Many service providers have been offering ultra-cheap connections to catch a larger portion of "market share". Eventually they're going to realise that they've got as much market share as they can, and they will start charging what it actually costs them.
I don't like per-megabyte charges at all, but when you're selling concentrated pipe the only alternative is to cap bandwidth utilisation. For example, rather than setting a 3Gb/month cap, set maximum utilisation at 1% (since in Telstra's case, they've oversubscribed their upstream bandwidth several hundred times).
Just because you have a 512kbps pipe to your house, doesn't mean you have 512kbps to use. The upstream bandwidth for 100 customers might only be 1Mbps. The ISP/telco's way of coping with this is to charge enough to support or even expand the upstream bandwidth (or just pay lots of dividends to their shareholders).
The monthly fee you pay for your ADSL doesn't mean that you actually have huge bandwidth to the Internet.
Hey... don't suppose you can point us to the Debian mirror? I've searched for "Debian Mirror" on the Telescum Bigpong site, and I only ever get references to articles about experiments with light and shiny surfaces.
In the article, the author proposes a future where "open/free software" has been made illegal. The only software you're allowed to run is what Microsoft provides you. There are no features to disable JavaScript. You are a slave to the media and they to Microsoft. You have no ability to change settings like/etc/hosts. You cannot install JunkBuster or Jesred. You have no power.
After all, if you had the ability to control your computer, you'd also have the ability to create or alter data ("content"). If you have the ability to create or alter content, you also have the ability to steal content. That's what SSSCA and DRM is all about - preventing "theft" of "intellectual property" by removing your ability to make the choice to not steal.
The reality for Internet users in Australia is that traffic costs a minimum of $0.13/Mb.
The ACCC is fighting to make Region Encoding of DVDs illegal in Australia - claiming that it's an anti-competitive trade practice.
I browse with images off as often as possible, because images cost ten times as much as the article they're obscuring. Spam costs me money. Running "apt-get upgrade" on my Debian box will cost me about $3-$10, depending on how much "woody" has changed in the last fortnight.
Opening Internet Explorer costs me money because it insists on redirecting me to the Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 home page and claiming that I really, really should download this new version of IE.
Thanks to spam, "postcards", NTP, scheduled IMAP checks and other non-interactive traffic, I can easily spend $1/hour when I'm sleeping. I don't even have to check my mail in the morning to start racking up the bills.
You people in the USA are living in a market-share-broadening dreamland, where providers are tripping over each other in an attempt to get you signed up to their networks. They all realise that once you've been using their service for 6 months "for free", they can start charging for traffic, and you'll just roll over and accept it like the good consumer-sheep you are.
In any Capitalist economy, you have to keep repeating this holy mantra - "The money has to come from somewhere. There is no such thing as a free lunch."
Not so long ago, in a land not so far away, there was a period of radical change which we now know as "The Industrial Revolution".
Some people invented machines that made it possible to make bulk copies of a particular textile. There were knitting machines and weaving machines and even sewing machines. These machines were superb at exact reproduction of a particular knit, weave or stitch.
Naturally, lots of textiles workers expected that they'd be put out of business by these machines, so they attempted to ban the machines. When that didn't work, they just went out and vandalised the machines.
Now look at the world 200 years after those events.
The best suits and dresses are still hand made. Humans are still required to create the original product, the machines can't create appealing garments by themselves.
Imagine where the world would be today if the textiles industry associations had convinced the Governments of the time to outlaw these machines which are used to steal their business?
The SSSCA is designed to protect a business model, not intellectual property. I do agree with the rights of content creators to have some protection from exploitation - it is illegal to claim ownership of someone else's work. I do not agree that businesses have any reason to expect that their business models should be protected.
Just imagine if your taxes were being used to protect Digital Convergence from their own stupidity.
I was a silly little duffer, and had my system do an "apt-get upgrade --download-only" every day at 6am (while I'm going to sleep). My reasoning was that when I got around to doing the "upgrade -u", I wouldn't have to wait forever for the downloads to occur.
The catch with that is that I'm in Australia - we're charged per megabyte for downloads (regardless of the ISP). Most ISPs offer a "free download" limit, so that you don't feel like you're paying per-MB from the first MB. Thus I woke up one day to find that my Debian boxes had consumed half my monthly "free download" quota on the first day of the month.
D'Oh!
And just in case anyone cares - the ISP in question is indeed Telstra BigPond. The very same people who refuse to give me an answer to the simple question, "Is traffic between ADSL customers on Telstra BigPond Freedom Plans billable?"
Latency aside, my arithmetic errors aside, the good ol' Jumbo-full-of-DDS still faces the problems of loading and unloading the data to and from the tapes (or DVDs in this case).
Which makes me wonder - what is going to be feeding this pipe?
Retail GPS systems such as the Garmin GPS II and III can provide resolutions down to 1 metre, with a positional error down to 4m.
IMHO, the hard part of Dorothy's work isn't figuring out how to extract a key from a set of numbers that are only close to the expected key value - no, the hard part of Dorothy's work is finding people who are silly enough to believe that this system would provide any real form of security.
Even worse than not providing security at all, imagine the instance where a signal is intercepted on the battlefield. "The Enemy" cracks the message, which means they now have the key. That means they now know exactly where to land their next volley of incendiary mortars.
(a) from within the application program running in the general purpose computer, a user issuing one of a "close," "save" or "save as" command for the document using the user input device;
Doesn't that sound like any generic application these days? Can we say "File/Save" anyone (or for the CLI people using vi, ":w"? So this part of this claim applies to practically any desktop application. What they are describing here is existing infrastructure, and nothing that could be considered to be characteristic of their own invention.
(b) automatically translating the command into an event;
Once again, any desktop application. Most GUIs I know are event based, so any menu action is always sent to the application as an event. This even generation process is transparent to the application itself. Once again, hardly unique or original, and definately not an indicator that a particular system is like their own.
(c) the crypto module automatically trapping the event;
One could achieve this by using, say, stegfs. The crypto module is part of the file system driver - it traps the events being sent to things like "open" or "write". There is a catch here - perhaps you could argue that, in order to be covered by this patent, the crypto package would have to intercept the "File/Save" event before that event actually got to the application.
(d) the crypto module automatically obtaining an encryption key value;
Like, say, obtaining a PGP key from a keystore using a cached passphrase? Or perhaps a passphrase that was specified at the time that the steganographic file system was mounted?
Perhaps their system is even more primitive - they pop up a dialog box and ask the user for a passphrase on the spot.
PGPDisk was doing all the stuff up to here a long time ago. So the claim so far sounds very unobvious and definitely not novel.
(e) the crypto module automatically encrypting the document using the encryption key value;
I only wonder if they mean "automatically" as opposed to "manually", or "automatically" as compared to "mechanically" or "algorithmically". To me it sounds like this claim is redundant and obvious. Encrypting the document using any other values than the ones provided by the crypto keys is pretty useless.
(f) the crypto module automatically passing control to an electronic document management system;
What do they mean by "electronic document management system"? A file system is a DMS. Are they just using obfuscated language here, or do they have a particular thing in mind when they say "electronic document management system"? If their patent suits are anything to go by (that link from another response to the original story, BTW), they mean "file system".
(g) the electronic document management system executing the issued "close," "save" or "save as" command;
That's what a DMS would normally do anyway, surely? You could escape this patent by having your encryption module issue its own "save" command, after intercepting the system's own "save" command.
Of course, letting an Electronic Document Management System do the things it's supposed to do is hardly a novel concept.
The Last Paragraph
Then we get to the interesting bit - right at the end:
Although
exemplary[1] embodiments of the present invention have been shown and described, it will be apparent to those having ordinary skill in the art that a number of changes, modifications, or alterations to the invention as described herein may be made, none of which depart from the spirit of the present invention. All such changes, modifications and alterations should therefore be seen as within the scope of the present invention.
Thus they are claiming that anything which looks something like this system is also covered by this patent - they're redefining patent law!
[1] They don't even know that a system built as described in their patent would work. exemplary in sense 3 implies that these guys have built a patent on top of a proof-of-concept.
Here are some of the things I like about Mac OS X:
I can run my Mac OS 9 applications (albeit a tad slower than native Mac OS 9)
I can run GNU tools on the command line
I can use SSH to remotely control my Macintosh
I can run X Windows Applications locally or remotely
I can do Java development using command line tools like "vim", "javac"
That's just the things that matter most to me right now, out of the box.
Oh... one final point I almost forgot - the Aqua interface looks pretty cool. For a while. Failing all else, you can pick up "themes" through MetamorphX from CharonSoft.
Mac OS X is very functional. It's as functional for my purposes than Linux on my PC running WindowMaker or Enlightenment.
As for your last statement - can you provide evidence to support this claim? I don't think Sony approaches the topic the same way you do. I don't think the Ubiquitous Computing folks approach this topic the same way you do either.
First off - lesson number one on the Internet is, "Trust No One." If you're going to be doing critical calculations, you'll want to do each calculation on at least three different machines, then accept the results if and only if all three agree. Thus if each calculation was worth $0.03, each provider would only be awarded $0.01 - and then only if all three providers returned the same value.
Secondly - for distributed backup to be useful, and resilient against nodes appearing and disappearing, you'd have to have multiple backups. If you only had 2 copies of all data on the ISOS file systems, you're still talking about having client machines that have 2/3 of their disk space dedicated to the distributed backup system - for other people's backups, not yours.
There is no means here for a provider to make a profit from this system fi they are also a consumer.
Thus the best place for this kind of system is where the provider is not aiming to make a profit, and has the extra disk space and processor time lying around unused. Large corporations with hundreds of PCs on desktops could benefit from this. Home users won't.
There certainly isn't any room to be hopeful of making a profit from the micropayment system proposed. There's a 3:1 ratio of expenditure to income, in the best case scenario of only having triple redundancy of calculations and storage. Certainly, if you're only providing services you might stand to make some small profit - but don't forget that you're still paying for the network traffic, electricity, and insurance for the processing capital.
Here in Australia, for example, I'd want to be paid $0.19/Mb for traffic generated (in both directions) by the ISOS system, otherwise I'd be losing money hand over fist. Electricity is about $0.08/kWh, which means a 300W machine would cost $5.76/day to run. Insurance on the hardware costs about $100/year, and this doesn't cover lightning or "Act of God."
I don't know how these costs compare to someone who is housing and feeding a mainframe, but I expect the economies of scale would ensure that a mainframe is cheaper per calculation than a home PC. If that is true, ISOS is (once again) really only of use to people who already have those PCs sitting on desks doing nothing.
He wasn't repeating the tired old saw about how CLIs are easy to use.
Michi was pointing out that even a well-designed GUI won't help someone who hasn't got a clue about what they're supposed to be doing.
You can actually cause more damage by putting a well-designed GUI in front of a clueless one. They don't have to guess about what commands are available - the commands are all right there in front of them.
"Let's see... I want to add a new account, what's this 'root privilege' check box? I'd better check it just in case..."
GUIs don't make life easier unless you actually know what you're doing, *AND* the GUI designer knew what they were doing too.
Brain Surgery is about knowing what you're doing. You can't just open up someone's head and start poking around until you've fixed whatever bug it was that made surgery necessary. Unless you know what you're doing, you're more likely to break things than fix things.
So too, any non-trivial programming task requires that you know what you're doing. You need to be familiar with the tools (what they can do, what they can't), you need to be familiar with the problem domain. You need to know common problem solving techniques.
Learning how to use a scalpel doesn't make you a brain surgeon. Neither does learning how to use gcc make you a software engineer.
Forget about the lives at risk - that's just a strawman argument.
There's an old saying, "those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it." A lot of what makes a good Software Engineer is knowing relevant history. You can't learn the history of software design from a Dummy's Guide to C++.
Telephone switching was once only achievable by having humans sticking plugs into sockets. Now we have complex robots (called "telephone exchanges") that do this for us.
Someone had to know how to make an F16 fly. The computer doesn't just make it magically possible. What the computer does do is make it possible to perform all the real-time calculations that are required to get from "pilot moves joystick left" to the minute details of "adjust left aileron up 2 degrees, adjust right aieleron down 2 degrees".
Utility services such as electricity, sewage, water and gas were supplied using human-controlled pipelines and valves long before computers came onto the scene. With the advent of modern technology, we just don't need to have a gas-company employee on every street corner ready to open or close the appropriate valves.
The entire Internet could easily be implemented using humans instead of routers. Just don't expect latencies lower than three minutes, or data throughput higher than 200 characters per minute. The automation of the Internet allows much lower latencies and much higher throughput. There's nothing magical about the Internet - it's just lots of routers and switches operating in a predetermined fashion. Routers only make decisions based on a set of rules - they are not creative thinkers.
I believe that what Michi is getting at is that computers allow you to automate repetitive tasks, and make calculations much faster than is possible for a human with a pen and paper, but they don't make you more creative.
A computer cannot possibly make you know how to do stuff that you didn't know how to do. If you don't know how to write a prize-winning novel, a computer can't magically write one for you. All the computer can do is make it easier for you to store your ideas for the book, and keep track of all the different revisions of the book as you're writing it.
Computers cannot replace the creative process. They cannot make design decisions. All they can do is automate repetitive tasks, and perform calculations much quicker than you can.
All the examples you've given are samples of automation, not of creativity.
I'm guessing that what Michi Henning was getting at is that source code on its own is useless.
What matters is knowing:
What the code is supposed to do
What design decisions were made before the source code was written
What is the architecture of the system that the source code is trying to implement
It's usually very hard to learn as much from reading the source code as from reading the architecture and design documents. Once you know what decisions led to this source code being written, you really don't need the source code itself.
In the context of advancing Computing Science or the IT industry, it's more important to know about the design decisions, the gotchas that were discovered, and the history of good and bad choices made through the production of a piece of software, than it is to know exactly how one particular piece of software is built.
The short version: I think Michi Henning is pointing out that it's DESIGN, not IMPLEMENTATION that we should be concerned with.
We became such "elitists" about the same time that Outlook insisted on being a major virus vector.
Outlook is not a mail client. It is a virus vector, specifically designed to spread viruses as quickly as possible.
By preventing Outlook and OE from posting to your mailing lists, you can save yourself and your subscribers a whole world of hurt.
Structuring your email in such a way that Outlook can't read it (but everyone else can) is as much a statement of opinion as it is a warning to people that Outlook has many bugs.
Katz isn't arguing that the censorship tools are bad. He's arguing that the use to which they're being put - and more importantly the amount of support that American companies are providing - is contradictory to his ideals of freedom of information.
In fact, the uses to which these tools are being put are contradictory to basic Human Rights - such as freedom from religious persecution, and freedom to access education.
It'd be a different outcome if these companies were supplying software to the Taliban, wouldn't it?
Imagine an arms dealer using the same excuse - "We're just selling guns to Al-Quaeda. We're not responsible for what use they're being put to." I think Dubya disagrees with that sentiment. Just can't wait till the entire CIA is in court on Terrorism charges for supplying arms to Al-Quaeda, the Taliban and the Mujahadeen.
I don't agree. The "News" is evil, carrying stories for the sake of sensationalism rather than for any value to the viewer.
The only time I've ever seen a human beheaded was on the 6pm news. The article was about (one of?) the civil war in Rwanda. There was a mother with a baby in her arms running from "soldiers" of one faction. They caught her, and right there in center frame, pulled out a machete and chopped her head off.
The presentation didn't include any kind of face-fuzzing - there was no attempt to hide the actual act. This was the last time I took any news seriously at all.
Good on China for blocking news sites. Most of what you read is concocted by reporters who do no fact-checking or background research anyway.
Of course, if I lived in China myself, I'd be ignoring everything that their propoganda agencies tried telling me. My vision of the world would be only that which is directly in my own experience. Yes, I would have a very limited understanding of the world "out there" - but honestly, do you think you fare any better when the media in your own country portrays you as dangerous simply because you are intelligent and socially reclusive?
Ask yourself how much value you're really getting from MSNBC. Wouldn't you be better off not having it? You'd have to go do your own research then, rather than just eating up whatever swill you're served on the various news sites.
The things that bothers me the most from the minutes of this shareholder meeting? The fact that only 8.9% of Microsoft shares (how many shareholders is that?) agreed that Microsoft should avoid engaging in deals with the Chinese Government that would result in further human rights abuses by the Chinese Government.
The attitude at the meeting seemed to me to be that "as long as we make a buck, we don't care."
The short version: Writing a large software system is like nailing jelly to a wall.
The long version:
Show me a client who knows what they want before they ask for it.
Show me a client who won't change their mind after you've started building.
Show me a client who accepts that the "state of the art" will rocket along independently of the development of this current system.
Show me a client whose business practices don't change - even slightly - in six months.
Show me a client who will pay up the full price of development to the agreed-upon specification, when it takes nine to twelve months to get the system fully developed to that original specification.
Show me a client who is willing to wait for the system to slowly grow over 12 months, as my development team releases features as they are ready.
Show me a client who is willing to believe that a system isn't ready to go the moment it's plugged in and switched on.
Show me a client who is prepared to pay up to 20% of the development cost of the software every year just to maintain it - cleaning up the rough bits, polishing the interface, optimising the flow of data, updating the system to take into account new legislation, business practice or monetary units.
Then...
Show me programmers who can spell.
Show me programmers who have professional pride.
Show me programmers who can do what the System Architect tells them to (and only what the SA tells them to).
Show me programmers who can write neat maintainable code, instead of trying to out-hack Duff's Device.
Show me programmers and architects who are willing to review each others work, without taking criticism personally.
Show me technical staff who can speak English in lay terms.
Show me programmers who are happy to maintain another programmer's code in the same style as the original programmer.
Show me programmers who are happy to write their code (semantically as well as syntactically) to an external specification.
Then and only then do I have half a chance of delivering software that doesn't have bugs or mis-features in it.
Slashdot Mirror
Bugger. That's Potato. I've got Woody on three machines at home. Ah well... at least I know where to find the Potato CDs if I ever need them!
Many service providers have been offering ultra-cheap connections to catch a larger portion of "market share". Eventually they're going to realise that they've got as much market share as they can, and they will start charging what it actually costs them.
I don't like per-megabyte charges at all, but when you're selling concentrated pipe the only alternative is to cap bandwidth utilisation. For example, rather than setting a 3Gb/month cap, set maximum utilisation at 1% (since in Telstra's case, they've oversubscribed their upstream bandwidth several hundred times).
Just because you have a 512kbps pipe to your house, doesn't mean you have 512kbps to use. The upstream bandwidth for 100 customers might only be 1Mbps. The ISP/telco's way of coping with this is to charge enough to support or even expand the upstream bandwidth (or just pay lots of dividends to their shareholders).
The monthly fee you pay for your ADSL doesn't mean that you actually have huge bandwidth to the Internet.
*perks ears up*
Hey... don't suppose you can point us to the Debian mirror? I've searched for "Debian Mirror" on the Telescum Bigpong site, and I only ever get references to articles about experiments with light and shiny surfaces.
In the article, the author proposes a future where "open/free software" has been made illegal. The only software you're allowed to run is what Microsoft provides you. There are no features to disable JavaScript. You are a slave to the media and they to Microsoft. You have no ability to change settings like /etc/hosts. You cannot install JunkBuster or Jesred. You have no power.
After all, if you had the ability to control your computer, you'd also have the ability to create or alter data ("content"). If you have the ability to create or alter content, you also have the ability to steal content. That's what SSSCA and DRM is all about - preventing "theft" of "intellectual property" by removing your ability to make the choice to not steal.
Quite simple really.
The reality for Internet users in Australia is that traffic costs a minimum of $0.13/Mb.
The ACCC is fighting to make Region Encoding of DVDs illegal in Australia - claiming that it's an anti-competitive trade practice.
I browse with images off as often as possible, because images cost ten times as much as the article they're obscuring. Spam costs me money. Running "apt-get upgrade" on my Debian box will cost me about $3-$10, depending on how much "woody" has changed in the last fortnight.
Opening Internet Explorer costs me money because it insists on redirecting me to the Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 home page and claiming that I really, really should download this new version of IE.
Thanks to spam, "postcards", NTP, scheduled IMAP checks and other non-interactive traffic, I can easily spend $1/hour when I'm sleeping. I don't even have to check my mail in the morning to start racking up the bills.
You people in the USA are living in a market-share-broadening dreamland, where providers are tripping over each other in an attempt to get you signed up to their networks. They all realise that once you've been using their service for 6 months "for free", they can start charging for traffic, and you'll just roll over and accept it like the good consumer-sheep you are.
In any Capitalist economy, you have to keep repeating this holy mantra - "The money has to come from somewhere. There is no such thing as a free lunch."
Not so long ago, in a land not so far away, there was a period of radical change which we now know as "The Industrial Revolution".
Some people invented machines that made it possible to make bulk copies of a particular textile. There were knitting machines and weaving machines and even sewing machines. These machines were superb at exact reproduction of a particular knit, weave or stitch.
Naturally, lots of textiles workers expected that they'd be put out of business by these machines, so they attempted to ban the machines. When that didn't work, they just went out and vandalised the machines.
Now look at the world 200 years after those events.
The best suits and dresses are still hand made. Humans are still required to create the original product, the machines can't create appealing garments by themselves.
Imagine where the world would be today if the textiles industry associations had convinced the Governments of the time to outlaw these machines which are used to steal their business?
The SSSCA is designed to protect a business model, not intellectual property. I do agree with the rights of content creators to have some protection from exploitation - it is illegal to claim ownership of someone else's work. I do not agree that businesses have any reason to expect that their business models should be protected.
Just imagine if your taxes were being used to protect Digital Convergence from their own stupidity.
I was a silly little duffer, and had my system do an "apt-get upgrade --download-only" every day at 6am (while I'm going to sleep). My reasoning was that when I got around to doing the "upgrade -u", I wouldn't have to wait forever for the downloads to occur.
The catch with that is that I'm in Australia - we're charged per megabyte for downloads (regardless of the ISP). Most ISPs offer a "free download" limit, so that you don't feel like you're paying per-MB from the first MB. Thus I woke up one day to find that my Debian boxes had consumed half my monthly "free download" quota on the first day of the month.
D'Oh!
And just in case anyone cares - the ISP in question is indeed Telstra BigPond. The very same people who refuse to give me an answer to the simple question, "Is traffic between ADSL customers on Telstra BigPond Freedom Plans billable?"
But I digress.
I think someone forgot to check the date on the source article.
I didn't think Dorothy was really quite this daft.
Latency aside, my arithmetic errors aside, the good ol' Jumbo-full-of-DDS still faces the problems of loading and unloading the data to and from the tapes (or DVDs in this case).
Which makes me wonder - what is going to be feeding this pipe?
Retail GPS systems such as the Garmin GPS II and III can provide resolutions down to 1 metre, with a positional error down to 4m.
IMHO, the hard part of Dorothy's work isn't figuring out how to extract a key from a set of numbers that are only close to the expected key value - no, the hard part of Dorothy's work is finding people who are silly enough to believe that this system would provide any real form of security.
Even worse than not providing security at all, imagine the instance where a signal is intercepted on the battlefield. "The Enemy" cracks the message, which means they now have the key. That means they now know exactly where to land their next volley of incendiary mortars.
Something for the brass to ponder, methinks.
Let's go through claim (1) for example:
(a) from within the application program running in the general purpose computer, a user issuing one of a "close," "save" or "save as" command for the document using the user input device;
Doesn't that sound like any generic application these days? Can we say "File/Save" anyone (or for the CLI people using vi, ":w"? So this part of this claim applies to practically any desktop application. What they are describing here is existing infrastructure, and nothing that could be considered to be characteristic of their own invention.
(b) automatically translating the command into an event;
Once again, any desktop application. Most GUIs I know are event based, so any menu action is always sent to the application as an event. This even generation process is transparent to the application itself. Once again, hardly unique or original, and definately not an indicator that a particular system is like their own.
(c) the crypto module automatically trapping the event;
One could achieve this by using, say, stegfs. The crypto module is part of the file system driver - it traps the events being sent to things like "open" or "write". There is a catch here - perhaps you could argue that, in order to be covered by this patent, the crypto package would have to intercept the "File/Save" event before that event actually got to the application.
(d) the crypto module automatically obtaining an encryption key value;
Like, say, obtaining a PGP key from a keystore using a cached passphrase? Or perhaps a passphrase that was specified at the time that the steganographic file system was mounted?
Perhaps their system is even more primitive - they pop up a dialog box and ask the user for a passphrase on the spot.
PGPDisk was doing all the stuff up to here a long time ago. So the claim so far sounds very unobvious and definitely not novel.
(e) the crypto module automatically encrypting the document using the encryption key value;
I only wonder if they mean "automatically" as opposed to "manually", or "automatically" as compared to "mechanically" or "algorithmically". To me it sounds like this claim is redundant and obvious. Encrypting the document using any other values than the ones provided by the crypto keys is pretty useless.
(f) the crypto module automatically passing control to an electronic document management system;
What do they mean by "electronic document management system"? A file system is a DMS. Are they just using obfuscated language here, or do they have a particular thing in mind when they say "electronic document management system"? If their patent suits are anything to go by (that link from another response to the original story, BTW), they mean "file system".
(g) the electronic document management system executing the issued "close," "save" or "save as" command;
That's what a DMS would normally do anyway, surely? You could escape this patent by having your encryption module issue its own "save" command, after intercepting the system's own "save" command.
Of course, letting an Electronic Document Management System do the things it's supposed to do is hardly a novel concept.
The Last Paragraph
Then we get to the interesting bit - right at the end:
Thus they are claiming that anything which looks something like this system is also covered by this patent - they're redefining patent law!
[1] They don't even know that a system built as described in their patent would work. exemplary in sense 3 implies that these guys have built a patent on top of a proof-of-concept.
It's been done.
Admittedly, not with these Blue Marble photos.
I am not Kiki. I am, however, a Mac OS X fan.
Here are some of the things I like about Mac OS X:
That's just the things that matter most to me right now, out of the box.
Oh... one final point I almost forgot - the Aqua interface looks pretty cool. For a while. Failing all else, you can pick up "themes" through MetamorphX from CharonSoft.
Mac OS X is very functional. It's as functional for my purposes than Linux on my PC running WindowMaker or Enlightenment.
As for your last statement - can you provide evidence to support this claim? I don't think Sony approaches the topic the same way you do. I don't think the Ubiquitous Computing folks approach this topic the same way you do either.
First off - lesson number one on the Internet is, "Trust No One." If you're going to be doing critical calculations, you'll want to do each calculation on at least three different machines, then accept the results if and only if all three agree. Thus if each calculation was worth $0.03, each provider would only be awarded $0.01 - and then only if all three providers returned the same value.
Secondly - for distributed backup to be useful, and resilient against nodes appearing and disappearing, you'd have to have multiple backups. If you only had 2 copies of all data on the ISOS file systems, you're still talking about having client machines that have 2/3 of their disk space dedicated to the distributed backup system - for other people's backups, not yours.
There is no means here for a provider to make a profit from this system fi they are also a consumer.
Thus the best place for this kind of system is where the provider is not aiming to make a profit, and has the extra disk space and processor time lying around unused. Large corporations with hundreds of PCs on desktops could benefit from this. Home users won't.
There certainly isn't any room to be hopeful of making a profit from the micropayment system proposed. There's a 3:1 ratio of expenditure to income, in the best case scenario of only having triple redundancy of calculations and storage. Certainly, if you're only providing services you might stand to make some small profit - but don't forget that you're still paying for the network traffic, electricity, and insurance for the processing capital.
Here in Australia, for example, I'd want to be paid $0.19/Mb for traffic generated (in both directions) by the ISOS system, otherwise I'd be losing money hand over fist. Electricity is about $0.08/kWh, which means a 300W machine would cost $5.76/day to run. Insurance on the hardware costs about $100/year, and this doesn't cover lightning or "Act of God."
I don't know how these costs compare to someone who is housing and feeding a mainframe, but I expect the economies of scale would ensure that a mainframe is cheaper per calculation than a home PC. If that is true, ISOS is (once again) really only of use to people who already have those PCs sitting on desks doing nothing.
Fallacy 5: If It's Graphical, It's Easy
He wasn't repeating the tired old saw about how CLIs are easy to use.
Michi was pointing out that even a well-designed GUI won't help someone who hasn't got a clue about what they're supposed to be doing.
You can actually cause more damage by putting a well-designed GUI in front of a clueless one. They don't have to guess about what commands are available - the commands are all right there in front of them.
"Let's see... I want to add a new account, what's this 'root privilege' check box? I'd better check it just in case..."
GUIs don't make life easier unless you actually know what you're doing, *AND* the GUI designer knew what they were doing too.
Brain Surgery is about knowing what you're doing. You can't just open up someone's head and start poking around until you've fixed whatever bug it was that made surgery necessary. Unless you know what you're doing, you're more likely to break things than fix things.
So too, any non-trivial programming task requires that you know what you're doing. You need to be familiar with the tools (what they can do, what they can't), you need to be familiar with the problem domain. You need to know common problem solving techniques.
Learning how to use a scalpel doesn't make you a brain surgeon. Neither does learning how to use gcc make you a software engineer.
Forget about the lives at risk - that's just a strawman argument.
There's an old saying, "those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it." A lot of what makes a good Software Engineer is knowing relevant history. You can't learn the history of software design from a Dummy's Guide to C++.
I used to be able to boot my PC/XT from a 360kb floppy and be editing documents in WordStar in about 4 minutes.
These days I can boot my AMD K6-II 500MHz machine from a 40Gb UDMA-100 hard drive and be editing documents in Microsoft Word in about... 10 minutes.
You're right. Microsoft Word is so much faster than WordStar ever was. Really. I mean that. Honest.
Telephone switching was once only achievable by having humans sticking plugs into sockets. Now we have complex robots (called "telephone exchanges") that do this for us.
Someone had to know how to make an F16 fly. The computer doesn't just make it magically possible. What the computer does do is make it possible to perform all the real-time calculations that are required to get from "pilot moves joystick left" to the minute details of "adjust left aileron up 2 degrees, adjust right aieleron down 2 degrees".
Utility services such as electricity, sewage, water and gas were supplied using human-controlled pipelines and valves long before computers came onto the scene. With the advent of modern technology, we just don't need to have a gas-company employee on every street corner ready to open or close the appropriate valves.
The entire Internet could easily be implemented using humans instead of routers. Just don't expect latencies lower than three minutes, or data throughput higher than 200 characters per minute. The automation of the Internet allows much lower latencies and much higher throughput. There's nothing magical about the Internet - it's just lots of routers and switches operating in a predetermined fashion. Routers only make decisions based on a set of rules - they are not creative thinkers.
I believe that what Michi is getting at is that computers allow you to automate repetitive tasks, and make calculations much faster than is possible for a human with a pen and paper, but they don't make you more creative.
A computer cannot possibly make you know how to do stuff that you didn't know how to do. If you don't know how to write a prize-winning novel, a computer can't magically write one for you. All the computer can do is make it easier for you to store your ideas for the book, and keep track of all the different revisions of the book as you're writing it.
Computers cannot replace the creative process. They cannot make design decisions. All they can do is automate repetitive tasks, and perform calculations much quicker than you can.
All the examples you've given are samples of automation, not of creativity.
I'm guessing that what Michi Henning was getting at is that source code on its own is useless.
What matters is knowing:
It's usually very hard to learn as much from reading the source code as from reading the architecture and design documents. Once you know what decisions led to this source code being written, you really don't need the source code itself.
In the context of advancing Computing Science or the IT industry, it's more important to know about the design decisions, the gotchas that were discovered, and the history of good and bad choices made through the production of a piece of software, than it is to know exactly how one particular piece of software is built.
The short version: I think Michi Henning is pointing out that it's DESIGN, not IMPLEMENTATION that we should be concerned with.
We became such "elitists" about the same time that Outlook insisted on being a major virus vector.
Outlook is not a mail client. It is a virus vector, specifically designed to spread viruses as quickly as possible.
By preventing Outlook and OE from posting to your mailing lists, you can save yourself and your subscribers a whole world of hurt.
Structuring your email in such a way that Outlook can't read it (but everyone else can) is as much a statement of opinion as it is a warning to people that Outlook has many bugs.
Katz isn't arguing that the censorship tools are bad. He's arguing that the use to which they're being put - and more importantly the amount of support that American companies are providing - is contradictory to his ideals of freedom of information.
In fact, the uses to which these tools are being put are contradictory to basic Human Rights - such as freedom from religious persecution, and freedom to access education.
It'd be a different outcome if these companies were supplying software to the Taliban, wouldn't it?
Imagine an arms dealer using the same excuse - "We're just selling guns to Al-Quaeda. We're not responsible for what use they're being put to." I think Dubya disagrees with that sentiment. Just can't wait till the entire CIA is in court on Terrorism charges for supplying arms to Al-Quaeda, the Taliban and the Mujahadeen.
I don't agree. The "News" is evil, carrying stories for the sake of sensationalism rather than for any value to the viewer.
The only time I've ever seen a human beheaded was on the 6pm news. The article was about (one of?) the civil war in Rwanda. There was a mother with a baby in her arms running from "soldiers" of one faction. They caught her, and right there in center frame, pulled out a machete and chopped her head off.
The presentation didn't include any kind of face-fuzzing - there was no attempt to hide the actual act. This was the last time I took any news seriously at all.
Good on China for blocking news sites. Most of what you read is concocted by reporters who do no fact-checking or background research anyway.
Of course, if I lived in China myself, I'd be ignoring everything that their propoganda agencies tried telling me. My vision of the world would be only that which is directly in my own experience. Yes, I would have a very limited understanding of the world "out there" - but honestly, do you think you fare any better when the media in your own country portrays you as dangerous simply because you are intelligent and socially reclusive?
Ask yourself how much value you're really getting from MSNBC. Wouldn't you be better off not having it? You'd have to go do your own research then, rather than just eating up whatever swill you're served on the various news sites.
The things that bothers me the most from the minutes of this shareholder meeting? The fact that only 8.9% of Microsoft shares (how many shareholders is that?) agreed that Microsoft should avoid engaging in deals with the Chinese Government that would result in further human rights abuses by the Chinese Government.
The attitude at the meeting seemed to me to be that "as long as we make a buck, we don't care."
The problem being that many C libraries are not ANSI compliant, and using free(NULL) will cause a segmentation fault.
The short version: Writing a large software system is like nailing jelly to a wall.
The long version:
Show me a client who knows what they want before they ask for it.
Show me a client who won't change their mind after you've started building.
Show me a client who accepts that the "state of the art" will rocket along independently of the development of this current system.
Show me a client whose business practices don't change - even slightly - in six months.
Show me a client who will pay up the full price of development to the agreed-upon specification, when it takes nine to twelve months to get the system fully developed to that original specification.
Show me a client who is willing to wait for the system to slowly grow over 12 months, as my development team releases features as they are ready.
Show me a client who is willing to believe that a system isn't ready to go the moment it's plugged in and switched on.
Show me a client who is prepared to pay up to 20% of the development cost of the software every year just to maintain it - cleaning up the rough bits, polishing the interface, optimising the flow of data, updating the system to take into account new legislation, business practice or monetary units.
Then...
Show me programmers who can spell.
Show me programmers who have professional pride.
Show me programmers who can do what the System Architect tells them to (and only what the SA tells them to).
Show me programmers who can write neat maintainable code, instead of trying to out-hack Duff's Device.
Show me programmers and architects who are willing to review each others work, without taking criticism personally.
Show me technical staff who can speak English in lay terms.
Show me programmers who are happy to maintain another programmer's code in the same style as the original programmer.
Show me programmers who are happy to write their code (semantically as well as syntactically) to an external specification.
Then and only then do I have half a chance of delivering software that doesn't have bugs or mis-features in it.
The even longer version: Go read this book (it's been reviewed on Slashdot by Jason Bennett).