You have to do that as part of the patent application process anyway!
If you're a lone gun with no money to pay lawyers, then sure. If you're at a company, as this guy is, and the company is smart, he doesn't do the research, the legal team does.
Now, if the legal team discovers that their company is, in fact, infringing on an existing patent, but they don't tell anyone else within the company, I don't know what happens. (i.e. does the infringement begin to be considered willful?) That's why I would consult a lawyer about matters like this.
prior art doesn't necessarily have to be patented.
Right. But if you're doing research on prior art and stumble upon an existing patent, you've immediately started willful infringement. Doing the research itself is risky.
Of course, so is getting legal advice from slashdot.
Tell boss the patent wont fly because of this prior art and you're saving the company $10k+
Smart.
If you find an existing patent that covers your company's product(s), and fail to license the patent from the patent-holder, your continuing infringement will constitute willful infringement. In which case the patent-holder is entitled to triple damages.
As others have said, consult a lawyer, not slashdot. Seriously.
P.S. Is the patent your boss wants for your company's only product or primary breadwinner? Because if so, and you find prior art, you will in effect force your company to license said prior art. In other words, you will force your company to buy into this system that you loathe.
Yup, just try clicking on a link in a Messenger conversation with or without Vista. You get IE, like it or not.
Likely this is just because a lazy programmer hardcoded it to run IE, rather than going through the proper API to figure out the user's browser preference and launch that.
Not a very nice thing to do? Sure. Intentionally malicious? Probably not.
[Microsoft's] strategy has therefore been to write software that requires more and more demanding hardware, not to offer enriched user experiences (as claimed) but rather as a rationalization for keeping costs up.
If a P3 500Mhz system was coded with the efficiency and elegance that prevailed on the Commodore 64, your OS and every application running would be so blazingly fast as to seem instantaneous...
Does Linux run as fast as you describe an OS would if its authors didn't have ulterior motives?
...we decided that we had to go with someone that would guarantee us editorial independence, and not create serious conflicts of interest by forcing us to favor some particular distribution.
Given your current Corporate Overlords (stock symbol LNUX, owners of linux.com etc.,) how do you feel about conflicts of interest?
...this article is tagged "things" (or at least it was when I viewed it). That may be the tag that conveys the least possible amount of information.
That's because the summary contains a typo that reads "things." Certainly the "typo" tag would be more informative, but whatever. Welcome to folksonomies. Emphasis mine:
Arlin Crotts now things that TLPs are something called 'outgassing'...
I wonder what your vested interest is... your lack of a meaningful response and indulging in mud-slinging appears very deceptive, and your motives - suspect.
I'm a Microsoft shill. They pay me a ton of money to post on/. because they know that maybe - just maybe - all it will take is one more post in their favor to convert the unfaithful.
Seriously? Come on dude. This entire story is more-of-the-same get-the-crowd-riled-up/. click-fodder. But if you want to make a show of it...
So an IBM employee is the best critic of a competing Microsoft product. Why is this hard to understand?
My post pointed out that the guy isn't objective. Then it proceeded to give an example of using the pejorative "parroting the party line" for merely stating a fact. That's it.
As for spreadsheet formats not being defined in ODF - it isn't a big deal, and the alliance seem to be working on the issue, in any case.
A lack of spreadsheet formats is a big deal if, for example, you want to create a spreadsheet.
I prefer to comment on stories and not my rhetorical technique, so I won't be watching for responses to this post. If you'd like to discuss it further, feel free to e-mail me at waltergr@aol.com.
coondoggie writes us with a link to the Network World site, as he tends to do.
(emphasis mine.) Interesting. First time for such meta-commentary by a slashdot editor? I don't think we ever saw the same for one of Roland Piquepaille's many submissions...
(Two guys exit a showing of the movie Minority Report.)
Guy: Mate, that film was brilliant! I reckon that interface'll be the interface of the future!
(Fast forward to 2099...)
Job interviewer, speaking to interviewee: I'm sorry ma'am. Your cognitive scores are incredible but you simply don't have the upper body strength to do this 8 hours a day.
If you're into usability and design, OK/Cancel is a great web comic to check out.
Indeed, but maybe you were making a different point to the one you thought.
I don't think so, but maybe I misunderstand your question... My point was that cell phones aren't the only cause of distraction; in fact children (and radios) cause more accidents than cell phones. At the end of my post I was recognizing that radios are more common than cell phones, hence their statistics may suggest that per cell phone use the likelihood of a crash is greater than that of radio (or child) use.
Instead of police officers needing to observe a cellphone in use, the system automatically detects a cell phone call and records which car was making the call.
The system should also automatically detect children in the car, and report those to the police. Or how about radios? That's easy - just report every car. From here:
Around 98 percent of reported accidents involve a single distracted driver concentrating not on the road, but rather on one of the following:
(snip)
Child/Passenger Distraction (9%)
Adjusting Radio/CD (7%)
Cell Phone (6%)
(Of course, I understand that radios in cars are far more common than cell phones. Was merely making a point.)
Anonymize? How do they plan to do that? AOL released "anonymized" search data - they replaced each unique user with a random numeric ID. And people were tracked down. Consider this New York Times article:
A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749
The number was assigned by the company to protect the searcher's anonymity, but it was not much of a shield. No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period...
And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for "landscapers in Lilburn, Ga," several people with the last name Arnold and "homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett county georgia."
It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold...
He was caught making a deal with a government informant that sent spam e-mails advertising a computer security program in return for 50 percent of the product's profits...
That's a weird sentence. Did the informant send spam e-mails (and hence is guilty of violating CAN-SPAM,) or did the guy get caught because he made a deal to send spam e-mails?
Do informants gets to break the law? I'm not sure how all that works...
Re:Here's where Cameron goes Berzerk.
on
Photosynth Demo
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Dude, did you watch the video? The acquisition the guy mentioned was the first part - the zoom in and out and pan around lots of images. That was the "meh" part.
The cool part... the part where they constructed a 3D model of Notre Dame by using only photos from Flickr, well the Photosynth page says where that came from: "Photosynth is a collaboration between Microsoft and the University of Washington based on the groundbreaking research of Noah Snavely (UW), Steve Seitz (UW), and Richard Szeliski (Microsoft Research)."
Excellent advice. It also bears mentioning that PageHeap will work when debugging programs written in languages other than C++. From the knowledgebase article:
Pageheap.exe is effective when used to verify any memory allocation process, including C++ style allocations new and delete, as long as the custom allocation/free functions eventually call into NT heap management interfaces (that is, RtlAllocateHeap, RtlFreeHeap).
(Emphasis mine.) For example, here's a bug report for something written in Delphi that crashes under pageheap.
Also, don't be tempted to use any of the following functions: IsBadWritePtr, IsBadHugeWritePtr, IsBadReadPtr, IsBadHugeReadPtr, IsBadCodePtr, IsBadStringPtr. Their use within Microsoft is deprecated as per MS's Secure Development Lifecycle. (Microsoft's resident security guru Michael Howard calls the *ReadPtr functions "CrashMyApplication" and the *WritePtr functions "CorruptMemoryAndCrashMySystem".:)
You can read about why these functions are bad on Larry Osterman's blog, and see more deprecated functions here.
you do not provide functions which can execute arbitrary programs.... This is the source of most of the vulnerabilities involving web browsing. Now we have Google competing to offer similar security holes.
Firefox offers the exact same mechanism. Firefox extensions can contain (and run) executable code. (See below.)
ActiveX = executable code + scripting from the web browser. Firefox extensions introduce the same risks as ActiveX.
Take for instance FoxyTunes, which is listed on the Recommended Add-ons page. Download the XPI file, rename it to ZIP. Open it in WinZip or whatever. You'll notice several files:
FoxyTunes.dll
FoxyTunes.dll.linux
FoxyTunes.dll.mac
FoxyTunesBonobo.so.file
DLL files are executable code on Windows. I'm assuming the *.linux and *.mac are similar. SO files are executable code under Linux, not sure why it has.file after it. I'm sure there are more extensions with executable code, that was just the first I looked at. Look for any extension that integrates with external software - almost always there will be a DLL or EXE.
Download the XPI file, rename it to ZIP. Open it in WinZip or whatever. You'll notice several files:
FoxyTunes.dll
FoxyTunes.dll.linux
FoxyTunes.dll.mac
FoxyTunesBonobo.so.file
DLL files are executable code on Windows. I'm assuming the *.linux and *.mac are similar. SO files are executable code under Linux, not sure why it has.file after it.
I'm sure there are more extensions with executable code, that was just the first I looked at. Look for any extension that integrates with external software - almost always there will be a DLL or EXE.
ActiveX = executable code + scripting from the web browser. Firefox extensions introduce the same risks as ActiveX.
(addons.mozilla.org is having problems right now, otherwise I'd point out some extensions that have.EXEs in them. I looked into it before and one extension that had them added support for 3rd party download managers - don't recall the name...)
Slashdot Mirror
Alright slashdot, I'm out.
As this month is your 11th anniversary, it's as good a time as any.
May your next 11 years be as technologically narrow-minded and dogmatic as your first.
If you're a lone gun with no money to pay lawyers, then sure. If you're at a company, as this guy is, and the company is smart, he doesn't do the research, the legal team does.
Now, if the legal team discovers that their company is, in fact, infringing on an existing patent, but they don't tell anyone else within the company, I don't know what happens. (i.e. does the infringement begin to be considered willful?) That's why I would consult a lawyer about matters like this.
Right. But if you're doing research on prior art and stumble upon an existing patent, you've immediately started willful infringement. Doing the research itself is risky.
Of course, so is getting legal advice from slashdot.
Smart.
If you find an existing patent that covers your company's product(s), and fail to license the patent from the patent-holder, your continuing infringement will constitute willful infringement. In which case the patent-holder is entitled to triple damages.
As others have said, consult a lawyer, not slashdot. Seriously.
P.S. Is the patent your boss wants for your company's only product or primary breadwinner? Because if so, and you find prior art, you will in effect force your company to license said prior art. In other words, you will force your company to buy into this system that you loathe.
Worse... grammar... ever.
Likely this is just because a lazy programmer hardcoded it to run IE, rather than going through the proper API to figure out the user's browser preference and launch that.
Not a very nice thing to do? Sure. Intentionally malicious? Probably not.
Xcode only runs on Mac OS X which only (legally) runs on Apple hardware. While Xcode is free, the cheapest Mac will set you back $599.
Does Linux run as fast as you describe an OS would if its authors didn't have ulterior motives?
And, in fact, was discussed here in June.
There was even a comment by one of thee engineers that worked on the first release Photosynth. He links to a couple videos about it.
No. Photosynth is a collaboration between the University of Washington and Microsoft Research. See here.
Given your current Corporate Overlords (stock symbol LNUX, owners of linux.com etc.,) how do you feel about conflicts of interest?
That's because the summary contains a typo that reads "things." Certainly the "typo" tag would be more informative, but whatever. Welcome to folksonomies. Emphasis mine:
I'm a Microsoft shill. They pay me a ton of money to post on /. because they know that maybe - just maybe - all it will take is one more post in their favor to convert the unfaithful.
Seriously? Come on dude. This entire story is more-of-the-same get-the-crowd-riled-up /. click-fodder. But if you want to make a show of it...
My post pointed out that the guy isn't objective. Then it proceeded to give an example of using the pejorative "parroting the party line" for merely stating a fact. That's it.
A lack of spreadsheet formats is a big deal if, for example, you want to create a spreadsheet.
I prefer to comment on stories and not my rhetorical technique, so I won't be watching for responses to this post. If you'd like to discuss it further, feel free to e-mail me at waltergr@aol.com.
Who is the author, Rob Weir?
So a guy working on a different document format, for a company who competes with Microsoft, has unkind words? Color me shocked.
Uh... ODF doesn't define spreadsheet formats. There's no standard for spreadsheets in ODF. How is that "parroting the party line?"
(emphasis mine.) Interesting. First time for such meta-commentary by a slashdot editor? I don't think we ever saw the same for one of Roland Piquepaille's many submissions...
Reminds me of this hilarious comic from OK/Cancel.
If you're into usability and design, OK/Cancel is a great web comic to check out.
The system should also automatically detect children in the car, and report those to the police. Or how about radios? That's easy - just report every car. From here:
(Of course, I understand that radios in cars are far more common than cell phones. Was merely making a point.)
Anonymize? How do they plan to do that? AOL released "anonymized" search data - they replaced each unique user with a random numeric ID. And people were tracked down. Consider this New York Times article:
From the Reuters article:
That's a weird sentence. Did the informant send spam e-mails (and hence is guilty of violating CAN-SPAM,) or did the guy get caught because he made a deal to send spam e-mails?
Do informants gets to break the law? I'm not sure how all that works...
Dude, did you watch the video? The acquisition the guy mentioned was the first part - the zoom in and out and pan around lots of images. That was the "meh" part.
The cool part... the part where they constructed a 3D model of Notre Dame by using only photos from Flickr, well the Photosynth page says where that came from: "Photosynth is a collaboration between Microsoft and the University of Washington based on the groundbreaking research of Noah Snavely (UW), Steve Seitz (UW), and Richard Szeliski (Microsoft Research)."
Excellent advice. It also bears mentioning that PageHeap will work when debugging programs written in languages other than C++. From the knowledgebase article:
(Emphasis mine.) For example, here's a bug report for something written in Delphi that crashes under pageheap.
Also, don't be tempted to use any of the following functions: IsBadWritePtr, IsBadHugeWritePtr, IsBadReadPtr, IsBadHugeReadPtr, IsBadCodePtr, IsBadStringPtr. Their use within Microsoft is deprecated as per MS's Secure Development Lifecycle. (Microsoft's resident security guru Michael Howard calls the *ReadPtr functions "CrashMyApplication" and the *WritePtr functions "CorruptMemoryAndCrashMySystem". :)
You can read about why these functions are bad on Larry Osterman's blog, and see more deprecated functions here.
Firefox offers the exact same mechanism. Firefox extensions can contain (and run) executable code. (See below.)
As the Greasemokey security vulnerability demonstrated, web pages can "script" Firefox extensions.
ActiveX = executable code + scripting from the web browser. Firefox extensions introduce the same risks as ActiveX.
Take for instance FoxyTunes, which is listed on the Recommended Add-ons page. Download the XPI file, rename it to ZIP. Open it in WinZip or whatever. You'll notice several files:
DLL files are executable code on Windows. I'm assuming the *.linux and *.mac are similar. SO files are executable code under Linux, not sure why it has .file after it. I'm sure there are more extensions with executable code, that was just the first I looked at. Look for any extension that integrates with external software - almost always there will be a DLL or EXE.
Ah, good. addons.mozilla.org seems to be responding again.
So check out FoxyTunes, which is listed on the Recommended Add-ons page.
Download the XPI file, rename it to ZIP. Open it in WinZip or whatever. You'll notice several files:
DLL files are executable code on Windows. I'm assuming the *.linux and *.mac are similar. SO files are executable code under Linux, not sure why it has .file after it.
I'm sure there are more extensions with executable code, that was just the first I looked at. Look for any extension that integrates with external software - almost always there will be a DLL or EXE.
Uh... not true at all. Firefox extensions can contain (and run) executable code.
As the Greasemokey security vulnerability demonstrated, web pages can "script" Firefox extensions.
ActiveX = executable code + scripting from the web browser. Firefox extensions introduce the same risks as ActiveX.
(addons.mozilla.org is having problems right now, otherwise I'd point out some extensions that have .EXEs in them. I looked into it before and one extension that had them added support for 3rd party download managers - don't recall the name...)