On the other hand, perhaps having this information sent directly to authorities will result in more prosecutions (or more successful prosecutions) under laws similar to CAN-SPAM, (or maybe that's just wishful thinking.) Blizzard cannot control violation of ToS SPAM on their own servers. What makes you think laws and governments can improve on that?
The libertarian in me says that the model of email is totally broken. If it's free to send ads to everyone, someone will do it. A less broken model would require paying the recipient of email to read it. Hey, if I were getting US$.25 or whatever for every ad I get in email, bring it on. (See the Cyphernomican, old cypherpunks list archives, etc. for discussion of that).
A law specifically banning testing while driving is harder to defend against. Agreed. I also think drunk driving laws are superfluous (reckless driving is already a crime). In so many cases, we do not need new laws, we just need existing laws to be enforced. (And to all the women who put on makeup while driving to work in the morning, probably none of whom read/., I'm looking at you).
there are plenty of open source projects that are just hobby applications that weren't worth charging for True, but there are plenty more proprietary products that are not worth charging for either, even if some of them are charging for them. And your point is? Sturgeon's law applies to just about everything.
Last time I did that (probably back in the 90's), any process already running worked, but I couldn't start any new processes. Remember, cp, rm, and mv are usually just programs in/bin, so if core libraries are hosed, you can't use them. I have to give credit to MS for being smart enough to make the corresponding commands built into command.com / cmd.exe. Of course, that's why you need cp, rm, mv etc. statically linked, or you should have sash (statically linked, of course) installed. (Busybox may be the modern equivalent of sash, but I've never investigated it).
Smart and command.com are oxymorons based on the code I audited - a delightful mix of CPM/86 and dumbed down Xenix with lots of really stupid bugs and very useful but hidden features. Maybe it got smarter.
I've always wondered how someone could consider the Unix design a good idea. Two different programs can open what they think is the same file, yet get completely different results. And yet some people don't seem to get why this is a really bad thing for shared libraries (or even files in general). It's because you only ever deal with pointers to files (inodes) and the inodes are what are cached when a file is open.
I consider it a friendly feature when you're debugging vital system libraries. The system stays alive and repairable even if you have just installed a bad libc. You can always find out which instance of a library a running process is linked against anyway. No big deal.
You're comparing the wrong thing. High quality maps have been unrestricted and widely available for fifty years now. There's also never been much in the way of restricting civilian access to flight - get a camera and rent a plane and you can have all the aerial photos you want. The knowledge has been available for a long time and it's rather stupid to think there's any security in restricting it now.
You also pay for Abrahms tanks, F-18 Hornets, Stinger Missles, etc. Do you honestly believe you should have access to those also? Other things being equal, which they, alas are not, I believe in citizen access to all that and also believe that governments need disarming not citizens. The leading cause of death in the 20th century was government whether by war or outright slaughter. I used to play NationStates and my fictional nation of Altair featured a highly competitive domestic market for backyard tactical nukes. The discussion used to live at http://merit.jink.org/ but I don't know whether it's still there or not. It's a pity that would never work in today's world, oh well.
It's a myth that Slashdot has almost all Linux users Agreed.
It used to be that way, but it has long since been overrun with a more "general computing" crowd. I would bet that if you add up the regular Windows and Mac users, it would outnumber regular Linux users Disagreed. I don't recall it ever being that way. I remember long, long ago reading that most (> 70%) of the hits on/. were coming from Microsoft Windows boxes.
For UIDs below 100k however, you would probably see a quite different statistic. Maybe, but I don't think it matters that much.
I never heard of these either, but why are they only now questioning web stats? The Nielsen ratings are cooked too. I got a diary in sweeps once and I didn't watch half of what I wrote into it, mostly put in shows that I thought deserved good ratings. Raise your hand if you've ever filled out a Nielsen diary honestly.
The point is that people 'want' to look at those sites. I suppose it boils down to that and the fact that the American taxpayer has paid for most of it. I paid for it, let me see it.
I've never played games on a desert island, but I have played games on a tropical island without electricity. GameBoy Advance and I think the game was Greatest Nine (NPB Japanese baseball simulator). (And yes, I did it so that I could write about it years later on forums like this one, my wife wasn't very happy, but oh well).
For yourself it's nothing, and that's fine. For me? I really don't like dieing. I work hard to avoid it. If there was a harsher penalty for dieing, say XP debt or loss of gear I would not be playing. I agree. And there are many places to die that are difficult and/or time-consuming to get back to (hurrah for the 'x' command they're adding in the 2.1 patch to dive under water). DDO has an XP penalty for dying, I hate that and probably will let not let my subscription continue.
I really couldn't give a flying fuck what people on the internet think of me; I'll never meet them in real life. That's short-sighted and goes against the long established rule - be kind to the person you're dealing with, you may be interviewing for a job with him soon.
I'm in my present position because the person who interviewed me googled me.
I'm not defending this patent; I'm only trying to explain it.
Well, we were doing that kind of thing on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum in 1982. It was really the only way to practically do it on a small Z80 based computer. Ah, the days when real programming and real programmers were still in vogue. I disagree with your statement, though.
This patent implies source code level debugging (specifically the ability to treat a single line of source non-assembly language as an atomic unit) and thus the equivalent of compiling `gcc -g' (or whatever the target language may be). Did you have that kind of space available on a Sinclair in 1982? In 1982 I was programming in 6502 assembly language with some UCSD Pascal and having to deal with severe source file size limitations - "I understand this code is complex, but the file was too big to assemble so I deleted all the comments to make it fit", to name the most infamous example.
If your debugger is using in effect self-modifying code by inserting a trap of any kind or any other kind of self-modification, that is not covered by this patent.
Even if you could weasel out of the decades of prior art, what they are doing is OBVIOUS. That's a stronger argument than your first one, except about the "decades of prior art". I'll only restate what I've posted elsewhere on this thread - this is not anywhere near a general debugging/breakpoint patent. It is extremely specialized and their royalties will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 0 Philippine Pesos. Nothing for the rest of us who can use gdb and kin to be worried about.
I think what Epson has done is extremely clever and probably not covered by prior art. It's certainly 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more clever than any code I've seen come out of Microsoft (caveat - I haven't done any serious code review of Microsoft code since PC DOS 2.0). The fact that so few people seem to understand what they've patented underscores the fact that maybe it isn't so obvious after all.
Many cars and trucks sold in China (by Chinese companies) are copies of Hyundai, Toyota, or GM designs. When I visited China in 2000, I never saw a single one of those models. I did see a lot of European cars. "Sold in China" doesn't have too much meaning anyway because the average[*] Chinese rides a bicycle and the very wealthy anywhere will do what they wish.
[*] Not implying mean, or median or anything more objective than what I saw (and counted) on the streets when I was there. I was in "don't buy Made In China" mode long before I moved to that part of the world. Guess what? Chinese don't buy "Made in China" either when it comes to cars.
There's actually very little that occupies the market niche of devices with sufficient resolution to read websites without reformatting them That says more about the sad state of "web design" than anything else. "This site is best viewed at AAAxBBB resolution" was declared bad practice from the very start, not that many people paid attention to it. As the web was originally designed, we could all be browsing this discussion with our cellphones (and/. is one of the friendlier sites).
Ah well. My side lost that argument years ago. Mark me -1 redundant, die-hard.
I was stepping through the Amiga ROM in the late eighties with just the SEKA (or whatever) assembler's debugger. That's a processor hardware feature, and you couldn't have been writing code to burn the ROM with to insert dummy void function calls that the debugger could trap on.
This is an extremely specialized application that Open Source has not and most probably will never deal with (ROM distribution of software is decidedly un-GPLish), pretty much the same as the Microsoft UAC patent that locks users out of their own system. So what? Epson has a stupid patent that at most five or ten programmers will ever have a use for. Let their employers pay for it and I hope Epson enjoys its royalties.
What the Vax $Fortran/nodebug function did was to compile the code excluding any source code lines that had a "D" in the first column Ah, we may have a winner then. You did say Fortran IV, my apologies. If code compiled this way could run without a debugger present, with said code doing nothing in that case, then I believe that might constitute prior art. The key question is then, how does the debugger interact with such a debugging code line? Can it decide what to do based upon what void function is being called is named? If so, then that is indeed prior art.
$ Fortran/nodebug See the code sample I posted above. No, that's not prior art. Nor is ADA/nodebug or CC/nodebug, etc.
Software "breakpoints" in this patent are implemented by special nop functions, programmer-defined and linked into the executable image and which must be able to be mapped to various actions (note the plural) to be performed. All/nodebug does is execute the program normally if you compiled it with/debug, otherwise it will always start in the debugger.
So a macro of something like #define SOFTWARE_BREAK asm { int 3; } which I have been using for years is now patented? That's laughable. No, that's not what they patented. The patent covers portable software breakpoints which are detected by mapping a special (void) function called to an action. The patent also covers a variety of methods of describing which void function calls should be trapped by the debugger and a variety of methods by which the name of the special void function call can be mapped into an action to perform.
No assembly is involved, the method is processor agnostic. No open inline code is involved either as the breakpoints must be detectable by software looking for function calls.
Slashdot Mirror
The libertarian in me says that the model of email is totally broken. If it's free to send ads to everyone, someone will do it. A less broken model would require paying the recipient of email to read it. Hey, if I were getting US$.25 or whatever for every ad I get in email, bring it on. (See the Cyphernomican, old cypherpunks list archives, etc. for discussion of that).
Ewww. I definitely did not want to know that. I hope you enjoyed yourself investigating it.
Smart and command.com are oxymorons based on the code I audited - a delightful mix of CPM/86 and dumbed down Xenix with lots of really stupid bugs and very useful but hidden features. Maybe it got smarter.
I consider it a friendly feature when you're debugging vital system libraries. The system stays alive and repairable even if you have just installed a bad libc. You can always find out which instance of a library a running process is linked against anyway. No big deal.
8 bit color with no obvious way to change it is stupid. That appears to be a fault with CDE in general though.
I've got nothing against Solaris, but I am sad that I'm fighting the same stupid UI issues today that I did 10 years ago.
(Posted from a Solaris box)
I never heard of these either, but why are they only now questioning web stats? The Nielsen ratings are cooked too. I got a diary in sweeps once and I didn't watch half of what I wrote into it, mostly put in shows that I thought deserved good ratings. Raise your hand if you've ever filled out a Nielsen diary honestly.
I've never played games on a desert island, but I have played games on a tropical island without electricity. GameBoy Advance and I think the game was Greatest Nine (NPB Japanese baseball simulator). (And yes, I did it so that I could write about it years later on forums like this one, my wife wasn't very happy, but oh well).
I'm in my present position because the person who interviewed me googled me.
Only if you're a virtual Hunter or otherwise allowed to carry missile weapons. Druids and Shamen need not apply.
This patent implies source code level debugging (specifically the ability to treat a single line of source non-assembly language as an atomic unit) and thus the equivalent of compiling `gcc -g' (or whatever the target language may be). Did you have that kind of space available on a Sinclair in 1982? In 1982 I was programming in 6502 assembly language with some UCSD Pascal and having to deal with severe source file size limitations - "I understand this code is complex, but the file was too big to assemble so I deleted all the comments to make it fit", to name the most infamous example.
If your debugger is using in effect self-modifying code by inserting a trap of any kind or any other kind of self-modification, that is not covered by this patent. Even if you could weasel out of the decades of prior art, what they are doing is OBVIOUS. That's a stronger argument than your first one, except about the "decades of prior art". I'll only restate what I've posted elsewhere on this thread - this is not anywhere near a general debugging/breakpoint patent. It is extremely specialized and their royalties will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 0 Philippine Pesos. Nothing for the rest of us who can use gdb and kin to be worried about.
I think what Epson has done is extremely clever and probably not covered by prior art. It's certainly 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more clever than any code I've seen come out of Microsoft (caveat - I haven't done any serious code review of Microsoft code since PC DOS 2.0). The fact that so few people seem to understand what they've patented underscores the fact that maybe it isn't so obvious after all.
No, I don't think that constitutes prior art either. Nothing in the patent deals with interpreters and implicit hook functions.
This isn't an argument I want to win. Software patents are evil. Do keep trying though.
"Sold in China" doesn't have too much meaning anyway because the average[*] Chinese rides a bicycle and the very wealthy anywhere will do what they wish.
[*] Not implying mean, or median or anything more objective than what I saw (and counted) on the streets when I was there. I was in "don't buy Made In China" mode long before I moved to that part of the world. Guess what? Chinese don't buy "Made in China" either when it comes to cars.
Ah well. My side lost that argument years ago. Mark me -1 redundant, die-hard.
... my "kidnap me I'm an American Citizen!" broadcasting passport is arriving any day now.
w _2190.html and understand that Tagum City (where the two American children were kidnapped) is the nearest city from my permanent home and where my son is.
See http://www.travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/t
This is an extremely specialized application that Open Source has not and most probably will never deal with (ROM distribution of software is decidedly un-GPLish), pretty much the same as the Microsoft UAC patent that locks users out of their own system. So what? Epson has a stupid patent that at most five or ten programmers will ever have a use for. Let their employers pay for it and I hope Epson enjoys its royalties.
Software "breakpoints" in this patent are implemented by special nop functions, programmer-defined and linked into the executable image and which must be able to be mapped to various actions (note the plural) to be performed. All
No assembly is involved, the method is processor agnostic. No open inline code is involved either as the breakpoints must be detectable by software looking for function calls.