Bad faith is "not simply bad judgment or negligence, but rather it implies the conscious doing of a wrong" -- Black's Law Dictionary.
Microsoft is not legal counsel, so any reference to them has no standing in a bad faith claim. It's the same as asking your dead grandmother via seance if she thinks it's ok. In fact I bet the Microsoft EULA specifically disclaims patent liability issues of this type.
I find this case highly ironic because it has been Microosft who has been making claims about use of Open Source being dangerous from a potential patent infringement point of view. Now they are found to have a problem.
Absolute Zero is not the lowest possible temperature, nor is it the lower bound of the range of possible temperatures. It is actually possible to attain temperatures BELOW absolute zero, as any student of statistical thermodynamics will know.
Absolute Zero is not the lowest possible temperature, nor is it the lower bound of the range of possible temperatures. It is actually possible to attain temperatures BELOW absolute zero, as any student of statistical thermodynamics will know.
My inclination as a chemist would be to pry the cover off of the drive, remove the platters and then soak them in a tub of rust remover aka Naval Jelly. That should pretty much take care of any data and/or media capable of retaining data. Once done some baking soda will do a nice job of neutralizing the mess.
You folks are missing the key point in the article:
"The mix spontaneously formed a cloudy emulsion".
This is very different from the usual case where you take an oil and water mix and maybe some surfactant and agitate it.
The reason is that the formation of surface area during the dispersion of oil into water normally requires an energy input. Surfactant reduces the energy required and also often stabilizes an emulsion by adding some repulsive forces (either steric or electrostatic) between the droplets. However, with the exception of systems called microemulsions that increased surface area always represents a energy increase. With time (the amount of time depending on the use of suractant etc.) that free energy will cause the emulsion to break and form two homogeneous layers.
Microemulsions are the exeception; they are unusually favorable systems that reduce the energy of formation of surface area to near zero, probably less than the thermal energy kT available. Thus they can spontaneously form emulsions that are stable indefinitely. Microemulsions generally require very specific compositions to form so they are not often seen except in some specialized applications.
The problem with Pashley's work is that he is claiming the spontaneous formation of an emulsion.. This would normally be expected only if the surface energy of his mixture was near zero - and there is nothing in the description of this system to indicate that this is happening, regardless of the side show with air bubbles.
What is more likely is that his oil-water system actually contains some small amount of surfactant as an impurity (quite typical in many oils). If so, the process of lowering temperature will take this mixture through what is known as the phase inversion temperature, where the mixture will achieve a minimum surface tension. This lowered usrface tension will make formation of an emulsion with minimal energy input quite likely.
but it doesn't change the fundamental fact that most medium to large-scale programs are written for Windows computers.
Maybe medium scale, but certainly NOT large scale. Large scale programs, say like weather simulators or 3D rendering applications or genetic sequencers pretty much always run on UNIX.
Whatever happened to the ZModem file transfer protocol? It was optimized to work over high latency satellite connections, and did so very robustly.
I wounder if it would be possible to use it's capabilities to solve the TCP/IP latency problems. Is Chuck Forsberg still living on his houseboat in Seatlle?
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings ?? If you are going to refer to record labels generically, you should make sure you are actually talking about a record label people have heard of.
Just because you are ignorant of something as important as the greatest collection of cultural heritage expressed in music doesn't mean everyone else is. The Smithsonian Folkways Recordings is a priceless irreplacable collection of music.
I would think anyone lucky and skilled enough to work from home would gladly pay a nominal fee such as this for their job access.
I would agree with that as far as it goes. My situation is rather different. My employer often expects me to perform work on his systems during evening and weekend hours, He also does not provide me with a keycard or other measns to access the workplace because he does not want anyone except his most senior employees to have access to the workplace. It seems to me that providing access to perform my job IS part of what he should be paying for.
If it was considered that important why was it still being upgraded 8 years later.
I imagine because ripping out the flooring to install the new fireproofing is a) expensive, and b) disrupts the tenants.
Not that it would have made much difference since the fire protection material was not blast resistant.
Actually it did make a difference where it was in place. The North tower had the floors in the blast region ugraded - this was the reason that the North tower lasted twice as long after being hit as the South tower. Unfortunately the big killer was that the fire protection systems were taken out by the blast.
9/11 actually revealled a previously unknown weakness in the design. Without public access to the plans etc, experts and documentarians may not have found out why the towers fell, and engineers may be planning buildings with the same techniques today.
That is not correct at all. The WTC design was very contorversial from the beginning, and in fact would have been illegal had it not been built by a government agency. The design was widely discussed, and the plans for the building were widely available. The susceptability of the main support structure to fire (it was known not to conform to typical building standards) was considered to be such an important issue after the 1993 bombing that the fireproofing of the main support structures was actully being upgraded at the time of the 9/11 attack.
http://www.eng.nsf.gov/engnews/2002/WorldTradeCe nt erCollapase/worldtradecentercollapase.htm
As for the education of the terrorists - if you recall after the first attack on the WTC, it was found that some the members of the qroups involved had attended or held engineering degrees from US universities. One of the people convicted in the WTC bombing was acually working in the engineering technology group at Allied Signal at the time of the bombing.
BTW, that first attack came closer to bringing down one of the towers and the neghboring Vista Hotel that is generally known. Emeergency structural reinforcement had to be put into place before trains could be allowed run through the PATH station.
So much for security through obscurity...
Yes, and how is not publishing this information in fact security through obscurity? Security through obscurity is the practice of not disclosing security holes in systems designed to protect sensitive information.
The sort of individual who joins one of these terrorist organizations does not usually have the 'scientific mindset,' shall we say.
Anyone who has investigated the 9/11 attacks has to be very impressed in the level of technical sophistication behind what happened. The fact is that the terrorists clearly understood the structural engineering behind the World Trade Center towers and in fact planned their attack precisely to take advantage of the structural weaknesses of those buildings. That, accompanied with the level of planning needed to evade security measures and put trained pilots aboard large commercial airliners has shocked most security analysts.
Many post-9/11 analysts have wondered if the wide availability of the designs of the WTC towers contributed to the success of the attacks. Many people think the answer is clearly yes.
The fact of the matter is that in any conflict the worst mistake you can make is to underestimate the enemy. Clearly this happened on 9/11.
In any conflict intelligence and counterintelligence is important. Yes, it would be nice if everything could be in the open, but the fact is that some security does depend on making some information difficult to obtain.
I think if Sun burns up (and with numbers like $2 billion in losses, it could happen overnight, look at Enron/WorldCom... who knows what sort of tricks are being played with the books) IBM would be the first in line to grab Java.
It is obvious to anyone with 0.05% of a brain that Java has enough momentum to continue if Sun should run into trouble. Even minor languages, once established never really seem to die out. Hell, you can download Algol 68 compilers for Linux. And Java is not a minor language at all.
As far as Sun going the way of Enron/WorldCom, I really doubt it. Sun has been through boom/bust cycles before, and knows how to handle them. No, if Sun were to go down, it would be because of a long term trend in the industry towards some new paradigm.
Right now Sun is hurting because corporate capital investment is down - nobody is buying heavy metal IT. Will that change? There are some important trends in Sun's favor - the biggest being the rapid growth of data warehouses in corporate datacenters - to use this data requires some real computing horsepower.
So basically I can hire developers right out of college and pay them $30k a year and expect them to work 80 hours a week.
Actually that is not true. The Fair Labor Standards act has a specific provision that places entry level computer programmers in the non-exempt category:
"Computer professional employees must meet certain standards to be considered exempt from the overtime provisions of the FLSA. A computer professional is defined as "any employee who is a computer systems analyst, computer programmer, software engineer, or other similarly skilled worker, whose primary duty is the application of systems analysis techniques and procedures, including consulting with users, to determine hardware, software, or system functional specifications; and/or the design, development, documentation, analysis, creation, testing, or modification of computer systems or programs, including prototypes, based on and related to user or system design specifications; and/or the design, documentation, testing, creation, or modification of computer programs related to machine operating systems," or a combination of these duties.
Employees performing these duties remain eligible for exemption from the overtime provisions as professionals under section 13(a)(1) of the Act. The jobs defined as computer professionals do not change with the 1996 amendment. Computer professional positions continue to be those meeting the duties test described in 29 CFR 541.303 (a)(1) above.
The exemption does not include trainees, employees in entry level positions learning to become proficient in such areas, or employees in these computer-related occupations who have not attained the level of skill and expertise which allows them to work independently and generally without supervision. Likewise, employees engaged in the operation, manufacture, repair, or maintenance of computer hardware or related equipment are not eligible for the exemption."
A software architecture for a distributed computing system comprising: an application configured to handle requests submitted by remote devices over a network; and an application program interface to present functions used by the application to access network and computing resources of the distributed computing system.
When you file a patent you enter a negotiation with the patent office. You start by claiming the sun, moon and stars (i.e. claim 1 which you quoted). Usually you end up with considerably more narrow coverage. Sometimes you end up with nothing (no patent).
Unit testing will catch the type errors and a whole hell of a lot more.
Why should I have to write a unit test suite that implements defacto type checking when I can offload that to the compiler vendor? A compiler vendor has far more resources to bring to the problem, and can often go to the extent of using formal methods to insure correctness.
The point is not to see errors at "compile time"; that's just defining the win for static typing on an irrelevant point.
My experience has been that compile time type errors are far less expensive than run-time type errors.
I think that this argument is exactly backwards. Strong typing allows mechanical type checking via compilers and incremental type checkers during the development process. Strong typing takes a lot of the load off a human developer, and puts it on mechanical systems that can be made much more reliable than humans. The important thing is to take maximum advantage of strong typing - use an IDE that does incremental compilation, etc.
On the other hand, since it is not possible to mechanically check weak typed code, weak typing places much more load on the programmer to make sure the types are correct than a strongly typed system. The result is many more bugs, and bugs caught much later in the development process when they are more expensive to correct.
The tax cuts and even some of the spending in certain areas, are intended to warm up the economy and put money back into people's pockets to spend.
That is a very strange strategy for a Republican administration to be embracing. Are the Republicans finally embracing the concept of Roosevlet's New Deal? Whatever happened to the concept that fiscal policy doesn't affect the economy? Putting moeny into people's pockets to spend is the antithesis of Regan's supply side theory.
but they sure as hell aren't businessmen, and it shows.
I find it quite a coincidence that the last two Republican presidents have had a very hard time with the economy.
As for Clinton, well...he was VERY fortunate to have been in office when he was
Perhaps you might make that case, on the other hand some would say that is partisan handwaving trying to explain away inconvenient facts.
Even if Clinton benefitted from favorable economic conditions, the fact reamins that he didn't screw it up, and delevered on the opportunity.
Slashdot Mirror
Bad faith is "not simply bad judgment or negligence, but rather it implies the conscious doing of a wrong" -- Black's Law Dictionary.
Microsoft is not legal counsel, so any reference to them has no standing in a bad faith claim. It's the same as asking your dead grandmother via seance if she thinks it's ok. In fact I bet the Microsoft EULA specifically disclaims patent liability issues of this type.
I find this case highly ironic because it has been Microosft who has been making claims about use of Open Source being dangerous from a potential patent infringement point of view. Now they are found to have a problem.
Absolute Zero is not the lowest possible temperature, nor is it the lower bound of the range of possible temperatures. It is actually possible to attain temperatures BELOW absolute zero, as any student of statistical thermodynamics will know.
Absolute Zero is not the lowest possible temperature, nor is it the lower bound of the range of possible temperatures. It is actually possible to attain temperatures BELOW absolute zero, as any student of statistical thermodynamics will know.
My inclination as a chemist would be to pry the cover off of the drive, remove the platters and then soak them in a tub of rust remover aka Naval Jelly. That should pretty much take care of any data and/or media capable of retaining data. Once done some baking soda will do a nice job of neutralizing the mess.
You folks are missing the key point in the article:
"The mix spontaneously formed a cloudy emulsion".
This is very different from the usual case where you take an oil and water mix and maybe some surfactant and agitate it.
The reason is that the formation of surface area during the dispersion of oil into water normally requires an energy input. Surfactant reduces the energy required and also often stabilizes an emulsion by adding some repulsive forces (either steric or electrostatic) between the droplets. However, with the exception of systems called microemulsions that increased surface area always represents a energy increase. With time (the amount of time depending on the use of suractant etc.) that free energy will cause the emulsion to break and form two homogeneous layers.
Microemulsions are the exeception; they are unusually favorable systems that reduce the energy of formation of surface area to near zero, probably less than the thermal energy kT available. Thus they can spontaneously form emulsions that are stable indefinitely. Microemulsions generally require very specific compositions to form so they are not often seen except in some specialized applications.
The problem with Pashley's work is that he is claiming the spontaneous formation of an emulsion.. This would normally be expected only if the surface energy of his mixture was near zero - and there is nothing in the description of this system to indicate that this is happening, regardless of the side show with air bubbles.
What is more likely is that his oil-water system actually contains some small amount of surfactant as an impurity (quite typical in many oils). If so, the process of lowering temperature will take this mixture through what is known as the phase inversion temperature, where the mixture will achieve a minimum surface tension. This lowered usrface tension will make formation of an emulsion with minimal energy input quite likely.
but it doesn't change the fundamental fact that most medium to large-scale programs are written for Windows computers.
Maybe medium scale, but certainly NOT large scale. Large scale programs, say like weather simulators or 3D rendering applications or genetic sequencers pretty much always run on UNIX.
The nice thing about Zmodem is that it has adaptive block sizes.
If there is an Eclipse plug-in for any of these CVS alternatives, I'd give 'em a try.
But what is the point if your development environment doesn't support these versioning systems?
Whatever happened to the ZModem file transfer protocol? It was optimized to work over high latency satellite connections, and did so very robustly.
I wounder if it would be possible to use it's capabilities to solve the TCP/IP latency problems. Is Chuck Forsberg still living on his houseboat in Seatlle?
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings ?? If you are going to refer to record labels generically, you should make sure you are actually talking about a record label people have heard of.
Just because you are ignorant of something as important as the greatest collection of cultural heritage expressed in music doesn't mean everyone else is. The Smithsonian Folkways Recordings is a priceless irreplacable collection of music.
I would think anyone lucky and skilled enough to work from home would gladly pay a nominal fee such as this for their job access.
I would agree with that as far as it goes. My situation is rather different. My employer often expects me to perform work on his systems during evening and weekend hours, He also does not provide me with a keycard or other measns to access the workplace because he does not want anyone except his most senior employees to have access to the workplace. It seems to me that providing access to perform my job IS part of what he should be paying for.
If it was considered that important why was it still being upgraded 8 years later.
I imagine because ripping out the flooring to install the new fireproofing is a) expensive, and b) disrupts the tenants.
Not that it would have made much difference since the fire protection material was not blast resistant.
Actually it did make a difference where it was in place. The North tower had the floors in the blast region ugraded - this was the reason that the North tower lasted twice as long after being hit as the South tower. Unfortunately the big killer was that the fire protection systems were taken out by the blast.
9/11 actually revealled a previously unknown weakness in the design. Without public access to the plans etc, experts and documentarians may not have found out why the towers fell, and engineers may be planning buildings with the same techniques today.
e nt erCollapase/worldtradecentercollapase.htm
That is not correct at all. The WTC design was very contorversial from the beginning, and in fact would have been illegal had it not been built by a government agency. The design was widely discussed, and the plans for the building were widely available. The susceptability of the main support structure to fire (it was known not to conform to typical building standards) was considered to be such an important issue after the 1993 bombing that the fireproofing of the main support structures was actully being upgraded at the time of the 9/11 attack.
http://www.eng.nsf.gov/engnews/2002/WorldTradeC
As for the education of the terrorists - if you recall after the first attack on the WTC, it was found that some the members of the qroups involved had attended or held engineering degrees from US universities. One of the people convicted in the WTC bombing was acually working in the engineering technology group at Allied Signal at the time of the bombing.
BTW, that first attack came closer to bringing down one of the towers and the neghboring Vista Hotel that is generally known. Emeergency structural reinforcement had to be put into place before trains could be allowed run through the PATH station.
So much for security through obscurity...
Yes, and how is not publishing this information in fact security through obscurity? Security through obscurity is the practice of not disclosing security holes in systems designed to protect sensitive information.
The sort of individual who joins one of these terrorist organizations does not usually have the 'scientific mindset,' shall we say.
Anyone who has investigated the 9/11 attacks has to be very impressed in the level of technical sophistication behind what happened. The fact is that the terrorists clearly understood the structural engineering behind the World Trade Center towers and in fact planned their attack precisely to take advantage of the structural weaknesses of those buildings. That, accompanied with the level of planning needed to evade security measures and put trained pilots aboard large commercial airliners has shocked most security analysts.
Many post-9/11 analysts have wondered if the wide availability of the designs of the WTC towers contributed to the success of the attacks. Many people think the answer is clearly yes.
The fact of the matter is that in any conflict the worst mistake you can make is to underestimate the enemy. Clearly this happened on 9/11.
In any conflict intelligence and counterintelligence is important. Yes, it would be nice if everything could be in the open, but the fact is that some security does depend on making some information difficult to obtain.
I think if Sun burns up (and with numbers like $2 billion in losses, it could happen overnight, look at Enron/WorldCom... who knows what sort of tricks are being played with the books) IBM would be the first in line to grab Java.
It is obvious to anyone with 0.05% of a brain that Java has enough momentum to continue if Sun should run into trouble. Even minor languages, once established never really seem to die out. Hell, you can download Algol 68 compilers for Linux. And Java is not a minor language at all.
As far as Sun going the way of Enron/WorldCom, I really doubt it. Sun has been through boom/bust cycles before, and knows how to handle them. No, if Sun were to go down, it would be because of a long term trend in the industry towards some new paradigm.
Right now Sun is hurting because corporate capital investment is down - nobody is buying heavy metal IT. Will that change? There are some important trends in Sun's favor - the biggest being the rapid growth of data warehouses in corporate datacenters - to use this data requires some real computing horsepower.
I don't understand how they could claim they invented such things in '98.
Probably they didn't. For example 5,991,791 is a continuation of an application originally filed in 1994.
Still, these patents look to be absurd on the face of it.
So basically I can hire developers right out of college and pay them $30k a year and expect them to work 80 hours a week.
Actually that is not true. The Fair Labor Standards act has a specific provision that places entry level computer programmers in the non-exempt category:
"Computer professional employees must meet certain standards to be considered exempt from the overtime provisions of the FLSA. A computer professional is defined as "any employee who is a computer systems analyst, computer programmer, software engineer, or other similarly skilled worker, whose primary duty is the application of systems analysis techniques and procedures, including consulting with users, to determine hardware, software, or system functional specifications; and/or the design, development, documentation, analysis, creation, testing, or modification of computer systems or programs, including prototypes, based on and related to user or system design specifications; and/or the design, documentation, testing, creation, or modification of computer programs related to machine operating systems," or a combination of these duties.
Employees performing these duties remain eligible for exemption from the overtime provisions as professionals under section 13(a)(1) of the Act. The jobs defined as computer professionals do not change with the 1996 amendment. Computer professional positions continue to be those meeting the duties test described in 29 CFR 541.303 (a)(1) above.
The exemption does not include trainees, employees in entry level positions learning to become proficient in such areas, or employees in these computer-related occupations who have not attained the level of skill and expertise which allows them to work independently and generally without supervision. Likewise, employees engaged in the operation, manufacture, repair, or maintenance of computer hardware or related equipment are not eligible for the exemption."
A software architecture for a distributed computing system comprising: an application configured to handle requests submitted by remote devices over a network; and an application program interface to present functions used by the application to access network and computing resources of the distributed computing system.
When you file a patent you enter a negotiation with the patent office. You start by claiming the sun, moon and stars (i.e. claim 1 which you quoted). Usually you end up with considerably more narrow coverage. Sometimes you end up with nothing (no patent).
Unit testing will catch the type errors and a whole hell of a lot more.
Why should I have to write a unit test suite that implements defacto type checking when I can offload that to the compiler vendor? A compiler vendor has far more resources to bring to the problem, and can often go to the extent of using formal methods to insure correctness.
The point is not to see errors at "compile time"; that's just defining the win for static typing on an irrelevant point.
My experience has been that compile time type errors are far less expensive than run-time type errors.
keystrokes are moved from the source to the unit tests.
This also moves type errors from compile time to run time.
I think that this argument is exactly backwards. Strong typing allows mechanical type checking via compilers and incremental type checkers during the development process. Strong typing takes a lot of the load off a human developer, and puts it on mechanical systems that can be made much more reliable than humans. The important thing is to take maximum advantage of strong typing - use an IDE that does incremental compilation, etc.
On the other hand, since it is not possible to mechanically check weak typed code, weak typing places much more load on the programmer to make sure the types are correct than a strongly typed system. The result is many more bugs, and bugs caught much later in the development process when they are more expensive to correct.
Secondly, there is no way a person could legally download more than 1 gig in a day.
That is simply not true. A RedHat Linux iso set is something like 3 gigs.
The tax cuts and even some of the spending in certain areas, are intended to warm up the economy and put money back into people's pockets to spend.
That is a very strange strategy for a Republican administration to be embracing. Are the Republicans finally embracing the concept of Roosevlet's New Deal? Whatever happened to the concept that fiscal policy doesn't affect the economy? Putting moeny into people's pockets to spend is the antithesis of Regan's supply side theory.
but they sure as hell aren't businessmen, and it shows.
I find it quite a coincidence that the last two Republican presidents have had a very hard time with the economy.
As for Clinton, well...he was VERY fortunate to have been in office when he was
Perhaps you might make that case, on the other hand some would say that is partisan handwaving trying to explain away inconvenient facts.
Even if Clinton benefitted from favorable economic conditions, the fact reamins that he didn't screw it up, and delevered on the opportunity.
What's the best J2EE platform has done so far? Running the front end window dressing Web Site!
I'd bet that Amazon and Ebay consider their based web sites to be mission critical.
Name the IBM's mission critical systems what have been switched to Java.
Read the linked article.