That's nothing. I actually came to a mutual agreement with someone while discussing creationism on Slashdot a couple weeks ago. Link to me and Zerby chatting. I'm pretty sure thats one of the signs of impending apocolypse or something. People coming to agreement on the Internet, never mind Slashdot. Oh well.
I disagree with him about the "running as root" issue. I understand his logic, but a "root only" Linux box is a Linux box that might very well come to need its virus scanner! Non-priv'd users are a big part of why Linux viruses are NOT a big issue.
Um, actually I don't think this is true at all. The biggest "virus" problem in Windows land is the various email "virus". Technically worms, but the point is the same. And these abuse the easy code-execution abilities for Microsoft mail clients. If Ximian Evolution automatically executed any.pl or.sh attachement you'd have the same problem on Linux.
With respect to true viruses, which infect files, privledges help in theory, but aren't going to help much in practice. Why? The system is spending all of it's time running as one user, and that user is quite capable of infecting their own execution environment. A virus could simply drop a copy of itself onto the system and tweek the users LD_LIBRARY_PATH in order to get itself executed at will. Sure, the user isn't technically changing the system binaries but the effect is the same. Well, you say, other users are safe from the infection right? That would be true if the system had any other users. But on a single user system, "infecting" the single user means that 100% of the users on the system are infected.
Sure, not running as root keeps the virus from actually formatting the disk. But since a virus is quite capable of trashing the users settings, environment and documents it's kind of a moot point. On a single user system "rm -rf ~" is just as effective as "rm -rf/". The problem is really that standard Unix privledges are far too coarse to be of any real use on a single user system. They are incapable of protecting the user from themselves (or more accurately, their processes.) Hopefully the work the NSA is doing on Linux will lead to a system where fine-grained privledges can actually be used to protect the user from themselves. But until that gets developed, I think Lindows is taking a perfectly reasonable approach.
That's funny. Back when I started college to get my CS degree, family and such used to ask me what I wanted to do with my degree. I always told them "I'm not sure, I just know I don't want to be the guy who programs microwave ovens". No offense if you're that guy:-)
What we need is a lightweight video codec which has just enough compression to get TV quality video down below 100Mbps. Then you could just decompress the video on a server in the back room and stream it over the LAN to a lightweight client which would actually display it. No need to muck around with undocumented MPEG2 decoders.
Hmm. Maybe a nice idea, but it also sounds like if I don't put a fence around my yard, anyone can come in and have a picnic!
Actually, they can. If you don't take affirmative action to indicate that you don't want people trespassing across your land, then you cannot prosecute them. You don't have to do much, put up a sign or a fence. And of course if you tell them in person to leave, they have to. But if you do nothing to indicate that you don't want people to tresspass then you can't prosecute them.
keep someone who gets a WiFi connection but not VPN credentials from simply 0wning other bokes connected to the APs. At lease when each AP is on its own interface, it severely limits the number of boxen that are exposed at any time.
That's true. A lot of VPN software can be set up to disable non-VPN access to the client when connected to the VPN server, but there is still that window of time when the laptop is on the network but the VPN software hasn't started up yet.
The problem is that we would have to to implement more firewalls not only at each and every access point, but also at each of the computers that would access them.
You do realize that this is not the case, correct? I mean, if you want to try to snow your users to avoid deploying wireless that's one thing. But I've got a wireless network with dozens of AP's spanning several buildings, and it does not require dozens of firewalls. It requires a small filter on the single router interface for the wireless network which limits traffic to only our VPN server. No need for a firewall at each access point. Just install a VPN client on each wireless users laptop. And if you have users who travel with laptops, you should be providing them with VPN clients or something equivalent anyway. So really, the incremental security impact of wireless can be made very low very easily.
As items are sold the RFID is struck from the list and the RFID destroyed.
Except this part isn't going to happen. Theft is in large part due to employees. If you give your employees an easy way to destroy the RFID, you aren't adressing employee theft. And if you aren't bothering to address employee theft, you may as well stick with existing theft deterrents (which are easily bypassed by employees)
Cause and Effect
on
BSA IDC FUD
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Once again somebody has decided to confuse cause and effect. Here's what the article says:
in general, nations with the lowest piracy rates had the largest IT sectors, as measured as a share of the countries' gross domestic product(GDP)
My take:
in general, nations with higher rates of piracy spend less of their GDP on software.
Gosh, what a suprise. I never would have guessed. I wonder what they'll think of next. I supose they'll tell us that people who buy cars instead of stealing them have larger "automotive spending sectors". Which isn't to say that copyright violations are OK. But to tell a country that sending more of their GDP overseas to the US will help their local IT economy is just a bunch of crap IMHO.
As I replied to another poster, your belief it's that simple isn't shared by much of the world. Where are our allies from last time around? They don't seem to think it's the same war. The Security Council doesn't seem to think it's the same war either.
It seems to me that we aren't starting a war, we're finishing the last one because Iraq refused to comply with the terms of surrender
That might be your belief, but it's not shared by most of the rest of the world. If that was the case, other countries would be supporting us as they did during the first gulf war. But they aren't. That should be telling you something.
And regarding NK, check out this [rushlimbaugh.com].
Whatever. Rush Limbaugh is a troll who talks out of his ass. Most of what he says doesn't rise above the level of name calling. He obviously belongs to the "might is right" crowd I was talking about, but our might didn't stop Al Queda and I don't know if I would be willing to be my life that it'll stop North Korea. I'm not talking out of my ass when I say that North Korea is running with the pre-emptive strike idea. I'm quoting North Korea. From the BBC
In being asked what that means, Mr Kim replied: "A pre-emptive attack is not only something the US can do. We can do it too. It's a matter of life or death."
My guess would be because in Kosovo, we were taking sides in a war already in progress. In Iraq, we are starting a war. There is a world of difference. The Bush administration's policy of "pre-emptive" war against a country which may (or may not) pose a threat to the US in the future is quite dangerous. I can guarantee that North Korea is going to begin saber rattling and saying that pre-emptive wars are legitimate because the US says so. And if you can't see any danger in that, you need to open your eyes. Most of the civilised world sees that danger, and realise that a world where it's "OK" to attack somebody because you think (but can't prove) they are going to be a threat in the future will be an unbelievably dangerous place to live. Why this is lost on most Americans I don't understand. Probably because most of us truly believe "might makes right", so as long as we are the biggest badass in the world we'll be OK.
The folks who say Bush is an evil oilman are motivated in part because even the most casual overview of American foreign policies will show that we don't give a rats ass about evil dictators. In fact, we often support them. Remember, Hussein was considered our friend the whole time he was gassing Iranian troops and the Kurds. Ethnic cleansing? We didn't even lift a finger to stop the horrors in Rwanda. Shall we talk about the many years we turned a blind eye to the Taliban? Shall we talk about the many years of support we gave to the "evil men" who ran brutal dictatorships in Latin America? Shall we talk about our support of the Shah of Iran?
Oh, and here's a fun picture. It's Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983. After Iraq invaded Iran. After Iraq began using chemical weapons. But to his credit, before Iraq killed 37 Americans onboard the USS Stark in 1987. (not that that ended our support of Hussein) Rumsfeld and Hussein
Think back a few years when Microsoft didn't even let their source out the door at all
This license only covers some sample code for how to write ASP pages. Whoop-de-do. I'm not a Microsoft developer myself, but I would guess that they've been provding sample code for years. Is there any major API vendor who doesn't provide sample code? Hell, the fact that they bother licensing it at all shows how anal Microsoft is about source code, not that they are loosing up.
While I wholly agree with Nicholas on most of the article, this line doesn't seem to help the community. One of the stereotypes of linux users is that we think it is better than everything else in every application. This is simply not the case.
Please go and re-read that portion of the article. He was not saying that Linux is better in every situation. He was referring to the fact that Linux servers are usually able to handle more tasks than Windows servers. The result of this is that companies will run several Windows boxes to do the work they need done, causing artificial inflation in the number of Windows licenses shipped. This is a well known phenomenon, and has nothing to do with your entertaining story about your grandmother.
Costing companies more in labor would keep them here?
What effect do you think removing the market for their goods does to a company? Because that's what's happening as the jobs move overseas. Who do you think is going buy the goods a company produces? I don't understand why some people just don't get this. Let me spell it out.
The money that comes in the front door of companies, where does it come from? The money which pays the salaries? The money which pays the rent? The money which pays the CEO? Where does that money come from? The salaries paid out to labor! That's where it comes from! Sure, you can eliminate or reduce those pesky labor costs, but doing so will impact your bottom line. Probably not in the next couple of fiscal quarters. And the impact will be small if you're the only company doing it. But when a lot of companies start shipping their labor overseas, and they've been doing it for a while, what do you think will happen? Maybe rising unemployment and decreased consumer spending? Gee, can I think of a country which has been exporting it's jobs by the thousands for a few years now and has an economy in the tanker?
As for x86 needs to die once and for all, it's hacked, hacked again, and hacked yet again. x86 was and is a 16bit system.
Yeah, I used to think the same thing. And I think most people will agree that the x86 ISA is nasty compared to other modern processors like Sparc or PPC. But I eventually got over that (about the time Be Inc. "dropped" PPC and x86 Linux really started to shine) The simple fact is that nothing has the same level of price performance. Not by a long shot. There is every reason to believe that there is a strong correlation between market share and price/performance. This is just a result of the fact that most of the costs of high performance are up-front in the R&D and fabrication equipment. The guy who sells the most chips can spend more money making them go fast while still spending less per chip than the other guys. Add in the fact that the x86 ISA is now available from at least four different vendors I don't see any reason to ditch it. Sure, it theory it's butt ugly. But in practice, it rocks.
Besides, no one is stopping you from buying a computer with a cleaner ISA. Feel free to buy a PPC, or a Sparc, or a MIPS, or an Alpha, or a Power4 for that matter. Whatever floats your boat. But don't complain that it costs more. Or that it's slower.
Fuel cells contain hydrogen and I would be pretty scared to carry around a laptop with that much energy potential in it.
I dunno if I would worry about it too much. First, fuel cells don't have to use hydrogen. A lot of different hydrocarbon fuels can be used, depending on the design of the cell. I believe that the new laptop fuel cells that have been announced will be using methanol (rubbing alchohol) for fuel. Second, you have to keep it in perspective. How many people carry around butane lighters? There is a significant amount of energy in one of those, yet they seem to be remarkably safe. I've never heard of a catastrophic lighter accident, although I'm sure it happens. No reason to assume that a fuel cell "tank" wouldn't be at least as safe.
Say what you want, but it appears that for SCO shareholders it's already bearing fruit. Their stock is up ~50% today (A whole dollar!). While I expect that fruit to quickly rot, right now the stock appears to be trading at an all time high. So if you sell right now you might actually make some money out of it.
Well, IBM could of course hone those expectations.
"We know your market cap is $25 million. How about we give you $10 million for the company instead of us crushing it into the ground with the worlds largest patent portfolio. Sound good?"
Suing IBM for patent infringment. It boggles the mind. They must be angling for a buyout. Nothing else makes sense. Only a pure IP-only firm of lawyers could hope to get away with that, not somebody who actually ships software.
Somebody should mod the parent up. The story doesn't say if his company charges for all peaks. If they do, they are pretty much crooks in my opinion and deserve to lose their customers. Basically every burstable pricing I've ever seen drops the top 10% of bursts, precisely because of the uncontrollable nature of the Internet. Anybody whose paying for those bursts is getting a raw deal and should look for a new ISP.
Will the crowd spew a diatribe against intellectual property in general
How about just a diatribe against the patent office. Did you actually take the time to look at the patent? Probably not. Here, I'll save you the trouble.
The ornamental design for a user interface for computer display, as shown and described.
That's it. And a picture of a trash can, which the patent office would be happy to sell you a copy of. This is an invention? If this is an "invention", then I think I can literally patent my ass. Why not? By this precedent, I should be able to send them a picture of my ass, with the claim "The design for a sitting device as shown and described."
Totally off topic, but by using Babelfish to read the original article I managed to end up on this page after a Spanish to English translation. Quite humorous, although I was getting pretty fed up with the authors use of slang by the time I figured it out:
they open standard: if your to streamer, aah to camcorder dies you dog rescue your dates with any to other one (except PAL/NTSC need to fit), you plows not bound to to special company it's to faster streamers than many and it will be dwells comfortable - you dog uses the search-index function to "jump" to to recording
Wha? The incessant use of the word "dog" was driving me nuts, bringing up memories of that Sean Connery movie from a couple years back. Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled broadcast, dog!
It's much better than it used to be. Years ago, I used the "strings blah.doc" trick on a Word file an office mate had sent me. What I found was that in addition to the text he intended, a bunch of his email headers were included! He of course blamed Eudora, because Microsoft certainly wouldn't be at fault.
It turns out that Windows didn't use to bother zeroing out RAM when it handed it over to an application, so I guess at times you could call malloc() and get random junk from other running applications. And Office of course doesn't actually write files out in a known format, it pretty much just dumps memory out intact (which is why it's such a pain to reverse engineer the file format). The combination of the OS not clearing RAM and Office writing out memory which it had allocated but never bothered using resulted in email headers in Word documents. This was fixed years ago, of course. I kinda missed it, though. I still routinely run strings on Office docs to see what shows up.
Slashdot Mirror
That's nothing. I actually came to a mutual agreement with someone while discussing creationism on Slashdot a couple weeks ago. Link to me and Zerby chatting. I'm pretty sure thats one of the signs of impending apocolypse or something. People coming to agreement on the Internet, never mind Slashdot. Oh well.
I disagree with him about the "running as root" issue. I understand his logic, but a "root only" Linux box is a Linux box that might very well come to need its virus scanner! Non-priv'd users are a big part of why Linux viruses are NOT a big issue.
.pl or .sh attachement you'd have the same problem on Linux.
/". The problem is really that standard Unix privledges are far too coarse to be of any real use on a single user system. They are incapable of protecting the user from themselves (or more accurately, their processes.) Hopefully the work the NSA is doing on Linux will lead to a system where fine-grained privledges can actually be used to protect the user from themselves. But until that gets developed, I think Lindows is taking a perfectly reasonable approach.
Um, actually I don't think this is true at all. The biggest "virus" problem in Windows land is the various email "virus". Technically worms, but the point is the same. And these abuse the easy code-execution abilities for Microsoft mail clients. If Ximian Evolution automatically executed any
With respect to true viruses, which infect files, privledges help in theory, but aren't going to help much in practice. Why? The system is spending all of it's time running as one user, and that user is quite capable of infecting their own execution environment. A virus could simply drop a copy of itself onto the system and tweek the users LD_LIBRARY_PATH in order to get itself executed at will. Sure, the user isn't technically changing the system binaries but the effect is the same. Well, you say, other users are safe from the infection right? That would be true if the system had any other users. But on a single user system, "infecting" the single user means that 100% of the users on the system are infected.
Sure, not running as root keeps the virus from actually formatting the disk. But since a virus is quite capable of trashing the users settings, environment and documents it's kind of a moot point. On a single user system "rm -rf ~" is just as effective as "rm -rf
hell, even your microwave has a computer.
:-)
That's funny. Back when I started college to get my CS degree, family and such used to ask me what I wanted to do with my degree. I always told them "I'm not sure, I just know I don't want to be the guy who programs microwave ovens". No offense if you're that guy
What we need is a lightweight video codec which has just enough compression to get TV quality video down below 100Mbps. Then you could just decompress the video on a server in the back room and stream it over the LAN to a lightweight client which would actually display it. No need to muck around with undocumented MPEG2 decoders.
Hmm. Maybe a nice idea, but it also sounds like if I don't put a fence around my yard, anyone can come in and have a picnic!
Actually, they can. If you don't take affirmative action to indicate that you don't want people trespassing across your land, then you cannot prosecute them. You don't have to do much, put up a sign or a fence. And of course if you tell them in person to leave, they have to. But if you do nothing to indicate that you don't want people to tresspass then you can't prosecute them.
keep someone who gets a WiFi connection but not VPN credentials from simply 0wning other bokes connected to the APs. At lease when each AP is on its own interface, it severely limits the number of boxen that are exposed at any time.
That's true. A lot of VPN software can be set up to disable non-VPN access to the client when connected to the VPN server, but there is still that window of time when the laptop is on the network but the VPN software hasn't started up yet.
The problem is that we would have to to implement more firewalls not only at each and every access point, but also at each of the computers that would access them.
You do realize that this is not the case, correct? I mean, if you want to try to snow your users to avoid deploying wireless that's one thing. But I've got a wireless network with dozens of AP's spanning several buildings, and it does not require dozens of firewalls. It requires a small filter on the single router interface for the wireless network which limits traffic to only our VPN server. No need for a firewall at each access point. Just install a VPN client on each wireless users laptop. And if you have users who travel with laptops, you should be providing them with VPN clients or something equivalent anyway. So really, the incremental security impact of wireless can be made very low very easily.
I'd rather get rid of the terrorist supporters in the world than die in a terrorist attack.
Damn right! It's about time we dealt with Saudi Arabia! Oh wait, never mind.
As items are sold the RFID is struck from the list and the RFID destroyed.
Except this part isn't going to happen. Theft is in large part due to employees. If you give your employees an easy way to destroy the RFID, you aren't adressing employee theft. And if you aren't bothering to address employee theft, you may as well stick with existing theft deterrents (which are easily bypassed by employees)
Once again somebody has decided to confuse cause and effect. Here's what the article says:
in general, nations with the lowest piracy rates had the largest IT sectors, as measured as a share of the countries' gross domestic product(GDP)
My take:
in general, nations with higher rates of piracy spend less of their GDP on software.
Gosh, what a suprise. I never would have guessed. I wonder what they'll think of next. I supose they'll tell us that people who buy cars instead of stealing them have larger "automotive spending sectors". Which isn't to say that copyright violations are OK. But to tell a country that sending more of their GDP overseas to the US will help their local IT economy is just a bunch of crap IMHO.
It's that simple. Case closed.
As I replied to another poster, your belief it's that simple isn't shared by much of the world. Where are our allies from last time around? They don't seem to think it's the same war. The Security Council doesn't seem to think it's the same war either.
It seems to me that we aren't starting a war, we're finishing the last one because Iraq refused to comply with the terms of surrender
.
That might be your belief, but it's not shared by most of the rest of the world. If that was the case, other countries would be supporting us as they did during the first gulf war. But they aren't. That should be telling you something.
And regarding NK, check out this [rushlimbaugh.com]
Whatever. Rush Limbaugh is a troll who talks out of his ass. Most of what he says doesn't rise above the level of name calling. He obviously belongs to the "might is right" crowd I was talking about, but our might didn't stop Al Queda and I don't know if I would be willing to be my life that it'll stop North Korea. I'm not talking out of my ass when I say that North Korea is running with the pre-emptive strike idea. I'm quoting North Korea. From the BBC
In being asked what that means, Mr Kim replied: "A pre-emptive attack is not only something the US can do. We can do it too. It's a matter of life or death."
My guess would be because in Kosovo, we were taking sides in a war already in progress. In Iraq, we are starting a war. There is a world of difference. The Bush administration's policy of "pre-emptive" war against a country which may (or may not) pose a threat to the US in the future is quite dangerous. I can guarantee that North Korea is going to begin saber rattling and saying that pre-emptive wars are legitimate because the US says so. And if you can't see any danger in that, you need to open your eyes. Most of the civilised world sees that danger, and realise that a world where it's "OK" to attack somebody because you think (but can't prove) they are going to be a threat in the future will be an unbelievably dangerous place to live. Why this is lost on most Americans I don't understand. Probably because most of us truly believe "might makes right", so as long as we are the biggest badass in the world we'll be OK.
The folks who say Bush is an evil oilman are motivated in part because even the most casual overview of American foreign policies will show that we don't give a rats ass about evil dictators. In fact, we often support them. Remember, Hussein was considered our friend the whole time he was gassing Iranian troops and the Kurds. Ethnic cleansing? We didn't even lift a finger to stop the horrors in Rwanda. Shall we talk about the many years we turned a blind eye to the Taliban? Shall we talk about the many years of support we gave to the "evil men" who ran brutal dictatorships in Latin America? Shall we talk about our support of the Shah of Iran?
Oh, and here's a fun picture. It's Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983. After Iraq invaded Iran. After Iraq began using chemical weapons. But to his credit, before Iraq killed 37 Americans onboard the USS Stark in 1987. (not that that ended our support of Hussein) Rumsfeld and Hussein
Think back a few years when Microsoft didn't even let their source out the door at all
This license only covers some sample code for how to write ASP pages. Whoop-de-do. I'm not a Microsoft developer myself, but I would guess that they've been provding sample code for years. Is there any major API vendor who doesn't provide sample code? Hell, the fact that they bother licensing it at all shows how anal Microsoft is about source code, not that they are loosing up.
While I wholly agree with Nicholas on most of the article, this line doesn't seem to help the community. One of the stereotypes of linux users is that we think it is better than everything else in every application. This is simply not the case.
Please go and re-read that portion of the article. He was not saying that Linux is better in every situation. He was referring to the fact that Linux servers are usually able to handle more tasks than Windows servers. The result of this is that companies will run several Windows boxes to do the work they need done, causing artificial inflation in the number of Windows licenses shipped. This is a well known phenomenon, and has nothing to do with your entertaining story about your grandmother.
Costing companies more in labor would keep them here?
What effect do you think removing the market for their goods does to a company? Because that's what's happening as the jobs move overseas. Who do you think is going buy the goods a company produces? I don't understand why some people just don't get this. Let me spell it out.
The money that comes in the front door of companies, where does it come from? The money which pays the salaries? The money which pays the rent? The money which pays the CEO? Where does that money come from? The salaries paid out to labor! That's where it comes from! Sure, you can eliminate or reduce those pesky labor costs, but doing so will impact your bottom line. Probably not in the next couple of fiscal quarters. And the impact will be small if you're the only company doing it. But when a lot of companies start shipping their labor overseas, and they've been doing it for a while, what do you think will happen? Maybe rising unemployment and decreased consumer spending? Gee, can I think of a country which has been exporting it's jobs by the thousands for a few years now and has an economy in the tanker?
As for x86 needs to die once and for all, it's hacked, hacked again, and hacked yet again. x86 was and is a 16bit system.
Yeah, I used to think the same thing. And I think most people will agree that the x86 ISA is nasty compared to other modern processors like Sparc or PPC. But I eventually got over that (about the time Be Inc. "dropped" PPC and x86 Linux really started to shine) The simple fact is that nothing has the same level of price performance. Not by a long shot. There is every reason to believe that there is a strong correlation between market share and price/performance. This is just a result of the fact that most of the costs of high performance are up-front in the R&D and fabrication equipment. The guy who sells the most chips can spend more money making them go fast while still spending less per chip than the other guys. Add in the fact that the x86 ISA is now available from at least four different vendors I don't see any reason to ditch it. Sure, it theory it's butt ugly. But in practice, it rocks.
Besides, no one is stopping you from buying a computer with a cleaner ISA. Feel free to buy a PPC, or a Sparc, or a MIPS, or an Alpha, or a Power4 for that matter. Whatever floats your boat. But don't complain that it costs more. Or that it's slower.
Fuel cells contain hydrogen and I would be pretty scared to carry around a laptop with that much energy potential in it.
I dunno if I would worry about it too much. First, fuel cells don't have to use hydrogen. A lot of different hydrocarbon fuels can be used, depending on the design of the cell. I believe that the new laptop fuel cells that have been announced will be using methanol (rubbing alchohol) for fuel. Second, you have to keep it in perspective. How many people carry around butane lighters? There is a significant amount of energy in one of those, yet they seem to be remarkably safe. I've never heard of a catastrophic lighter accident, although I'm sure it happens. No reason to assume that a fuel cell "tank" wouldn't be at least as safe.
Say what you want, but it appears that for SCO shareholders it's already bearing fruit. Their stock is up ~50% today (A whole dollar!). While I expect that fruit to quickly rot, right now the stock appears to be trading at an all time high. So if you sell right now you might actually make some money out of it.
Well, IBM could of course hone those expectations.
"We know your market cap is $25 million. How about we give you $10 million for the company instead of us crushing it into the ground with the worlds largest patent portfolio. Sound good?"
Suing IBM for patent infringment. It boggles the mind. They must be angling for a buyout. Nothing else makes sense. Only a pure IP-only firm of lawyers could hope to get away with that, not somebody who actually ships software.
Somebody should mod the parent up. The story doesn't say if his company charges for all peaks. If they do, they are pretty much crooks in my opinion and deserve to lose their customers. Basically every burstable pricing I've ever seen drops the top 10% of bursts, precisely because of the uncontrollable nature of the Internet. Anybody whose paying for those bursts is getting a raw deal and should look for a new ISP.
Yes, X is part of the Unix legacy. No, it's not needed anymore
There has to be stability and uniformity.
We need stability in the API, so we should throw out X because it's too old and not needed? Isn't that a little contradictory?
Will the crowd spew a diatribe against intellectual property in general
How about just a diatribe against the patent office. Did you actually take the time to look at the patent? Probably not. Here, I'll save you the trouble.
The ornamental design for a user interface for computer display, as shown and described.
That's it. And a picture of a trash can, which the patent office would be happy to sell you a copy of. This is an invention? If this is an "invention", then I think I can literally patent my ass. Why not? By this precedent, I should be able to send them a picture of my ass, with the claim "The design for a sitting device as shown and described."
Totally off topic, but by using Babelfish to read the original article I managed to end up on this page after a Spanish to English translation. Quite humorous, although I was getting pretty fed up with the authors use of slang by the time I figured it out:
they open standard: if your to streamer, aah to camcorder dies you dog rescue your dates with any to other one (except PAL/NTSC need to fit), you plows not bound to to special company
it's to faster streamers than many and it will be dwells comfortable - you dog uses the search-index function to "jump" to to recording
Wha? The incessant use of the word "dog" was driving me nuts, bringing up memories of that Sean Connery movie from a couple years back. Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled broadcast, dog!
It's much better than it used to be. Years ago, I used the "strings blah.doc" trick on a Word file an office mate had sent me. What I found was that in addition to the text he intended, a bunch of his email headers were included! He of course blamed Eudora, because Microsoft certainly wouldn't be at fault.
It turns out that Windows didn't use to bother zeroing out RAM when it handed it over to an application, so I guess at times you could call malloc() and get random junk from other running applications. And Office of course doesn't actually write files out in a known format, it pretty much just dumps memory out intact (which is why it's such a pain to reverse engineer the file format). The combination of the OS not clearing RAM and Office writing out memory which it had allocated but never bothered using resulted in email headers in Word documents. This was fixed years ago, of course. I kinda missed it, though. I still routinely run strings on Office docs to see what shows up.