If what they're doing is novel, then yes, this is probably worthy of a patent. That does not mean that everyone else who does the same thing a different way is infringing. Contrary to the horror stories we keep hearing, patents are usually interpreted narrowly by the courts. I'm not worried... yet.
Ummm... most people look at Mensa membership as an indication that you haven't come to terms with being beat up on the playground in school by kids who were dumber than you. I'd probably qualify for it, but even if it was free, and something posessed me to join, I sure as hell wouldn't put it on my resume. Every experienced employer knows that being smart is not a very good discriminator for job performance, beyond simple qualification.
We had a lot of problems with lazily patched SQL servers and web servers, many of which weren't even supposed to be servers. Yeah, it would be great to be able to force everyone to patch, but as a University we're supposed to leave the departments rather autonomous. The best we could do was make a fairly secure image on a system that supports automatic updating without forcing reboots without warning, and hope as many people as possible use it. For these purposes, XP is far, FAR better than 2000.
Anything that is more than twice as powerful as what you could get for the same money three years ago. Alternatively, anything that costs less than half what it did three years ago.
IBM stands to make a killing migrating companies to linux. This is a great chance for them to experience the migration for themselves in a way that sending a few engineers to remote sites never can, and it's probably a lot cheaper for the amount of knowledge they'll get out of it. Obviously this is more than just an experiment, but it clearly makes good sense for them to say to the world "We did it, and we'll help you do it too."
Yes, but since configuration information is neatly distributed on unix systems, you can easily clean up when something goes wrong. Yes, it's theoretically possible to make windows software that works this way, but most vendors don't do it this way, in part because Microsoft encourages them to do the opposite.
I was doing a pack of penguin mints every 48 hours for the last couple weeks of this past semester (and sleeping about 6 hours every 48 as well) and I quit cold turkey when the semester ended. I promptly lost the ability to stay awake for more than 6 hours. Then I tried having a soda when I woke up, a soda at lunch, and a soda when I got home from work, and getting a little extra sleep. After a couple days I stopped having the morning drink. After another week I did away with the late afternoon drink. I'm still having the caffeine at lunch, but when you work university tech support around the holidays, you need something like that anyway. I did have a bit of the headaches along the way, but it was worth it to get un-wired.
There's a stark difference between a service that may be requested from out of state and something that is actively pushed to that state. The case of the Tennessee postal inspector sounds like a load of BS, and I bet the BBS would have won if they'd appealed. AOL is going after a company based in Florida that is doing business (possibly illegally or injuriously) in Virginia. There is an enormous body of caselaw supporting this, so I would be quite surprised if they lost their appeal.
While I haven't seen the IBM tests, being stable at a load of 12 is impressive. Being stable at 86 is a miracle. Generally speaking, you don't plan on operating a server with a steady load of 12, but it's nice to know it can go that high if it needs to. It may also be possible to tune Linux to have similar load tolerance to FreeBSD, but the default policies don't have that effect, which has on occasion been the source of lengthy and heated debate among Linux kernel developers.
This is often true, but configurations in which it is not true are not uncommon. A friend of mine once had his BSD server stay up with a load of 86. It might take 2 minutes to completely service a request, but it still worked. When he had linux on the same box, same configuration on the same services, it would fall over around 12. BSD is incredible at handling load. It's less flexible in many ways than Linux, but it makes a really great server.
When Diebold got their source stolen, it was a big deal. Why? Because it's shitty software whose correct operation is impossibly to verify. VoteHere, on the other hand, isn't worried about the leak of their source code, because even if someone found an exploit in it, everyone would know right away, because their system is designed to expose fraud, rather than conceal it.
Of course, security problems at electronic voting companies are always an ominous sign, but at least VoteHere had the forethought to realize that security is bound to be breached somewhere in the chain from development to election, and designed a system that's armored against it.
Dogbert t-shirt that said "You're next on my list of things to ignore." There was a 12-hour breakup a week later, but after that we lasted a while. It's a good shirt.
If they do it right, everything will be interchangeable.
I also noticed that it's happy handling mp3 streams. I hope someone with the skills can be pursuaded to do the same for ogg, as streaming my oggs in wav format would impose an unacceptably high network load, and decompressing ogg to wav and re-encoding to mp3 on the fly for streaming would be as obscene a waste of system resources as it would be of sound quality.
Re:That's how discovery works in litigation
on
SCOrched Earth
·
· Score: 1
Generally speaking, source code for things like operating systems that are used rather diversely and developed for by many different companies is not a trade secret. It is certainly proprietary, and woe betide anyone who misappropriates it, but it's generally not secret. I'm pretty sure you can even get a lot of the Windows source.
I work tech support, and we used to recommend ad-aware all the time. Then we started noticing it botching removals left and right, leaving systems worse off than they were before. The new policy is "There's a product called ad-aware you could try. Use it at your own risk." It's completely understandable for Dell to not allow their techs to even say that, because as anyone who has ever worked tech support will tell you, users do not understand the concept of cause and effect, and they certainly don't listen. Every now and then, one of our techs will accidentally mention ad-aware or something like it in a context that doesn't strongly imply that using it is dangerous. Usually nothing happens. One guy got unlucky, and the user's hard drive crashed the next day. We made him do the data recovery anyway, since from the perspective of the user, it was his fault, and it's difficult to protect him when he recommended a product that's known to occasionally screw up systems. If their hard drive had crashed after he recommended something on the okay list, we'd have backed him up.
The critical thing to remember is that users have a tendency to be paranoid, stupid, and dishonest as long as they're on the phone with tech support. You can save yourself a world of pain by not giving them any excuse to blame their mistakes on you. Maybe it's not nice that Dell won't help these people, but it's good business sense.
Note: I am not saying that ad-aware or any other anti-spyware program is bug-ridden and dangerous by itself. What I'm referring to is the nasty habit of spyware to be designed in such a way as to make it very difficult to completely remove, and incomplete removal results in Bad Things happening. This is why if someone has spyware that won't uninstall, we take them through manual removal. It may be tedious, but we know it works. Since we have documentation for that, the user can't blame us if they screw it up.
Useful teaching tool
on
Javascrypt
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Schneider's javascript Rijndael implementation makes a great teaching tool, because it's so easy to modify it to show intermediate steps. Sure, you can do this in any other language, but it's especially compact in javascript, and anyone who has ever programmed in ANY modern language can read javascript, which cannot be said of plenty of other languages. For my architecture class we had to implement Rijndael with synthesizable modules, and that implementation saved us countless hours, because it was so easy to tweak things in the javascript implementation that we could often save time by deliberately introducing bugs into the reference implementation and seeing if it had familiar effects. Anyone who's ever used FPGA Advantage probably knows how much of a pain in the ass it can be debugging with that alone.
If you'll recall from the Rambus fiasco, they signed settlements that actually had clauses ending the royalty payments if anyone successfully challenged the patent in court. A settlement means nothing more than "it would cost us more to fight this" and everyone knows it.
The hash is different per ballot, and the extra information that distinguishes the ballots (and thus differentiates the hashes) is not tied in any way to voter identity. Check the documentation. They've got a rather complete threat/countermeasure matrix that explains why their system is secure enough to back up their claim that it's better than paper.
Slashdot Mirror
If what they're doing is novel, then yes, this is probably worthy of a patent. That does not mean that everyone else who does the same thing a different way is infringing. Contrary to the horror stories we keep hearing, patents are usually interpreted narrowly by the courts. I'm not worried... yet.
Ummm... most people look at Mensa membership as an indication that you haven't come to terms with being beat up on the playground in school by kids who were dumber than you. I'd probably qualify for it, but even if it was free, and something posessed me to join, I sure as hell wouldn't put it on my resume. Every experienced employer knows that being smart is not a very good discriminator for job performance, beyond simple qualification.
We had a lot of problems with lazily patched SQL servers and web servers, many of which weren't even supposed to be servers. Yeah, it would be great to be able to force everyone to patch, but as a University we're supposed to leave the departments rather autonomous. The best we could do was make a fairly secure image on a system that supports automatic updating without forcing reboots without warning, and hope as many people as possible use it. For these purposes, XP is far, FAR better than 2000.
Anything that is more than twice as powerful as what you could get for the same money three years ago. Alternatively, anything that costs less than half what it did three years ago.
That's funny, ours is trying desperately to get everyone running 2000 to upgrade to XP, because 2000 is such a security disaster.
Then again, our whole network is on publicly routable IPs, and most of it always will be for a variety of reasons.
Try a BIOS update. I won't guarantee it'll work, but it's a quick fix if it does, and it's generally not a bad idea to do it anyway.
IBM stands to make a killing migrating companies to linux. This is a great chance for them to experience the migration for themselves in a way that sending a few engineers to remote sites never can, and it's probably a lot cheaper for the amount of knowledge they'll get out of it. Obviously this is more than just an experiment, but it clearly makes good sense for them to say to the world "We did it, and we'll help you do it too."
Yes, but since configuration information is neatly distributed on unix systems, you can easily clean up when something goes wrong. Yes, it's theoretically possible to make windows software that works this way, but most vendors don't do it this way, in part because Microsoft encourages them to do the opposite.
I was doing a pack of penguin mints every 48 hours for the last couple weeks of this past semester (and sleeping about 6 hours every 48 as well) and I quit cold turkey when the semester ended. I promptly lost the ability to stay awake for more than 6 hours. Then I tried having a soda when I woke up, a soda at lunch, and a soda when I got home from work, and getting a little extra sleep. After a couple days I stopped having the morning drink. After another week I did away with the late afternoon drink. I'm still having the caffeine at lunch, but when you work university tech support around the holidays, you need something like that anyway. I did have a bit of the headaches along the way, but it was worth it to get un-wired.
There's a stark difference between a service that may be requested from out of state and something that is actively pushed to that state. The case of the Tennessee postal inspector sounds like a load of BS, and I bet the BBS would have won if they'd appealed. AOL is going after a company based in Florida that is doing business (possibly illegally or injuriously) in Virginia. There is an enormous body of caselaw supporting this, so I would be quite surprised if they lost their appeal.
While I haven't seen the IBM tests, being stable at a load of 12 is impressive. Being stable at 86 is a miracle. Generally speaking, you don't plan on operating a server with a steady load of 12, but it's nice to know it can go that high if it needs to. It may also be possible to tune Linux to have similar load tolerance to FreeBSD, but the default policies don't have that effect, which has on occasion been the source of lengthy and heated debate among Linux kernel developers.
This is often true, but configurations in which it is not true are not uncommon. A friend of mine once had his BSD server stay up with a load of 86. It might take 2 minutes to completely service a request, but it still worked. When he had linux on the same box, same configuration on the same services, it would fall over around 12. BSD is incredible at handling load. It's less flexible in many ways than Linux, but it makes a really great server.
When Diebold got their source stolen, it was a big deal. Why? Because it's shitty software whose correct operation is impossibly to verify. VoteHere, on the other hand, isn't worried about the leak of their source code, because even if someone found an exploit in it, everyone would know right away, because their system is designed to expose fraud, rather than conceal it.
Of course, security problems at electronic voting companies are always an ominous sign, but at least VoteHere had the forethought to realize that security is bound to be breached somewhere in the chain from development to election, and designed a system that's armored against it.
Nevermind, my Aunt just topped that. 36-pack of Toilet Paper, figuring that any bachelor pad probably needs it.
Dogbert t-shirt that said "You're next on my list of things to ignore." There was a 12-hour breakup a week later, but after that we lasted a while. It's a good shirt.
The caldera logo isn't enough. We need to be putting these stories on sco.slashdot.org
I wonder what Steve Jobs would say if he sees people doing such things to his machines!!
The critical question is, what would Woz think?
Now maybe those hippies will stop complaining about RFID tags!
If they do it right, everything will be interchangeable.
I also noticed that it's happy handling mp3 streams. I hope someone with the skills can be pursuaded to do the same for ogg, as streaming my oggs in wav format would impose an unacceptably high network load, and decompressing ogg to wav and re-encoding to mp3 on the fly for streaming would be as obscene a waste of system resources as it would be of sound quality.
Generally speaking, source code for things like operating systems that are used rather diversely and developed for by many different companies is not a trade secret. It is certainly proprietary, and woe betide anyone who misappropriates it, but it's generally not secret. I'm pretty sure you can even get a lot of the Windows source.
I work tech support, and we used to recommend ad-aware all the time. Then we started noticing it botching removals left and right, leaving systems worse off than they were before. The new policy is "There's a product called ad-aware you could try. Use it at your own risk." It's completely understandable for Dell to not allow their techs to even say that, because as anyone who has ever worked tech support will tell you, users do not understand the concept of cause and effect, and they certainly don't listen. Every now and then, one of our techs will accidentally mention ad-aware or something like it in a context that doesn't strongly imply that using it is dangerous. Usually nothing happens. One guy got unlucky, and the user's hard drive crashed the next day. We made him do the data recovery anyway, since from the perspective of the user, it was his fault, and it's difficult to protect him when he recommended a product that's known to occasionally screw up systems. If their hard drive had crashed after he recommended something on the okay list, we'd have backed him up.
The critical thing to remember is that users have a tendency to be paranoid, stupid, and dishonest as long as they're on the phone with tech support. You can save yourself a world of pain by not giving them any excuse to blame their mistakes on you. Maybe it's not nice that Dell won't help these people, but it's good business sense.
Note: I am not saying that ad-aware or any other anti-spyware program is bug-ridden and dangerous by itself. What I'm referring to is the nasty habit of spyware to be designed in such a way as to make it very difficult to completely remove, and incomplete removal results in Bad Things happening. This is why if someone has spyware that won't uninstall, we take them through manual removal. It may be tedious, but we know it works. Since we have documentation for that, the user can't blame us if they screw it up.
Schneider's javascript Rijndael implementation makes a great teaching tool, because it's so easy to modify it to show intermediate steps. Sure, you can do this in any other language, but it's especially compact in javascript, and anyone who has ever programmed in ANY modern language can read javascript, which cannot be said of plenty of other languages. For my architecture class we had to implement Rijndael with synthesizable modules, and that implementation saved us countless hours, because it was so easy to tweak things in the javascript implementation that we could often save time by deliberately introducing bugs into the reference implementation and seeing if it had familiar effects. Anyone who's ever used FPGA Advantage probably knows how much of a pain in the ass it can be debugging with that alone.
1) Frivolous lawsuit against IBM
2) Frivolous lawsuit against Novell
3) Frivolous lawsuit against Google
If you'll recall from the Rambus fiasco, they signed settlements that actually had clauses ending the royalty payments if anyone successfully challenged the patent in court. A settlement means nothing more than "it would cost us more to fight this" and everyone knows it.
The hash is different per ballot, and the extra information that distinguishes the ballots (and thus differentiates the hashes) is not tied in any way to voter identity. Check the documentation. They've got a rather complete threat/countermeasure matrix that explains why their system is secure enough to back up their claim that it's better than paper.