I agree with your points, especially the bit about your wife. I sit on the computer at night to get some small task done that I don't want to make time for at work during my work day and my wife calls me ever 5 minutes for something. I know darn good and well if I was home all day that I would still get called every 5 minutes for something.
I am for allowing people to work from home, but at the same time people should be judged soley on the amount of output they generate and not by the number of hours they claim to put in. I'd have to work twice as long to get the same amount of work done at home.
The Sky+ is doing pretty much the same thing as the dual tuner DirectTIVO boxes. The reason they can do this is not because of what you said but instead because they don't have to have an mpeg encoder because the satellite streams mpeg2 natively. The money/realestate they saved on that encoder was used to put in a 2nd tuner pipeline. You are allowed to watch the stream through either tuner and switch back and forth between them. DirecTIVO also caches both streams so you can rewind one show watch it a while, jump to the other show rewind it and watch a while. Its really quite nice but not unique to the Sky+ machine.
I think more to the point, they broke the GPL. They don't "have" to release thier IP as GPL, they just have to pay appropriate damages for distributing linux in breach of the licence. I don't know what specific penalties the GPL has in it other than ceasation of future distribution so I don't think that SCO has to worry about much of anything in regards to losing thier IP.
He could answer it the way he pretty much does on his website. He designed it to allow download of anything that is currently downloaded off of webservers today. It is just a load distributor so that a single server doesn't get hammered, so he saw no restrictions on the types of files traded, he left it in the hand of the server operators to use the tool correctly, just as Apache did with its webservers which are just as easily a tool of piracy as bittorrent.
ATI would say that its optimization would also be applied to any game that worked with ATI during development because ATI would tell them how to make it run fastest. Eh, I don't know either way. I have to side with the people on here that say benchmark your card lots and lots of ways and don't rely on any single number for your decision.
That said I'm still using my radeon 8500 and it is working just as well as it always did for the games I play. Maybe I'll upgrade at some point but so far I haven't needed to.
So you advocate a system of monopolies and price fixing? You don't sound like the normal/. anti-corporation, free-software drone I'm used to seeing around here.
Free market forces are a good thing, prices should tend toward the marginal cost in the presence of competition.
Except (as it has been stated before) in the case that they are a monopoly in which case as the sole provider of the service they have less choice of who they sell to so long as those people are willing to pay the same price as everyone else purchasing the product.
Unless the site that provides free guide data goes under and then you have little more than a fancy programmable VCR. There is one reason I like tivo (I have never tried ReplayTV so this might apply equally to that) is that I go to the search, click a few buttons, pick the show and bam its recorded. If it changes times I will get the change (unless its one of the cases where it changes time too close to the showing and new guide data doesn't come to me but that is fairly rare). Its just easy and it works.
The free roll your own solutions are close, but again the guide data is the sticker, and if that goes away or becomes a "for pay" thing then the free solutions lose a ton of value.
Actually I think that it is inventive (after reading the summary in the patent) but I think it is a specific subcase of a general class of problems and so probably shouldn't be patented.
The summary basically says that they are patenting the process of caching domain information from all the different services (some of them being a manual process and thus not automatable by normal methods) and then using a basic search against the cache to check for existance. So instead of querying all the services in real time (which for the ones that require a phone call or fax to be sent would be VERY slow) they query the cache which is nearly up to date. Furthermore the lump in presenting an order form in this patent so I am not convinced that if you just do the lookup without offering to register the domain that you break the patent but IANAL.
I think that effective prior art may be internet search engines in all honesty, can someone look into that? I don't know if making the search specific to domain names allows Verisign to have a unique patent on the process. I mean isn't what search engines do is query a large number of slow systems and then index and cache the results to be easily searched by someone?
Re:Why hard to run something like Amazon as busine
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That said there is no reason they can't run the business in a pure classical economic environment and make everyone happy. The "profit" might be 0 economically but that doesn't mean that stockholders and employees don't get paid. 0 economic profit means that the price is at the minimum point required to keep it worthwhile to run the company, stockholder dividends at some minimal level are part of the cost of business and not profit in the economic sense.
The professor needed to do more than just say "aww hey its ok, everyone makes mistakes." All he did was validate thier methods for trying to prevent piracy which amount to little more than sending around the electronic brute squad to batter anyone that looks like they might guilty.
If I were the professor I would have sued them. Unfortunately the only way these places listen is if you hit them in the pocketbooks.
I guess its just another reason for me to not buy CD's (and no I don't just download the mp3's, I wouldn't give them the pleasure).
I think they were looking for a wide area network to put in the community as getting a direct connect to the internet (T1) is easy for them. I suggest possibly working with the phone company to install DSL locally. There were some articles on/. earlier about roll your own DSL using unused copper in the phone system.
Yes and then I want you to have the MIS department charge $80 an hour for support calls and see how fast those people ask for windows back. Also I want you to objectively measure the amount of time the people spend fucking around to get thier applications to work the way they expect.
That said I don't hate linux, I just realize there are some costs related to it that are not included in the purchase price.
Most of the time the RIAA "buys" the songs from the artist for a one time (and not always very large) sum of money. There are no "royalties" taken from the artist most of the time, just dollars out of the companies bank accounts.
Granted it might limit future artists if the RIAA companies don't have money to spend for new talent and whatever but realistically this money goes straight to the RIAA.
Has anyone looked into how much the music companies are spending on lawyers and such to stop piracy? At some point it seems like they are using more money trying to stop piracy (not to mention people that quit buying cds because the record industry is run by assholes) than they would gain by having it stopped.
Thats because the OS itself is barely more than an abstraction layer on the hardware. Unix was built as hundreds of command files that could pipe input and output between themselves to do complex jobs with small, "correct" pieces.
I think the reason so many people like linux is that they can't afford and they can't affect the alternatives. Thats the one truely innovative thing (not that I'm convinced I like it) about linux, the license.
Its totally possible to follow through on a complex project in the OSS world, it just doesn't tend to happen. A person that hacks an app because they need a new feature tends to get it working "good enough" and then uses it. If you are lucky they will accept some bug fixes from other people they share the app with but maintenance is usually low on the priority list.
Then step in corporations that want the OSS as a base and don't see a huge loss in releasing thier code and on goes a layer of polish. Or you get a group of people that just hates the alternatives and decides to push through a product with some polish.
Usually the things that people put polish on are in the catch up phase because a number of people/companies need to get competative to an inovative (or just well done as is probably microsofts case lots of the time) product thats already on the market. The truely innovative pieces seem to get to the "good enough" phase and then the orignal author gives up on it and then its up to luck for someone else to pick it up and polish it.
Yup exactly, I think what is supposed to be the key of MS puzzle questions is that they have multiple levels of answers, and you can judge a person not only how how he/she answers but also on the process they go through to solve the problem. Actually MS stresses that the puzzle questions should NOT be the main criteria for deciding whether to hire.
The better questions are about how they handled some big project in the past, especially if the process didn't go so smoothly, and find out how that person handles the process. MS picks hires based on a vast array of "competencies" that have been heavily researched and time tested to produce good candidates. Even then MS doesn't always make a good pick and the trial by fire approach to getting a new hire into the workforce usually does its job to weed out people that aren't up to the task and if that doesn't do it the first poor performance review will give them the hint. MS also has wonderful mentorship programs to help someone learn the info they need and learn to tap into the brain trust that resides on campus.
My personal opinion is that MS generates more successful programmers because they have a solid base of successful programmers already in the company that are more than willing to help newcomers get on thier feet.
Interesting, whoever wrote the desciption on the software I looked at sucked, they made it sound like it took longer to send the stream from the tivo than it did to record it real time. That added to the fact that my tivo is an "unhackable" series 2 (I could hack it, I found the info, but it seems like too much trouble to unsolder the prom) I gave up totally. If you could give me a link to better info than what I have I'd be interested in exploring the possibility of getting a series 1 dtivo and using that.
As far as I have ever read the tivo data stream is encrypted on the hard drive and in a format that is currently only deciphered on the tivo itself. Noone has decoded the tystream or else there would be software available that let you pop the tivo drive into your PC and dump the data directly at high speed.
My speculation is based on stories the fox pro developers have mentioned when we talked (I know 2 or 3 of the people responsible for the product before it was owned by MS) and the way they talked about the users.
As far as MS using it to lock people into windows I would say yeah, a bit of the reason it still exists is to keep those users on MS products. It would have died long ago if MS would have been successful converting the people who use fox pro over to thier other technologies.
I would say this is espcecially true of Fox Pro programmers. They live in a world disconnected from reality as we know it (which is why they haven't upgraded to a reasonably new database technology and support language) would probably blame microsoft for all kinds of problems that were OS related and not product related.
I also get the impression from people that developed fox pro that the users were upset when MS bought the product and were upset when they made it a "visual" lanugage.
That said I can't imagine that MS hasn't thought about possible lost OS license sales and that the lost sales aren't a major motivator for clamping down on the howto.
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I am for allowing people to work from home, but at the same time people should be judged soley on the amount of output they generate and not by the number of hours they claim to put in. I'd have to work twice as long to get the same amount of work done at home.
The Sky+ is doing pretty much the same thing as the dual tuner DirectTIVO boxes. The reason they can do this is not because of what you said but instead because they don't have to have an mpeg encoder because the satellite streams mpeg2 natively. The money/realestate they saved on that encoder was used to put in a 2nd tuner pipeline. You are allowed to watch the stream through either tuner and switch back and forth between them. DirecTIVO also caches both streams so you can rewind one show watch it a while, jump to the other show rewind it and watch a while. Its really quite nice but not unique to the Sky+ machine.
I think more to the point, they broke the GPL. They don't "have" to release thier IP as GPL, they just have to pay appropriate damages for distributing linux in breach of the licence. I don't know what specific penalties the GPL has in it other than ceasation of future distribution so I don't think that SCO has to worry about much of anything in regards to losing thier IP.
They could always loop the Duke 3d dialog track in the background :)
He could answer it the way he pretty much does on his website. He designed it to allow download of anything that is currently downloaded off of webservers today. It is just a load distributor so that a single server doesn't get hammered, so he saw no restrictions on the types of files traded, he left it in the hand of the server operators to use the tool correctly, just as Apache did with its webservers which are just as easily a tool of piracy as bittorrent.
That said I'm still using my radeon 8500 and it is working just as well as it always did for the games I play. Maybe I'll upgrade at some point but so far I haven't needed to.
Free market forces are a good thing, prices should tend toward the marginal cost in the presence of competition.
Except (as it has been stated before) in the case that they are a monopoly in which case as the sole provider of the service they have less choice of who they sell to so long as those people are willing to pay the same price as everyone else purchasing the product.
The free roll your own solutions are close, but again the guide data is the sticker, and if that goes away or becomes a "for pay" thing then the free solutions lose a ton of value.
The summary basically says that they are patenting the process of caching domain information from all the different services (some of them being a manual process and thus not automatable by normal methods) and then using a basic search against the cache to check for existance. So instead of querying all the services in real time (which for the ones that require a phone call or fax to be sent would be VERY slow) they query the cache which is nearly up to date. Furthermore the lump in presenting an order form in this patent so I am not convinced that if you just do the lookup without offering to register the domain that you break the patent but IANAL.
I think that effective prior art may be internet search engines in all honesty, can someone look into that? I don't know if making the search specific to domain names allows Verisign to have a unique patent on the process. I mean isn't what search engines do is query a large number of slow systems and then index and cache the results to be easily searched by someone?
That said there is no reason they can't run the business in a pure classical economic environment and make everyone happy. The "profit" might be 0 economically but that doesn't mean that stockholders and employees don't get paid. 0 economic profit means that the price is at the minimum point required to keep it worthwhile to run the company, stockholder dividends at some minimal level are part of the cost of business and not profit in the economic sense.
If I were the professor I would have sued them. Unfortunately the only way these places listen is if you hit them in the pocketbooks.
I guess its just another reason for me to not buy CD's (and no I don't just download the mp3's, I wouldn't give them the pleasure).
I think they were looking for a wide area network to put in the community as getting a direct connect to the internet (T1) is easy for them. I suggest possibly working with the phone company to install DSL locally. There were some articles on /. earlier about roll your own DSL using unused copper in the phone system.
That said I don't hate linux, I just realize there are some costs related to it that are not included in the purchase price.
Nanotubes and nanites are not really related. Nanotubes are just one of the forms that a pure carbon molecule can take.
Woohooo, an interplanetary Fidonet. Now those were the days.
Granted it might limit future artists if the RIAA companies don't have money to spend for new talent and whatever but realistically this money goes straight to the RIAA.
Has anyone looked into how much the music companies are spending on lawyers and such to stop piracy? At some point it seems like they are using more money trying to stop piracy (not to mention people that quit buying cds because the record industry is run by assholes) than they would gain by having it stopped.
Thats because the OS itself is barely more than an abstraction layer on the hardware. Unix was built as hundreds of command files that could pipe input and output between themselves to do complex jobs with small, "correct" pieces.
I think the reason so many people like linux is that they can't afford and they can't affect the alternatives. Thats the one truely innovative thing (not that I'm convinced I like it) about linux, the license.
Then step in corporations that want the OSS as a base and don't see a huge loss in releasing thier code and on goes a layer of polish. Or you get a group of people that just hates the alternatives and decides to push through a product with some polish.
Usually the things that people put polish on are in the catch up phase because a number of people/companies need to get competative to an inovative (or just well done as is probably microsofts case lots of the time) product thats already on the market. The truely innovative pieces seem to get to the "good enough" phase and then the orignal author gives up on it and then its up to luck for someone else to pick it up and polish it.
The better questions are about how they handled some big project in the past, especially if the process didn't go so smoothly, and find out how that person handles the process. MS picks hires based on a vast array of "competencies" that have been heavily researched and time tested to produce good candidates. Even then MS doesn't always make a good pick and the trial by fire approach to getting a new hire into the workforce usually does its job to weed out people that aren't up to the task and if that doesn't do it the first poor performance review will give them the hint. MS also has wonderful mentorship programs to help someone learn the info they need and learn to tap into the brain trust that resides on campus.
My personal opinion is that MS generates more successful programmers because they have a solid base of successful programmers already in the company that are more than willing to help newcomers get on thier feet.
Interesting, whoever wrote the desciption on the software I looked at sucked, they made it sound like it took longer to send the stream from the tivo than it did to record it real time. That added to the fact that my tivo is an "unhackable" series 2 (I could hack it, I found the info, but it seems like too much trouble to unsolder the prom) I gave up totally. If you could give me a link to better info than what I have I'd be interested in exploring the possibility of getting a series 1 dtivo and using that.
As far as I have ever read the tivo data stream is encrypted on the hard drive and in a format that is currently only deciphered on the tivo itself. Noone has decoded the tystream or else there would be software available that let you pop the tivo drive into your PC and dump the data directly at high speed.
As far as MS using it to lock people into windows I would say yeah, a bit of the reason it still exists is to keep those users on MS products. It would have died long ago if MS would have been successful converting the people who use fox pro over to thier other technologies.
I also get the impression from people that developed fox pro that the users were upset when MS bought the product and were upset when they made it a "visual" lanugage.
That said I can't imagine that MS hasn't thought about possible lost OS license sales and that the lost sales aren't a major motivator for clamping down on the howto.