Comcast probably should be allowed to sell whatever product they think will do well in the market (provided that they adhere to whatever consent decree they signed to get the geographic monopoly). On the other hand, they shouldn't be a mysterious black box that sometimes passes packets unmolested.
If you ask me, the essence of net neutrality should be that an IP provider precisely document what they do to their traffic, and provide a mechanism for users to easily understand when traffic is blocked, altered, or re-prioritized.
Other than that, I'm basically okay with cable companies offering screwed up IP products, it's all part of the big Darwinian product stew and the free market will take care of it. The place for public policy is making sure there's no big mystery about what they do to my packets.
It makes me so glad that anyone can read the source code for the OS I use. I don't know how I would get by if one company was the only trusted agent to decide whether some issue was too "nuanced" for me to know about. I don't know how people get through the day running that stuff.
I have experience with a few different companies that make chips for PCs. I've found that the most common reason for keeping specs proprietary is patent liability. Areas like computer graphics are minefields with thousands and thousands of patents held by unfriendly entities. If you publicly release a detailed spec for your graphics chip you are inviting these unfriendly patent holders to look for potential litigation.
It's not like nVidia and ATI are looking for reasons to sue each other, it's more about some no-name holding company looking to litigate something like Cadtrak's XOR Cursor patent.
This might also be a competitive thing for Microsoft since they own a big pile of 3D graphics patents from SGI. Microsoft might take legal action against a chip supplier that publishes a spec for a 3D graphics chip that violates one of the old SGI patents.
In my experience most tech companies are now pretty hip about linux and free software, but the potential downside holds them back from releasing specs to the community.
Over the last year I spent about 6-weeks at the arecibo observatory. I'm an engineer that did FPGA designs for a backend spectrometer for the new 7-beam ALFA receiver used for both SETI and radioastronomy.
During the recent lunar eclipse there were a bunch of us sitting outside drinking rum and watching the sky. After awhile it occurred to me that I was the only american in the group. I pointed this out and someone else pointed out that there were actually no two people from the same country visiting the observatory at the time. (In fact there were two Italians, but he was correct aside from that).
So, in answer to the parent thread, the scientific community that works at arecibo is amazingly diverse, information is freely exchanged, and the scientists that I have worked with tend to be lefty anti-establishment types. If some indication of ET were found, government officials would probably be the last people to find out.
As further evidence, when pulsars were first discovered and the mechanism for regular radio pulses was not understood, pulsars were initially called LGMs (little green men) only partially in jest as a possible explanation. I don't think there is evidence of an attempt to hide pulsar discoveries back when they were called LGMs.
Finally, SETI is a longterm proposition, it's the sort of search that is best measured in centuries. Sadly SETI is subject to the whims of politics and fashion that work on a much shorter timescale. The ~$12M/year it costs to run the arecibo observatory is the best spent money I've ever seen.
Okay, I've got to call foul on this WindRiver marketing ploy. They're trading on the last days of being able to get away with saying that something mystical and special and super-high quality is going on behind the walls of trade secret and proprietary software.
I used vxworks on a reasonably large project several years ago, it's a fine piece of work, but nothing special, it's no where close to the quality of a recent linux kernel.
About half-way through our project we developed a need for a local filesystem on our box. We bought a FAT filesystem add-on from wind river that was annoyingly poor quality, lots of bizarre little problems, memory leaks, and of course no source to look at. In the end we didn't use it, we put together our own filesystem from freely available sources.
When I read the articles about vxworks filesystem problems nearly borking the entire Mars rover mission I laughed and laughed. I'm sure that it was the same crappy code (although I don't really know for sure).
For me it's a case study on why you shouldn't use closed source software, you can't evaluate the quality of the code on the other side trade-secret barrier and you wind up trusting things like glossy brochures.
The interview reminds me of an old joke that a "mandelbrot" would become a standard unit for measuring ego. Like Farad, one Mandelbrot would be a very large amount of ego, in common usage you would typically see pico- and micro-mandelbrots.
The nnARM thing is the tip of the iceberg. ARM is a viscious company that uses a few crappy patents to beat into submission any small guy that tries to sell a similar processor core.
The design of a CPU core like ARM is a relatively simple matter for a skilled designer. The chinese grad student that did nnARM did it, a small company in silicon valley called Picoturbo did it and was sued into submission by ARM.
When an instruction set is published it is not protected as trade secret or by patent, we are all free to use it once published. In fact, the ARM simulator code in GDB was donated by ARM under a GPL license. But... ARM asserts that implementing their instruction in a piece of hardware set will infringe one of their patents and they are rabid about defending this position against others that might design processors compatible with the ARM instruction set.
In the case of picoturbo, they used US patents 5701493, 5386563, and 5583804. These three patents are as ridiculous as any you will find and are the cornerstone of ARM defending its market position. Two of the patents are essentially the mechanism used for setting condition code flags, a technique used in the ARM6 long before these patents were filed. The third patent is essentially a patent on a 32x32 multiplier where the result can be read 32-bits at a time, too much prior art to dignify with comment.
Pictourbo spent probably $4M and about a year defending themselves in a federal lawsuit in order to get to the point where they could ask the court for a summary judgement in their favor. On the day the court was to rule on this motion Pictoturbo was bought by ARM for $15M.
The ARM instruction set is kind of cool, but this should not be confused with a company that will use its cash reserves, a set of crappy patents, and monopoly position to crush anyone that tries to produce a product compatible with the instruction set.
I'm running SUSE-9.1 64-bit on a Tyan S2885 dual opteron motherboard with two SATA drives in RAID-0, just great... Boot from the DVD in rescue mode and it even finds/dev/md0 with no fiddling.
As a longtime redhat guy, I've found the new distribution for me.
Let's face it, this is really just another example of how that patent system is now geared to protect bigger coprporte interests and not the smaller inventors the patent system was origianally intended to protect.
The patent office went back to review this patent because of the dollar-size of the potential damage and less to do with the legitamacy of the patent. A small company would likely never see such a consideration from the patent office.
Instead, a smaller guy is most likely to face a crappy patent that is presumed valid until you spend $2-3M and 12-months to get to a markman ruling in a fedral lawsuit before a judge can even consider a summary judgement against a clearly bogus patent.
Even though the odds are about 50/50 for winning if you take a patent to court, the barrier to entry is so great for a little guy that it's not usually not possible to contest a patent.
IBM is just great with Thinkpads. The service manual for all Thinkpad models is available online as a PDF file. It has incredibly detailed instructions for assembling the laptop from several hundred FRUs. You can order the FRUs from IBM or cheaper from a number of resellers. They seem to keep good stock on parts for older models.
A few years ago a friend of mine dropped her T20 Thinkpad onto asphalt from about 4 feet. It made quite a mess. I thought that it was going to be a total write-off, but I found the IBM info, ordered about $150 of little broken bits and restored the thing to perfect working order in about a week. It was great.
I've been a devoted Thinkpad fan ever since. I bought a new keyboard for my T23 recently, it took about 5 minutes to order the right part and another 5 minutes to install it. IBM really does do service manuals and parts the way you think a big company should do it.
All too true, but as time goes by Darl will become the placeholder villain. The lawfirm already owns a good chunk of SCO and as time goes by you can expect that they will own more and more, they'll probably get a seat on the board at some point.
When a company's strategy becomes litigious, the lawyers will control the company eventually. Darl will become a figurehead, this letter is a sign of things to come.
EDN has always been a peg boy for microsoft, or whoever will buy a full page ad in the magazine. This article is more of the same. Check out the issue and you'll find a staff written love story about bringing up CE.NET on a piece of embedded hardware.
For $40 you can get one of these flying saucers. It uses IR instead of Bluetooth, but it's
good fun. I bought one this weekend for, ahem, my friend's kids, but I've been testing it...
jeff
That's just f***ing great, now the bar for being a cool guy in free software just got raised. It used to be you just had to write a million lines of useful code. Now you've got to get a subpoena from SCO to be cool.
"Should we invite Jeff to speak at our little conference?" "Well, he didn't get a subpoena from SCO, so he's probably not that important..."
This thing is almost certainly a scam. The bill of materials for a GSM phone is about $40, even after you remove the display, microphone, and speaker, which these guys seem to have done from the picture.
Someone's got to pay for this, you can do it with a subsidized contract or you can charge for the phone, and you've still got to find a way to make money.
Something like this comes up every couple of years. No reason to expect that this one is any more credible.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm thinking special glasses for the TSA agents to make them colorblind.
jeff
Comcast probably should be allowed to sell whatever product they think will do well in the market (provided that they adhere to whatever consent decree they signed to get the geographic monopoly). On the other hand, they shouldn't be a mysterious black box that sometimes passes packets unmolested.
If you ask me, the essence of net neutrality should be that an IP provider precisely document what they do to their traffic, and provide a mechanism for users to easily understand when traffic is blocked, altered, or re-prioritized.
Other than that, I'm basically okay with cable companies offering screwed up IP products, it's all part of the big Darwinian product stew and the free market will take care of it. The place for public policy is making sure there's no big mystery about what they do to my packets.
jeff
I wish Microsoft would accuse me of masterminding the plot against OOXML seeing as 50% of my business comes from dealing with crappy software.
It makes me so glad that anyone can read the source code for the OS I use. I don't know how I would get by if one company was the only trusted agent to decide whether some issue was too "nuanced" for me to know about. I don't know how people get through the day running that stuff.
I think you've been conned into living a closet...
I wonder if this makes checkpointing in VMware a DMCA circumvention measure as well?
-jeff
I just want my Aibo to hobble over and push the reset button on my windows box so I can stay on the couch...
jeff
I have experience with a few different companies that make chips for PCs. I've found that the most common reason for keeping specs proprietary is patent liability. Areas like computer graphics are minefields with thousands and thousands of patents held by unfriendly entities. If you publicly release a detailed spec for your graphics chip you are inviting these unfriendly patent holders to look for potential litigation.
It's not like nVidia and ATI are looking for reasons to sue each other, it's more about some no-name holding company looking to litigate something like Cadtrak's XOR Cursor patent.
This might also be a competitive thing for Microsoft since they own a big pile of 3D graphics patents from SGI. Microsoft might take legal action against a chip supplier that publishes a spec for a 3D graphics chip that violates one of the old SGI patents.
In my experience most tech companies are now pretty hip about linux and free software, but the potential downside holds them back from releasing specs to the community.
jeff
open source code for a proprietary platform? I don't think so. I suspect RMS would call this sharecropping. Totally uninteresting.
Credit card readers built into the side of gas pumps.
jeff
I've got to put in my 2-cents worth.
Over the last year I spent about 6-weeks at the arecibo observatory. I'm an engineer that did FPGA designs for a backend spectrometer for the new 7-beam ALFA receiver used for both SETI and radioastronomy.
During the recent lunar eclipse there were a bunch of us sitting outside drinking rum and watching the sky. After awhile it occurred to me that I was the only american in the group. I pointed this out and someone
else pointed out that there were actually no two people from the same country visiting the observatory at the time. (In fact there were two Italians, but he was correct aside from that).
So, in answer to the parent thread, the scientific community that works at arecibo is amazingly diverse, information is freely exchanged, and the scientists that I have worked with tend to be lefty anti-establishment types. If some indication of ET were found, government officials would probably be the last people to find out.
As further evidence, when pulsars were first discovered and the mechanism for regular radio pulses was not understood, pulsars were initially called LGMs (little green men) only partially in jest as a possible explanation. I don't think there is evidence of an attempt to hide pulsar discoveries back when they were called LGMs.
Finally, SETI is a longterm proposition, it's the sort of search that is best measured in centuries. Sadly SETI is subject to the whims of politics and fashion that work on a much shorter timescale. The ~$12M/year it costs to run the arecibo observatory is the best spent money I've ever seen.
jeff
Okay, I've got to call foul on this WindRiver marketing ploy. They're trading on the last days of being able to get away with saying that something mystical and special and super-high quality is going on behind the walls of trade secret and proprietary software.
I used vxworks on a reasonably large project several years ago, it's a fine piece of work, but nothing special, it's no where close to the quality of a recent linux kernel.
About half-way through our project we developed a need for a local filesystem on our box. We bought a FAT filesystem add-on from wind river that was annoyingly poor quality, lots of bizarre little problems, memory leaks, and of course no source to look at. In the end we didn't use it, we put together our own filesystem from freely available sources.
When I read the articles about vxworks filesystem problems nearly borking the entire Mars rover mission I laughed and laughed. I'm sure that it was the same crappy code (although I don't really know for sure).
For me it's a case study on why you shouldn't use closed source software, you can't evaluate the quality of the code on the other side trade-secret barrier and you wind up trusting things like glossy brochures.
jeff
The interview reminds me of an old joke that a "mandelbrot" would become a standard unit for measuring ego. Like Farad, one Mandelbrot would be a very large amount of ego, in common usage you would typically see pico- and micro-mandelbrots.
jeff
Wasn't that the cover story of every issue of Popular Mechanics during the 80's? It's nice to see /. appealing to my aging tastes.
jeff
The nnARM thing is the tip of the iceberg. ARM is a viscious company that uses a few crappy patents to beat into submission any small guy that tries to sell a similar processor core.
The design of a CPU core like ARM is a relatively simple matter for a skilled designer. The chinese grad student that did nnARM did it, a small company in silicon valley called Picoturbo did it and was sued into submission by ARM.
When an instruction set is published it is not protected as trade secret or by patent, we are all free to use it once published. In fact, the ARM simulator code in GDB was donated by ARM under a GPL license. But... ARM asserts that implementing their instruction in a piece of hardware set will infringe one of their patents and they are rabid about defending this position against others that might design processors compatible with the ARM instruction set.
In the case of picoturbo, they used US patents 5701493, 5386563, and 5583804. These three patents are as ridiculous as any you will find and are the cornerstone of ARM defending its market position. Two of the patents are essentially the mechanism used for setting condition code flags, a technique used in the ARM6 long before these patents were filed. The third patent is essentially a patent on a 32x32 multiplier where the result can be read 32-bits at a time, too much prior art to dignify with comment.
Pictourbo spent probably $4M and about a year defending themselves in a federal lawsuit in order to get to the point where they could ask the court for a summary judgement in their favor. On the day the court was to rule on this motion Pictoturbo was bought by ARM for $15M.
The ARM instruction set is kind of cool, but this should not be confused with a company that will use its cash reserves, a set of crappy patents, and monopoly position to crush anyone that tries to produce a product compatible with the instruction set.
I'm running SUSE-9.1 64-bit on a Tyan S2885 dual opteron motherboard with two SATA drives in RAID-0, just great... Boot from the DVD in rescue mode and it even finds /dev/md0 with no fiddling.
As a longtime redhat guy, I've found the new distribution for me.
jeff
Let's face it, this is really just another example of how that patent system is now geared to protect bigger coprporte interests and not the smaller inventors the patent system was origianally intended to protect.
The patent office went back to review this patent because of the dollar-size of the potential damage and less to do with the legitamacy of the patent. A small company would likely never see such a consideration from the patent office.
Instead, a smaller guy is most likely to face a crappy patent that is presumed valid until you spend $2-3M and 12-months to get to a markman ruling in a fedral lawsuit before a judge can even consider a summary judgement against a clearly bogus patent.
Even though the odds are about 50/50 for winning if you take a patent to court, the barrier to entry is so great for a little guy that it's not usually not possible to contest a patent.
jeff
"Its brain -- a 40-pound computer system tucked inside its body --"
You know it's got to be powerful when compute power is measured in pounds...
jeff
IBM is just great with Thinkpads. The service manual for all Thinkpad models is available online as a PDF file. It has incredibly detailed instructions for assembling the laptop from several hundred FRUs. You can order the FRUs from IBM or cheaper from a number of resellers. They seem to keep good stock on parts for older models.
A few years ago a friend of mine dropped her T20 Thinkpad onto asphalt from about 4 feet. It made quite a mess. I thought that it was going to be a total write-off, but I found the IBM info, ordered about $150 of little broken bits and restored the thing to perfect working order in about a week. It was great.
I've been a devoted Thinkpad fan ever since. I bought a new keyboard for my T23 recently, it took about 5 minutes to order the right part and another 5 minutes to install it. IBM really does do service manuals and parts the way you think a big company should do it.
jeff
All too true, but as time goes by Darl will become the placeholder villain. The lawfirm already owns a good chunk of SCO and as time goes by you can expect that they will own more and more, they'll probably get a seat on the board at some point.
When a company's strategy becomes litigious, the lawyers will control the company eventually. Darl will become a figurehead, this letter is a sign of things to come.
jeff
Right, as much as I need my daily dose of SCO, this latest letter from Darl should be mod'd down as flame-bait.
jeff
EDN has always been a peg boy for microsoft, or whoever will buy a full page ad in the magazine. This article is more of the same. Check out the issue and you'll find a staff written love story about bringing up CE.NET on a piece of embedded hardware.
jeff
For $40 you can get one of these flying saucers. It uses IR instead of Bluetooth, but it's good fun. I bought one this weekend for, ahem, my friend's kids, but I've been testing it... jeff
That's just f***ing great, now the bar for being a cool guy in free software just got raised. It used to be you just had to write a million lines of useful code. Now you've got to get a subpoena from SCO to be cool.
"Should we invite Jeff to speak at our little conference?" "Well, he didn't get a subpoena from SCO, so he's probably not that important..."
jeff
This thing is almost certainly a scam. The bill of materials for a GSM phone is about $40, even after you remove the display, microphone, and speaker, which these guys seem to have done from the picture.
Someone's got to pay for this, you can do it with a subsidized contract or you can charge for the phone, and you've still got to find a way to make money.
Something like this comes up every couple of years. No reason to expect that this one is any more credible.
jeff