Re:Why we use base 2 instead of base 3
on
Bringing Back the PDP8
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· Score: 4, Informative
Off hand, I can't think of a way to do that with a third logic-value. Consider drawing even a tiny amount of current while a gate is sitting at logic "2" (or whatever you want to call the 3rd value).
It could be accomplished (fully static CMOS, no steady state current to maintain a 3rd logic level) with a second power supply, and circuitry designed to connect the output to either Vss, Vdd or Vmm (m for middle, for lack of any other name.. hmm)
Brian Hayes's flawed assumption is that circuit complexity increases linearily with the number of logic levels. He writes "An obvious strategy is to minimize the product of these two quantities", refering to the radix and number of symbols to represent a number... but he just pulled that out of a hat. The required circuit complexity is not linear function of the radix, and a realistic model would quickly prove that binary is the most efficient. A fully static ternary output requires a minimum of four transistors, whereas binary requires only two.
That chip's going to get a little hot!
With a static CMOS circuit designed this way, power consumption would be approx 0.5 * C * f * V^2 (as it is in normal binary circuit). C will probably increase somewhat, as nearly twice as many transitors would be needed per circuit, yet fewer trits are needed that bits for the representing the same numerical range, so the increase in C probably wouldn't be by a factor of two. Presumably f (the clock frequency) would stay the same (well... I'll get to that...), and V stays the same (50% of transitions in binary are full supply voltage, in ternary 33% are full voltage and 33% are half voltage). Power comsumption would probably be similar.
Saddly, f probably won't stay the same. C gets larger on each signal, and when driving to half voltages, the transistors that would connect to the Vmm supply get only half the effective gate voltage applied. So doubling the load and cutting the drive significantly is really going to hurt the circuit's speed.
Dynamic logic tricks (pre-charged busses) and bicmos circuits add another interesting dimension that's too complex to worry about, though it'd be important for any microprocessor.
But power consumption isn't likely to be a problem.
Getting back to the old PDP-8, as I recall it was a binary machine. The motivation behind 12 bits was that 6 bits was ideal to represent both upper and lower case characters and plenty of symbols, and 12 bits (two chars) was plenty for useful math. I don't recall the popularity of 6/12 bit systems having anything to do with base-3 signaling.
As far as someone like doubleclick is concerned (or any other advertising-helper company), they pushed the impression and get paid by the actual advertiser.
And if your browser corresponds cookies and a "referer" string with them, they also got to track that you visited that particular site. So their REAL revenue stream, collection and sales of marketing data mined from unsuspecting web users, remains intact.
... attempt to make a buck anyway they can. And it is quite profitable to aggregate as much data as possible to maximize its resale value. Selling marketing data collected about real people's web surfing habbits MUCH more profitable than simply publishing the ads, which ammounts to little more than setting up a web server to pump out bytes.
Spying? Maybe. First,
check the definition of the word. Ok, I'll save you one mouse click (and filter out the uses of the word that don't apply)
One who secretly keeps watch on another or others.
To discover by close observation.
To seek or observe something secretly and closely.
To make a careful investigation: spying into other people's activities.
Looks like the word "spying" is used pretty accurately here. Though the other uses of the word have concepts of military secrets or comany confidentail informtaion and espionage rolled up in them, if we're to believe the 4th edition of the American Heritage dictionary (Webster's is very similar), what these folks do amounts to spying by the dictionary definition of the word.
That's like saying, "the police in my town are lazy and aren't cracking down on crime. That's why we need to start committing crimes left and right and encouraging others to do the same until the cops are motivated enough."
It's much more like the local newspaper publishing the limited routes the cops actually patrol, thereby allowing crooks to rob the places that aren't adaquetely protected. Sure, criminals will read the paper and know where they can strike, but the idea is that everyone who lives or does business in such an area is venuerable will learn that they are at risk and put pressure one the cops to clean up their act. One of the biggest factors in making a value judgement in a case like that is what level of effort was made with the cops before widely publishing their weaknesses.
Remeber that Andreas Sandblad contacted Microsoft about this problem on Oct 4 (Wired didn't even read the bugtraq posting they reported). That's six weeks ago... even longer than the 1 month period that Microsoft has suggested is necessary from discovery to disclosure. He published only after Microsoft said they didn't think it was a bug. Since Microsoft essentially claimed it wasn't a problem, the announcement needed to prove otherwise to have any chance of success.
One more quote....
You do realize that it isn't the laziness of MS that *actually* does harm, but the fact that it allows malicious people to do bad things?
Are you suggesting that Microsoft's inaction and refusal to fix the problem when they first learned of it six weeks ago was not harmful?
You probably also believe the infamous exploding gas tanks on the Ford Pinto wasn't harmful, and the deaths and injuries were purely the fault of drivers hitting Pintos. Ford's "laziness" (cheaper to settle out of court with victims than the recall and improve the cars) when they knew of the problem and did not fix it probably wouldn't be an issue for you, would it?
Back to Microsoft... who didn't fix the problem when they learned of it 6 weeks ago... does their inaction ever become harmful in your world view? How about when systems are compromised on a small scale? What about when a virus/worm is released with the ability to exploit it? (and what if someone had made a big stink about it in the press and forced them to fix it before that virus/worm was written) It's all the faults of those hackers, and Microsoft's "laziness" (when they knew of the problem in advance) never receives any of the blame? Yet someone who attempts to force the issue with a high profile public announcement, only after first having made an attempt to get them to fix it, is somehow as guilty in your little world as the actual attachers and at the same time the vendor who refused to fix the problem with advanced notice is not to blame at all?
Spamassassin does a pretty good job of filtering out all those messages, despite the altered spellings.
Vipul's Razor (real-time spam database) uses
Nilsimsa signatures to detect superficial changes to known messages, and spamassassin removes non-visible html tricks from the message before it checks against razor (assuming you enabled the razor check in your.spamassassin/user_prefs file, or system wide when you installed it).
Someone I know once worked on software to do realtime filtering of keywords in "family friendly" chatrooms. He said it was almost impossible
It's obviously not impossible, since it's implemented and working in spamassassin/razor, and together with the hundreds of other checks and weighted scroring system, it IS highly effective at removing nearly all spam.
Spamassassin is a great example of the power of open-source software development. It's a big arms race between spammers and spam filters, and the only filter that seems to be consistently winning in spamassassin.
And if you're stuck with a lame but unfortunately common OS and email client, it looks like Deersoft is packaging it all up with a nice "any idiot can click and install this" package, but be ready to pay a few bucks. Spamassassin really does work wonders, so if you're no good at unix, the $30 is probably money well spent for someone to make it easy for you. It's of course free and relatively to use on any respectable unix platform that has procmail or sendmail.
It is very simple. Charge people to send e-mail. Yep, let's say you charge.0001 per e-mail that is sent out.
Saddly, it's not simple. It's not simple at all to bill people and collect money.
The fundamental problem is that a system which bills people and collects their money is exposed to financial risk from fraudlent transactions.
Fraud sucks. Our little website has been stung a few times. The bottom line is that someone, somewhere is going to lose money when fraud occurs. The money lost is both the amount stolen plus work that needed to be done by parties involved.
Even at.0001 per message, if the system can be exploited (the idea is that some heavy users would rack up substantial fees, which translates into substantial opportunities for fraud), there are plenty of people who certainly will abuse the system. The worst spammers may even be the people who commit those crimes, as many of them have criminal records for fraud.
So any system must take measures on every single transaction to prevent fraud. When problems do occur (not just fraud, but common billing disputes), they must be handled. This generally takes real people. Witness the problems with Paypal, which doesn't take phone calls and is seriously backlogged in resolving disputes.
Every transaction carries a significant non-zero cost, due to the need to verify the transasction, resolve disputes, and cover the risk of loss due to fraud. Someone has to pay for that cost. With credit cards, the merchant pays a percentage of the sale PLUS a small fixed fee. The folks in the middle, processing the transaction, generally also like to make a profit. Paypal charges percentages only, which is quite remarkable, but even paypal isn't a viable alternative for micropayments.
It just is not simple to process monetary transactions. There are real costs and risks involved, which have prevented the world from reaching the utopia of a micropayment system.
Again, when your entire multi-billion-dollar monopoly which has widespread penetration in many markets is being supported by two out of thousands of products... that's abuse.
Similar to the "abuse" of a tabloid reporting that two products make huge profit, one makes reasonable profit, and four others are losing money.
That's only 7. What about the 1993 other products? Visual Studio quickly comes to mind.
... and here's the message I just sent to every person I've ever had contact with at Verio.
By now, you have probably heard the news that Verio has been accused
by SPAMHAUS of supporting major spam operators and Verio is being
added to their anti-spam blacklist that serves 98 million email users
worldwide. If you have not yet heard of this, please read:
Like most other Verio customers, reliable legitimate (non-spam)
email communication with my own customers is critically important,
and I will be forced to relocate my site to another provider if
these blacklists interfere with my business. At this point, it
appears the ranges of blocked IP numbers do not include my own
dedicated server ([snip, verio server ID number]).
Over the last 2 years, I have experienced a small number of
blacklist related problems, where my email messages were not
delivered. Luckily, few of the major blacklists have targeted
large netblocks at Verio, and relatively few users make use of
the smaller, over-agressive blacklists.
Blacklists are especially disruptive when our customer places
an order via the website, and our two confirmation email (the
second with their UPS tracking number) are not delivered. To
our customer, it appears as if we have poor service. They are
unaware that their ISP or anti-spam software blocked our
confirmation messages.
To date, these problems have been rare, but very troublesome
when they occur. If they become frequent, we will have no
choice but to seek a different provider to host our site.
The same people that fought to get the DMCA passed will fight to get this stopped.
In 1998, it was hardly a "fight". Nobody lobbied against it (in any effective manner). It's hard to fault lawmakers for passing a law that they only heard good thigns about and nobody seemed to object (at the time).
The problem is that these people are very powerful and have a lot of money.
True, but the likes of Intel, HP/Compaq, Apple, Sun, Oracle, Dell, Gateway have MUCH MORE MONEY and they're rapidly catching up to the political savvy of the entertainment industry.
You didn't think this bill was introduced because of slashdot, did you?
To say that "they" have "lost" implies that there's some sort of contest, competition, war, etc, with clearly definable winners and losers. MPAA vs hackers, RIAA vs consumers, or something like that, or maybe some other contest? Just because someone invented a self-destructing disc and some media company is giving it a trial run for distributing a free promotion is somehow an indication that "they" have "lost" this (undefined) contest?
Yeah, that's +4 insightful. So is...
If any 5 year old can publish themselves WORLD WIDE 24/7, then the business of distrobution (of "information") is dead. Ever see a little kid make a homepage on AOL? They do... it ain't XHTML but it's there for the world to see 24/7. Tell me again why I need YOU to publish my info for ungodly sums of money?
Well, assuming you're an indie band or film maker, if you take the "throw up a webpage" approach, you'll be in fine company with many other no-names. The reality of today's market is that most people (at least in the US) gain exposure to music by listening to the radio, and movies by viewing big-budget advertising (television, newspaper, billboards, etc).
I would suggest to you that "they" are "winning" as long as the mainstream population learns of new entertainment and makes their entertainment spending decisions based on advertising which "they" control.
When/if someday a good portion of the population discovers new entertainment and makes purchasing decisions for entertainment based on indie-accessible channels (internet), then I'll be convinced that "they" have "lost". In the meantime, a trial run of a new media type (that sucks) means nothing.
What about states that have no sales tax? If I buy something from, say, Florida, would Florida charge me a sales tax?
Probably. As I understand it, if you were to purchase something from my little website, which is based in Oregon, one of the few states without sales tax (the server is in a datacenter in California, by the way, but I don't think that matters, as the business operates in Oregon), we'd charge you the Florida tax and make a payment to the state of Florida (yearly, quartly, monthly is still unclear).
The system supposedly simplifies the process so we could only need to know 45 different rates (5 states w/out tax) multiplied by the number of different taxable categories in each state, rather than 7000 (cities, counties, etc) multiplies by non-uniform rules about which types of goods are taxable and the rates of each in each district.
You could move out here to Oregon, but then you'd have to pay the high income tax, and also property tax (or higher rent if you don't own the property).
How about a browser? Can you afford that? My off the cuff implementation would be a web service.
If the article is to be believed, only certain "approved software" could be used (mentions taxware is the one that's being tested), or a custom app would need to be "certified".
The point is that it costs money to pay taxes. Not the tax itself... you need to spend time and money (usually pay a CPA) to prepare the taxes. For very small businesses, it costs a few hundred a year. From the article, it appears that it will be tremendously expensive to pay all these sales taxes. They're supposedly making it "simpler", but how simple is it if you need to have "approved software" (someone pointed out that taxware is six figures!)
Furthermore, make the tax collector put up the service!
This is a fine idea, but if you read the article (imagine that), the state's plan is to supposedly simplify the process and require people to use this extreemly expensive software to make all those supposedly simplified payments.
Sure, in theory the states could do something where they bear the burden (assuming that this idea could work, which is another question altogether). But based on the article, their plan appears to be nothing like what you proposed. They're making the rules "simpler", but it's still so damn complex that specially approved software (taxware) is mandated by the plan. They know it's so expensive that they propose "sharing" a chunk of the money with merchants... which help the big boys, but for the little guys, a chunk of the collected tax isn't going to cover what seems like an enormous cost.
Then again, this is all guesswork from just a few sentences in the article. Please do read the article.
(3) too embarrased to buy certain items in person.
Diet pills that work without excersize or diet
Fake diplomas
Penis or Breast enlargment kits
Fraudlent credit boosting schemes
Cable TV descramblers
Home employment / money-making scams (herbalife?)
Sex enhancing pills and herbs
I'd be pretty embarrased buying this stuff...
Seriously, while paying taxes sucks in general, they still haven't really simplified this thing. Their plan calls for specially approved (likely extreemly expensive) software to sort out the massively complex maze of city, county and state districts and how to send money to each of them.
Under the states' plan, online sellers would be required to purchase approved software to compute the appropriate state and local taxes or to certify with the state any in-house calculation systems already in place. E-tailers could choose to outsource tax collection to a certified third-party under the states' plan.
My little website is just one of thousands of tiny little businesses that are run part-time, or just barely pay the bills for one person to run it.
It's absolutely unbelievable what a lot of companies charge for "e-commerce" software. How likely is this to be a $49.95 turbo-tax package? Nope, it'll be targeted at businesses and a few blood-sucking companies will see this as a big opportunity to rake in the dollars from every on-line merchant. We've seen lots of this mega-expensive software, and we manage to get by and make customers happy without any of it. It's unheard of to be _required_ by law to purchase some particular (extreemly expensive) software. And with some special gov't appoval/certification process, you can be sure it'll be plenty expensive...
But for the little guys (like me), that money just isn't there. We can't spend thousands on software, or just about anything else for that matter. It looks like the company these states are working with is Taxware. Go visit their site and take a wild guess at what they're going to charge for this sort of software. It ain't gonna be cheap.
The fact is that there are many thousands of very small on-line merchants. VERY small. Filing 45 tax returns is going to suck. Paying for expensive software, or consulting fees to some "approved" company will only add injury to the insult. Our accounting software budget includes a new version of Quickbooks for next year. That's about all we can afford software-wise.
And it goes against all other tax paying practice to require specific approved software. You don't need special software from a specific "approved" vendor to file taxes. You do need to know how to do it, of course. My partner is a CPA and she knows ordinary sales tax very well (even though we live in Oregon where there is no sales tax). Why should we be held hostage to purchasing special software? Why does it need to be from specially approved vendors?
If the tax can't be paid by a company with an ordinary CPA, and some special software is required, and that software is so special that vendors need to be certified by some special approval process, they certain't haven't made great strides towards making this a simple enough process. Special software isn't required for paying normal taxes, and requiring a special certification process for tax calculation software is totally unheard of. It reaks of a back-room deal between GovOne (the makers taxware) and these states... if some complicated certification process is required for anyone else trying to enter the market for this new software that every on-line merchant is compelled to buy, guess what the prices will be in the first year when Taxware is the only product available and everyone is REQUIRED to buy it?
Well, enough ranting for one day. Maybe it won't be so bad. I'm just in a bad mood because a customer refused to pay the tax/duty on a package we shipped to the UK (and now we need to do something about it, and all the options suck....)
I do not believe this is a NEW factor within the last 1-2 years leading to the CURRENT decline (boycott) of CD sales.
I haven't bought a CD from a major label in a long, long time.
My point exactly. It's been "bad" for a long time, yet sales have steadily increased year after year despite the focus on teen pop and other manufactured music.
Something changed very RECENTLY. The only thing that corresponds well is thedecline is CD sales is the decline in economy. File sharing and CDR sales sort-of correspond to the decline, though those trends started earlier... but not that much earlier that they can be easily discounted as potential factors.
But selection and promotion of "fresh" music just hasn't changed much in the last couple years, or even in the few prior years leading up to the current decline. So while it does suck, I just can't buy that as a factor leading to the decline in sales.
The board inside should have jillions of 72 pin SIMM sockets (in pairs is ok, multi-level board is ok) and a connector for an old ATAPI 2 or 3 Gig laptop drive. The case should have room for a little battery to do what that really expensive drive could do years ago to backup in case of a power failure. Hell, I'd even pay 50 bucks or so for it. Any takers?
I'm planning to add a project to PJRC in the next year that is essentially this... but using 168 pin DIMMs (which are collecting now that higher performance PCs use DDR).
Saddly, $50 is a unrealistic for a low-volume product. The "controller chip" is a FPGA that costs almost $50 by itself in modest volumes. A large multi-layer circuit board is also needed (most of the surface area is to mount the DIMM sockets). Finally, low volume BGA soldering and x-ray inspection isn't cheap either. It's a very different world making several hundred niche-market boards vs millions of cheap ethernet cards. A board like this with 12 or 16 sockets can't realistically be sold under $350 (under 1000 per year volume).
Sure about that? For the price of the Ramdrive, I could easily get 2GB of DDR.
Maybe. Most motherboards have three DDR sockets, but if you use unbuffered (inexpensive) IMMs with chips on both sides, most motherboards will only work with one or two of those DIMMs. Generally, you need buffered/registered DIMMs if you are going to use several.
Over at pricewatch.com today, 1 GB DDR DIMMS are listed between $324 to $480, depending on the speed and vendor. 512 meg DDR DIMMs seem to be in the $120 to $160 range, but those are not buffered/registered... so it's very unlikely you could get four of them to work on a normal motherboard.
Hell, for the price of the Ramdrive I could get a motherboard that supported 64GB and fill a moderate chunk of it.
Again, you'd be looking at an expensive server motherboard, and it would likely require the very expensive registered/buffered DIMMs.
That thing has lower speed and greater access time than main memory and costs more, so just using RAM as disk cache would appear to be more useful under the majority of circumstances.
This might be true, if you could inexpensively add that much memory, and deal with the volatility.
A few times I've considered adding a solid state disk project to PJRC.COM.... it's likely have 16 DIMMs sockets at about half the price of this gadget (they used a big xilinx FPGA... same basic idea).
Unbuffered 512 meg SDRAM (not DDR) DIMMs are selling at about $30 each these days... maybe the value in having an extreemly fast non-volatile 8 gigabyte disk at $830 would be better??
Saddly, flash is rarely used well, and even when it is, it is still DIFFERENT than using ordinary html.
First, I wait for the page I was previously viewing to disappear.
Then, I wait for something, anything, anything at all to appear.
Something renders on the screen... usually its a nav bar or something uninteresting I've seen before, but I look at it anyway because I'm still waiting.
Finally, useful information appears and I begin looking at it.
However (on most sites), as images and other stuff comes in, it all reformats and moves around, so I don't get a good look at it yet.
Finally, everything is loaded and (at most sites) something is animated and highly distracting. Most people learn to ignore it... I personally use Mozilla and set it to stop animating after one loop, and I use use junkbuster to filter most of the crap. But sometimes I use someone else's computer and I'm reminded of what an annoying mess most web pages are.
But eventually, the animations stop or are ignorable, and I can start actually reading the page, looking at its photos or illustrations, interacting with a form, or begin looking for a link to take me to what I ulimately want, or do whatever it is I'm actually going to do with the web site.
But not if it's Macromedia Flash... the waiting game has only just begun....
No, not with flash sites. I've already suffered through waiting for the page to load, waiting for the browser to finally format everything where it goes, and I've managed to ignore the advertising in one way or another. That ought to be enough, but not for flash.
Now I have to look at some additional "still loading", usually with nice pretty animation, but I'm still waiting with nothing USEFUL to look at.
Once it finally is finished loading, do I get something useful as rapidly as my computer can render it... NO. That's too easy. With Flash, it's always got to roll, fade, or somehow come into my field of view in a slick, animated way that takes too damn long.
But it's not over. I'm not a fast reader (many people are), but nearly all flash applets choose to slowly present me with more stuff. Usually it's because they'll remove the previous thing as they show something else. Often it's a long progression of things.
I simply don't want to wait. I already waited for the page to load, which is longer than normal due to the applet being larger than html/jpg, and then I have to wait as the applet loads more data, and even then I have to wait as it animates slowly. And all that, often just to end up following a link to get to what I _really_ wanted.... all flash ever seems to do is slow me down. Even with infinite bandwidth, it's still TOO DAMN SLOW.
Try explaining to a 12 year old girl with $20.00 burning in her pocket why she shouldn't buy the Britney Spears CD all her friends have because it's 'crippled'.
You don't need to. She's already not buying it even before it's crippled. Sales are down 20-some percent and falling, remember?
It plays in her walkman and that's all she cares about. The worst part is, if it doesn't play in her player, she'll buy a new one.
That is, IF she purhcased a CD. If instead she copied it from a friend or downloaded it from the net (paid legit or kazaa), what will matter is if the CDR she burns on her family's PC plays correctly in her CD or MP3 player. Compatibility with CDR will matter probably as much as compatibility with copy-prevention schemes. In case you haven't shopped for CD players recently, most specifically state on their packaging that they play CDR and CD/RW. That's likely printed on the package because it matters in the purchase decision to a good portion of potential buyers (mainstream, not just slashdot)
We're not their bread and butter in their short term vision.
Whoever is their bread and butter is definately not buying as many CDs as they used to be. Whoever this is _might_ not care about copy prevention, but they _definately_ do care about something that is already causing them to buy fewer CDs.
They cite pointless statistics about dropping sales.
Of all the crap in RIAA press released and lobbying, this is the one part that is objective and factual. WHY the sales are down is a good question, but they are down. That mean a LOT of people, not just geeks, are choosing not to buy CDs. It is a fact.
MPAA claims studios will go under, attempts to royalty/tax VCRs and blanks tapes fails
Copy protection is developed and encoded on most tapes
About 50% of VCRs can copy macrovision encoded tapes
New VCRs are made with faster AGC circuits, so they can't copy macrovision
Few people cared, and the tiny fraction that did purchased circumvention devices which ultimately had little or no measurable impact on the market.
Studios discover (by accident) that many people will buy at $20, rather than rent, movie prices drop
Harry Potter is released without Macrovision, sales are increadible anyway
Studios make about 1/2 their money from video sales and rental.
Then again, maybe "the internet changes everything", but in the case of Macrovision, most of the VCR manufactures built their recorders to respect the macrovision signal.
It appears that "we" already are boycotting CD purchases. Sales are down 10% to 24% depending on how you measure (or who you believe). Any way you slice it, CD sales are significantly down by double digit percentages when in the past they have almost always increased in low single digit percentages. That's what I'd call a boycott.
Why the boycott?? Probably not copy prevention, since few discs have been released. More likely, it's either a combination of several factors:
High prices and poor economy
Easy to make second copy (car, work, excersize), so only one purchase is required
Easy to download from Kazaa and burn to CDR, so no purchase is required
But whatever the reason, it's pretty clear that a boycott of CD purchases is already underway, simply by the significant decrease is sales. Perhaps copy prevention will drive even more people to boycott, as it will only really work against #2 (nobody reading./ comments is naive enough to believe copy prevention on CDs is going to prevent someone, somewhere, from making a "good enough" analog rip or circumvent it digitially and than post it to Kazaa). Then again, maybe #2 is the reason for the boycott, but my personal hunch is it's mostly #1 and #3.
Your Linux solution is running a pre-1.0 kernel on a box that runs under 100Mhz. If you need to recompile it to work on new hardware and OS when your old system bites it, you can.
ipfwadm -> ipchains -> iptables (I know of an app that's a firewall-in-a-box based on ipfwadm and a very stipped down system to minimize but a nice gui front-end... still hasn't been updated)
gcc 2.4.5 -> [many versions] -> gcc 2.9.5 -> gcc 2.9.6(redhat) -> gcc 3.x (many gcc bug fixes "improved" error checking and thus old code with sloppy but then common syntax would need to be edited)
/usr/include/xxx greatly reorganized, many times over
/proc/xxx
kernel ioctls and APIs changed many times over (maybe you're lucky enough to only be using C library interfaces, but even that is a giant minefield).
[insert more changes if other libs used... anyone remember the bad-old-days of paying big bucks for motif?]
The list goes on... but yes, at least you CAN do something about it. I've been using linux since just before the pre-1.0 kernel, and I maintained some old code since those days. It's not so bad if you upgrade regularily and recompile each time (rather than installing old libraries and putting it off, which I've also done). But if your 1994 era code suddently needed to be recompiled for a modern system, it would be painful. You can, true enough (and you can't if it's proprietary and the vendor is unwilling to sell an updated version), but the pain is substantial.
Mark, in your IT dept, who can add a watermark feature to a PDF/html conversion program in 15 minutes and roll it out to users in another 20 minutes will soon learn to walk on water, turn that water into wine, and thus will either need a promotion or end up working somewhere else.
Maybe his supernatural powers could also modify a proprietary app too, thus making the whole arguement moot.
Re:PDF Files arn't easily modifiable.
on
Microsoft takes on PDF
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· Score: 5, Interesting
If PDF isn't an open format, then how did
Derek Noonburg create XPDF, a free (GPL) PDF viewer for unix/X11 that works well on almost all PDF files, even ones with encryption.
It wasn't always fully open... I've followed xpdf for many years. In the early days, Derek could not show encrypted PDF files because Adobe would not release specs on the encryption . Long ago, xpdf printed a message with contact info for someone at Adobe, saying "contact them and tell them to make good on their claim that PDF is an open format" (or something like that... it's been years). Apparantly there was quite a bit of tension between Adobe and Derek, and people from Adobe claimed (lied) that xpdf could not show those files because Derek was a bad programmer. Finally, Adobe relented and released full specs including the encryption. This probably never would have occured if it weren't for Derek Noonburg and his xpdf program (and Adobe's initial refusal to release a linux version of acrobat reader).
What's even more amazing that an miles-long, meters wide evacuated tube???
[drum roll]
Making money from it, not by actually DOING anything, but simply by acquiring intellectual property rights and then licensing the technology.
Or perhaps, finding a bunch of sucke... er, venture capitalists desparate/stupid enough to believe in a crazy scheme like this, right after the dot-com bust.
Our financial strategy is to grow the Company's value through expanding licensing and royalty revenues. We believe that early revenues will come primarily from up front fees paid to the Company by our industrial partners under licensing agreements for the use of pieces of Company intellectual property for product development and sales. In addition, we expect to receive payment for activities supporting these partnerships during product development. We further believe that long-term revenues will flow from royalties received from successful products developed by our customers.
So essentially, they control a few patents and have some trade secrets (as mentioned elsewhere on the page), and they're going to make money by licensing it. They're not actually going to DO any of the work. Somehow, others will magically finance the construction, solve the technical problems, work out all the logistics, operate the system, and maintain it.
They even make an estimate/wish that ETT will "advance" over the next 30 years. Unlikely as that seems, one thing is absolutely certain. Those patents will lapse into the public domain by then, and that would be plenty of time to reverse engineer any ecomonically important trade secrets.
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It could be accomplished (fully static CMOS, no steady state current to maintain a 3rd logic level) with a second power supply, and circuitry designed to connect the output to either Vss, Vdd or Vmm (m for middle, for lack of any other name.. hmm) Brian Hayes's flawed assumption is that circuit complexity increases linearily with the number of logic levels. He writes "An obvious strategy is to minimize the product of these two quantities", refering to the radix and number of symbols to represent a number... but he just pulled that out of a hat. The required circuit complexity is not linear function of the radix, and a realistic model would quickly prove that binary is the most efficient. A fully static ternary output requires a minimum of four transistors, whereas binary requires only two.
That chip's going to get a little hot!
With a static CMOS circuit designed this way, power consumption would be approx 0.5 * C * f * V^2 (as it is in normal binary circuit). C will probably increase somewhat, as nearly twice as many transitors would be needed per circuit, yet fewer trits are needed that bits for the representing the same numerical range, so the increase in C probably wouldn't be by a factor of two. Presumably f (the clock frequency) would stay the same (well... I'll get to that...), and V stays the same (50% of transitions in binary are full supply voltage, in ternary 33% are full voltage and 33% are half voltage). Power comsumption would probably be similar.
Saddly, f probably won't stay the same. C gets larger on each signal, and when driving to half voltages, the transistors that would connect to the Vmm supply get only half the effective gate voltage applied. So doubling the load and cutting the drive significantly is really going to hurt the circuit's speed.
Dynamic logic tricks (pre-charged busses) and bicmos circuits add another interesting dimension that's too complex to worry about, though it'd be important for any microprocessor.
But power consumption isn't likely to be a problem.
Getting back to the old PDP-8, as I recall it was a binary machine. The motivation behind 12 bits was that 6 bits was ideal to represent both upper and lower case characters and plenty of symbols, and 12 bits (two chars) was plenty for useful math. I don't recall the popularity of 6/12 bit systems having anything to do with base-3 signaling.
And if your browser corresponds cookies and a "referer" string with them, they also got to track that you visited that particular site. So their REAL revenue stream, collection and sales of marketing data mined from unsuspecting web users, remains intact.
Spying? Maybe. First, check the definition of the word. Ok, I'll save you one mouse click (and filter out the uses of the word that don't apply)
- One who secretly keeps watch on another or others.
- To discover by close observation.
- To seek or observe something secretly and closely.
- To make a careful investigation: spying into other people's activities.
Looks like the word "spying" is used pretty accurately here. Though the other uses of the word have concepts of military secrets or comany confidentail informtaion and espionage rolled up in them, if we're to believe the 4th edition of the American Heritage dictionary (Webster's is very similar), what these folks do amounts to spying by the dictionary definition of the word.It's much more like the local newspaper publishing the limited routes the cops actually patrol, thereby allowing crooks to rob the places that aren't adaquetely protected. Sure, criminals will read the paper and know where they can strike, but the idea is that everyone who lives or does business in such an area is venuerable will learn that they are at risk and put pressure one the cops to clean up their act. One of the biggest factors in making a value judgement in a case like that is what level of effort was made with the cops before widely publishing their weaknesses.
Remeber that Andreas Sandblad contacted Microsoft about this problem on Oct 4 (Wired didn't even read the bugtraq posting they reported). That's six weeks ago... even longer than the 1 month period that Microsoft has suggested is necessary from discovery to disclosure. He published only after Microsoft said they didn't think it was a bug. Since Microsoft essentially claimed it wasn't a problem, the announcement needed to prove otherwise to have any chance of success.
One more quote....
You do realize that it isn't the laziness of MS that *actually* does harm, but the fact that it allows malicious people to do bad things?
Are you suggesting that Microsoft's inaction and refusal to fix the problem when they first learned of it six weeks ago was not harmful?
You probably also believe the infamous exploding gas tanks on the Ford Pinto wasn't harmful, and the deaths and injuries were purely the fault of drivers hitting Pintos. Ford's "laziness" (cheaper to settle out of court with victims than the recall and improve the cars) when they knew of the problem and did not fix it probably wouldn't be an issue for you, would it?
Back to Microsoft... who didn't fix the problem when they learned of it 6 weeks ago... does their inaction ever become harmful in your world view? How about when systems are compromised on a small scale? What about when a virus/worm is released with the ability to exploit it? (and what if someone had made a big stink about it in the press and forced them to fix it before that virus/worm was written) It's all the faults of those hackers, and Microsoft's "laziness" (when they knew of the problem in advance) never receives any of the blame? Yet someone who attempts to force the issue with a high profile public announcement, only after first having made an attempt to get them to fix it, is somehow as guilty in your little world as the actual attachers and at the same time the vendor who refused to fix the problem with advanced notice is not to blame at all?
Vipul's Razor (real-time spam database) uses Nilsimsa signatures to detect superficial changes to known messages, and spamassassin removes non-visible html tricks from the message before it checks against razor (assuming you enabled the razor check in your .spamassassin/user_prefs file, or system wide when you installed it).
Someone I know once worked on software to do realtime filtering of keywords in "family friendly" chatrooms. He said it was almost impossible
It's obviously not impossible, since it's implemented and working in spamassassin/razor, and together with the hundreds of other checks and weighted scroring system, it IS highly effective at removing nearly all spam.
Spamassassin is a great example of the power of open-source software development. It's a big arms race between spammers and spam filters, and the only filter that seems to be consistently winning in spamassassin.
And if you're stuck with a lame but unfortunately common OS and email client, it looks like Deersoft is packaging it all up with a nice "any idiot can click and install this" package, but be ready to pay a few bucks. Spamassassin really does work wonders, so if you're no good at unix, the $30 is probably money well spent for someone to make it easy for you. It's of course free and relatively to use on any respectable unix platform that has procmail or sendmail.
Saddly, it's not simple. It's not simple at all to bill people and collect money.
The fundamental problem is that a system which bills people and collects their money is exposed to financial risk from fraudlent transactions.
Fraud sucks. Our little website has been stung a few times. The bottom line is that someone, somewhere is going to lose money when fraud occurs. The money lost is both the amount stolen plus work that needed to be done by parties involved.
Even at .0001 per message, if the system can be exploited (the idea is that some heavy users would rack up substantial fees, which translates into substantial opportunities for fraud), there are plenty of people who certainly will abuse the system. The worst spammers may even be the people who commit those crimes, as many of them have criminal records for fraud.
So any system must take measures on every single transaction to prevent fraud. When problems do occur (not just fraud, but common billing disputes), they must be handled. This generally takes real people. Witness the problems with Paypal, which doesn't take phone calls and is seriously backlogged in resolving disputes.
Every transaction carries a significant non-zero cost, due to the need to verify the transasction, resolve disputes, and cover the risk of loss due to fraud. Someone has to pay for that cost. With credit cards, the merchant pays a percentage of the sale PLUS a small fixed fee. The folks in the middle, processing the transaction, generally also like to make a profit. Paypal charges percentages only, which is quite remarkable, but even paypal isn't a viable alternative for micropayments.
It just is not simple to process monetary transactions. There are real costs and risks involved, which have prevented the world from reaching the utopia of a micropayment system.
Similar to the "abuse" of a tabloid reporting that two products make huge profit, one makes reasonable profit, and four others are losing money.
That's only 7. What about the 1993 other products? Visual Studio quickly comes to mind.
In 1998, it was hardly a "fight". Nobody lobbied against it (in any effective manner). It's hard to fault lawmakers for passing a law that they only heard good thigns about and nobody seemed to object (at the time).
The problem is that these people are very powerful and have a lot of money.
True, but the likes of Intel, HP/Compaq, Apple, Sun, Oracle, Dell, Gateway have MUCH MORE MONEY and they're rapidly catching up to the political savvy of the entertainment industry.
You didn't think this bill was introduced because of slashdot, did you?
Yeah, that's +4 insightful. So is...
If any 5 year old can publish themselves WORLD WIDE 24/7, then the business of distrobution (of "information") is dead. Ever see a little kid make a homepage on AOL? They do... it ain't XHTML but it's there for the world to see 24/7. Tell me again why I need YOU to publish my info for ungodly sums of money?
Well, assuming you're an indie band or film maker, if you take the "throw up a webpage" approach, you'll be in fine company with many other no-names. The reality of today's market is that most people (at least in the US) gain exposure to music by listening to the radio, and movies by viewing big-budget advertising (television, newspaper, billboards, etc).
I would suggest to you that "they" are "winning" as long as the mainstream population learns of new entertainment and makes their entertainment spending decisions based on advertising which "they" control.
When/if someday a good portion of the population discovers new entertainment and makes purchasing decisions for entertainment based on indie-accessible channels (internet), then I'll be convinced that "they" have "lost". In the meantime, a trial run of a new media type (that sucks) means nothing.
Probably. As I understand it, if you were to purchase something from my little website, which is based in Oregon, one of the few states without sales tax (the server is in a datacenter in California, by the way, but I don't think that matters, as the business operates in Oregon), we'd charge you the Florida tax and make a payment to the state of Florida (yearly, quartly, monthly is still unclear).
The system supposedly simplifies the process so we could only need to know 45 different rates (5 states w/out tax) multiplied by the number of different taxable categories in each state, rather than 7000 (cities, counties, etc) multiplies by non-uniform rules about which types of goods are taxable and the rates of each in each district.
You could move out here to Oregon, but then you'd have to pay the high income tax, and also property tax (or higher rent if you don't own the property).
If the article is to be believed, only certain "approved software" could be used (mentions taxware is the one that's being tested), or a custom app would need to be "certified".
The point is that it costs money to pay taxes. Not the tax itself... you need to spend time and money (usually pay a CPA) to prepare the taxes. For very small businesses, it costs a few hundred a year. From the article, it appears that it will be tremendously expensive to pay all these sales taxes. They're supposedly making it "simpler", but how simple is it if you need to have "approved software" (someone pointed out that taxware is six figures!)
Furthermore, make the tax collector put up the service!
This is a fine idea, but if you read the article (imagine that), the state's plan is to supposedly simplify the process and require people to use this extreemly expensive software to make all those supposedly simplified payments.
Sure, in theory the states could do something where they bear the burden (assuming that this idea could work, which is another question altogether). But based on the article, their plan appears to be nothing like what you proposed. They're making the rules "simpler", but it's still so damn complex that specially approved software (taxware) is mandated by the plan. They know it's so expensive that they propose "sharing" a chunk of the money with merchants... which help the big boys, but for the little guys, a chunk of the collected tax isn't going to cover what seems like an enormous cost.
Then again, this is all guesswork from just a few sentences in the article. Please do read the article.
I'd be pretty embarrased buying this stuff...
Seriously, while paying taxes sucks in general, they still haven't really simplified this thing. Their plan calls for specially approved (likely extreemly expensive) software to sort out the massively complex maze of city, county and state districts and how to send money to each of them.
My little website is just one of thousands of tiny little businesses that are run part-time, or just barely pay the bills for one person to run it.
It's absolutely unbelievable what a lot of companies charge for "e-commerce" software. How likely is this to be a $49.95 turbo-tax package? Nope, it'll be targeted at businesses and a few blood-sucking companies will see this as a big opportunity to rake in the dollars from every on-line merchant. We've seen lots of this mega-expensive software, and we manage to get by and make customers happy without any of it. It's unheard of to be _required_ by law to purchase some particular (extreemly expensive) software. And with some special gov't appoval/certification process, you can be sure it'll be plenty expensive...
But for the little guys (like me), that money just isn't there. We can't spend thousands on software, or just about anything else for that matter. It looks like the company these states are working with is Taxware. Go visit their site and take a wild guess at what they're going to charge for this sort of software. It ain't gonna be cheap.
The fact is that there are many thousands of very small on-line merchants. VERY small. Filing 45 tax returns is going to suck. Paying for expensive software, or consulting fees to some "approved" company will only add injury to the insult. Our accounting software budget includes a new version of Quickbooks for next year. That's about all we can afford software-wise.
And it goes against all other tax paying practice to require specific approved software. You don't need special software from a specific "approved" vendor to file taxes. You do need to know how to do it, of course. My partner is a CPA and she knows ordinary sales tax very well (even though we live in Oregon where there is no sales tax). Why should we be held hostage to purchasing special software? Why does it need to be from specially approved vendors?
If the tax can't be paid by a company with an ordinary CPA, and some special software is required, and that software is so special that vendors need to be certified by some special approval process, they certain't haven't made great strides towards making this a simple enough process. Special software isn't required for paying normal taxes, and requiring a special certification process for tax calculation software is totally unheard of. It reaks of a back-room deal between GovOne (the makers taxware) and these states... if some complicated certification process is required for anyone else trying to enter the market for this new software that every on-line merchant is compelled to buy, guess what the prices will be in the first year when Taxware is the only product available and everyone is REQUIRED to buy it?
Well, enough ranting for one day. Maybe it won't be so bad. I'm just in a bad mood because a customer refused to pay the tax/duty on a package we shipped to the UK (and now we need to do something about it, and all the options suck....)
I do not believe this is a NEW factor within the last 1-2 years leading to the CURRENT decline (boycott) of CD sales.
I haven't bought a CD from a major label in a long, long time.
My point exactly. It's been "bad" for a long time, yet sales have steadily increased year after year despite the focus on teen pop and other manufactured music.
Something changed very RECENTLY. The only thing that corresponds well is thedecline is CD sales is the decline in economy. File sharing and CDR sales sort-of correspond to the decline, though those trends started earlier... but not that much earlier that they can be easily discounted as potential factors.
But selection and promotion of "fresh" music just hasn't changed much in the last couple years, or even in the few prior years leading up to the current decline. So while it does suck, I just can't buy that as a factor leading to the decline in sales.
I'm planning to add a project to PJRC in the next year that is essentially this... but using 168 pin DIMMs (which are collecting now that higher performance PCs use DDR).
Saddly, $50 is a unrealistic for a low-volume product. The "controller chip" is a FPGA that costs almost $50 by itself in modest volumes. A large multi-layer circuit board is also needed (most of the surface area is to mount the DIMM sockets). Finally, low volume BGA soldering and x-ray inspection isn't cheap either. It's a very different world making several hundred niche-market boards vs millions of cheap ethernet cards. A board like this with 12 or 16 sockets can't realistically be sold under $350 (under 1000 per year volume).
Maybe. Most motherboards have three DDR sockets, but if you use unbuffered (inexpensive) IMMs with chips on both sides, most motherboards will only work with one or two of those DIMMs. Generally, you need buffered/registered DIMMs if you are going to use several.
Over at pricewatch.com today, 1 GB DDR DIMMS are listed between $324 to $480, depending on the speed and vendor. 512 meg DDR DIMMs seem to be in the $120 to $160 range, but those are not buffered/registered... so it's very unlikely you could get four of them to work on a normal motherboard.
Hell, for the price of the Ramdrive I could get a motherboard that supported 64GB and fill a moderate chunk of it.
Again, you'd be looking at an expensive server motherboard, and it would likely require the very expensive registered/buffered DIMMs.
That thing has lower speed and greater access time than main memory and costs more, so just using RAM as disk cache would appear to be more useful under the majority of circumstances.
This might be true, if you could inexpensively add that much memory, and deal with the volatility.
A few times I've considered adding a solid state disk project to PJRC.COM.... it's likely have 16 DIMMs sockets at about half the price of this gadget (they used a big xilinx FPGA... same basic idea).
Unbuffered 512 meg SDRAM (not DDR) DIMMs are selling at about $30 each these days... maybe the value in having an extreemly fast non-volatile 8 gigabyte disk at $830 would be better??
First, I wait for the page I was previously viewing to disappear.
Then, I wait for something, anything, anything at all to appear.
Something renders on the screen... usually its a nav bar or something uninteresting I've seen before, but I look at it anyway because I'm still waiting.
Finally, useful information appears and I begin looking at it.
However (on most sites), as images and other stuff comes in, it all reformats and moves around, so I don't get a good look at it yet.
Finally, everything is loaded and (at most sites) something is animated and highly distracting. Most people learn to ignore it... I personally use Mozilla and set it to stop animating after one loop, and I use use junkbuster to filter most of the crap. But sometimes I use someone else's computer and I'm reminded of what an annoying mess most web pages are.
But eventually, the animations stop or are ignorable, and I can start actually reading the page, looking at its photos or illustrations, interacting with a form, or begin looking for a link to take me to what I ulimately want, or do whatever it is I'm actually going to do with the web site.
But not if it's Macromedia Flash... the waiting game has only just begun....
No, not with flash sites. I've already suffered through waiting for the page to load, waiting for the browser to finally format everything where it goes, and I've managed to ignore the advertising in one way or another. That ought to be enough, but not for flash.
Now I have to look at some additional "still loading", usually with nice pretty animation, but I'm still waiting with nothing USEFUL to look at.
Once it finally is finished loading, do I get something useful as rapidly as my computer can render it... NO. That's too easy. With Flash, it's always got to roll, fade, or somehow come into my field of view in a slick, animated way that takes too damn long.
But it's not over. I'm not a fast reader (many people are), but nearly all flash applets choose to slowly present me with more stuff. Usually it's because they'll remove the previous thing as they show something else. Often it's a long progression of things.
I simply don't want to wait. I already waited for the page to load, which is longer than normal due to the applet being larger than html/jpg, and then I have to wait as the applet loads more data, and even then I have to wait as it animates slowly. And all that, often just to end up following a link to get to what I _really_ wanted.... all flash ever seems to do is slow me down. Even with infinite bandwidth, it's still TOO DAMN SLOW.
You don't need to. She's already not buying it even before it's crippled. Sales are down 20-some percent and falling, remember?
It plays in her walkman and that's all she cares about. The worst part is, if it doesn't play in her player, she'll buy a new one.
That is, IF she purhcased a CD. If instead she copied it from a friend or downloaded it from the net (paid legit or kazaa), what will matter is if the CDR she burns on her family's PC plays correctly in her CD or MP3 player. Compatibility with CDR will matter probably as much as compatibility with copy-prevention schemes. In case you haven't shopped for CD players recently, most specifically state on their packaging that they play CDR and CD/RW. That's likely printed on the package because it matters in the purchase decision to a good portion of potential buyers (mainstream, not just slashdot)
We're not their bread and butter in their short term vision.
Whoever is their bread and butter is definately not buying as many CDs as they used to be. Whoever this is _might_ not care about copy prevention, but they _definately_ do care about something that is already causing them to buy fewer CDs.
They cite pointless statistics about dropping sales.
Of all the crap in RIAA press released and lobbying, this is the one part that is objective and factual. WHY the sales are down is a good question, but they are down. That mean a LOT of people, not just geeks, are choosing not to buy CDs. It is a fact.
Then again, maybe "the internet changes everything", but in the case of Macrovision, most of the VCR manufactures built their recorders to respect the macrovision signal.
It appears that "we" already are boycotting CD purchases. Sales are down 10% to 24% depending on how you measure (or who you believe). Any way you slice it, CD sales are significantly down by double digit percentages when in the past they have almost always increased in low single digit percentages. That's what I'd call a boycott.
Why the boycott?? Probably not copy prevention, since few discs have been released. More likely, it's either a combination of several factors:
But whatever the reason, it's pretty clear that a boycott of CD purchases is already underway, simply by the significant decrease is sales. Perhaps copy prevention will drive even more people to boycott, as it will only really work against #2 (nobody reading ./ comments is naive enough to believe copy prevention on CDs is going to prevent someone, somewhere, from making a "good enough" analog rip or circumvent it digitially and than post it to Kazaa). Then again, maybe #2 is the reason for the boycott, but my personal hunch is it's mostly #1 and #3.
Yes. But....
libc4 -> libc5 -> glibc2 -> glibc2.1 (or something like that)
ipfwadm -> ipchains -> iptables (I know of an app that's a firewall-in-a-box based on ipfwadm and a very stipped down system to minimize but a nice gui front-end... still hasn't been updated)
gcc 2.4.5 -> [many versions] -> gcc 2.9.5 -> gcc 2.9.6(redhat) -> gcc 3.x (many gcc bug fixes "improved" error checking and thus old code with sloppy but then common syntax would need to be edited)
kernel ioctls and APIs changed many times over (maybe you're lucky enough to only be using C library interfaces, but even that is a giant minefield).
[insert more changes if other libs used... anyone remember the bad-old-days of paying big bucks for motif?]
The list goes on... but yes, at least you CAN do something about it. I've been using linux since just before the pre-1.0 kernel, and I maintained some old code since those days. It's not so bad if you upgrade regularily and recompile each time (rather than installing old libraries and putting it off, which I've also done). But if your 1994 era code suddently needed to be recompiled for a modern system, it would be painful. You can, true enough (and you can't if it's proprietary and the vendor is unwilling to sell an updated version), but the pain is substantial.
Maybe his supernatural powers could also modify a proprietary app too, thus making the whole arguement moot.
It wasn't always fully open... I've followed xpdf for many years. In the early days, Derek could not show encrypted PDF files because Adobe would not release specs on the encryption . Long ago, xpdf printed a message with contact info for someone at Adobe, saying "contact them and tell them to make good on their claim that PDF is an open format" (or something like that... it's been years). Apparantly there was quite a bit of tension between Adobe and Derek, and people from Adobe claimed (lied) that xpdf could not show those files because Derek was a bad programmer. Finally, Adobe relented and released full specs including the encryption. This probably never would have occured if it weren't for Derek Noonburg and his xpdf program (and Adobe's initial refusal to release a linux version of acrobat reader).
[drum roll]
Making money from it, not by actually DOING anything, but simply by acquiring intellectual property rights and then licensing the technology.
Or perhaps, finding a bunch of sucke... er, venture capitalists desparate/stupid enough to believe in a crazy scheme like this, right after the dot-com bust.
This executive summary page really says it all. For example, their financial strategy is:
So essentially, they control a few patents and have some trade secrets (as mentioned elsewhere on the page), and they're going to make money by licensing it. They're not actually going to DO any of the work. Somehow, others will magically finance the construction, solve the technical problems, work out all the logistics, operate the system, and maintain it.
They even make an estimate/wish that ETT will "advance" over the next 30 years. Unlikely as that seems, one thing is absolutely certain. Those patents will lapse into the public domain by then, and that would be plenty of time to reverse engineer any ecomonically important trade secrets.