Our idea is to deploy 3,000 different types of digital ants, each looking for evidence of a threat
That's not an "idea", that's an analogy. An analogy with nature is a nice way of explaining something, not an idea.
There "idea" seems to be that if there is evidence of an infection, then the infected system should be examined further for evidence of other infection. I'm not sure why that's useful. Why not investigate all systems for all infections? Why continue to run an infected system at all?
it is programmed to leave behind a stronger scent. Stronger scent trails attract more ants, producing the swarm that marks a potential computer infection.
That sounds actually like it might itself result in a denial of service attack of the system.
How do I tell my customers which wifi card is safe? Will that new laptop they are looking at continue to work reliably when the next updates are released? Which printers that are on sale currently at Walmart will work in PCLOS? The answer to all those questions is you don't have a clue. You don't know, I don't know, the kid behind the counter sure as hell don't know, and that is the problem.
None of those things are even remotely guaranteed for Windows either. In fact, old hardware support is much better in Linux than in Windows. And a lot of nominally Windows-compatible hardware doesn't work correctly on actual Windows machines in practice.
Any lawyer with half a brain would advise AGAINST sharing source code, as the risk of patent trolls is high compared to the gains of a 2% user base.
Well, your estimate is completely off-base. Maybe manufacturers don't care about a gain in desktop users, but Linux is so widespread in high performance computing, embedded systems, mobile computing, and other industrial and business applications that most major chip manufacturers don't have a choice but to release source code.
But most hardware manufacturers simply don't want to play the GPL game
Most hardware conforms to open standards these days anyway. And for the hardware that doesn't most manufacturers that actually matter seem to supply enough information to build Linux drivers.
and with Windows and OSX they don't have to.
Actually, a lot of driver support for OS X is share with Linux.
Webcam drivers and the like DO NOT BELONG IN THE KERNEL.
They perform high performance I/O, hence they belong in the kernel.
Specific device drivers have no business being in kernel space.
Everybody else puts them there; why shouldn't Linux?
Most attempts to move them out of kernel space have failed miserably. The latest big failure was when Apple turned Mach into a monolithic kernel.
FWIW, Linux probably has some of the best support these days for user mode drivers, but few people bother.
I mean, they did that for printers, why not every other piece of hardware?
You're confusing two different meanings of "driver". The actual printer driver (the thing that ferries bits to the hardware) is in the kernel on Linux; it's usually a generic USB driver for printer class devices. There is another "driver" there--the renderer--but that is irrelevant to this discussion because it's a completely different kind of software that just happens to be called a "driver" as well.
Apple has done a fine job of building a decent platform around Mach and BSD,
Actually, Apple didn't really. The platform (GUI etc.) came from NeXT, which, in turn had taken most of the ideas and technologies from Stepstone, GNU, and Xerox.
Until you want to implement something like a privacy button. It needs to clear the disk cache. It needs to clear the cookies. It needs to clear the autocomplete for the navigation bar.
Well, and in good UNIX fashion, all of those go under ~/.uzbl, and once you recognize the need for privacy, you separate that into ~/.uzbl/private and ~/.uzbl/config subdirectories. Then you can implement the privacy button completely without knowledge about what the private data actually is, and the button can work with both existing and future private data and arbitrary other plugins.
What's one thing for the user isn't one thing for the developer, which is why you end up building monolithical applications.
You have "monolithical" applications because most developers don't know any better.
This is a uniquely American problem. In Europe, this is just a smart phone among many--with a nicer operating system--a smart phone you can use with any carrier.
Language like "malicious", "illegal", and "abusers" is ridiculous; these are photos taken in public places. If people can see inside your house from the street or you do anything embarrassing, be more careful next time, don't sue other people for your stupidity.
The Japanese should be particularly sensitive to the rights of photographers, given both their photo industry and how insanely much Japanese tourists snap pictures when they travel around the world.
This is a good sign. The fact that Microsoft feels it necessary to attack Linux at the retail level shows that Linux is becoming more and more of a factor in the computing mainstream as well. Thanks, Microsoft, for supporting Linux.
The computing industry has received massive government subsidies. The Internet, high performance computing, CPU architectures, compiler construction, and plenty more was financed by DARPA and other US government agencies, as well as European and Japanese government function. The subsidies were in the form of research grants, technology transfer from government research labs, among others. Knowledge and technologies were also massively transferred in the form of graduate students, academics, and government researchers coming into the private computing sector.
There's nothing wrong with--it's government doing what it should be doing. But if Andy Grove thinks computing did it all by itself, he's kidding himself.
If other sectors (automotive, energy, transportation, environment, etc.) are supposed to catch up, the government needs to invest massively in basic and applied research, fellowships, and government research labs in those areas.
I don't get why people keep come up with all these bizarre alternatives. If you want basic city transportation, get a bicycle or a folding bike (if you need to take it on public transit). If you can't pedal or don't want to sweat, get an electric bike or electric assist. If you have balance problems, get an adult tricycle (they also come in folding and electric varieties). Those are cheap, proven transportation solution that will also keep you fit.
The fundamental problem of using something smaller and more efficient than a car is that you're at risk in a collision. But none of these "alternatives" solves that problem any better than a bicycle.
A monopole is supposed to be an elementary particle with a magnetic charge. This is--as the abstract itself says--a "tractable analog" of a magnetic monopole.
There are a lot of things in solid state physics that "behave like" some kind of elementary particle but aren't: phonons, holes, etc. This is just another instance.
and the European Commission, which seems to get off on abusing American firms
In what way is the European Commission "abusing American firms"? Seems to me they are doing exactly what a regulatory authority for a big market like the EU should do, and they are regulating European firms just as much as American firms.
"Hate speech" is typically threatening. If you call someone a nigger, that's one thing. And at least in the US, it's no crime. But if you put up a noose, you're threatening to lynch someone.
If you're doing it symbolically (i.e., not with a clear intent of putting a person in that noose), it's protected speech in the US.
And that's a good thing: it might just as well be done by someone with an actual hatred of African Americans as by someone who wants to make a point about the dangers that African Americans face.
Moreover, it is obviously racially motivated.
Yes.
That behavior cannot be tolerated,
Well, and you can "not tolerate" it by speaking out against it. You cannot put someone in jail over it.
and laws were put into place
Really? Which specific laws are you referring to?
specifically BECAUSE IT WAS HAPPENING UNTIL THE LAWS WERE PUT INTO PLACE AND ENFORCED. People still get lynched, though it is becoming rarer.
It's a wild guess on your part that making hate speech illegal reduces hate crimes.
I think suppressing hate speech makes hate crimes more likely, not less likely.
A "design patent" is something very different from a "patent". A design patent protects the look of something. So, you can't have a big white page with the Google logo and the same arrangement of buttons on it. Big deal.
Although putting a single LED into a contact lens is already an achievement, it's not the hard part. As the article points out: power and focusing are major problems, with no plausible solution in sight.
The people to whom the accolades should go are those who finally manage to put it all together, not the people who put together a tiny bit of the technology.
The idea itself, of course, is nearly as old as contact lenses and has appeared in many science fiction stories.
So, this means that we let Japan put a 300 MW microwave transmitter in orbit, a transmitter that can be aimed anywhere the Japanese choose. I don't think that's wise.
It's particularly worrisome because, from the point of energy generation, space based power is extremely expensive--meaning that any country that moves to space based power generation may have hidden motives.
Well, no, it's not. The term wasn't in common use, although some groups used it to describe themselves. "Open standards" only became a big marketing tool after "open source" had caught on and customers actually cared about "open anything". And at that point, organizations like MPEG-LA started widely abusing the term to make their costly and proprietary standards more appealing.
'The Open Group' standards for DCE, UNIX and X dates back to the 1980's.
And, lo and behold, they were producing "open standards" in the EU sense, not the MPEG-LA sense.
Open source reference implementations are useful to supplement standards, but they're two different things
Quite right: open source implementations are neither necessary nor sufficient for guaranteeing that a standard is open.
Sun has been trying to take advantage of that confusion by producing an open source implementation of a patent encumbered "standard".
Yours is a ridiculous and arrogant rebuttal. Equating changes in the definition of "open" to human rights? Were you hit in the head as a child or what? Raven's history of the definition is accurate.
You really have no clue about human history, do you. The ability to speak publicly, the ability to print, and to disseminate information has been at the heart of the development of human rights throughout history; you cannot separate one from the other.
I'm old enough to have lived though it as an IT professional.
So am I, which is why I can tell you that you're full of it. Go search the USENET archives, for example: you won't even find any significant mention of the term "open standard" prior to the introduction of "open source" in 1998. The term simply wasn't in common use. After that, many companies have been trying to misrepresent both their software and their standards as "open" in order to mislead customers into thinking that their products are something that they are not.
What finally gets me is your last paragraph. What an arrogant bastard! Who are you to tell the world what is or is not acceptable?
Let me translate this for you, since you're obviously too dense to understand simple English: "It is not acceptable" means "People like me will not shut up because of your bogus arguments or bogus claims of authority". Clear enough?
And what ultimately matters is the legal definitions; the EU has made a good first step towards that. You now go and try specifying MPEG as an "open standard" on an EU contract and see where it gets you.
Even if that were true (it is not), so what? It is the current definition, and it's the only meaningful and useful definition.
Just because we accepted slavery, lack of voting rights for women, throwing people in jail for their sexual orientation, or mixing church and state in the past doesn't mean we have to continue to do so. And it's the same with the misuse of the term "open".
The ITU-T and IETF explicitly refer to such standards as open.
Yes: old bodies dominated by big corporate interests. In the past, they have been able to get away with it. Today, we don't let them anymore.
You can try to redefine the term according to the new EU definition, but you shouldn't be surprised if you get confusion
Nothing surprises me. I'm just saying that enough is enough. Don't use the term "open" to describe standards that are clearly proprietary. That kind of misuse and deliberate confusion may have been fine in the 1970's, but it is unacceptable today, period.
Am I alone in thinking that this seems rather ironic? The countries that traditionally valued freedom disallowing the very same freedom in a conquered country?
Not really. Germany was still full of the same people who had supported the Nazis just a few years earlier; some restrictions were bound to be necessary. It's actually quite amazing, and a testament to US political skill, that Germany managed to do so well with so few restrictions.
The US might have chosen 50 years of draconian military rule and reeducation in Germany, and neither the American voter nor Germany's European neighbors would have shed a tear over it. That wouldn't have been inconsistent with US principles: the primary objective of US foreign policy is to keep America safe and democratic, not to democratize the rest of the world. But it would likely have worked much worse than the actual strategy: a wealthy, happy, democratic Germany was the best defense against the USSR. Germans should just remember that this kind of post-war treatment by the West wasn't a right, it was a side-effect of other political objectives of the victors of WWII.
You can redefine terms to mean something different from how they have been used for decades and complain that everyone else is using the wrong definition, but you are unlikely to get much sympathy.
Yes, *you* can, *you* are obviously trying to, but *you* shouldn't.
Of the million or so search results for 'MPEG open standard' you will find very few claiming that MPEG is not an open standard
The MPEG consortium has a vested interest in changing the definition of the term "open", and they have the might and force of some of the biggest entertainment, marketing, and consumer electronics companies behind them. We should not let them.
If MPEG is "open", then the term "open" has lost any useful meaning.
Slashdot Mirror
Their tablets and pda's do have good handwriting recognition. Use one- they're good.
Good relative to what? Microsoft has driven anybody else building handwriting recognition systems for the mass market out of business.
(And most of that technology wasn't created at Microsoft anyway.)
Our idea is to deploy 3,000 different types of digital ants, each looking for evidence of a threat
That's not an "idea", that's an analogy. An analogy with nature is a nice way of explaining something, not an idea.
There "idea" seems to be that if there is evidence of an infection, then the infected system should be examined further for evidence of other infection. I'm not sure why that's useful. Why not investigate all systems for all infections? Why continue to run an infected system at all?
it is programmed to leave behind a stronger scent. Stronger scent trails attract more ants, producing the swarm that marks a potential computer infection.
That sounds actually like it might itself result in a denial of service attack of the system.
Surface is definitely neat
But not new.
the Office ribbon bar is
It's new alright, but so is H1N1.
They've been advancing the state of tablets and hand-writing recognition continually over the years.
Really? As evidenced by what?
I could go on, but they've made a huge number of fairly innovative developments, both large and small, over the years.
You haven't named a single innovation yet, not even a small one.
How do I tell my customers which wifi card is safe? Will that new laptop they are looking at continue to work reliably when the next updates are released? Which printers that are on sale currently at Walmart will work in PCLOS? The answer to all those questions is you don't have a clue. You don't know, I don't know, the kid behind the counter sure as hell don't know, and that is the problem.
None of those things are even remotely guaranteed for Windows either. In fact, old hardware support is much better in Linux than in Windows. And a lot of nominally Windows-compatible hardware doesn't work correctly on actual Windows machines in practice.
Any lawyer with half a brain would advise AGAINST sharing source code, as the risk of patent trolls is high compared to the gains of a 2% user base.
Well, your estimate is completely off-base. Maybe manufacturers don't care about a gain in desktop users, but Linux is so widespread in high performance computing, embedded systems, mobile computing, and other industrial and business applications that most major chip manufacturers don't have a choice but to release source code.
But most hardware manufacturers simply don't want to play the GPL game
Most hardware conforms to open standards these days anyway. And for the hardware that doesn't most manufacturers that actually matter seem to supply enough information to build Linux drivers.
and with Windows and OSX they don't have to.
Actually, a lot of driver support for OS X is share with Linux.
Webcam drivers and the like DO NOT BELONG IN THE KERNEL.
They perform high performance I/O, hence they belong in the kernel.
Specific device drivers have no business being in kernel space.
Everybody else puts them there; why shouldn't Linux?
Most attempts to move them out of kernel space have failed miserably. The latest big failure was when Apple turned Mach into a monolithic kernel.
FWIW, Linux probably has some of the best support these days for user mode drivers, but few people bother.
I mean, they did that for printers, why not every other piece of hardware?
You're confusing two different meanings of "driver". The actual printer driver (the thing that ferries bits to the hardware) is in the kernel on Linux; it's usually a generic USB driver for printer class devices. There is another "driver" there--the renderer--but that is irrelevant to this discussion because it's a completely different kind of software that just happens to be called a "driver" as well.
Apple has done a fine job of building a decent platform around Mach and BSD,
Actually, Apple didn't really. The platform (GUI etc.) came from NeXT, which, in turn had taken most of the ideas and technologies from Stepstone, GNU, and Xerox.
Until you want to implement something like a privacy button. It needs to clear the disk cache. It needs to clear the cookies. It needs to clear the autocomplete for the navigation bar.
Well, and in good UNIX fashion, all of those go under ~/.uzbl, and once you recognize the need for privacy, you separate that into ~/.uzbl/private and ~/.uzbl/config subdirectories. Then you can implement the privacy button completely without knowledge about what the private data actually is, and the button can work with both existing and future private data and arbitrary other plugins.
What's one thing for the user isn't one thing for the developer, which is why you end up building monolithical applications.
You have "monolithical" applications because most developers don't know any better.
This is a uniquely American problem. In Europe, this is just a smart phone among many--with a nicer operating system--a smart phone you can use with any carrier.
Language like "malicious", "illegal", and "abusers" is ridiculous; these are photos taken in public places. If people can see inside your house from the street or you do anything embarrassing, be more careful next time, don't sue other people for your stupidity.
The Japanese should be particularly sensitive to the rights of photographers, given both their photo industry and how insanely much Japanese tourists snap pictures when they travel around the world.
This is a good sign. The fact that Microsoft feels it necessary to attack Linux at the retail level shows that Linux is becoming more and more of a factor in the computing mainstream as well. Thanks, Microsoft, for supporting Linux.
The computing industry has received massive government subsidies. The Internet, high performance computing, CPU architectures, compiler construction, and plenty more was financed by DARPA and other US government agencies, as well as European and Japanese government function. The subsidies were in the form of research grants, technology transfer from government research labs, among others. Knowledge and technologies were also massively transferred in the form of graduate students, academics, and government researchers coming into the private computing sector.
There's nothing wrong with--it's government doing what it should be doing. But if Andy Grove thinks computing did it all by itself, he's kidding himself.
If other sectors (automotive, energy, transportation, environment, etc.) are supposed to catch up, the government needs to invest massively in basic and applied research, fellowships, and government research labs in those areas.
I don't get why people keep come up with all these bizarre alternatives. If you want basic city transportation, get a bicycle or a folding bike (if you need to take it on public transit). If you can't pedal or don't want to sweat, get an electric bike or electric assist. If you have balance problems, get an adult tricycle (they also come in folding and electric varieties). Those are cheap, proven transportation solution that will also keep you fit.
The fundamental problem of using something smaller and more efficient than a car is that you're at risk in a collision. But none of these "alternatives" solves that problem any better than a bicycle.
The Science article is just as bad. The editors should have insisted that this article be entitled something like:
"Solid-State Analogs of Dirac Strings and Magnetic Monopoles in Spin Ice Dy2Ti2O7"
A monopole is supposed to be an elementary particle with a magnetic charge. This is--as the abstract itself says--a "tractable analog" of a magnetic monopole.
There are a lot of things in solid state physics that "behave like" some kind of elementary particle but aren't: phonons, holes, etc. This is just another instance.
and the European Commission, which seems to get off on abusing American firms
In what way is the European Commission "abusing American firms"? Seems to me they are doing exactly what a regulatory authority for a big market like the EU should do, and they are regulating European firms just as much as American firms.
"Hate speech" is typically threatening. If you call someone a nigger, that's one thing. And at least in the US, it's no crime. But if you put up a noose, you're threatening to lynch someone.
If you're doing it symbolically (i.e., not with a clear intent of putting a person in that noose), it's protected speech in the US.
And that's a good thing: it might just as well be done by someone with an actual hatred of African Americans as by someone who wants to make a point about the dangers that African Americans face.
Moreover, it is obviously racially motivated.
Yes.
That behavior cannot be tolerated,
Well, and you can "not tolerate" it by speaking out against it. You cannot put someone in jail over it.
and laws were put into place
Really? Which specific laws are you referring to?
specifically BECAUSE IT WAS HAPPENING UNTIL THE LAWS WERE PUT INTO PLACE AND ENFORCED. People still get lynched, though it is becoming rarer.
It's a wild guess on your part that making hate speech illegal reduces hate crimes.
I think suppressing hate speech makes hate crimes more likely, not less likely.
A "design patent" is something very different from a "patent". A design patent protects the look of something. So, you can't have a big white page with the Google logo and the same arrangement of buttons on it. Big deal.
The receiving areas on Earth that they typically talk about
And what if the Japanese decide to deliberately point the beam outside the "receiving area"? Say, at Seoul or Pyongyang or Beijing or LA?
Although putting a single LED into a contact lens is already an achievement, it's not the hard part. As the article points out: power and focusing are major problems, with no plausible solution in sight.
The people to whom the accolades should go are those who finally manage to put it all together, not the people who put together a tiny bit of the technology.
The idea itself, of course, is nearly as old as contact lenses and has appeared in many science fiction stories.
So, this means that we let Japan put a 300 MW microwave transmitter in orbit, a transmitter that can be aimed anywhere the Japanese choose. I don't think that's wise.
It's particularly worrisome because, from the point of energy generation, space based power is extremely expensive--meaning that any country that moves to space based power generation may have hidden motives.
That's completely, utterly false.
Well, no, it's not. The term wasn't in common use, although some groups used it to describe themselves. "Open standards" only became a big marketing tool after "open source" had caught on and customers actually cared about "open anything". And at that point, organizations like MPEG-LA started widely abusing the term to make their costly and proprietary standards more appealing.
'The Open Group' standards for DCE, UNIX and X dates back to the 1980's.
And, lo and behold, they were producing "open standards" in the EU sense, not the MPEG-LA sense.
Open source reference implementations are useful to supplement standards, but they're two different things
Quite right: open source implementations are neither necessary nor sufficient for guaranteeing that a standard is open.
Sun has been trying to take advantage of that confusion by producing an open source implementation of a patent encumbered "standard".
Yours is a ridiculous and arrogant rebuttal. Equating changes in the definition of "open" to human rights? Were you hit in the head as a child or what? Raven's history of the definition is accurate.
You really have no clue about human history, do you. The ability to speak publicly, the ability to print, and to disseminate information has been at the heart of the development of human rights throughout history; you cannot separate one from the other.
I'm old enough to have lived though it as an IT professional.
So am I, which is why I can tell you that you're full of it. Go search the USENET archives, for example: you won't even find any significant mention of the term "open standard" prior to the introduction of "open source" in 1998. The term simply wasn't in common use. After that, many companies have been trying to misrepresent both their software and their standards as "open" in order to mislead customers into thinking that their products are something that they are not.
What finally gets me is your last paragraph. What an arrogant bastard! Who are you to tell the world what is or is not acceptable?
Let me translate this for you, since you're obviously too dense to understand simple English: "It is not acceptable" means "People like me will not shut up because of your bogus arguments or bogus claims of authority". Clear enough?
And what ultimately matters is the legal definitions; the EU has made a good first step towards that. You now go and try specifying MPEG as an "open standard" on an EU contract and see where it gets you.
This is a very new definition.
Even if that were true (it is not), so what? It is the current definition, and it's the only meaningful and useful definition.
Just because we accepted slavery, lack of voting rights for women, throwing people in jail for their sexual orientation, or mixing church and state in the past doesn't mean we have to continue to do so. And it's the same with the misuse of the term "open".
The ITU-T and IETF explicitly refer to such standards as open.
Yes: old bodies dominated by big corporate interests. In the past, they have been able to get away with it. Today, we don't let them anymore.
You can try to redefine the term according to the new EU definition, but you shouldn't be surprised if you get confusion
Nothing surprises me. I'm just saying that enough is enough. Don't use the term "open" to describe standards that are clearly proprietary. That kind of misuse and deliberate confusion may have been fine in the 1970's, but it is unacceptable today, period.
Am I alone in thinking that this seems rather ironic? The countries that traditionally valued freedom disallowing the very same freedom in a conquered country?
Not really. Germany was still full of the same people who had supported the Nazis just a few years earlier; some restrictions were bound to be necessary. It's actually quite amazing, and a testament to US political skill, that Germany managed to do so well with so few restrictions.
The US might have chosen 50 years of draconian military rule and reeducation in Germany, and neither the American voter nor Germany's European neighbors would have shed a tear over it. That wouldn't have been inconsistent with US principles: the primary objective of US foreign policy is to keep America safe and democratic, not to democratize the rest of the world. But it would likely have worked much worse than the actual strategy: a wealthy, happy, democratic Germany was the best defense against the USSR. Germans should just remember that this kind of post-war treatment by the West wasn't a right, it was a side-effect of other political objectives of the victors of WWII.
In that case, you seem to be using a different definition of 'open standard' to the rest of the world.
I'm using the definition of the EU, half a dozen EU member states, by Bruce Perens, and even Vijay Kapoor of Microsoft:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard
You can redefine terms to mean something different from how they have been used for decades and complain that everyone else is using the wrong definition, but you are unlikely to get much sympathy.
Yes, *you* can, *you* are obviously trying to, but *you* shouldn't.
Of the million or so search results for 'MPEG open standard' you will find very few claiming that MPEG is not an open standard
The MPEG consortium has a vested interest in changing the definition of the term "open", and they have the might and force of some of the biggest entertainment, marketing, and consumer electronics companies behind them. We should not let them.
If MPEG is "open", then the term "open" has lost any useful meaning.