It's good to see some high profile lawsuits over bad patents. Too often it's the little guys being hit over the head with patents. Sure, they may be plainly bogus, but if you can't afford tens of thousands in legal bills, you're hosed. This time all the players are on roughly equal footing. With any luck, one of them will lobby Congress to review the situation with patent law.
I'm not sure if JFS doesn't support mixed case or is case-insensitive; they weren't clear on that point.
Case sensitivity in general is very important for Unix systems. I'm quite certain that it is required by Posix and other standards. I've seen a good number of cases where case was all that separated two files (e.g., Makefile vs. makefile) in the same directory. Now you can easily argue that this is a bad idea, but it certainly is part of our heritage, and I, for one, like it.
When I was at the Ottawa Linux Symposium, there were talks on XFS, JFS, and ext3fs. It seemed clear that XFS was near beta, so the recent announcement was no surprise. Ext3fs also sounded near beta. Ext3 takes the simple approach of adding journaling to ext2 in such a way that as long as you unmount cleanly (so there's no need to play the log back), you can take an ext3 partition and mount it as an ext2 partition. From the talk, it sounded pretty much ready.
JFS was another story. My take on the talk was that people who atteneded it learned one important thing: JFS is the journaling file system to ignore. The Linux port comes from OS/2, instead of directly from AIX. It lacks such things as support for mixed case filenames. The answers to most of the questions were, "We hadn't thought of that," or, "We'll have to look into that." If JFS didn't have the "me-too" ego of IBM behind it, the developers would have realized that they were better off working on one of the other file systems.
Re:The killer "app" for Mayo-at least for me
on
DivX ;-) Deux Update
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· Score: 2
Most of what you describe could be done with Linux. The only problem is the real-time MPEG compression of the video-in stream. Here the issue is that the hardware MPEG encoders use propreitary APIs, and they haven't released the specs.
Perhaps they can't release the specs because their hardware also handles CSS or something like that. Perhaps they're just being paranoid about their intelectual property.
Video CD uses a fixed bitrate so that it plays at the same speed as a standard audio CD. Hence, you can get 74 or 80 minutes per CD-R. I believe that it's MPEG-1. It's been around for a while, and is quite popular in the Far East.
Super Video CD uses a higher and variable bitrate, so you only get 35-45 minutes per CD. If you buy the 80-minute CD-Rs, then it should be fine for archiving TV shows (a one-hour episond minus comercials tends to run 42 or 43 minutes). Obviously, this is higher quality than standard Video CD, and I think it uses MPEG-2.
My DVD player supports both formats, though most only support the original Video CDs, as that has been around much longer. (I have the Raite DVD/CD/MP3 player, purchased for $150-ish at Egghead.com.)
Now if I could get some good Super Video CD authoring software under Linux, I would be set!
5 years is a bit of a stretch, but on the other hand, they may have a significant lead. Of course, to admit that they have a lead is to concede that their technology is the right way to go. If you accept that, then, yes, it will take the other chip makers quite a while to switch to that type of processor design. Consider that it takes Intel several years to develop each chip generation, and that's when the fundamental design technology is similar.
So it could well take Intel or AMD 5 years to develop a processor that used the same technology as Transmeta has now. Of course, that's no reason to believe that Transmeta will succeed in making competitive processors.
Has there ever been any credible evidence that real life man-in-the-middle attacks have been used?
If they were being used on a wide-spread basis, the PGP community would find out very quickly, considering how many of them exchange keys in person at conferences and such.
Once such an attack is shown to be taking place, people will just come up with better key-distribution mechanisms.
No, I'm pretty sure that power isn't a big issue. If it were, they would replace the CRTs with LCDs for showing the in-flight entertainment (true, newer planes use LCDs, but not because of the power drain).
Anyway, it wouldn't be a safety issue--you can bet that it would be set up so that if power runs low, non-essential systems go first. You might not like having your laptop considered non-essential, but that's life.
And they have a common sense ticketing policy with refundable tickets--the person sitting next to you pays the same as you.
The only problem is that you are on your own for communications. So if you want to be online, you need to use a cell phone connection. (Also, the power flakes out every once in a while, so you can only use it to avoid killing batteries, not to use stuff that doesn't have batteries.)
If I were CEO of an airline, I would make it free. It may cost a bit to roll out, but it would be a key factor in getting travelers to choose that airline.
For bandwidth, this is an ideal situation for sattelite Internet. Just adapt one of those small dishes for use in an airplane, and you'll have decent download bandwidth. You'll have to be a little more creative for the upstream side, but people will usually tollerate that being relatively slow.
The domain would probably identify you as a passenger of a given airline.
It could easily be misconfigured so that cookies survive between different legs of the same flight, so that someone on a latter leg would already be signed in to whatever servers the previous passenger had been visiting.
And of course, just like with laptops, anyone sitting nearby can see what you're doing. So if you like to visit porn sites, you'll run a risk of offending other passengers. Air rage? Yet another cause. Oh wait, they'll probably use some censorware to solve that problem and create a bunch of new ones.
Anyway, there are a bunch of issues for the airlines to deal with. Personally, I would prefer if they just provided a power outlet and an ethernet port (or run wireless networking--wouldn't the FAA love that!).
Now the airline that makes it free instead of $$$/minute will see a huge boost in ticket sales.
So what if people have 100Mbps connections? By the time that becomes at all common, the backbone will be running at multi-terabit speeds. They're already running a terabit on a single fibre in the labs; it shouldn't be too long before that becomes normal for backbone fibres.
Web sites will be just like they are today: low volume stuff can be served out of someone's home with a broadband connection, and high volume stuff uses an expensive high-speed link.
So Yahoo, CNN, and Amazon have to upgrade to faster links. So what?
Actually, the real issue here is what the impact of increased bandwidth will be. Back when I created my first web page in 1994, most people surfed with image loading off. Professional web sites were created by a single person in a day or two. Now professional web sites are full of graphics, animations, and whatnot. There's a much larger gap between commercial web sites and personal ones. The investment to create a serious web site is higher. This gap between amateur and professional web sites will increase. Multimedia will increase.
If I were creating an online game and wanted to block unauthorized servers, I would obtain a patent for the communications protocol. This could be as simple as getting a patent for a data structure that is passed, or as complex as a patent for a new encryption or compression algorithm.
Then I would have the option of shutting down servers not only based on copyright law, but also using patent law.
I'm under the impression that they haven't done this, fortunately.
The US is behind in wireless for one basic reason: Our land lines are much better than elsewhere. Look at countries with huge wireless adoption rates. Now correlate that with the time (or possibly cost) required to obtain a regular wire phone line. You'll see that there's a strong correlation.
Wireless is exploding in many countries due to necessity.
At the present, this seems like a curse for those of us in the USA. On the other hand, it suggests that in the long run we may end up with a system built in the '00s while the rest of the world is living with systems from the '90s. That's probably just sour grapes, though.
Is there any evidence of this being used in the field? Obviously people have tested the bug once it was reported, but has anyone used it in evesdropping?
It should be easy enough to write a program to check to see if any archived mail has the extra keys.
No, you don't need your current appliances networked, but you will want your new appliances to be networked.
I have ReplayTV. I want it networked so that I can log into it from work and see what's recording, delete stuff I don't want, record shows that I forgot to ask it to record, and such. When I watch TV, I want to be able to call up the IMDB page for the movie I just watched.
I want to have my MP3 player networked.
I want my alarm clock/radio to also play MP3s, so I want it networked.
I would like a lot of my house controls (lights, heat, AC, and such) computerized and networked. So I went on vacation and forgot to turn off the AC? I can log in and stop wasting electricity, and program it to be cool again just before I get home.
I would love to have my car networked. It could search for low gas prices on my intended route when the tank gets low. It could report its location if it gets stolen. Obviously, it could download MP3s for the stereo.
I would like to have my doorbell networked. I have a friend that has a doorbell with an intercom, along with a web cam all computerized. Someone can ring the doorbell when he is at work. He can answer on the intercom and look at the person at the door, making them think he's home but can't come to the door.
Ten years ago most people didn't think they needed their computers networked. All it takes is a little imagination. Sure, the value-add may not be that huge at first, but others will imagine a little more, and soon we'll wonder how we ever got by without having everything online.
Good point. The DeCSS lawsuits do, indeed, site special anti-copying provisions of the DMCA. However, the MPAA has also been using the trade secret argument. They're not limiting themselves to only one legal strategy.
Unfortunately, I haven't been following the lawsuits closely enough to discuss how the various arguments have been played out in each of the separate courts, but I do remember the trade secret argument being used, at least in the first round of hearings.
So trade secrets that are leaked illegally can not be published in the US. How many countries have this level of protection for trade secrets?
If a trade secret is disclosed, it's no longer a trade secret. However, if a trade secret is disclosed illegally, even if everyone on Earth knows it, it is still protected information in the US, it seems.
The reasoning is that the web sites were distributing material that could only have been obtained through illegal disclosure of trade secret information.
This is the same reasoning the MPAA is using to block the distribution of deCSS code.
Huh? Why would you develop for a specific browser? Just follow the standards, and your stuff should work with all browsers.
Well, obviously, most browsers have some standards deficiencies, but usually they're in areas that you don't really need to be using anyway.
I think the real problem is that web page creators think they're "developers" instead of "authors." The web is about information, not programming. If you're putting more effort into JavaScript than into your content, your site will suck. If someone goes to your web site with Lynx, will they still find it just as useful, even if it is less cool looking?
Slashdot Mirror
Just like everything else. You use it up, then you throw it out.
Time to toss out the earth.
Maybe some hacker will dig it out of the trash and fix it, but mainstream society will move on.
It's good to see some high profile lawsuits over bad patents. Too often it's the little guys being hit over the head with patents. Sure, they may be plainly bogus, but if you can't afford tens of thousands in legal bills, you're hosed. This time all the players are on roughly equal footing. With any luck, one of them will lobby Congress to review the situation with patent law.
I'm not sure if JFS doesn't support mixed case or is case-insensitive; they weren't clear on that point.
Case sensitivity in general is very important for Unix systems. I'm quite certain that it is required by Posix and other standards. I've seen a good number of cases where case was all that separated two files (e.g., Makefile vs. makefile) in the same directory. Now you can easily argue that this is a bad idea, but it certainly is part of our heritage, and I, for one, like it.
When I was at the Ottawa Linux Symposium, there were talks on XFS, JFS, and ext3fs. It seemed clear that XFS was near beta, so the recent announcement was no surprise. Ext3fs also sounded near beta. Ext3 takes the simple approach of adding journaling to ext2 in such a way that as long as you unmount cleanly (so there's no need to play the log back), you can take an ext3 partition and mount it as an ext2 partition. From the talk, it sounded pretty much ready.
JFS was another story. My take on the talk was that people who atteneded it learned one important thing: JFS is the journaling file system to ignore. The Linux port comes from OS/2, instead of directly from AIX. It lacks such things as support for mixed case filenames. The answers to most of the questions were, "We hadn't thought of that," or, "We'll have to look into that." If JFS didn't have the "me-too" ego of IBM behind it, the developers would have realized that they were better off working on one of the other file systems.
Most of what you describe could be done with Linux. The only problem is the real-time MPEG compression of the video-in stream. Here the issue is that the hardware MPEG encoders use propreitary APIs, and they haven't released the specs.
Perhaps they can't release the specs because their hardware also handles CSS or something like that. Perhaps they're just being paranoid about their intelectual property.
Well, there's Video CD and Super Video CD.
Both are essentially just an MPEG on a CD.
Video CD uses a fixed bitrate so that it plays at the same speed as a standard audio CD. Hence, you can get 74 or 80 minutes per CD-R. I believe that it's MPEG-1. It's been around for a while, and is quite popular in the Far East.
Super Video CD uses a higher and variable bitrate, so you only get 35-45 minutes per CD. If you buy the 80-minute CD-Rs, then it should be fine for archiving TV shows (a one-hour episond minus comercials tends to run 42 or 43 minutes). Obviously, this is higher quality than standard Video CD, and I think it uses MPEG-2.
My DVD player supports both formats, though most only support the original Video CDs, as that has been around much longer. (I have the Raite DVD/CD/MP3 player, purchased for $150-ish at Egghead.com.)
Now if I could get some good Super Video CD authoring software under Linux, I would be set!
5 years is a bit of a stretch, but on the other hand, they may have a significant lead. Of course, to admit that they have a lead is to concede that their technology is the right way to go. If you accept that, then, yes, it will take the other chip makers quite a while to switch to that type of processor design. Consider that it takes Intel several years to develop each chip generation, and that's when the fundamental design technology is similar.
So it could well take Intel or AMD 5 years to develop a processor that used the same technology as Transmeta has now. Of course, that's no reason to believe that Transmeta will succeed in making competitive processors.
Perhaps this is an effort to help build up their stock value, along with a general PR effort.
Has there ever been any credible evidence that real life man-in-the-middle attacks have been used?
If they were being used on a wide-spread basis, the PGP community would find out very quickly, considering how many of them exchange keys in person at conferences and such.
Once such an attack is shown to be taking place, people will just come up with better key-distribution mechanisms.
Atari is now owned by Hasbro.
Since he didn't actually copy any of their stuff, only modified it, they can't complain.
Now if he started selling these things, they might take note.
So is the event horizon is the "great barrier" that they talked about in Star Trek V?
No, I'm pretty sure that power isn't a big issue. If it were, they would replace the CRTs with LCDs for showing the in-flight entertainment (true, newer planes use LCDs, but not because of the power drain).
Anyway, it wouldn't be a safety issue--you can bet that it would be set up so that if power runs low, non-essential systems go first. You might not like having your laptop considered non-essential, but that's life.
Yup, Amtrak is great.
And they have a common sense ticketing policy with refundable tickets--the person sitting next to you pays the same as you.
The only problem is that you are on your own for communications. So if you want to be online, you need to use a cell phone connection. (Also, the power flakes out every once in a while, so you can only use it to avoid killing batteries, not to use stuff that doesn't have batteries.)
If I were CEO of an airline, I would make it free. It may cost a bit to roll out, but it would be a key factor in getting travelers to choose that airline.
For bandwidth, this is an ideal situation for sattelite Internet. Just adapt one of those small dishes for use in an airplane, and you'll have decent download bandwidth. You'll have to be a little more creative for the upstream side, but people will usually tollerate that being relatively slow.
There could be a lot of privacy issues here.
The domain would probably identify you as a passenger of a given airline.
It could easily be misconfigured so that cookies survive between different legs of the same flight, so that someone on a latter leg would already be signed in to whatever servers the previous passenger had been visiting.
And of course, just like with laptops, anyone sitting nearby can see what you're doing. So if you like to visit porn sites, you'll run a risk of offending other passengers. Air rage? Yet another cause. Oh wait, they'll probably use some censorware to solve that problem and create a bunch of new ones.
Anyway, there are a bunch of issues for the airlines to deal with. Personally, I would prefer if they just provided a power outlet and an ethernet port (or run wireless networking--wouldn't the FAA love that!).
Now the airline that makes it free instead of $$$/minute will see a huge boost in ticket sales.
So what if people have 100Mbps connections? By the time that becomes at all common, the backbone will be running at multi-terabit speeds. They're already running a terabit on a single fibre in the labs; it shouldn't be too long before that becomes normal for backbone fibres.
Web sites will be just like they are today: low volume stuff can be served out of someone's home with a broadband connection, and high volume stuff uses an expensive high-speed link.
So Yahoo, CNN, and Amazon have to upgrade to faster links. So what?
Actually, the real issue here is what the impact of increased bandwidth will be. Back when I created my first web page in 1994, most people surfed with image loading off. Professional web sites were created by a single person in a day or two. Now professional web sites are full of graphics, animations, and whatnot. There's a much larger gap between commercial web sites and personal ones. The investment to create a serious web site is higher. This gap between amateur and professional web sites will increase. Multimedia will increase.
If I were creating an online game and wanted to block unauthorized servers, I would obtain a patent for the communications protocol. This could be as simple as getting a patent for a data structure that is passed, or as complex as a patent for a new encryption or compression algorithm.
Then I would have the option of shutting down servers not only based on copyright law, but also using patent law.
I'm under the impression that they haven't done this, fortunately.
The US is behind in wireless for one basic reason: Our land lines are much better than elsewhere. Look at countries with huge wireless adoption rates. Now correlate that with the time (or possibly cost) required to obtain a regular wire phone line. You'll see that there's a strong correlation.
Wireless is exploding in many countries due to necessity.
At the present, this seems like a curse for those of us in the USA. On the other hand, it suggests that in the long run we may end up with a system built in the '00s while the rest of the world is living with systems from the '90s. That's probably just sour grapes, though.
Is there any evidence of this being used in the field? Obviously people have tested the bug once it was reported, but has anyone used it in evesdropping?
It should be easy enough to write a program to check to see if any archived mail has the extra keys.
I assume GPG doesn't support key escrow. If I'm right on that, then it doesn't have the problem.
No, you don't need your current appliances networked, but you will want your new appliances to be networked.
I have ReplayTV. I want it networked so that I can log into it from work and see what's recording, delete stuff I don't want, record shows that I forgot to ask it to record, and such. When I watch TV, I want to be able to call up the IMDB page for the movie I just watched.
I want to have my MP3 player networked.
I want my alarm clock/radio to also play MP3s, so I want it networked.
I would like a lot of my house controls (lights, heat, AC, and such) computerized and networked. So I went on vacation and forgot to turn off the AC? I can log in and stop wasting electricity, and program it to be cool again just before I get home.
I would love to have my car networked. It could search for low gas prices on my intended route when the tank gets low. It could report its location if it gets stolen. Obviously, it could download MP3s for the stereo.
I would like to have my doorbell networked. I have a friend that has a doorbell with an intercom, along with a web cam all computerized. Someone can ring the doorbell when he is at work. He can answer on the intercom and look at the person at the door, making them think he's home but can't come to the door.
Ten years ago most people didn't think they needed their computers networked. All it takes is a little imagination. Sure, the value-add may not be that huge at first, but others will imagine a little more, and soon we'll wonder how we ever got by without having everything online.
Good point. The DeCSS lawsuits do, indeed, site special anti-copying provisions of the DMCA. However, the MPAA has also been using the trade secret argument. They're not limiting themselves to only one legal strategy.
Unfortunately, I haven't been following the lawsuits closely enough to discuss how the various arguments have been played out in each of the separate courts, but I do remember the trade secret argument being used, at least in the first round of hearings.
So trade secrets that are leaked illegally can not be published in the US. How many countries have this level of protection for trade secrets?
If a trade secret is disclosed, it's no longer a trade secret. However, if a trade secret is disclosed illegally, even if everyone on Earth knows it, it is still protected information in the US, it seems.
The reasoning is that the web sites were distributing material that could only have been obtained through illegal disclosure of trade secret information.
This is the same reasoning the MPAA is using to block the distribution of deCSS code.
I really like IE5. It's easy to develop for,
Huh? Why would you develop for a specific browser? Just follow the standards, and your stuff should work with all browsers.
Well, obviously, most browsers have some standards deficiencies, but usually they're in areas that you don't really need to be using anyway.
I think the real problem is that web page creators think they're "developers" instead of "authors." The web is about information, not programming. If you're putting more effort into JavaScript than into your content, your site will suck. If someone goes to your web site with Lynx, will they still find it just as useful, even if it is less cool looking?