My direct and personal experience is with semiconductor circuitry, and maybe my employer has overly conservative lawyers. But as far as we're concerned, once a chip has "escaped", it can be delayered, reverse-engineered, and thus discovered.
Are you trying to tell me that software gets "better" patent protection than hardware?
When you're talking over $1000/lb shipping to the moon, the cost difference between cheap and the very best becomes minor. Then when you add in the penalty for failure, you clearly want only the very best.
This is obvious, but since nobody has said it, and since this specific topic hasn't come up yet on other/. patent discussions...
IANAL, but...
Shipping your product is equivalent to publication. It start a timer, 1 year in some places, 6 months in others. You have to have your patent applications into the office within that time, or the art is considered "published" and can never be patented. The definition of "shipping" can be pretty darned nebulous, as well. Sending out a beta with a regular NDA is also probably considered publication. You've got to get quite a bit more serious about the restrictions to have a hope of preserving patent rights, from what I understand, and it fact it may be just plain impossible, once it goes out your doors.
Think of this as an opportunity for the mass amputation industry. The wheelchair lobby should get their act together and lobby for leg amputation as punishment for crimes. Both industries win, and it would be interesting to see what happens to the crime rate.
I'm sorry, it's just a complete blank. I enjoyed the story a long time ago, read it once, and it was in an anthology. But other than some more plot points that would be spoilers... oh, what the heck...
****** SPOILER ALERT **********
After the protagonist has brought music for music's sake back to life, the forces of commercial music have their revenge on him. They get him sent to some sort of place (how, where, and "official why" forgotten) where the ambient noise is loud enough that he loses his hearing. After he comes back to society, he can't hear what he has done.
There was something else in there... this was commercial music, including subliminal effects with subsonics, supersonics, etc. Then he put all of that into his music, one of his favorites was "sex music."
Years/decades ago I read a science fiction story set in a time when this ad-as-show trend had played to its logical conclusion. In this world, all music was commercial jingles, and musicians would play the popular "coms" for their live shows. The protagonist of the story was a musician who began creating music for its own sake. Queue the obvious, add a dash of O'Henry, bake until done.
Predating "Red Mars" (and even predating "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress") by a few years, Robert Heinlein wrote "Farmer in the Sky". In it he went into goodly detail about what it would take to turn bare rock into fertile soil, including earthworms and composting all of your biological waste. He had the Ganymede colony under a dome, though it was at reduced pressure.
A friend who had also read "Farmer..." said that he'd been to Hawaii and seen their process of recovering lava fields to soil, and felt that Heinlein was right in the same ballpark, and least with the rock-crushing side of things. Obviously in a place like Hawaii it would be harder to keep life out than to start it up.
I thought I'd heard somewhere that the new (fully OSS) Atheros drivers were going into the kernel with 2.6/.25, but see no mention. Does anyone have any information on the Atheros/DadWifi kernel merge plans?
It's much more profitable to report on Britney and American Idol than on political muckraking. For that matter it's more profitable to cover the Presidential race as a horse-race, complete with sound-bites, than it is as a serious political discourse and critical event. To think about it, political muckraking typically offends those with wealth and power, and that's clearly not profitable.
After profit IS the most important thing, isn't it?
Re:we need it where it matters
on
The Return of Ada
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I was grabbing someone's.sig and stuffing it into my "quotes" file, and found this relevant tidbit...
Imagine a surgeon who discovers how much money can be saved by purchasing Xacto blades instead of using blades manufactured to more stringent standards. That is exactly the situation we are currently facing when contractors decide to use C or C++ instead of Ada. On the surface one gets the same result. It is only that superficial result that counts for the lowest bidder.
They may be biased, but they're also informed. Would you prefer a summary from a C coder who knew nothing whatsoever about Ada? A knowledgeable person can make efforts to set aside bias. An ignorant person can't set aside ignorance, because by doing so he becomes knowledgeable.
Years ago I read a very good article on the Apollo 13 fuel cell problem. They gave no names, but it was right down to an initially defective set of thermostat contacts, and a person who forced things to fit, instead of flagging the problem. When the fit was forced, the thermostat was jammed. Plus during test, in order to get it done faster, they used overvoltage, welding the contacts together.
Rather frightening, because while they named no names, I'm sure it's right down to a sequence of 2 or 3 people who caused the problem by not following proper procedures. I'd hate to have been one of them.
The pogo things was a few minutes with Google. I'd never heard of pogo oscillations before.
I wouldn't expect computing to get turned into a utility, just a commodity. Along those lines, Microsoft has done everything they can to turn everything about computing into a commodity - except themselves. A while back, Gates was griping about computer hardware being too expensive, even as the retail (I know the preload cost is much lower, but still...) cost of Microsoft Windows was exceeding the retail cost of the hardware. It's just not a stable situation.
At this point, I'm to the point that I'd like to see the Internet turned into a public utility, just like electricity and water. Corporate America came up with crap like CompuServe, TheSource, AOL, Prodigy, and GEnie - all balkanized by their obsession with owning it ALL. The reason the Internet won was precisely the non-ownership, and that is precisely what the corporations who now own the pieces of the Internet are trying to kill. IMHO making it a public utility may be the only way to save it.
Much of Microsoft's business model has become dependent on being THE choice, on not having significant competition. They can be very scrappy, and indeed very good when wedging they way into a market. But once they're in there and on top, thing change.
Going from 96% to 92% is a tiny loss, but it's more significant to look at the "other", which has gone from 4% to 8%. It has doubled, and as the trend continues, "other" is getting economically interesting to support. As that happens, Microsoft's "safe" monopoly markets come under competition, and they have to start diverting development dollars back there, again.
As for the whole Vista/XP thing, it shows up as a stumble, which is bad for PR and the "invincible" image. It leaves the crack open for "other" to make significant gains. (When you're in the single digits, single digit gains are big news.) It also puts them in an awkward revenue position. Sure both Vista and XP are revenue, but Vista is more revenue, and they'd have to be very careful about raising the price of XP, because that could be seen as making it "better" than Vista, the flagship product.
As others have said, I don't expect to see Microsoft die off, just become "another software company." By the same token, I expect the process to be very painful for Microsoft, just like it was for IBM.
The failure in Apollo 13 was due to a heater thermostat in one of the fuel cells that was jammed during testing. The testing verified that the heater could turn on, but didn't verify "off," and was not long enough to detect the pressure buildup. When the full system was powered up on the pad, the fuel cell heater was turned on and stayed that way. It didn't hit overpressure until after the lunar injection burn.
The reference I read indicated that there was a pogo fault on the center engine on the first stage, and that engine was shut down to prevent system failure. I remember listening to early liftoff coverage, hearing the various points where they could lose 1 engine and still make orbit, then 2 engines, etc. Evidently the center engine pogo failure was late enough that it didn't matter.
Recently I had the opportunity to talk with the sysadmin for a major power utility in my state, and to be honest I felt much better for having done so. I went into it with a very Slashdot-like unpatched-Win95-on-the-internet attitude, and came out with considerable respect. Everything the guy said was consistent, and gave a good, concerned, somewhat paranoid sysadmin attitude, the kind you'd like to see.
Our SCADA is almost entirely on private links, with the remainder on leased lines. None of it is routed over the Internet, VPN or no VPN. There is a related protocol, ICCP, which allows different companies to "talk" with each other. Some of that system does go over the Internet, all over VPN. But more important, the data itself is screened, so even if you found a MITM attack, you couldn't declare playtime. As for the Internet and the rest, they're carefully separated, and any common points are well secured.
OTOH, he talked of going on an audit trip of some other power facility. The audit team recommended running one of the links through a firewall system, among other things. Later he took a look at some of the implementations of the recommendations. The ethernet cable came into a hole on one side of the firewall system, and went out a hole on another side of that system. It "ran through a firewall."
No offense taken. I was just trying to make a Slashdot-ready phrasing for a response.
I kind of drifted out of the Comics somewhere in high school, though I still have a few old ones laying around. (Including the "Batman vs Hulk" DC-Marvel crossover.) I also bought about a half-dozen Superman comics around the "Death of Superman" timeframe, just in case they gain collectors' value. Cheap investment, along with my 2 boxes of "Original Color" and 1 box of "New Wave" color Crayola 64-packs. (I bought the "New Colors" pack in case they realized their mistake, and quickly moved back, like Coke.)
I bow to your superior knowledge of the Marvel Universe. Besides, my post was based on 30-40 year old memories. Did you ever stop to think that John McCain is the one Presidential candidate who can't make the "senior moment" joke over a memory lapse?
Marvel Comics has been telling us this for years! Decades, even!
Galactus, the Overmind, and the Stranger all came from the previous Universe, by one mechanism or another surviving the Big Crunch and the following Big Bang. There may be other previous universe types, but those 3 are the only ones I picked up on, back in my comic book days. (decades ago, even)
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't Goat-Skin+RW be generally better for archival purposes, and are you sure that's RW, or isn't it really burn-once Goat-Skin+/-R?
My direct and personal experience is with semiconductor circuitry, and maybe my employer has overly conservative lawyers. But as far as we're concerned, once a chip has "escaped", it can be delayered, reverse-engineered, and thus discovered.
Are you trying to tell me that software gets "better" patent protection than hardware?
When you're talking over $1000/lb shipping to the moon, the cost difference between cheap and the very best becomes minor. Then when you add in the penalty for failure, you clearly want only the very best.
This is obvious, but since nobody has said it, and since this specific topic hasn't come up yet on other /. patent discussions...
IANAL, but...
Shipping your product is equivalent to publication. It start a timer, 1 year in some places, 6 months in others. You have to have your patent applications into the office within that time, or the art is considered "published" and can never be patented. The definition of "shipping" can be pretty darned nebulous, as well. Sending out a beta with a regular NDA is also probably considered publication. You've got to get quite a bit more serious about the restrictions to have a hope of preserving patent rights, from what I understand, and it fact it may be just plain impossible, once it goes out your doors.
Think of this as an opportunity for the mass amputation industry. The wheelchair lobby should get their act together and lobby for leg amputation as punishment for crimes. Both industries win, and it would be interesting to see what happens to the crime rate.
That might be the very story I'm talking abiut.
I'm sorry, it's just a complete blank. I enjoyed the story a long time ago, read it once, and it was in an anthology. But other than some more plot points that would be spoilers... oh, what the heck...
****** SPOILER ALERT **********
After the protagonist has brought music for music's sake back to life, the forces of commercial music have their revenge on him. They get him sent to some sort of place (how, where, and "official why" forgotten) where the ambient noise is loud enough that he loses his hearing. After he comes back to society, he can't hear what he has done.
There was something else in there... this was commercial music, including subliminal effects with subsonics, supersonics, etc. Then he put all of that into his music, one of his favorites was "sex music."
Years/decades ago I read a science fiction story set in a time when this ad-as-show trend had played to its logical conclusion. In this world, all music was commercial jingles, and musicians would play the popular "coms" for their live shows. The protagonist of the story was a musician who began creating music for its own sake. Queue the obvious, add a dash of O'Henry, bake until done.
Title, author forgotten.
Predating "Red Mars" (and even predating "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress") by a few years, Robert Heinlein wrote "Farmer in the Sky". In it he went into goodly detail about what it would take to turn bare rock into fertile soil, including earthworms and composting all of your biological waste. He had the Ganymede colony under a dome, though it was at reduced pressure.
A friend who had also read "Farmer..." said that he'd been to Hawaii and seen their process of recovering lava fields to soil, and felt that Heinlein was right in the same ballpark, and least with the rock-crushing side of things. Obviously in a place like Hawaii it would be harder to keep life out than to start it up.
Never mind. Found it on kernelnewbies, under "ath5k", I was searching "atheros".
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=fa1c114fdaa605496045e56c42d0c8aa4c139e57
I thought I'd heard somewhere that the new (fully OSS) Atheros drivers were going into the kernel with 2.6/.25, but see no mention. Does anyone have any information on the Atheros/DadWifi kernel merge plans?
It's been killed by becoming a profit center.
It's much more profitable to report on Britney and American Idol than on political muckraking. For that matter it's more profitable to cover the Presidential race as a horse-race, complete with sound-bites, than it is as a serious political discourse and critical event. To think about it, political muckraking typically offends those with wealth and power, and that's clearly not profitable.
After profit IS the most important thing, isn't it?
I was grabbing someone's .sig and stuffing it into my "quotes" file, and found this relevant tidbit...
Imagine a surgeon who discovers how much money can be saved by purchasing Xacto blades instead of using blades manufactured to more stringent standards. That is exactly the situation we are currently facing when contractors decide to use C or C++ instead of Ada. On the surface one gets the same result. It is only that superficial result that counts for the lowest bidder.
- Richard Riehle
They may be biased, but they're also informed. Would you prefer a summary from a C coder who knew nothing whatsoever about Ada? A knowledgeable person can make efforts to set aside bias. An ignorant person can't set aside ignorance, because by doing so he becomes knowledgeable.
Sounds like an incipient buffer overflow, to me.
Years ago I read a very good article on the Apollo 13 fuel cell problem. They gave no names, but it was right down to an initially defective set of thermostat contacts, and a person who forced things to fit, instead of flagging the problem. When the fit was forced, the thermostat was jammed. Plus during test, in order to get it done faster, they used overvoltage, welding the contacts together.
Rather frightening, because while they named no names, I'm sure it's right down to a sequence of 2 or 3 people who caused the problem by not following proper procedures. I'd hate to have been one of them.
The pogo things was a few minutes with Google. I'd never heard of pogo oscillations before.
I wouldn't expect computing to get turned into a utility, just a commodity. Along those lines, Microsoft has done everything they can to turn everything about computing into a commodity - except themselves. A while back, Gates was griping about computer hardware being too expensive, even as the retail (I know the preload cost is much lower, but still...) cost of Microsoft Windows was exceeding the retail cost of the hardware. It's just not a stable situation.
At this point, I'm to the point that I'd like to see the Internet turned into a public utility, just like electricity and water. Corporate America came up with crap like CompuServe, TheSource, AOL, Prodigy, and GEnie - all balkanized by their obsession with owning it ALL. The reason the Internet won was precisely the non-ownership, and that is precisely what the corporations who now own the pieces of the Internet are trying to kill. IMHO making it a public utility may be the only way to save it.
Much of Microsoft's business model has become dependent on being THE choice, on not having significant competition. They can be very scrappy, and indeed very good when wedging they way into a market. But once they're in there and on top, thing change.
Going from 96% to 92% is a tiny loss, but it's more significant to look at the "other", which has gone from 4% to 8%. It has doubled, and as the trend continues, "other" is getting economically interesting to support. As that happens, Microsoft's "safe" monopoly markets come under competition, and they have to start diverting development dollars back there, again.
As for the whole Vista/XP thing, it shows up as a stumble, which is bad for PR and the "invincible" image. It leaves the crack open for "other" to make significant gains. (When you're in the single digits, single digit gains are big news.) It also puts them in an awkward revenue position. Sure both Vista and XP are revenue, but Vista is more revenue, and they'd have to be very careful about raising the price of XP, because that could be seen as making it "better" than Vista, the flagship product.
As others have said, I don't expect to see Microsoft die off, just become "another software company." By the same token, I expect the process to be very painful for Microsoft, just like it was for IBM.
The failure in Apollo 13 was due to a heater thermostat in one of the fuel cells that was jammed during testing. The testing verified that the heater could turn on, but didn't verify "off," and was not long enough to detect the pressure buildup. When the full system was powered up on the pad, the fuel cell heater was turned on and stayed that way. It didn't hit overpressure until after the lunar injection burn.
The reference I read indicated that there was a pogo fault on the center engine on the first stage, and that engine was shut down to prevent system failure. I remember listening to early liftoff coverage, hearing the various points where they could lose 1 engine and still make orbit, then 2 engines, etc. Evidently the center engine pogo failure was late enough that it didn't matter.
Recently I had the opportunity to talk with the sysadmin for a major power utility in my state, and to be honest I felt much better for having done so. I went into it with a very Slashdot-like unpatched-Win95-on-the-internet attitude, and came out with considerable respect. Everything the guy said was consistent, and gave a good, concerned, somewhat paranoid sysadmin attitude, the kind you'd like to see.
Our SCADA is almost entirely on private links, with the remainder on leased lines. None of it is routed over the Internet, VPN or no VPN. There is a related protocol, ICCP, which allows different companies to "talk" with each other. Some of that system does go over the Internet, all over VPN. But more important, the data itself is screened, so even if you found a MITM attack, you couldn't declare playtime. As for the Internet and the rest, they're carefully separated, and any common points are well secured.
OTOH, he talked of going on an audit trip of some other power facility. The audit team recommended running one of the links through a firewall system, among other things. Later he took a look at some of the implementations of the recommendations. The ethernet cable came into a hole on one side of the firewall system, and went out a hole on another side of that system. It "ran through a firewall."
No offense taken. I was just trying to make a Slashdot-ready phrasing for a response.
I kind of drifted out of the Comics somewhere in high school, though I still have a few old ones laying around. (Including the "Batman vs Hulk" DC-Marvel crossover.) I also bought about a half-dozen Superman comics around the "Death of Superman" timeframe, just in case they gain collectors' value. Cheap investment, along with my 2 boxes of "Original Color" and 1 box of "New Wave" color Crayola 64-packs. (I bought the "New Colors" pack in case they realized their mistake, and quickly moved back, like Coke.)
I bow to your superior knowledge of the Marvel Universe. Besides, my post was based on 30-40 year old memories. Did you ever stop to think that John McCain is the one Presidential candidate who can't make the "senior moment" joke over a memory lapse?
Not to mention Timecube!
Marvel Comics has been telling us this for years! Decades, even!
Galactus, the Overmind, and the Stranger all came from the previous Universe, by one mechanism or another surviving the Big Crunch and the following Big Bang. There may be other previous universe types, but those 3 are the only ones I picked up on, back in my comic book days. (decades ago, even)
Yes, he's an SOB, and I don't think I'd like to work for him, and maybe more of his talent is in marketing.
But he grows Apple's business.