My only point was that they didn't meet the technical definition of a patent troll. I didn't say they were 'nice', in fact I clearly stated otherwise ('not panda bears').
But, you seem to be having fun demolishing a strawman, so why should I stop you:)
Ugh. If this was Google defending their patent portfolio
Microsoft isn't "defending its patent portfolio." It's being sued for infringement by a competitor, and even that competitor isn't "defending its own patent portfolio", it's suing to protect its business, using its patent portfolio (which might be just this one patent, for all we know).
I appreciate a preemptive "You're all Google fanbois, if it was Microsoft, blah blah" rant for it's humor value, but at least take your trolling seriously.
They are reaping what they sowed. It doesn't make the patent troll any less despicable though.
How many times does this need to be pointed out? i4i is not a patent troll. That doesn't mean they're cute and cuddly panda bears, but they aren't a patent troll, which is defined as suing over patents without having an actual product (or in other words, suing over patents is a patent troll's business model, not building things). i4i does have an actual product, and they claim that Microsoft is competing against their product; after convincing a judge of that, they got the injunction.
That wont work because it would completely eliminate women from being competitive in a wide range of sports.
So what if it would?
Black people dominate several areas of sports. Should we have separate black and non-black events just so non-black people can be competitive in them? I'd say of course no, and my point is that this is exactly the same as having separate male and female events.
Yes, they would need to sue individual users separately.
In practice, they would sue a small number of very big users - just like SCO did with Linux, in fact. Basically, pick a few huge corporations that use Microsoft Office... not hard to find.
You are right, removing OOXML will lead to a large amount of consumer confusion and annoyance - so yes, this is very problematic.
In addition, even removing OOXML won't solve the entire problem with this patent. Despite TFA (and the summary) saying
The injunction doesn't apply to existing product that has already been sold
that is only true for Microsoft - but not for Microsoft customers. A user of Word can be sued by the patent holder, simply because that user infringes upon the patent (that the user didn't write the code doesn't matter at all). If a user is in fact sued, Microsoft is committed to indemnify them, which means... Microsoft is once more fighting this patent in the courts.
Bottom line, it won't end until Microsoft buys a license for the patent, or until the patent is invalidated. Microsoft's usual strategy is to fight in the courts until the end of time, but given this injunction, that isn't an option (the patent holder can sue Microsoft users tomorrow and get an injunction against them).
Either Microsoft miraculously gets the injunction cancelled, or it buys a license (for many, many billions of dollars - the patent holder would be stupid to ask for anything less). There is no "easy work-around" despite what TFA says.
TFA may well be a Microsoft effort to keep its share price from dropping due to this debacle. It might work, Wall Street isn't that bright about this stuff.
I presume your country is fairly small, which makes it possible to get within close ping distance of everyone there fairly easily. But, in general to cover e.g. the entire US or Europe with good ping rates will cost a lot.
Of course if they put servers in close ping proximity to every user, this can work. But that means a lot of servers, spread all around the world, which they need to set up and maintain.
Whereas the current business model involves the users themselves getting their hardware to every place where it is needed (i.e. to every user's house). This is much more scalable and simpler from the perspective of the business. But yeah, this is a hassle for users, and OnLive and Gaikai believe their offering will win because of that and related issues.
Regardless, to get back to the topic in the original post, these 'new two' aren't starting a revolution against the incumbents. Simply because, if they show any promise at all in actually succeeding, one of those incumbents will buy them. If the 'new two's model makes sense, I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft buying one and Sony the other (as they can easily outbid Nintendo). But, this is all speculation, we still have no idea whether this new model will succeed.
Actually I did take an interest in it, and have a very good idea about what it is, which is basically like alternative medicine in scientific validity.
It sounds promising, and it may end up meaning Stallman was wrong all along
You've got the causality exactly wrong. If it wasn't for Stallman and other FOSS people making a lot of noise about this recently, it wouldn't have happened. (Note that I'm not saying Stallman himself is to be thanked for this, it's the general noise about the topic, which he was a part of.)
There are always two levels to statements such as those Stallman etc. made about Mono. On the first level, they are meant to be taken at face value - their arguments are either valid or not, in and of themselves. On the second level, they are intended to cause an effect of some form, such as motivating certain people to do certain things. In this case, the second level was meant to motivate Microsoft to make the first level (the direct arguments against using Mono) invalid. That appears to have worked (well, once Microsoft formally announces this, presumably soon, but all we have so far is a blog post).
For one thing, even though popular games already have lag of 66-100ms, that lag is consistent - it takes pretty much the same number of frames to see the results of your click. So you adjust to this. But if we are adding network lag of a supposedly smaller amount - say 50ms (I don't see how it will be 20ms like he says) - we also need to take into account lag variability (this is like the joke with the statistician drowning in a pool with an average depth of 1 inch). If the network lag jumps around 25-75ms, then players will not be able to expect exactly when their click will result in a shot fired, which I suspect will be annoying.
Second, network lag isn't like 'engine lag' (for lack of a better name). With engine lag, when I click, yeah it might take 3 frames to see the result, but my click is already in the pipeline. With network lag it only gets into the pipeline when it reaches the server, at which point it mixes with other stuff going on there. In other words, just like in multiplayer FPSes where you can have the rare event of a 'lag bug', like when two people pick up the same item at once (that's what they do on their clients), but the server only lets one of them have it (whichever request for the item reaches it first), with Gaikai we will have lag bugs even in singleplayer games. That is, you might click to do an amazing headshot, but due to network lag the enemy might already move out of the way.
Still, this is interesting technology, and even if FPSes have problems running on it, it might be great for other types of games.
As he explained, a C# implementation is useful in that it lets you run C# code that already exists, on non-Windows OSes. That is a good thing, and that is why he says he has no problem with the implementations. But, he says, writing our own apps in C# is a bad idea.
Feel free to disagree with him, but I thought the distinction between the C# implementation and the act of writing apps in C# makes a lot of sense.
It's gameplay that makes you come back, not reality.
100% true. But major game titles are big business, and what they want is for you to play a new expensive game for a short while, then buy another. Your going back and playing games you already paid for gives them nothing, or worse than nothing.
We all know that the thing that hogs the most memory in Firefox is all the extensions that people use to immitate other browsers... Who actually uses Firefox without a single extension and brags about how good it is anyway?
I use Firefox all the time with no extensions at all. Well, except for Ubufox which was installed for me by Ubuntu. And the Flash plugin.
Unless you are talking about a system with severely limited memory, memory usage is probably not the right criteria for deciding which browser to use.
Chrome used over 1 GB in this test. Safari and Opera passed the 500 MB mark. That is an issue for far more machines than 'systems with severely limited memory'.
How the hell is BREIN the "Dutch RIAA"? They have no links to each other, no affiliation, no hard relation whatsover.
"Dutch RIAA" doesn't mean they are affiliated with the (US) RIAA or that they have any relationship. All the phrase means is that they are the equivalent of the RIAA, in the Netherlands. In other words, that they have a similar purpose and so forth.
I'm all for spanking the RIAA, but nowhere was it implied they would "never launch a lawsuit again". I think it's just as much FUD from this side to imply "OMG they lied to Congress". Nowhere did they claim they would not resume such activities after reviewing things (with as much of a grain of salt for such a review as you'd like), and nor were, and nor should they have been bound to.
This is a non-story.
You're 100% right except for the last line.
This is a story, not for the reasons you rightfully tore down, but simply because it's newsworthy that lots of new lawsuits are being filed.
Trademarks are sort of like authorship. You can transfer copyright to your work to somebody else - but you can't transfer authorship. That's doesn't prevent you from using the work, it only prevents you from imposing on somebody else.
Seems pretty logical to me.
And not only is it logical, it's very much at the heart of open source. Even the most permissive licenses (BSD, etc.) have the requirement that you not remove the original author names, and not claim that you wrote the original software (unless you actually did, of course).
In other words, all open source licenses explicitly support the principle of identity - use the code, but know who wrote it. That's the principle behind trademarks as well - to let people know where something comes from. To lop this in with patents as a "risk to open source" is completely incorrect.
No, that was about how doing tasks with web apps was bad. This is about how the whole concept of doing computing on a machine which is not under your control is wrong.
Yeah, the argument this time is a lot more general. Kudos to him for having such 'pure' views, but this time I'd say he's way off base.
Doing all your computation on your own machine is like never asking other people for help with anything. It means never asking someone else to do some simple arithmetic for us. And it means never using a calculator (that you haven't hacked).
Agreed. The author seems to be implying that he was promised P2P would solve all his marketing needs. As a distribution system there is only one thing it reliably does: distribution.
True, but I think there's more to it than that.
Yes, P2P doesn't solve marketing needs. But it also does something else: drive distribution costs to 0. This is the critical issue: Right now, while the big labels are still fat off of profits from non-P2P, they use those profits to market, and they conquer all markets that way - non-P2P and otherwise.
But once P2P is the main game, and it's just a matter of time, then the situation will be radically different. The big labels and the big artists won't have those non-P2P sources of cash, so they won't be able to flood the planet with their marketing. This will be a huge boon for indie artists.
So, the original argument is valid right now. But not in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
My only point was that they didn't meet the technical definition of a patent troll. I didn't say they were 'nice', in fact I clearly stated otherwise ('not panda bears').
:)
But, you seem to be having fun demolishing a strawman, so why should I stop you
Ugh. If this was Google defending their patent portfolio
Microsoft isn't "defending its patent portfolio." It's being sued for infringement by a competitor, and even that competitor isn't "defending its own patent portfolio", it's suing to protect its business, using its patent portfolio (which might be just this one patent, for all we know).
I appreciate a preemptive "You're all Google fanbois, if it was Microsoft, blah blah" rant for it's humor value, but at least take your trolling seriously.
They are reaping what they sowed. It doesn't make the patent troll any less despicable though.
How many times does this need to be pointed out? i4i is not a patent troll. That doesn't mean they're cute and cuddly panda bears, but they aren't a patent troll, which is defined as suing over patents without having an actual product (or in other words, suing over patents is a patent troll's business model, not building things). i4i does have an actual product, and they claim that Microsoft is competing against their product; after convincing a judge of that, they got the injunction.
Why not just 'engineer' them to have no brain at all, just like the guy who suggested this!
That's like saying "why not have flying cars already?".
It's hard to make animals that don't feel pain. It's much, much harder to make animals without brains.
That wont work because it would completely eliminate women from being competitive in a wide range of sports.
So what if it would?
Black people dominate several areas of sports. Should we have separate black and non-black events just so non-black people can be competitive in them? I'd say of course no, and my point is that this is exactly the same as having separate male and female events.
Yes, they would need to sue individual users separately.
In practice, they would sue a small number of very big users - just like SCO did with Linux, in fact. Basically, pick a few huge corporations that use Microsoft Office... not hard to find.
In addition, even removing OOXML won't solve the entire problem with this patent. Despite TFA (and the summary) saying
The injunction doesn't apply to existing product that has already been sold
that is only true for Microsoft - but not for Microsoft customers . A user of Word can be sued by the patent holder, simply because that user infringes upon the patent (that the user didn't write the code doesn't matter at all). If a user is in fact sued, Microsoft is committed to indemnify them, which means... Microsoft is once more fighting this patent in the courts.
Bottom line, it won't end until Microsoft buys a license for the patent, or until the patent is invalidated. Microsoft's usual strategy is to fight in the courts until the end of time, but given this injunction, that isn't an option (the patent holder can sue Microsoft users tomorrow and get an injunction against them).
Either Microsoft miraculously gets the injunction cancelled, or it buys a license (for many, many billions of dollars - the patent holder would be stupid to ask for anything less). There is no "easy work-around" despite what TFA says.
TFA may well be a Microsoft effort to keep its share price from dropping due to this debacle. It might work, Wall Street isn't that bright about this stuff.
I understand that if I build an application that links with a library that is licensed under GPLv2, I must also make my application GPL2
That is NOT correct.
The criteria is 'derivative work', not 'link to'. Linking is sometimes a rule of thumb in this area, but it isn't decisive.
Note that 'derivative work' is a legal term, not a technical one. So before you try to circumvent the GPL in this way, consult a lawyer.
I presume your country is fairly small, which makes it possible to get within close ping distance of everyone there fairly easily. But, in general to cover e.g. the entire US or Europe with good ping rates will cost a lot.
Of course if they put servers in close ping proximity to every user, this can work. But that means a lot of servers, spread all around the world, which they need to set up and maintain.
Whereas the current business model involves the users themselves getting their hardware to every place where it is needed (i.e. to every user's house). This is much more scalable and simpler from the perspective of the business. But yeah, this is a hassle for users, and OnLive and Gaikai believe their offering will win because of that and related issues.
Regardless, to get back to the topic in the original post, these 'new two' aren't starting a revolution against the incumbents. Simply because, if they show any promise at all in actually succeeding, one of those incumbents will buy them. If the 'new two's model makes sense, I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft buying one and Sony the other (as they can easily outbid Nintendo). But, this is all speculation, we still have no idea whether this new model will succeed.
But it isn't a search engine, it is the world's first decision enigne. Obviously it decided that OSX is too expensive.
Bing: You search, we decide.
Actually I did take an interest in it, and have a very good idea about what it is, which is basically like alternative medicine in scientific validity.
I suggest some NLP training
And while you're at it, an astrology course. Knowing someone's zodiac sign really helps in understanding them. /sarcasm
It sounds promising, and it may end up meaning Stallman was wrong all along
You've got the causality exactly wrong. If it wasn't for Stallman and other FOSS people making a lot of noise about this recently, it wouldn't have happened. (Note that I'm not saying Stallman himself is to be thanked for this, it's the general noise about the topic, which he was a part of.)
There are always two levels to statements such as those Stallman etc. made about Mono. On the first level, they are meant to be taken at face value - their arguments are either valid or not, in and of themselves. On the second level, they are intended to cause an effect of some form, such as motivating certain people to do certain things. In this case, the second level was meant to motivate Microsoft to make the first level (the direct arguments against using Mono) invalid. That appears to have worked (well, once Microsoft formally announces this, presumably soon, but all we have so far is a blog post).
I'm still not sure this is going to work.
For one thing, even though popular games already have lag of 66-100ms, that lag is consistent - it takes pretty much the same number of frames to see the results of your click. So you adjust to this. But if we are adding network lag of a supposedly smaller amount - say 50ms (I don't see how it will be 20ms like he says) - we also need to take into account lag variability (this is like the joke with the statistician drowning in a pool with an average depth of 1 inch). If the network lag jumps around 25-75ms, then players will not be able to expect exactly when their click will result in a shot fired, which I suspect will be annoying.
Second, network lag isn't like 'engine lag' (for lack of a better name). With engine lag, when I click, yeah it might take 3 frames to see the result, but my click is already in the pipeline. With network lag it only gets into the pipeline when it reaches the server, at which point it mixes with other stuff going on there. In other words, just like in multiplayer FPSes where you can have the rare event of a 'lag bug', like when two people pick up the same item at once (that's what they do on their clients), but the server only lets one of them have it (whichever request for the item reaches it first), with Gaikai we will have lag bugs even in singleplayer games. That is, you might click to do an amazing headshot, but due to network lag the enemy might already move out of the way.
Still, this is interesting technology, and even if FPSes have problems running on it, it might be great for other types of games.
As he explained, a C# implementation is useful in that it lets you run C# code that already exists, on non-Windows OSes. That is a good thing, and that is why he says he has no problem with the implementations. But, he says, writing our own apps in C# is a bad idea.
Feel free to disagree with him, but I thought the distinction between the C# implementation and the act of writing apps in C# makes a lot of sense.
It's gameplay that makes you come back, not reality.
100% true. But major game titles are big business, and what they want is for you to play a new expensive game for a short while, then buy another. Your going back and playing games you already paid for gives them nothing, or worse than nothing.
That is certainly possible. If it is so, I expect Chrome devs will inform us.
We all know that the thing that hogs the most memory in Firefox is all the extensions that people use to immitate other browsers... Who actually uses Firefox without a single extension and brags about how good it is anyway?
I use Firefox all the time with no extensions at all. Well, except for Ubufox which was installed for me by Ubuntu. And the Flash plugin.
Unless you are talking about a system with severely limited memory, memory usage is probably not the right criteria for deciding which browser to use.
Chrome used over 1 GB in this test. Safari and Opera passed the 500 MB mark. That is an issue for far more machines than 'systems with severely limited memory'.
How the hell is BREIN the "Dutch RIAA"? They have no links to each other, no affiliation, no hard relation whatsover.
"Dutch RIAA" doesn't mean they are affiliated with the (US) RIAA or that they have any relationship. All the phrase means is that they are the equivalent of the RIAA, in the Netherlands. In other words, that they have a similar purpose and so forth.
I'm all for spanking the RIAA, but nowhere was it implied they would "never launch a lawsuit again". I think it's just as much FUD from this side to imply "OMG they lied to Congress". Nowhere did they claim they would not resume such activities after reviewing things (with as much of a grain of salt for such a review as you'd like), and nor were, and nor should they have been bound to.
This is a non-story.
You're 100% right except for the last line.
This is a story, not for the reasons you rightfully tore down, but simply because it's newsworthy that lots of new lawsuits are being filed.
In other words it is all about identity.
Trademarks are sort of like authorship. You can transfer copyright to your work to somebody else - but you can't transfer authorship. That's doesn't prevent you from using the work, it only prevents you from imposing on somebody else.
Seems pretty logical to me.
And not only is it logical, it's very much at the heart of open source. Even the most permissive licenses (BSD, etc.) have the requirement that you not remove the original author names, and not claim that you wrote the original software (unless you actually did, of course).
In other words, all open source licenses explicitly support the principle of identity - use the code, but know who wrote it. That's the principle behind trademarks as well - to let people know where something comes from. To lop this in with patents as a "risk to open source" is completely incorrect.
No, that was about how doing tasks with web apps was bad. This is about how the whole concept of doing computing on a machine which is not under your control is wrong.
Yeah, the argument this time is a lot more general. Kudos to him for having such 'pure' views, but this time I'd say he's way off base.
Doing all your computation on your own machine is like never asking other people for help with anything. It means never asking someone else to do some simple arithmetic for us. And it means never using a calculator (that you haven't hacked).
Agreed. The author seems to be implying that he was promised P2P would solve all his marketing needs. As a distribution system there is only one thing it reliably does: distribution.
True, but I think there's more to it than that.
Yes, P2P doesn't solve marketing needs. But it also does something else: drive distribution costs to 0. This is the critical issue: Right now, while the big labels are still fat off of profits from non-P2P, they use those profits to market, and they conquer all markets that way - non-P2P and otherwise.
But once P2P is the main game, and it's just a matter of time, then the situation will be radically different. The big labels and the big artists won't have those non-P2P sources of cash, so they won't be able to flood the planet with their marketing. This will be a huge boon for indie artists.
So, the original argument is valid right now. But not in the long run.