So you're basically saying that those communist gang-raping anti-Americans foisted the TRIPS agreements on all WTO member countries? Methinks TRIPS does benefit U.S. taxpayers (think: Hollywood, Microsoft, RIAA etc.). Well, except for the software and business patents, then.
They must have optimized this patent lawsuit for "nuisance value": if it was issued in 1991 and runs out 17 years later in december 2008, then
UNLESS the USA gets its act together w.r.t. software patents, or this patent is overthrown at whatever cost to the defendants, everyone using X-windows in the USA (yes, both software companies and end-users) can enjoy their compiz spinning cube again if they
(A) refrain from using a linux desktop for more than a year, or
(B) do whatever IP InnovatioN LLC or its holding company Acacia Technologies wants them to do. (I'm aware that this lawsuit is only targeted at Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc., but once IP Innovation LLC has some money why couldn't they repeat the trick to everyone else?).
Oops sorry i'm not allowed to say X-windows anymore, am I? I meant: the X window system(TM).
IIRC the GIF patent lawsuit went in a similar vein: sue just before the patent is going to run out, then the defendants are more likely to give in because the lawsuit might last longer than the remaining lifetime of the patent anyway, and they'll be able to use the technology again soon.
If you live in a country that tolerates software patents, I'd suggest you go do something about it (if you like multiple desktops, that is).
PS: who t.f. is "Technology licensing corporation", anyway?
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I still don't understand what happened from what you described. Did you create an "infinite bounce" or were your e-mail servers just incredibly crappy? I'm (unfortunately) familiar with causing loops by attempting to rewrite sendmail configuration, but otherwise surely any normal MTA would cope with a few thousand extra e-mails. And sendmail is 20 years old software.
dpkg-repackage, IIRC. That's a very old program; I don't think it's even in Debian anymore.. Pity though..
It would collect all of the relevant files scattered around your disk and make a new.deb package out of them.
everyone scans their fingerprint and votes. That fingerprint is claimed by your friendly government to be used as a one-way hash to encrypt the vote.
Fixed that for you. Seriously, we're talking about obtaining significant power in a nation for 4 years; I'm shocked at the level of naïveté of the comments here today. And that's with my tin-foil hat off.
Oh and BTW, if we're going to be governed for 4 years, or 1461 days, I don't mind if it takes 1 day to count the votes. It often takes months to form a viable coalition anyway.
AFAIK in Europe, the loser pays the court costs. In that case, it seems reasonable to me that in the USA extra monetary punishment is asked: e.g. the price of the winner's lawyers' costs plus a percentage "nuisance and bother value" to have to bring the suit in the first place.
Otherwise you'd be bled dry slowly with each court case you won. Mind that I have no idea whether we're talking thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.
One thing I wondered: at the "end of life" of Mir, why did the russians let it burn in the atmosphere and not boost it into orbit around the moon or mars, as a source of recycleable parts and high-grade scrap metal heap? Or would that be impossible due to the orbit of Mir?
Could you do us all a favour and point a link to that list of technical complaints of ODF? We all know where to find the OOXML list of horrors. Otherwise you're just adding to the (already intolerably high) FUD level, whereas your list could give us something interesting to compare.
I find it VERY difficult to believe that the complaints list for ODF could be "even longer than the ones about OOXML".
perhaps if someone took the good bits out of both of these and made a better one everyone would be happy.
Because any spreadsheet program that wants to be compliant with MS-OOXML shall implement that 20-year-old MS Excel date bug?
What's the point of putting that in the standard?
For legacy reasons, an implementation using the 1900 date base system shall treat 1900 as though it was a leap year.
and before you ask
As to which date base system an implementation uses by default or whether it allows its users to switch
between date base systems, is unspecified. See 3.17.6.7 for XML-related details. [Note: As the XML allows
either date base system to be used, an implementation must be able to deal with both systems. end note]
I don't know how you call this, but I wouldn't call it "a superb standard". It's a public document btw, download it and read it, don't just believe all these foaming-at-the-mouth slashdotters, what do they know:-)
As a programmer, I'd say it's not a standard at all, because besides these technical bugs that shall be implemented, the document also contains references to technology which is not accessible under RAND conditions. See the various countries' comments in this zip file.
Netherlands (translation/summary: they worked very hard to stay professional and to stay away from all the turmoil and study the document, and then came to a almost consensus decision to vote "disapproval with comments". Almost consensus because Microsoft alone decided to vote "yes" (with no technical reasons given) so there was no consensus, so in effect the vote of the Netherlands was vetoed. According to the NEN rules, the Netherlands had to abstain, without comments, in this case. [N.B.: I think this means also that all of the dutch technical comments (5 months of work) will not be permitted to be sent on to ISO for review - me]
The article goes on to explain that this one member isoc.nl (who is the longest sitting member of that NEN committee and voted no) finds that it would be appropriate for the submitter of a standard to refrain from voting this actively, especially because Microsoft had already given out a press release that the result would become "abstain" before the vote was actually being held. In other words, they knew they were going to sabotage(*) the dutch "no with comments" vote and told the press in advance.
Please correct any inaccuracies in my post; I really do not want to misrepresent this article, which speaks volumes for itself IMHO.
(*) original meaning of sabotage: to throw a wooden shoe into a machine to prevent it from working properly.
IANAMOANB, but maybe this really is the first time that one particular vendor tries to push through a bad standard, as opposed to just their own standard with their own idiosyncrasies and technology head-start.
About the size of the document, I had to laugh at the graph of "specification speed" against "technical committee time" on Rob Weir's blog:
here, a few pages down.
It looks almost like it's not a human-produced document but rather a dump of MS internal.doc memory structures translated to english.
And then to think that Microsoft put it on a "fast-track" through ECMA (=rubber stamped) and then ISO is amazing. I can think of only one reason why they are in such a hurry, and that must be that customers are hesitantly considering the merits of standardizing on ODF (the next-largest standard, at the top left of the graph).
That standard is so large, it would cost Microsoft weeks to implement with the developer capacity that they have. I wonder when they'll announce that Microsoft Office 2008 supports it 100%:-)
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, when bureaucrats have to decide something, they usually err on the side of "do nothing and see if it disappears naturally"?
So you're basically saying that those communist gang-raping anti-Americans foisted the TRIPS agreements on all WTO member countries? Methinks TRIPS does benefit U.S. taxpayers (think: Hollywood, Microsoft, RIAA etc.). Well, except for the software and business patents, then.
(A) refrain from using a linux desktop for more than a year, or
(B) do whatever IP InnovatioN LLC or its holding company Acacia Technologies wants them to do. (I'm aware that this lawsuit is only targeted at Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc., but once IP Innovation LLC has some money why couldn't they repeat the trick to everyone else?).
Oops sorry i'm not allowed to say X-windows anymore, am I? I meant: the X window system(TM).
IIRC the GIF patent lawsuit went in a similar vein: sue just before the patent is going to run out, then the defendants are more likely to give in because the lawsuit might last longer than the remaining lifetime of the patent anyway, and they'll be able to use the technology again soon.
If you live in a country that tolerates software patents, I'd suggest you go do something about it (if you like multiple desktops, that is).
PS: who t.f. is "Technology licensing corporation", anyway?
PPS: I'm surprised Intellectual Ventures didn't bring this lawsuit.
PPPS here's the complaint (from Groklaw, see if you can get it from Pacer if you don't trust that).
And here's Acacia's announcement that IP Innovation LLC is "a wholly owned subsidiary" of theirs, for suing with GUI patents.
as said in another thread, it's IP Innovation LLC, IP Innovations LLC is apparently a different company..
That's not really true though, you're omitting the fact that you could rebuild London's infrastructure as recent as 1666 ;-)
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I still don't understand what happened from what you described. Did you create an "infinite bounce" or were your e-mail servers just incredibly crappy? I'm (unfortunately) familiar with causing loops by attempting to rewrite sendmail configuration, but otherwise surely any normal MTA would cope with a few thousand extra e-mails. And sendmail is 20 years old software.
dpkg-repackage, IIRC. That's a very old program; I don't think it's even in Debian anymore.. Pity though.. It would collect all of the relevant files scattered around your disk and make a new .deb package out of them.
Well duh! That's because It's deflated.
Oh and BTW, if we're going to be governed for 4 years, or 1461 days, I don't mind if it takes 1 day to count the votes. It often takes months to form a viable coalition anyway.
On the other hand, I've never used Gentoo (how many days does that "emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice" take?)
Woohoo! 8 out of 9! you made my day ;-)
Otherwise you'd be bled dry slowly with each court case you won. Mind that I have no idea whether we're talking thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.
37282700 * 0.45
should be 16777215 (2^24-1)
Office 2.7K "moron"? Is that the next version?
Round() or ceiling()? ;-)
One thing I wondered: at the "end of life" of Mir, why did the russians let it burn in the atmosphere and not boost it into orbit around the moon or mars, as a source of recycleable parts and high-grade scrap metal heap? Or would that be impossible due to the orbit of Mir?
I find it VERY difficult to believe that the complaints list for ODF could be "even longer than the ones about OOXML".
I agreeIf anyone has time, can you please comment on this ODF vs OOXML (or maybe MS Office 2003 XML) comparison from November 2005? I don't know enough about XML to understand all of the finer points.
I don't know how you call this, but I wouldn't call it "a superb standard". It's a public document btw, download it and read it, don't just believe all these foaming-at-the-mouth slashdotters, what do they know :-)
As a programmer, I'd say it's not a standard at all, because besides these technical bugs that shall be implemented, the document also contains references to technology which is not accessible under RAND conditions. See the various countries' comments in this zip file.
Great! it's installed! (playing....)
apt-get remove singularity
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it."
Uh oh...
The article goes on to explain that this one member isoc.nl (who is the longest sitting member of that NEN committee and voted no) finds that it would be appropriate for the submitter of a standard to refrain from voting this actively, especially because Microsoft had already given out a press release that the result would become "abstain" before the vote was actually being held. In other words, they knew they were going to sabotage(*) the dutch "no with comments" vote and told the press in advance.
Please correct any inaccuracies in my post; I really do not want to misrepresent this article, which speaks volumes for itself IMHO.
(*) original meaning of sabotage: to throw a wooden shoe into a machine to prevent it from working properly.
Can anyone in the know comment?
It looks almost like it's not a human-produced document but rather a dump of MS internal .doc memory structures translated to english.
And then to think that Microsoft put it on a "fast-track" through ECMA (=rubber stamped) and then ISO is amazing. I can think of only one reason why they are in such a hurry, and that must be that customers are hesitantly considering the merits of standardizing on ODF (the next-largest standard, at the top left of the graph).
That standard is so large, it would cost Microsoft weeks to implement with the developer capacity that they have. I wonder when they'll announce that Microsoft Office 2008 supports it 100% :-)