The problem is, most Slashdot readers don't know much of the law behind patents, how they're written, and how they're challenged.
Exactly correct. The/. editors should have "you cannot patent an idea, only the specific implementation of an idea" tattooed on their forearms so they cannot possibly miss it when typing up a story.
You laugh, but a few years ago in Wales a mob of angry "locals" stormed a house that they'd heard belonged to... a paediatrician. Those simple folk couldn't read beyond the first few letters.
The whole issue is very strange. I mean, being anti-child-abuse is nothing special, it's just the default setting for civilized people. Yet some people seem to think that being rabidly anti-paedophile is some sort of shining badge of virtue. It's the same with fascism, being anti-fascist is nothing particular to be proud of, it's just the default position for almost everyone, yet some people make a big thing of constantly proclaiming it. Myself, I wonder what these people are over-compensating for.
No, backwards compatibility would mean that you could compile for Solaris 9 on UltraSPARC-III and run it on Solaris 2.4 on a MicroSPARC-II, and that's not possible in this case. Forwards compatibility is that your old application will run perfectly on a new platform, protecting the investment you have made in software when you upgrade to newer hardware.
Does that mean that if I dope with Michael Johnson's genes and go into a meet against Michael Johnson, that I will have an advantage?
It doesn't quite work like that. Genes encode proteins, proteins interact to build cells, cells interact to build organs and so on. There isn't a "nose" gene that controls what your nose will look like, for example. Your nose is an emergent property of complex interactions between proteins. Similarly, Michael Johnson doesn't have a "speed gene" - his athletic ability is an emergent property, just like his nose is. You can't splice one specific feature from someone to someone else, because DNA doesn't work that way.
It's like in Dark Angel, Max has eyes that can zoom in. Great, but that means modifying the structure of the eye, and creating new muscles to actuate that feature, and new nerves to control those muscles, and a patch to the brain's balance algorithms so she can zoom without the sensation of motion without losing her balance, etc - all that without affecting or displacing anything else. Gene splicing is probably going to be straightforward enough to use to treat things like gluten intolerance - but you won't be seeing superhumans any time soon - and if you do, they're much more likely to be cyborgs, since that will be an order of magnitude easier to do.
The company has to decide: is SUN a hardware company? that would mean investing a lot in the development of SPARC, killing the Solaris x86 line and fighting Linux
Well, you can buy a 1U Sun SPARC now for less than a comparable 1U Dell. Sun is price-competitive now at the low end, for the first time. And, they have an edge Dell can't match, namely that Sun guarantees forwards compatibility - you can take an old app from old hardware and an old Solaris, and run it on the latest kit and OS. If you can't, and you stuck to documented APIs in your code, Sun treats it as a bug in Solaris and fixes it. Dell can't provide that because they don't control any of the OSs they offer. Not only that, but Sun's hardware is of a higher quality. I recently experienced my first Sun hardware failure in years - two SPARC processors failed in a production server. The machine just kept right on running, as it was designed to do, and we swapped a new board in when it was convenient. What can you hot-swap on a Dell these days, just disks?
What I'm getting at is that Sun is not a hardware company nor a software company. It's a platform company, like IBM's mainframe division, and like Apple. If you want to compare it to Dell, a more subtle analysis is required than just "price per box".
The obvious attraction of VoIP is not enough on itself to make it succesful, rather it will need a big push in order to get going. All I have seen so far is that it has barely advanced beyond the simple voice chatting features of an IM client such as ICQ.
The interesting thing about SIP is that it is a generic protocol for starting and running conversations. It's not limited to one medium like say Jabber is limited to text IM only. You can use SIP for IM, VoIP, videoconferencing, file transfer, shared whiteboards, whatever you want. It's pretty cool. And it has loads of real-world vendors behind it. Forget about dodgy startups like Kazaa, I'm talking Nortel, Alcatel, Microsoft, et al. That's important because these are companies that ship real products (i.e. phone on your desk, the phone switch in the basement of your office, etc etc). They can simply roll SIP in and migrate customers very smoothly to it. The analogy to MP3 doesn't really hold, because the real strength of SIP from a consumer perspective is that it will be transparently embedded in everyday items - most users will never even hear about it.
reach UNIX performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of UNIX code, methods or concepts to achieve such performance, and coordination by a larger developer
Actually, that one's fairly true. How many students can afford 16-way servers with many 32G of memory to refine their SMP code on, for example? How many can afford an FC-AL storage array just to develop the drivers for it? Without big corporate backers like SGI and IBM, Linux would not have a chance at all for running serious databases.
I don't believe the bit about appropriation of code, since IBM and SGI (et al) had already proved that their engineers were more than capable of developing such features for themselves.
So you draw the line at what, the standard C library? Or is using strcpy() cheating because someone already wrote it? If you were looking to teach students how to create something from the ground up, why don't you start them at principles of turing machines and then have them create their own C compiler before they can use it?
In Introduction to Computer Graphics, we were given a framework that would take care of opening a window and there was one function we could use, setPixel(x, y, c) (where c is the colour). From that, people built their own functions to draw lines, then polygons, then circles and so on - by the end of the course, it was a (slow) raytracer with (slowly) moveable light sources and camera.
Now, it would have been far more "useful" from a coding perspective to have jumped right in with OpenGL but that would be missing the point slightly. I didn't go on to work in graphics but in OLTP and I can see the two sorts of people all the time. The "basic principles" people think about what the machine is actually going to do with their code, and can optimize it. The "learn to code" people write stuff that doesn't take into account how things physically work, unless it's exactly the same machine, API etc, that their instructor used, and their code is crap.
Yes, but the reverse is also true: When a state gets it right everyone benefits in having cheap, reliable power. Whereas when a company gets it right only a few executives get the bulk of the benefit. I'll take the state run utility, thank you very much.
You are wrong. When a company gets it right, it's a win-win - the customers get a good product at a good price, the shareholders make money, everyone's happy. The a company gets it wrong, the customers get what they want elsewhere, and the shareholders pick up the pieces. No-one is forced to become a shareholder against their will; they volunteer to invest their own money in the hope of a good return.
In a state, everyone takes the blame, no matter whose fault it is. When a company screws up really badly, it ceases to exist and can do no more damage (see Enron for an example of this). When a state screws up really badly, it just gouges more money out of its taxpayers, who've no choice in the matter unless they want to emigrate (see CA for an example of this) - until such time as they throw the incompetent government out, but by then the damage may have been done.
That is, the government would take control of all properties owned by current energy companies for the purpose of electrical production and distribution (which would most likely involve financial compensation for the property) and would work to make the power grid as robust as possible.
You people never give up, do you? Using your logic, in some countries the government "nationalized" the farms - millions starved. There is decades, almost a century of real-world evidence that Socialist economics do not work.
Who says that the government can do better that private enterprise?
Again, there is ample evidence in the real world that there is very, very little that a government can do better than private enterprise.
Well, in the wake of deregulation, we've all seen what too much motivation from profit can do to the power grid. The sweeping general move towards deregulation have had terrible effects on all aspects of our life.
There was no deregulation in California in any meaningful sense. For years, CA politicians had blocked the construction of new power stations, leaving no choice but to import power from neighbouring states. Then they deregulated the wholesale market but not the retail. When wholesale prices went up - because supply was artificially restricted by government edict - retail could not compensate and the market froze.
So, give nationalizing the power grid a try!
And the farms! And the factories! You too can live like a Soviet peasant in the 1920s!
State and provincial governments should buy grid infrastructure back from the mismanaged, ailing private companies.
As Gray Davis demonstrated, politicians never mismanage finances. When a company gets it wrong, the damage is limited to its shareholders, and other competing companies take up the slack. When a state gets it wrong, everyone pays the penalty.
It is utterly unacceptable for Suncomm to whine about "digital property" when they go behind the user's back to install unwanted "features" on said user's physical property.
In my ideal world, each server would have one, and only one, purpose. That way if a piece of software is compromised in such a way that remote access is granted, the damage is somewhat contained.
In a slightly more ideal world, you would use a single machine running an OS that supports proper partitioning of the machine into sandboxes or VMs or zones (whatever you want to call them). This machine would have redundant and hot-swappable everything. There would be another identical machine in another datacentre a few thousand miles away, connected by a redundant link for replication.
This was perfectly do-able 15 years ago on kit from IBM or DEC - in 5 years, it might be do-able on Solaris also.
I think this illustrates the image that many people around the world have. Just about everyone in Europe seems to speak multiple languages.
I have to say, as an Englishman who has lived and worked in the US, that this stereotype is largely unfounded. Most of the Americans I know also speak another language, for example Spanish or Russian or Hebrew or Japanese - and to a far higher standard than I speak any foreign languages (in my case, French and Dutch).
As a computer scientist, you're supposed to solve problems, and solve them in the most efficient manner possible. I think sharing code counts as
As a software developer you are expected to solve problems in the most efficient manner possible, including the reuse of existing code. As a computer scientist you are expected to demonstrate an ability to derive solutions from basic principles and operate in areas where there is no precedent, i.e. in research. Upon graduation, you should be equally qualified to get a job in industry or to pursue a PhD. If you don't want to learn to think, just to code, then you don't belong at college but in a vendor certification programme.
So either they got very good at Prolog or very good at hiding their cheating.
In my first year of undergrad, there were some people who were terrible cheats. This was at a university that's consistently ranked among the top 5 in the UK, so you would think the students would be a little smarter. These people would literally photocopy someone else's report, stick blank white self-adhesive labels over the original name, handwrite their own name on the label, then bind the photocopied pages and hand it in. I mean, they weren't even smart enough to get a copy of the Word document and reprint it, let alone try to rewrite the content in their own style. About half a dozen of them were booted out in the first few weeks of the course - the only reason they lasted as long was it took a while for professors to get round to actually looking at lab reports!
When I want to select a filesystem, I do not want to know how fast it can read a 3GB file sequentially. I want to know how well it performs on a fileserver, mailserver etc.
Horses for courses, my friend. If you are running a database or doing video editing then reading large files is exactly what you do want. This is exactly what SGI's customers do, and that is why XFS is IRIX default filesystem.
Someone should alert them to the existence of google.
You - and almost every other Slashbot posting here - have failed to understand what a patent is.
A patent is not granted on an idea but on the implementation of an idea
A patent is not its title, its title is its title.
If you have patented a specific process for producing mangled widgets, does that mean that no-one else can mangle widgets without infringing? No, it only means they cannot use your specific technique. If someone invents their own unique widget-mangling technique, the fact that you have a patent entitled "A Method for Mangling Widgets" is neither here nor there.
I also find it amusing that Slashbots get upset with Microsoft patents something, but cheer when someone else uses a patent against Microsoft. Double standard, anyone?
You won't see any announcements from GM stating that they've decided to run Linux From Scratch or Gentoo.
A company the size of GM will have the capability to do that, if they wanted to. They'd simply say to EDS or Accenture, we'd like you to support this please - when you're talking 100,000 desktops, you can write your own ticket. The question is, would it be cheaper than supporting Windows? Even without retraining, probably not. Win2K is light years ahead of NT4 when it comes to mass management.
if Apple were to port OSX to X86 commodity hardware
Apple cannot port OSX to "x86 commodity hardware". That's not a slur on their engineers - no-one can. The reason is that part of the OSX value proposition is "it just works". You can only do that if your hardware platform is wholly known. One specific x86-based machine - yes. But "commodity", i.e. "cheapest" and OSX will have all the problems Windows has, namely, it's almost impossible to test every possible combination of hardware.
This is clever, and it's nice to see that it works, but Java?
It's not Java - well most of it isn't. It's almost all written in C and C++. Sun has decided that Java is a brand, not the name of a programming language, and plans to use it for all their software products. The Sun people I've spoken to vary in their happiness about this (the same people who refer to Solaris 8 as "SunOS 5.8" as you can imagine think it's just marketing nonsense).
Slashdot Mirror
... among sysadmins that translates roughly as "never underestimate the bandwidth of a crate of tapes in the back of a station wagon".
These CERN upstarts don't impress me much, I had and was using more capacity a decade ago!
The problem is, most Slashdot readers don't know much of the law behind patents, how they're written, and how they're challenged.
/. editors should have "you cannot patent an idea, only the specific implementation of an idea" tattooed on their forearms so they cannot possibly miss it when typing up a story.
Exactly correct. The
I told you Macs were cheaper!
Then I hope they're waterproof too, since the $38M also included the cost of a building to put them in...
Mentally Challenged Parents Association
You laugh, but a few years ago in Wales a mob of angry "locals" stormed a house that they'd heard belonged to... a paediatrician. Those simple folk couldn't read beyond the first few letters.
The whole issue is very strange. I mean, being anti-child-abuse is nothing special, it's just the default setting for civilized people. Yet some people seem to think that being rabidly anti-paedophile is some sort of shining badge of virtue. It's the same with fascism, being anti-fascist is nothing particular to be proud of, it's just the default position for almost everyone, yet some people make a big thing of constantly proclaiming it. Myself, I wonder what these people are over-compensating for.
That's called backwards compatibility, actually.
No, backwards compatibility would mean that you could compile for Solaris 9 on UltraSPARC-III and run it on Solaris 2.4 on a MicroSPARC-II, and that's not possible in this case. Forwards compatibility is that your old application will run perfectly on a new platform, protecting the investment you have made in software when you upgrade to newer hardware.
Does that mean that if I dope with Michael Johnson's genes and go into a meet against Michael Johnson, that I will have an advantage?
It doesn't quite work like that. Genes encode proteins, proteins interact to build cells, cells interact to build organs and so on. There isn't a "nose" gene that controls what your nose will look like, for example. Your nose is an emergent property of complex interactions between proteins. Similarly, Michael Johnson doesn't have a "speed gene" - his athletic ability is an emergent property, just like his nose is. You can't splice one specific feature from someone to someone else, because DNA doesn't work that way.
It's like in Dark Angel, Max has eyes that can zoom in. Great, but that means modifying the structure of the eye, and creating new muscles to actuate that feature, and new nerves to control those muscles, and a patch to the brain's balance algorithms so she can zoom without the sensation of motion without losing her balance, etc - all that without affecting or displacing anything else. Gene splicing is probably going to be straightforward enough to use to treat things like gluten intolerance - but you won't be seeing superhumans any time soon - and if you do, they're much more likely to be cyborgs, since that will be an order of magnitude easier to do.
The company has to decide: is SUN a hardware company? that would mean investing a lot in the development of SPARC, killing the Solaris x86 line and fighting Linux
Well, you can buy a 1U Sun SPARC now for less than a comparable 1U Dell. Sun is price-competitive now at the low end, for the first time. And, they have an edge Dell can't match, namely that Sun guarantees forwards compatibility - you can take an old app from old hardware and an old Solaris, and run it on the latest kit and OS. If you can't, and you stuck to documented APIs in your code, Sun treats it as a bug in Solaris and fixes it. Dell can't provide that because they don't control any of the OSs they offer. Not only that, but Sun's hardware is of a higher quality. I recently experienced my first Sun hardware failure in years - two SPARC processors failed in a production server. The machine just kept right on running, as it was designed to do, and we swapped a new board in when it was convenient. What can you hot-swap on a Dell these days, just disks?
What I'm getting at is that Sun is not a hardware company nor a software company. It's a platform company, like IBM's mainframe division, and like Apple. If you want to compare it to Dell, a more subtle analysis is required than just "price per box".
The obvious attraction of VoIP is not enough on itself to make it succesful, rather it will need a big push in order to get going. All I have seen so far is that it has barely advanced beyond the simple voice chatting features of an IM client such as ICQ.
The interesting thing about SIP is that it is a generic protocol for starting and running conversations. It's not limited to one medium like say Jabber is limited to text IM only. You can use SIP for IM, VoIP, videoconferencing, file transfer, shared whiteboards, whatever you want. It's pretty cool. And it has loads of real-world vendors behind it. Forget about dodgy startups like Kazaa, I'm talking Nortel, Alcatel, Microsoft, et al. That's important because these are companies that ship real products (i.e. phone on your desk, the phone switch in the basement of your office, etc etc). They can simply roll SIP in and migrate customers very smoothly to it. The analogy to MP3 doesn't really hold, because the real strength of SIP from a consumer perspective is that it will be transparently embedded in everyday items - most users will never even hear about it.
reach UNIX performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of UNIX code, methods or concepts to achieve such performance, and coordination by a larger developer
Actually, that one's fairly true. How many students can afford 16-way servers with many 32G of memory to refine their SMP code on, for example? How many can afford an FC-AL storage array just to develop the drivers for it? Without big corporate backers like SGI and IBM, Linux would not have a chance at all for running serious databases.
I don't believe the bit about appropriation of code, since IBM and SGI (et al) had already proved that their engineers were more than capable of developing such features for themselves.
Star Office Drawing is as good as Visio for simple tasks. It's free for educational use.
So you draw the line at what, the standard C library? Or is using strcpy() cheating because someone already wrote it? If you were looking to teach students how to create something from the ground up, why don't you start them at principles of turing machines and then have them create their own C compiler before they can use it?
In Introduction to Computer Graphics, we were given a framework that would take care of opening a window and there was one function we could use, setPixel(x, y, c) (where c is the colour). From that, people built their own functions to draw lines, then polygons, then circles and so on - by the end of the course, it was a (slow) raytracer with (slowly) moveable light sources and camera.
Now, it would have been far more "useful" from a coding perspective to have jumped right in with OpenGL but that would be missing the point slightly. I didn't go on to work in graphics but in OLTP and I can see the two sorts of people all the time. The "basic principles" people think about what the machine is actually going to do with their code, and can optimize it. The "learn to code" people write stuff that doesn't take into account how things physically work, unless it's exactly the same machine, API etc, that their instructor used, and their code is crap.
Yes, but the reverse is also true: When a state gets it right everyone benefits in having cheap, reliable power. Whereas when a company gets it right only a few executives get the bulk of the benefit. I'll take the state run utility, thank you very much.
You are wrong. When a company gets it right, it's a win-win - the customers get a good product at a good price, the shareholders make money, everyone's happy. The a company gets it wrong, the customers get what they want elsewhere, and the shareholders pick up the pieces. No-one is forced to become a shareholder against their will; they volunteer to invest their own money in the hope of a good return.
In a state, everyone takes the blame, no matter whose fault it is. When a company screws up really badly, it ceases to exist and can do no more damage (see Enron for an example of this). When a state screws up really badly, it just gouges more money out of its taxpayers, who've no choice in the matter unless they want to emigrate (see CA for an example of this) - until such time as they throw the incompetent government out, but by then the damage may have been done.
That is, the government would take control of all properties owned by current energy companies for the purpose of electrical production and distribution (which would most likely involve financial compensation for the property) and would work to make the power grid as robust as possible.
You people never give up, do you? Using your logic, in some countries the government "nationalized" the farms - millions starved. There is decades, almost a century of real-world evidence that Socialist economics do not work.
Who says that the government can do better that private enterprise?
Again, there is ample evidence in the real world that there is very, very little that a government can do better than private enterprise.
Well, in the wake of deregulation, we've all seen what too much motivation from profit can do to the power grid. The sweeping general move towards deregulation have had terrible effects on all aspects of our life.
There was no deregulation in California in any meaningful sense. For years, CA politicians had blocked the construction of new power stations, leaving no choice but to import power from neighbouring states. Then they deregulated the wholesale market but not the retail. When wholesale prices went up - because supply was artificially restricted by government edict - retail could not compensate and the market froze.
So, give nationalizing the power grid a try!
And the farms! And the factories! You too can live like a Soviet peasant in the 1920s!
State and provincial governments should buy grid infrastructure back from the mismanaged, ailing private companies.
As Gray Davis demonstrated, politicians never mismanage finances. When a company gets it wrong, the damage is limited to its shareholders, and other competing companies take up the slack. When a state gets it wrong, everyone pays the penalty.
I just want to copy the CD I BOUGHT.
It is utterly unacceptable for Suncomm to whine about "digital property" when they go behind the user's back to install unwanted "features" on said user's physical property.
In my ideal world, each server would have one, and only one, purpose. That way if a piece of software is compromised in such a way that remote access is granted, the damage is somewhat contained.
In a slightly more ideal world, you would use a single machine running an OS that supports proper partitioning of the machine into sandboxes or VMs or zones (whatever you want to call them). This machine would have redundant and hot-swappable everything. There would be another identical machine in another datacentre a few thousand miles away, connected by a redundant link for replication.
This was perfectly do-able 15 years ago on kit from IBM or DEC - in 5 years, it might be do-able on Solaris also.
I think this illustrates the image that many people around the world have. Just about everyone in Europe seems to speak multiple languages.
I have to say, as an Englishman who has lived and worked in the US, that this stereotype is largely unfounded. Most of the Americans I know also speak another language, for example Spanish or Russian or Hebrew or Japanese - and to a far higher standard than I speak any foreign languages (in my case, French and Dutch).
You will probably find that there are more /.'rs that claim to have programed 6502's by typing in hex codes.
I have done that, you insensitive clod!
As a computer scientist, you're supposed to solve problems, and solve them in the most efficient manner possible. I think sharing code counts as
As a software developer you are expected to solve problems in the most efficient manner possible, including the reuse of existing code. As a computer scientist you are expected to demonstrate an ability to derive solutions from basic principles and operate in areas where there is no precedent, i.e. in research. Upon graduation, you should be equally qualified to get a job in industry or to pursue a PhD. If you don't want to learn to think, just to code, then you don't belong at college but in a vendor certification programme.
I know - it's weird, and I'm not sure I buy that explanation either.
It better be, or my warp drive will never work.
So either they got very good at Prolog or very good at hiding their cheating.
In my first year of undergrad, there were some people who were terrible cheats. This was at a university that's consistently ranked among the top 5 in the UK, so you would think the students would be a little smarter. These people would literally photocopy someone else's report, stick blank white self-adhesive labels over the original name, handwrite their own name on the label, then bind the photocopied pages and hand it in. I mean, they weren't even smart enough to get a copy of the Word document and reprint it, let alone try to rewrite the content in their own style. About half a dozen of them were booted out in the first few weeks of the course - the only reason they lasted as long was it took a while for professors to get round to actually looking at lab reports!
When I want to select a filesystem, I do not want to know how fast it can read a 3GB file sequentially. I want to know how well it performs on a fileserver, mailserver etc.
Horses for courses, my friend. If you are running a database or doing video editing then reading large files is exactly what you do want. This is exactly what SGI's customers do, and that is why XFS is IRIX default filesystem.
Someone should alert them to the existence of google.
You - and almost every other Slashbot posting here - have failed to understand what a patent is.
A patent is not granted on an idea but on the implementation of an idea
A patent is not its title, its title is its title.
If you have patented a specific process for producing mangled widgets, does that mean that no-one else can mangle widgets without infringing? No, it only means they cannot use your specific technique. If someone invents their own unique widget-mangling technique, the fact that you have a patent entitled "A Method for Mangling Widgets" is neither here nor there.
I also find it amusing that Slashbots get upset with Microsoft patents something, but cheer when someone else uses a patent against Microsoft. Double standard, anyone?
You won't see any announcements from GM stating that they've decided to run Linux From Scratch or Gentoo.
A company the size of GM will have the capability to do that, if they wanted to. They'd simply say to EDS or Accenture, we'd like you to support this please - when you're talking 100,000 desktops, you can write your own ticket. The question is, would it be cheaper than supporting Windows? Even without retraining, probably not. Win2K is light years ahead of NT4 when it comes to mass management.
if Apple were to port OSX to X86 commodity hardware
Apple cannot port OSX to "x86 commodity hardware". That's not a slur on their engineers - no-one can. The reason is that part of the OSX value proposition is "it just works". You can only do that if your hardware platform is wholly known. One specific x86-based machine - yes. But "commodity", i.e. "cheapest" and OSX will have all the problems Windows has, namely, it's almost impossible to test every possible combination of hardware.
This is clever, and it's nice to see that it works, but Java?
It's not Java - well most of it isn't. It's almost all written in C and C++. Sun has decided that Java is a brand, not the name of a programming language, and plans to use it for all their software products. The Sun people I've spoken to vary in their happiness about this (the same people who refer to Solaris 8 as "SunOS 5.8" as you can imagine think it's just marketing nonsense).