Come on. I've read five notable comments in this thread and they all say in effect "How can I disable this protection to prevent the government from spying on me?"
Yes, I am concerned about my privacy. I find it really painful that so many people have my phone number, my email address, and my home address. People send me offensive ads every day which I wish I could refuse without inviting more.
This said, why are people instantly opposed to money with copy protection? I have no objection to this money unless something goes severely wrong, for example:
The money requires me to input my name and address after acquiring it.
The money breaks if I don't take good care of it.
Retailers refuse to accept it because the copy protection is so burdensome.
The wierd thing is that existing money often has these problems. When I go to the bank and withdraw cash from my account, they ask me for my name and address on the withdrawal form. If I leave a twenty in the wash a few too many times, it might fall apart - sometimes you can get people to still take it, but often not. And most inexplicably, the new US $100 bill that has so many copy protection features on it - I can't use it anywhere! People simply refuse it and say "there's too many forgeries around." Isn't that odd?
If the ECB puts a 1k data chip on their money, and the money still works like normal money, I will encourage it.
Coax works exactly like you describe. Each user can plug themselves in, and you can connect people downstream from yourself. But, whenever you need to disconnect, everyone downstream from you gets cut off... bummer. And, because there are so many connections, your reliability goes down pretty quickly as you wear out your plugs from constant use. Performance gets bad because in order to send information from one end of the chain to the next, you have to talk to everyone in the middle.
So, the current system of hubs and switches was developed to get around these problems. It's technically called Star network (10BaseT) vs a Ring network (Coax, or the system you described). In a star network, it costs more to add additional ports, but each individual port works at top speed, and if one user goes down everyone else stays up. As the marketplace has voted with its dollars, it's much better.
One of the really annoying things about chip manufacturing is Moore's law. In my opinion, the constant pace of innovation is what beat out all Intel competitors.
Examples:
Digital makes an Alpha chip that's 25% faster than Intel's chip. That's a noticeable speed boost!... But, if you wait a year, Intel's chips will match its speed. So you might as well buy an Intel chip now and plan to upgrade in a few years.
Centaur makes a chip that's 25% cheaper than Intel's chip. That's a nice price drop!... But, Intel makes so many chips that don't turn out to be 1.5 GHz P4s, it can afford to send out all those low-speed Celerons at roughly the same price as Centaur. So, you might as well buy a low-cost brand-name Intel chip.
Now, Transmeta makes a chip that's 25% cooler... and once again you can buy an Intel chip that's almost as good, but much more available.
In each of these cases, Intel has been able to shift the price-performance ratio and knock out a competitor. Only AMD's Athlon line, which is capable of competing with Intel from top to bottom, seems to be able to stake out its own territory.
I think the niche market for general purpose CPUs doesn't exist.
I'm sure I'm not the first person to wonder about it, but DVDs have been getting increasingly software-like in their admonishments to users.
It used to be that a few seconds at the front of every videotape said "Copying is prohibited, etc, etc," and you'd just fast forward through it. Nowadays all my DVDs have thirty second clips of FBI warnings, and they include codes that prevent my DVD player from fast forwarding. The DVD, literally, takes precedence over what I click on my remote control.
Although we all understand the UCITA has turned into a frightful mess, it seems like there does need to be a standard set of laws for software and content. When I buy a CD, most of the time I know what I'm getting and I know how to use it. When I buy a DVD, I don't know if they've somehow inserted idiotic menus and ads that I will be forced to watch.
Try Shogun: Total War. Asides from the fact that it's based on a really clever old board game ("Shogun" later renamed to "Samurai Swords"), it has a very elegant tactical warfare model.
This is to say, it's ugly. You control literally hundreds of troops on a big playing field. You have to plan your attack or defense well, because your troops grow tired the further they march. They grow disheartened if they see too many buddies get killed. And most importantly, they don't react the instant you tell them to go somewhere! You'd be surprised how important this little delay can be - the hyperactive teenager can't get his troops to move any faster than the methodical Prussian tactician.
There are lots of elements of victory. Troops attacking downhill have the advantage. You can rally your troops by making sure that reinforcements are waiting behind their lines (fleeing soldiers tend to regroup if they see lots of friendlies). If you put your general in harms' way, he can get killed or turn tail and flee, usually fatal blunders. You can surround and crush an enemy excursion; but if you miss the timing, they can easily break through and wreak havoc on your lines.
Be warned though: it's slow, and it can be dull and frustrating. I find that figuring out why I won or why I lost is at least as interesting as fighting the actual battle.
After reading this Slashdot article, I finally understand the purpose of Sprint ION.
I had read press releases and seen advertising mentioning Sprint "ION" as early as 1999, but I always got the impression that "ION" was Sprint's new corporate philsophy. Little did I know it was a real, useful service that I would have liked to purchase.
One lesson among many to draw from this company's closure is that advertising needs to be blunt. If you are a new business trying to gain customers, there is no room for touchy-feely ads that claim to make life better. If one company says "We sell innovative wireless communication solutions!" and the other says "We sell phone and Internet access to residences for one low price," which would you pick?
Actually, I guess we know which one the VC would pick.
Overall, the items I listed are the distinct benefits that came to mind thinking of the difference between CLI and GUI tools. However, I also concluded that Turbo Pascal was also a GUI tool: my answers compared integrated development environments to CLI tools, not GUI tools vs CLI tools.
Also, I am not a hardcore programmer in the sense that you have described. I don't like editing makefiles. I don't like meta-languages. I don't like switching back and forth between an editor and a set of development tools. My tastes in development are towards the simplest possible solution for the problem at hand; I'm no good when a refined, elegant application is called for.
Perhaps this is also why I've never grown fond of sending man pages through grep filters: developing a comfort level with CLI tools requires effort, but it often pays off if you use the tools frequently. I like the way I can pick up a GUI tool after leaving it alone for six months and still know how to use it. If I left grep alone for six months, I'd forget what all of the command line options were, and then I'd have to read through the man file again.
I have no doubt that if I was required to use CLI tools daily, I would grow to appreciate them as you have.
Are you serious? GUI tools are incredible nowadays.
I can run the program and step through the source code in another window.
The editor highlights my code in color, and I can expand or contract each class definition.
In a project window, I can see all the files available and check them in or out of source code control.
When I move my mouse over a function call, I get a popup with the list of arguments.
I can standardize my comments and have the development tool create new classes for me with my comment scheme already in place.
If I forget a constant's name, I can call up a separate window where I can browse or search through constants defined in many modules.
Make scripts are generated for me automatically.
But probably the best part is that I don't have to give up any of my command line tools in order to get these benefits. If I want to run it from the command line, or do a make from a batch script, that option is still there.
I want to stress that not all of these advantages are Visual Studio or Codewarrior related - some of them come from the revered Turbo Pascal. None of these development environments require you to give up the command line.
Actually, this is technically inaccurate. The IA-64 architecture (click on the link, it's the assembly language reference for the Itanium) has 128 integer registers and 128 floating point registers - on each side, 127 real ones, and R0, which is fixed to return 0.
What's not commonly known is that the P3 and P4 also have dozens if not hundreds of registers. The trick is register renaming: the P3 and P4 speculatively execute instructions as fast as they can, and they assign the results to temporary registers. If the processor needs these results, they reassign them back to the real registers like EAX, EBX, and so on.
So, overall, I'm not sure where the 328 number comes from.:P
Did anyone notice that in the middle of the article it says that the Pentium 4 chip has hardware multithreading, yet it was disabled "until the company comes out with its first Xeon processor with multithreading."
BY placing these right in the fimware Sun is able to smoke x86 performancewise ALWAYS.
While I agree that Sun's computer architecture is more clean than that of the PC, SPARC CPU performance really isn't that good. Using the best benchmark (SPEC CINT 2000) with which I am familiar, an Athlon 1.4GHz can get up to 495, while the fastest Sun computer (a Sun Blade 1000 model 1900) gets a respectable 439. A Pentium 4 1.8GHz can score as high as 596.
While CINT2000 is a great measure of typical application performance, it used to be true that Intel PCs had terrible floating point performance compared to RISC architectures such as Sun, SGI, and Alpha. However, according to SPEC CFP2000, the Sun Blade scores 369, the Athlon scores 433, and the P4 goes up to a shocking 618.
Sadly, most of today's software isn't CPU limited, so your best choice is to get a balance of performance between your disk, memory, operating system, graphics card, and CPU.
Reading this article, I see many intelligent posts about the similarity between regular audiotape copies, VCR copies, and digital CD-R copies. Many argue, and I agree, that the RIAA has fought this battle before, over different technologies, and lost each time.
It seems to me that the only way the RIAA could continue to object to new technologies (such as CD-Rs) is if they somehow expect that conditions are different now, and that they'll win, this time. Without legal training, I can't come up with any differences between the legality of audiotapes and CD-Rs, other than the fact that CDs are higher quality than audiotape.
Delving a little bit deeper, I wonder if this argument can't be traced to proud individuals who look at past copyright laws and say, "If I was in charge back then, we wouldn't have lost!" Or, conversely, "If I was in charge now, I wouldn't be losing!"... It appears to me that people grandstand about these issues far more often than regular ones. The RIAA does it; the MPAA does it; posters on Slashdot do it; even the US Government displays this type of reaction when comparing the current Drug War fiasco to the Prohibition Era.
Perhaps the real problem is that people simply want to re-fight the same arguments over and over again because they weren't satisfied with the results the last time?
Jim Kardach, an Intel technician and amateur historian, dubbed the wireless standard "Bluetooth," after Harald Bluetooth, a Scandinavian king who unified Denmark and Norway in the 10th century. The imagery was simple: the technology would bring together devices just like King Bluetooth linked the two countries.
Seeing as how Norway and Denmark are currently separate, we can add that Bluetooth also works just as well as its namesake.
Reading through the Warcraft III character summaries, I came across the Demon Hunter, a character whose voice is brought to you by the signature of evil from Ys, Darm.
Perhaps few people other than myself remember it, but the game Ys book 1 and 2 for the TurboGrafx has a long legacy - it was probably the first CD-ROM roleplaying game.
And in case you were wondering, the fantastic anime Escaflowne contains a number of scenes of Folken conversing with Lord Dornkirk over a communicator, in exactly the same pose and setting as Dalles speaking to Darm in the famous cutscene...
Proper virus warnings show up as articles on CNN, or companywide notices sent by your company's IT administrator. If it didn't come from either of these two sources, ignore it.
This is my own attempt to educate the user population. However, virus spam messages seem to be much better at educating the population than my replies.
So what would happen if I wrote a serious message with a real warning (e.g. "Anything with a.VBS extension is a virus.") and said, "Forward this on to everyone you know?"
P.S. Based on my understanding of privacy laws, it's legal to encourage people to forward messages to their friends, as long as you aren't collecting information about them.
If the "time to live" of all copyrights, patents etc - only lasted for 3 or 4 years - would the system still work?
Although this often seems like a good approach - 3 to 4 years seems to be the right length of time for an Internet technology patent, for example - most technologies take about two years to go through the patent office. Typically, a patent owner will file a provisional patent application, develop their idea a bit further, and then submit the complete concept after fleshing it out to be more thorough.
In many cases, a single patent isn't enough to cover a product for its lifetime. For example, while building industrial machinery, my associates have frequently applied for patents throughout their job: they can file a patent beforehand demonstrating what they intend to do, during development they file amendments and patents on newly discovered processes, and so on.
By the time the hardware is ready, it may easily be five or six years since the first provisional patent applications were submitted - sometimes the key parts of the machine are only covered for a short time. Then, the marketing department starts selling these machines (it takes a few years to convince people that they need anything revolutionary).
Next, considering the massive investment that was required to build the new machines, the first few years of profits go straight to pay off debts and to build a successful corporation around the patent. Fortunately, the original inventor (whom we hope owns stock) can get some payoff on investor enthusiasm and an early IPO, although that's less likely in today's market.
A similar case might be the inventor of the cellular phone: his patent lasted the full 17 years, but he was simply never able to get the business off the ground during this time. His patent expired before cell phones caught the public imagination, and other companies ended up making the profits.
Now, contrast these two examples with the Amazon.com one-click patent. One guy sits around the table and says, "It's too difficult to place an order. I wish we could do it with one click." Another guy replies, "We have their credit card number cached - why not make it just one click?" It may have taken a month to go through QA and legal, but their patent will become active and profitable immediately.
It seems to me that the worth of a patent can be judged (among other factors) by how long it takes to put the idea into practice, and shortening the life of a patent would penalize inventions involving the most effort. Perhaps the patent office should be reviewing the time and effort it takes to build the product when they consider it for a patent? A product that can be built in one month should frequently be more similar to prior art than one that takes a year to construct.
I saw on Coming Attractions that Disney's next film is called Lilo and Stich, in which an intergalactic runaway turns himself into an animal and befriends a young girl. Sounds cool? It has an interesting number of similarities to Osamu Tezuka's Wonder Three, in which three space policemen travel to Earth, turn themselves into animals, and befriend regular humans to decide if it the planet is worth saving. There are probably enough differences to make the story unique, but there's more fodder for the posters.
For reference, another company, Enfish, has been developing this software for the past three-four years. I have seen their product grow from a beta to a full fledged released product. It organizes your documents, email, network folders, and so on. They have a nice flash demo which shows how the product works.
I like them and I like their product; however, it didn't quite set sales goals on fire. It's very difficult to get used to accessing your data through a search engine when you're used to opening up folders on your disk. It's a great replacement for the Start | Search feature in Windows, but the extra power and extra speed it provides never generated the enthusiasm the founders hoped.
Why is everyone so excited about "making an example" of a small company that is obviously trying to do the right thing?
Let me clarify: I observe that this company is small because their product is not widely known. I also observe that this company has gone to the extraordinary length to publish a "Credit Where Credit Is Due" page on their website, to specifically single out the software developers whose work made the program possible.
GPL aside, isn't this type of public credit exactly what we want authors of open-source software to get? It seems to be to be a pretty good world where, if I do hard work and create a valuable algorithm and open it to the public, I am recognized when people use it.
Yes, it stings when someone else makes money off your hard work: I've had it happen to my code, and I felt dumb for not making that money myself. But if I open my code to the world and yet limit its use to other people willing to open their code to the world, I'm not really opening my code to the world... only to my own little close-knit community.
My legal department representative walked into my room the other day and announced, "I need you to work on the EU Data Directive." There's a surprisingly little amount of information to use.
So far, the explanations I have received from our vendors and our partners are unsatisfactory. People aren't really aware of the data directive; and those who are aware, refer to a clause called "Safe Harbor" that protects businesses that work on non-EU data but whose websites operate in the EU.
The most cogent explanation I have received so far is that the EU Data Directive acts as a "poison pill," attaching itself to any data that comes from the EU. If a website collects data on users from the EU, that data can never leave the EU - the exception being "safe harbor" companies who do not really have a presence in the EU. I haven't yet received a satisfactory explanation about how a website that operates in the EU and collects data about American users is affected.
Perhaps I should pose a business question: How can a website effectively mix US and EU data in a database? It sounds like we are in the land of do-as-you-please for US data, but anything from the EU cannot be shared, sold, or transferred to partners.
I presume most of us here would reject the UCITA, which makes commercial software click-wrap agreements binding. If UCITA passes, software companies can insert fun statements into their clickwrap like "By opening this package, I owe MegaCorp $5 extra;" and the lawyers will have the support to make these licenses stick. I hope you'll agree with me that this is a bad idea.
Conversely, don't we have the same situation with the GPL? You're running a program, you find a bug, so you download the source code and hastily click through or agree to whatever requirements the code ships with. How can the GPL be made to be enforceable while clickwraps shouldn't be?
Just before Daily Radar closed down, they started experimenting with advertisements. When banner ad revenues dropped precipitously, they added affiliate programs, popups, floating javascript banners, interactive ads, site sponsorships, and more.
What frustrates me is recognizing that these ad technologies - despite being clever, and, in rare cases, useful - did nothing to improve the site's revenue position. Daily Radar had pretty much everything a web site can ask for: daily rotating content, a loyal and excited fan base, community building features, a direct link to sales tools (they had buy buttons on every game review), and more.
What does this say about the state of every other website out there? Daily Radar did not appear to be mismanaged, nor did it appear to lack technical innovation. Most of the attributes Daily Radar had, I have come to regard as essential for a website's success.
I think this means that if you run a website that provides content:
Slashdot Mirror
Come on. I've read five notable comments in this thread and they all say in effect "How can I disable this protection to prevent the government from spying on me?"
Yes, I am concerned about my privacy. I find it really painful that so many people have my phone number, my email address, and my home address. People send me offensive ads every day which I wish I could refuse without inviting more.
This said, why are people instantly opposed to money with copy protection? I have no objection to this money unless something goes severely wrong, for example:
The money requires me to input my name and address after acquiring it.
The money breaks if I don't take good care of it.
Retailers refuse to accept it because the copy protection is so burdensome.
The wierd thing is that existing money often has these problems. When I go to the bank and withdraw cash from my account, they ask me for my name and address on the withdrawal form. If I leave a twenty in the wash a few too many times, it might fall apart - sometimes you can get people to still take it, but often not. And most inexplicably, the new US $100 bill that has so many copy protection features on it - I can't use it anywhere! People simply refuse it and say "there's too many forgeries around." Isn't that odd?
If the ECB puts a 1k data chip on their money, and the money still works like normal money, I will encourage it.
</obscure simpsons quote>
God: Think about it, Kent. What use is a phase conjugate tracking mirror? A big mirror needs a big beam.
Kent: I... I overheard Dr. Hathaway talking about a test out in the desert.
God: Good. Now, I want you to think about what you've done. And for the last time, stop touching yourself!
Coax works exactly like you describe. Each user can plug themselves in, and you can connect people downstream from yourself. But, whenever you need to disconnect, everyone downstream from you gets cut off... bummer. And, because there are so many connections, your reliability goes down pretty quickly as you wear out your plugs from constant use. Performance gets bad because in order to send information from one end of the chain to the next, you have to talk to everyone in the middle.
So, the current system of hubs and switches was developed to get around these problems. It's technically called Star network (10BaseT) vs a Ring network (Coax, or the system you described). In a star network, it costs more to add additional ports, but each individual port works at top speed, and if one user goes down everyone else stays up. As the marketplace has voted with its dollars, it's much better.
Examples:
Digital makes an Alpha chip that's 25% faster than Intel's chip. That's a noticeable speed boost! ... But, if you wait a year, Intel's chips will match its speed. So you might as well buy an Intel chip now and plan to upgrade in a few years.
Centaur makes a chip that's 25% cheaper than Intel's chip. That's a nice price drop! ... But, Intel makes so many chips that don't turn out to be 1.5 GHz P4s, it can afford to send out all those low-speed Celerons at roughly the same price as Centaur. So, you might as well buy a low-cost brand-name Intel chip.
Now, Transmeta makes a chip that's 25% cooler... and once again you can buy an Intel chip that's almost as good, but much more available.
In each of these cases, Intel has been able to shift the price-performance ratio and knock out a competitor. Only AMD's Athlon line, which is capable of competing with Intel from top to bottom, seems to be able to stake out its own territory.
I think the niche market for general purpose CPUs doesn't exist.
It used to be that a few seconds at the front of every videotape said "Copying is prohibited, etc, etc," and you'd just fast forward through it. Nowadays all my DVDs have thirty second clips of FBI warnings, and they include codes that prevent my DVD player from fast forwarding. The DVD, literally, takes precedence over what I click on my remote control.
Although we all understand the UCITA has turned into a frightful mess, it seems like there does need to be a standard set of laws for software and content. When I buy a CD, most of the time I know what I'm getting and I know how to use it. When I buy a DVD, I don't know if they've somehow inserted idiotic menus and ads that I will be forced to watch.
This is to say, it's ugly. You control literally hundreds of troops on a big playing field. You have to plan your attack or defense well, because your troops grow tired the further they march. They grow disheartened if they see too many buddies get killed. And most importantly, they don't react the instant you tell them to go somewhere! You'd be surprised how important this little delay can be - the hyperactive teenager can't get his troops to move any faster than the methodical Prussian tactician.
There are lots of elements of victory. Troops attacking downhill have the advantage. You can rally your troops by making sure that reinforcements are waiting behind their lines (fleeing soldiers tend to regroup if they see lots of friendlies). If you put your general in harms' way, he can get killed or turn tail and flee, usually fatal blunders. You can surround and crush an enemy excursion; but if you miss the timing, they can easily break through and wreak havoc on your lines.
Be warned though: it's slow, and it can be dull and frustrating. I find that figuring out why I won or why I lost is at least as interesting as fighting the actual battle.
I had read press releases and seen advertising mentioning Sprint "ION" as early as 1999, but I always got the impression that "ION" was Sprint's new corporate philsophy. Little did I know it was a real, useful service that I would have liked to purchase.
One lesson among many to draw from this company's closure is that advertising needs to be blunt. If you are a new business trying to gain customers, there is no room for touchy-feely ads that claim to make life better. If one company says "We sell innovative wireless communication solutions!" and the other says "We sell phone and Internet access to residences for one low price," which would you pick?
Actually, I guess we know which one the VC would pick.
Overall, the items I listed are the distinct benefits that came to mind thinking of the difference between CLI and GUI tools. However, I also concluded that Turbo Pascal was also a GUI tool: my answers compared integrated development environments to CLI tools, not GUI tools vs CLI tools.
Also, I am not a hardcore programmer in the sense that you have described. I don't like editing makefiles. I don't like meta-languages. I don't like switching back and forth between an editor and a set of development tools. My tastes in development are towards the simplest possible solution for the problem at hand; I'm no good when a refined, elegant application is called for.
Perhaps this is also why I've never grown fond of sending man pages through grep filters: developing a comfort level with CLI tools requires effort, but it often pays off if you use the tools frequently. I like the way I can pick up a GUI tool after leaving it alone for six months and still know how to use it. If I left grep alone for six months, I'd forget what all of the command line options were, and then I'd have to read through the man file again.
I have no doubt that if I was required to use CLI tools daily, I would grow to appreciate them as you have.
I can run the program and step through the source code in another window.
The editor highlights my code in color, and I can expand or contract each class definition.
In a project window, I can see all the files available and check them in or out of source code control.
When I move my mouse over a function call, I get a popup with the list of arguments.
I can standardize my comments and have the development tool create new classes for me with my comment scheme already in place.
If I forget a constant's name, I can call up a separate window where I can browse or search through constants defined in many modules.
Make scripts are generated for me automatically.
But probably the best part is that I don't have to give up any of my command line tools in order to get these benefits. If I want to run it from the command line, or do a make from a batch script, that option is still there.
I want to stress that not all of these advantages are Visual Studio or Codewarrior related - some of them come from the revered Turbo Pascal. None of these development environments require you to give up the command line.
What's not commonly known is that the P3 and P4 also have dozens if not hundreds of registers. The trick is register renaming: the P3 and P4 speculatively execute instructions as fast as they can, and they assign the results to temporary registers. If the processor needs these results, they reassign them back to the real registers like EAX, EBX, and so on.
So, overall, I'm not sure where the 328 number comes from. :P
Shades of the whole 486SX debacle?
While I agree that Sun's computer architecture is more clean than that of the PC, SPARC CPU performance really isn't that good. Using the best benchmark (SPEC CINT 2000) with which I am familiar, an Athlon 1.4GHz can get up to 495, while the fastest Sun computer (a Sun Blade 1000 model 1900) gets a respectable 439. A Pentium 4 1.8GHz can score as high as 596.
While CINT2000 is a great measure of typical application performance, it used to be true that Intel PCs had terrible floating point performance compared to RISC architectures such as Sun, SGI, and Alpha. However, according to SPEC CFP2000, the Sun Blade scores 369, the Athlon scores 433, and the P4 goes up to a shocking 618.
Sadly, most of today's software isn't CPU limited, so your best choice is to get a balance of performance between your disk, memory, operating system, graphics card, and CPU.
It seems to me that the only way the RIAA could continue to object to new technologies (such as CD-Rs) is if they somehow expect that conditions are different now, and that they'll win, this time. Without legal training, I can't come up with any differences between the legality of audiotapes and CD-Rs, other than the fact that CDs are higher quality than audiotape.
Delving a little bit deeper, I wonder if this argument can't be traced to proud individuals who look at past copyright laws and say, "If I was in charge back then, we wouldn't have lost!" Or, conversely, "If I was in charge now, I wouldn't be losing!" ... It appears to me that people grandstand about these issues far more often than regular ones. The RIAA does it; the MPAA does it; posters on Slashdot do it; even the US Government displays this type of reaction when comparing the current Drug War fiasco to the Prohibition Era.
Perhaps the real problem is that people simply want to re-fight the same arguments over and over again because they weren't satisfied with the results the last time?
Seeing as how Norway and Denmark are currently separate, we can add that Bluetooth also works just as well as its namesake.
Perhaps few people other than myself remember it, but the game Ys book 1 and 2 for the TurboGrafx has a long legacy - it was probably the first CD-ROM roleplaying game.
And in case you were wondering, the fantastic anime Escaflowne contains a number of scenes of Folken conversing with Lord Dornkirk over a communicator, in exactly the same pose and setting as Dalles speaking to Darm in the famous cutscene...
Anyway, that's today's trivia.
Or am I too obscure?
When I receive a bogus virus warning from my friends (e.g. Good Times), I reply:
- Check urbanlegends.about.com to see if it is a hoax before forwarding an email.
- Proper virus warnings show up as articles on CNN, or companywide notices sent by your company's IT administrator. If it didn't come from either of these two sources, ignore it.
This is my own attempt to educate the user population. However, virus spam messages seem to be much better at educating the population than my replies.So what would happen if I wrote a serious message with a real warning (e.g. "Anything with a .VBS extension is a virus.") and said, "Forward this on to everyone you know?"
P.S. Based on my understanding of privacy laws, it's legal to encourage people to forward messages to their friends, as long as you aren't collecting information about them.
Although this often seems like a good approach - 3 to 4 years seems to be the right length of time for an Internet technology patent, for example - most technologies take about two years to go through the patent office. Typically, a patent owner will file a provisional patent application, develop their idea a bit further, and then submit the complete concept after fleshing it out to be more thorough.
In many cases, a single patent isn't enough to cover a product for its lifetime. For example, while building industrial machinery, my associates have frequently applied for patents throughout their job: they can file a patent beforehand demonstrating what they intend to do, during development they file amendments and patents on newly discovered processes, and so on.
By the time the hardware is ready, it may easily be five or six years since the first provisional patent applications were submitted - sometimes the key parts of the machine are only covered for a short time. Then, the marketing department starts selling these machines (it takes a few years to convince people that they need anything revolutionary).
Next, considering the massive investment that was required to build the new machines, the first few years of profits go straight to pay off debts and to build a successful corporation around the patent. Fortunately, the original inventor (whom we hope owns stock) can get some payoff on investor enthusiasm and an early IPO, although that's less likely in today's market.
A similar case might be the inventor of the cellular phone: his patent lasted the full 17 years, but he was simply never able to get the business off the ground during this time. His patent expired before cell phones caught the public imagination, and other companies ended up making the profits.
Now, contrast these two examples with the Amazon.com one-click patent. One guy sits around the table and says, "It's too difficult to place an order. I wish we could do it with one click." Another guy replies, "We have their credit card number cached - why not make it just one click?" It may have taken a month to go through QA and legal, but their patent will become active and profitable immediately.
It seems to me that the worth of a patent can be judged (among other factors) by how long it takes to put the idea into practice, and shortening the life of a patent would penalize inventions involving the most effort. Perhaps the patent office should be reviewing the time and effort it takes to build the product when they consider it for a patent? A product that can be built in one month should frequently be more similar to prior art than one that takes a year to construct.
I saw on Coming Attractions that Disney's next film is called Lilo and Stich, in which an intergalactic runaway turns himself into an animal and befriends a young girl. Sounds cool? It has an interesting number of similarities to Osamu Tezuka's Wonder Three, in which three space policemen travel to Earth, turn themselves into animals, and befriend regular humans to decide if it the planet is worth saving. There are probably enough differences to make the story unique, but there's more fodder for the posters.
I like them and I like their product; however, it didn't quite set sales goals on fire. It's very difficult to get used to accessing your data through a search engine when you're used to opening up folders on your disk. It's a great replacement for the Start | Search feature in Windows, but the extra power and extra speed it provides never generated the enthusiasm the founders hoped.
Let me clarify: I observe that this company is small because their product is not widely known. I also observe that this company has gone to the extraordinary length to publish a "Credit Where Credit Is Due" page on their website, to specifically single out the software developers whose work made the program possible.
GPL aside, isn't this type of public credit exactly what we want authors of open-source software to get? It seems to be to be a pretty good world where, if I do hard work and create a valuable algorithm and open it to the public, I am recognized when people use it.
Yes, it stings when someone else makes money off your hard work: I've had it happen to my code, and I felt dumb for not making that money myself. But if I open my code to the world and yet limit its use to other people willing to open their code to the world, I'm not really opening my code to the world ... only to my own little close-knit community.
Thoughts?
So far, the explanations I have received from our vendors and our partners are unsatisfactory. People aren't really aware of the data directive; and those who are aware, refer to a clause called "Safe Harbor" that protects businesses that work on non-EU data but whose websites operate in the EU.
The most cogent explanation I have received so far is that the EU Data Directive acts as a "poison pill," attaching itself to any data that comes from the EU. If a website collects data on users from the EU, that data can never leave the EU - the exception being "safe harbor" companies who do not really have a presence in the EU. I haven't yet received a satisfactory explanation about how a website that operates in the EU and collects data about American users is affected.
Perhaps I should pose a business question: How can a website effectively mix US and EU data in a database? It sounds like we are in the land of do-as-you-please for US data, but anything from the EU cannot be shared, sold, or transferred to partners.
Conversely, don't we have the same situation with the GPL? You're running a program, you find a bug, so you download the source code and hastily click through or agree to whatever requirements the code ships with. How can the GPL be made to be enforceable while clickwraps shouldn't be?
Just before Daily Radar closed down, they started experimenting with advertisements. When banner ad revenues dropped precipitously, they added affiliate programs, popups, floating javascript banners, interactive ads, site sponsorships, and more.
What frustrates me is recognizing that these ad technologies - despite being clever, and, in rare cases, useful - did nothing to improve the site's revenue position. Daily Radar had pretty much everything a web site can ask for: daily rotating content, a loyal and excited fan base, community building features, a direct link to sales tools (they had buy buttons on every game review), and more.
What does this say about the state of every other website out there? Daily Radar did not appear to be mismanaged, nor did it appear to lack technical innovation. Most of the attributes Daily Radar had, I have come to regard as essential for a website's success.
I think this means that if you run a website that provides content:
You are probably out of luck.