Posts by Tom 13

Re: WinCE

So sorry you are living in the dustbin of history. Maybe you'll get a chance to move out one of these days.

Re: ask forgiveness than permission.

Not in the IP world. Pull that crap in the IP world and there's a good chance I'll own your company.

@Davie Dee

I'd say the man's tweet had bright neon lights pointing at the latch to open the door.

The man has a trademark and like it or not, under the law he is required to protect it or he loses it. Having been involved in two such disputes I can tell you the typical response, usually drafted by a lawyer is something along the lines of:

Dear [insert name of defendant here]:

[Name of trademark holder] has become aware of ongoing work [defendant] is engaged in which violates their trademark protected materials. Cease and desist all activities in regard to this project immediately and [insert rest of terms here, including but not limited to turning over or destroying all infringing materials, posting public notices of your infringement and apologizing for same]. If not we will be forced to pursue legal remedies.

Now, if another lawyer reads the letter they may think to ask for permission and/or licensing terms. If the transmitting lawyer is really, really nice [not all that common] they MIGHT leave a pointer that the plaintiff is really angling for a licensing deal but are required to respond in the manner indicated. In the first dispute I was involved in, the lawyer was directed to write the hint in the letter because frankly the defendant was bigger than we were and gave us great publicity. We knew the defendant had intended it as a compliment, but our hands were tied. Thankfully their lawyer understood, sent the appropriate reply, and we granted permission to use the trademark with the appropriate notice. In the second instance we sent the other kind of letter because there was no other resolution we would regard as satisfactory.

Re: this kind of service for that kind of price.

Except the phone companies have been socialistic since their inception in the US. The profits in the big cities subsidize the rollouts in the rural areas even though the rural areas still feel like they're getting raked over the coals.

I'll admit some of it makes absolutely no sense to me. Where my parents live (rural/suburban) Verizon has rolled out FIOS for internet and phone, but not tv. They promised the tv availability was coming in two years back around 2005. They have Dish and would really like to switch to FIOS for tv as they get frequent thunderstorms that block Dish reception. I told them to take the Comcast deal if they want to replace Dish and suggested he switch the internet at the same time. That way when FIOS does finally roll out their cable subscription he can come back as a "new" customer and get a better deal.

Re:newer uber hard breed over there that eat plastic and copper.

I heard it was a DARPA project to develop a crack infiltration team. Unfortunately a few of them escaped the compound and now they are breeding in the wild. They put it down as a 50% successful project.

Re: 1500-2000% pure PROFIT

Um, NO.

Verizon delivered a total return of 18.6 percent to our shareholders in 2013, while attracting more customers than our competitors and improving our financial performance.

http://bgr.com/2014/01/21/verizon-earnings-q4-2013/

There is no math in which 18.6% = 1500-2000%.

Re: lackadaisical approach to their FIOS rollout.

Nope. It's affecting FIOS too. I pay the more than two Franklins a month for our triple play and 2 dvrs. So tonight I'll be talking to the roomie about sending them a letter. Account is in her name, I just send the checks.

Re: so no individual can see data from divisions other than the one they work for,

Except we determined that was exactly the problem with predicting 9/11 and so changed that fundamental premise of intelligence work. The data is supposed to be freely shared internal to the agency, just not the means, methods, and assets used to collect it (or certain data that would reveal means, methods and/or assets).

@Wzrd1: Two points

Because, as I recall, the criminal or an associate apparently was asking around on how to crack the crypto protecting the data itself.

I think that was a red herring. An article I saw indicated that it was the POS terminals themselves that were compromised. The bad guys were reading the data right from the devices getting both card numbers and in some cases PINs associated with the account numbers (debit cards).

What stinks about this is that companies won't divulge the full details of a breach, as they're trying to protect themselves against litigation.

That's one possible reason. At the moment, I'm not doing support work in the commercial sector. Instead we've got rigorous reporting standards for all incidents. (Sometimes insane interpretations of said standards like the nitwit who wanted all "McAfee stopped this virus" reports forwarded as individual incidents to the central handling agency, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.) Usually these things take weeks to work their way through the process. At the end of which I've gotten such unsatisfactory directives as "use standard procedures to correct the issue" and the occasional clear directive "wipe the drive with DoD 5220.22-M compliant software." The scariest one was when the security guy said "Some of these incidents will never be closed. And you'll never be told why, because the directive is coming from way, way up the food chain and potentially involves national security." But the one thing I've never seen is a clear description of how an incident evolved, because that's now considered sensitive information that can't be disclosed because it might leak to the bad guys.

Re: The annoying thing is...

And what exactly has CalPERS done about fixing your very, very correct first point? Frankly they're in a better position to fix that than Ichan is.

You second point is incorrect. They may be using some of it, but not even half of it.

Re: One is a reputable pension fund fronting for thousands of pensioners

Nope. They just another socialist front from California posing as a reputable organization.

I don't like Ichan, but his closing statement is absolutely true. IF state run pension organizations were truly more interested in doing well long term for their investors they'd be pushing for the sorts of legislative reforms that would result in companies distributing their profits to the shareholders in a timely manner and preferably in the form of dividends instead of buy out sprees. But their socialist agendas are more important to them than the future well being of their pensioners.

And frankly, if you make the sorts of reforms that ought to be made, Ichan would actually be less able to run the sorts of corporate raids for which he is famous.

Re: Value of opinion

Dammit! I'm at work so I can't Google for the School House Rock "Conjunction Junction" clip and post a link here.

Re: I thought Netflix had its own fat pipes

The more socialist the country, the more imbalanced the society.

And yes, the socialists here in the US do want to do away with indoor plumbing and replace it with some green scam that leaves a good portion of your house smelling like an old fashioned outhouse.

Re: Questioning Verizon's net neutrality?

Yes, I've been noticing issues the last few days too. Problem is I'm not sure if it is Netflix, Verizon, or the Blueray manufacturer who are at fault. Start the Netflix app, leave it on pause or the selection scren for a few minutes and come back to a non-working stream. Reboot the blueray, same thing. Reboot the ISP router and the blueray and everything works again.

I'll stand by my previous posts that we don't need Congress regulating the issue. I fully expect that as the truth emerges from customers, Verizon will change its ways or lose customers. Because there are other choices, even in remote areas.

Re: Seriously

Gates may not have been visionary, but he understood business. Jobs was visionary, but I'm still not sure he understood business. I'm not sure how MS lost that thread in Windows 8, but that was their major failure on that front. To a great extent, I think they got too envious of Jobs and tried to become him. Jobs always dictated how his users would work. For them, that seems to work. PCs were always about the user dictating how things will work. Trying to reverse that was, is, and always will be a recipe for disaster. If Gates remembers that, he will do well. Otherwise we'll stumble along, perhaps into oblivion.

Re: @ShelLuser

That was not the passed tents.

Re: it doesn't address that the ™ was granted

Actually it does in a round about way. As an earlier poster noted, you lose your trademark is you don't defend it. The intent is that King can't defend all the infringements, so when he next slaps a suite against someone, they can easily defend against it.

Re: Gotta love this

Trademarks have their place. If someone makes a superior product there should be some way for them to protect the product identifier so it can be easily distinguished in the market place. I've been on the end when someone when someone was obviously infringing on a trademark and service I helped create and which deserved protection.

The problem is that the politicians on both sides of the pond have rewritten the rules and destroyed the system in the process. King should not have been able to trademark or service mark "candy". I could perhaps see "candy crush", although I think it should be something more along the lines of "candy krush" to be eligible. He does have something of a point about the buzzword bingo on the infringing name - I don't think he missed any of the top selling game names in the mash up. The thing is, the search word biz is setup to encourage exactly that sort of gaming. So while I think it's kind of slimy, I don't think it rises to the level of lawsuit worthy. So more demerits for King than the guy he bitch slapped.

Re: I have no idea why some people down-voted

Because when the similarities are more important than the differences, we in the masses are tired of Jesuits like you producing the dog when the prosecution accuses someone of "killing two men and a dog".

Re: Color me unconvinced

By the time of the 386, Microsoft was already ubiquitous in the consumer computer market (you need to stay focused on the company, not the OS which at that time was MS-DOS not Windows). Apple had already relegated itself to a niche market. True at that point they weren't the server market, but back then that was still specialized hardware. But on what we now call the PC market, it was Microsoft all the way.

Not claiming this was a good thing. In fact I think it has stifled innovation. But it was the reality.

Re: Are you serious?

Smart TVs and other consumer electronics are essentially sub-cases of the mobile and netbook cases. Not a lot of computing power required relative to the requested task. PCs have always been the other way around, which is the case not proven.

The only way ARM works is if the mean for its chip production exceeds the power needed for the consumer PC. Maybe we are at that point and the non-standard architecture is the only roadblock. But I'm doubtful on this point.

Re: Color me unconvinced

Demand is ALWAYS end-user driven. If it was the other way around, the Itanium would have been a smashing success for Intel.

Maybe there is something new on the block and this decentralized model will start to work. But history doesn't look good for it.

Re: Improved password change security!

All operating systems can and in secure settings are configured to remember x number of previous passwords and prevent you from using them again. Whether the password is encrypted or they are just checking against a hash I don't know, but it's pretty much irrelevant. At my current work location I believe they are tracking the previous 24 for both network and email accounts. Damn thing remembers passwords I don't remember having used.

I understand the reason for the check and the absurdly high number of remembered passwords. Back when it remembered the last 5 passwords we had people who would change the password 6 times to get back to their original password. Personally I'd rather those idiots were throw into the Hell of the Upside Down Sinners.

Re: the change password dialogue

Hey, at least you could FIND the change password dialogue. I spent five minutes hunting for the damn thing when I logged into Yahoo!

Who the f*ck HIDES the change password dialogue? That's like keeping a doomsday device secret!

Re: Password complexity

I don't have a lot of trouble generating the passwords. Remembering them is a whole other story.

What I find more annoying is that some sites change the rules on what needs to be included, so my the passwords with that level of complexity which I routinely generate don't always work. Because some silly site (Yahoo!) won't allow you to use symbols in your password. The worst is WebEx where they have about 4 symbols that are allowed. So the resulting password is always complete jibberish. Also annoying in this story is that the third party is not named. They should be. I only use my Yahoo account for things I expect to be spammed on, so it isn't overly important to me. I did use the same password on a throwaway FB account just so I could keep track of the FB account pw. I don't actually care about the accounts per se. I just don't want them being used to hack other people.