One of the best christmas gifts I've ever given (to my sister and brother in law, or to anyone for that matter) was a 3 month subscription to the Weekly World News. Rita told me that it was the most embarrassing thing to go down and pick up the mail in her apartment building... her neighbors all had subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, etc. Meanwhile, there was their mail... BAT BOY ESCAPES!!! Jim, on the other hand, though it was a hilarious gift, and especially liked his weekly dose of "Ed Anger."
Plus, it's really cheap. I think that the subscription cost about $15.00. Plus... it served as a weekly reminder of our love for them... or something like that:-)
Amazing advice... "Far too many women think it's just bad luck that the only men who ask them out are nerdy nobodies with pocket protectors and pants cuffs that stop just below the knees.
Not just a stereotype, but an UGLY stereotype. Better listen to her advice, or you might find yourself stuck married to someone who turns out to be a scientist or engineer! WALK WITH YOUR SHOULDERS BACK AND YOUR HEAD UP
Of course! This will make your breasts stick out like a pair of headlights. This will help attract men who are interested in your breasts. That's a start!
Putting your shoulders forward is a mild cue that says that you're approachable. Walking with your shoulders back and head up has the opposite effect of making yourself appear aloof and uninterested.
This will help drive away those "losers" who might be interested in you as a friend first -- and attract the men who are primarily interested in the challenge posed by your outthrust breasts.
After all, you're deliberately putting out strong signals that you aren't interested, and then dating those men who deliberately ignore those signals, right?
Now that you've started out your relationship by rewarding him for disrespecting your subliminal signals, what other signals is he going to ignore? "Date Rape Magnet," anyone? AVOID NERVOUS GIGGLING -- Women who laugh when they're uncomfortable look vulnerable... only laugh when something genuinely amuses you.
Yes. Never attempt to defuse an uncomfortable situation with giggling or laughter. It might give the impression that you are a tolerant person, and attract other tolerant "losers."
Don't smile, giggle or laugh just because you're happy... because being happy attracts the wrong sort of people -- you might wind up in a happy relationship -- instead of the "Leonardo DeCaprio" fantasy relationship you're after.
Plus, the unamused look on your face will help him to concentrate on your forward-thrust breasts.
After all, it's not like this advice is going to get you someone who is interested in your personality anyway, so you might as well keep your eyes on the prize... BANISH WISHY-WASHY PHRASES FROM YOUR CONVERSATION... [like] "Aw, I don't know,"... or "Gee, I'm not sure"
Heaven forbid you should ever admit that you are unsure about anything or might be in any way fallable. This will just make yourself less desirable as a sexual object, and attract the sort of "losers" who readily admit when they aren't sure about something.
You'll be much better off in a relationship where neither of you can or will ever say "I don't know". Let us all know how your first argument works out. Speak with confidence and cultivate phrases like "Without a doubt," "Yes, absolutely," and "Let's go for it."
Especially when he propositions you for sex... which is about the only avenue of communication you are leaving open, and the only interest you are expressing. DON'T ADJUST YOUR CLOTHING TOO MUCH -- This simple habit sends the message: "I'm not sure I'll be accepted" -- just the news the weirdos want to hear. They'll flock to you in droves.
This is so funny. I have a picture of a poor girl trying all this advice. All her girlfriends have great looking athletic boyfriends majoring in "general studies", but the only guys who are interested in here are those pathetic looking chemical engineering students and computer science majors. (Hey, I can toss around the stereotypes with the best of them:-) Luckily, she has found this book that is going to change her life. There she stands, breasts thrust forward. Afraid to adjust her skirt, which has ridden up her butt, for fear of looking like she's afraid of not being accepted, trying desperately to look unamused and aloof, pretending she knows everything.
Meanwhile, the guys with IQs over 100 are keeping a mile away from this obvious pretentious fraud,
and she wonders why the guys who she meets all look good and sound confident at first, but after a while she finds out that they're, gosh, pretentious frauds.
Following this advice will definitely keep the "geeks" away from you. They're too busy looking for honest, friendly relationships to put up with more then about 10 seconds of fake crap.
In my experience, "geeks" are acutely aware of rejection signals, and shy away from people who radiate them. They are also accepting people, and are drawn towards other accepting people.
So if you feel that geeks are attracted to you, maybe it's because you're putting out signals that you're interested in them. Maybe you should stop listening to people, like this author, who denegrate them, and listen to yourself instead, because following this bad advice is just going to make you hate yourself in the long run.
Hmm. I (half seriously) propose the establishment of an "anti-patent" organization. Call it "AntiPatent, Inc."
AntiPatent would be funded by a consortium of software companies and individuals who have an interest in a patent-free software world.
The purpose of this public interest organization would be to take out as many legitimate, broad patents on computer software as possible. In the current patent office environment, this may not be very hard at all. It would also seek out donations of software patents, much as the FSF seeks out donations of source code.
The goal of AntiPatent would be to make it impossible for anyone to write computer software without infringing the AntiPatent Inc. patents.
Then, AntiPatent would turn around and offer to license these patents under the following terms:
All AntiPatent patents may be licensed by any person or organization freely and without charge.
However, the instant such person or organization brings litigation against any other person or organization, claiming infringement of THEIR patents, all licenses to AntiPatent technology will be immediately revoked.
License to AntiPatent technology may only be restored by the litigating organization or person by that organization or person agreeing to license the patent in question, free of charge, to the allegedly infringing person or organization, and paying all legal expenses brought on by the litigation.
In other words, similar to the GPL, AntiPatent turns the idea of patent law 180 degrees, and uses the coercive power of patents to promote freedom of innovation, as opposed to the patent "land grab" that is going on now.
There are two serious dangers of using "semi-open" source code that are not often discussed here. 1) There is the very real possibility that the owner of the source code may yank the source code out from under you. This has happened. Specifically, in the IBM VM community.
VM started back in the mid 1960s as a small internal IBM project, with a few extremely talented programmers, who were trying to scratch an itch. Sound familiar? The specific itch was: "How can we run multiple operating systems on the same computer", so that we can do our testing during the day instead of having to schedule downtime for the entire system to make our tests?"
The result was a program called CP, that runs on IBM 370 iron, where each and every task is a "virtual 370". Just like VMWARE, but for mainframes. You've seen how VMWARE lets you bring up Windows 95 in a Unix window. Well, VM allowed you to bring up MVS, or any other 370 operating system, including VM itself on a terminal. Just for fun, I once set up a second level VM, then went into that second level VM, and built a third and fourth level VM, and it worked.
CP found its sweet spot when it was combined with a different single-user operating system called CMS. VM is really the marriage of CP and CMS. CMS was originally designed as a single-user, high performance operating system to run on bare iron. CMS is single-tasking, and provides the filesystem, compilers, I/O, interrupt structure, etc.
The system provided performance that was simply unheard of on unix systems of similar power. At our peak, we easily ran over a thousand CMS sessions on our 3090 -- each of which was emulating an entire 370 for a single user.
VM was a tight, lean operating system with great performance. Of course, it didn't hurt that the people who wrote it were some of IBM's best hackers, and they had an additional incentive to produce excellent code: all of their work was visible to the customers.
IBM also tried more then once to kill off this "upstart" operating system... that happened to run much more efficiently then the bloated, "traditionally-designed" MVS/TSO combination.
Since the first days of the VM mainframe operating system, the entire operating system was distributed with full, buildable source code to the entire operating system. The result was that sites could and did experiment with the CP and CMS kernels, adding functionality, finding bugs, and creating what was, to many, the finest mainframe operating system ever designed.
VM system programmers freely traded their mods around, in source code form, and some of the best of these mods became part of the VM core distribution. In other words, the Open Source process was ALIVE AND WORKING in practice, only it was restricted to paying customers of IBM. The IBM users group is called SHARE, and VM systems programming community had its' share of brilliant programmers who share their work in exactly the same spirit of the current open source community.
Of course, this never harmed IBM, because almost all of this work was being written in IBM 370 assembler language (for maximum efficiency, of course), and with the exception of a few Amdahl sites, must sites were running IBM mainframe hardware anyway.
This was all fine until the mid 80s, when IBM made a management decision to withdraw source code to all of their products. Dispite the outcry from sites around the world, IBM started selectively removing parts of the source code from their distributions, and introducing new functionality without source. Along with the new functionality came huge, bloated object code modules, and conceptually defective interfaces. IBM also threw hundreds of programmers at VM, and the efficiency and elegance of the operating system started to deteriorate.
The result was a disaster that virtually killed the VM community. Whereas in an open source environment, system administrators such as myself could trace crash dumps, find bugs, and report them to IBM, we were all left in the situation where we would crash a crash dump, only to have the trace lead into an "object-code-only" module. This made it much more difficult to maintain a reliable system.
The other disaster was to sites (such as ours) that had made large numbers of local modifications to the IBM-supplied source code. More then once, I had the experience of sitting down to port our local mods to the next release of VM, only to find that one of the modules that I needed to modify had had the source code removed. The result was that people such as myself were forced to disassemble the IBM object decks, work out binary patches, and apply them blindly. I still have a couple of these binary-only patches, based on five year old source code, on our VM system.
We are currently in the process of phasing out our VM systems, and not surprisingly, so are many other VM sites.... which is a shame, because there are lots of things in VM, Rexx and CMS pipelines, for instance, that provide functionality that simply does not exist in the Unix environment.
So here's the question. Say you are a company that builds a mission-critical system by joining the Sun Community Source License program. You download the source code, and make a large number of changes to the source code to build your mission-critical production server. Now, a year or two down the line, Sun announces the end of the Community Source License program. The next month, Sun releases a new object-code-only version of Solaris that incorporates new features or bug fixes that you need.
Now you are absolutely screwed. Don't think that this couldn't happen. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED TO IBM'S VM CUSTOMERS.
For the curious, an excellent history of the VM operating system may be found on Melinda Varian's home page:
http://pucc.princeton.edu/~melinda 2) The second danger that is not often discussed here is the danger of accidently incorporating propriatary code, or code that is "close enough to sue", in an open source project.
The WINE project has been able to proceed on safe legal ground, because reverse engineering is a legal activity. Microsoft can hardly claim that parts of Wine were derived illegally from Microsoft propriatary source code, because Microsoft closely guards access to the source code. If Microsoft were to release the windows source code, and someone were to read the windows source code and use that information to fix a bug or add a feature to WINE, or someone just happened to write their own code that happened to resemble part of Windows' source code, Microsoft could file a lawsuit against the WINE developers, and probably obtain a injunction banning distribution of Wine. The fact that Windows is Object Code Only is the ONLY defense against legal harassment, and I predict that this will become a serious problem as more propriatary source code is made available under non-free licensing terms.
Could the same thing happen with Sun and Linux? How farfetched would it be to imagine that sometime down the road, Sun were to file a lawsuit against the major Linux distributors, claiming that some newly-written feature of Linux was so much like a Solaris feature that it must have been illegally copied from Solaris, even if the feature was independantly written, and just happened to look like Sun's solution because both authors solved the problem essentially the same way.
I see Sun's "Community Licensing" as a serious, dangerous threat to the open source community, and I think that we would be much better off if they were to simply not release their source code, rather then release it under their unacceptable terms.
Obviously, free software developers cannot afford to fight lawsuits, and Sun is giving us NOTHING that we can use, while putting themselves in a position to use lawsuits to try and put free software competitors out of business. Whether or not this an "Accidental" feature of their policy, it is still a danger that has not been addressed.
eBay appears to be dead set on destroying their customer goodwill as fast and hard as they can. The 35mm movie print fiasco (where they put up a policy page that labelled film collectors as criminals) has reduced my goodwill and respect for eBay down into the single digit range.
The problem with competing with eBay is that it's nearly impossible to get enough eyeballs to visit your site to build volume and name recognition.
I think that non-eBay auction sites banding together to form common search databases is a good thing, and I also think that it is a good thing that eBay will NOT be part of this, as it will hasten the backlash against eBay. There are plenty of people who really wish that there was a viable alternative.
Even better. We had (have) some IBM model 120 X-stations. They made funny little noises, depending on what was happening on the screen. This was a very useful feature, because when you were waiting for something to happen, you could look at something else, and the X-station would make a sort of "Zzzzt" noise when it was finished. One day I took the cover off to find out what was happening, and it turns out that the noise was coming from the fan. Apparently, digital noise was getting into the cooling fan circuit, and somehow one was modulating the other and producing human-hearing range noises!
Just out of curiosity, why do you think the framers threw in that line about the "well regulated Militia?
Because the term "well regulated" applies to the firearms, not the people.
A "well regulated" firearm is one that has been correctly adjusted and maintained.
Modern guns are constructed out of interchangable parts and are orders of magnitude more reliable then the flintlock muskets of the revolutionary war period. Revolutionary-era weapons were high maintenance items, which required a great deal of learned skill to operate safely and reliably. If you didn't properly maintain your musket, it was likely to blow up in your face, and kill you, or malfunction and not fire at all.
At the time, "the militia" was clearly understood to mean all able-bodied citizens who were capable of handling a firearm. This is in STRONG contrast to the modern-day revisionist interpretation of the second amendment "militia" as a standing army embodied in the National Guard. The founders believed that standing armies were very dangerous to the freedom of the people. See Section 8. Powers of Congress: Congress shall have the power... To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;
A "well-regulated militia" meant that the INDIVIDUAL citizens must be able to defend themselves. Not only against foreign invasion, but also domestic insurrection, and against their own government also. The framers had just survived a revolution, where they were forced to overthrow their own government, and the second amendment was written to try and provide assurance that if the government ever attempted to wage war on the people, that the people would have a working, functional arsenal to fight back with. Hence the requirement that the government NOT interfere with gun ownership.
This is the OPPOSITE of the revisionist gun control interpretation, which is that the purpose of the second amendment was to provide for a national guard, under the control of the government. Again, this was anethma to the writers of the constitution. This was what the British had done to them, they knew that once the government/police had superior military power over the people, it was all to easy to use that power.
It's taken us 200 years to forget these lessons.
Re:I saw this on TV about 6 months ago
on
Project Grizzly
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· Score: 1
His trash dump is infested with wild bears? How frightening!
WRONG! Prior art requires PUBLICATION. What you are suggesting has been suggested as a method of establishing copyright, but would NOT help you in a patent case.
If you want to establish original invention, you should put your claim on a web page, date it, and register it with all the search engines.
There are MAJOR advantages, from the management point of view, to use what is essentially a dumb terminal in a business environment. It eliminates the millions of lost hours that people spend messing around with windows, installing and playing games, downloading viruses, trying to upgrade, etc. It makes software upgrades MUCH easier, and reduces troubleshooting time. Basically, it's a return to the mainframe philosophy... which is a move AWAY from individual creativity, but in many business environments, the purpose of your using a computer isn't to nurture your creativity... it's a tool you use to do your uninteresting work. There's a reason why security camera monitors are small, inexpensive dedicated CRTs instead of big, color televisions with cable hookups.
You are wrong about Unisys not "inventing anything since long before the web." My own group is in the process of getting a patent. It involves offloading I/O (TCP/IP, Raid) processing from a host system on to an intelligent adapter.
Wow. I wonder if IBM knows that Unisys has invented the I/O channel. Looks like IBM will need to pay back-royalties for all of its mainframe systems going back to the system 360!
Stick a little microprocessor on it (it wouldn't need much of one!), add a DAC and ADC, and suddenly you have a portable audio recorder/player with some amazing muscle!
"As good" is very relative. It depends on the application. If your application is tape trading (as in Grateful Dead and Phish tapes), then digital beats the pants off of analog. Why? Because tape traders deal in high generation tapes. Make a 6th generation cassette, and a 6th generation DAT clone or CDR. The cassette will have hiss and distortion, and the DAT or CDR will be virtually indistinguishable from the original.
>Aren't there cracks available for DVDs that work >the same way?
Some DVD drives use software decryption, and I remember that a while ago someone reported that they were able to figure out how to make direct calls to the proprietary DLL and turn the encrypted data stream into an unencrypted MPEG stream. Anyone remember this?
Interesting, but not even close to optimal. The problem is that the program just captures the output stream on the way to the soundcard.
Why is this bad? Because the data has been subjected to lossy compression, then decompression.
What you get is an uncompressed PCM file with WMA data reduction artifacts. This may sound OK as is, and you could always burn a CDR with this data stream, but I'll bet that if you compress it with MP3, the combination of the WMA artifacts and the MP3 artifacts will result in audible sound degradation.
Anyone have all the software together to try this experiment? I'd certainly be interested in knowing if I'm right about this.
When someone comes up with a way to resave the data as a WMA file with only the copy restrictions removed, I'll count that as a real crack.
I just called e*trade and was told that this extension is ONLY for those people who placed an indication of interest at $10-$12, and then missed the 10 minute re-confirmation window when the IPO was repriced at $14.
So if that's you, get on the phone.
Those of us who received "Offer not suitable" from the screening page are still out of luck.
All in all, a very interesting and educational experience.
Well, It isn't an exact science. If you have to brake, do so, and try again, going a mile or two per hour slower. No calculus is required:)
As to your second point, check out the web sites that other people have posted. One of them has the observation that even though some people will cut into your buffer, they cars that don't cut in front of you form a "plug" of patient drivers who don't change lanes, and that "plug" holds the lane-changers behind you.
I don't think that the "three-phase" model is a good model. Stop & go traffic, at least the freeway variety, appears to be more a combination of people not leaving intervals between cars, and people waiting too long to reduce speed.
A hypothetical driver comes up on stopped traffic on a freeway, and is forced to stop. A few seconds or so later, traffic restarts.
"Ah", he says, "Moving again.", and start to drive at the speed of the car in front of him, leaving a car length or two maybe. A few seconds later, the car in front of him puts on his brakes, lighting his brake lights.
Now they teach you in driver's ed that you're supposed to leave one car length for every 10 miles per hour, and you're supposed to start braking the instant you see the car in front of you put on his brakelights, both to reduce speed, and to warn the car behind you to start braking also, but hardly anyone seems to do that. Instead, the typical action seems to be to coast as long as possible, then brake to avoid collision.
The result is that our hypothetical driver has to break harder and faster then the car in front of him because of his delay.
If a dozen or so people do this in a row, it will naturally cause the traffic to stop and go in a ripple pattern.
Just watch the brakelight patterns next time you're in heavy traffic on a curve. The lights move backward in waves; the speed of the wave is a combination of the drivers' individual reaction times, and the drivers' wishful thinking time.
If you can figure out the average speed, and move at that exact speed, and force yourself to leave an appropriate interval between yourself and the car in front of you, you can break the stop & go pattern for yourself and the cars behind you. In other words, when the car in front of you zooms ahead, go at a constant speed, and let a gap open up in front of you. Then, continue at that constant speed, so that you catch up to the car in front of you in the same amount of time he has braked, stopped, and started again.
The result is that you move at maybe 15 mph, as opposed to 0, 25, 0, 25...
Of course, you lose a little because people cut into your buffer space, but the sort of people who will change lanes to take your buffer space will change right back when the other lane moves again, so it appears to average out over time.
I have no idea whether this helps anyone but myself, or whether I'm just being annoying as hell, as my wife claims:)
Actually, the best way I found was to build a one-square bump, put 8 waterfall tiles on the 8 sides of the bump, put hydroelectric plants on the 8 waterfall tiles, and put a water pump on top of the bump.
The big advantage to this was that hydroelectric power plants never wear out, and the water pumps operate at maximum efficiency, because they are surrounded completely by water.
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One of the best christmas gifts I've ever given (to my sister and brother in law, or to anyone for that matter) was a 3 month subscription to the Weekly World News. Rita told me that it was the most embarrassing thing to go down and pick up the mail in her apartment building ... her neighbors all had subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, etc. Meanwhile, there was their mail ... BAT BOY ESCAPES!!! Jim, on the other hand, though it was a hilarious gift, and especially liked his weekly dose of "Ed Anger."
... it served as a weekly reminder of our love for them ... or something like that :-)
Plus, it's really cheap. I think that the subscription cost about $15.00. Plus
Amazing advice ...
... only laugh when something genuinely amuses you.
... because being happy attracts the wrong sort of people -- you might wind up in a happy relationship -- instead of the "Leonardo DeCaprio" fantasy relationship you're after.
...
... [like] "Aw, I don't know," ... or "Gee, I'm not sure"
... which is about the only avenue of communication you are leaving open, and the only interest you are expressing.
:-) Luckily, she has found this book that is going to change her life. There she stands, breasts thrust forward. Afraid to adjust her skirt, which has ridden up her butt, for fear of looking like she's afraid of not being accepted, trying desperately to look unamused and aloof, pretending she knows everything.
:-)
"Far too many women think it's just bad luck that the only men who ask them out are nerdy nobodies with pocket protectors and pants cuffs that stop just below the knees.
Not just a stereotype, but an UGLY stereotype. Better listen to her advice, or you might find yourself stuck married to someone who turns out to be a scientist or engineer!
WALK WITH YOUR SHOULDERS BACK AND YOUR HEAD UP
Of course! This will make your breasts stick out like a pair of headlights. This will help attract men who are interested in your breasts. That's a start!
Putting your shoulders forward is a mild cue that says that you're approachable. Walking with your shoulders back and head up has the opposite effect of making yourself appear aloof and uninterested.
This will help drive away those "losers" who might be interested in you as a friend first -- and attract the men who are primarily interested in the challenge posed by your outthrust breasts.
After all, you're deliberately putting out strong signals that you aren't interested, and then dating those men who deliberately ignore those signals, right?
Now that you've started out your relationship by rewarding him for disrespecting your subliminal signals, what other signals is he going to ignore?
"Date Rape Magnet," anyone?
AVOID NERVOUS GIGGLING -- Women who laugh when they're uncomfortable look vulnerable
Yes. Never attempt to defuse an uncomfortable situation with giggling or laughter. It might give the impression that you are a tolerant person, and attract other tolerant "losers."
Don't smile, giggle or laugh just because you're happy
Plus, the unamused look on your face will help him to concentrate on your forward-thrust breasts.
After all, it's not like this advice is going to get you someone who is interested in your personality anyway, so you might as well keep your eyes on the prize
BANISH WISHY-WASHY PHRASES FROM YOUR CONVERSATION
Heaven forbid you should ever admit that you are unsure about anything or might be in any way fallable. This will just make yourself less desirable as a sexual object, and attract the sort of "losers" who readily admit when they aren't sure about something.
You'll be much better off in a relationship where neither of you can or will ever say "I don't know". Let us all know how your first argument works out.
Speak with confidence and cultivate phrases like "Without a doubt," "Yes, absolutely," and "Let's go for it."
Especially when he propositions you for sex
DON'T ADJUST YOUR CLOTHING TOO MUCH -- This simple habit sends the message: "I'm not sure I'll be accepted" -- just the news the weirdos want to hear. They'll flock to you in droves.
This is so funny. I have a picture of a poor girl trying all this advice. All her girlfriends have great looking athletic boyfriends majoring in "general studies", but the only guys who are interested in here are those pathetic looking chemical engineering students and computer science majors. (Hey, I can toss around the stereotypes with the best of them
Meanwhile, the guys with IQs over 100 are keeping a mile away from this obvious pretentious fraud,
and she wonders why the guys who she meets all look good and sound confident at first, but after a while she finds out that they're, gosh, pretentious frauds.
Following this advice will definitely keep the "geeks" away from you. They're too busy looking for honest, friendly relationships to put up with more then about 10 seconds of fake crap.
In my experience, "geeks" are acutely aware of rejection signals, and shy away from people who radiate them. They are also accepting people, and are drawn towards other accepting people.
So if you feel that geeks are attracted to you, maybe it's because you're putting out signals that you're interested in them. Maybe you should stop listening to people, like this author, who denegrate them, and listen to yourself instead, because following this bad advice is just going to make you hate yourself in the long run.
From my little soapbox
- John
Yeah! Then when you modify inetd.conf, you would have to go into the game, find the inetd monster, and give it slap!
me likes it!
Hmm. I (half seriously) propose the establishment of an "anti-patent" organization. Call it "AntiPatent, Inc."
AntiPatent would be funded by a consortium of software companies and individuals who have an interest in a patent-free software world.
The purpose of this public interest organization would be to take out as many legitimate, broad patents on computer software as possible. In the current patent office environment, this may not be very hard at all. It would also seek out donations of software patents, much as the FSF seeks out donations of source code.
The goal of AntiPatent would be to make it impossible for anyone to write computer software without infringing the AntiPatent Inc. patents.
Then, AntiPatent would turn around and offer to license these patents under the following terms:
All AntiPatent patents may be licensed by any person or organization freely and without charge.
However, the instant such person or organization brings litigation against any other person or organization, claiming infringement of THEIR patents, all licenses to AntiPatent technology will be immediately revoked.
License to AntiPatent technology may only be restored by the litigating organization or person by that organization or person agreeing to license the patent in question, free of charge, to the allegedly infringing person or organization, and paying all legal expenses brought on by the litigation.
In other words, similar to the GPL, AntiPatent turns the idea of patent law 180 degrees, and uses the coercive power of patents to promote freedom of innovation, as opposed to the patent "land grab" that is going on now.
Comments, anyone?
- John Schulien
jms@uic.edu
There are two serious dangers of using "semi-open" source code that are not often discussed here.
... that happened to run much more efficiently then the bloated, "traditionally-designed" MVS/TSO combination.
... which is a shame, because there are lots of things in VM, Rexx and CMS pipelines, for instance, that provide functionality that simply does not exist in the Unix environment.
1) There is the very real possibility that the owner of the source code may yank the source code out from under you. This has happened. Specifically, in the IBM VM community.
VM started back in the mid 1960s as a small internal IBM project, with a few extremely talented programmers, who were trying to scratch an itch. Sound familiar? The specific itch was: "How can we run multiple operating systems on the same computer", so that we can do our testing during the day instead of having to schedule downtime for the entire system to make our tests?"
The result was a program called CP, that runs on IBM 370 iron, where each and every task is a "virtual 370". Just like VMWARE, but for mainframes. You've seen how VMWARE lets you bring up Windows 95 in a Unix window. Well, VM allowed you to bring up MVS, or any other 370 operating system, including VM itself on a terminal. Just for fun, I once set up a second level VM, then went into that second level VM, and built a third and fourth level VM, and it worked.
CP found its sweet spot when it was combined with a different single-user operating system called CMS. VM is really the marriage of CP and CMS. CMS was originally designed as a single-user, high performance operating system to run on bare iron. CMS is single-tasking, and provides the filesystem, compilers, I/O, interrupt structure, etc.
The system provided performance that was simply unheard of on unix systems of similar power. At our peak, we easily ran over a thousand CMS sessions on our 3090 -- each of which was emulating an entire 370 for a single user.
VM was a tight, lean operating system with great performance. Of course, it didn't hurt that the people who wrote it were some of IBM's best hackers, and they had an additional incentive to produce excellent code: all of their work was visible to the customers.
IBM also tried more then once to kill off this "upstart" operating system
Since the first days of the VM mainframe operating system, the entire operating system was distributed with full, buildable source code to the entire operating system. The result was that sites could and did experiment with the CP and CMS kernels, adding functionality, finding bugs, and creating what was, to many, the finest mainframe operating system ever designed.
VM system programmers freely traded their mods around, in source code form, and some of the best of these mods became part of the VM core distribution. In other words, the Open Source process was ALIVE AND WORKING in practice, only it was restricted to paying customers of IBM. The IBM users group is called SHARE, and VM systems programming community had its' share of brilliant programmers who share their work in exactly the same spirit of the current open source community.
Of course, this never harmed IBM, because almost all of this work was being written in IBM 370 assembler language (for maximum efficiency, of course), and with the exception of a few Amdahl sites, must sites were running IBM mainframe hardware anyway.
This was all fine until the mid 80s, when IBM made a management decision to withdraw source code to all of their products. Dispite the outcry from sites around the world, IBM started selectively removing parts of the source code from their distributions, and introducing new functionality without source. Along with the new functionality came huge, bloated object code modules, and conceptually defective interfaces. IBM also threw hundreds of programmers at VM, and the efficiency and elegance of the operating system started to deteriorate.
The result was a disaster that virtually killed the VM community. Whereas in an open source environment, system administrators such as myself could trace crash dumps, find bugs, and report them to IBM, we were all left in the situation where we would crash a crash dump, only to have the trace lead into an "object-code-only" module. This made it much more difficult to maintain a reliable system.
The other disaster was to sites (such as ours) that had made large numbers of local modifications to the IBM-supplied source code. More then once, I had the experience of sitting down to port our local mods to the next release of VM, only to find that one of the modules that I needed to modify had had the source code removed. The result was that people such as myself were forced to disassemble the IBM object decks, work out binary patches, and apply them blindly. I still have a couple of these binary-only patches, based on five year old source code, on our VM system.
We are currently in the process of phasing out our VM systems, and not surprisingly, so are many other VM sites.
So here's the question. Say you are a company that builds a mission-critical system by joining the Sun Community Source License program. You download the source code, and make a large number of changes to the source code to build your mission-critical production server. Now, a year or two down the line, Sun announces the end of the Community Source License program. The next month, Sun releases a new object-code-only version of Solaris that incorporates new features or bug fixes that you need.
Now you are absolutely screwed. Don't think that this couldn't happen. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED TO IBM'S VM CUSTOMERS.
For the curious, an excellent history of the VM operating system may be found on Melinda Varian's home page:
http://pucc.princeton.edu/~melinda
2) The second danger that is not often discussed here is the danger of accidently incorporating propriatary code, or code that is "close enough to sue", in an open source project.
The WINE project has been able to proceed on safe legal ground, because reverse engineering is a legal activity. Microsoft can hardly claim that parts of Wine were derived illegally from Microsoft propriatary source code, because Microsoft closely guards access to the source code. If Microsoft were to release the windows source code, and someone were to read the windows source code and use that information to fix a bug or add a feature to WINE, or someone just happened to write their own code that happened to resemble part of Windows' source code, Microsoft could file a lawsuit against the WINE developers, and probably obtain a injunction banning distribution of Wine. The fact that Windows is Object Code Only is the ONLY defense against legal harassment, and I predict that this will become a serious problem as more propriatary source code is made available under non-free licensing terms.
Could the same thing happen with Sun and Linux? How farfetched would it be to imagine that sometime down the road, Sun were to file a lawsuit against the major Linux distributors, claiming that some newly-written feature of Linux was so much like a Solaris feature that it must have been illegally copied from Solaris, even if the feature was independantly written, and just happened to look like Sun's solution because both authors solved the problem essentially the same way.
I see Sun's "Community Licensing" as a serious, dangerous threat to the open source community, and I think that we would be much better off if they were to simply not release their source code, rather then release it under their unacceptable terms.
Obviously, free software developers cannot afford to fight lawsuits, and Sun is giving us NOTHING that we can use, while putting themselves in a position to use lawsuits to try and put free software competitors out of business. Whether or not this an "Accidental" feature of their policy, it is still a danger that has not been addressed.
- John Schulien
jms@uic.edu
eBay appears to be dead set on destroying their customer goodwill as fast and hard as they can. The 35mm movie print fiasco (where they put up a policy page that labelled film collectors as criminals) has reduced my goodwill and respect for eBay down into the single digit range.
The problem with competing with eBay is that it's nearly impossible to get enough eyeballs to visit your site to build volume and name recognition.
I think that non-eBay auction sites banding together to form common search databases is a good thing, and I also think that it is a good thing that eBay will NOT be part of this, as it will hasten the backlash against eBay. There are plenty of people who really wish that there was a viable alternative.
Even better. We had (have) some IBM model 120 X-stations. They made funny little noises, depending on what was happening on the screen. This was a very useful feature, because when you were waiting for something to happen, you could look at something else, and the X-station would make a sort of "Zzzzt" noise when it was finished. One day I took the cover off to find out what was happening, and it turns out that the noise was coming from the fan. Apparently, digital noise was getting into the cooling fan circuit, and somehow one was modulating the other and producing human-hearing range noises!
Just out of curiosity, why do you think the framers threw in that line about the "well regulated Militia?
Because the term "well regulated" applies to the firearms, not the people.
A "well regulated" firearm is one that has been correctly adjusted and maintained.
Modern guns are constructed out of interchangable parts and are orders of magnitude more reliable then the flintlock muskets of the revolutionary war period. Revolutionary-era weapons were high maintenance items, which required a great deal of learned skill to operate safely and reliably. If you didn't properly maintain your musket, it was likely to blow up in your face, and kill you, or malfunction and not fire at all.
At the time, "the militia" was clearly understood to mean all able-bodied citizens who were capable of handling a firearm. This is in STRONG contrast to the modern-day revisionist interpretation of the second amendment "militia" as a standing army embodied in the National Guard. The founders believed that standing armies were very dangerous to the freedom of the people. See Section 8. Powers of Congress:
Congress shall have the power
A "well-regulated militia" meant that the INDIVIDUAL citizens must be able to defend themselves. Not only against foreign invasion, but also domestic insurrection, and against their own government also. The framers had just survived a revolution, where they were forced to overthrow their own government, and the second amendment was written to try and provide assurance that if the government ever attempted to wage war on the people, that the people would have a working, functional arsenal to fight back with. Hence the requirement that the government NOT interfere with gun ownership.
This is the OPPOSITE of the revisionist gun control interpretation, which is that the purpose of the second amendment was to provide for a national guard, under the control of the government. Again, this was anethma to the writers of the constitution. This was what the British had done to them, they knew that once the government/police had superior military power over the people, it was all to easy to use that power.
It's taken us 200 years to forget these lessons.
His trash dump is infested with wild bears? How frightening!
WRONG! Prior art requires PUBLICATION. What you are suggesting has been suggested as a method of establishing copyright, but would NOT help you in a patent case.
If you want to establish original invention, you should put your claim on a web page, date it, and register it with all the search engines.
- John
There are MAJOR advantages, from the management point of view, to use what is essentially a dumb terminal in a business environment. It eliminates the millions of lost hours that people spend messing around with windows, installing and playing games, downloading viruses, trying to upgrade, etc. It makes software upgrades MUCH easier, and reduces troubleshooting time. Basically, it's a return to the mainframe philosophy ... which is a move AWAY from individual creativity, but in many business environments, the purpose of your using a computer isn't to nurture your creativity ... it's a tool you use to do your uninteresting work. There's a reason why security camera monitors are small, inexpensive dedicated CRTs instead of big, color televisions with cable hookups.
However, there is no mechanism in place for key revocation, so this explanation is not valid.
... but then, if you watch the news closely, most non-crime media stories these days about are in fact really company press releases.
You are wrong about Unisys not "inventing anything since long before the web." My own group is in the process of getting a patent. It involves offloading I/O (TCP/IP, Raid) processing from a host system on to an intelligent adapter.
Wow. I wonder if IBM knows that Unisys has invented the I/O channel. Looks like IBM will need to pay back-royalties for all of its mainframe systems going back to the system 360!
This would store approximately 3888 hours of UNCOMPRESSED true CD-quality music.
2300 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 / (44100 * 4 * 60 * 60) = ~3888
Stick a little microprocessor on it (it wouldn't need much of one!), add a DAC and ADC, and suddenly you have a portable audio recorder/player with some amazing muscle!
An *excellent* book for those interested in the history of these early vacuum tube computers is:
Nancy Stern, "From ENIAC to UNIVAC - An Appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly Computers" (Digital Press, Bedford, Massachusetts, 1981)
Highly recommended.
"As good" is very relative. It depends on the application. If your application is tape trading (as in Grateful Dead and Phish tapes), then digital beats the pants off of analog. Why? Because tape traders deal in high generation tapes. Make a 6th generation cassette, and a 6th generation DAT clone or CDR. The cassette will have hiss and distortion, and the DAT or CDR will be virtually indistinguishable from the original.
>Aren't there cracks available for DVDs that work
>the same way?
Some DVD drives use software decryption, and I remember that a while ago someone reported that they were able to figure out how to make direct calls to the proprietary DLL and turn the encrypted data stream into an unencrypted MPEG stream. Anyone remember this?
This would qualify as a True Crack.
- John
Interesting, but not even close to optimal. The problem is that the program just captures the output stream on the way to the soundcard.
Why is this bad? Because the data has been subjected to lossy compression, then decompression.
What you get is an uncompressed PCM file with WMA data reduction artifacts. This may sound OK as is, and you could always burn a CDR with this data stream, but I'll bet that if you compress it with MP3, the combination of the WMA artifacts and the MP3 artifacts will result in audible sound degradation.
Anyone have all the software together to try this experiment? I'd certainly be interested in knowing if I'm right about this.
When someone comes up with a way to resave the data as a WMA file with only the copy restrictions removed, I'll count that as a real crack.
I just called e*trade and was told that this extension is ONLY for those people who placed an indication of interest at $10-$12, and then missed the 10 minute re-confirmation window when the IPO was repriced at $14.
So if that's you, get on the phone.
Those of us who received "Offer not suitable" from the screening page are still out of luck.
All in all, a very interesting and educational experience.
I don't know where you're posting from, but most people in western democracies don't think of spying and torture as a normal police function.
Clearly you are not from Chicago.
Well, It isn't an exact science. If you have to brake, do so, and try again, going a mile or two per hour slower. No calculus is required :)
As to your second point, check out the web sites that other people have posted. One of them has the observation that even though some people will cut into your buffer, they cars that don't cut in front of you form a "plug" of patient drivers who don't change lanes, and that "plug" holds the lane-changers behind you.
- John
I don't think that the "three-phase" model is a good model. Stop & go traffic, at least the freeway variety, appears to be more a combination of people not leaving intervals between cars, and people waiting too long to reduce speed.
...
:)
A hypothetical driver comes up on stopped traffic on a freeway, and is forced to stop. A few seconds or so later, traffic restarts.
"Ah", he says, "Moving again.", and start to drive at the speed of the car in front of him, leaving a car length or two maybe. A few seconds later, the car in front of him puts on his brakes, lighting his brake lights.
Now they teach you in driver's ed that you're supposed to leave one car length for every 10 miles per hour, and you're supposed to start braking the instant you see the car in front of you put on his brakelights, both to reduce speed, and to warn the car behind you to start braking also, but hardly anyone seems to do that. Instead, the typical action seems to be to coast as long as possible, then brake to avoid collision.
The result is that our hypothetical driver has to break harder and faster then the car in front of him because of his delay.
If a dozen or so people do this in a row, it will naturally cause the traffic to stop and go in a ripple pattern.
Just watch the brakelight patterns next time you're in heavy traffic on a curve. The lights move backward in waves; the speed of the wave is a combination of the drivers' individual reaction times, and the drivers' wishful thinking time.
If you can figure out the average speed, and move at that exact speed, and force yourself to leave an appropriate interval between yourself and the car in front of you, you can break the stop & go pattern for yourself and the cars behind you. In other words, when the car in front of you zooms ahead, go at a constant speed, and let a gap open up in front of you. Then, continue at that constant speed, so that you catch up to the car in front of you in the same amount of time he has braked, stopped, and started again.
The result is that you move at maybe 15 mph, as opposed to 0, 25, 0, 25
Of course, you lose a little because people cut into your buffer space, but the sort of people who will change lanes to take your buffer space will change right back when the other lane moves again, so it appears to average out over time.
I have no idea whether this helps anyone but myself, or whether I'm just being annoying as hell, as my wife claims
I'd love to see a sim-traffic game.
Actually, the best way I found was to build a one-square bump, put 8 waterfall tiles on the 8 sides of the bump, put hydroelectric plants on the 8 waterfall tiles, and put a water pump on top of the bump.
The big advantage to this was that hydroelectric power plants never wear out, and the water pumps operate at maximum efficiency, because they are surrounded completely by water.
Plus, no pollution.
- John
Hehe. Reminds me of the Futurama theme park
...
We're whalers of the moon