Yeah, except unlike copyrights or trademarks, you can enforce a patent at will any time during it's lifetime. If all you have is a promise not to sue you for use of the patent, then you might as well forget it (Unisys had a policy for a long time that they wouldn't go after free software that made use of their LZW patent, but decided to change their tune when they decided they could make a cash grab on it). Besides, shouldn't IETF drafts be good enough for prior art claims?
The other thing to consider is the higher power output may have a higher chance of destroying the RFID tags rather than just reading them. If a RFID tag that expects no more than 1 mW, and gets 50 mW instead, there's likely a chance that the circuitry gets destroyed instead.
The ate_alloc function was in the ia64 arch. While I'm sure Intel will tell you that the Itanic is a hit, the fact is, far more people use the i386 arch version. Maybe the "benefit" I'm getting from that is it consuming sectors on my hard drive!
This interview with Chris Sontag in Byte Magazine, most likely.
"But what about BSD?" I asked. Sontag responded that there "could be issues with the [BSD] settlement agreement," adding that Berkeley may not have lived up to all of its commitments under the settlement.
"So you want royalties from FreeBSD as well?" I asked. Sontag responded that "there may or may not be issues. We believe that UNIX System V provided the basic building blocks for all subsequent computer operating systems, and that they all tend to be derived from UNIX System V (and therefore are claimed as SCO's intellectual property)."
SCO basically believes they own every OS ever written and that ever will be written.
Plus, for that $19 you get more than just the movie. You also get any extras the movie studio can come up with like deleted scenes, commentary (which I personally hate), the making of, original theatrical trailers, etc. All of this provides some significant benefit over just downloading a rip of the movie instead. The only extra "feature" the recording industry seems to want to put on their discs is copy protection to prevent me from listening to it while using my computer.
SCO hasn't even singled it down to the kernel either. They say Linux in the same way they use UnixWare -- as a complete system. The Linux kernel is only 5.5 million lines or 1.3 if you exclude drivers and archs other than i386. That's an awfully small number of lines to complain that millions of lines of code have been copied from SCO UNIX. In fact, there's only 1,020,550 lines different between 2.2.25 and 2.4.22 (389,236 excluding drivers, docs, and archs other than i386), and between 2.2.25 and 2.6.0-test6, there are only 1102198 lines different (480,500 when trimmed as above). 2.4 and 2.6 have millions of lines of offending code, yet Linux 2.2 is clean? Bullshit.
Note: I generated these numbers using "diff -rdbE kernel1 kernel2 | grep "\>" | wc", so if a file just moved, it was counted a changed lines.
Because, like most companies (and individuals), SGI doesn't like being involved with lawsuits unless it has no other choice. They're damaging financially and publicly, even if you win. SGI is also proving that they're willing to try to remedy any "harm" that has come to SCO before going to court for it. SGI can show that they tried to fix it, but can't really be faulted if SCO is foaming at the mouth and cannot be reasoned with.
Most IBM and HPaq server systems I've seen use a custom Pheonix BIOS. Of course, maybe HPaq uses the Compaq BIOS instead these days.
IBM, who was indeed first on the block with a TCPA implementation, as also first on the block with a tutorial with how to encrypt your drive on your laptop in Linux with it.
I'm sure they studied it extensively. They studied how much money they can charge for advertising. They studied how many people would buy advertising on that service. They studied how many invalid domain look-ups happen daily. They studied how much power such a server would need to handle that kind of load. They even studied how much money they could make from this 'service'. I'm certain they even studied their contract to make sure they had some weasel room in case ICANN sued them.
Yes, it does bounce, and (currently) the body of the message never makes it to verisign. The broken MTA running on sitefinder rejects any and all recipients with a 550 error. However, Verisign can change this at any time, so it's not exactly conforting (but it's still no reason to state things that aren't currently true). One thing you CAN complain about is it increases the amount of traffic to successfully bounce an e-mail. Verisign could also use it to harvest email addresses if they ever wanted to break into the spamming business (wouldn't put it past them).
220 sitefinder.verisign.com VeriSign mail rejector (Postfix)
HELO dsnjkas
250 OK
MAIL FROM: <sdnjkas@com.com>
250 Ok
RCPT TO: <sdnjkasd@sdnfjkasd.com>
550 <unknown[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]>: Client host rejected: The domain you are trying
to send mail to does not exist.
Things fall down when there are no repercussions to actions. When the power fails regularily, because the grid was oversold, and no one is to blame, what then? Regulation is supposed to be the answer to that. By forcing the companies that hold a monopoly to obey certain rules, it is believed that the public can be spared by harm caused by companies that wish to do only what is required, and skimp on proper maintainance, and making sure they have enough surplus power to handle a sudden spike in usage. Because a company in Ohio decided that being cheap was more important that reliability, they managed to pull down the entire grid in the eastern US, and southern Ontario.
Any time that a company is given a monopoly over a certain resource, regulation is needed to make sure they use the public resource consistent with the public interest. Then again, I come from Manitoba, where Manitoba Hydro is a crown corporation (government held), makes heaps of money, and sells a lot of power to the US. We often have minor power failures (a few seconds each) during thunderstorms, but otherwise the power is stable. Power is dirt cheap (5.16 cents per kW.h over 175kW.h), and available Manitoba wide (even the far north town of Churchill). MB Hydro makes so much money for the gov't, I doubt we'd ever see it privatized or deregulated.
Except if MS is right, they only have to give 2/3 of the remainder of the settlement to the schools. Some of the "think of the children" pleading in the letter is a little shallow after that bit of information. Now, I feel that lindows.com trying to cash in on this is more than a little sleazy.
Even more to the point, back when all fax machines used thermal paper, it was EXPENSIVE to recieve junk faxes. Thermal paper rolls for those machines cost a lot, so the cost of junk faxes quickly added up. These days with inkjet and laser printer fax machines becoming more common, the cost is reduced, but still there.
Even on a fairly crappy TV, you can see the different between something encoded 320x240 (even with lossless compression) versus broadcast TV. Even if we start with the fact that NTSC televisions show 525 interlaced lines at 60Hz (of which, about 470-490 tend to be visible). Horizontal resolution is trickier since TVs are analogue, but it's fairly safe to say that it's more than 320 pixels wide. On some TVs, you can see the difference between 500, 600, and 700 pixels per line, others appear roughly indistinguishable.
Now, perhaps you're confused because of the fact most gaming consoles in the past never output more than about 320x240. However, the difference was, many of them could output images at 60 frames per second, whereas TV broadcasts are only 30 frames per second. The console games were able to treat each field as a frame, which is why if you try hooking them up to a TV tuner card that can only do 320x240@30fps, you end up with things that should be blinking that are either solid, or invisible -- the card is discarding what would be the second field.
While it is possible to have an ABI that is common across operating systems on the same CPU architecture, it is impossible to have the same ABI across CPU architectures.
Not entirely. Things like Java bytecode and.NET CLR are ABIs that are portable across CPU architectures, and even OS's. Both of them, however, severely limit what forms of access you have to the machine. Writing a driver in either of them would likely be nearly impossible (if not completely impossible on some types of systems).
The other problem is, even as simply an API, the POSIX specification leaves quite a few things up to the implementor. A function may do the same type of task on two different platforms, but perform it differently enough that a program written for one fails on the other. There are numerous combinations of parameters that have undefined meanings according to POSIX, and they may work just fine on some platforms, and completely bomb on others. In fact, Linux 2.6 changed some of this 'undefined' behaviour compared to 2.4, and broke some stuff (it had to do with combinations of O_TRUNC and O_RDONLY in open() calls). Things like this can be a bigger problem than even ABIs.
Actually, I believe you are still responsible for paying your provincial sales tax on purchases you make from out of province/country. Of course, no one ever does, and no one ever checks for it, but still. The only exception that I know of is automobiles. Anyone who tries to register a car or truck in Manitoba must pay sales tax on it first (side effect of having public insurance), regardless of if it's a private sale or not.
No, it's also hated because it's unsolicitied. Even if I was in the market for all the things I get spam about, I still wouldn't want to recieve it at work. I generally have far more tolerance for receiving mail from companies I have either dealt with in the past or are currently dealing with. However, I ONLY expect to be contacted by them, not by their partners, affiliates, or anyone else they may have a financial arrangement with.
Okay, fine. I was stating an OPINION and personal OBSERVATION from back when I actually cared enough to try and report spam. I'm sorry I offended you by not explicitly stating this.
Telemarketer dialers don't exist only to weed out answering machines, bad numbers, etc, they also exist to maximize the time the telemarketer spends on the phone with the mark. A low proportion of them end up hung up on because of this (maybe only 1 in 10 or 20), but it does happen, and the cost of the call is less than the cost of the telemarketer spending waiting for someone to pick up the phone. Look at it this way, maybe a call only costs $0.05 to make, but it would take $0.08 for a telemarketer making $5/hr for 1 minute of waiting. Losing $0.05 on 1/20 of calls is an acceptable loss instead of losing more on telemarketers waiting for someone to pick up.
Actually, resources are being wasted. Most telemarketers use predictive dialing, which means the company dials up your number, because it is predicted that a representative will be available soon. They were prohibited from allowing a machine answer, so if a representative is not available by the time you pick up your phone, the machine hangs up.
BTW, no one is forcing you to listen to a telemarket call. At any time you can hang up, or not even answer your phone to begin with. Also, while resources are being they are not being wasted. The telemarketing company is paying someone to make that call to your phone number.
Yes, it's true, I don't have to listen to the call, and yes, I can hang up on them, but not answer the call; how would I do that? Many telemarketer calls come in with the caller ID saying "BLOCKED NUMBER" or "UNKNOWN NUMBER". How do I know if that's a telemarketer? It could be from somewhere rural where caller ID is not supported, or from a business I've dealt with that is in a similar situation. The DMA is opposed to anything that would restrict their businesses, and I'm sure some jobs would be lost in that industry. Or maybe they'll just find they can harass people twice as often now...
"Theft of services" is an interesting phrase, and probably not a legal phrase. I can envision a scenario where one could steal a service (mostly just taking off without paying), but in this case, you're depriving a business income after recieving a service that required the business to pay an employee to directly provide to you. In a case like this, the business is honestly out a certain number of dollars (the wage of the employee involved).
Copying copyrighted works is different, however. When a copy is illegally made from one of those works, it doesn't directly cost the owner of the work money. The only thing that gives the owner of the work rights over it, is copyright law, a limited monopoly over it's duplication and distribution. Hence, the label copyright infringement is applied to such acts because theft does not correctly apply to them. Yes, I'm arguing over semantics, but it's not uninportant semantics.
As I understood it, some of these "copy protection" technologies relied on incorrect ECC/EDC data on the disc, and computer systems would apply the 'correction', and corrupt the data, or simply return an error while ripping. Most consumer CD equipment, on the other hand, would ignore the invalid correction data, and just play the raw data. Then again, there was also invalid TOC entry tricks by other manufacturers, trying to confuse the computer/CD player into thinking there were no audio tracks on the disc, only data.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, except unlike copyrights or trademarks, you can enforce a patent at will any time during it's lifetime. If all you have is a promise not to sue you for use of the patent, then you might as well forget it (Unisys had a policy for a long time that they wouldn't go after free software that made use of their LZW patent, but decided to change their tune when they decided they could make a cash grab on it). Besides, shouldn't IETF drafts be good enough for prior art claims?
The other thing to consider is the higher power output may have a higher chance of destroying the RFID tags rather than just reading them. If a RFID tag that expects no more than 1 mW, and gets 50 mW instead, there's likely a chance that the circuitry gets destroyed instead.
Can you acess 911 from your cable modem? Even with VoIP?
The ate_alloc function was in the ia64 arch. While I'm sure Intel will tell you that the Itanic is a hit, the fact is, far more people use the i386 arch version. Maybe the "benefit" I'm getting from that is it consuming sectors on my hard drive!
This interview with Chris Sontag in Byte Magazine, most likely.
SCO basically believes they own every OS ever written and that ever will be written.
Plus, for that $19 you get more than just the movie. You also get any extras the movie studio can come up with like deleted scenes, commentary (which I personally hate), the making of, original theatrical trailers, etc. All of this provides some significant benefit over just downloading a rip of the movie instead. The only extra "feature" the recording industry seems to want to put on their discs is copy protection to prevent me from listening to it while using my computer.
Note: I generated these numbers using "diff -rdbE kernel1 kernel2 | grep "\>" | wc", so if a file just moved, it was counted a changed lines.
Because, like most companies (and individuals), SGI doesn't like being involved with lawsuits unless it has no other choice. They're damaging financially and publicly, even if you win. SGI is also proving that they're willing to try to remedy any "harm" that has come to SCO before going to court for it. SGI can show that they tried to fix it, but can't really be faulted if SCO is foaming at the mouth and cannot be reasoned with.
IBM, who was indeed first on the block with a TCPA implementation, as also first on the block with a tutorial with how to encrypt your drive on your laptop in Linux with it.
I thought that was obvious... *shrug* I guess I'll need to spell these things out next time.
I'm sure they studied it extensively. They studied how much money they can charge for advertising. They studied how many people would buy advertising on that service. They studied how many invalid domain look-ups happen daily. They studied how much power such a server would need to handle that kind of load. They even studied how much money they could make from this 'service'. I'm certain they even studied their contract to make sure they had some weasel room in case ICANN sued them.
220 sitefinder.verisign.com VeriSign mail rejector (Postfix)
HELO dsnjkas
250 OK
MAIL FROM: <sdnjkas@com.com>
250 Ok
RCPT TO: <sdnjkasd@sdnfjkasd.com>
550 <unknown[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]>: Client host rejected: The domain you are trying to send mail to does not exist.
Any time that a company is given a monopoly over a certain resource, regulation is needed to make sure they use the public resource consistent with the public interest. Then again, I come from Manitoba, where Manitoba Hydro is a crown corporation (government held), makes heaps of money, and sells a lot of power to the US. We often have minor power failures (a few seconds each) during thunderstorms, but otherwise the power is stable. Power is dirt cheap (5.16 cents per kW.h over 175kW.h), and available Manitoba wide (even the far north town of Churchill). MB Hydro makes so much money for the gov't, I doubt we'd ever see it privatized or deregulated.
Except if MS is right, they only have to give 2/3 of the remainder of the settlement to the schools. Some of the "think of the children" pleading in the letter is a little shallow after that bit of information. Now, I feel that lindows.com trying to cash in on this is more than a little sleazy.
Even more to the point, back when all fax machines used thermal paper, it was EXPENSIVE to recieve junk faxes. Thermal paper rolls for those machines cost a lot, so the cost of junk faxes quickly added up. These days with inkjet and laser printer fax machines becoming more common, the cost is reduced, but still there.
Now, perhaps you're confused because of the fact most gaming consoles in the past never output more than about 320x240. However, the difference was, many of them could output images at 60 frames per second, whereas TV broadcasts are only 30 frames per second. The console games were able to treat each field as a frame, which is why if you try hooking them up to a TV tuner card that can only do 320x240@30fps, you end up with things that should be blinking that are either solid, or invisible -- the card is discarding what would be the second field.
Not entirely. Things like Java bytecode and .NET CLR are ABIs that are portable across CPU architectures, and even OS's. Both of them, however, severely limit what forms of access you have to the machine. Writing a driver in either of them would likely be nearly impossible (if not completely impossible on some types of systems).
The other problem is, even as simply an API, the POSIX specification leaves quite a few things up to the implementor. A function may do the same type of task on two different platforms, but perform it differently enough that a program written for one fails on the other. There are numerous combinations of parameters that have undefined meanings according to POSIX, and they may work just fine on some platforms, and completely bomb on others. In fact, Linux 2.6 changed some of this 'undefined' behaviour compared to 2.4, and broke some stuff (it had to do with combinations of O_TRUNC and O_RDONLY in open() calls). Things like this can be a bigger problem than even ABIs.
Actually, I believe you are still responsible for paying your provincial sales tax on purchases you make from out of province/country. Of course, no one ever does, and no one ever checks for it, but still. The only exception that I know of is automobiles. Anyone who tries to register a car or truck in Manitoba must pay sales tax on it first (side effect of having public insurance), regardless of if it's a private sale or not.
No, it's also hated because it's unsolicitied. Even if I was in the market for all the things I get spam about, I still wouldn't want to recieve it at work. I generally have far more tolerance for receiving mail from companies I have either dealt with in the past or are currently dealing with. However, I ONLY expect to be contacted by them, not by their partners, affiliates, or anyone else they may have a financial arrangement with.
Okay, fine. I was stating an OPINION and personal OBSERVATION from back when I actually cared enough to try and report spam. I'm sorry I offended you by not explicitly stating this.
Telemarketer dialers don't exist only to weed out answering machines, bad numbers, etc, they also exist to maximize the time the telemarketer spends on the phone with the mark. A low proportion of them end up hung up on because of this (maybe only 1 in 10 or 20), but it does happen, and the cost of the call is less than the cost of the telemarketer spending waiting for someone to pick up the phone. Look at it this way, maybe a call only costs $0.05 to make, but it would take $0.08 for a telemarketer making $5/hr for 1 minute of waiting. Losing $0.05 on 1/20 of calls is an acceptable loss instead of losing more on telemarketers waiting for someone to pick up.
Actually, resources are being wasted. Most telemarketers use predictive dialing, which means the company dials up your number, because it is predicted that a representative will be available soon. They were prohibited from allowing a machine answer, so if a representative is not available by the time you pick up your phone, the machine hangs up.
Yes, it's true, I don't have to listen to the call, and yes, I can hang up on them, but not answer the call; how would I do that? Many telemarketer calls come in with the caller ID saying "BLOCKED NUMBER" or "UNKNOWN NUMBER". How do I know if that's a telemarketer? It could be from somewhere rural where caller ID is not supported, or from a business I've dealt with that is in a similar situation. The DMA is opposed to anything that would restrict their businesses, and I'm sure some jobs would be lost in that industry. Or maybe they'll just find they can harass people twice as often now...A lot of spam goes through servers overseas (open SMTP relays), but still originates in the US (or the ever popular Nigeria).
Copying copyrighted works is different, however. When a copy is illegally made from one of those works, it doesn't directly cost the owner of the work money. The only thing that gives the owner of the work rights over it, is copyright law, a limited monopoly over it's duplication and distribution. Hence, the label copyright infringement is applied to such acts because theft does not correctly apply to them. Yes, I'm arguing over semantics, but it's not uninportant semantics.
As I understood it, some of these "copy protection" technologies relied on incorrect ECC/EDC data on the disc, and computer systems would apply the 'correction', and corrupt the data, or simply return an error while ripping. Most consumer CD equipment, on the other hand, would ignore the invalid correction data, and just play the raw data. Then again, there was also invalid TOC entry tricks by other manufacturers, trying to confuse the computer/CD player into thinking there were no audio tracks on the disc, only data.