That won't cut it for GPL. Explorer and the plugins it ships with are a single "work" - it would be difficult to argue otherwise. All of Explorer would need to be licensed under the GPL, as would any plugins that it ships with. An external application that can be used on its own without Explorer, can be missing and Explorer continues to function (just without that specific functionality), that runs in its own process space and communicates with Explorer through a mechanism similar to IPC (pipes, sockets, signals), wouldn't need to be - it all depends on how closely linked they are. Of course, that type of "embedding" by running an external application is the very subject of TFP. Ironic.
ONLY interaction is being blocked (until you click on it and hit a key), and ONLY when the control is loaded directly from the HTML (the HTML running a script which loads the control is allowed).
Not having RTFP (or the court ruling over what TFP actually covers), I don't understand why specifying that you want to load some content, and the content implicitly loads a control, wouldn't also be an exception (so specifying that you want to embed a video clip or a flash animation, and THAT is what loads the control, would be OK). Only saying "load an (active) interactive control here" would violate the patent, e.g. "create movie player control; tell movie player control to play movie.mpg" would keep the player non-interactive (until you interact with it by clicking on it and pressing Enter!??!), but saying "play movie.mpg", where the browser is configured to open a movie player control would allow it to be interactive. I don't see how the latter is in any way different from saying "run script playmovie.js", where "playmovie.js" creates a movie player control and tells it to play movie.mpg.
It would be licensed for everyone's free use - when used in a GPL program. All Microsoft would have to do would be to GPL Explorer.
I agree, however, that this patent should never have been granted. The fact that Microsoft can work around it in this ridiculous manner shows how stupid the patent actually is. If what Microsoft is doing ISN'T patented, it should be "obvious" that requiring "activating" a control (and ONLY for the purpose of it being interactive), or that loading a control by referencing an "external script", is an unnecessary step, and any sane person would simply look at that and say "hey, let's cut out that step".
Now, that's assuming that Microsoft's lawyers looked at the patent, and the court ruling, very VERY closely to figure out exactly what they had to disable in order to not fall under the patent. I almost think that the description of how they're working around the patent is a perfect indication of how broken the patent system currently is, and should be presented to Congress so they can fix it (along with the Blackberry patent and the harm that is doing). Patents are supposed to ENCOURAGE innovation, not stifle it (regardless of what you or I may think of ActiveX).
Besides, I'm never going to return a call made from a mobile if I have to pay the airtime.
I'm not sure I understand this one. How would that happen?
Someone calls me from their cellphone. Why would I want to call them back to find out what they wanted if I have to pay?
Being long-distance is an equal access type thing. They are where they are, I am where I am. It isn't a convenience, it's a fact. When I call someone long distance, the rates I get are based on MY carrier, MY calling card, MY calling plan, not theirs. With cellphones, the rates are all over the place, but if caller pays, then the person doing the paying has no control over choosing the rate.
Roaming is also a problem. If a cellphone is local, and I'm expecting to pay only local plus airtime to call it, what happens when it is in Hawaii? Is it now also a long-distance call? What happens if I call it FROM Hawaii? Shouldn't it now be a local call (plus airtime)? What if airtime is more expensive in Hawaii, do I also have to pay the higher rate?
How do you do 4-way video conferencing with iChat? As soon as I am in a video chat with someone else (one-way or two-way), both of us are marked unavailable for audio/video, and neither of us can initiate another chat (audio or video). We can still do IM, of course.
iChat doesn't seem able to traverse two NAT routers properly (without doing port forwarding or DMZ tricks), and I'm not sure why not. It should be a simple matter of sending a packet to the server you're both talking to, which notifies the other of your real IP address and port number being used. The routers I've tested attempt to keep the same port number after translation, and even when it has to change it, at least keeps it consistent (e.g. sending from port 61000 to host A and host B, both would see packets coming from the same port). From there, it is a simple exercise to set up two-way direct communication even with both sides being behind NAT/firewall. You can do UDP or TCP this way (TCP works best if the NAT ignores, rather than rejects, connection attempts, which makes the first side to try connecting wait, until the other side attempts to connect, and then magically they're both connected. It won't work if one side rejects a connection attempt, and the other side doesn't maintain an open connection status after it has been rejected (depends on how well it tracks the state of a connection). This whole idea of communicating using numbers and ports, with different ports being assumed to be using corresponding protocols, is so out of date).
The psychology is different. I've heard people from other countries explain that people who call them have to pay because "it is a convenience for them to be able to reach me when I would otherwise not be available". Here, the thinking is that it is a convenience to ME that I can be away from a land line and people can still reach me. If you don't want to talk to the person, don't answer and you don't get charged anything.
There's also the factor that there's no way to tell if a phone number is a mobile - even more so now with number portability (before, you COULD find out if you looked up the area code + prefix, if you knew how). Unless I always get an intercept telling me how much I'm going to pay, it just wouldn't fly. There are still people upset that you no longer have to dial 1 to go long distance in the same area code.
Besides, I'm never going to return a call made from a mobile if I have to pay the airtime.
I've found it works a lot better talking to my sister in England than to my parents in New York (I'm in Illinois). Echo cancellation is also almost non-existent - with iChat, I can talk just fine in speaker-phone-mode (both my sister and dad have iMacs with built-in microphones). With Skype, I can't see using it unless both sides have headsets.
I did find using Skype to talk to toll-free numbers in England to be extremely helpful, though!
Around 1993 or so, I was talking to a CS professor who was doing a lot of stuff with video and MBone. I mentioned that I was very interested in the work being done on video compression, and he scoffed a bit and said compression was totally unnecessary, as everyone would have gigabit ATM to the desktop within a few years.
I've always wanted someone to write a "bootstrapping civilization" book. Starting conditions: dropped naked (except for the book) on an unpopulated Earth, how do you light your first fire, how do you figure out what's edible, how do you catch your first meal, how do you make your first knife, tan a hide, make iron, glass, copper wire, transistor, CRT, hard drive, laser, spaceship. The whole chain of technologies, including a list of all the reference works you'll need that contain the distilled knowledge of everything our civilization has created (all patents, engineering handbooks, materials references, gene and protein databanks, electronics design and theory, physics, math, CS, chemistry, biology references, etc.) Being mostly text, I wonder how much of that you could cram onto a small set of DVDs - it would be nice include all technical doctoral theses ever created, for instance, and the complete archives of all the important (and not so important) journals.
Of course, you'd need to have the DVD reader/screen (or equivalent) to access all that information.
The companion volume is the complete collected literary works of humanity (books, plays, magazines, newspapers, music, paintings, photographs, sculptures, video games, TV shows, movies). Now there's a good application for the petabyte solid-state memory cube...
There's security, and there's error-free. There's absolutely no reason that a correctly written signal analysis program is vulnerable IN THE SLIGHTEST to ANY signal, no matter how malicious. Remember when "Good Times" was a hoax? A text mail reader that never tries to execute anything in the e-mail it displays is absolutely invulnerable to being compromised, given even the slightest precautions in handling a few fields (such as not assuming that the Subject: or From: or Date: items are correctly formatted, shorter than some assumed maximum, or don't contain odd characters). That type of checking is NOT "slow", and it really isn't that difficult.
The biggest risk really is one of social engineering. The theme has been dealt with in many stories - get the recipients to build some Wonderful Machine to your specs, then infect THAT. When we get an intelligible signal, and they show us how to build a machine or an organism that we don't understand COMPLETELY, then we should start to worry.
Think of it as Alien Phishing. "Hello, we haven't met, but I am the chief scientist for an intergalactic research group that has just discovered the secret of lightspeed travel. As you are a new species, we believe we can trust you with this new technology. Please build an ansible with the following plans so we can communicate further."
Even in a benevolent society, errors occur, and programs will still need to guard against them. Since DRM isn't necessary in such a society, all the effort being put in to limiting what people can do can instead be used to make programs bulletproof, and with everything being Free Software, any errors that do exist can be fixed "Benevolent Society" doesn't imply that all individuals are good, nor does it imply that everyone has gotten stupid, nor does it mean that people won't mind nosy neighbors looking into their affairs. There would still be security, anonymity, encryption.
You still won't fly straight lines, you'll fly the fastest for the amount of energy you have (or want to use). It doesn't make sense to spend a lot of energy just to go in a straight line, when a straight line doesn't get you anything. Use the extra energy you'd spend on correcting the course to a straight line to go faster and get to your destination at an earlier point in the orbit.
What are you talking about, it opened with 40% of the gross for that weekend. At #38, Wallace and Grommit didn't do $10000/theater either. I don't see that being in the top 100 means it was a "flop". It shows it as being #42 for September openings (going back at least to '91). It did better than the other two widely released films that week (Into the Blue and The Greatest Game Ever Played). For a film that everyone said was going to be a total failure because only "the faithful" would bother watching it, it did spectacularly well, and will undoubtedly also do well on DVD.
I know the reason we didn't watch Firefly on TV was because it was on Fox. Fox has a history of screwing up good shows, so we tend not to even bother watching them, if its any good they'll just cancel it. They showed the truth of this by airing them out of order from the beginning, confusing the audience, then screwing up the scheduling and "counter-programming", then canceling it.
Yeah (and thanks for the dialog, it's been a while). I was referring to the origin of the idea (and the name) of a tapeworm in a computer system (actually networked computers), that being John Brunner's Shockwave Rider. But you're right, that exchange is perfect for making a comment on holographic memory!
The rest of the sentence didn't change the meaning of the phrase. How does "the technology is optical" lead to it being "more akin to tape technology for long-term backup" in opposition to CD or DVD, which are optical technologies. The phrase stands on its own - "Because humans are biological, they shouldn't be thought of as mammals"... I don't care WHAT you might end that phrase with, it is still nonsensical.
Nail clippers, knitting needles, blunt scissors are all now allowed. Makes you wonder why they were such a threat until they changed the rules that they could confiscate it, fine you, arrest you or put you on a no-fly list because you forgot you had some nail clippers in your grooming kit...or the guy who had his Mercedes key confiscated because it was a flip-out type key when you pressed a button, which made it a "switchblade".
Yeah, 20GB would have been in the hundred-thousand dollar range, probably in 10-30 units taking up a whole room...
You confirm what I said, which was that 10-20MB was a large drive, and that 40MB was unlikely (but not impossible). I think I had a 20MB hard drive in 1985 (or whenever the Mac Plus came out). I had a 40MB drive on the Mac II, which I supplemented with an external 70MB drive, then later a 320MB drive, each of which cost around $300-350 (SCSI). I did a Linux install on that 70MB drive years later (also on a 100MB Zip drive).
Unlikely it was a 40MB drive, 10-20MB was quite large if you even had a hard drive. A computer with 640K wouldn't have had a 40MB drive (you'd spend the money on extended/expanded RAM first). My first computer was a Lisa, with 1MB RAM and a 10MB hard drive, 22 years ago, for about $5000 (including a printer).
I could see spending $5000, on a quad G5 with 4GB RAM and 500GB disk space, if you really needed the speed and storage. However, if I really needed that much computer, I'd probably want to just boost it to around $12K and get the 1TB disk space, and the dual 30" widescreen monitors (and get more RAM from other than Apple, of course - e.g. RamJet 8GB ECC for $1029 rather than Apple at $3100, though RamJet doesn't yet have 2GB ECC modules available, so getting to 16GB ECC from Apple will cost another $12K - funny that their RAM is so much more overpriced than their disk drives).
After Apple introduced the world to the mouse, PC gamers claimed it would never catch on because a mouse was so much more difficult to use than a joystick when playing games. Trackballs were "ok" for some games (or brilliant in some, see Missile Command), but the mouse was doomed to failure.
Games work best using the controls that they were designed for, and using the controls that you're most used to. A force-feedback control stick is quite clearly superior for flying, for instance, leaving the mouse free to click or drag controls. A keyboard or a control pad with lots of buttons are equivalent, assuming a good variety of button layouts. There's nothing natural or obvious about several rows of parallel buttons, or limiting yourself to two or three controls on your pointing device. Being able to use both hands at once, along with adding in foot controls (with two degrees of freedom for each foot) gives the most flexibility, of course. It would be interesting to add in a real 6-degrees-of-freedom hand control, and even more interesting to see whether having two of them with a few buttons for each hand is better than one control with the other hand having a pad of buttons.
But claiming that PCs are better than consoles because they have mice is foolish (especially since consoles can now have mice and keyboards).
Slashdot Mirror
"The great thing about hypocrisy is that once you accept it in yourself, you can still criticize it in others!"
That won't cut it for GPL. Explorer and the plugins it ships with are a single "work" - it would be difficult to argue otherwise. All of Explorer would need to be licensed under the GPL, as would any plugins that it ships with. An external application that can be used on its own without Explorer, can be missing and Explorer continues to function (just without that specific functionality), that runs in its own process space and communicates with Explorer through a mechanism similar to IPC (pipes, sockets, signals), wouldn't need to be - it all depends on how closely linked they are. Of course, that type of "embedding" by running an external application is the very subject of TFP. Ironic.
What plugin would that be? It's just displays a GIF. What interactive controls do you think that page is loading?
ONLY interaction is being blocked (until you click on it and hit a key), and ONLY when the control is loaded directly from the HTML (the HTML running a script which loads the control is allowed).
Not having RTFP (or the court ruling over what TFP actually covers), I don't understand why specifying that you want to load some content, and the content implicitly loads a control, wouldn't also be an exception (so specifying that you want to embed a video clip or a flash animation, and THAT is what loads the control, would be OK). Only saying "load an (active) interactive control here" would violate the patent, e.g. "create movie player control; tell movie player control to play movie.mpg" would keep the player non-interactive (until you interact with it by clicking on it and pressing Enter!??!), but saying "play movie.mpg", where the browser is configured to open a movie player control would allow it to be interactive. I don't see how the latter is in any way different from saying "run script playmovie.js", where "playmovie.js" creates a movie player control and tells it to play movie.mpg.
The whole thing is just ridiculous.
It would be licensed for everyone's free use - when used in a GPL program. All Microsoft would have to do would be to GPL Explorer.
I agree, however, that this patent should never have been granted. The fact that Microsoft can work around it in this ridiculous manner shows how stupid the patent actually is. If what Microsoft is doing ISN'T patented, it should be "obvious" that requiring "activating" a control (and ONLY for the purpose of it being interactive), or that loading a control by referencing an "external script", is an unnecessary step, and any sane person would simply look at that and say "hey, let's cut out that step".
Now, that's assuming that Microsoft's lawyers looked at the patent, and the court ruling, very VERY closely to figure out exactly what they had to disable in order to not fall under the patent. I almost think that the description of how they're working around the patent is a perfect indication of how broken the patent system currently is, and should be presented to Congress so they can fix it (along with the Blackberry patent and the harm that is doing). Patents are supposed to ENCOURAGE innovation, not stifle it (regardless of what you or I may think of ActiveX).
Someone calls me from their cellphone. Why would I want to call them back to find out what they wanted if I have to pay?
Being long-distance is an equal access type thing. They are where they are, I am where I am. It isn't a convenience, it's a fact. When I call someone long distance, the rates I get are based on MY carrier, MY calling card, MY calling plan, not theirs. With cellphones, the rates are all over the place, but if caller pays, then the person doing the paying has no control over choosing the rate.
Roaming is also a problem. If a cellphone is local, and I'm expecting to pay only local plus airtime to call it, what happens when it is in Hawaii? Is it now also a long-distance call? What happens if I call it FROM Hawaii? Shouldn't it now be a local call (plus airtime)? What if airtime is more expensive in Hawaii, do I also have to pay the higher rate?
How do you do 4-way video conferencing with iChat? As soon as I am in a video chat with someone else (one-way or two-way), both of us are marked unavailable for audio/video, and neither of us can initiate another chat (audio or video). We can still do IM, of course.
iChat doesn't seem able to traverse two NAT routers properly (without doing port forwarding or DMZ tricks), and I'm not sure why not. It should be a simple matter of sending a packet to the server you're both talking to, which notifies the other of your real IP address and port number being used. The routers I've tested attempt to keep the same port number after translation, and even when it has to change it, at least keeps it consistent (e.g. sending from port 61000 to host A and host B, both would see packets coming from the same port). From there, it is a simple exercise to set up two-way direct communication even with both sides being behind NAT/firewall. You can do UDP or TCP this way (TCP works best if the NAT ignores, rather than rejects, connection attempts, which makes the first side to try connecting wait, until the other side attempts to connect, and then magically they're both connected. It won't work if one side rejects a connection attempt, and the other side doesn't maintain an open connection status after it has been rejected (depends on how well it tracks the state of a connection). This whole idea of communicating using numbers and ports, with different ports being assumed to be using corresponding protocols, is so out of date).
The psychology is different. I've heard people from other countries explain that people who call them have to pay because "it is a convenience for them to be able to reach me when I would otherwise not be available". Here, the thinking is that it is a convenience to ME that I can be away from a land line and people can still reach me. If you don't want to talk to the person, don't answer and you don't get charged anything.
There's also the factor that there's no way to tell if a phone number is a mobile - even more so now with number portability (before, you COULD find out if you looked up the area code + prefix, if you knew how). Unless I always get an intercept telling me how much I'm going to pay, it just wouldn't fly. There are still people upset that you no longer have to dial 1 to go long distance in the same area code.
Besides, I'm never going to return a call made from a mobile if I have to pay the airtime.
I've found it works a lot better talking to my sister in England than to my parents in New York (I'm in Illinois). Echo cancellation is also almost non-existent - with iChat, I can talk just fine in speaker-phone-mode (both my sister and dad have iMacs with built-in microphones). With Skype, I can't see using it unless both sides have headsets.
I did find using Skype to talk to toll-free numbers in England to be extremely helpful, though!
Around 1993 or so, I was talking to a CS professor who was doing a lot of stuff with video and MBone. I mentioned that I was very interested in the work being done on video compression, and he scoffed a bit and said compression was totally unnecessary, as everyone would have gigabit ATM to the desktop within a few years.
When, exactly, was "before pornography"?
No, but I have this nifty abacus virus that might be useful...
I've always wanted someone to write a "bootstrapping civilization" book. Starting conditions: dropped naked (except for the book) on an unpopulated Earth, how do you light your first fire, how do you figure out what's edible, how do you catch your first meal, how do you make your first knife, tan a hide, make iron, glass, copper wire, transistor, CRT, hard drive, laser, spaceship. The whole chain of technologies, including a list of all the reference works you'll need that contain the distilled knowledge of everything our civilization has created (all patents, engineering handbooks, materials references, gene and protein databanks, electronics design and theory, physics, math, CS, chemistry, biology references, etc.) Being mostly text, I wonder how much of that you could cram onto a small set of DVDs - it would be nice include all technical doctoral theses ever created, for instance, and the complete archives of all the important (and not so important) journals.
Of course, you'd need to have the DVD reader/screen (or equivalent) to access all that information.
The companion volume is the complete collected literary works of humanity (books, plays, magazines, newspapers, music, paintings, photographs, sculptures, video games, TV shows, movies). Now there's a good application for the petabyte solid-state memory cube...
There's security, and there's error-free. There's absolutely no reason that a correctly written signal analysis program is vulnerable IN THE SLIGHTEST to ANY signal, no matter how malicious. Remember when "Good Times" was a hoax? A text mail reader that never tries to execute anything in the e-mail it displays is absolutely invulnerable to being compromised, given even the slightest precautions in handling a few fields (such as not assuming that the Subject: or From: or Date: items are correctly formatted, shorter than some assumed maximum, or don't contain odd characters). That type of checking is NOT "slow", and it really isn't that difficult.
The biggest risk really is one of social engineering. The theme has been dealt with in many stories - get the recipients to build some Wonderful Machine to your specs, then infect THAT. When we get an intelligible signal, and they show us how to build a machine or an organism that we don't understand COMPLETELY, then we should start to worry.
Think of it as Alien Phishing. "Hello, we haven't met, but I am the chief scientist for an intergalactic research group that has just discovered the secret of lightspeed travel. As you are a new species, we believe we can trust you with this new technology. Please build an ansible with the following plans so we can communicate further."
Even in a benevolent society, errors occur, and programs will still need to guard against them. Since DRM isn't necessary in such a society, all the effort being put in to limiting what people can do can instead be used to make programs bulletproof, and with everything being Free Software, any errors that do exist can be fixed "Benevolent Society" doesn't imply that all individuals are good, nor does it imply that everyone has gotten stupid, nor does it mean that people won't mind nosy neighbors looking into their affairs. There would still be security, anonymity, encryption.
You still won't fly straight lines, you'll fly the fastest for the amount of energy you have (or want to use). It doesn't make sense to spend a lot of energy just to go in a straight line, when a straight line doesn't get you anything. Use the extra energy you'd spend on correcting the course to a straight line to go faster and get to your destination at an earlier point in the orbit.
Or, even simpler than doing the factorials, just (N * (N - 1)) / 2 (sum of 1 .. N). Same answer, of course.
What are you talking about, it opened with 40% of the gross for that weekend. At #38, Wallace and Grommit didn't do $10000/theater either. I don't see that being in the top 100 means it was a "flop". It shows it as being #42 for September openings (going back at least to '91). It did better than the other two widely released films that week (Into the Blue and The Greatest Game Ever Played). For a film that everyone said was going to be a total failure because only "the faithful" would bother watching it, it did spectacularly well, and will undoubtedly also do well on DVD.
I know the reason we didn't watch Firefly on TV was because it was on Fox. Fox has a history of screwing up good shows, so we tend not to even bother watching them, if its any good they'll just cancel it. They showed the truth of this by airing them out of order from the beginning, confusing the audience, then screwing up the scheduling and "counter-programming", then canceling it.
Yeah (and thanks for the dialog, it's been a while). I was referring to the origin of the idea (and the name) of a tapeworm in a computer system (actually networked computers), that being John Brunner's Shockwave Rider. But you're right, that exchange is perfect for making a comment on holographic memory!
And here I thought it was Shockwave Rider.
Why do you think that MPEG2 is not lossy?
The rest of the sentence didn't change the meaning of the phrase. How does "the technology is optical" lead to it being "more akin to tape technology for long-term backup" in opposition to CD or DVD, which are optical technologies. The phrase stands on its own - "Because humans are biological, they shouldn't be thought of as mammals" ... I don't care WHAT you might end that phrase with, it is still nonsensical.
Nail clippers, knitting needles, blunt scissors are all now allowed. Makes you wonder why they were such a threat until they changed the rules that they could confiscate it, fine you, arrest you or put you on a no-fly list because you forgot you had some nail clippers in your grooming kit...or the guy who had his Mercedes key confiscated because it was a flip-out type key when you pressed a button, which made it a "switchblade".
Yeah, 20GB would have been in the hundred-thousand dollar range, probably in 10-30 units taking up a whole room...
You confirm what I said, which was that 10-20MB was a large drive, and that 40MB was unlikely (but not impossible). I think I had a 20MB hard drive in 1985 (or whenever the Mac Plus came out). I had a 40MB drive on the Mac II, which I supplemented with an external 70MB drive, then later a 320MB drive, each of which cost around $300-350 (SCSI). I did a Linux install on that 70MB drive years later (also on a 100MB Zip drive).
Unlikely it was a 40MB drive, 10-20MB was quite large if you even had a hard drive. A computer with 640K wouldn't have had a 40MB drive (you'd spend the money on extended/expanded RAM first). My first computer was a Lisa, with 1MB RAM and a 10MB hard drive, 22 years ago, for about $5000 (including a printer).
I could see spending $5000, on a quad G5 with 4GB RAM and 500GB disk space, if you really needed the speed and storage. However, if I really needed that much computer, I'd probably want to just boost it to around $12K and get the 1TB disk space, and the dual 30" widescreen monitors (and get more RAM from other than Apple, of course - e.g. RamJet 8GB ECC for $1029 rather than Apple at $3100, though RamJet doesn't yet have 2GB ECC modules available, so getting to 16GB ECC from Apple will cost another $12K - funny that their RAM is so much more overpriced than their disk drives).
After Apple introduced the world to the mouse, PC gamers claimed it would never catch on because a mouse was so much more difficult to use than a joystick when playing games. Trackballs were "ok" for some games (or brilliant in some, see Missile Command), but the mouse was doomed to failure.
Games work best using the controls that they were designed for, and using the controls that you're most used to. A force-feedback control stick is quite clearly superior for flying, for instance, leaving the mouse free to click or drag controls. A keyboard or a control pad with lots of buttons are equivalent, assuming a good variety of button layouts. There's nothing natural or obvious about several rows of parallel buttons, or limiting yourself to two or three controls on your pointing device. Being able to use both hands at once, along with adding in foot controls (with two degrees of freedom for each foot) gives the most flexibility, of course. It would be interesting to add in a real 6-degrees-of-freedom hand control, and even more interesting to see whether having two of them with a few buttons for each hand is better than one control with the other hand having a pad of buttons.
But claiming that PCs are better than consoles because they have mice is foolish (especially since consoles can now have mice and keyboards).