You didn't read the article. It said clearly that unique machine identifier information is embedded in every color copier/printer (at least for Xerox) and they get several requests a week for traceback information from the government.
If I thought that the U.S. were involved in a war I didn't approve of, I'd be proud to use morphing or any other means neccesary to end, cripple, or otherwise harm U.S. military interests in the affair.
Assuming for a moment that you are American, I find it fascinating how Americans on the fringe often castigate the US for all of its misdoings, without stopping to realize that the very fact they are allowed to publically object is the strongest argument for the greatness of the country.
I am by no means a knee-jerk "patriot", but I cannot imagine sabotaging the forces of my very own country. There will be a time when we will not be the bully of the world, and a time when we will appreciate what we have. I recognize our leaders do things for often corrupt reasons, but there are still our fellow countrymen out there dying somewhere.
According to the Phish trading policy, all online archives of shows that are available for resale must be removed from the archives. So, while you can still trade for a "hardcopy" (i.e CD, tape) of the show, you will not be able to get an MP3 legally except from emusic.
That being said, $14.99 is not a bad price for a great show.
A Sun E10000, the company's hot-selling high-end computer, with 64 chips and equivalent amounts of computer memory, costs about 50 percent more than an RS/6000 with 24 microprocessors, IBM said.
Does this comparison make sense? The E10K has 166% more processors, yet only costs 50% more. What a bargain!!. Not to mention the fact that an E10K can run up to 8 instances of an OS at the same time in electrically isolated domains and this is not an apples to apples comparison.
A better comparison would be to the Sun E6X00 series. Currently, the E6500 can have up to 30 400MHz 8MB cache processors, and 30GB of RAM. I guess that wouldn't make a good press release.
The only thing that happens when the SSP (the Ultra 5 referred to in the article) dies is the fans on the E10K go into high mode. This is because the temperature alarm monitoring is unavailable. It doesn't hurt anything and listening to the 10K switch modes is kind of cool.
The knock on the security issue is kind of valid. One account can crash up to 7 domains. The SSP account is a loaded gun.
The quiesce of the system boards is painless, interrupts no services except those to the system board being removed (duh!!) and takes a very short period of time.
Item # 1 might be accurate. Sun recommends lots of things, not all of them are mandatory. Clustering amongst domains might not give you hardware redundancy, but it sure as hell would give you OS redundancy. This way you could bring down one half of the cluster for patches or whatever and keep your stuff up.
I still haven't found out exactly what happened at ebay, but I suspect it was OS level corruption. If your entire business model depends on a machine being up and you don't cluster or have a hot backup machine ready, you're just negligent.
What my Sun sales rep, and one of the people who allegedly helped work on it told me, is that Xerox helped design the Sun E450 server because they couldn't get enough I/O throughput out of the Sun Ultra Sparc 2 machines to serve the big color printers. The E450 has a theoretical I/O bandwidth of around 2GB/s (or around that).
Personally, I'm guessing the network printers will have some sort SMB capabilities built in. The current line of network printers has Unix LP, NetWare, AppleTalk, and possibly whatever Windows uses (as well as a web server) built into it.
Disclaimer: I work for Xerox, but as a Unix SA in an area totally unrelated to product design. I don't know nothing official about this.
Example: If you want to perform calculations, a Beowulf cluster of Linux boxes can give wonderful results for a modest investment. I believe a Beowulf could be constructed that could beat an E10000 in raw calculating power for a fraction of the cost. For that matter... I believe that it is possible to build a cluster of E10000's using Beowulf technology that could beat just about anything on the planet - it'd be expensive though...:)
We just had an NDA meeting with some Sun reps, and they told of us of a large manufacturing company that uses a cluster of 6 fully loaded E10Ks for supply chain simulations (using I2 Rhythm software).
Sun's future clustering solutions include Beowulf type clusters, as they are going for the HPC market as well.
Sun gets a big win by being able to design the OS to the hardware. It's nice to be able to power down a CPU board via software, be able to remove it while the OS is still up, replace a bad part and put it back in again. You can do that now on a E5500 and E6500. On an E10K you can divide the 12 system boards into electrically isolated domains running individual copies of Solaris. Electrically isolated means that if you get a hardware failure that crashes one domain, the other ones stay up.
Xerox has some demo tools for this at: http://www.xerox.com/research/ipp/index.htm lpr is fine for just sending files to be printed, but it's got problems. It really doesn't allow for printer configuration very well, for example. This seems like a long needed rewrite of the lpr protocol.
I wonder how this compares to macro packages in troff and TeX (i.e man page formatting macros) which essentially let you markup a document using high level tags, which then use a predefined style file to format the document.
I also don't see the differences between the prior art and Microsoft's claim. I'm glad I turned down that Patent Office job 10 years ago. Patent law is basically a fancy way of defining the difference between a glass being half full of water or half empty.
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You didn't read the article. It said clearly that unique machine identifier information is embedded in every color copier/printer (at least for Xerox) and they get several requests a week for traceback information from the government.
A quick search of IBM's patent database has uncovered the following:
Anti-counterfeit pattern detector and method
Digital watermarking using conjugate halftone screens
Methods and means for embedding machine readable digital data in halftone images
Assuming for a moment that you are American, I find it fascinating how Americans on the fringe often castigate the US for all of its misdoings, without stopping to realize that the very fact they are allowed to publically object is the strongest argument for the greatness of the country.
I am by no means a knee-jerk "patriot", but I cannot imagine sabotaging the forces of my very own country. There will be a time when we will not be the bully of the world, and a time when we will appreciate what we have. I recognize our leaders do things for often corrupt reasons, but there are still our fellow countrymen out there dying somewhere.
At the risk of being a party pooper, check the date on that RFC.
Linux doesn't even show up on the radar on these.
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That being said, $14.99 is not a bad price for a great show.
Does this comparison make sense? The E10K has 166% more processors, yet only costs 50% more. What a bargain!!. Not to mention the fact that an E10K can run up to 8 instances of an OS at the same time in electrically isolated domains and this is not an apples to apples comparison.
A better comparison would be to the Sun E6X00 series. Currently, the E6500 can have up to 30 400MHz 8MB cache processors, and 30GB of RAM. I guess that wouldn't make a good press release.
The only thing that happens when the SSP (the Ultra 5 referred to in the article) dies is the fans on the E10K go into high mode. This is because the temperature alarm monitoring is unavailable. It doesn't hurt anything and listening to the 10K switch modes is kind of cool.
The knock on the security issue is kind of valid. One account can crash up to 7 domains. The SSP account is a loaded gun.
The quiesce of the system boards is painless, interrupts no services except those to the system board being removed (duh!!) and takes a very short period of time.
Item # 1 might be accurate. Sun recommends lots of things, not all of them are mandatory. Clustering amongst domains might not give you hardware redundancy, but it sure as hell would give you OS redundancy. This way you could bring down one half of the cluster for patches or whatever and keep your stuff up.
I still haven't found out exactly what happened at ebay, but I suspect it was OS level corruption. If your entire business model depends on a machine being up and you don't cluster or have a hot backup machine ready, you're just negligent.
What my Sun sales rep, and one of the people who allegedly helped work on it told me, is that Xerox helped design the Sun E450 server because they couldn't get enough I/O throughput out of the Sun Ultra Sparc 2 machines to serve the big color printers. The E450 has a theoretical I/O bandwidth of around 2GB/s (or around that).
Personally, I'm guessing the network printers will have some sort SMB capabilities built in. The current line of network printers has Unix LP, NetWare, AppleTalk, and possibly whatever Windows uses (as well as a web server) built into it.
Disclaimer: I work for Xerox, but as a Unix SA in an area totally unrelated to product design. I don't know nothing official about this.
We just had an NDA meeting with some Sun reps, and they told of us of a large manufacturing company that uses a cluster of 6 fully loaded E10Ks for supply chain simulations (using I2 Rhythm software).
Sun's future clustering solutions include Beowulf type clusters, as they are going for the HPC market as well.
Sun gets a big win by being able to design the OS to the hardware. It's nice to be able to power down a CPU board via software, be able to remove it while the OS is still up, replace a bad part and put it back in again. You can do that now on a E5500 and E6500. On an E10K you can divide the 12 system boards into electrically isolated domains running individual copies of Solaris. Electrically isolated means that if you get a hardware failure that crashes one domain, the other ones stay up.
Xerox has some demo tools for this at: http://www.xerox.com/research/ipp/index.htm lpr is fine for just sending files to be printed, but it's got problems. It really doesn't allow for printer configuration very well, for example. This seems like a long needed rewrite of the lpr protocol.
The latest figure I read was that IBM had over a
billion in income off of their patent licensing.
It's a big money maker for large companies. Other
companies, such as Xerox, are starting to get sue
happy over patent infringement.
I wonder how this compares to macro packages in troff and TeX (i.e man page formatting macros) which essentially let you markup a document using high level tags, which then use a predefined style file to format the document.
I also don't see the differences between the prior art and Microsoft's claim. I'm glad I turned down that Patent Office job 10 years ago. Patent law is basically a fancy way of defining the difference between a glass being half full of water or half empty.