I'm not an expert in trade secret law, but isn't the burden of keeping trade secrets secret on the company? I mean, once the info is leaked, it isn't a trade secret anymore. The only way they would have a case against the websites would be if the sites had received the information from Apple directly, and had signed an NDA.
As I understand it, a trade secret may remain "secret", as long as reasonable steps were taken to protect it (NDA's, marked documents, etc.). If it is leaked, a competing company can usually not legally use the information until they get the same information though an untainted source.
I'm not sure how the laws of trade secret apply in this case, where the publications are clearly not competing with Apple. --
One problem I see with IT industry guys is that, since we tend to study in male dominated schools (or at least classes) and work in male dominated departments, most of us never got comfortable working with women. This comes out most strongly in social interactions, but social interactions have a strong effect on work, especially in startups and other small companies since they affect job assignments and determine how comfortable individuals are in asking their co-workers for help.
My wife, who is the first and only woman in the Network Operations Center of a major ISP, was shocked to find that the tech who had used her computer the shift before had left porn as the default desktop image and even more shocked that her co-workers (who she got along with well and had not felt particularily discriminated against by) found this humerous. Such a thing would not have occurred in a department with more women in it, or among men who had spent more time dealing with women.
In and of it self the situation is negative, perhaps even actionable in our litigious society, but it is more troubling as a symptom of an insular male dominated sub-class which doesn't yet know how to deal with women. It is not surprising that such gender biases exist, they are or were the same in medicine, armed forces, law and other male dominated fields.
I suspect that as the number of women in IT fields and that this in and of itself will change the geek culture to be more inclusive and welcoming of women. Until then some women who are strong technically will be turned away by the culture, even if they are attracted by the problems.
Until then, be aware of (and stop) your actions that might make a woman uncomfortable, even when there is _not_ a woman present, and make an active effort to give the same encouragement, help, and respect to your female colleagues as male. We're smart, savvy and anti-bullshit. Let us see male-centric part of geekdom for the dumb, old cruft is and get rid of it. --
I can understand how the can licence distribution of binaries (since they include proprietary library code), but what legal justification od they have to prohibit the distribution of source code? Is there "wizard" based or other generated code which includes copyrighted material? And if so can you get around it by using the compiler only to compile code which is 100% open source?
They may quite reasonably prohibit the distribution of header files and generated code. Beyond that I doubt they have any right to restrict your code. --
There aren't nuclear weapons simulations per se because such things require tuned parameters from actual tests and are not directly useful for anything other than making nuclear explosion, but there are open source (mostly public domain actually since they were government sponsored) particle simulations which can be used for things like simulating the propogation of radiation in the human body. --
I went into the machine room for a major animation company during an interview and among the racks of Origin 2K's and disk arrays they had a couple of midrange Cray's.
I assumed they were for graphics processing (that's what the Origins were for), but it turns out they were simply the fastest fileservers on the market at the time of purchase (an important thing if you're pushing around mutli GB files). --
The moon landing was many things, but the main technolgical reason to pursue a moon landing was that it was a palatable way to spend billions on missile technology. --
The other advantage of FFT it can be perfomed in the memory consumed by the data set if you don't care about overwriting your data. This is extremely important for DSP implementations where memory is constrained.
Interestingly enough, the so called "butterfly" factorization of the transform matrix which is at the heart of the FFT was discovered by Gauss, but never used in the context of Fourier analysis. It was rediscovered independently. --
IANAL, but I think that a trade secret can be legally protected if reasonable steps were taken to protect it. So if someone breaks in and steal your trade secret, then publishes it, other parties may be enjoined from using the information.
A court would have to decide if Microsoft took reasonable steps to protect their trade secret in this case, I'd say they didn't, but then again I'm biased. --
IIRC, Microsoft has extended Kerberos in a standard way, that is, by using parts of the protocol which are intended to be vendor defined. I'm not sure whether they have maintained interoperability. --
All they have proof of is that people have files on their computers with the same names as Metallica songs. I don't think that the name alone is copy protected. Unless they download an MP3 from each of the defendants or snoop it in transit, I think they have nothing but scare tactics.
Then again I'd be happy if commercial artists crack down on digital copying as long as it doesn't affect the ability of independent bands to release their own MP3s under a more lenient distribution agreement. Perhaps it's time for a GPL for music, by which artists who care more about art than money can share their work with eachother and with their fans. --
Can't have one without the other. That is to say a changing electric field produces a changing magnetic field and vice versa. A faraday cage stops electric fields so it stops high frequency magnetic fields. (The fields will pass through on the order of a few wavelengths, so having the shield so close to the chip is not going to do much for you.) --
I know this is response to a troll but... Unisis did not invent and does not own GIF. They do hold the patent for LZW which was used in GIF and which was patented after being published in a journal with no notice of patent pending (legal but dubious). No action was taken for years until GIFs got popular, then actions were taken against commercial graphics programs, now individuals. --
I found a good Q&A about US libel law here:http://freeadvice.com/law/576us.htm. As I understand it, the main difference in US law is that it is very difficult for a public figure to sue for libel in the US since the defendant must be shown to have knowingly and maliciously made a false statement. For a private individual like Mr. Godfrey it seems to be quite similar to UK law. --
Short answer... you're out of luck unless your next door neighbor has a T1 and you can string cable over the fence.
The biggest problem is that you need an ISP or something else with fast enough internet access at the other end. DSL is just a point to point link and does not imply internet connectivity. So if you find an extremly friendly ISP or you are in good with the LAN guys at work and they are on the same CO as you and the telco is willing to sell the dry pair then you might be able to make it work. However you will still run into the length problem, only compounded now because the line now goes to the CO and then from the CO to the terminating end. --
Connecting to your neighbor's house
on
Homebrew S/ADSL
·
· Score: 2
I realize you are asking a hypothetical question, but wireless LAN technology, like Lucent's WaveLAN will go quite a distance (about a mile line of sight IIRC) with appropriate antennas on both ends. The link can be encrypted to avoid snooping. --
It is unlikely that the physical connections between the users and the telcos were down, however it is quite easy for other problems to cause large scale outages.
1) The DSLAM craps out in the CO 2) The frame-relay or ATM or whatever upstream link to the ISP is misconfigured or has a hardware failure or a line cut. 3) The ISP is the one having the problem (not in your case apparently)
In the case of Covad, since they colocate equipment in the CO's of local telco monopolies, I imagine it is harder to diagnose and fix hardware problems. Not that the telcos are necessarily better. I had an 8 hour outage caused by GTE losing a frame relay switch and having to readd routes by hand because the backup was misconfigured.
Also know that DSL customers are last on the list of services to be reconnected if there is a major problem. Voice users, frame relay and other leased line users with Quality of Service contraces are ahead in line. T1 is probably a good choice for you if you need reliability. Better yet, get a backup link over a geographically and network topologically distinct link. The network topology is impossible to determine by guessing since many providers cross link and rent lines from eachother, so make sure you ask, you may not be as redundant as you think.
My SO works at a major ISP and they lost WAN access between two offices (fiber link provided by Level 3), telephone service to another office and lost connections to thousands of UUNet POPs all because of a fire in a single MCI WorldCom facility. It took them over an hour to realize that there was a single cause. It turned out that Level 3 rented the fiber from WorldComm, UUNet is of course a subsidary of WorldCom and I can't remember exactly how the voice lines were involved. --
Price does not include internet access
on
Homebrew S/ADSL
·
· Score: 2
He is getting the line for that much, not the internet connectivity. At one end of the line is (his) ISP which has to pay for it's T1 and upstream ISP service.
So if all you want to do is to get a point to point connection, say to the office LAN, it might be a savings, but if you are after internet access, you have to pay for that at some point.
I don't really care about seeing porn from time to time and I don't have any kids. What I would like though is a good distributed web moderation system.
This is already done to some degree with some search engines, especially specialized ones for books or movies. But I would love to see something built into my browser that would allow me (securely and privately of course) to set my preferences (intelligent > 2 | funny > 4 ) & (commercial 1) so that links to other stuff are colored differently. Of course obtaining moderator status would be hard, so it would probably have to be a firefly kind of thing where you're views are matched with others of your same views (securely and privately of course). Consider it the poor man's intelligent agent. --
Re:Net did not succeed because gov't left it alone
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 2
While local phone monopolies suck, I find it hard to accept your assertion that they suck worse than a complete country wide monopoly on phone service and equipment. Do you think that the internet as we know it would have been allowed by AT&T. They didn't even allow people to own their own phones.
In any case, the opening up of local long distance and CLECs is a case of regulation for the purpose of promoting competition (a good thing). Without strict government regulations, there would never be competition in the local phone space because the telcos could leverage their natural monopoly on phone lines to get a monopoly in everything else.
Less regulation is not necessarily better if it means less competition. Of course the same is true of more regulation. We need to remember that it is competition, not deregulation that is key to getting the benefits of a free market. Anything which takes away competition without offsetting benefits, whether it is an monopolistic corporation or stupid regulations, should be stopped. --
Redhat is slower than anybody, in that I can't remember the last time I got in to ftp.redhat.com. I usually use ftp.freesoftware.com (formerly ftp.cdrom.com) although they don't have redhat 6.2 yet. They are usually up to date, available(5000 users) and fast(1Gbps pipe to the internet). --
Have you noticed that Bush is somewhat slow? This isn't intended as an insult or anything. The man really isn't very bright. He also doesn't seem to have any opinions or ideas of his own. I get the distinct impression he does nothing but go up on stage and say whatever they tell him to.
He alternates between smug self assurance and helpless bewilderment. Not that Al Gore is much better. He may be objectivelty smarter but he is far too "handled".
Of the candidates left (the ones I have seen anyway)Ralph Nader is probably the smartest and most plainspoken, even if he is a bit liberal for me. I just want to vote for a decent guy who wont be an embarassment. I would have voted for McCain, even though I disagreed with him on most issues, but he seemed honest enough, which would be nice for a change.
Slashdot Mirror
#!/usr/bin/perl
while(){
$hash{$_}++;
}
while(($line,$times_seen) = each %hash){
print "$times_seen $line\n";
}
--
vmware is also not an emulator, it just virtualize the i386 on top of an i386.
Bochs is an emulator.
--
As I understand it, a trade secret may remain "secret", as long as reasonable steps were taken to protect it (NDA's, marked documents, etc.). If it is leaked, a competing company can usually not legally use the information until they get the same information though an untainted source.
I'm not sure how the laws of trade secret apply in this case, where the publications are clearly not competing with Apple.
--
One problem I see with IT industry guys is that, since we tend to study in male dominated schools (or at least classes) and work in male dominated departments, most of us never got comfortable working with women. This comes out most strongly in social interactions, but social interactions have a strong effect on work, especially in startups and other small companies since they affect job assignments and determine how comfortable individuals are in asking their co-workers for help.
My wife, who is the first and only woman in the Network Operations Center of a major ISP, was shocked to find that the tech who had used her computer the shift before had left porn as the default desktop image and even more shocked that her co-workers (who she got along with well and had not felt particularily discriminated against by) found this humerous. Such a thing would not have occurred in a department with more women in it, or among men who had spent more time dealing with women.
In and of it self the situation is negative, perhaps even actionable in our litigious society, but it is more troubling as a symptom of an insular male dominated sub-class which doesn't yet know how to deal with women. It is not surprising that such gender biases exist, they are or were the same in medicine, armed forces, law and other male dominated fields.
I suspect that as the number of women in IT fields and that this in and of itself will change the geek culture to be more inclusive and welcoming of women. Until then some women who are strong technically will be turned away by the culture, even if they are attracted by the problems.
Until then, be aware of (and stop) your actions that might make a woman uncomfortable, even when there is _not_ a woman present, and make an active effort to give the same encouragement, help, and respect to your female colleagues as male. We're smart, savvy and anti-bullshit. Let us see male-centric part of geekdom for the dumb, old cruft is and get rid of it.
--
I can understand how the can licence distribution of binaries (since they include proprietary library code), but what legal justification od they have to prohibit the distribution of source code? Is there "wizard" based or other generated code which includes copyrighted material? And if so can you get around it by using the compiler only to compile code which is 100% open source?
They may quite reasonably prohibit the distribution of header files and generated code. Beyond that I doubt they have any right to restrict your code.
--
There aren't nuclear weapons simulations per se because such things require tuned parameters from actual tests and are not directly useful for anything other than making nuclear explosion, but there are open source (mostly public domain actually since they were government sponsored) particle simulations which can be used for things like simulating the propogation of radiation in the human body.
--
I went into the machine room for a major animation company during an interview and among the racks of Origin 2K's and disk arrays they had
a couple of midrange Cray's.
I assumed they were for graphics processing (that's what the Origins were for), but it turns out they were simply the fastest fileservers on the market at the time of purchase (an important thing if you're pushing around mutli GB files).
--
The moon landing was many things, but the main technolgical reason to pursue a moon landing was that it was a palatable way to spend billions on missile technology.
--
The other advantage of FFT it can be perfomed in the memory consumed by the data set if you don't care about overwriting your data. This is extremely important for DSP implementations where memory is constrained.
Interestingly enough, the so called "butterfly" factorization of the transform matrix which is at the heart of the FFT was discovered by Gauss, but never used in the context of Fourier analysis. It was rediscovered independently.
--
IANAL, but I think that a trade secret can be legally protected if reasonable steps were taken to protect it. So if someone breaks in and steal your trade secret, then publishes it, other parties may be enjoined from using the information.
A court would have to decide if Microsoft took reasonable steps to protect their trade secret in this case, I'd say they didn't, but then again I'm biased.
--
IIRC, Microsoft has extended Kerberos in a standard way, that is, by using parts of the protocol which are intended to be vendor defined. I'm not sure whether they have maintained interoperability.
--
All they have proof of is that people have files on their computers with the same names as Metallica songs. I don't think that the name alone is copy protected. Unless they download an MP3 from each of the defendants or snoop it in transit, I think they have nothing but scare tactics.
Then again I'd be happy if commercial artists crack down on digital copying as long as it doesn't affect the ability of independent bands to release their own MP3s under a more lenient distribution agreement. Perhaps it's time for a GPL for music, by which artists who care more about art than money can share their work with eachother and with their fans.
--
I wouldn't like you to steal my PC, but you can go ahead and make a copy. (You would have to get my permission to enter my house though).
--
Can't have one without the other. That is to say a changing electric field produces a changing magnetic field and vice versa. A faraday cage stops electric fields so it stops high frequency magnetic fields. (The fields will pass through on the order of a few wavelengths, so having the shield so close to the chip is not going to do much for you.)
--
I know this is response to a troll but...
Unisis did not invent and does not own GIF. They do hold the patent for LZW which was used in GIF and which was patented after being published in a journal with no notice of patent pending (legal but dubious). No action was taken for years until GIFs got popular, then actions were taken against commercial graphics programs, now individuals.
--
If you use libungif you can output uncompressed GIFs, which are not covered by any patent (AFAIK).
--
I found a good Q&A about US libel law here:http://freeadvice.com/law/576us.htm.
As I understand it, the main difference in US law is that it is very difficult for a public figure to sue for libel in the US since the defendant must be shown to have knowingly and maliciously made a false statement. For a private individual like Mr. Godfrey it seems to be quite similar to UK law.
--
Short answer... you're out of luck unless your next door neighbor has a T1 and you can string cable over the fence.
The biggest problem is that you need an ISP or something else with fast enough internet access at the other end. DSL is just a point to point link and does not imply internet connectivity. So if you find an extremly friendly ISP or you are in good with the LAN guys at work and they are on the same CO as you and the telco is willing to sell the dry pair then you might be able to make it work. However you will still run into the length problem, only compounded now because the line now goes to the CO and then from the CO to the terminating end.
--
I realize you are asking a hypothetical question, but wireless LAN technology, like Lucent's WaveLAN will go quite a distance (about a mile line of sight IIRC) with appropriate antennas on both ends. The link can be encrypted to avoid snooping.
--
It is unlikely that the physical connections between the users and the telcos were down, however it is quite easy for other problems to cause large scale outages.
1) The DSLAM craps out in the CO
2) The frame-relay or ATM or whatever upstream link to the ISP is misconfigured or has a hardware failure or a line cut.
3) The ISP is the one having the problem (not in your case apparently)
In the case of Covad, since they colocate equipment in the CO's of local telco monopolies, I imagine it is harder to diagnose and fix hardware problems. Not that the telcos are necessarily better. I had an 8 hour outage caused by GTE losing a frame relay switch and having to readd routes by hand because the backup was misconfigured.
Also know that DSL customers are last on the list of services to be reconnected if there is a major problem. Voice users, frame relay and other leased line users with Quality of Service contraces are ahead in line. T1 is probably a good choice for you if you need reliability. Better yet, get a backup link over a geographically and network topologically distinct link. The network topology is impossible to determine by guessing since many providers cross link and rent lines from eachother, so make sure you ask, you may not be as redundant as you think.
My SO works at a major ISP and they lost WAN access between two offices (fiber link provided by Level 3), telephone service to another office and lost connections to thousands of UUNet POPs all because of a fire in a single MCI WorldCom facility. It took them over an hour to realize that there was a single cause. It turned out that Level 3 rented the fiber from WorldComm, UUNet is of course a subsidary of WorldCom and I can't remember exactly how the voice lines were involved.
--
He is getting the line for that much, not the internet connectivity. At one end of the line is (his) ISP which has to pay for it's T1 and upstream ISP service.
So if all you want to do is to get a point to point connection, say to the office LAN, it might be a savings, but if you are after internet access, you have to pay for that at some point.
--
I don't really care about seeing porn from time to time and I don't have any kids. What I would like though is a good distributed web moderation system.
This is already done to some degree with some search engines, especially specialized ones for books or movies. But I would love to see something built into my browser that would allow me (securely and privately of course) to set my preferences
(intelligent > 2 | funny > 4 ) & (commercial 1)
so that links to other stuff are colored differently. Of course obtaining moderator status would be hard, so it would probably have to be a firefly kind of thing where you're views are matched with others of your same views (securely and privately of course). Consider it the poor man's intelligent agent.
--
While local phone monopolies suck, I find it hard to accept your assertion that they suck worse than a complete country wide monopoly on phone service and equipment. Do you think that the internet as we know it would have been allowed by AT&T. They didn't even allow people to own their own phones.
In any case, the opening up of local long distance and CLECs is a case of regulation for the purpose of promoting competition (a good thing). Without strict government regulations, there would never be competition in the local phone space because the telcos could leverage their natural monopoly on phone lines to get a monopoly in everything else.
Less regulation is not necessarily better if it means less competition. Of course the same is true of more regulation. We need to remember that it is competition, not deregulation that is key to getting the benefits of a free market. Anything which takes away competition without offsetting benefits, whether it is an monopolistic corporation or stupid regulations, should be stopped.
--
Redhat is slower than anybody, in that I can't remember the last time I got in to ftp.redhat.com. I usually use ftp.freesoftware.com (formerly ftp.cdrom.com) although they don't have redhat 6.2 yet. They are usually up to date, available(5000 users) and fast(1Gbps pipe to the internet).
--
Have you noticed that Bush is somewhat slow? This isn't intended as an insult or anything. The man really isn't very bright. He also doesn't seem to have any opinions or ideas of his own. I get the distinct impression he does nothing but go up on stage and say whatever they tell him to.
He alternates between smug self assurance and helpless bewilderment. Not that Al Gore is much better. He may be objectivelty smarter but he is far too "handled".
Of the candidates left (the ones I have seen anyway)Ralph Nader is probably the smartest and most plainspoken, even if he is a bit liberal for me. I just want to vote for a decent guy who wont be an embarassment. I would have voted for McCain, even though I disagreed with him on most issues, but he seemed honest enough, which would be nice for a change.
--