supplier, very slowly and using lots of short words. They will be switching within a quarter.
I also explained about using a faux print spooler (Samba -> pipe containing OOo run headless) but I think it went over their heads. You can apparently even do that with SaMBa on MS-Windows now.
MS-Office only looks well-integrated, under the sheets it's a bit of a botch. You don't need MS-Office, what you do need is a compeent office suite of some kind.
OpenOffice does that - and throws in free PDF writing; real, parseable XML files; the ability to load damaged MSW dox safely; and a number of other handy, production-loss-averting features.
And KOffice is fast catching up (plus it's a reasonable MS-Publisher erplacement now too).
Score 0 again. I think a post should get a point for being replied to by one or more non-ACs. That would both reward attractive posts and deter people from pointlessly flaming (as the response would +1 the message).
The laws above prevent people from doing harm to themselves or others, not to force people to choose or think about their best interests. Correct me if I've misinterpreted your intention here.
You have. Those laws are made against people who take the easiest way out, at least in their view. Taking the easiest way out to a nicotine addict means tarring their own lungs, plus all of the people and props within an amazing distance of ground zero. It's not really the easiest way out, and it's certainly not the most productive.
One law which I didn't cover but which is relevant from a different angle is "flash" ads in movies, one frame which gets past our filters and straight into our brain.
The easiest way out for an installer is "Yes to all". But that is not the best way, for society as a whole whether or not you argue in favour of the results for the individual user (I don't).
Until the choice is as easy and relevant to consumers as window shopping, you'll only be putting the average Joe in a position he neither asks nor cares for.
Exactly parallel to the smoker. Or emission controls, for that matter.
the "free" condition seems somewhat ad hoc, as does the inclusion of bundled software.
True, but necessary. There is a difference between giving a competitor a fair shot, and being forced to pay the competitor for including their fair shot.
As a working example, if they chose to include Opera, the fact that it may time out after a reasonable trial period is Opera's point to ponder, not Microsoft's. If I was working for Opera, I'd extend that trial period until the user was well and truly familiar with the browser, preferring an exploded market to up-front profits. I'd also have the browser hit a page on my own site which was a useful portal page which also touted the advantages of standards as well as Opera's performance points, in the hope of weaning people more permanently away from non-standard browsers, in particular Explorer.
Click-throughs are one thing - unbundling the OS and forcing customers to look elsewhere is another in my books.
Think of it as a fat click-through.
Thanks but I've had more than one account modded to the crapper. I'm more interested in one-on-one discourse anyway, and AC is usually good enough for that.
Odd. I'm a loud-mouthed and offensive bugger at the best of times, and that's never happened to me. What did you do to earn your slagging-down?
You think that if they were forced to make a choice, they'd choose someone apart from Microsoft. You would - you're technically literate. The technically illiterate general population just wants it to be easy as possible.
Yes, this is why we have laws banning drugs (including, to some extent, alcohol), smoking in some places, and stealing (some people view stealing as the easist approach to asset base enhancement).
Being forced to make a choice does not mean that every J Random Consumer is going to make a choice which I see as the best one, but it means that (almost) every one of that crowd are now going to be aware that there is a choice, and a certain portion of those will be asking "Why? What might be better about the other products?", and a certain overlapping portion are going to more often choose an alternative.
If I'd made a call along those lines, I would require them to offer to install copies of the three next most popular free non-Microsoft browsers (email clients, office suites, whatever gets bundled), and require Microsoft to pay the providers of those browsers reasonable rates for their time to test and to sign off on theose browsers' functionality when installed standalone or alongside others before Microsoft was allowed to ship, and prescribe immediate, escalating and stiff penalties if any OS or related application update from Microsoft broke one of the competing applications.
Microsoft are making some of their own hassles anyway. Compaq machines arrive without MS-Windows actually installed, and the user has to supply enough details for a wizardy thing to run through and do the actual installation (from hard disk) before they can use it. I gather that this is done in an attempt to somehow validate their click-through licencing. If they can make that much trouble in their search for ways to inflict their EULAs on people, they can also do it to improve the fairness of their dealings with the public.
If you look at the fairness hoops lots of gummint bodies have to jump through to get things done, Microsoft would be getting off fairly lightly with what has already been prescribed even if they hadn't unfairly abused their monopoly position and ben caught and convicted doing so.
And please don't post as an AC. You made (and I think lost) a reasonable point, you should take credit for it and also give it the extra mod point it needs to become visible to the average browser.
...especially since the vast majority of it didn't go into the mainstream kernel anyway, and if every line of it had, that's what? One sixty-thousandth by weight, or 0.0016%.
This is also disregarding TSG's habit of using one word, or one more or less inevitable process, as evidence of copying everywhere.
The other problem they have is that we don't want to use their code, don't need to use their code, we have a significant aversion to anything involving TSG, so even if it's not theirs (true in every case so far examined) you can expect it to all be replaced within days.
D'ohl wants to bottle and sell Linux the same way others bottle and sell water. What he hasn't figured out is that people buy the bottled water because they perceive it as being better than water falling out of the sky or pumped out of the ground for fifty cents a kilolitre. D'ohl forgot to add any value to his bottling process, so now he wants to fix that by forcing the world to buy either his bottles or someone else's.
So did you use the Anti-Slash Groklaw post database for this karma whoring attempt or what?
If it offends you, I can post it as AC next time. It would be kind of appropriate, given that the original was anonymous too.
I didn't do that today because so many whining poor-spirited losers hide behind nonentity and I don't want to encourage any whining, losers or hit-and-run posts.
I don't care about my karma, it's not been under 48 points in several years. I would say "behold, the corrosive effect of a karma cap" except that if the cap wasn't there I'd be uncaring because I'd have several thousand points up and it would again be next to meaningless (except in "karma racing" events). Even if my karma sucked, I wouldn't care unless is made my posts invisible. Perhaps the slashlords might want to take that to heart and rejigger the kerma system so that it remains meaningful?
These files and line numbers given are simply the files and lines which implement RCU, NUMA and JFS in Linux. All of them.
Although this APPEARS to be specific. It is of course not any more specific than what SCO already has claimed; I.e. that "RCU, NUMA and JFS are infringing".
SCO has yet to show how these infringe on SysV copyrights.
However, they have thereby limited their current claims to these sections. And five beeeellion dollars.
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Inasmuch as that can be separated from any "IP" hooks, that's encouraging.
You still have the albatross of supporting "special effects" around your neck, though. Are there a few very popular special effects which you could emulate directly?
For the furriners, the original Holden Commodore design was originally an Opel (also Vauxhall in the UK and Chevrolet in RSA).
Not long (year or two) after they came out, a local newspaper (The Sunday Times) ran a radio ad (!) touting the quality of their transcription, in which a dude tries to sell his Commodore and gets it listed as a commode (which his friend informs him is "a kind of a toilet"), and within weeks I heard a send-up of it on a different radio station in which the advertiser is trying to sell his toilet and gets it mis-labelled as a Commodore (which his friend informs him is "a kind of a car").
They also have a reputation for being easy to steal, in case you hadn't guessed from my first par. (-:
OK, so they've been a little indirect here, paying to keep someone afloat so that the someone can abuse their (purported) "IP" portfolio against Linux rather than Microsoft suing Linux people themselves, but I think the point is made.
Another tangential approach is suing Lindows for having a name like those glass panels you find built into many peoples' walls.
They've also been a bit unkind to the SaMBa people from time to time, although Tridge and crew are too gentlemanly to mention it much. No doubt if you had the time you could turn up dozens of other examples. There's no question but that they've been fairly firm with their "IP" against other competitors, so why not us?
Contrast this with Novell, IBM or SGI, who are giving away and/or freely licencing assorted rights for FOSS projects hand over fist.
...of R and ND. As has frequently been demonstrated.
Do you have enough resources to argue the point with someone carrying tens of beeeeellions of dollars around in their corporate pocket?
...you might also have W32.Icky virus. To remove it, you will need to clean off (delete) some of the files it leaves around, like C:\WINNT\KERNEL32.EXE and C:\WINNT\RUNDLL32.EXE (the location may vary depending upon your version of MS-Windows and who installed it).
One reason that I'm fairly confident in this between-the-lines interpretation is because it follows the pattern of many things which Microsoft has consistently done since they bought QDOS and renamed it MS-DOS.
That's bad enough on its face, but what you also appear to be saying here...
...is that many developers are going beyond even that level of tainting to call MS-Windows stuff directly, outside the .NET spec, and that in order to make things work you're following them there.
.NET as an MS-Windows only platform, which comes as no surprise given its originator. I mis-typed their name as "Mirosoft" but maybe my fingers knew what they were doing. Mire-O-Soft is about right. It's not as if Microsoft are inexperienced in the patents/copyrights/trademarks game, but such a direct coding commitment really does open any .NET-ish developer to a whole new easy-to-access range of control/abuse from Mire-O-Soft.
The tendency I'm seeing across the board here is towards
This is why religion and politics need to be kept separate. You can't have the same people who control a situation competing in it.
Is there any substantial reason why I shouldn't rate this grand and noble ambition "-1, Doomed to fail" and move along to something less entangled?
Lots of browsers (Opera, Konqueror, Mozilla-and-derivatives) allow you to lie about your browser ID. Many people do, so stuff like internet banking works flawlessly for them where if they confessed to not using Exploder it would tll them to take a hike, unsupported browser, yadda yadda. While many browsers allow you to configure this per-site (Konqueror, for example), many of the people who bother to white-lie about their browser at all just set it globally. Which of course completely buggers up the statistics.
What we need is a RealUserAgent HTTP header, which lists the browser's real name first, then the browsers it emulates (with version number ranges), which would allow people coding for specific versions to fairly easily decide how to accomodate a new one. I'd also like to see the Accept headers expanded to include stuff like Flash and Java, along with some way of indicating that you can't or won't add a particular capability (or any capability) - or in other words, "no, I don't want to be redirected to a Macromedia download once for every Flash object on the page".
It Just Works(tm).
However, given that my two desktop machines are both nForce2 based, I take your point. I added Radeon 9200 video cards, which has helped both reliability and performance considerably, but Apple only makes hardware that dodgy for their portable audio players.
The other point is, the screen on the 1547 is a big letdown. 1024x768 is OK for wordprocessing but for anything seriously graphical it just sucks. Also, they keyboard seems to be wearing out fast and nobody knows anything about the (apparently, I've not dismembered the thing and looked) WinBond card-reader chip in it. TANSTAAFL, I guess.
On the bright side I get well over 3 hours out of a charge and it paid for itself (AUD$1860 inc GST, 2.4GHz 512MB 40GB) in less than two months in work I did on it when otherwise I would have been idle (on transport, waiting for appointments and similar, during a power blackout, etc).
accesory
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Microsoft would own some marketing rights, that's all. Unix is owned by The Open Group. System V and UnixWare (at least) and the vast majority of corresponding copyrights and patents (except those held by OG) are owned by Novell. Oh, and Microsoft would also own a truckload of incoming lawsuits. How.. attractive.
The court's findings on details like that are trumped by Novell's instructions to The SCO Group to waive their claims against IBM. Any SCO wailing-and-gesticulation after that is kind of pointless, at least in legal terms.
IBM is free to donate whatever it pleases out of Dynix and AIX to whomever it pleases, as long as that code was not in the original System V codebase.
But... the original System V code is based on code which in the earlier USL-vs-BSD case was in the judge's opinion Public Domain, so even if code was copied from System V, there is still an obligation on SCO to prove that any copied bit wasn't in the Public Domain anyway, and that they didn't release it themselves.
The SCO Group really are seriously up the creek in a barbed-wire nowey sans paddle. And the counterclaims haven't been addressed yet.
In... let me see... 1982? I dealt with a PDP-11/23 running RSX-11-M-PLUS which autostarted backups and things when you inserted media (e.g. 1600BPI magtape into a Cypher F880(?) tape drive). We also had monstrous great two megabyte removable hard disks the size of a sombrero, and the system would auto-start things when the correct one of those was inserted. It had been doing these things for many years before I arrived on the scene.
A local Fight'o'net BBS operator I know, back in the same era, had a process auto-start when you inserted a tape cartridge (snail-mailed from the 'states) full of downloadables in your '286.
So they're just being SCOlets, pump-n-dump barratrous assholes. It seems to be trendy these days.
...who must run MS-Word full screen as Administrator (and no screen-saver because even a blank one slows it down) in order to print out faxes.
I recently explained the "headless" command-line switch of OpenOffice to their supplier, very slowly and using lots of short words. They will be switching within a quarter.
I also explained about using a faux print spooler (Samba -> pipe containing OOo run headless) but I think it went over their heads. You can apparently even do that with SaMBa on MS-Windows now.
Yeah, their free fonts were nice. Until they pulled them for competitive reasons. (-:
Good choice of handle for a spite-magnet. (-:
Or at least cheap shot... (-:
MS-Office only looks well-integrated, under the sheets it's a bit of a botch. You don't need MS-Office, what you do need is a compeent office suite of some kind.
OpenOffice does that - and throws in free PDF writing; real, parseable XML files; the ability to load damaged MSW dox safely; and a number of other handy, production-loss-averting features.
And KOffice is fast catching up (plus it's a reasonable MS-Publisher erplacement now too).
Run rails around the equator, anchor Deimos to a train, and combine space access with an extremely regular high-speed surface transport. (-:
You have. Those laws are made against people who take the easiest way out, at least in their view. Taking the easiest way out to a nicotine addict means tarring their own lungs, plus all of the people and props within an amazing distance of ground zero. It's not really the easiest way out, and it's certainly not the most productive.
One law which I didn't cover but which is relevant from a different angle is "flash" ads in movies, one frame which gets past our filters and straight into our brain.
The easiest way out for an installer is "Yes to all". But that is not the best way, for society as a whole whether or not you argue in favour of the results for the individual user (I don't).
Exactly parallel to the smoker. Or emission controls, for that matter.
True, but necessary. There is a difference between giving a competitor a fair shot, and being forced to pay the competitor for including their fair shot.
As a working example, if they chose to include Opera, the fact that it may time out after a reasonable trial period is Opera's point to ponder, not Microsoft's. If I was working for Opera, I'd extend that trial period until the user was well and truly familiar with the browser, preferring an exploded market to up-front profits. I'd also have the browser hit a page on my own site which was a useful portal page which also touted the advantages of standards as well as Opera's performance points, in the hope of weaning people more permanently away from non-standard browsers, in particular Explorer.
Think of it as a fat click-through.
Odd. I'm a loud-mouthed and offensive bugger at the best of times, and that's never happened to me. What did you do to earn your slagging-down?
Yes, this is why we have laws banning drugs (including, to some extent, alcohol), smoking in some places, and stealing (some people view stealing as the easist approach to asset base enhancement).
Being forced to make a choice does not mean that every J Random Consumer is going to make a choice which I see as the best one, but it means that (almost) every one of that crowd are now going to be aware that there is a choice, and a certain portion of those will be asking "Why? What might be better about the other products?", and a certain overlapping portion are going to more often choose an alternative.
If I'd made a call along those lines, I would require them to offer to install copies of the three next most popular free non-Microsoft browsers (email clients, office suites, whatever gets bundled), and require Microsoft to pay the providers of those browsers reasonable rates for their time to test and to sign off on theose browsers' functionality when installed standalone or alongside others before Microsoft was allowed to ship, and prescribe immediate, escalating and stiff penalties if any OS or related application update from Microsoft broke one of the competing applications.
Microsoft are making some of their own hassles anyway. Compaq machines arrive without MS-Windows actually installed, and the user has to supply enough details for a wizardy thing to run through and do the actual installation (from hard disk) before they can use it. I gather that this is done in an attempt to somehow validate their click-through licencing. If they can make that much trouble in their search for ways to inflict their EULAs on people, they can also do it to improve the fairness of their dealings with the public.
If you look at the fairness hoops lots of gummint bodies have to jump through to get things done, Microsoft would be getting off fairly lightly with what has already been prescribed even if they hadn't unfairly abused their monopoly position and ben caught and convicted doing so.
And please don't post as an AC. You made (and I think lost) a reasonable point, you should take credit for it and also give it the extra mod point it needs to become visible to the average browser.
...especially since the vast majority of it didn't go into the mainstream kernel anyway, and if every line of it had, that's what? One sixty-thousandth by weight, or 0.0016%.
This is also disregarding TSG's habit of using one word, or one more or less inevitable process, as evidence of copying everywhere.
The other problem they have is that we don't want to use their code, don't need to use their code, we have a significant aversion to anything involving TSG, so even if it's not theirs (true in every case so far examined) you can expect it to all be replaced within days.
I've seen video footage of you lot kicking aside the ice floes so you can go for a dip. Give me a nice, dry, toasty 300K day - any day. (-:
D'ohl wants to bottle and sell Linux the same way others bottle and sell water. What he hasn't figured out is that people buy the bottled water because they perceive it as being better than water falling out of the sky or pumped out of the ground for fifty cents a kilolitre. D'ohl forgot to add any value to his bottling process, so now he wants to fix that by forcing the world to buy either his bottles or someone else's.
If it offends you, I can post it as AC next time. It would be kind of appropriate, given that the original was anonymous too.
I didn't do that today because so many whining poor-spirited losers hide behind nonentity and I don't want to encourage any whining, losers or hit-and-run posts.
I don't care about my karma, it's not been under 48 points in several years. I would say "behold, the corrosive effect of a karma cap" except that if the cap wasn't there I'd be uncaring because I'd have several thousand points up and it would again be next to meaningless (except in "karma racing" events). Even if my karma sucked, I wouldn't care unless is made my posts invisible. Perhaps the slashlords might want to take that to heart and rejigger the kerma system so that it remains meaningful?
'2 points for being logged in
+1 karma bonus (can't seem to shake that no matter how abusive I get)
+1 runner-up "furriest post"
However, they have thereby limited their current claims to these sections. And five beeeellion dollars.