The ladies were all sleeping with Gene Roddenberry, Leonard Nimoy did a decent job as Spock, but Mr. Scott is the ideal we all dreamed of being -- the guy who makes things work while having impossible demands made on his resources and abilities. James Doohan did a brilliant job with him. From the Trouble with Tribbles - "He called me a tin-plated dictator with delusions of grandeur? So that's when you hit him, Mr. Scott? No Sir. He called the Enterprise a garbage scow and that's when I hit him." to the Andromedans and "What are you drinking, Mr. Scott? It's, um, well it's green!"
RIP James Doohan, you inspired me to become an engineer and it was a pleasure to meet you briefly.
I haven't been inside a US theater in a decade, but I'll probably go see this out of loyalty to "classic" Star Trek[1]. I will change my mind if Mr. Scott is tainted.
[1] The best Star Trek movie was the first one. The long scene where Kirk was being brought up to the Enterprise via shuttle was for us real (and older) die hard fans and I *loved* it. Amazing that a "You Must Be New Here" scene actually made it to the big screen...
The patent is on the ability of share windows/views between multiple workspaces. So the fact that your application toolbar / "start menu" shows up in multiple workspaces would be a violation of this patent. FYI, ctl-alt-left,right arrow to switch between workspaces in gnome. Also right click the window-title "always on visible workspace" option is a violation of this patent. Well, that certainly describes features in CDE which predates both GNOME and KDE by about a decade (but not the application date of the patent). Why are Sun and HP not being sued?
Is it flame bait to point out that this isn't a Microsoft lawsuit? Possibly. It certainly isn't a "Linux" patent infringement. Multiple desktop GUI environments were pioneered in the market place by Sun, HP and DEC. Why aren't Sun and HP the main targets, and why did they wait so long? CDE has been around since at least the early 1990's.
This was filed in 1987 Virtual consoles predate that. The System V-oid O/S on the Unix PCs had virtual console support. End of life for the Unix PC was around that time, so virtual consoles absolutely came first.
This patent seems to involve multiple desktops in a GUI environment and the first implementation of that that I recall was olvwm from Sun Micro. I don't think olwm, the single desktop predecessor of olvwm came that early. HP's Vu (spelling?) might have had multiple desktops by 1989ish, but I don't remember. CDE (which merged HP, DEC, and Sun's X11 environments) has the same feature.
Regardless, this is not a "Linux" Patent Infringement. Sun, DEC and HP were doing it on their proprietary versions of Unix first, so it's a GUI thing. Sun and HP still survive. Perhaps they should have started suing there.
T-Mobile is being sued because their unlocking policies are unreasonable. When I signed up, I indicated that I wanted both an international roaming phone and unlockable phones to be used with Smart (in the Philippines). Although I was told I would get both, I got neither.
The international roaming bit was service from hell. I was attempting to get my main phone unlocked in the last two weeks before returning to Manila. The secondary phone was unlocked, but there was a problem with the primary phone that they did not tell me about and I had to call the service center a few hours before check-in to verify that yes, they would not be unlocking that phone due to some technical issue with the model. At that time (and for the third time in the week) I asked them about international roaming and was told that it was OK. It was not.
When I called their "customer care" after coming back to California I was informed that I had to notify them first, "which I see you did before you left. We're very sorry for the inconvenience..."
T-Mobile deserves to be sued. Can I still sign up for this lawsuit? I'm a very angry T-Mobile customer in California who did not get what he paid for.
It is also true I beleive that Windows contains a fair amount of LGPL or BSD code inside it. That's legal under those lic. But what if someone, say SCO, were to say that the code in the LGLP lic was theirs? Then If it makes sense to sue users of Linux it would make sense to sue users of MS. I'm trying to parse this and coming up empty.
After releasing code under the LGPL, it doesn't matter who "owns" it. A recipient is free to use it. Period.
The sticky situation is where you have released code under LGPL or BSD or whatever free license and it is based upon a patent that you own. In that case, you would claim that use of such code requires patent royalties to be paid to you. This is not the situation that Ballmer has been claiming. He is claiming that unspecified Linux code, independently developed by unspecified Linux people infringes on 235 unspecified patents owned by Microsoft. I do not believe that he has ever claimed code sharing and clearly, the recent code released under Microsoft's public source license is tainted for use in an Open Source project whether or not patents are involved.
So if GNU is at risk of containing other people's IP then since MS uses GNU they are too. Um no. Actually if that GNU code infringes on a Microsoft patent, Microsoft would be the only one who could legally use that code without paying patent royalties.
What you write makes no sense and is not an analogous situation.
Omron http://www.omronsoft.com/ does data entry for Japanese and Chinese. See also http://www.omronsoft.com/mobile/adwmnnv2.html for some description on how it performs the "translation". These guys have the prior art on "smart" dictionary data entry that somebody in Canada is trying to patent.
With great difficulty. Many of the same characters are used, but they sound different and mean different things now. I suspect there's similar difficulties between the Taiwanese and Red Chinese since they now use different characters for writing as well.
If by "Japanese keyboard" you mean a keyboard with Japanese characters on the keycaps... There are two types, there's the huge monster kanji typewriter with something like a thousand keys that I don't think anyone knows how to use and kana keyboards which Japanese ignore and are not popular. My sponsor laughed at me when I was writing kana.el (kana keyboard support for XEmacs), but hey, it seemed like the thing to do at the time.
Japanese writing is entered with a qwerty keyboard and phonetic translation to latin script called Romaji. Chinese writing is entered a similar way with a phonetic translation called Pinyin. The beauty of such methods is that they can work with a severely reduced set of keys, like on the face of a cellphone.
That would be Chinese and Japanese - top to bottom, right to left.
Japanese writing has pretty much been converted to the western left to right style. Formal government documents and newspapers are written that way and in day-to-day life in Japan one will rarely encounter top to bottom writing except in traditional restaurants, certain stylized ads and museums. You actually encounter it less than outright English (English is very popular in ads see http://www.engrish.com/ ), which few people read.
My brief trip to China seemed to indicate that they've done the same thing there.
Well put.
Part of the problem is that good security is more a matter of good people that it is good equipment. And the other parts you laid out pretty nicely.
MS Windows is the soft target for these people, paticularly the hobby version and not the server version. This storm virus thingie deliberately avoids infecting MS Windows server edition. I don't think that counts. *Anything* Microsoft is a soft target, as is any networked computer with a clueless admin.
I seem to recall one episode where Kirk beat him by playing an unexpected "illogical" move. It always struck me as being most illogical to play a position that was that vulnerable to something unexpected. Spock immediately resigned, so I guess Kirk's move really shouldn't be considered illogical after all.
Re:Organizing the search space...
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 1
This is incorrect and has been scientifically proven otherwise (see the DeGroot link I just posted).
Re:Artificial Intelligence?
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 1
I would also strongly disagree with your assertion that "even world champions of chess" don't think more than 5-6 ply ahead--I've seen guesses of several times that number. There's no need to guess. Adriaan DeGroot http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3290 did scientific studies of it. In certain positions, masters would look ahead more than 10 moves (>20 ply). His book is fascinating reading, by the way.
ebay sellers are complaining because ads are taking their customers away? There's a word for those ads: it's *competition*. Um, without those sellers, EBay doesn't have a web site. It doesn't seem wise to me to alienate the core of your business.
This link http://www.eolas.com/about_us.html is more informative. Two of the top three guys are lawyers. Patent drones who intend to make profit in court sounds about right.
You may be hit by a car and killed if you cross the street. Does that make it not OK to cross a street on foot? A law isn't going to protect you against someone who doesn't care.
No matter what laws you attempt to create and enforce, unencrypted email is a postcard and can and will be abused. Yes, this is most unfortunate for us old-timers when the problem used to be getting wanted email to a recipient.
To respond to your scenario, that means I never answer the phone to an unknown number which works for me, but maybe not for you. I don't live permanently in the US, so I could care less about junk snail mail. (The first day I got mail after moving to Japan the junk mail I got was for an English Conversation school advertised by Celine Deon. W00t!)
Usually, I find that smart people grip about the most obvious potential flaws without looking into proposed solutions. Email me if you wish to continue this discussion. I haven't "griped" about anything, just tried to describe how your solution doesn't solve anything I consider to be a problem. I've done two Linux kernel-based distros from the ground up and could be persuaded to do it again if I thought it solved an interesting problem.
P.S. Keeping hashes on directories for the purpose of syncing is not a particularly workable idea.
P.S.S. Linus *was* shot down when he was doing the work that would become the Linux kernel - "If you were my student and turned that in for a project, I'd flunk you". Working code goes a *long* ways.
In general I try not to worry about the rest of the world and focus on my own needs. You're not the only one. What problems of mine can you solve?
No, not at all. What I am saying is that there is no reason for anyone to have expectation of privacy of unencrypted email on the internet regardless of who is routing it.
This is all basic Cypherpunks 101. Cypherpunks write code. I've worked on the development of MUAs with builtin encryption and helped test encrypted mailing lists. I've also hacked on and administered MTAs in a commercial environment. I know what I'm talking about.
If you don't like someone reading your postcards, either don't send them or put them in an envelope by encrypting them.
Encrypted or otherwise, people (especially business people) would not be smart trusting security to any webmail service be it Google, Yahoo!, or Microsoft. Ballmer singling out Google when Hotmail has all the same problems is FUD.
(I disagree with the -1 Troll moderation on the post I'm responding to).
Well, the download speed would only be a problem The download speed is always going to be a problem, or more precisely, the attempt to make a non-local access will be painfully slow.
Installation is perhaps the easiest part of maintaining a computer. I've never had WAN access fast enough that would make the idea of incrementally loading an OS on demand an ideal.
You also make assumptions that are not true in any environment I consider interesting - everyone running the exact same version of software on the exact same equipment/architecture.
How would you go about demand loading a windowing system? Is X11 and basic KDE already installed? What happens the first time you invoke XEmacs (would the same thing happen when you attempt to browse the XEmacs lisp libraries for the first time)?
I don't mean to shoot you down entirely, it's good to think up truly different things, but some things already have a very good solution and it's truly difficult to come up with something better.
So when a gmail user sends me an email, google has invaded my privacy as the email receiver and if they attempt to send me a targeted add based upon the contents of my email, have they committed an offence and opened and read my mail with out my authorisation. Whoa, slow down there cowboy. Any webmail service has to "read" email that it relays through the system. Any email service too, for that matter.
It's always been the case that email is best compared to a postcard. When it's sitting in someone's spool directory, it's readable unless you've encrypted it with end-to-end encryption like GPG or the equivalent.
If you don't wish to send postcard email, encrypt it. Plain and simple. Otherwise you must assume that your email will be read by someone. It's just the way the technology works.
This is all more FUD like the 200+ invisible magic patents that they can't name.
Even though such a project sounds super-cool to me personally, getting even one other human being interested takes a miracle. In reality, you just have to write it, and hope the user base grows. Well, yes, that's the way it works. Most "super-cool" ideas unaccompanied by code (and often accompanied by code) either don't solve interesting problems or cannot solve interesting problems in a reasonable amount of time.
My limited experience with P2P (the Blizzard downloader) makes me shudder at the thought of an operating system dependent upon that, but maybe your mileage varies.
This article doesn't surprise me at all. The Japanese do things *right*.
The initial project was originally discussed in the 1930's with construction beginning in 1959 - the Tokaido Shinkansen started running on October 1, 1964, in time for the Tokyo Olympics. I rode on that line regularly between Kobe and Tokyo in 2002 (maybe a couple dozen times). The Shinkansen puts any other public transportation I've ever been on to shame[1].
Japan was wired with ISDN first (Japan was all ISDN when I got there in 1999). My Japanese keitai in 2002 still has some features not available in the US today (the dictionary mode works right, to name one).
There is a lot to love about engineering in Japan. I wish they'd sell more of (the best of) it abroad, but that's their privilege.
[1] Singapore Airlines which just won some kind of award for inflight entertainment with a new Linux-based system is not bad though.
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The ladies were all sleeping with Gene Roddenberry, Leonard Nimoy did a decent job as Spock, but Mr. Scott is the ideal we all dreamed of being -- the guy who makes things work while having impossible demands made on his resources and abilities. James Doohan did a brilliant job with him. From the Trouble with Tribbles - "He called me a tin-plated dictator with delusions of grandeur? So that's when you hit him, Mr. Scott? No Sir. He called the Enterprise a garbage scow and that's when I hit him." to the Andromedans and "What are you drinking, Mr. Scott? It's, um, well it's green!"
...
RIP James Doohan, you inspired me to become an engineer and it was a pleasure to meet you briefly.
I haven't been inside a US theater in a decade, but I'll probably go see this out of loyalty to "classic" Star Trek[1]. I will change my mind if Mr. Scott is tainted.
[1] The best Star Trek movie was the first one. The long scene where Kirk was being brought up to the Enterprise via shuttle was for us real (and older) die hard fans and I *loved* it. Amazing that a "You Must Be New Here" scene actually made it to the big screen
This patent seems to involve multiple desktops in a GUI environment and the first implementation of that that I recall was olvwm from Sun Micro. I don't think olwm, the single desktop predecessor of olvwm came that early. HP's Vu (spelling?) might have had multiple desktops by 1989ish, but I don't remember. CDE (which merged HP, DEC, and Sun's X11 environments) has the same feature.
Regardless, this is not a "Linux" Patent Infringement. Sun, DEC and HP were doing it on their proprietary versions of Unix first, so it's a GUI thing. Sun and HP still survive. Perhaps they should have started suing there.
T-Mobile is being sued because their unlocking policies are unreasonable. When I signed up, I indicated that I wanted both an international roaming phone and unlockable phones to be used with Smart (in the Philippines). Although I was told I would get both, I got neither.
..."
The international roaming bit was service from hell. I was attempting to get my main phone unlocked in the last two weeks before returning to Manila. The secondary phone was unlocked, but there was a problem with the primary phone that they did not tell me about and I had to call the service center a few hours before check-in to verify that yes, they would not be unlocking that phone due to some technical issue with the model. At that time (and for the third time in the week) I asked them about international roaming and was told that it was OK. It was not.
When I called their "customer care" after coming back to California I was informed that I had to notify them first, "which I see you did before you left. We're very sorry for the inconvenience
T-Mobile deserves to be sued. Can I still sign up for this lawsuit? I'm a very angry T-Mobile customer in California who did not get what he paid for.
After releasing code under the LGPL, it doesn't matter who "owns" it. A recipient is free to use it. Period.
The sticky situation is where you have released code under LGPL or BSD or whatever free license and it is based upon a patent that you own. In that case, you would claim that use of such code requires patent royalties to be paid to you. This is not the situation that Ballmer has been claiming. He is claiming that unspecified Linux code, independently developed by unspecified Linux people infringes on 235 unspecified patents owned by Microsoft. I do not believe that he has ever claimed code sharing and clearly, the recent code released under Microsoft's public source license is tainted for use in an Open Source project whether or not patents are involved. So if GNU is at risk of containing other people's IP then since MS uses GNU they are too. Um no. Actually if that GNU code infringes on a Microsoft patent, Microsoft would be the only one who could legally use that code without paying patent royalties.
What you write makes no sense and is not an analogous situation.
What Red Hat is doing is very important.
Omron http://www.omronsoft.com/ does data entry for Japanese and Chinese. See also http://www.omronsoft.com/mobile/adwmnnv2.html for some description on how it performs the "translation". These guys have the prior art on "smart" dictionary data entry that somebody in Canada is trying to patent.
With great difficulty. Many of the same characters are used, but they sound different and mean different things now. I suspect there's similar difficulties between the Taiwanese and Red Chinese since they now use different characters for writing as well.
If by "Japanese keyboard" you mean a keyboard with Japanese characters on the keycaps... There are two types, there's the huge monster kanji typewriter with something like a thousand keys that I don't think anyone knows how to use and kana keyboards which Japanese ignore and are not popular. My sponsor laughed at me when I was writing kana.el (kana keyboard support for XEmacs), but hey, it seemed like the thing to do at the time.
Japanese writing is entered with a qwerty keyboard and phonetic translation to latin script called Romaji. Chinese writing is entered a similar way with a phonetic translation called Pinyin. The beauty of such methods is that they can work with a severely reduced set of keys, like on the face of a cellphone.
That would be Chinese and Japanese - top to bottom, right to left.
Japanese writing has pretty much been converted to the western left to right style. Formal government documents and newspapers are written that way and in day-to-day life in Japan one will rarely encounter top to bottom writing except in traditional restaurants, certain stylized ads and museums. You actually encounter it less than outright English (English is very popular in ads see http://www.engrish.com/ ), which few people read.
My brief trip to China seemed to indicate that they've done the same thing there.
It's not an issue.
I seem to recall one episode where Kirk beat him by playing an unexpected "illogical" move. It always struck me as being most illogical to play a position that was that vulnerable to something unexpected. Spock immediately resigned, so I guess Kirk's move really shouldn't be considered illogical after all.
This is incorrect and has been scientifically proven otherwise (see the DeGroot link I just posted).
Probably the first person to categorically write some of it down was Aron Nimzovich http://www.chess-poster.com/great_players/nimzovich.htm
Chess is all about patterns.
In short, I basically agree with what you say.
Yeah. Maybe we should send the guys who keep reposting the crap-eating story first to test it out.
This link http://www.eolas.com/about_us.html is more informative. Two of the top three guys are lawyers. Patent drones who intend to make profit in court sounds about right.
OK, I guess you really are trolling.
You may be hit by a car and killed if you cross the street. Does that make it not OK to cross a street on foot? A law isn't going to protect you against someone who doesn't care.
No matter what laws you attempt to create and enforce, unencrypted email is a postcard and can and will be abused. Yes, this is most unfortunate for us old-timers when the problem used to be getting wanted email to a recipient.
To respond to your scenario, that means I never answer the phone to an unknown number which works for me, but maybe not for you. I don't live permanently in the US, so I could care less about junk snail mail. (The first day I got mail after moving to Japan the junk mail I got was for an English Conversation school advertised by Celine Deon. W00t!)
P.S. Keeping hashes on directories for the purpose of syncing is not a particularly workable idea.
P.S.S. Linus *was* shot down when he was doing the work that would become the Linux kernel - "If you were my student and turned that in for a project, I'd flunk you". Working code goes a *long* ways. In general I try not to worry about the rest of the world and focus on my own needs. You're not the only one. What problems of mine can you solve?
No, not at all. What I am saying is that there is no reason for anyone to have expectation of privacy of unencrypted email on the internet regardless of who is routing it.
This is all basic Cypherpunks 101. Cypherpunks write code. I've worked on the development of MUAs with builtin encryption and helped test encrypted mailing lists. I've also hacked on and administered MTAs in a commercial environment. I know what I'm talking about.
If you don't like someone reading your postcards, either don't send them or put them in an envelope by encrypting them.
Encrypted or otherwise, people (especially business people) would not be smart trusting security to any webmail service be it Google, Yahoo!, or Microsoft. Ballmer singling out Google when Hotmail has all the same problems is FUD.
(I disagree with the -1 Troll moderation on the post I'm responding to).
Installation is perhaps the easiest part of maintaining a computer. I've never had WAN access fast enough that would make the idea of incrementally loading an OS on demand an ideal.
You also make assumptions that are not true in any environment I consider interesting - everyone running the exact same version of software on the exact same equipment/architecture.
How would you go about demand loading a windowing system? Is X11 and basic KDE already installed? What happens the first time you invoke XEmacs (would the same thing happen when you attempt to browse the XEmacs lisp libraries for the first time)?
I don't mean to shoot you down entirely, it's good to think up truly different things, but some things already have a very good solution and it's truly difficult to come up with something better.
It's always been the case that email is best compared to a postcard. When it's sitting in someone's spool directory, it's readable unless you've encrypted it with end-to-end encryption like GPG or the equivalent.
If you don't wish to send postcard email, encrypt it. Plain and simple. Otherwise you must assume that your email will be read by someone. It's just the way the technology works.
This is all more FUD like the 200+ invisible magic patents that they can't name.
Interesting, but it was Mrs. Woz who got arrested for scalping. I can't find an original article, but here's a reference out of Google's cache http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:hKxvKcOBiyQJ:findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NEW/is_1990_June_12/ai_8665906+Wozniak+Olympic+ticket+scalping&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a
My limited experience with P2P (the Blizzard downloader) makes me shudder at the thought of an operating system dependent upon that, but maybe your mileage varies.
Japan was wired with ISDN first (Japan was all ISDN when I got there in 1999). My Japanese keitai in 2002 still has some features not available in the US today (the dictionary mode works right, to name one).
There is a lot to love about engineering in Japan. I wish they'd sell more of (the best of) it abroad, but that's their privilege.
[1] Singapore Airlines which just won some kind of award for inflight entertainment with a new Linux-based system is not bad though.