You mean \”fared\” instead of\” faired\”. Simple grammatical errors can undermine an otherwise good article.

-c

The other kind is a \”preliminary injunction\”. These are granted before the trial completes. It is preliminary injunctions your article is talking about. It is extremely rare to get a preliminary injunction in a patent case. Courts only grant them when all four of the following conditions hold.

1. The plaintiff has demonstrated a reasonable likelihood that they will prevail at trail.

2. The plaintiff will be *irreparably* harmed if the injunction is not granted.

3. The harm to the plaintiff outweighs the harm the injunction will inflict on the defendant.

4. The injunction serves the public interest.

There is no chance whatsoever Microsoft would have been able to get a preliminary injunction against TomTom, as any infringement from TomTom was not causing irreparable harm. All harm any infringement was causing was easily reparable by monetary damages.

The second inaccuracy is a failure to mention that TomTom was suing Microsoft over patents, too. We do not know which company was the aggressor in this case, since neither is talking. What is known is that they had been negotiating for something like a year over licensing each others patents, and the negotiations broke down. We don\’t know who first approached the other. After negotiations broke down, they both sued. Microsoft filed first, by about a month. A patent suit takes quite a bit longer than a month to prepare, so we can infer that TomTom was working on their filing before Microsoft filed, so we can\’t tell if Microsoft actually made the decision to sue first, or just had lawyers that got the paperwork together faster.

We do know that this is the first software patent lawsuit involving Microsoft as a plaintiff. (They\’ve been in the defendant\’s chair many times). We also know that TomTom\’s countersuit it is NOT the first time TomTom\’s been in court to enforce their patents. They\’ve sued Garmin and they\’ve sued some of Garmin\’s customers. Given that fact pattern, it is pretty hard to rule out the possibility that TomTom started the fight.

At any rate – more competition and exposure is most likely a good thing.

Cheers,
-c

So since there still some verbal fight between ubtuntu and debian they shoudl be cleared and a long term solution for cooperation and coexistence or a takeover by ubuntu…

Otherwise i see troubles comming for ubuntu .. anyone withme with that prgnosis ?

@bofh999, I think this a problem too, but probably not as big as first thought. Generally speaking, Debian and Ubuntu users are very different people. Although Ubuntu stole many Debian developers (well in all fairness, gave them a paid job) their relations are OK. But really, it probably doesn\’t matter. Debian is open source and Ubuntu can take it and do whatever they like. It would be nice to have a close working relationship, but Debian isn\’t going anywhere (and even if it did, they would probably go to Ubuntu rather than say, Fedora).

-c

since ubuntu still depends on debian i dont think its so easy..

ok developes might stay or change to ubuntu but a project this size not only depend on developers.

its a contruct between community/third party/integrators and so on and they interact on every level together.
the end (stable) product is a result of all these ……

so that developing\”ecosystem\” get disturb to much a change in the product will be the result (if its a bad or good change i cant judge here right now).

the issue is that ubuntu depend much on the result and here comes the danger i think..

dont get me wrong, im not hoping for such thing. since i complete dissagree with redhat in everything (beginning with the technical and ending with licenses) and debian is getting less and less an option (even if still use it on my important productive servers)

(btw i dont understand debian either. one one hand try to be ultra stable and thin but on the other hand so slow with real criticial updates on major packeges like, Xsql, apache, php, perl which make it vunurable and unstable/buggy sometimes)

so for my point of view ubuntu is in the moment the way to go.. but im afraid what happens if to many debians join this way too

PS: im not an native english speaker so if anyone find some gramatical errors you can keep them and invite them to dinner if you like :-)

So for my Point of view all those Spelling Rules are an Important Guide but at the End of the Day is much more important what is said and not how…

So the Point is dont be too much embarrased about small mistakes in the spelling itself as long your facts are without. And do not compare to real newspapers.. they have at least 2 more control stages bevore it goes to print and still you can find a lot of errors there too.

Humans cant be without errors,its not in our nature..

Funny how my Ubuntu desktop is \’serving\’ just fine, I got apache, mysql, php, perl, the whole nut working as if it were on a \”server\”, all on Ubuntu desktop. And I do not just install these components, I actually use them. Ubuntu seems to be a little more ahead of the curve on desktops than anyone else.

As to affecting Debian, well, the horses are out of the barn, so really, Ubuntu is really on its own momentum now. Debian can do whatever it wants, same for Ubuntu. They\’re both good, but I have to say, Ubuntu rocks!

But yes, RedHat. I have admin\’d countless RHEL servers for the dot-com. Legions of servers out there, many uncounted. RedHat should just add another million or two to the number of installations that they -don\’t- support yet are out there, serving up the web from the biggest dot-coms and satellite systems. It\’s really out there.

Ubuntu server compared to RHEL, well, Ubuntu server has a ways to go. I haven\’t been impressed with the Ubuntu server product at all, but maybe it\’s just me. The install needs more work, but I\’m sure if they put the same attention to the server that they put into the desktop they\’d have a rockin server. I\’m going to install 10.04 server in a VM and see if there\’s any new stuff to pay attention to.

I just installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS desktop on a couple of laptops, and I think this is \’the one\’ that will tip the distro in to the green light of \”acceptable enough to replace Windows\” for the desktop. The finished product is even better than the beta was. It\’s good enough to be a server no question, which is why I challenge the notion of desktop vs server.

Ubuntu 10.04 gets the checklist:

– Wireless networks. . Wireless works painlessly and flawlessly.

– Flash. . Needed a manual install but installed the plugin into Firefox painlessly and perfectly.

– Bluetoof. . Works flawlessly.

In order to beat Windows these three needed to work out of the box, and they did it! Windows days are numbered with this release.

Meanwhile…

I put RHEL 5.5 on my Ubuntu desktop at work under VMWare Workstation just to have a copy and to have my own reference install. RHEL is a good nuts and bolts Linux server, always seeming to lag a little on the installation, but good enough. Now that they are going with more VM support it should get really interesting.

RHEL\’s package management has improved drastically, getting better with yum, and farther and farther away from its ugly 1995 style and limited admin tools, to getting better GUI interfaces for admin-ing components. I think it\’s time they did away with LVM, it was good to have early on, but now with SANs, LVM is a bit unnecessary.

Anyway, I think RHEL 5.5 is pretty darn good, and things seem to be improving for the better.

To be realistic the TCO is way to high (still) and there are many small anoying bugs which are no problem for adavanced user but they are for standard \”secretary\”.

also theres still way not enough \”end user suiteable\” software for the daly office work,.. not to mention the private users with a lot more wishes…

dont get me wrong its a start in a good direction but far far far not a replacement except for some small enviroemnts with a small range of needs and a close support.

for specialist on the other hand its way better but only additional not as an replacement – i couldnt drive with ubuntu only no way for that .. sadly but it is how it is

I can tell you that at work we switched the secretary computer from Windows XP to Ubuntu 10.04, and solved a lot of problems. She isn\’t an expert user at all, but she already was used to Thunderbird, Firefox and OpenOffice, and felt this change just as her computer was becoming more stable.

I know that she doesn\’t call me any more speaking about troubles with her computer. Before this switch, she had problems with viruses, slow system, and windows updates that sometimes leaved the machine in an bad state. Every week I had to go there and check that computer.
Now it just works, and everything else is OK for our needs.

Maybe it\’s just a matter of different needs and different people.

good luck