you don't like the idea of being able to run a fullscreen game in dx video mode and have your windowed apps (IM/IRC/winamp/etc) running and accessible on your secondary monitor?
alt-tab doesn't have to switch video modes, and switching over to another app, doing some 'work', and tabbing back is much faster. not to mention the benefits of being able to monitor downloads/network traffic/etc.
and that doesn't even take into account the additional cheating capabilities one could use in online gaming. i'd imagine having your hack app sitting on the secondary monitor (radar proxy, network packet disassembly, aiming proxy, etc) is quite preferrable (and cheaper than an entirely seperate machine for the same purpose).
I don't know many gamers who have actually used multimon setup that -dont- want a second monitor at home.
it's just the problem of weight, spacing and interference between 2 19" CRTs or being able to afford LCDs. LCDs also being nearly universally reviled for gaming purposes. excepting lan partying, where their weight and size are a huge benefit.
From NewScientist: "If we resolved this and confirmed that space is finite, this would be an enormous step forward in our understanding of nature." -- mathematician Jeffrey Weeks from Canton, New York
i thought that most of our quantum theories hinged on the idea that the universe was infinite, and the multiple universes can and do interact.
if the universe is finite, and multiple universes can't interact, then string theory and gravity being a 4+ dimensional force (accounting for its perceived weakness compared to nuclear and electromagnetic forces) are pretty much out the window.
and in my opinion that's a pretty huge step -backwards- for our understanding, since quite a bit of research has been done with those theories as a foundation.
not to mention, if the universe is a finite, closed system, then entropy will slowly fill it entirely and definitively end it. (at least with regards to us)
sure, in the long run if this holds up it'd be a positive step for understanding - any discovery would be. but the immediate effect and implications would be profoundly negative.
All this Eolas guy did was clamp down on the independent browser makers -more-.
so MS figures out a workaround... due to the fact that IE holds 95% of the market, all the big plugin vendors will change their access methods to support the new workaround.
So web developers who wish maximum coverage (nearly all) will change their html code to support the new access method.
Then, either other browser vendors have to spend just as much money to maintain compatibility, or they lose the features on any site that has switched to support 95% of the internet.
And a small browser company's turnover time for making the change is going to be longer than MS, as they don't have the swarms of programmers. So it costs the independent software developers at least the same in programmer wages (excepting -purely- OSS browsers) to do the change, but costs them more in user-satisfaction and market-share as they have a longer time without the features, and they've lost programming time they could have been using to -improve- their own browser.
How much time has the Opera or Safari team already lost just doing CYA code reviews to ensure they're not in an exposed legal position?
And as for this altruistic notion that Eolas is only out to stop the Big Bad Guy... what happens if IE does lose market share to something like Opera? What happens when Eolas would suddenly decide that that Opera's business tactics weren't fair either?
There's too much legal risk for a browser developer to -not- migrate to supporting the new method right away. Sure, they'll probably be backwards compatible to the old way - but what web developer wants to embed an activex plugin in their web content that is unusable to 95% of their potential market?
Keep in mind that this new plugin requirement only needs to displays an 'Ok' box in the event that the plugin data is remote. Meaning if you go to homestarrunner.com and watch an sbemail flash movie hosted from homestarrunner.com - there's no messagebox; it's still a seamless experience.
So what does this mean? Well... it does mean that you'll have to click Ok once for every remotely hosted activex ad (nightmare).
I myself tend to think that web hosts would sooner drop plugin ads, or start hosting locally long before they'd suffer through potentially losing 95% of their viewers.
(I certainly hope that IE ads a config option so I can disable remote activex data streams altogether. That'd be a pretty good adblocker. I guess there may be a silver lining.)
spam - and what defines spam - isn't the pertinant question. The important fact is that spammers exploiting SMTP make 'opting out' impossible.
There is too much assumed honesty in SMTP.
Yes, it was a key factor in getting everything going, and yes, its beauty is in its simplicity.
however, much like open relays, this assumed honesty has outlived its usefulness. It is being corrupted to a degree unforseeable by the original protocol architects, and it is time for something new.
I don't pretend to know the specifics to building a secure, unexploitable system. And it would almost certainly be a messy conversion. That shouldn't mean that it isn't worth doing.
Let each user and ISP decide for themselves what spam is. But we need a secure email system so that when Spam is identified, that particular sender can be effectively blocked.
Yes, players need tools. If a game allows a player to build a wall - someone will inevitably trap another player inside a box to torment them. So the game needs to allow you to also -break- anything that can be built.
If a player can lock or block a door, they will find a way to lock another player on the wrong side of the door intentionally. Therefore the game needs to allow you to -push- such barriers.
the problem of course is that - even with all the right tools, if someone treats you like a complete *sshole, I'll never know it. They could have spent 4 hours trapping people in boxes, and I would treat them like anyone else if I hadn't seen it or happened to be in your immediate circle of friends.
massmog communities are too loose. Only 10-20% of players on any given server are playing at any one time. the odds of an effective server-wide community notification system are pretty slim.
So what's a good solution? karma. an aura. perhaps only visible with a skill or spell. Every day that a player logs in, they have some karma points to spend on other players. positively or negatively.
you simply institute a law of diminishing returns, so that no one person or small group of people can give you enough karma to undo the negative karma a large group of people gave you - and there you have it. (probably put an upper cap on the amt of negative or positive karma a single person can give you and weight it)
you could even make it so that a person with negative karma themselves has their outgoing karma points reduced in 'worth'. so if an indescriminate killer calls you a jerk - it means even less.
Don't allow karma to gradually return to neutral over time (easily exploited). And most importantly -never- automatically assume any given action in-game is inherently good or bad karma. Leave it up to the players to decide.
You may have started a pvp fight with another player - but they may have stolen from you, or been hassling you. It could very well be justified. The game code can't possibly know - but a witness could.
You may likewise have killed a killer - but you could have done it out of greed or malice or an attempt to game the system. If no trustworthy witness deems it 'good', then there's no reason to assume it was.
The actions themselves can't be coded good or bad (UO's failed notoriety system being the prime example). Only another player has the proper context to interpret that.
judging from reloaded, when the reviews start to hit for revolutions - the wind will be completely out of the franchise's sails.
the international demand at release would have totally fizzled with a traditional release scheme.
looking at the numbers, the US gross for the first matrix was about 30% of the worldwide grosses (US:$171m, world:$450) and the US gross for reloaded was still about 30% of the worldwide(US:$281m, world:$738m).
Then consider that the first film made the bulk of its money fairly evenly over time, as word of mouth about it being good took time to get around.
In stark contrast, the second made $200m in the first 2 weeks. (with the 5 week total of $258m). It's huge rate of dropoff is heavily indicative of the very negative reaction the bulk of the fans gave it.
(Weekly box office data not available for the original.) source
My guess is they're just protecting themselves from a possible implosion in their biggest audience.
Whether or not the movie will be good is up for debate - but decisions like this come from suits who look only at the numbers.
the point is that you can't use a hacked client on the xbox live network. so the xbox live version will be the only one that can be considered a level playing field. (which is one of my favorite features of their network anyway)
well, you -can- mod the xbox to allow a hacked client to load - but then xbox live will block your modded box. i suppose its possible that eventually people will reverse engineer how MS is detecting modded boxes and spoof that check too.
but in the meantime, on xbox live, with no hacked clients you can at least enjoy the fair competition.
(until the hackers can overwhelm MS resources and get modded boxes onto XBL - but by then we'll likely be playing on the xbox2.
I tend to disagree that there is no inventive step in their process.
I think the idea that the repository potentially holds additional instructions to request further diagnostic information is a suitably inventive step. Eg A request to record particular data locations not generally gathered for every crash, but requested for a particular app/platform/exception type.
I don't think that step is immediately obvious, and it definitely increases the effectiveness of the system. The fact that IBM has had a phone-home system for decades and never implemented such a feature should be demonstrative of the non-obviousness.
Furthermore, their copious documentation of existing systems is definitely on the up and up, and I don't see how they would be able to leverage this patent in an anticompetitive fashion.
Other companies are free to have automated phone-home systems, even systems that automatically download patches. So long as their particular process isn't step by step identical to this one.
Of course I'm not trying to 'convince' anyone - I'm just stating my opinion. I can be, have been, and doubtlessly will again - be wrong.
The original post was primarily in response to the inane 'prior art' posts that weren't even dealing with the issue and get mindlessly slammed en masse on any patent article thread.
I'm not up on my gnome utils - but if it predated MS' phone home implementation (first released with XP i believe, though possibly in some distros of 2k server) then it woudl indeed be prior art.
remember, this patent -only- covers the exact steps listed. So if another phone-home app didn't host fixes in their repository, or didn't allow automatic install of those fixes, or didn't check the repository for requested additional info then it is not at all affected.
MS was granted a patent on a very specific phone home -implementation-.
I hate bad software patents as much as the next guy, and that's why I took it upon myself to get educated on the process and language; and that's why I -read- these patents.
Their patent covers a phone-home architecutre that:
. detects the failure (via exception handling) . locates the source of the failure . -asks the user if they want to allow phone home- . phones home to a repository (if allowed) . looks up the failure in the repository to determine if there is any request for additional information to gather for that particular type of failure (or by particular application that failed) . gathers the requested additional information from the failed machine . transmits all the desired information to the repository. . searches the repository for any existing fix for the problem . transmitting the fix to the failed machine and applying it . if no preexisting instance of the failure exists, creating a new instance
further, the repository can be local or remote, as specified in a setting located on the client machine.
If IBM's system has done all this prior to microsoft's - then fine, it's prior art. But in my experience, that is well beyond the capabilities of IBM's 'phone home' system.
If you make a phone home system, so long as you don't -exactly- copy their implementation it's fine.
If you even didn't offer the user a choice to phone home, that would be enough of a deviation from their patent to protect you. Their patent is that narrow.
It's that easy to work around it. They're just protecting themselves from direct copycatting as a matter of routine.
Why is it that when I buy a mcdonalds lunch I pay for the lunch, then I (as a taxpayer) pay for the landfill their disposable (and questionably useful) materials fill up? Why do I pay for a monitor then pay for the lead shielding and toxic metals to be properly disposed of?
Why not require mcdonalds to pay the cost of disposal? Why not require huggies to pay the cost of disposal? Why not require Dell to pay for the cost of disposal? Why not require every manufacturer to pay the cost of disposal for their packaging - heck, lets force them to make everything strictly either recyclable or biodegradable.
Economically incentivize them to make useful, recyclable or biodegradable packaging. The prices for us would raise what? a couple pennies, maybe a nickle? In the meantime we could end the ridiculous land fill phenomenon.
Why do we continue giving corporations all the desireable rights of individuals, but deny them any of the responsibilities?
I suspect that the nature of the generation market means that the transmission grid is now under greater stress transporting cheaper power from far-flung places, as opposed to using more localised sources.
which means it's a... wait for it.... transmission problem.
if the problem is that there is dramatically more power on the line now than 50 years ago, and the transmission lines are failing - it's a transmission problem by definition.
a generation problem only includes failures to generate enough electricity. If you have rolling brownouts or blackouts because there isn't enough power to meet demand, that's a generation problem.
But that isn't whats been happening. during the US/Canada blackout, all plants were online (excepting the nuke plants which were shut down by procedure when the grid was dead).
NIMBY is stressing transmission and leading to serious quantities of waste as energy is lost on the line.
people don't want fossil plants, they don't want nuke plants, heck even the proposed wind farm on the nantucket sound is being blocked by the very politicians that play to a 'green' constituency.
This attitude is creating problems we can no longer pretend don't exist. Before we only had to suffer the energy wasted from unnecessary transmission distances. Now we have to suffer the fragility of the entire distribution system.
the -solution- is indeed a generation solution. It's to educate and inform communities that local municipality-run utilities are the only way to go. dependence on basics like power and water from another locale is dangerous, expensive and wasteful.
while my lights were out last month, my buddy's never were. I was sleeping on his couch, enjoying the AC while 50 million people floundered in the heat and hoarded water, because his city had the foresight to have local municpal power generation.
the 'correct' solution is hardly likely however. my recommendation for dealing with reality is: get as 'off the grid' as possible, because it will only get worse.
The space station shouldn't have been built. that was precisely the point. Not in its current form, there just isn't much use for it (apart from studying the long-term effects of weightlessness, but Mir was doing that admirably for years). It was built apart from purpose.
It was built because people spending tax dollars thought it sounded good. Were they attempting to create a space based solar power plant? Not really. Are they attempting to determine the feasability of simulated gravity enivornments? Not even close.
The reason that corporations don't just go into space is because there is a mind boggling overlapse of governmental agency jurisdiction over the necessary elements of space flight (DoT, DoC, NASA, FAA, etc). No-one can get permission to -try- let alone to work on getting the price down.
I agree 100% that unmanned is the most logical means for the near future. Until we have a goal and a plan that require human beings to leave earth, it's all better done by machine. Manned space flight is another in the list of -political- requirements.
For reference regarding the reality of privatization of space flight/launch: http://www.spacepolicy.org/page_jd 1099.html
France is not socialist. my comparison to france was purely on the level of near-socialist taxation levels. Raising american taxes to that level and socializing health care -would- by definition make the American system nearly identicle to France's system, because those are the two main differences.
Then I switched to talking about Russia, since it was the only government attempt a communist type nation in recent times. (I suppose I could have chosen early 'communist' china, before it went to their unique blend fo free-market communism)
I understand that Ccommunism is not socialism, and neither type of nation has ever existed. Russia was far from 'communist' in the strict sense, but what's the point of splitting hairs in the definition? When people talk about implimented communism, they think of the Russian system. That's the terminology that gets the point across and allows us to communicate. I'm not about to define every commonly held term in a post to slashdot. This isn't a doctoral thesis, it's my opinion.
I switched to examples from 'communist' Russia to demonstrate that when you extend government micromanagement to that level, you dont just slow down production, and innovation, you inversely affect motivation and efficiency.
America out-produced Russia. That's why we won. Human greed and economic freedom allowed us to innovate, experiment, produce, and invent at a greater speed than the singularly focused will of a nation with comparable resources. We also created a spectacular quantity of wealth and luxury (for -every- american, unless you think today's minimum wage worker isn't better off than that of 1942) in the process.
I would like to preserve our socioeconomic system thank you very much, I believe it works damn well. Feel free to disagree, but please leave the personal attacks out of it.
I didn't vote for Bush so don't lump me in with the bible thumping right just because it's convenient for you to assume there are only 2 points of view.
I have been unemployed. I have dealt with dental care while unemployed. I grew up uninsured.
I have had a not-successfully self-employed (uninsured) parent with emphysema and gone through the medical bills and ambulance bills and 24/7 o2 bills - and ultimately funeral expenses.
Yeah, I'm familiar with all the rough edges of our health industry. However, I'm also not so self-assured in my worldliness as to question the situation in which you grew up or experienced our health industry.
As for your comments about military budget overruns - that's entirely the province of the decision makers and the policy makers. They are deciding what is investigated or produced. They may run over their budget, but has there been an incident where the US ordered tanks or rifles or comm gear and the supplier didn't finish them on time, or came up short?
Yes, some of our prue research has proven to be chasing the implausible, so not every endeavor is an unqualified 'success'; the unknowable is awfully hard to predict that way. But Ssuch is the risk of all research.
On the other hand, much more of our research yields fantastical results unheard of anywhere else as government contractors have done nothing but bring prices down and quality up in the last century.
The distribution of wealth may look awfully uneven, but the fact that the free market has -created- wealth is unavoidable. Minimum wage may be vastly less than you or I currently earn, but the fact that one can afford luxuries such as consumer electronics, broadband, automobiles, their own living space, etc - on that wage, is remarkable.
The things that most people seem to take for granted, are not rights to be held by everyone. I never -went- on vacation till I finished college. I never lived on my own till I could afford all the bills associated with it (coincidentally while i was doing both work and school full time). I never owned a car till I purchased one on my own. I paid for my own education - no grants, no relatives, no trust funds. I had to haggle over the price of having my wisdom teeth extracted after I was downsized last year.
I like to think that I have a pretty good perspective on what life is like in America when you're both up and down. As such I have a slightly different view of what true luxury American living can provide.
And from my life and my experiences in America, all I can do is thank $deity that my grandparents had the foresight and perserverance to get here.
If you want to disagree, more power to you. My opinion is no more right or wrong than yours, and a big part of why I love america is that we're continually arguing and striving to make everything better.
I don't think your one experience with an obviously shady dentist you already didn't like is indicative of a failing in the entire American medical system. I find it curious you didn't even check another dentist in the area for pricing.
You don't blame the consumer electronics industry if the plasma TV at an audio/visual specialty shop in an affluent neighborhood is $10000. You most likely would find yourself a nearly-the-same $2000 off-brand plasma tv that meets all your needs at Best Buy.
That doesn't necessarily imply that the $3000 tv is equivalent. Yes, you probably -don't- actually -need- the $10000 tv's extra features/quality. And quite possibly, they aren't really existant or measureable.
But you would at least shop around right? If you're implying that all root canal's cost $1300, you are the misinformed one.
I grew up wholly uninsured - and I bet you your $30 root canal that if you called a bunch of area dentists you'd easily find one who'd do the job for $400 (which is bound to be the same percentage of a median US income that $30 is of a median Taiwanese income).
Medical care does not exclude shopping around, that's part of the free market.
The short-sighted and self-absorbed would-be pundits like to ignore the fact that being 'poor' in America is on par with being royalty elsewhere in the world.
A large part of the -created-wealth- in America comes from the devices and services that become affordable to everyone thanks to competition.
You may not be able to wear the latest fashions, or drive the latest car earning mimimum wage (which is far below the mean wage) - but you can easily afford a car (a pure luxury in most countries), apartment, television, computer, internet access, some of the highest quality foodstuffs in the world...
I find it deliciously ironic that these pseudo-socialist movements always seem to come, not from a populist uprising of the 'oppressed', but from people of money who profess to be behind the little guy - but have never donated time to a cause, never worked a soup kitchen, never bought a random 'poor' stranger a gift, and never actually -known- any other life besides that of luxury.
You know, the wealth I -worked- harder than you to earn.
The wealth I racked up student loan debt to get educated enough to earn.
The wealth I busted my ass doing overtime to get.
The wealth I -earned- by -creating- something.
Take away the incentive to create via socialist taxation levels - and America becomes France.
How much great art came out of Russia under communism? How much great technology did they invent? How productive were their workers? How many of them would have preferred their life to ours?
America's privatized health care has created the world's leading health care industry. Why do you think every foreigner who can afford to, comes to US clinics for surgeries or treatments?
Yes, americans don't all have the best insurance, or any at all for that matter - but the care you get uninsured for $40 at the outpatient clinic down the street is vastly better than what most of the world gets.
Competitive privatized industries have -never- been a disaster.
The simplest example, is comparing price/performance and advancement of the rail industry (government sanctioned monopolies) with the airline industry (competitive free market).
the 'disasters' you must be referring to regarding privatized prisons and energy production are not examples of privatized industry at all. They are the examples of a private company operating in a government funded monopoly. Privatized power generation in California hasn't hit a snag since the conversion was completed (which was caused by government imposed limits on power generation which were enacted before sufficient alternative companies had their generation online).
And while the bulk of the military itself has never been privatized (for the same reason the government hasn't - to keep policy decisions out of the hands of private industry and to keep soldier loyalty directly under the decision-makers), you would probably be amazed at how much -has- been privatized. The government hasn't made its own weapons (or commandeered industry to do it) since WWI - and the improvements in weapons and decreases in cost have been astronomical. Compare american military technological advancements to that of any other nation on the planet. These are all due to private industry research and development. Private industry air and ship capacity is also used to transfer military personnel and equipment overseas in times of high need. Then there's military body armor, telecommunications gear, medecine, reconnaissance, etc.
Contrary to your claim, free-market privatization has proven to be the biggest asset of every American endeavor it has been a part of.
the new 90nm process chips don't require hardcore cooling at 3ghz. Odds are the stock fan is quieter than your power supply.
'silent' machines are already possible (and being sold) with the mobile centrino processors, and available with fullspeed p4 processors in custom cases (certain SFF designs).
If you want quiet at today's speeds - you've already got it.
But since most corporate consumers are demanding more speed from tomorrow's chips, guess what Intel is giving them?
pundits have always said that 'most people' will never need 'x' generation specs. And they're probably right. In the utilitarian sense that exposes the irony of makign that statement using a GUI and a processor faster than ~40mhz to bicker in text on slashdot.
Unfortunately, since multimedia apps are becoming more feature rich (scripting in Flash), more detailed (larger data streams), more pervasive (sales and usage of video games and online trailers,etc keep growing), and more processor intensive (compressed datastreams) - that critique is being shown wrong faster than ever.
the capsule replacement was always intented purely to support a low earth orbit space station. a space station that congress didn't want to build. so the ultimate craft was designed to land like an airplane, and featured some fudged cost-effectiveness numbers so that it would be popular enough to greenlight. the resulting bureaucratic design being the cause of countless safety failures and unnecessary risks.
This BS ruined our capability to do much of anything for 20 years while we floundered until the ISS rekindled public interest in its primary function.
We got to the moon in 10 years because the people (and thereby elected officials) were behind it. NASA either has to fix its bureaucratic problems (impossible), privatize the space industry (desireable), or rekindle public interest in beating the Chinese to permanent moon settlement (short sighted, too expensive).
Look at the smaller cheaper autonomous initiative (good idea) at NASA that was popularized with the Mars Rover, and was subsequently killed in its crib by the follow-up failure of the polar lander (tragic).
The true irony is that NASA is organizationally incapable of doing things fast, or cheap, as the polar lander should have shown. All that money, all those procedures, committees, and double-checks - and still a small problem got by and resulted in the loss of a $100 million dollar craft and the priceless research it could have done.
The best solution is for space to become privatized. Public money is best spent elsewhere, and private industry is more suited to rapid expansion, evolution, and reaching cost effectiveness. Look at what the privatized airline industry did in only -50- years after the Wright brothers first flew. From Kitty Hawk to Chuck Yeager in nearly the same amount of time that we've been to the moon and done nothing.
Why should we continue to let Boeing and the like purely profit from programs like the x34 which get cut before they can produce. Why not share risk/reward more?
Consolidate the agencies with control over spacecraft (to make privatization pluasible), set rules regarding space related patents (to ensure that tech falls to the public domain quickly), and set -international- rules for extraplanetary rights and coordination.
I don't want to have to learn mandarin to vacation on Mars.
This apparently was why Peter Jackson felt he had to reorder so much of the content of the books so the film would be as chronological as possible.::sigh::
Slashdot Mirror
you don't like the idea of being able to run a fullscreen game in dx video mode and have your windowed apps (IM/IRC/winamp/etc) running and accessible on your secondary monitor?
alt-tab doesn't have to switch video modes, and switching over to another app, doing some 'work', and tabbing back is much faster. not to mention the benefits of being able to monitor downloads/network traffic/etc.
and that doesn't even take into account the additional cheating capabilities one could use in online gaming. i'd imagine having your hack app sitting on the secondary monitor (radar proxy, network packet disassembly, aiming proxy, etc) is quite preferrable (and cheaper than an entirely seperate machine for the same purpose).
I don't know many gamers who have actually used multimon setup that -dont- want a second monitor at home.
it's just the problem of weight, spacing and interference between 2 19" CRTs or being able to afford LCDs. LCDs also being nearly universally reviled for gaming purposes. excepting lan partying, where their weight and size are a huge benefit.
From NewScientist:
"If we resolved this and confirmed that space is finite, this would be an enormous step forward in our understanding of nature." -- mathematician Jeffrey Weeks from Canton, New York
i thought that most of our quantum theories hinged on the idea that the universe was infinite, and the multiple universes can and do interact.
if the universe is finite, and multiple universes can't interact, then string theory and gravity being a 4+ dimensional force (accounting for its perceived weakness compared to nuclear and electromagnetic forces) are pretty much out the window.
and in my opinion that's a pretty huge step -backwards- for our understanding, since quite a bit of research has been done with those theories as a foundation.
not to mention, if the universe is a finite, closed system, then entropy will slowly fill it entirely and definitively end it. (at least with regards to us)
sure, in the long run if this holds up it'd be a positive step for understanding - any discovery would be. but the immediate effect and implications would be profoundly negative.
All this Eolas guy did was clamp down on the independent browser makers -more-.
so MS figures out a workaround... due to the fact that IE holds 95% of the market, all the big plugin vendors will change their access methods to support the new workaround.
So web developers who wish maximum coverage (nearly all) will change their html code to support the new access method.
Then, either other browser vendors have to spend just as much money to maintain compatibility, or they lose the features on any site that has switched to support 95% of the internet.
And a small browser company's turnover time for making the change is going to be longer than MS, as they don't have the swarms of programmers. So it costs the independent software developers at least the same in programmer wages (excepting -purely- OSS browsers) to do the change, but costs them more in user-satisfaction and market-share as they have a longer time without the features, and they've lost programming time they could have been using to -improve- their own browser.
How much time has the Opera or Safari team already lost just doing CYA code reviews to ensure they're not in an exposed legal position?
And as for this altruistic notion that Eolas is only out to stop the Big Bad Guy... what happens if IE does lose market share to something like Opera? What happens when Eolas would suddenly decide that that Opera's business tactics weren't fair either?
There's too much legal risk for a browser developer to -not- migrate to supporting the new method right away. Sure, they'll probably be backwards compatible to the old way - but what web developer wants to embed an activex plugin in their web content that is unusable to 95% of their potential market?
Keep in mind that this new plugin requirement only needs to displays an 'Ok' box in the event that the plugin data is remote. Meaning if you go to homestarrunner.com and watch an sbemail flash movie hosted from homestarrunner.com - there's no messagebox; it's still a seamless experience.
So what does this mean? Well... it does mean that you'll have to click Ok once for every remotely hosted activex ad (nightmare).
I myself tend to think that web hosts would sooner drop plugin ads, or start hosting locally long before they'd suffer through potentially losing 95% of their viewers.
(I certainly hope that IE ads a config option so I can disable remote activex data streams altogether. That'd be a pretty good adblocker. I guess there may be a silver lining.)
It loads a custom device driver via 'autorun' when you stick the CD in.
So if you hold shift, disable autorun, or run an OS that doesn't do autorun, the CD might as well have no copy protection whatsoever.
This is about as effective as putting a sticker on the front that says 'Pretty please do not attempt to extract data from this CD on your computer'.
I wonder how much money this company got for their incredibly secure DRM system...
spam - and what defines spam - isn't the pertinant question. The important fact is that spammers exploiting SMTP make 'opting out' impossible.
There is too much assumed honesty in SMTP.
Yes, it was a key factor in getting everything going, and yes, its beauty is in its simplicity.
however, much like open relays, this assumed honesty has outlived its usefulness. It is being corrupted to a degree unforseeable by the original protocol architects, and it is time for something new.
I don't pretend to know the specifics to building a secure, unexploitable system. And it would almost certainly be a messy conversion. That shouldn't mean that it isn't worth doing.
Let each user and ISP decide for themselves what spam is. But we need a secure email system so that when Spam is identified, that particular sender can be effectively blocked.
Yes, players need tools. If a game allows a player to build a wall - someone will inevitably trap another player inside a box to torment them.
So the game needs to allow you to also -break- anything that can be built.
If a player can lock or block a door, they will find a way to lock another player on the wrong side of the door intentionally. Therefore the game needs to allow you to -push- such barriers.
the problem of course is that - even with all the right tools, if someone treats you like a complete *sshole, I'll never know it. They could have spent 4 hours trapping people in boxes, and I would treat them like anyone else if I hadn't seen it or happened to be in your immediate circle of friends.
massmog communities are too loose. Only 10-20% of players on any given server are playing at any one time. the odds of an effective server-wide community notification system are pretty slim.
So what's a good solution? karma. an aura. perhaps only visible with a skill or spell.
Every day that a player logs in, they have some karma points to spend on other players. positively or negatively.
you simply institute a law of diminishing returns, so that no one person or small group of people can give you enough karma to undo the negative karma a large group of people gave you - and there you have it. (probably put an upper cap on the amt of negative or positive karma a single person can give you and weight it)
you could even make it so that a person with negative karma themselves has their outgoing karma points reduced in 'worth'. so if an indescriminate killer calls you a jerk - it means even less.
Don't allow karma to gradually return to neutral over time (easily exploited). And most importantly -never- automatically assume any given action in-game is inherently good or bad karma. Leave it up to the players to decide.
You may have started a pvp fight with another player - but they may have stolen from you, or been hassling you. It could very well be justified. The game code can't possibly know - but a witness could.
You may likewise have killed a killer - but you could have done it out of greed or malice or an attempt to game the system. If no trustworthy witness deems it 'good', then there's no reason to assume it was.
The actions themselves can't be coded good or bad (UO's failed notoriety system being the prime example). Only another player has the proper context to interpret that.
Because Daedalus was the worrywort engineer who kept trying to prevent Icarus from flying to close to the sun and getting himself in trouble?
It'd be a much better analogy from that angle - as it would equate the file sharers to Icarus, the wings to Kazaa and the Sun to the RIAA.
Calling the watchdog app Icarus... well it's just begging to fall into the Ocean and drown.
or maybe that was their actual intent...
judging from reloaded, when the reviews start to hit for revolutions - the wind will be completely out of the franchise's sails.
the international demand at release would have totally fizzled with a traditional release scheme.
looking at the numbers, the US gross for the first matrix was about 30% of the worldwide grosses (US:$171m, world:$450) and the US gross for reloaded was still about 30% of the worldwide(US:$281m, world:$738m).
Then consider that the first film made the bulk of its money fairly evenly over time, as word of mouth about it being good took time to get around.
In stark contrast, the second made $200m in the first 2 weeks. (with the 5 week total of $258m).
It's huge rate of dropoff is heavily indicative of the very negative reaction the bulk of the fans gave it.
(Weekly box office data not available for the original.)
source
My guess is they're just protecting themselves from a possible implosion in their biggest audience.
Whether or not the movie will be good is up for debate - but decisions like this come from suits who look only at the numbers.
the point is that you can't use a hacked client on the xbox live network. so the xbox live version will be the only one that can be considered a level playing field. (which is one of my favorite features of their network anyway)
well, you -can- mod the xbox to allow a hacked client to load - but then xbox live will block your modded box. i suppose its possible that eventually people will reverse engineer how MS is detecting modded boxes and spoof that check too.
but in the meantime, on xbox live, with no hacked clients you can at least enjoy the fair competition.
(until the hackers can overwhelm MS resources and get modded boxes onto XBL - but by then we'll likely be playing on the xbox2.
I tend to disagree that there is no inventive step in their process.
I think the idea that the repository potentially holds additional instructions to request further diagnostic information is a suitably inventive step. Eg A request to record particular data locations not generally gathered for every crash, but requested for a particular app/platform/exception type.
I don't think that step is immediately obvious, and it definitely increases the effectiveness of the system. The fact that IBM has had a phone-home system for decades and never implemented such a feature should be demonstrative of the non-obviousness.
Furthermore, their copious documentation of existing systems is definitely on the up and up, and I don't see how they would be able to leverage this patent in an anticompetitive fashion.
Other companies are free to have automated phone-home systems, even systems that automatically download patches. So long as their particular process isn't step by step identical to this one.
Of course I'm not trying to 'convince' anyone - I'm just stating my opinion. I can be, have been, and doubtlessly will again - be wrong.
The original post was primarily in response to the inane 'prior art' posts that weren't even dealing with the issue and get mindlessly slammed en masse on any patent article thread.
I'm not up on my gnome utils - but if it predated MS' phone home implementation (first released with XP i believe, though possibly in some distros of 2k server) then it woudl indeed be prior art.
remember, this patent -only- covers the exact steps listed. So if another phone-home app didn't host fixes in their repository, or didn't allow automatic install of those fixes, or didn't check the repository for requested additional info then it is not at all affected.
Phone home itself is an obvious application.
MS was granted a patent on a very specific phone home -implementation-.
I hate bad software patents as much as the next guy, and that's why I took it upon myself to get educated on the process and language; and that's why I -read- these patents.
Their patent covers a phone-home architecutre that:
. detects the failure (via exception handling)
. locates the source of the failure
. -asks the user if they want to allow phone home-
. phones home to a repository (if allowed)
. looks up the failure in the repository to determine if there is any request for additional information to gather for that particular type of failure (or by particular application that failed)
. gathers the requested additional information from the failed machine
. transmits all the desired information to the repository.
. searches the repository for any existing fix for the problem
. transmitting the fix to the failed machine and applying it
. if no preexisting instance of the failure exists, creating a new instance
further, the repository can be local or remote, as specified in a setting located on the client machine.
If IBM's system has done all this prior to microsoft's - then fine, it's prior art. But in my experience, that is well beyond the capabilities of IBM's 'phone home' system.
If you make a phone home system, so long as you don't -exactly- copy their implementation it's fine.
If you even didn't offer the user a choice to phone home, that would be enough of a deviation from their patent to protect you. Their patent is that narrow.
It's that easy to work around it. They're just protecting themselves from direct copycatting as a matter of routine.
For all products, not just computers.
Why is it that when I buy a mcdonalds lunch I pay for the lunch, then I (as a taxpayer) pay for the landfill their disposable (and questionably useful) materials fill up? Why do I pay for a monitor then pay for the lead shielding and toxic metals to be properly disposed of?
Why not require mcdonalds to pay the cost of disposal? Why not require huggies to pay the cost of disposal? Why not require Dell to pay for the cost of disposal? Why not require every manufacturer to pay the cost of disposal for their packaging - heck, lets force them to make everything strictly either recyclable or biodegradable.
Economically incentivize them to make useful, recyclable or biodegradable packaging. The prices for us would raise what? a couple pennies, maybe a nickle? In the meantime we could end the ridiculous land fill phenomenon.
Why do we continue giving corporations all the desireable rights of individuals, but deny them any of the responsibilities?
you could dump the data to a pda and have an on-dash radar visual of the traffic surrounding your car.
no more 'objects in mirrors' BS, folks lurking in your blind spot, or parking incidents...
I suppose alternately you could mount it on your house and be the local lookout post for the foil-hat crowd...
I suspect that the nature of the generation market means that the transmission grid is now under greater stress transporting cheaper power from far-flung places, as opposed to using more localised sources.
which means it's a... wait for it.... transmission problem.
if the problem is that there is dramatically more power on the line now than 50 years ago, and the transmission lines are failing - it's a transmission problem by definition.
a generation problem only includes failures to generate enough electricity. If you have rolling brownouts or blackouts because there isn't enough power to meet demand, that's a generation problem.
But that isn't whats been happening. during the US/Canada blackout, all plants were online (excepting the nuke plants which were shut down by procedure when the grid was dead).
NIMBY is stressing transmission and leading to serious quantities of waste as energy is lost on the line.
people don't want fossil plants, they don't want nuke plants, heck even the proposed wind farm on the nantucket sound is being blocked by the very politicians that play to a 'green' constituency.
This attitude is creating problems we can no longer pretend don't exist. Before we only had to suffer the energy wasted from unnecessary transmission distances. Now we have to suffer the fragility of the entire distribution system.
the -solution- is indeed a generation solution. It's to educate and inform communities that local municipality-run utilities are the only way to go. dependence on basics like power and water from another locale is dangerous, expensive and wasteful.
while my lights were out last month, my buddy's never were. I was sleeping on his couch, enjoying the AC while 50 million people floundered in the heat and hoarded water, because his city had the foresight to have local municpal power generation.
the 'correct' solution is hardly likely however.
my recommendation for dealing with reality is: get as 'off the grid' as possible, because it will only get worse.
The space station shouldn't have been built. that was precisely the point. Not in its current form, there just isn't much use for it (apart from studying the long-term effects of weightlessness, but Mir was doing that admirably for years). It was built apart from purpose.
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It was built because people spending tax dollars thought it sounded good. Were they attempting to create a space based solar power plant? Not really. Are they attempting to determine the feasability of simulated gravity enivornments? Not even close.
The reason that corporations don't just go into space is because there is a mind boggling overlapse of governmental agency jurisdiction over the necessary elements of space flight (DoT, DoC, NASA, FAA, etc). No-one can get permission to -try- let alone to work on getting the price down.
I agree 100% that unmanned is the most logical means for the near future. Until we have a goal and a plan that require human beings to leave earth, it's all better done by machine. Manned space flight is another in the list of -political- requirements.
For reference regarding the reality of privatization of space flight/launch:
http://www.spacepolicy.org/page_j
France is not socialist. my comparison to france was purely on the level of near-socialist taxation levels. Raising american taxes to that level and socializing health care -would- by definition make the American system nearly identicle to France's system, because those are the two main differences.
Then I switched to talking about Russia, since it was the only government attempt a communist type nation in recent times. (I suppose I could have chosen early 'communist' china, before it went to their unique blend fo free-market communism)
I understand that Ccommunism is not socialism, and neither type of nation has ever existed. Russia was far from 'communist' in the strict sense, but what's the point of splitting hairs in the definition? When people talk about implimented communism, they think of the Russian system. That's the terminology that gets the point across and allows us to communicate. I'm not about to define every commonly held term in a post to slashdot. This isn't a doctoral thesis, it's my opinion.
I switched to examples from 'communist' Russia to demonstrate that when you extend government micromanagement to that level, you dont just slow down production, and innovation, you inversely affect motivation and efficiency.
America out-produced Russia. That's why we won. Human greed and economic freedom allowed us to innovate, experiment, produce, and invent at a greater speed than the singularly focused will of a nation with comparable resources. We also created a spectacular quantity of wealth and luxury (for -every- american, unless you think today's minimum wage worker isn't better off than that of 1942) in the process.
I would like to preserve our socioeconomic system thank you very much, I believe it works damn well. Feel free to disagree, but please leave the personal attacks out of it.
I didn't vote for Bush so don't lump me in with the bible thumping right just because it's convenient for you to assume there are only 2 points of view.
I have been unemployed. I have dealt with dental care while unemployed. I grew up uninsured.
I have had a not-successfully self-employed (uninsured) parent with emphysema and gone through the medical bills and ambulance bills and 24/7 o2 bills - and ultimately funeral expenses.
Yeah, I'm familiar with all the rough edges of our health industry. However, I'm also not so self-assured in my worldliness as to question the situation in which you grew up or experienced our health industry.
As for your comments about military budget overruns - that's entirely the province of the decision makers and the policy makers. They are deciding what is investigated or produced. They may run over their budget, but has there been an incident where the US ordered tanks or rifles or comm gear and the supplier didn't finish them on time, or came up short?
Yes, some of our prue research has proven to be chasing the implausible, so not every endeavor is an unqualified 'success'; the unknowable is awfully hard to predict that way. But Ssuch is the risk of all research.
On the other hand, much more of our research yields fantastical results unheard of anywhere else as government contractors have done nothing but bring prices down and quality up in the last century.
The distribution of wealth may look awfully uneven, but the fact that the free market has -created- wealth is unavoidable. Minimum wage may be vastly less than you or I currently earn, but the fact that one can afford luxuries such as consumer electronics, broadband, automobiles, their own living space, etc - on that wage, is remarkable.
The things that most people seem to take for granted, are not rights to be held by everyone. I never -went- on vacation till I finished college. I never lived on my own till I could afford all the bills associated with it (coincidentally while i was doing both work and school full time). I never owned a car till I purchased one on my own. I paid for my own education - no grants, no relatives, no trust funds. I had to haggle over the price of having my wisdom teeth extracted after I was downsized last year.
I like to think that I have a pretty good perspective on what life is like in America when you're both up and down. As such I have a slightly different view of what true luxury American living can provide.
And from my life and my experiences in America, all I can do is thank $deity that my grandparents had the foresight and perserverance to get here.
If you want to disagree, more power to you. My opinion is no more right or wrong than yours, and a big part of why I love america is that we're continually arguing and striving to make everything better.
I don't think your one experience with an obviously shady dentist you already didn't like is indicative of a failing in the entire American medical system. I find it curious you didn't even check another dentist in the area for pricing.
You don't blame the consumer electronics industry if the plasma TV at an audio/visual specialty shop in an affluent neighborhood is $10000. You most likely would find yourself a nearly-the-same $2000 off-brand plasma tv that meets all your needs at Best Buy.
That doesn't necessarily imply that the $3000 tv is equivalent. Yes, you probably -don't- actually -need- the $10000 tv's extra features/quality. And quite possibly, they aren't really existant or measureable.
But you would at least shop around right?
If you're implying that all root canal's cost $1300, you are the misinformed one.
I grew up wholly uninsured - and I bet you your $30 root canal that if you called a bunch of area dentists you'd easily find one who'd do the job for $400 (which is bound to be the same percentage of a median US income that $30 is of a median Taiwanese income).
Medical care does not exclude shopping around, that's part of the free market.
The short-sighted and self-absorbed would-be pundits like to ignore the fact that being 'poor' in America is on par with being royalty elsewhere in the world.
A large part of the -created-wealth- in America comes from the devices and services that become affordable to everyone thanks to competition.
You may not be able to wear the latest fashions, or drive the latest car earning mimimum wage (which is far below the mean wage) - but you can easily afford a car (a pure luxury in most countries), apartment, television, computer, internet access, some of the highest quality foodstuffs in the world...
I find it deliciously ironic that these pseudo-socialist movements always seem to come, not from a populist uprising of the 'oppressed', but from people of money who profess to be behind the little guy - but have never donated time to a cause, never worked a soup kitchen, never bought a random 'poor' stranger a gift, and never actually -known- any other life besides that of luxury.
my wealth.
You know, the wealth I -worked- harder than you to earn.
The wealth I racked up student loan debt to get educated enough to earn.
The wealth I busted my ass doing overtime to get.
The wealth I -earned- by -creating- something.
Take away the incentive to create via socialist taxation levels - and America becomes France.
How much great art came out of Russia under communism? How much great technology did they invent? How productive were their workers?
How many of them would have preferred their life to ours?
America's privatized health care has created the world's leading health care industry. Why do you think every foreigner who can afford to, comes to US clinics for surgeries or treatments?
Yes, americans don't all have the best insurance, or any at all for that matter - but the care you get uninsured for $40 at the outpatient clinic down the street is vastly better than what most of the world gets.
Competitive privatized industries have -never- been a disaster.
The simplest example, is comparing price/performance and advancement of the rail industry (government sanctioned monopolies) with the airline industry (competitive free market).
the 'disasters' you must be referring to regarding privatized prisons and energy production are not examples of privatized industry at all. They are the examples of a private company operating in a government funded monopoly. Privatized power generation in California hasn't hit a snag since the conversion was completed (which was caused by government imposed limits on power generation which were enacted before sufficient alternative companies had their generation online).
And while the bulk of the military itself has never been privatized (for the same reason the government hasn't - to keep policy decisions out of the hands of private industry and to keep soldier loyalty directly under the decision-makers), you would probably be amazed at how much -has- been privatized. The government hasn't made its own weapons (or commandeered industry to do it) since WWI - and the improvements in weapons and decreases in cost have been astronomical. Compare american military technological advancements to that of any other nation on the planet. These are all due to private industry research and development.
Private industry air and ship capacity is also used to transfer military personnel and equipment overseas in times of high need. Then there's military body armor, telecommunications gear, medecine, reconnaissance, etc.
Contrary to your claim, free-market privatization has proven to be the biggest asset of every American endeavor it has been a part of.
the new 90nm process chips don't require hardcore cooling at 3ghz. Odds are the stock fan is quieter than your power supply.
'silent' machines are already possible (and being sold) with the mobile centrino processors, and available with fullspeed p4 processors in custom cases (certain SFF designs).
If you want quiet at today's speeds - you've already got it.
But since most corporate consumers are demanding more speed from tomorrow's chips, guess what Intel is giving them?
pundits have always said that 'most people' will never need 'x' generation specs. And they're probably right. In the utilitarian sense that exposes the irony of makign that statement using a GUI and a processor faster than ~40mhz to bicker in text on slashdot.
Unfortunately, since multimedia apps are becoming more feature rich (scripting in Flash), more detailed (larger data streams), more pervasive (sales and usage of video games and online trailers,etc keep growing), and more processor intensive (compressed datastreams) - that critique is being shown wrong faster than ever.
because it's a heavily politicized bureaucracy.
the capsule replacement was always intented purely to support a low earth orbit space station. a space station that congress didn't want to build. so the ultimate craft was designed to land like an airplane, and featured some fudged cost-effectiveness numbers so that it would be popular enough to greenlight. the resulting bureaucratic design being the cause of countless safety failures and unnecessary risks.
This BS ruined our capability to do much of anything for 20 years while we floundered until the ISS rekindled public interest in its primary function.
We got to the moon in 10 years because the people (and thereby elected officials) were behind it. NASA either has to fix its bureaucratic problems (impossible), privatize the space industry (desireable), or rekindle public interest in beating the Chinese to permanent moon settlement (short sighted, too expensive).
Look at the smaller cheaper autonomous initiative (good idea) at NASA that was popularized with the Mars Rover, and was subsequently killed in its crib by the follow-up failure of the polar lander (tragic).
The true irony is that NASA is organizationally incapable of doing things fast, or cheap, as the polar lander should have shown. All that money, all those procedures, committees, and double-checks - and still a small problem got by and resulted in the loss of a $100 million dollar craft and the priceless research it could have done.
The best solution is for space to become privatized. Public money is best spent elsewhere, and private industry is more suited to rapid expansion, evolution, and reaching cost effectiveness. Look at what the privatized airline industry did in only -50- years after the Wright brothers first flew. From Kitty Hawk to Chuck Yeager in nearly the same amount of time that we've been to the moon and done nothing.
Why should we continue to let Boeing and the like purely profit from programs like the x34 which get cut before they can produce. Why not share risk/reward more?
Consolidate the agencies with control over spacecraft (to make privatization pluasible), set rules regarding space related patents (to ensure that tech falls to the public domain quickly), and set -international- rules for extraplanetary rights and coordination.
I don't want to have to learn mandarin to vacation on Mars.
This apparently was why Peter Jackson felt he had to reorder so much of the content of the books so the film would be as chronological as possible. ::sigh::