The "windows everywhere" is a great slogan but it results in interfaces that are hugely difficult to use unless you do _exactly_ as the designer expected. You only have to try and use WinCE2 to understand that Windows does not scale to a 4" screen.
MS works from a checklist of must_have items which have been gathered from discussions and contractual requirements over the years. This explains all the curious little things that are possible but not visible in the interface (or only with great effort.)
By 2010, most "computers" will be next to invisible as they will be a natural part of the objects in the home.
The most computer like object to be seen will be a thin magazine sized color display with a touch sensitive surface. These will be dirt cheap, found everywhere and comunicate via IR or wireless IP. Somewhere in the home will be a box with disk storage and a Ip connection to the external world (via cable or phone.) CD, DVD etc players will be freestanding as now -- your TV or HIFi will access them as network devices.
the point of the tshirt is that in order to protect the trade secret status of the orginal CSS code, the courts would have to prevent the distribution, everywhere, of all codes (such as DeCSS), in any form (print included), that had the SAME FUNCTION but were developed independently.
As I understand US law, this would require "prior restraint", otherwise the functionallity would be publically available and the "can of worms" condition is reached.
RIP has already been shown to be ineffective and so pointless. As part of evidence presented during the consultation part of the bill various ways to avoid tapping were described. The current issue of New scientist also has a short article on legal ways around the rules.
A pointless act, pushed into existance by a government that is either stupid or just acting to maximise positive spin.
so if Deja has a posting of mine containing the sentence, ``What sex is your goldfish?'', can I expect links to a sex site and a credit card site(http://www.goldfish.co.uk/)?
OTOH, if one is ever in court based on the contents of a posting archived on Deja you have the perfect defence, they edit postings and got some mis-attributed...
If someone really wants to, extracting the operational characteristics of the Windows version of the driver is a simple, if lengthy process (but could no doubt be automated on a PC emulator - if they can do DNA a little driver must be easy:-)) All the company has is yet another instance of "security by obscurity"
MS has stated publically that they concider their own old versions of various products to be their major compeditor. What better action to take than to destroy the 2nd hand market for old versions??
ISTR, that the car companies were once caught attempting to fix the prices of pre-owned cars and had their hands slapped. I see no difference here.
poor marketing to blame
on
Boo No More
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· Score: 1
Although I was vaguely aware of boo and can remember a couple of zero-content TV ads a few months back I only found out what the company did after it had gone bust. The idea of marketting is to make your potential customers AWARE of what you do; Beneton can get away with not mentioning their products because they already HAVE customer awareness. They say 50% of all advertising spending is wasted; in this case it appears 100% was wasted. Nothing to do with the web; move along; nothing to see.
The actual odds of a false positive are much, much lower than 37M:1. The DNA comparison is much like a fingerprint comparison. Only a limited number of points are compared, if they match then it's counted as a DNA match. What a match is is often down to human opinion and thus is quite falable.
Looks like something as rattled MS's cage and given them a fright. Could be that RN is now in their sights or possibly Icecast is in line for a quick thrashing for moving into the market.
As RN seems unwilling to support Linux there's not much we can do to help, but Icecast probably needs all the support it can get and IS happy to support *nix.
The patent office and/or the prospective patentees are supposed to perform a prior art search before submitting (it's how it's supposed to work in UK anyway.) The US patent office doesn't seem able to do this BUT there's no easy way to search for software techniques so it's not all their fault.
Create a well known web site and just allow software algorithms/techniques to be posted on it. Give it a search engine and maybe let editors do some tidy up work and spam elimination.
The object is NOT to assign priority to the posters but to make public both the algorithm and the fact it's already publically known.
After a while such a site would be useful in it's own right as a knowledge bank.
Some recent numbers from MS indicated it cost them $7 per line to write W2K and $133 per line to test it.
MS needs a major OS release every few years to maintain a revenue stream at a reasonable level to support it's rising share price.
I don't believe that MS, in it's current form, is capable of writing and testing W2.005K. Far better would be to start again from scratch using a better architecture and no historical baggage.
But Bill can't do that within MS because it's a high risk stratigy - but there's no reason not to do it outside MS...
Suppose a recording artist, say David Bowie, takes a stand on this matter. Look at the situaion from his point of view. If he records an album it may sell 10 million CD copies worldwide at approx. $18 each. David may see something like $3/CD the rest goes into "marketing", "distribution", "manufactoring" etc. David is fully net-aware and knows that using the Internet he can do all of those things for little or no cost; he could sell MP3 downloads at $5/each and keep all the money.
There are problems a) most people haven't even heard about MP3s and as they can't even set their VCR clocks would be totally confused with the concept of downloads. b) the first few people who download the album will just put it on a server and give it away for free.
But are people that dishonest? Some are, but does that mean that everybody should be treated as potentially dishonest? Of course not. Chase the guys in black hats and don't bother the rest of us.
I wish that someone like David Bowie would test the waters and break away from the distribution companies. Whatever the result, it would be interesting.
None of the DVD "protection" has the slightest effect on the real mass-market pirates. None of them are going to stop reverse-engineering DVDs just because of yet one more entry on the chargesheet. The only people hurt are poor consumers who, strangely, actually want to listen/watch the content, not engage in some curious and bizarre marketing stratigy.
The regional thing is not really a problem - I just bought a DVD orientated magazine and 90% of the player adverts indicated that an "all region" version of a player was available. The conversion kits were advertised for approx. $50 each.
if I were a manufacturer of WinCE h/w I would be VERY unhappy to have it labelled as "Windows Powered" It hides the fact that I make the h/w and gives the impression that the product is supplied by Microsoft.
More companies are going to look at Palm and wonder if they really need to feed a percentage of their sales profits to an already overweight MS.
Whenever I'm *forced* to fill out some stupid form to access some web-based resource I lie. Databases gathered from unchecked sources will tend to be full of errors -- one of these days some big organisations are going to end up in court because they distribute inaccurate, unchecked data.
a few years ago a Mr Brown described a scheme called "throwaway compiling". A bit like a JIT compiler but using limited workspace for generated code; if you ever run out of workspace everything was thrown away (except program state of course.)
very simple and effective and mostly ignored.
But apply that scheme to translating opcodes on the fly, using the CPU cache to hold the translated codes... Oops, instant universal CPU. (and if this counts a prior publication and transmeta are doing something else that's another patent blocked:-)
Any high performance db will attempt to cache and share data in memory when it's appropriate. It's the obvious thing to do to enhance performance. Yahoo's only feature seems to be that they also cache the per-user view of the data as well. As the general principle of cache/don't recompute is always an option that can speed up access, there's little original here.
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MS works from a checklist of must_have items which have been gathered from discussions and contractual requirements over the years. This explains all the curious little things that are possible but not visible in the interface (or only with great effort.)
By 2010, most "computers" will be next to invisible as they will be a natural part of the objects in the home.
The most computer like object to be seen will be a thin magazine sized color display with a touch sensitive surface. These will be dirt cheap, found everywhere and comunicate via IR or wireless IP. Somewhere in the home will be a box with disk storage and a Ip connection to the external world (via cable or phone.) CD, DVD etc players will be freestanding as now -- your TV or HIFi will access them as network devices.
All will run Linux kernels :-)
As I understand US law, this would require "prior restraint", otherwise the functionallity would be publically available and the "can of worms" condition is reached.
A pointless act, pushed into existance by a government that is either stupid or just acting to maximise positive spin.
OTOH, if one is ever in court based on the contents of a posting archived on Deja you have the perfect defence, they edit postings and got some mis-attributed...
If someone really wants to, extracting the operational characteristics of the Windows version of the driver is a simple, if lengthy process (but could no doubt be automated on a PC emulator - if they can do DNA a little driver must be easy :-)) All the company has is yet another instance of "security by obscurity"
ISTR, that the car companies were once caught attempting to fix the prices of pre-owned cars and had their hands slapped. I see no difference here.
Although I was vaguely aware of boo and can remember a couple of zero-content TV ads a few months back I only found out what the company did after it had gone bust. The idea of marketting is to make your potential customers AWARE of what you do; Beneton can get away with not mentioning their products because they already HAVE customer awareness. They say 50% of all advertising spending is wasted; in this case it appears 100% was wasted. Nothing to do with the web; move along; nothing to see.
The actual odds of a false positive are much, much lower than 37M:1. The DNA comparison is much like a fingerprint comparison. Only a limited number of points are compared, if they match then it's counted as a DNA match. What a match is is often down to human opinion and thus is quite falable.
As RN seems unwilling to support Linux there's not much we can do to help, but Icecast probably needs all the support it can get and IS happy to support *nix.
Create a well known web site and just allow software algorithms/techniques to be posted on it. Give it a search engine and maybe let editors do some tidy up work and spam elimination.
The object is NOT to assign priority to the posters but to make public both the algorithm and the fact it's already publically known.
After a while such a site would be useful in it's own right as a knowledge bank.
MS needs a major OS release every few years to maintain a revenue stream at a reasonable level to support it's rising share price.
I don't believe that MS, in it's current form, is capable of writing and testing W2.005K. Far better would be to start again from scratch using a better architecture and no historical baggage.
But Bill can't do that within MS because it's a high risk stratigy - but there's no reason not to do it outside MS...
There are problems a) most people haven't even heard about MP3s and as they can't even set their VCR clocks would be totally confused with the concept of downloads. b) the first few people who download the album will just put it on a server and give it away for free.
But are people that dishonest? Some are, but does that mean that everybody should be treated as potentially dishonest? Of course not. Chase the guys in black hats and don't bother the rest of us.
I wish that someone like David Bowie would test the waters and break away from the distribution companies. Whatever the result, it would be interesting.
The regional thing is not really a problem - I just bought a DVD orientated magazine and 90% of the player adverts indicated that an "all region" version of a player was available. The conversion kits were advertised for approx. $50 each.
More companies are going to look at Palm and wonder if they really need to feed a percentage of their sales profits to an already overweight MS.
Whenever I'm *forced* to fill out some stupid form to access some web-based resource I lie. Databases gathered from unchecked sources will tend to be full of errors -- one of these days some big organisations are going to end up in court because they distribute inaccurate, unchecked data.
very simple and effective and mostly ignored.
But apply that scheme to translating opcodes on the fly, using the CPU cache to hold the translated codes... Oops, instant universal CPU. (and if this counts a prior publication and transmeta are doing something else that's another patent blocked :-)
Any high performance db will attempt to cache and share data in memory when it's appropriate. It's the obvious thing to do to enhance performance. Yahoo's only feature seems to be that they also cache the per-user view of the data as well. As the general principle of cache/don't recompute is always an option that can speed up access, there's little original here.