As far as I'm concerned, the more of these judgements that are handed out, the more it will wake up politicians and the corporate elite that software patents were always a bad idea. Let them bleed for their greed.
Microsoft managed to stall OpenGL 2.0 and other improvements for the longest time by claiming potential patent infringements with its vertex and pixel shader technologies. As a result OpenGL stalled for some time. Microsoft has since left the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) after doing the damage it needed to do. Deja vu.
Honestly, do you really think Microsoft is interested in collaborating with a standard that threatens to deprecate the MS Office format? Is that what you seriously believe?
The lag has been unbearable for weeks. I can only hope that rumours of upcoming hardware upgrades are true. The three drakes in BWL have been miserably difficult for us to do lately because of the way the lag is affecting the timing of their attacks. Example: offtanks successfully taunt off the winged buffet and get bounced back, but the MT eats the attack anyways-- manageable once or twice, but a huge pain if it happens eight or ten times during the encounter. Or Firemaw, flies off after a punted offtank and gets stuck in the way back.
At 15$ to 12$ a month from six million subscribers I am very disapointed in how long it has taken Blizzard to react to the absolutely inevitable server issues they are currently having.
I've been playing mmorpgs since the beginning of UO. I'm sorry to say that I've found Blizzard's overall ability to respond to player concerns effectively inexistant in general
The only feedback mechanisms is the forums, which are unreliable, unsearchable, and lose their history due to posts mysteriously disapearing after a while with no evidence of their existence ever. I can see every post I've ever made to Slashdot over the years, but I can't see posts I made to the Blizzard forums just a few months ago. It's simply just appalling that with the resources their customer base affords them they can't put toghether a decent bulletin board system.
More importantly, however, I can't begin to count the number times I've seen posts with a lot of effort put into them and huge feedback from the player base not even get a single reply from an rep. there. After a while, when people don't get a personal response from their feedback, they stop making it. What's keeping the wave of feedback happening right now is the huge base of players who have yet to really experience the mediocrity of the wow player forums. Simply put, in my book Blizzard gets abysmal marks for community interaction.
World of Warcraft remains a fun game to play. However, in my opinion, without significant community improvements Blizzard stands to lose out massively to the next wow that comes out.
Microsoft, has come across some issues in some projects , such as Apache.
The bug this security guy from Microsoft talks about was not from the Apache source. Rather it was a patch some guy posted at bugtraq apparently. He explains this later on in his blog:
"You are absolutely correct - this is not an Apache Group fix, and I updated the text to reflect this."
Without any obligation to give anything back. Yep, and you're all damned communists for not wanting to support a free ride for Sun.
His crying for the third-world is doubly laughable hogwash since it ignores completely that the GPL works in two directions and in the same way for each. Then it ignores that it is the insanely expensive nature of western software that makes much of our vaunted technology inaccessible to them to begin with.
Finally, as we've done at my company, if you really want to use GPLed code why don't you try purchasing a different license from its developer. They might not be interested, of course, or it might not be possible due to multiple copyright owners, but a number of interesting open source projects do dual-license. It's a nice arrangement: developer gets a nice wad of cash and continues to own their code and work on it and the company gets its product done faster and consequently they get to the market faster.
Please, read the articles before commenting. As usual on Slashdot, the news is misleading : he was not condemned for releasing exploit code, but simply for software piracy (the antivirus copy he had used was not legitimate).
After reading the article I see no information there about software piracy.
Following the links I did find some interesting tidbits that would indicate the company in question is less than honorable: A factual issue, not part of the trial but seemingly of Tegam's scare tactics, is that Guillermito was accused publicly by the software company to be a "terrorist wanted by the DST (French secret service) and the FBI". This has not lead him to recluse in fear, but he is hardly optimistic of the outcome, scheduled for March this year...
It seems he was being procecuted for violating a European Directive which prohibits tampering with copyright protection measures. Ergo, that this researcher had to by-pass copyright-protection measures to find the flaws in their product.
I'm willing to guess that the reason Microsoft doesn't have to actually take anyone to court is that a cease-and-desist letter from a company with enough cash to sue your company, your board, your friends, your children and all your future generations without blinking even a little bit at the cost is sufficient to scare the bejezuus outta most people.
Ask the Virtual Dub guy what he did when he got his cease-and-desist letter in the mail from Microsoft.
OH BS... unless XP has the drivers you need bundled with it, you aren't connecting to a network, and you're only planning on using solitaire and not gaming, there's a lot of work to do to get a system installed right. Oh, hope the user doesn't start with a pre SP1 install.. connecting to the network will be really fun then.
"A claim is limited to a practical application when the method, as claimed, produces a concrete, tangible and useful result; i.e., the method recites a step or act of producing something that is concrete, tangible and useful."
Out of curiosity what software out there, do you think, doesn't perform this function?
Subversion isn't the only choice for people looking for relief from SourceUnsafe. CVSNT is an evolved and mature CVS that you should look at too. http://www.cvsnt.com/cvspro/ for the server and http://www.wincvs.org/ for a gui client
Mergepoints in cvsnt are very cool and wincvs is a powerful client. Since cvsnt runs on Windows and many unixes, you also have your choice of platform as well.
cvsnt is a project that has been around over five years (at my reckoning) and has a good following. Plus you can get commercial support for it from March... what more can you ask for from Free software?
They haven't changed the encryption since Word '97 because it would break the document formats backwards compatibility (contrary to popular belief, the file formats used by Office applications haven't changed since '97; extra stuff has been added, but Word '97 can still open a Word 2003 document).
Of course, they could also backwards patch all their versions of office to support stronger reliable crypto too... but that would cost money. Better to leave a big gapping hole since customers have too much invested in Office to switch now anyways.
It's obvious that no one should have trouble understanding the increasingly mind-numbing legalese that make up license agreements.
The complexity of the legalese doesn't excuse copyright violation, but it is a huge credibility problem for license agreements in my mind. It is impossible for the average person to completely understand the litany of complexe license agreements that so much commercial software contains these days.
People have so much paper work shoved under their nose these days that it's not feasible for someone to have both the money and time to get a lawyer to review every single purchase they make.
My opinion is that its time for license agreements to be standardized and for that standard required for a license agreement to be valid. People should be able to understand what they can and can't do without having to melt their brain reading through hundreds of pages of legalese.
At the very least, if someone can produce a receipt for the purchase of the software, Valve owes it to them to unblock their account.
You'll find out exactly what has happened when you get to the end of the air boat canal. When you get to the secret hideout, you'll have a moment to walk around a room looking at stuff. Take some time to review the newspaper clippings on the wall to find out what has happened while you were gone.
Maybe the long loading times are there to make up for the fact the game is too short:/
Maybe Half-Life 2 is really an introduction to third part of the story, where all the pieces come together. But it makes me a bit unease thinking that all these years I was only waiting for a prologue to the real thing.
Everything is reproducable once you've seen it. Thats the whole idea behind patents.
Apparently Jefferson disagreed with you:
From the Economist: PATENTS, said Thomas Jefferson, should draw "a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not."
And this: Jefferson, a strong proponent of equality among all people, was not sure if it was fair or even constitutional to grant what was essentially a monopoly to an inventor, who would then be able to grant the use of his idea only to those who could afford it. His feeling that all should have total access to new technology was one of the reasons he never took out a patent on his own inventions. This is consistent in his belief in the natural right of all mankind to share useful improvements without restraints. He felt that inventions can not, in nature, be a subject of property and that the promiscuous granting of patents was not only against the theory of popular government, but would be pernicious in its consequences. (Curtis, 1901) In fact he referred to patents as "embarrassments to the public" (McLaughlin, 1989).
The only protection you should be entitled to is a competitive market place. If your idea is easily reproducible -- read obvious -- by your competitors it should fail the very first litmus test for a patent in my opinion. The Economist succinctly points out this is no longer the case; that business process patents were a mistake from the very beginning.
Keep in mind that you already have the protection afforded by copyright and trade secrets.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I'm concerned, the more of these judgements that are handed out, the more it will wake up politicians and the corporate elite that software patents were always a bad idea. Let them bleed for their greed.
They should have listened to Knuth.
Right in this very discussion even!
Microsoft managed to stall OpenGL 2.0 and other improvements for the longest time by claiming potential patent infringements with its vertex and pixel shader technologies. As a result OpenGL stalled for some time. Microsoft has since left the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) after doing the damage it needed to do. Deja vu.
Quickly accused to be BS by an Anonymous Coward.
but then another AC to the rescue with the smackdown.
Honestly, do you really think Microsoft is interested in collaborating with a standard that threatens to deprecate the MS Office format? Is that what you seriously believe?
The lag has been unbearable for weeks. I can only hope that rumours of upcoming hardware upgrades are true. The three drakes in BWL have been miserably difficult for us to do lately because of the way the lag is affecting the timing of their attacks. Example: offtanks successfully taunt off the winged buffet and get bounced back, but the MT eats the attack anyways-- manageable once or twice, but a huge pain if it happens eight or ten times during the encounter. Or Firemaw, flies off after a punted offtank and gets stuck in the way back.
At 15$ to 12$ a month from six million subscribers I am very disapointed in how long it has taken Blizzard to react to the absolutely inevitable server issues they are currently having.
Would one of the pro-patent people I see on these boards care to explain to me how this is a shining example of how patents foster innovation?
Sorry, too busy trying to kill that shaman with 4,000,000 other subsribers otherwise I'd have some kind of snappy reply for you.
@#$%@%@#$ earhshock crits you for 1300 again...
I've been playing mmorpgs since the beginning of UO. I'm sorry to say that I've found Blizzard's overall ability to respond to player concerns effectively inexistant in general
The only feedback mechanisms is the forums, which are unreliable, unsearchable, and lose their history due to posts mysteriously disapearing after a while with no evidence of their existence ever. I can see every post I've ever made to Slashdot over the years, but I can't see posts I made to the Blizzard forums just a few months ago. It's simply just appalling that with the resources their customer base affords them they can't put toghether a decent bulletin board system.
More importantly, however, I can't begin to count the number times I've seen posts with a lot of effort put into them and huge feedback from the player base not even get a single reply from an rep. there. After a while, when people don't get a personal response from their feedback, they stop making it. What's keeping the wave of feedback happening right now is the huge base of players who have yet to really experience the mediocrity of the wow player forums. Simply put, in my book Blizzard gets abysmal marks for community interaction.
World of Warcraft remains a fun game to play. However, in my opinion, without significant community improvements Blizzard stands to lose out massively to the next wow that comes out.
Microsoft, has come across some issues in some projects , such as Apache.
The bug this security guy from Microsoft talks about was not from the Apache source. Rather it was a patch some guy posted at bugtraq apparently. He explains this later on in his blog:
"You are absolutely correct - this is not an Apache Group fix, and I updated the text to reflect this."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace
Old UNIX shell thing.
Without any obligation to give anything back. Yep, and you're all damned communists for not wanting to support a free ride for Sun.
His crying for the third-world is doubly laughable hogwash since it ignores completely that the GPL works in two directions and in the same way for each. Then it ignores that it is the insanely expensive nature of western software that makes much of our vaunted technology inaccessible to them to begin with.
Finally, as we've done at my company, if you really want to use GPLed code why don't you try purchasing a different license from its developer. They might not be interested, of course, or it might not be possible due to multiple copyright owners, but a number of interesting open source projects do dual-license. It's a nice arrangement: developer gets a nice wad of cash and continues to own their code and work on it and the company gets its product done faster and consequently they get to the market faster.
Please identify which scalability features in Linux you think Google is "going out of their way to avoid".
Thanks.
Please, read the articles before commenting. As usual on Slashdot, the news is misleading : he was not condemned for releasing exploit code, but simply for software piracy (the antivirus copy he had used was not legitimate).
After reading the article I see no information there about software piracy.
Following the links I did find some interesting tidbits that would indicate the company in question is less than honorable:
A factual issue, not part of the trial but seemingly of Tegam's scare tactics, is that Guillermito was accused publicly by the software company to be a "terrorist wanted by the DST (French secret service) and the FBI". This has not lead him to recluse in fear, but he is hardly optimistic of the outcome, scheduled for March this year...
It seems he was being procecuted for violating a European Directive which prohibits tampering with copyright protection measures. Ergo, that this researcher had to by-pass copyright-protection measures to find the flaws in their product.
I'm willing to guess that the reason Microsoft doesn't have to actually take anyone to court is that a cease-and-desist letter from a company with enough cash to sue your company, your board, your friends, your children and all your future generations without blinking even a little bit at the cost is sufficient to scare the bejezuus outta most people.
Ask the Virtual Dub guy what he did when he got his cease-and-desist letter in the mail from Microsoft.
OH BS... unless XP has the drivers you need bundled with it, you aren't connecting to a network, and you're only planning on using solitaire and not gaming, there's a lot of work to do to get a system installed right. Oh, hope the user doesn't start with a pre SP1 install.. connecting to the network will be really fun then.
nu-uh.
Your script doesn't remove explorer at all; at best you've just taken away the most obvious way to instantiate it.
"A claim is limited to a practical application when the method, as claimed, produces a concrete, tangible and useful result; i.e., the method recites a step or act of producing something that is concrete, tangible and useful."
Out of curiosity what software out there, do you think, doesn't perform this function?
Subversion isn't the only choice for people looking for relief from SourceUnsafe. CVSNT is an evolved and mature CVS that you should look at too.
http://www.cvsnt.com/cvspro/ for the server
and http://www.wincvs.org/ for a gui client
Mergepoints in cvsnt are very cool and wincvs is a powerful client. Since cvsnt runs on Windows and many unixes, you also have your choice of platform as well.
cvsnt is a project that has been around over five years (at my reckoning) and has a good following. Plus you can get commercial support for it from March... what more can you ask for from Free software?
They haven't changed the encryption since Word '97 because it would break the document formats backwards compatibility (contrary to popular belief, the file formats used by Office applications haven't changed since '97; extra stuff has been added, but Word '97 can still open a Word 2003 document).
Of course, they could also backwards patch all their versions of office to support stronger reliable crypto too... but that would cost money. Better to leave a big gapping hole since customers have too much invested in Office to switch now anyways.
The truth never bothered astroturfing trolls and their friends.
It's obvious that no one should have trouble understanding the increasingly mind-numbing legalese that make up license agreements.
The complexity of the legalese doesn't excuse copyright violation, but it is a huge credibility problem for license agreements in my mind. It is impossible for the average person to completely understand the litany of complexe license agreements that so much commercial software contains these days.
People have so much paper work shoved under their nose these days that it's not feasible for someone to have both the money and time to get a lawyer to review every single purchase they make.
My opinion is that its time for license agreements to be standardized and for that standard required for a license agreement to be valid. People should be able to understand what they can and can't do without having to melt their brain reading through hundreds of pages of legalese.
At the very least, if someone can produce a receipt for the purchase of the software, Valve owes it to them to unblock their account.
You'll find out exactly what has happened when you get to the end of the air boat canal. When you get to the secret hideout, you'll have a moment to walk around a room looking at stuff. Take some time to review the newspaper clippings on the wall to find out what has happened while you were gone.
Maybe the long loading times are there to make up for the fact the game is too short :/
Maybe Half-Life 2 is really an introduction to third part of the story, where all the pieces come together. But it makes me a bit unease thinking that all these years I was only waiting for a prologue to the real thing.
100% dead on! Those were my thoughts entirely.
Everything is reproducable once you've seen it. Thats the whole idea behind patents.
Apparently Jefferson disagreed with you:
From the Economist:
PATENTS, said Thomas Jefferson, should draw "a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not."
And this:
Jefferson, a strong proponent of equality among all people, was not sure if it was fair or even constitutional to grant what was essentially a monopoly to an inventor, who would then be able to grant the use of his idea only to those who could afford it. His feeling that all should have total access to new technology was one of the reasons he never took out a patent on his own inventions. This is consistent in his belief in the natural right of all mankind to share useful improvements without restraints. He felt that inventions can not, in nature, be a subject of property and that the promiscuous granting of patents was not only against the theory of popular government, but would be pernicious in its consequences. (Curtis, 1901) In fact he referred to patents as "embarrassments to the public" (McLaughlin, 1989).
The only protection you should be entitled to is a competitive market place. If your idea is easily reproducible -- read obvious -- by your competitors it should fail the very first litmus test for a patent in my opinion. The Economist succinctly points out this is no longer the case; that business process patents were a mistake from the very beginning.
Keep in mind that you already have the protection afforded by copyright and trade secrets.
Greed and money. The oldest reasons in the book.
(d) In whose backyard does the nuclear waste go?