I do not know what "ease of use" and "gee-whiz" stuff is "wide open".
This is not meant to be a flame, but I'm curious: what exactly is enabled by default that poses a security risk?
Nothing, afaik. The mods just didn't appreciate my irony, it seems:) I just wanted to say that it's true that Mac OS X by default is user friendly and that it has a lot of gee whiz stuff that is readily accessible, but that otoh the standard network security holes are (virtually?) non-existant, as all services are turned off by default.
I've read a few articles describing certain features that it has (ease of use and gee-whiz stuff) that sounded to me like a potential vulnerability.
It seemed that a lot of these things were enabled by default and wide open.
The ease of use and gee-whiz stuff is indeed enabled by default and wide open. All network services (ssh, ftp, samba, apple filesharing, printer sharing aka cups,...) are disabled by default though.
I doubt you'll be able to make use of 2-2-2 memory's extra speed without firmware hacking.
The memory speed never had to be set in open firmware. I seem to remember to have read once in a knowledge base article that the system automatically uses the best possible timings that all chips support, but I can't find it anymore unfortunately.
Apparently, the Rage (Pro?) cards found in older G3s aren't properly supported in MacOS X.2
Rage II cards: no graphics acceleration at all
Rage Pro cards: 2D acceleration, no hardware OpenGL acceleration
Rage 128 cards: 2D + OpenGL acceleration
ATI Radeon, all Geforce's shipped with Macs: 2D + OpenGL + Quartz Extreme
I'm hoping to wring some cash out of Apple when I discover that Quartz extreme (found in Jaguar and Panther) doesn't work with my dual USB ibook.
Apple never promised it would work on your machine. Apple did promise the early G3's would be supported by Mac OS X and people felt that not having 2D and/or 3D acceleration made that claim misleading, as Apple nowhere explicitly stated that up front (while they did state it wrt Quartz Extreme).
A cross licensing deal is often much cheaper than going to court to try to invalidate a patent, so I wouldn't be surprised if that is often tried before deciding to invalidate a patent. Of course, I'm not a lawyer, but these people are and they advise more or less the same if it's a viable option in the light of the litigated company's strategy (i.e., if they're mainly interested in being able to continue their business).
You think it's simple to take a human process and automate it?
He just says you can let everything that was already known work together using humans and a telephone system via a computer network and a computer. He doesn't tell you how to write the software to handle everything, he just claims the mere idea of being able to automise it using a computer and a network. In cases like that, where the algorithm that the humans follow is simply transposed to a computer system, yes, the principle is very simple.
The innovation happened because the inventor was promised, by the patent system, a monopoly on the innovation. Without that promise, the innovation wouldn't have happened.
Of course, that's why no software innovation happened and no business methods were modernized before software/business method patents were allowed.
Furthermore, intellectual property rights aren't intended to do anything. They have no goal. We offer legal protection to intellectual property rights because it's the right thing to do. Period.
The US constitution (article 1, section 8, clause 8) and the US patent office, see second paragraph on first page) disagrees with that. The UK Patent office disagrees with you as well. I have to admit that even the most brain dead proponents of more or less unlimited patentability I've encountered, haven't said something as stupid as that. "They have no goal", ROTFL:)
Indeed, that's why you have to make sure your wording can be interpreted as broad as possible.
How many patents have you written?
None.
Seriously; I'm asking. Because, you see, you don't do this.
If you'd actually read the link to the US patent attorney's article in my previous post, you'd have seen that is exactly what he recommends, finishing with "C'est la vie". It's just the way patent law is constructed.
I guess you'll retard^H^H^Hort (look, it's infectious!) by throwing another bunch of petty insults in my general direction, so I'll leave it at this. If you really want to document yourself better, then stop worrying about job security for a moment and reada bitaboutit. Then maybe the next time you can reply with arguments instead of with insults.
I have no doubt about your knowledge of the patent system (and probably IP in general), but you sound like a mindless drone just repeating his mantra's over and over again, not listening to anyone else because he's convinced he's right and anyone who disagrees with him cannot possibly know what he's talking about, or is a "self-hating apologist" or some such (I'm honestly surprised you haven't called me a communist yet). I really do hope you have some happy moments from time to time as well.
They mention computers, a network, a bar code scanner and printer etc just to give it the air of not being only a business method
Uh-huh. So not only have you failed to read the patent (or, at the very least, failed to understand it), but you also suffer from the delusion that you can somehow read the minds of those who wrote it.
Which part of "they mention computers, a network, a bar code scanner and printer" did you not find in claim 1 of the patent? And no, I don't read minds, I just have read too many analyses about the proposed European software patents directive, where mentioning a technical effect (if only "a reduction of the number of necessary mouse clicks") is necessary. And you of course conveniently snipped the rest of that sentence.
His addition to the state-of-the-art is that this auction is organized using a computer and website. That's all.
Yup. And it was bloody innovative. Sufficiently so that the inventor was granted a patent on the idea.
No, it's not innovative. He simply replaced the people at the phones with software, the phone system with a computer network/website. Taking a random business process and doing this simple, very well known substitution is not suddenly innovative simply because no-one before you did that transformation with the specific business process you mention. The fact that he got a patent for it, doesn't prove anything. It's a nice try at circular reasoning though.
Remember the old quote? "It takes a special kind of genius to render the previously unheard of blindingly obvious. The cry of 'I could have thought of that!' is especially telling because the fact is, you didn't."
He is simply taking a particular business method and automising it in the obvious way. You can take any business method, replace as many people as possible with software, phone lines with computer networks, filing cabinets with databases and phones with computers and say "Look, this is so innovative". This is not novel nor non-obvious and most certainly does not "promote the progress of science and useful arts", as is the original goal of the patent system (and all intellectual property rights).
Behold your epic lack of understanding of how patents work. Patents are not broad.
That's the idea, yes. Unfortunately, in practice this is not always the case.
They are specific. That's why they're very long, with lots of fiddly language. You can't read a patent and then generalize it. That's the opposite of the way patents work.
Indeed, that's why you have to make sure your wording can be interpreted as broad as possible. A lot of the wording is simply there to make the patent sound more cryptic and to make more interpretations possible. See the last two/three paragraphs in this article written by a US patent attorney.
It's the same rhetoric and fake limits they're using in Europe to try to get software and business method patents into the system.
Again, your ability to read minds is shocking.
And so is your ability to give convincing counter arguments. Maybe you should read a bit about it.
In refutation of this, you offer me enthusiasm at the D&P show.
I'm not sure what a D&P show means (Desktop & Publishing?), but WWDC stands for WorldWide Developer Conference. I.e. it's a gathering geared at everyone that programs for the Mac OS. That's quite relevant imho.
Oh, I'm starting to understand now. You haven't actually read the patent in question. Go read it. Whole thing, start to finish. All the words are important, so don't skim.
That's not true. They mention computers, a network, a bar code scanner and printer etc just to give it the air of not being only a business method (although I don't know why they did that, as business methods are also patentable according to case law in the US) and to show the "novelty" of their "invention". In fact, the owner of the patent admits that collectibles are not now, auctions of such collectibles are not new and such auctions on television are not new. His addition to the state-of-the-art is that this auction is organized using a computer and website. That's all.
So, once again we have: a principle that's already well known, but you add a computer and a network and great, you've got yourself an invention. Since a computer is completely generic, you've just patented yourself every possible practical use of a method/algorithm in conjunction with a computer. So although lawyers can still say you can't patent algorithms, you can patent the computerized use of any algorithm/business method. It's the same rhetoric and fake limits they're using in Europe to try to get software and business method patents into the system.
And the researchers were so impressed by insightful and informative critics like you that one of them together with someone else produced a a follow-up study with the same conclusions. And the European Directorate-General for Research comes to pretty much agrees in their own study.
You have to look at THE RESULTS of research, not the dollars spent on it. We've seen more technological innovation in the fields of software and related disciplines in the last ten years than in all the rest of the history of computing combined.
Suppose someone would accept that for some reason as a fact, then of course this invariably proves that this innovation is thanks to software patents, and that without software patents this would not have happened (and that we wouldn't have seen much more innovation in computer-related fields without them, instead of in the IP-litigation field). You could just as well say the innovation is thanks to the demolition of the Berlin Wall (post hoc etc). Get real...
PS: sorry for answering your trolling.
Originality never was one of your strong points I guess.
Patents aren't necessarily bad for innovation, but software patents are. Look it up in this MIT study. For example, the budget of US companies spent on R&D after software patents started being granted (in the mid eighties) declined by 10% to 15%.
Yes, it only applies to Darwin and their other open source projects. No, the previous version of the APSL wasn't FSF-approved, it was only OSI approved.
I'm fairly certain he has also explicitly said "Either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists". I got that quote from this movie (at 1 minute 27 seconds). Although that movie is one big cut-and-paste job of a ton of fragments (and most definitely created by a person who is very much against GWB's actions), that particular quote seems to be one single fragment (although they left 0.1 second or so out of it to keep up with the rhythm of the music; you can see the text at the bottom suddenly slightly jumps after "Either you're with us", but it's still the same scroller and text).
No, but most good compilers (e.g. GCC) can optimize for SSE/SSE2.
Most gains in graphics filters are gotten from vectorising the code. GCC cannot vectorize anything automatically afaik. The only think it does when you tell it to use sse, is replace all floating point operations with sse/sse2 equivalents. The reason is that they are more RISC like (as opposed to the stack-based 80x87 FPU), which results in GCC's optimizer being able to do a better job. ICC otoh is able to vectorize code on its own.
Also, ICC and other compilers have their own extentions for programming SSE/SSE2.
This locks you to a certain compiler however...
My point was that the algorithms were developed to be efficent on the PowerPC, and that they just don't run as fast on a different architecture.
Do you have more information about this? (I don't mean benchmark results, but background on how they did this)
hotoshop is more optimized for the Mac. Adobe designed the filter algorithms to run fast with Altivec and the PPC architecture, therefore, they are inefficent when run on an x86 processor
Photoshop is also optimized for mmx and sse (don't know about sse2). And as there are no standard C extensions to program mmx or sse code (unlike for altivec), I think it's safe to assume that those filters are even written in assembler.
First of all, I want to say that I couldn't care less which license one uses to release his code and that I'm not a proponent of one license or another (nor am I an opponent of any of the open source licenses). That said...
First of all, I don't believe in the myth that BSD software will be embraced, extended and replaced by a closed version that we are forced to buy.
I also don't think they will be replaced. I do think that it happens that improvements are done to BSD licensed programs which are then kept as closed source, so that this work is done twice or more times because the changes weren't freed.
The people who bandy this/. folklore can never give me an example.
I think it's hard to give an example of changes you don't know about, since they were kept closed source:) I don't think anyone is in a position to say how often this happens.
You're free to disagree, but please don't pretend that BSD advocates aren't interested in the community.
I've never claimed this (though the sentence you quoted may be interpreted as such). It may be better to say that the GPL and BSD licenses have different ways of attempting to keep the community thriving: GPL by making sure the code remains Free, BSD by making sure the developers are Free.
This is a pullback from the original plan which called for wide dissemination of data including financial and medical history.
Of course it is. That's how they are attempting to make the new plan sound reasonable, because it's so much less worse than the previous one. And it seems they're succeeding...
So, back to the GPL/BSD - I think it offers mostly "positive freedom" ("you have right to this and that, anything else is prohibited") while the BSD offers mostly "negative freedom" ("this and that is prohibited; otherwise, do as you please").
I think it's more complicated in this case. The reason is that the GPL inherently causes more and more applications (or at least modifications to existing GPL applications) to be freely (Freely) available, while the BSD license does not enforce that. So the GPL sort of automatically introduces more choice, which in turn gives you more freedom on the level of choosing applications (what good does it do if you are allowed choose whatever you want, if there is only one choice?)
Slashdot Mirror
- Rage II cards: no graphics acceleration at all
- Rage Pro cards: 2D acceleration, no hardware OpenGL acceleration
- Rage 128 cards: 2D + OpenGL acceleration
- ATI Radeon, all Geforce's shipped with Macs: 2D + OpenGL + Quartz Extreme
Apple never promised it would work on your machine. Apple did promise the early G3's would be supported by Mac OS X and people felt that not having 2D and/or 3D acceleration made that claim misleading, as Apple nowhere explicitly stated that up front (while they did state it wrt Quartz Extreme).Afaik they're mainly focussing on copyright and not on patents.
A cross licensing deal is often much cheaper than going to court to try to invalidate a patent, so I wouldn't be surprised if that is often tried before deciding to invalidate a patent. Of course, I'm not a lawyer, but these people are and they advise more or less the same if it's a viable option in the light of the litigated company's strategy (i.e., if they're mainly interested in being able to continue their business).
I wasn't at WWDC, I simply (wrongly) thought you didn't know what kind of conference it was.
PS: you can stop hitting the reload button now.
I guess you'll retard^H^H^Hort (look, it's infectious!) by throwing another bunch of petty insults in my general direction, so I'll leave it at this. If you really want to document yourself better, then stop worrying about job security for a moment and read a bit about it. Then maybe the next time you can reply with arguments instead of with insults.
I have no doubt about your knowledge of the patent system (and probably IP in general), but you sound like a mindless drone just repeating his mantra's over and over again, not listening to anyone else because he's convinced he's right and anyone who disagrees with him cannot possibly know what he's talking about, or is a "self-hating apologist" or some such (I'm honestly surprised you haven't called me a communist yet). I really do hope you have some happy moments from time to time as well.
So, once again we have: a principle that's already well known, but you add a computer and a network and great, you've got yourself an invention. Since a computer is completely generic, you've just patented yourself every possible practical use of a method/algorithm in conjunction with a computer. So although lawyers can still say you can't patent algorithms, you can patent the computerized use of any algorithm/business method. It's the same rhetoric and fake limits they're using in Europe to try to get software and business method patents into the system.
PS: sorry for answering your trolling.
Yes, it only applies to Darwin and their other open source projects. No, the previous version of the APSL wasn't FSF-approved, it was only OSI approved.
I'm fairly certain he has also explicitly said "Either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists". I got that quote from this movie (at 1 minute 27 seconds). Although that movie is one big cut-and-paste job of a ton of fragments (and most definitely created by a person who is very much against GWB's actions), that particular quote seems to be one single fragment (although they left 0.1 second or so out of it to keep up with the rhythm of the music; you can see the text at the bottom suddenly slightly jumps after "Either you're with us", but it's still the same scroller and text).
Yes, it's a bit late, but the patent numbers are mentioned in NCR's press release.
Long live The Underdogs: Crystal Quest and its follow-up, Crystal Crazy
Why couldn't sarcasm be insightful?