The minutiae of implementation are exactly what patents are about. You can't patent a concept (e.g., snapshotting of metadata); you can patent the inventive steps involved in implementing that concept.
The gas giants are more massive, but also much further away. Saturn is 95x more massive than the Earth, but it's 9.5x further away from the Sun, so its tug on the Sun (mass/distance^2) is only marginally more than the Earth's -- and is less than that of Venus, which is 0.8 Earth masses but only 0.72 AU away from the Sun.
An astronomer from 55 Cancri would probably detect Jupiter (mass/distance^2 = 11.7 Earths/AU^2), Venus (1.56 Earths/AU^2), Saturn (1.04), Earth (1.00), and possibly Mercury (0.367), while Mars (0.046), Uranus (0.039), and Neptune (0.019) would almost certainly go unnoticed.
Maybe patent applications should be examined by qualified people to see if they can be implimented using only the information supplied in the application together with that already in the public domain.
Most of the problems with the patent system right now can be traced to the fact that patent examiners neither have enough time nor the qualifications necessary to make such determinations -- the days when the likes of Einstein worked for the Patent Office are long past. However, this is a reason to recruit more and better patent examiners (and in particular more in the area of computing), not to throw out the entire system.
WAFL is closed source and ZFS is open. So someone has to explain exactly how Sun expected to get away with "copying".
The design of WAFL has been extensively published. I'm sure that ZFS doesn't have any code directly copied from WAFL; but the ideas do seem to be extensively copied.
I disagree completely: This is why we need to keep software patents. NetApp did something innovative with WAFL; Sun then came along, reimplemented everything, and called it ZFS.
Remember, "innovation" means "doing something new" -- not "copying what someone else has done". There are certainly implementational issues with the patent system as it currently exists, but in principle the patent system is all about protecting people who do something new from corporations (like Sun or Microsoft) who just reimplement without adding anything new.
Amazon recently announced that S3 had more than 10 billion objects stored, and a transaction rate which suggests that S3 is doing many Gbps of traffic. Unless you have very deep pockets, odds are that S3 can handle more requests than you can pay for.
I didn't say that HTTP servers could take advantage of the fact that gzip is a streaming compressor -- I said that HTTP clients could take advantage of that. Even if the server generates the entire compressed response before it starts to send anything back to the client, using a streaming compression format allows the client to overlap HTML parsing with the portion of download time which results from having finite bandwidth.
Unlike bzip2, gzip is a streaming compression format; so the web browser can start parsing the first part of a page while the rest is still being downloaded.
If chroot didn't require root privileges, the following exploit would be possible:
1. Create ~/etc/master.passwd with an empty root password. 2. Hard link/usr/bin/su to ~/usr/bin/su. (Yes, you can create hard links to files which you don't own.) 3. Copy/bin/sh,/bin/chmod, and the necessary libraries to the corresponding places under ~. 4. chroot ~/usr/bin/su root/bin/chmod 4555/bin/sh 5. ~/bin/sh is now an unrestricted root shell.
Coding is a bit like sex. It's only satisfying when you do it for the joy of creating code, not if money's all that matters to you.
Also, it's very easy to make a mistake which you don't discover until several months later, but which you end up having to support for the next two decades.
Would it be better (or faster) to apply for a job and try to get a visa that way? I've seen hundreds of job ads for positions I'd be qualified to fill.
Apply for a job, but be prepared to not get it. Canadian law says (approximately) that a job can only be given to someone from outside of Canada if the employer has tried and failed to find a qualified Canadian. Fortunately this is applied rather vaguely; it's quite common that when an employer decides that they want to hire someone from outside of Canada, they (a) decide that they didn't need to fill the position which they were originally advertising, and (b) invent a new position which they need to fill, which has astonishingly specific requirements.
In short, you need to convince a company that they want to hire you; not necessarily that you should be hired for a particular job which they're advertising.
If location didn't matter, then they'd offshore to the cheaper 3rd-world.
Unlike most third-world countries, Canada is (a) in the same time zones as the USA, (b) close enough that workers can easily fly in for meetings, and (c) has a population which speaks English fluently (except for some regions of Quebec).
Why would Canadians want to work in the US when the wage differences are negligable? Sure, there might be a few, but 3rd world workers really want the big cost-of-living differential.
You misunderstand. Workers who can't get US visas could work for the same company in Canada instead -- if the company has offices in Canada.
And in Waterloo, if you happen to be a wireless developer (gee, I wonder why Google is hiring wireless developers in RIM's home town?). But judging by the jobs on offer, it seems like Google's Canadian offices are small and mostly sales and marketing, not anything really technical or related to Google's core operations.
"Open offices in Canada, where a skilled worker who can speak English and has a job offer is practically guaranteed a visa."
Guaranteed a visa "maybe", but not a job related to their profession. Like many others in Canada, I've had my share of chats with PhDs driving cabs.
If you have a job offer related to your profession, then you are indeed guaranteed a job related to your profession. If you come to Canada on the basis of a job offer for a job which you don't want, well, you get what you deserve.
There are absolutely highly skilled immigrants who are not able to get jobs which utilize their skills; but they are generally those who entered Canada as refugees or were sponsored by family members, not those who entered the country with a job offer.
There's a simple solution to the H-1B visa problem: Open offices in Canada, where a skilled worker who can speak English and has a job offer is practically guaranteed a visa. Vancouver in the same time zone as Silicon Valley, only a 2 hour flight away, and has a lower cost of living than any large city on the US west coast. Add to that two great universities, a moderate climate, and some of the best skiing in the world, in addition to all the usual amenities of a large city, and it's no surprise that Vancouver is routinely rated as one of the best places to live in the world. What are allyouguys waiting for?
(This post brought to you by I-want-a-job-and-don't-want-to-move-to-California. )
That AppleWorks outsold 1-2-3 should not have been much of a surprise, because it was much cheaper, and because Apple dealers frequently included in it attractively-priced bundles.
This qualifies AppleWorks as being one of the most distributed pieces of software, but doesn't really qualify it as being one of the most sold pieces of software. For something to be "sold", it must be "bought"; and for something to be "bought", there must be a deliberate action ("hey, I want that"), not just a grudging acceptance ("in order to get X, which I want, I have to agree to have Y and Z, which are utterly useless garbage").
I would love to know what 'excuse' Archive.org gave for removing such essential internet history information. It seems to be there reason for existence.
The people who run archive.org aren't immune from copyright law. The legality of their archive is questionable at best, but if the copyright owner for some documents or web sites asks that they be removed, the legality is no longer questionable.
Slashdot Mirror
The minutiae of implementation are exactly what patents are about. You can't patent a concept (e.g., snapshotting of metadata); you can patent the inventive steps involved in implementing that concept.
The gas giants are more massive, but also much further away. Saturn is 95x more massive than the Earth, but it's 9.5x further away from the Sun, so its tug on the Sun (mass/distance^2) is only marginally more than the Earth's -- and is less than that of Venus, which is 0.8 Earth masses but only 0.72 AU away from the Sun.
An astronomer from 55 Cancri would probably detect Jupiter (mass/distance^2 = 11.7 Earths/AU^2), Venus (1.56 Earths/AU^2), Saturn (1.04), Earth (1.00), and possibly Mercury (0.367), while Mars (0.046), Uranus (0.039), and Neptune (0.019) would almost certainly go unnoticed.
Maybe patent applications should be examined by qualified people to see if they can be implimented using only the information supplied in the application together with that already in the public domain.
There's no maybe about this. As part of a patent application, "the specification must include a written description of the invention and of the manner and process of making and using it, and is required to be in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the technological area to which the invention pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same"; and patent examiners are responsible for determining if a patent application meets this requirement.
Most of the problems with the patent system right now can be traced to the fact that patent examiners neither have enough time nor the qualifications necessary to make such determinations -- the days when the likes of Einstein worked for the Patent Office are long past. However, this is a reason to recruit more and better patent examiners (and in particular more in the area of computing), not to throw out the entire system.
WAFL is closed source and ZFS is open. So someone has to explain exactly how Sun expected to get away with "copying".
The design of WAFL has been extensively published. I'm sure that ZFS doesn't have any code directly copied from WAFL; but the ideas do seem to be extensively copied.
I disagree completely: This is why we need to keep software patents. NetApp did something innovative with WAFL; Sun then came along, reimplemented everything, and called it ZFS.
Remember, "innovation" means "doing something new" -- not "copying what someone else has done". There are certainly implementational issues with the patent system as it currently exists, but in principle the patent system is all about protecting people who do something new from corporations (like Sun or Microsoft) who just reimplement without adding anything new.
Amazon recently announced that S3 had more than 10 billion objects stored, and a transaction rate which suggests that S3 is doing many Gbps of traffic. Unless you have very deep pockets, odds are that S3 can handle more requests than you can pay for.
I didn't say that HTTP servers could take advantage of the fact that gzip is a streaming compressor -- I said that HTTP clients could take advantage of that. Even if the server generates the entire compressed response before it starts to send anything back to the client, using a streaming compression format allows the client to overlap HTML parsing with the portion of download time which results from having finite bandwidth.
Unlike bzip2, gzip is a streaming compression format; so the web browser can start parsing the first part of a page while the rest is still being downloaded.
If chroot didn't require root privileges, the following exploit would be possible:
/usr/bin/su to ~/usr/bin/su. (Yes, you can create hard links to files which you don't own.) /bin/sh, /bin/chmod, and the necessary libraries to the corresponding places under ~. /usr/bin/su root /bin/chmod 4555 /bin/sh
1. Create ~/etc/master.passwd with an empty root password.
2. Hard link
3. Copy
4. chroot ~
5. ~/bin/sh is now an unrestricted root shell.
The private exponent is of length O(N), while the public exponent is of length O(1).
Encryption/decryption grows linearly in the length of the key
No. With classical algorithms, RSA encryption and signature verification are O(n^2), while RSA decryption and signing are O(n^3).
and cracking is [considered] exponential in the length of the key
No. All modern factorization algorithms are subexponential; this is why a 1024 bit RSA key is roughly as secure as an 80 bit symmetric encryption key.
[Gdrive] is apparently no longer a rumor.
I think you mean "Gdrive has been rumoured for the past year to no longer be just a rumour". There's no announcement or even confirmation from Google.
Greg K-H ... admits that the January offer was a bit of "marketing hype"
Translation from marketing-speak to English: "Greg K-H was lying, knew that he was lying, doesn't feel bad about it, and will do it again".
This doesn't help the reputation of open source software at all.
For example not teaching children proper algorithms for basic multiplication...
Have fast fourier transforms ever been taught in elementary school?
Coding is a bit like sex. It's only satisfying when you do it for the joy of creating code, not if money's all that matters to you.
Also, it's very easy to make a mistake which you don't discover until several months later, but which you end up having to support for the next two decades.
Would it be better (or faster) to apply for a job and try to get a visa that way? I've seen hundreds of job ads for positions I'd be qualified to fill.
Apply for a job, but be prepared to not get it. Canadian law says (approximately) that a job can only be given to someone from outside of Canada if the employer has tried and failed to find a qualified Canadian. Fortunately this is applied rather vaguely; it's quite common that when an employer decides that they want to hire someone from outside of Canada, they (a) decide that they didn't need to fill the position which they were originally advertising, and (b) invent a new position which they need to fill, which has astonishingly specific requirements.
In short, you need to convince a company that they want to hire you; not necessarily that you should be hired for a particular job which they're advertising.
If location didn't matter, then they'd offshore to the cheaper 3rd-world.
Unlike most third-world countries, Canada is (a) in the same time zones as the USA, (b) close enough that workers can easily fly in for meetings, and (c) has a population which speaks English fluently (except for some regions of Quebec).
It's always nice being able to see the mountains from your window
It's also nice to be able to see trees -- by which I mean forests of 50m tall Cedars, Hemlocks, and Douglas firs, not puny 3m high shrubbery.
Why would Canadians want to work in the US when the wage differences are negligable? Sure, there might be a few, but 3rd world workers really want the big cost-of-living differential.
You misunderstand. Workers who can't get US visas could work for the same company in Canada instead -- if the company has offices in Canada.
Google has offices in Toronto and Montreal.
And in Waterloo, if you happen to be a wireless developer (gee, I wonder why Google is hiring wireless developers in RIM's home town?). But judging by the jobs on offer, it seems like Google's Canadian offices are small and mostly sales and marketing, not anything really technical or related to Google's core operations.
If you have a job offer related to your profession, then you are indeed guaranteed a job related to your profession. If you come to Canada on the basis of a job offer for a job which you don't want, well, you get what you deserve.
There are absolutely highly skilled immigrants who are not able to get jobs which utilize their skills; but they are generally those who entered Canada as refugees or were sponsored by family members, not those who entered the country with a job offer.
There's a simple solution to the H-1B visa problem: Open offices in Canada, where a skilled worker who can speak English and has a job offer is practically guaranteed a visa. Vancouver in the same time zone as Silicon Valley, only a 2 hour flight away, and has a lower cost of living than any large city on the US west coast. Add to that two great universities, a moderate climate, and some of the best skiing in the world, in addition to all the usual amenities of a large city, and it's no surprise that Vancouver is routinely rated as one of the best places to live in the world. What are all you guys waiting for?
. )
(This post brought to you by I-want-a-job-and-don't-want-to-move-to-California
That AppleWorks outsold 1-2-3 should not have been much of a surprise, because it was much cheaper, and because Apple dealers frequently included in it attractively-priced bundles.
This qualifies AppleWorks as being one of the most distributed pieces of software, but doesn't really qualify it as being one of the most sold pieces of software. For something to be "sold", it must be "bought"; and for something to be "bought", there must be a deliberate action ("hey, I want that"), not just a grudging acceptance ("in order to get X, which I want, I have to agree to have Y and Z, which are utterly useless garbage").
Sounds like someone wrote this writeup while in a meeting...
Not at all. The title is a very creative interpretation of the story.
I would love to know what 'excuse' Archive.org gave for removing such essential internet history information. It seems to be there reason for existence.
The people who run archive.org aren't immune from copyright law. The legality of their archive is questionable at best, but if the copyright owner for some documents or web sites asks that they be removed, the legality is no longer questionable.