I was most surprised by the MS spokesperson's comment that there was an as-yet-undisclosed exploit in the MSN Messenger software.
"Here, take this 'trustworthy' software; there's something big and wrong with the one you've got right now but we're not going to tell you what it is."
Unless I'm mistaken, don't all of your CDMA phones "have" to include Qualcomm hardware, only because they're the ones who own the IP to the CDMA technology?
If so, they seem to already have a legally-enforced "common" platform... they're in every phone, thanks to patent law. No real point for them to come to the table, eh?
A coworker and I were just talking about this sort of concept not a few days ago. I brought up the fact that the founder of Domino's Pizza (as opposed to the Domino's corporation itself, which is not true), has made significant contributions to Operation Rescue, which is pretty hard-line against reproductive and gay rights.
He mentioned "what if there was a tool..." basically exactly like this -- scan a barcode, and find out if purchasing that item could potentially result in money moving to organizations that you don't support.
Even if it's a small concept, I honestly wish such a device went further, even if only as a demonstration piece -- take it into someone's kitchen and see what social issues are represented by the food in their pantry.
Hopefully this means that they'll release drivers for their 54-mbit cards already, then.
From what I read, they use the same Broadcom chipset as the access points, which means Linux drivers do exist, in spite of their not being released to anyone.
I'm half-expecting Waterston to also get the Nobel sometime in the near future, once the entire public human genomic sequencing effort has yielded all of its results. The processes and data gained have been valuable to the entire community to a whole, and he's been instrumental in bringing everything together.
Research on this kind of stuff has been done for a while. About 10 years ago I remember reading about how Nielsen was working on a camera-based system that would use face recognition to identify which family member was sitting in front of the TV. That is, is the 5-year-old kid in the family watching, or the parent?
This would help them eliminate spurious data on their Neilsen families, and get a little more -- like find out whether or not the little kid likes to watch Nightline, or Sesame Street.
It was actually kind of cool research. I'm curious if anything ever came out of it.
This IS NOT Big Brother, by the way. Do not jump to the typical Slashdot conclusion that THE MAN wants to track what you're watching.
I've no doubt that this will go the way of the "DVD Killer Divx", the minidisc, and the DAT (which is used professionally - dataplay won't even have that market).
Here we have Sandia, a government-funded laboratory working with Celera, who wants to privatize the genome, patenting interesting bits and selling access to their database for the rest at extremely large dollar amounts per user.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm seeing something wrong here.
So technically not only are our tax dollars funding the government-funded Human Genome Project, we are also paying a national laboratory to help develop a supercomputer for commercial interests, correct?
Sandia Lab and the Human Genome Proejct are both run by the US Department of Energy, so I certainly seem to see a conflict of interest here... anyone else?
Celera's attempt at the human genome is to break up the genome into extra-small fragments, sequence them, and use a computer to reassemble them into the contiguous genome.
The problem with this is that the human genome has lots of repetitive sequence which make it hard to identify what fragment goes where.
Compare to the government-funded approach of first breaking up the genome into manageable chunks of known location and size, then break those up into smaller extra-small chunks and then re-assemble those. Then you know what you've already done, and where you've got gaps.
Obviously taking fragments from all over the genome and assembling is going to take a significant amount of processing power, much more than it would take to just do one smaller manageable chunk of the genome.
The strangest thing is, a lot of companies that require you to give them an email address (like to download RealPlayer for example) do JavaScript/CGI verification on email addresses to make sure you don't put in fluff. They DON'T block, however, addresses like:
I've got a few ideas here I'd like to toss around:
First, setting all issues on whether or not WAVE or programs like it are moral or right, why is our nations' youth so incredibly apathetic that they refuse to take any action until they're bribed with free T-shirts, money, etc? As another post here had said, in Europe people would already have taken to the streets in protest by now.
Also, exactly what can we do about our schools, where the administrators pretend to care about students' well-being, but then let in these for-profit groups to alienate and harm their own students?
For one thing, shouldn't schools handle this sort of stuff internally, rather than awarding some sort of "thought-police" contract to some outside company? Having Pepsi ads in school hallways (although this is questionable as well) is one thing, but allowing an outside company to do this is definitely of questionable ethics.
I am currently attending college, but I live off campus, about a block or two away. Where do you draw the line saying a 300-ft cable is OK, but what if I laid down a longer cable between someone in one of the closer dorms and my house? What about wireless? Satellite, even? (I'm exaggerating a little here, but hopefully you get my point.)
The fact is that theft of service is illegal, pure and simple. This is no different than stealing cable television. Bandwidth is not a right bestowed upon every person upon birth. This school is not being oppressive in any way whatsoever. They are merely protecting their interests -- if they want to prosecute them, that's their option.
If these people wanted a port in their rooms, he could have paid the extra $24/semester. My school charges $120/year for network access, so this guy's getting a bargain.
Don't tell me that high-speed access is critical for learning. I'm studying for a CS degree and I'm doing fine with a 56K modem - it's actually good since it keeps me working, and not playing Quake. The MP3 hoarders and warez pups are the only ones who need high speed access.
What's going to be left here? Palm is gone, and their former USR line also includes things such as cable modems (and as a former 3Com cable modem user, I have to say they were low quality cable modems, at that).
I never really saw 3Com as a big router company, either, but it's obviously big enough for them to spin off. What's left for 3Com to try to survive on besides selling overpriced NIC cards?
It's already been noted that they've pretty much shot themselves in the foot by spinning off Palm. It seems to me like they're going to be doing it again, twice.
From the article: "SORM is a normal system for locating criminals and tax evaders. The United States has such a system -- every country does," said Yelena Volchinskaya, a consultant for the State Duma Security Council, which is charged with evaluating the progress of SORM.
Call me naive, but how does this sort of system exist in the US? Whic 3-letter acronym spy agency here in the USA is responsible (CIA, NSA, FBI, IRS)? If its going on in Russia, at least people now KNOW it's happening, unlike here in the US...
The whole idea behind the iBook is that you can plug it into the modem, ethernet, AirPort, whatever, and always be connected.
I maintain several different networking profiles on my iBook - one for home network to my Linux machine, one for my work network, and one for dialup. I switch between them all quite often, and it's a real pain to have to reboot just to force the network settings to take effect.
I don't know about other machines, but Apple has piled so much cruft into the MacOS installed on iBooks that it takes the machines forever to come up. Having to reboot just to force a switch is stupid.
What's going to happen here is the same thing that happens with open spam relays - reconfiguring Sendmail is a pain, so people don't bother with it, and so we have lots of more open relays.
This 'patch' causes problems, and people don't want to deal with it -- so they'll just take it right off their machine and so there'll still be the same amount of insecure machines, regardless of whether or not there's a patch.
Let's have a look at a snippet of info about one of the judges....
Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com (see "Invention Is a Flower, Innovation Is a Weed,") offered a telegraphic listing of his criteria: "signs of early success, some sign of a struggle, some sign of interim approval from the real world, something exciting, something big."
Is this not the same Bob Metcalfe who just a few months ago was blasting Linux and the open-source model? The same model that Miguel de Icaza is being honored for enhancing and perpetuating?
Why is this patent bad? Google's people invested their hard work and time into developing a page analysis method, and they are more than within their rights to patent it.
Patenting a concept (i.e. the "concept" of banner ads) is relatively questionable business behavior. Patenting an IMPLEMENTATION of that is not - it helps the developers protect their investments, and it forces everyone else to find a better way to do the same thing.
Here Google's authors can rest assured that nobody will steal the fruits of their hard work, and it prompts the rest of the community to come up with a different implementation of a page rankings algorithm that may be better or serve a different purpose.
I'm sure that if someone were to release a competing search engine using Google's algorithm, this entire community would be up in arms about it. So why don't you allow Google the chance to protect their work?
They only show Apache running on Linux, but seem to overlook the fact that it will run on other UNIX (like Solaris 2.7 on their Sun E-250 that they used in the test)...
Is the Sun Web Server that much better tuned for Solaris? In the static page view comparison it blew just about everything else away, but they conveniently decided not to include Apache.
I'm not saying patents on software or concepts are good, or bad. I just don't want to take a stand either way in the matter, since there isn't much information out there about the incident, but there is a whole lot of propaganda.
I read an article about Bezos a few months ago, in I think the New York Times Magazine.
This man managed to turn a little website sitting on a SPARCstation 5 into a multi-national empire in just a matter of 2 or 3 years. Amazon.com was the pioneer for online merchandising (I refuse to use the word e-commerce), and despite for a couple of minor issues (i.e. the '1-click' patent issue, but we won't go down that path here) Amazon remains the gold standard for an e-commerce site.
Amazon.com showed the unwashed masses that they won't get burned by buying things online. In addition, their prices are slightly better than the national book mega-store chains (Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc).
Frankly, I say he deserves the title of "Man of the Year" since 1999 certainly is the explosion of "e-commerce." Sure, there have been minor hiccups in the system (like the whole patent issue). However, things like the automobile, phones, and computers (gasp!) had issues when they were first emerging, and today we take them for granted.
I'm no Wall Street analyst but I can see from a mile away that this will be big. Palm's got everything going for them. They've got a great product with universal appeal -- everyone from high school kids up to executives have Pilots. They barely even need to advertise - their stuff sells itself.
Even though the Linux companies seem somewhat shaky, Palm looks pretty sound. I wish I weren't a poor student and had enough $$$ to let e-trade sell me some IPO stock.
Slashdot Mirror
I was most surprised by the MS spokesperson's comment that there was an as-yet-undisclosed exploit in the MSN Messenger software.
"Here, take this 'trustworthy' software; there's something big and wrong with the one you've got right now but we're not going to tell you what it is."
Not necessarily true.
The overhead fluorescents in my small office (with roughly 8-10 cubes) have not been turned on in 4 years.
Works just great.
Unless I'm mistaken, don't all of your CDMA phones "have" to include Qualcomm hardware, only because they're the ones who own the IP to the CDMA technology?
If so, they seem to already have a legally-enforced "common" platform... they're in every phone, thanks to patent law. No real point for them to come to the table, eh?
Chick-Fil-A is also closed on Sundays. Bah.
A coworker and I were just talking about this sort of concept not a few days ago. I brought up the fact that the founder of Domino's Pizza (as opposed to the Domino's corporation itself, which is not true), has made significant contributions to Operation Rescue, which is pretty hard-line against reproductive and gay rights.
He mentioned "what if there was a tool..." basically exactly like this -- scan a barcode, and find out if purchasing that item could potentially result in money moving to organizations that you don't support.
Even if it's a small concept, I honestly wish such a device went further, even if only as a demonstration piece -- take it into someone's kitchen and see what social issues are represented by the food in their pantry.
Hopefully this means that they'll release drivers for their 54-mbit cards already, then.
From what I read, they use the same Broadcom chipset as the access points, which means Linux drivers do exist, in spite of their not being released to anyone.
I'm half-expecting Waterston to also get the Nobel sometime in the near future, once the entire public human genomic sequencing effort has yielded all of its results. The processes and data gained have been valuable to the entire community to a whole, and he's been instrumental in bringing everything together.
Research on this kind of stuff has been done for a while. About 10 years ago I remember reading about how Nielsen was working on a camera-based system that would use face recognition to identify which family member was sitting in front of the TV. That is, is the 5-year-old kid in the family watching, or the parent?
This would help them eliminate spurious data on their Neilsen families, and get a little more -- like find out whether or not the little kid likes to watch Nightline, or Sesame Street.
It was actually kind of cool research. I'm curious if anything ever came out of it.
This IS NOT Big Brother, by the way. Do not jump to the typical Slashdot conclusion that THE MAN wants to track what you're watching.
I've no doubt that this will go the way of the "DVD Killer Divx", the minidisc, and the DAT (which is used professionally - dataplay won't even have that market).
...
:)
Divx did kill DVDs. I haven't bought a single
Oh, wait. Wrong Divx.
I picked up beautifulGarbage and my roommate managed to rip it to MP3's just fine.
Sadly, the album itself wasn't nearly as good as Garbage's first two, which left me fairly disappointed.
Here we have Sandia, a government-funded laboratory working with Celera, who wants to privatize the genome, patenting interesting bits and selling access to their database for the rest at extremely large dollar amounts per user.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm seeing something wrong here.
So technically not only are our tax dollars funding the government-funded Human Genome Project, we are also paying a national laboratory to help develop a supercomputer for commercial interests, correct?
Sandia Lab and the Human Genome Proejct are both run by the US Department of Energy, so I certainly seem to see a conflict of interest here... anyone else?
Celera's attempt at the human genome is to break up the genome into extra-small fragments, sequence them, and use a computer to reassemble them into the contiguous genome.
The problem with this is that the human genome has lots of repetitive sequence which make it hard to identify what fragment goes where.
Compare to the government-funded approach of first breaking up the genome into manageable chunks of known location and size, then break those up into smaller extra-small chunks and then re-assemble those. Then you know what you've already done, and where you've got gaps.
Obviously taking fragments from all over the genome and assembling is going to take a significant amount of processing power, much more than it would take to just do one smaller manageable chunk of the genome.
The strangest thing is, a lot of companies that require you to give them an email address (like to download RealPlayer for example) do JavaScript/CGI verification on email addresses to make sure you don't put in fluff. They DON'T block, however, addresses like:
webmaster@insertevilcompanyhere.com
or
root@www.whateverevilcompany.com
I've got a few ideas here I'd like to toss around:
First, setting all issues on whether or not WAVE or programs like it are moral or right, why is our nations' youth so incredibly apathetic that they refuse to take any action until they're bribed with free T-shirts, money, etc? As another post here had said, in Europe people would already have taken to the streets in protest by now.
Also, exactly what can we do about our schools, where the administrators pretend to care about students' well-being, but then let in these for-profit groups to alienate and harm their own students?
For one thing, shouldn't schools handle this sort of stuff internally, rather than awarding some sort of "thought-police" contract to some outside company? Having Pepsi ads in school hallways (although this is questionable as well) is one thing, but allowing an outside company to do this is definitely of questionable ethics.
I am currently attending college, but I live off campus, about a block or two away. Where do you draw the line saying a 300-ft cable is OK, but what if I laid down a longer cable between someone in one of the closer dorms and my house? What about wireless? Satellite, even? (I'm exaggerating a little here, but hopefully you get my point.)
The fact is that theft of service is illegal, pure and simple. This is no different than stealing cable television. Bandwidth is not a right bestowed upon every person upon birth. This school is not being oppressive in any way whatsoever. They are merely protecting their interests -- if they want to prosecute them, that's their option.
If these people wanted a port in their rooms, he could have paid the extra $24/semester. My school charges $120/year for network access, so this guy's getting a bargain.
Don't tell me that high-speed access is critical for learning. I'm studying for a CS degree and I'm doing fine with a 56K modem - it's actually good since it keeps me working, and not playing Quake. The MP3 hoarders and warez pups are the only ones who need high speed access.
What's going to be left here? Palm is gone, and their former USR line also includes things such as cable modems (and as a former 3Com cable modem user, I have to say they were low quality cable modems, at that).
I never really saw 3Com as a big router company, either, but it's obviously big enough for them to spin off. What's left for 3Com to try to survive on besides selling overpriced NIC cards?
It's already been noted that they've pretty much shot themselves in the foot by spinning off Palm. It seems to me like they're going to be doing it again, twice.
Call me naive, but how does this sort of system exist in the US? Whic 3-letter acronym spy agency here in the USA is responsible (CIA, NSA, FBI, IRS)? If its going on in Russia, at least people now KNOW it's happening, unlike here in the US...
The whole idea behind the iBook is that you can plug it into the modem, ethernet, AirPort, whatever, and always be connected.
I maintain several different networking profiles on my iBook - one for home network to my Linux machine, one for my work network, and one for dialup. I switch between them all quite often, and it's a real pain to have to reboot just to force the network settings to take effect.
I don't know about other machines, but Apple has piled so much cruft into the MacOS installed on iBooks that it takes the machines forever to come up. Having to reboot just to force a switch is stupid.
What's going to happen here is the same thing that happens with open spam relays - reconfiguring Sendmail is a pain, so people don't bother with it, and so we have lots of more open relays.
This 'patch' causes problems, and people don't want to deal with it -- so they'll just take it right off their machine and so there'll still be the same amount of insecure machines, regardless of whether or not there's a patch.
Let's have a look at a snippet of info about one of the judges....
Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com (see "Invention Is a Flower, Innovation Is a Weed,") offered a telegraphic listing of his criteria: "signs of early success, some sign of a struggle, some sign of interim approval from the real world, something exciting, something big."
Is this not the same Bob Metcalfe who just a few months ago was blasting Linux and the open-source model? The same model that Miguel de Icaza is being honored for enhancing and perpetuating?
Why is this patent bad? Google's people invested their hard work and time into developing a page analysis method, and they are more than within their rights to patent it.
Patenting a concept (i.e. the "concept" of banner ads) is relatively questionable business behavior. Patenting an IMPLEMENTATION of that is not - it helps the developers protect their investments, and it forces everyone else to find a better way to do the same thing.
Here Google's authors can rest assured that nobody will steal the fruits of their hard work, and it prompts the rest of the community to come up with a different implementation of a page rankings algorithm that may be better or serve a different purpose.
I'm sure that if someone were to release a competing search engine using Google's algorithm, this entire community would be up in arms about it. So why don't you allow Google the chance to protect their work?
They only show Apache running on Linux, but seem to overlook the fact that it will run on other UNIX (like Solaris 2.7 on their Sun E-250 that they used in the test)...
Is the Sun Web Server that much better tuned for Solaris? In the static page view comparison it blew just about everything else away, but they conveniently decided not to include Apache.
I'm not saying patents on software or concepts are good, or bad. I just don't want to take a stand either way in the matter, since there isn't much information out there about the incident, but there is a whole lot of propaganda.
I read an article about Bezos a few months ago, in I think the New York Times Magazine.
This man managed to turn a little website sitting on a SPARCstation 5 into a multi-national empire in just a matter of 2 or 3 years. Amazon.com was the pioneer for online merchandising (I refuse to use the word e-commerce), and despite for a couple of minor issues (i.e. the '1-click' patent issue, but we won't go down that path here) Amazon remains the gold standard for an e-commerce site.
Amazon.com showed the unwashed masses that they won't get burned by buying things online. In addition, their prices are slightly better than the national book mega-store chains (Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc).
Frankly, I say he deserves the title of "Man of the Year" since 1999 certainly is the explosion of "e-commerce." Sure, there have been minor hiccups in the system (like the whole patent issue). However, things like the automobile, phones, and computers (gasp!) had issues when they were first emerging, and today we take them for granted.
I'm no Wall Street analyst but I can see from a mile away that this will be big. Palm's got everything going for them. They've got a great product with universal appeal -- everyone from high school kids up to executives have Pilots. They barely even need to advertise - their stuff sells itself.
Even though the Linux companies seem somewhat shaky, Palm looks pretty sound. I wish I weren't a poor student and had enough $$$ to let e-trade sell me some IPO stock.
Centipede taught me that heavy artillery works great against insects.