It's the backlog. Apparently, there are thousands of patents filed every day. They have to make sure the paperwork is in order and that there is some possibility of the patent being valid.
I've been waiting for over a year and a half on one patent, and as far as I can tell, it hasn't been looked at yet by the examiner.
Actually, no. The patent office does a cursory check, but in general, the technology and claim are not investigated at all until the patent is challenged. It's a lazy evaluation system, just like the constitutionality of laws is not checked when they are passed but rather when they are challenged. It's more efficient this way; the patent doesn't do anything until someone tries to take it to court.
I've filed 4 patents on behalf of employeers who required me to do so. One was very good about it and actually required me to prove my results, search prior art, etc. The others specifically instructed me not to search prior art or perform too much work verifying my results, because if I knew that anything was wrong with the application, we'd legally have to withdraw it. This really pisses me off. I'm really glad O'Reilly came out and talked about this practice.
The sad fact is that software patents are downright stupid. They skirt the very edge of patenting "laws of mathematics" (many of them blatantly patent trivial algorithms like interpolation, run length encoding, etc.) But even without that debate, allowing the entire 20 years that it will be valid for well over the useful lifetime of many of these patents; completely destroying the patent system which was designed to encourage inventors to publicly release their secret techniques in exchange for a time limited monopoly. Since it takes about two years for a patent to be processed, the patent is often useless by the time it is granted, let alone when it expires.
I use Roger Wilco under Win32. This is not available for Linux currently, is is a technology that is related to your question and may interest you (as well as interesting to other readers).
Roger Wilco (http://www.rogerwilco.com) is a voice activated net radio system designed specifically to augment games. It is free, and there is a freely available SDK for using it within your own game. I run it in standalone mode, where it has nothing to do with the game itself, it just sits there as another application.
The interesting thing about Roger Wilco is that it doesn't screw up your computer. I run it over Unreal Tournament and it takes very little bandwidth (I don't notice any induced lag) or processor power (again, not noticable on my PII). The game sound comes through clearly and is not interfered with by Roger Wilco. The quality is almost as good as normal telephone. Previously I was not aware that this level of quality was possible.
The company is very intent on becoming the dominant net-voice technology. I don't know if they will succeed, but this is very good for consumers. They give away their software to get a large user base, and I suspect that if enough linux users wrote to them they would open the source for us to port or write a port themselves.
I was eagerly looking for the process secret and was dissapointed to find that the thing the author thought was the key was bug-tracking, revision control, and code reviews. These are standard practices. They seemed to impress the author, but I think the impressive part is the management process that actually requires a rigid design, where everything is clearly specified ahead of time and goes back to square 1 when something changes.
I blame the captain when the ship goes down, and I blame the managers (starting with the CEO) when coders are staying up late and projects are overbudget. It's fun to pull an all nighter and be a hero every now and then, but if you have good programmers, it's not their fault when things go south. In my experience, projects fall apart because managers didn't allow enough time for specification and didn't stick to the original specs.
On a separate point, the error rate given (99.9% of all errors are caught) is statistically bogus. First off, they mean 99.9% of the errors that were caught or manifested were found. They don't know how many errors that haven't manifested themselves are still there. It is possible to predict such numbers given bug rates and other data, but that is a prediction, not an actual accuracy rate. The real issue I have with the number is that they are saying that the first 80% are caught before QA gets the code. I call that "making my program work." If I counted every problem I fixed before I handed over my code, then my rate would be pretty good too.
That said, the shuttle group is awesome. Special thanks to them for enabling the most important endeavor of this century.
It also depends what you mean by "on top." nVidia's GeForce2 is arguably the most powerful PC gamer card available, but ATI is outselling everybody by a long shot. Places like Gateway and Dell use the cheap ATI cards almost exclusively (not that the ATI hardware is lousy; their new chipset is pretty competitive with GeForce).
The actual text copies are owned by the poster, according to/. policy. I agree with the numerous posters who have stated that the quotations from the specification, information on how to bypass the EULA (which does not bypass they copyright), and the links to the specification are all not violations of copyright. In fact, you would expect to find that kind of material in any newspaper that covered technical issues.
Even though/. does not own the posts, they are making them available. Nowhere in the/. policies have I ready anything that binds/. to continue to host my posts. I don't see why/. has any obligation to make available material that violates copyright. Deleting it is not destroying the information (the original poster can repost somewhere else), nor affecting the ownership of the post in any way.
I'd suggest that removing the blatant copyright violation and leaving the rest is a reasonably course of action. That said, this is an opportunity for/. to stand up for the notions that as a group we stand for, namely that the time has come to revisit IP law. The existing laws don't make sense in a digital context and are being abused by large corporations to server their own ends. By not removing the posts of complete copyrighted documents, I think/. is violating the law. But I think it is also violating the law in the manner of an activist chaining him or herself to the object of their opposition.
On a purely humerous note, I was really suprised at the number of middle school-age kids at the last Metallica concert I attended (esp. girls). I saw this as a positive sign, but certainly didn't expect to see the same crowd you find at a backstreet boys or ricky martin concert croud there. Come to think about it, I'm sure the teenage boys were happy about this.
Anyhow, there are more 13 year olds listening to metallica, hanging out on slashdot, and making over $100k a year than reality would seem to dictate at first.
Now that it is illegal to collect personal information on people under 13, didn't Metallica and NetPD themselves violate the law by electronically collecting user information on a large number of people without ascertaining their ages (presumably some of the 300k+ Napster users lister are under 13)?
In the United States, any artistic expression is automatically copyrighted to the author on creation, regardless of copyright or other protections sought.
It is a violation of the author's copyright to electronically distribute the Microsoft document without permission (even though they posted it on the web), or to make physical copies without permission. I personally find it silly to post technical specifications without granting the reader the right to make copies (i.e. print it out and make copies of that printout), but the decision as to making copies is up to the author.
It is legal to distribute the "concept" (i.e. information content) contained in an artistic expression as long as it is rephrased (i.e. not an exact copy or derivative work). There are three exceptions to this:
Source code is a gray area currently being debated. Some people believe it is an artistic expression and is text, others believe it is something else altogether and not protected by copyright.
You can be held liable in certain circumstances if you illegally obtained information then redistributed it. The term trade secret refers to such information, and is part of the debate. National secrets come under this category as well (I think that term is something of an oxymoron if taken literally)
It is always legal to reproduce small portions of a work for review or commentary purposes provided a citation is given.
So, like Metallica's songs, your post on/., and the book War of the Worlds, that PDF document is copyrighted. It is illegal to distribute it against the copyright holder's (MS) wishes. Whether it is legal to redistribute the information content (the spec.) without using the verbatim text is a separate question over which copyright law does not preside.
MP3.com's main service is great. I love it. I wish someone would ma
Obviously, I wouldn't mind music for free. I'm just saying I'd be happy to pay as much as I do now for music if traditional labels would only package it in a reasonable way. Puting giant PCM files on a physical disk and making me go buy it is lame, when it has been proven that the technology is sufficiently advanced to let me download directly.
If traditional labels signed into MP3.com, that would be great. It's probably not in their interest, however. I think big artists should seriously consider signing onto them, however. They would probably get more business and a bigger cut. MP3.com needs to develop a big arm that handles tours, advertising, etc. to get those guys to sign, but that is clearly the direction music should go. There's no way back for the recording industry now; they need to just accept it.
So how long until bandwidth is common enough to make DVD ripping and trading commonplace? Will that industry be more intelligent -- oops, I forgot, it's the same stupid companies: WB, Sony, etc.
Napster is sending Limp Bizkit and some other bands on a free concert tour this summer. I'm not sure what to make of this, but they are trying to participate in the music community in a positive way.
There's got to be a way to find a revenue model for artists that isn't completely nonsensical in the face of modern technology. Everything that the industry (meaning distributers, publishers, and producers, not the people who make the music in the first place) has attempted in the music arena is stupid. They need to make it as easy as Napster and Gnutella made file trading. I'm happy to pay a few bucks a song for a download if the process is:
Easy -- point and click (oops, Amazon patented that)
High quality (you get a lot of crappy rips off Napster users)
Legal
Fast. I want my music now, not after you've made me type in my credit card three times, and waited for you to mail me a stupid CD I then have to rip in order to listen to as part of my music list.
I'd love it if there was a button on my radio that would download the song that's playing and charge me $5 for it. There is more money in this model because people would impulse buy more, there would be no distribution cost (look at what that did for software development), and you could end up charging more for the sum of all the tracks on the CD. I'd pay a premium for speed and convenience.
Card's other books are pretty good, but I agree with you (as does OSC himself-- I attended an event he was at and he said "everyone asks why I don't write another book like Ender's game... don't you think I'm trying to?") that Ender's Game is his masterpiece.
I just read the script and he's done a great adaptation of the book. At first I was offended by some of the plot changes (they tell you how Mazer defeated the bugs right away, in the first scene), but he did an excellent job of making the "ender as hacker commander," psychological issues (esp. use of overwhelming force), and overwhelming "secret suprise" of the game come across pretty well.
Yes. The problem with OSS is that much of it is evolved code, not designed code. This leads to robust and secure systems, but not ones where it is easy to add features or hunt down new bugs. Consider the example of an AI neural net (or the real thing, if you like squishy things). You've trained the thing to give mostly right answers by propagating feedback through the net in complicated ways, but have sacrificed any possibility of understanding why it gives the right answers. It is like a roof made from patches with no actual roof left. It keeps the rain out, but has lost all structure and is harder and harder to deal with. (Too many analogies in that paragraph).
I've finally adopted a very game-programmer oriented philosophy towards development. Code should be written so that it is the specification, with appropriate inline comments documenting it and really clear variable names. Programmers should be extremely vigilant, and continuously roam their own code making sure that it actually reflects the current state of assumptions about the system. Whenever a change is made to the system, anything remotely affected should be proactively rewritten to reflect the change. This is pretty much how Abrash describes himself and Carmack working on Doom and Quake, and it is really successful. You keep performance up, stay in touch with your code, and never accumulate cruft. Bugs are immediately ferreted out and the programmer must never fear diving into code to tackle a big cleanup job, and can never allow pieces of code to exist that she (or he) doesn't understand.
Of course, you need massive automated tests to make sure your rewrites don't screw anything up. Designs must be extremely abstraction oriented, with a close eye to strong interfaces and bootstrapping, otherwise you will end up with so much code that it is impossible to manage the continual cleaning. And you need really dedicated programmers.
When I look at the Doom and Quake source, and the code that my own dev. team has produced, I see that the results are worthwhile. Each routine is beautifully crafted and works flawlessly. The codebase is a fraction of the size you would expect because so much effort has been put into doing everything the right way and eliminating broken or excessive code. And no bugs...
magic
Re:Ask yourself this: Where did the MP3 come from?
on
MP3.com Loses In Court
·
· Score: 2
Yes. This poster understands the legal issue.
The irony of this is that MP3's service works (and is, in my opinion, legal) because the music industry is selling exact copies of digital information to users. I buy a bunch of bits on CD from a music store. MP3.com buys the same bits. MP3.com is arguing that if we both have the bits, it is legal for them to send me a copy of their bits, since I am gaining no new information. Information theory is on their side. If I already own the bits, then they aren't giving me any new information.
The whole idea of a "copy" in a digital world is nonsense. The only concept that makes sense is whether someone is gaining access to information they didn't previously have available. When you buy a CD, you have to be buying the right to listen access the bits, not buying the information itself. Everybody has exactly the same information on their CD. You can't sell the same thing to multiple people; you can only license access to it. The music industry is trying to confuse information with the storage medium.
The only valid legal argument I see against MP3.com is that they are making it easier for others to infringe copyrights because it is easier to borrow a friend's CD and register with MP3.com than it is to burn your own CD of it. I'd disagree with this, but that is the only argument I find reasonable here.
At MIT, hackers don't endanger anyone or leave a mess for campus staff to clean up. Part of the unwritten rule of hacking is that you take down your hack when it is done, leave a nice note for the authorities explaining why what you did is structurally sound, and you don't break anything or vandalize property.
Oh, yeah, and MIT hacks are clever. Many involve an aspect of "how the heck did somebody get up there/pull this off without being seen." Dropping stuff down a stairway then making a janitor clean it up is just immature. When people drop things at MIT (like pianos, TV's, various exploding chemicals), they clean it up themselves and take safety precautions.
Visit http://hacks.mit.edu/ for a gallery of real hacks. Don't condone stupid pranks like what the RPI kids did; they are just perpetuating the idea of spoiled rich kids abusing their college opportunity. They should get some manners and some class.
I thought the article was really good up to that point as well. Kudos to Will Wright! This was a truly geek move and deliciously evil to put a cute pet on the Maxis homepage that could lead to such havoc. By virtue of making a way to play through the virus and save the character, he's done it in just the right way, without affecting game balance.
At first I was a little mortified at the thought of some kid innocently wanting a pet in the game then having their character get messed up, but then I realized this even has educational value. That little kid will understand that pets need to be taken care of, their cages cleaned, and that human hygiene when sick is important to prevent the spread of disease. Too bad my coworkers didn't learn about washing themselves as kids...
Playing tones into telephones does absolutely nothing whatsoever, other then relaying the sound to the other end.
Not true; when you play tones at a dial tone you are talking to the switch. This is how touch-tone works. You can make recordings of a phone dialing and use it to place calls.
But how the hell do you spend it on an island in the middle of nowhere where everything is going to hell because of overpopulation and industrialization and everyone else is equally "rich"?
Slashdot Mirror
I've been waiting for over a year and a half on one patent, and as far as I can tell, it hasn't been looked at yet by the examiner.
magic
magic
The sad fact is that software patents are downright stupid. They skirt the very edge of patenting "laws of mathematics" (many of them blatantly patent trivial algorithms like interpolation, run length encoding, etc.) But even without that debate, allowing the entire 20 years that it will be valid for well over the useful lifetime of many of these patents; completely destroying the patent system which was designed to encourage inventors to publicly release their secret techniques in exchange for a time limited monopoly. Since it takes about two years for a patent to be processed, the patent is often useless by the time it is granted, let alone when it expires.
magic
Roger Wilco (http://www.rogerwilco.com) is a voice activated net radio system designed specifically to augment games. It is free, and there is a freely available SDK for using it within your own game. I run it in standalone mode, where it has nothing to do with the game itself, it just sits there as another application.
The interesting thing about Roger Wilco is that it doesn't screw up your computer. I run it over Unreal Tournament and it takes very little bandwidth (I don't notice any induced lag) or processor power (again, not noticable on my PII). The game sound comes through clearly and is not interfered with by Roger Wilco. The quality is almost as good as normal telephone. Previously I was not aware that this level of quality was possible.
The company is very intent on becoming the dominant net-voice technology. I don't know if they will succeed, but this is very good for consumers. They give away their software to get a large user base, and I suspect that if enough linux users wrote to them they would open the source for us to port or write a port themselves.
magic
"PC gamer card"
I blame the captain when the ship goes down, and I blame the managers (starting with the CEO) when coders are staying up late and projects are overbudget. It's fun to pull an all nighter and be a hero every now and then, but if you have good programmers, it's not their fault when things go south. In my experience, projects fall apart because managers didn't allow enough time for specification and didn't stick to the original specs.
On a separate point, the error rate given (99.9% of all errors are caught) is statistically bogus. First off, they mean 99.9% of the errors that were caught or manifested were found. They don't know how many errors that haven't manifested themselves are still there. It is possible to predict such numbers given bug rates and other data, but that is a prediction, not an actual accuracy rate. The real issue I have with the number is that they are saying that the first 80% are caught before QA gets the code. I call that "making my program work." If I counted every problem I fixed before I handed over my code, then my rate would be pretty good too.
That said, the shuttle group is awesome. Special thanks to them for enabling the most important endeavor of this century.
magic
magic
magic
Even though /. does not own the posts, they are making them available. Nowhere in the /. policies have I ready anything that binds /. to continue to host my posts. I don't see why /. has any obligation to make available material that violates copyright. Deleting it is not destroying the information (the original poster can repost somewhere else), nor affecting the ownership of the post in any way.
I'd suggest that removing the blatant copyright violation and leaving the rest is a reasonably course of action. That said, this is an opportunity for /. to stand up for the notions that as a group we stand for, namely that the time has come to revisit IP law. The existing laws don't make sense in a digital context and are being abused by large corporations to server their own ends. By not removing the posts of complete copyrighted documents, I think /. is violating the law. But I think it is also violating the law in the manner of an activist chaining him or herself to the object of their opposition.
magic
(Metallica provided the electronic version the next day).
Anyhow, there are more 13 year olds listening to metallica, hanging out on slashdot, and making over $100k a year than reality would seem to dictate at first.
magic
magic
It is a violation of the author's copyright to electronically distribute the Microsoft document without permission (even though they posted it on the web), or to make physical copies without permission. I personally find it silly to post technical specifications without granting the reader the right to make copies (i.e. print it out and make copies of that printout), but the decision as to making copies is up to the author.
It is legal to distribute the "concept" (i.e. information content) contained in an artistic expression as long as it is rephrased (i.e. not an exact copy or derivative work). There are three exceptions to this:
So, like Metallica's songs, your post on /., and the book War of the Worlds, that PDF document is copyrighted. It is illegal to distribute it against the copyright holder's (MS) wishes. Whether it is legal to redistribute the information content (the spec.) without using the verbatim text is a separate question over which copyright law does not preside.
magic
The original poster meant that the document is copyrighted, not the concepts in it.
Obviously, I wouldn't mind music for free. I'm just saying I'd be happy to pay as much as I do now for music if traditional labels would only package it in a reasonable way. Puting giant PCM files on a physical disk and making me go buy it is lame, when it has been proven that the technology is sufficiently advanced to let me download directly.
If traditional labels signed into MP3.com, that would be great. It's probably not in their interest, however. I think big artists should seriously consider signing onto them, however. They would probably get more business and a bigger cut. MP3.com needs to develop a big arm that handles tours, advertising, etc. to get those guys to sign, but that is clearly the direction music should go. There's no way back for the recording industry now; they need to just accept it.
So how long until bandwidth is common enough to make DVD ripping and trading commonplace? Will that industry be more intelligent -- oops, I forgot, it's the same stupid companies: WB, Sony, etc.
magic
There's got to be a way to find a revenue model for artists that isn't completely nonsensical in the face of modern technology. Everything that the industry (meaning distributers, publishers, and producers, not the people who make the music in the first place) has attempted in the music arena is stupid. They need to make it as easy as Napster and Gnutella made file trading. I'm happy to pay a few bucks a song for a download if the process is:
I'd love it if there was a button on my radio that would download the song that's playing and charge me $5 for it. There is more money in this model because people would impulse buy more, there would be no distribution cost (look at what that did for software development), and you could end up charging more for the sum of all the tracks on the CD. I'd pay a premium for speed and convenience.
magic
I just read the script and he's done a great adaptation of the book. At first I was offended by some of the plot changes (they tell you how Mazer defeated the bugs right away, in the first scene), but he did an excellent job of making the "ender as hacker commander," psychological issues (esp. use of overwhelming force), and overwhelming "secret suprise" of the game come across pretty well.
magic
I've finally adopted a very game-programmer oriented philosophy towards development. Code should be written so that it is the specification, with appropriate inline comments documenting it and really clear variable names. Programmers should be extremely vigilant, and continuously roam their own code making sure that it actually reflects the current state of assumptions about the system. Whenever a change is made to the system, anything remotely affected should be proactively rewritten to reflect the change. This is pretty much how Abrash describes himself and Carmack working on Doom and Quake, and it is really successful. You keep performance up, stay in touch with your code, and never accumulate cruft. Bugs are immediately ferreted out and the programmer must never fear diving into code to tackle a big cleanup job, and can never allow pieces of code to exist that she (or he) doesn't understand.
Of course, you need massive automated tests to make sure your rewrites don't screw anything up. Designs must be extremely abstraction oriented, with a close eye to strong interfaces and bootstrapping, otherwise you will end up with so much code that it is impossible to manage the continual cleaning. And you need really dedicated programmers.
When I look at the Doom and Quake source, and the code that my own dev. team has produced, I see that the results are worthwhile. Each routine is beautifully crafted and works flawlessly. The codebase is a fraction of the size you would expect because so much effort has been put into doing everything the right way and eliminating broken or excessive code. And no bugs...
magic
The irony of this is that MP3's service works (and is, in my opinion, legal) because the music industry is selling exact copies of digital information to users. I buy a bunch of bits on CD from a music store. MP3.com buys the same bits. MP3.com is arguing that if we both have the bits, it is legal for them to send me a copy of their bits, since I am gaining no new information. Information theory is on their side. If I already own the bits, then they aren't giving me any new information.
The whole idea of a "copy" in a digital world is nonsense. The only concept that makes sense is whether someone is gaining access to information they didn't previously have available. When you buy a CD, you have to be buying the right to listen access the bits, not buying the information itself. Everybody has exactly the same information on their CD. You can't sell the same thing to multiple people; you can only license access to it. The music industry is trying to confuse information with the storage medium.
The only valid legal argument I see against MP3.com is that they are making it easier for others to infringe copyrights because it is easier to borrow a friend's CD and register with MP3.com than it is to burn your own CD of it. I'd disagree with this, but that is the only argument I find reasonable here.
magic
Oh, yeah, and MIT hacks are clever. Many involve an aspect of "how the heck did somebody get up there/pull this off without being seen." Dropping stuff down a stairway then making a janitor clean it up is just immature. When people drop things at MIT (like pianos, TV's, various exploding chemicals), they clean it up themselves and take safety precautions.
Visit http://hacks.mit.edu/ for a gallery of real hacks. Don't condone stupid pranks like what the RPI kids did; they are just perpetuating the idea of spoiled rich kids abusing their college opportunity. They should get some manners and some class.
magic
I thought the article was really good up to that point as well. Kudos to Will Wright! This was a truly geek move and deliciously evil to put a cute pet on the Maxis homepage that could lead to such havoc. By virtue of making a way to play through the virus and save the character, he's done it in just the right way, without affecting game balance.
At first I was a little mortified at the thought of some kid innocently wanting a pet in the game then having their character get messed up, but then I realized this even has educational value. That little kid will understand that pets need to be taken care of, their cages cleaned, and that human hygiene when sick is important to prevent the spread of disease. Too bad my coworkers didn't learn about washing themselves as kids...
-m
This guy should have been moderated up (humerous) and the others moderated down (off topic).
Or their producer cut them a bad deal and takes all of the cash.
magic
Not true; when you play tones at a dial tone you are talking to the switch. This is how touch-tone works. You can make recordings of a phone dialing and use it to place calls.
magic
But how the hell do you spend it on an island in the middle of nowhere where everything is going to hell because of overpopulation and industrialization and everyone else is equally "rich"?