What makes this story newsworthy? There aren't any interesting technical details, it's just the account of one guy who bumbled through putting his Mac on the company network. Good for him.
I'm also not impressed by the knee-jerk bashing of the IT department that doesn't know Macs. The IT department's job is supporting hardware/software the company owns, not whatever the employees could ever want to have. Neither the author nor Apple could say why his Powerbook wasn't getting an IP, but for some reason only the IT department gets branded as ignorant.
I know it sounds wierd... but people need to realize that watching TV is not a right. And the producers of programs need to be compensated for their production.
You might have a point when it comes to cable and satalite TV but we do have a right to dictate how the public airwaves are used. We the public grant TV stations the right to use the airwaves for their broadcast in return for their promise to adhere to a standard of quality that we set. The TV companies are then free to do anything that will make them a profit but only as long as they play by the rules we set.
That means that if enough people want to regulate product placement, then product placement will be regulated. Our airwaves, our rules.
This is like an early Christmas present for RIAA detractors. Their lawsuit-by-scattergun approach has caught the worst target possible: A 12-year-old honor student who had no idea she was doing anything wrong ("But we were paying for it!"). What a PR nightmare.
Too bad it won't last. This particular case will get resolved as quickly and quietly as possible. You'll be able to feel the breeze from the RIAA quickly brushing it under the rug. Or, worse, if they're smart they will dismiss all charges (and give little Brianna lots of free music) in exchange for her too-cute 200-word essay on "Why Filesharing Is Wrong".
The EFF and other RIAA opponents could get heavy mileage out of this case if they tried, but I fear they just aren't coordinated enough to counter the RIAA's spin.
I've had one of these boxes for two or three months in Indianapolis, IN. It's a piece of shit.
It does the very basics of what it claims with mixed results. If you tell it to record every episode of a show, be prepared to get every episode. In theory it should be able to detect a repeat of an already recorded show but in practice mine records lots and lots of repeats, quickly filling the drive. If the drive does fill up your shows scheduled to record will be ignored without warning. And sometimes your shows will be de-scheduled for no apparent reason at all.
To make things worse, the hardware quality is absolutely wretched. The first hard drive in mine died after three weeks. The replacement must have a bearing problem because it makes a very audible whirring noise. It's annoying, but not as annoying as blocking out four hours to wait for a cable guy to come fix it. The last guy who came out told me that about half of the units they get are DOA, usually with bad drives. Oh, and the picture quality on analog channels is worse than my previous non-DVR cable box. Artifacts and color banding galore.
So basically this thing sucks dead maggots through a straw but it's still slightly better than no DVR at all. The dual tuners, low price, and easy setup (all in one box, no phoneline, no IR blaster) are what keep me from buying a real DVR like Replay or Tivo. Still, I wish I had the option of paying 3x as much for a better piece of equipment. Cheap-ass Time Warner (oops, I mean Brighthouse!).
From Fiscal Year 1981 through Fiscal Year 1981, only once did the Reagan administration propose more spending than Congress approved; for the other eight years, Congress spent more money than Reagan proposed. Here are the actual figures Reagan proposed, and the actual amount Congress authorized (in billions of dollars):
But just look at your own year-to-year figures. From 1981 to 1989, only once (in 1986) did Reagan propose spending less than Congress had authorized the year before. In all the rest of those years he was asking for a spending increase compared to the previous year. It's pretty safe to say Reagan's fiscal policy was all about increased government spending.
Or you could simply go to eBay and type IBM Model M. Old authentic Model Ms can easily be had for $15 plus shipping. That's a damn sight better than the $49 "sale price" PCKeyboard wants to charge you.
Experience has its place
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
I would rather employ a keen teenager who code programs computers quickly than an older person.
I wrote code really fast when I was younger, that doesn't mean it was any good. The code I write today takes longer but that's because I take more time to ensure my code is solid, readable, and maintainable.
How great is your IT department if it's full of teenagers who slap their code together quickly without knowing how to do it right?
The current FCC Chairman was appointed by Bill Clinton.
That means nothing. No FCC commission may have more than three members from any one party. On top of that, Powell was appointed in 1997 when the Senate (which must approve appointees) was controlled by Republicans. So not only was Clinton required to appoint a Republican, but any choice not approved by the rest of the Republican party would have been shot down.
You and all the people who modded you up Insightful are just repeating the same tired, meaningless defense of Powell's ultra-conservative deregulation binge.
It's all well and good to adopt 28-year copyrights when your books have a shelf life of five years, tops. I like that they're doing this, but it strikes me as mostly PR.
Hey, what do you know. The same guy who piloted 3dfx down the toilet was at the helm when SonicBlue went tits up.
Look, I understand that CEO is not an easy job, but how much accountability is this guy held to when investors are left holding the bag of his failures?
800 theaters is a joke. They spend insane millions making and marketing the craptastic Treasure Planet, they release it in 4x as many theaters, and it tanks. And now Spirited Away earns the highest American movie award, in addition to mountains of international acclaim, and their answer is 800 theaters?
What the fuck, Eisner? Do you need me to draw you a diagram?
* Cost: 500 * Prerequisite: Super tensile solids * Benefits: Doubles energy reserves production at this base and doubles mineral production rate at all your bases when producing orbital improvements; your units equipped with drop pods may now make orbital insertions anywhere on Planet; this project also waives any aerospace complex restrictions on orbital improvements.
We estimate that during the next mission century most of Planet's industries will be moved off-planet to Nessus Prime and other orbital facilities. Many of our industries will benefit greatly from the low gravity environments available in space, particularly those involving genetically engineered microbes.
According to Reuters, the FCC today decided to greatly curtail the laws that force incumbent phone companies to share their lines with their competition at cost.
ILECs have not been forced to share their lines at cost. That is a myth invented by the baby Bells to convince lawmakers that linesharing makes them lose money. Actually what the 1996 Telecom Act says is that they have to rent their lines to outside customers and they must charge everybody the same rate, including internal customers.
A popular stunt among the ILECs is to rent lines to their own internet divisions at way below cost, thus making their internet business seem more profitable than it is. The 1996 Telecom Act just evens the playing field in that respect and prevents the Bells from using their local loop monopoly to prop up other corporate divisions.
The new rules do force line sharing as long as companies are willing to offer voice service, but this essentially states that if you are not already a phone company, you cannot offer DSL.
This is actually not as bad as it sounds when you consider that FCC Chairman Michael Powell *spit* wanted to completely sweep away ALL the regulations that require the ILECs to share lines. His proposal was defeated with respect to local phone service because Republican commissioner Kevin J. Martin jumped the fence and sided with the Democrats. So while this may suck for Covad, Speakeasy, etc., at least it won't totally eliminate DSL competition for now.
Probably both sides are going to be unhappy about this. Expect this battle to go to the courts next.
So in a nutshell, if the USPTO has already issued a patent, it's really damn hard to get it reversed. It takes lots of time, money, and a HELL of a lot of evidence and valid argumentation.
I'm not saying the patent process doesn't have real problems, I'm saying this story is needlessly alarmist without really adding anything new to the discussion.
I'm guessing this NCR situation is actually one of two things. Either:
1. The patents listed aren't nearly as broad as they sound. Remember, you can't patent ideas, just implementations of ideas. It's very possible that the details of these patents are such that they only cover certain specific implementations of the concepts, thus putting not very many net businesses in violation.
2. These patents are every bit as ridiculous as they sound and the weasels that own them are just shaking down as many businesses as they can. If eBay, Amazon, and MS really are licensing from these guys then the patents probably do have some shred of merit. But it may be that the license fees are carefully designed to be just barely cheaper than the cost of litigation. If so, then the weasels will keep making money until they screw with the wrong person. This is no different from any of the other hucksters, frauds, and con artists that have flourished on the net.
Either way, I seriously doubt NCR is in any position to extract the "billions" that this story claims will be lost. Nothing to see here, move along.
How is this not the lead story on every site? every day? Maybe because no one wants to get sued for having an online business.
Or maybe, just maybe now, because it's a complete non-story. If these patent claims are so ludicrous then they will never stand up to a serious challange. You say the USPTO grants some silly patents? So what else is new? Call me back when any of these manages to survive a day in court.
Isn't this story early? I thought we did patent hysteria on Thursdays.
Counting boxes is done using the "id" field in the IP header. The id field is relatively unique to each datagram sent between two hosts and is used to reassemble datagram fragments. This scheme depends on the observation that most IP stacks keep this field unique by just incrementing a counter for each datagram. By examining the id field of each packet coming from a NAT box and finding trends in the values you can tell how many boxes are behind the NAT. Each trend you can identify is another box hiding behind the NAT.
But as the article states:
We do not currently attempt to deal with the randomized IPid generator used by OpenBSD and FreeBSD. Cryptanalyzing the generator may be infeasible in any event.
So there you go. Write a patch for your IP stack to randomize the id field instead of incrementing it. I couldn't do it, but I imagine someone else can (and will).
I dunno, the USB key/pen/stick/whatever drives aren't anywhere near as convenient as floppies yet. There are still lots of old PCs out there that don't have USB. Lots more do have it, but the ports are in back and a pain to get to.
CDRs on the other hand have been around a lot longer and work on more platforms. Now that new CD burners don't make coasters nearly as often, just give us small cheap 80mm CDRs with thin jewelboxes to carry them in and you have a great floppy replacement.
It might just mean that Mitnick is tired of the entire legal process, and just wants to get on with his life.
Did you ever consider that?
Sure I did. I also considered that maybe Mitnick is trying to crucify Markoff in the court of public opinion without producing any actual proof, the same thing he accuses Markoff of doing, thus making him a hypocrite as well as a criminal.
One of these possibilites paints Mitnick in the best possible light, the other in the worst possible light. I imagine the truth lies somewhere in between.
Why should Kevin prove it? The writings were about Kevin's life. If anything Markoff needs to prove what he writes about someone is true.
*BUZZZZ* Wrong. Mitnick is making the accusation that Markoff comitted libel against him. To prove that he has to not only show that Markoff's statements about him were false, but that they were made with actual malice.
Mitnick's answer about Markoff was basically cut-and-paste from the unpublished chapter of his book that was up on the Register. He uses the word libel several times, but apparently he's not willing to put his court filings where his mouth is. Everyone who reads this interview has to decide for himself what that means.
high end isn't where the money is at.. its the mid to low end that generates most of the revenue.
True, but you don't have the same price premium that you can charge for the high end. Margins are lower, thus the cost of all that low-end revenue is higher. High end products carry higher margins and generate more profit, which is good because you need some way to pay for the R&D cost of designing them.
While we're talking about mid-to-low-end graphics, don't forget that ATI has a huge share of that market too. That's the foundation of their business. Years back Intel started eating into ATI's low-end sales with low cost video integrated into the motherboard chipset. NVIDIA looks like they're testing out that path with the nForce2 chipsets, but keep in mind that: 1. NVIDIA still doesn't have anything as cheap as Intel's i815E was, and 2. NVIDIA is starting at the bottom of the mobo heap and working their way up, compared to Intel who started as the dominant chipset supplier.
So while I applaud NVIDIA's efforts to branch out and I hope they make more fine new products, I worry that a big hit to their high-end business will cause them to lose serious momentum.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes this story newsworthy? There aren't any interesting technical details, it's just the account of one guy who bumbled through putting his Mac on the company network. Good for him.
I'm also not impressed by the knee-jerk bashing of the IT department that doesn't know Macs. The IT department's job is supporting hardware/software the company owns, not whatever the employees could ever want to have. Neither the author nor Apple could say why his Powerbook wasn't getting an IP, but for some reason only the IT department gets branded as ignorant.
I know it sounds wierd... but people need to realize that watching TV is not a right. And the producers of programs need to be compensated for their production.
You might have a point when it comes to cable and satalite TV but we do have a right to dictate how the public airwaves are used. We the public grant TV stations the right to use the airwaves for their broadcast in return for their promise to adhere to a standard of quality that we set. The TV companies are then free to do anything that will make them a profit but only as long as they play by the rules we set.
That means that if enough people want to regulate product placement, then product placement will be regulated. Our airwaves, our rules.
This is like an early Christmas present for RIAA detractors. Their lawsuit-by-scattergun approach has caught the worst target possible: A 12-year-old honor student who had no idea she was doing anything wrong ("But we were paying for it!"). What a PR nightmare.
Too bad it won't last. This particular case will get resolved as quickly and quietly as possible. You'll be able to feel the breeze from the RIAA quickly brushing it under the rug. Or, worse, if they're smart they will dismiss all charges (and give little Brianna lots of free music) in exchange for her too-cute 200-word essay on "Why Filesharing Is Wrong".
The EFF and other RIAA opponents could get heavy mileage out of this case if they tried, but I fear they just aren't coordinated enough to counter the RIAA's spin.
I've had one of these boxes for two or three months in Indianapolis, IN. It's a piece of shit.
It does the very basics of what it claims with mixed results. If you tell it to record every episode of a show, be prepared to get every episode. In theory it should be able to detect a repeat of an already recorded show but in practice mine records lots and lots of repeats, quickly filling the drive. If the drive does fill up your shows scheduled to record will be ignored without warning. And sometimes your shows will be de-scheduled for no apparent reason at all.
To make things worse, the hardware quality is absolutely wretched. The first hard drive in mine died after three weeks. The replacement must have a bearing problem because it makes a very audible whirring noise. It's annoying, but not as annoying as blocking out four hours to wait for a cable guy to come fix it. The last guy who came out told me that about half of the units they get are DOA, usually with bad drives. Oh, and the picture quality on analog channels is worse than my previous non-DVR cable box. Artifacts and color banding galore.
So basically this thing sucks dead maggots through a straw but it's still slightly better than no DVR at all. The dual tuners, low price, and easy setup (all in one box, no phoneline, no IR blaster) are what keep me from buying a real DVR like Replay or Tivo. Still, I wish I had the option of paying 3x as much for a better piece of equipment. Cheap-ass Time Warner (oops, I mean Brighthouse!).
From Fiscal Year 1981 through Fiscal Year 1981, only once did the Reagan administration propose more spending than Congress approved; for the other eight years, Congress spent more money than Reagan proposed. Here are the actual figures Reagan proposed, and the actual amount Congress authorized (in billions of dollars):
But just look at your own year-to-year figures. From 1981 to 1989, only once (in 1986) did Reagan propose spending less than Congress had authorized the year before. In all the rest of those years he was asking for a spending increase compared to the previous year. It's pretty safe to say Reagan's fiscal policy was all about increased government spending.
Or you could simply go to eBay and type IBM Model M. Old authentic Model Ms can easily be had for $15 plus shipping. That's a damn sight better than the $49 "sale price" PCKeyboard wants to charge you.
I would rather employ a keen teenager who code programs computers quickly than an older person.
I wrote code really fast when I was younger, that doesn't mean it was any good. The code I write today takes longer but that's because I take more time to ensure my code is solid, readable, and maintainable.
How great is your IT department if it's full of teenagers who slap their code together quickly without knowing how to do it right?
The current FCC Chairman was appointed by Bill Clinton.
That means nothing. No FCC commission may have more than three members from any one party. On top of that, Powell was appointed in 1997 when the Senate (which must approve appointees) was controlled by Republicans. So not only was Clinton required to appoint a Republican, but any choice not approved by the rest of the Republican party would have been shot down.
You and all the people who modded you up Insightful are just repeating the same tired, meaningless defense of Powell's ultra-conservative deregulation binge.
If you examine the image very closely, you can see their server. The explosion is visible from space.
It's all well and good to adopt 28-year copyrights when your books have a shelf life of five years, tops. I like that they're doing this, but it strikes me as mostly PR.
Google cache here.
Hey, what do you know. The same guy who piloted 3dfx down the toilet was at the helm when SonicBlue went tits up.
Look, I understand that CEO is not an easy job, but how much accountability is this guy held to when investors are left holding the bag of his failures?
800 theaters is a joke. They spend insane millions making and marketing the craptastic Treasure Planet, they release it in 4x as many theaters, and it tanks. And now Spirited Away earns the highest American movie award, in addition to mountains of international acclaim, and their answer is 800 theaters?
What the fuck, Eisner? Do you need me to draw you a diagram?
The Space Elevator
* Cost: 500
* Prerequisite: Super tensile solids
* Benefits: Doubles energy reserves production at this base and doubles mineral production rate at all your bases when producing orbital improvements; your units equipped with drop pods may now make orbital insertions anywhere on Planet; this project also waives any aerospace complex restrictions on orbital improvements.
We estimate that during the next mission century most of Planet's industries will be moved off-planet to Nessus Prime and other orbital facilities. Many of our industries will benefit greatly from the low gravity environments available in space, particularly those involving genetically engineered microbes.
CEO Nwabudike Morgan
"The Centauri Monopoly"
According to Reuters, the FCC today decided to greatly curtail the laws that force incumbent phone companies to share their lines with their competition at cost.
ILECs have not been forced to share their lines at cost. That is a myth invented by the baby Bells to convince lawmakers that linesharing makes them lose money. Actually what the 1996 Telecom Act says is that they have to rent their lines to outside customers and they must charge everybody the same rate, including internal customers.
A popular stunt among the ILECs is to rent lines to their own internet divisions at way below cost, thus making their internet business seem more profitable than it is. The 1996 Telecom Act just evens the playing field in that respect and prevents the Bells from using their local loop monopoly to prop up other corporate divisions.
The new rules do force line sharing as long as companies are willing to offer voice service, but this essentially states that if you are not already a phone company, you cannot offer DSL.
This is actually not as bad as it sounds when you consider that FCC Chairman Michael Powell *spit* wanted to completely sweep away ALL the regulations that require the ILECs to share lines. His proposal was defeated with respect to local phone service because Republican commissioner Kevin J. Martin jumped the fence and sided with the Democrats. So while this may suck for Covad, Speakeasy, etc., at least it won't totally eliminate DSL competition for now.
Probably both sides are going to be unhappy about this. Expect this battle to go to the courts next.
This article has more good info.
So in a nutshell, if the USPTO has already issued a patent, it's really damn hard to get it reversed. It takes lots of time, money, and a HELL of a lot of evidence and valid argumentation.
I'm not saying the patent process doesn't have real problems, I'm saying this story is needlessly alarmist without really adding anything new to the discussion.
I'm guessing this NCR situation is actually one of two things. Either:
1. The patents listed aren't nearly as broad as they sound. Remember, you can't patent ideas, just implementations of ideas. It's very possible that the details of these patents are such that they only cover certain specific implementations of the concepts, thus putting not very many net businesses in violation.
2. These patents are every bit as ridiculous as they sound and the weasels that own them are just shaking down as many businesses as they can. If eBay, Amazon, and MS really are licensing from these guys then the patents probably do have some shred of merit. But it may be that the license fees are carefully designed to be just barely cheaper than the cost of litigation. If so, then the weasels will keep making money until they screw with the wrong person. This is no different from any of the other hucksters, frauds, and con artists that have flourished on the net.
Either way, I seriously doubt NCR is in any position to extract the "billions" that this story claims will be lost. Nothing to see here, move along.
How is this not the lead story on every site? every day? Maybe because no one wants to get sued for having an online business.
Or maybe, just maybe now, because it's a complete non-story. If these patent claims are so ludicrous then they will never stand up to a serious challange. You say the USPTO grants some silly patents? So what else is new? Call me back when any of these manages to survive a day in court.
Isn't this story early? I thought we did patent hysteria on Thursdays.
Note to self: Just because you CAN run a webserver on an NES doesn't mean you should.
Counting boxes is done using the "id" field in the IP header. The id field is relatively unique to each datagram sent between two hosts and is used to reassemble datagram fragments. This scheme depends on the observation that most IP stacks keep this field unique by just incrementing a counter for each datagram. By examining the id field of each packet coming from a NAT box and finding trends in the values you can tell how many boxes are behind the NAT. Each trend you can identify is another box hiding behind the NAT.
But as the article states:
We do not currently attempt to deal with the randomized IPid generator used by OpenBSD and FreeBSD. Cryptanalyzing the generator may be infeasible in any event.
So there you go. Write a patch for your IP stack to randomize the id field instead of incrementing it. I couldn't do it, but I imagine someone else can (and will).
I dunno, the USB key/pen/stick/whatever drives aren't anywhere near as convenient as floppies yet. There are still lots of old PCs out there that don't have USB. Lots more do have it, but the ports are in back and a pain to get to.
CDRs on the other hand have been around a lot longer and work on more platforms. Now that new CD burners don't make coasters nearly as often, just give us small cheap 80mm CDRs with thin jewelboxes to carry them in and you have a great floppy replacement.
It might just mean that Mitnick is tired of
the entire legal process, and just wants to
get on with his life.
Did you ever consider that?
Sure I did. I also considered that maybe Mitnick is trying to crucify Markoff in the court of public opinion without producing any actual proof, the same thing he accuses Markoff of doing, thus making him a hypocrite as well as a criminal.
One of these possibilites paints Mitnick in the best possible light, the other in the worst possible light. I imagine the truth lies somewhere in between.
Why should Kevin prove it? The writings were about Kevin's life. If anything Markoff needs to prove what he writes about someone is true.
*BUZZZZ* Wrong. Mitnick is making the accusation that Markoff comitted libel against him. To prove that he has to not only show that Markoff's statements about him were false, but that they were made with actual malice.
Mitnick's answer about Markoff was basically cut-and-paste from the unpublished chapter of his book that was up on the Register. He uses the word libel several times, but apparently he's not willing to put his court filings where his mouth is. Everyone who reads this interview has to decide for himself what that means.
defenestrate
high end isn't where the money is at.. its the mid to low end that generates most of the revenue.
True, but you don't have the same price premium that you can charge for the high end. Margins are lower, thus the cost of all that low-end revenue is higher. High end products carry higher margins and generate more profit, which is good because you need some way to pay for the R&D cost of designing them.
While we're talking about mid-to-low-end graphics, don't forget that ATI has a huge share of that market too. That's the foundation of their business. Years back Intel started eating into ATI's low-end sales with low cost video integrated into the motherboard chipset. NVIDIA looks like they're testing out that path with the nForce2 chipsets, but keep in mind that: 1. NVIDIA still doesn't have anything as cheap as Intel's i815E was, and 2. NVIDIA is starting at the bottom of the mobo heap and working their way up, compared to Intel who started as the dominant chipset supplier.
So while I applaud NVIDIA's efforts to branch out and I hope they make more fine new products, I worry that a big hit to their high-end business will cause them to lose serious momentum.