MicroSoft has acquired monopoly status in many aspects of IT, include net servers and OS.
Microsoft has monopoly status in the area of desktop OS's and certain enduser applications. It has no such status in the realm of servers, where it's market share is about 42%.
poses the threat (from frequent large changes in law) that it was created to stop.
I think that increasing expertise at the district is a sound concept, but having appeals go to the numbered circuits may result in precident being made by inexpert courts. The current body of law is not sufficient to prevent the Federal Circuit from issuing divergent opinions, so what will happen in the numbered circuits where surely an even wider range of views exist?
Is the only real answer to some of the issues like business process and equivalents in Congress?
change it, and then use the gene patent free on the basis that it is not _exactly_ the same sequence?
No, because patent coverage is rarely that narrow. If it was, you could take a molecule containing 30% A, 35% B and 35% C, and slightly vary the composition to escape the patent. If patent coverage was that narrow there would be no point to having a patent system.
There is something called 'the doctrine of equivalents' which essentially translates to if you are using essentially the same thing to obtain the same result you are infringing.
However, the Federal Circuit now has a twenty year history of ignoring the law and creating its own jurisprudence in favor of strong patent rights.
Perhaps, although my experience with this court led to a competitor's patent being invalidated.
This court was established for a pretty good reason - prior to its existance patent appeals were tried in a wide variety of courts with little or no patent experience all over the country, with a mish-mash of quite inconsistant results. Stuff like venue shopping was quite common. The result was chaos in the extreme, and something like 90% of challenged patents were being invalidated by judges with little or no patent law experience. This meant that any company with deep enough pockets could run over the actual inventor almost at will, with little regard to the actual value of the patent.
While this court may have gone too far in the other direction (in particlar in the area of business methods), the concept of a court of this nature, and the need to have more uniform interpretation of patent law was obvious at the time, and in fact this court has probably done more good than harm in the aggregate.
The obvious difference is that you can update a RedHat installation for free,
It is not obvious at all that upgrading a server is free. Sysadmins don't work for free. And then there is the issue of software like Oracle - by the time Oracle gets around to supporting a given Red Hat version, it will likely be EOL.
The real problem with this 1 year cycle is that many third party apps are going to be usable only on EOL systems,
Nah...the problem isn't entirely with Microsoft, but with lazy admins.
I don't think that is true at all. Microsoft just released SP3 last week - before that you had to use a hotfix to patch this. Hotfixes are not easy to manage. In addition the fact is that any organization that is serious about having their applications run properly is going to run a test/acceptance cycle before putting a patched product into full production. This testing costs real money, and an organization may well make a decision not to apply a patch because of the cost of validation.
Then there are the people running SQL Server on a box in a non-professional enviromenet - home, academic, whatever. Nobody can expect that they are going to take the care that would be expected of a professional sysop.
While there are cases where you can argue that a compromise is due to 'lazy sysadmins', I bet that most of the traffic due to this worm is not attributable to sysasdmin failures.
Where does that leave the blame? At the foot of the company that released grossly vulnerable software in the first place.
last time I checked the root-servers weren't running Windows and they went down like a date on prom night.
Actually NONE of the root nameservers went down, either during this worm incident, or during the Oct 21 incident. The network nameservers are generally highly overprovisioned, and do a very good job of responding to every request they receive, even under abnormal load.
What happened is that the increase in network traffic staturated some of the feeds to the root name servers making it impossible for requests to reach the name servers. This is the real danger of these attacks.
And as far as blaming negligent sysadmins for not patching their servers, well, sure. But sysadmins are not the only players in this game. Companies often have policies regarding software patches and validation that restrain what a sysadmin can do. And the fact is that the sysadmin did not put the vulnerability in the software, nor is this the first time a Microsoft product has servered as the vector for something like this.
There is no way that the contrast range of an LCD is as good as a CRT. A typical LCD has a contrast range of 350:1, while CRTs are generally better than 800:1.
LCDs have other issues - especially color rendition.
And of course if you want to change the pixel resolution, LCD's don't do well.
The Ultimate Car For Tinkerers
on
Cars for Tinkerers?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Caterham Super Seven. Available in KIT form. The Superlight R500 version has the highest power/weight ratio of any street car and is the fastest 0-100-0 MPH (11.44 secs) road car in the world.
The Classic version is the car driven by Patrick McGoohan in the opening sequence of the TV series "The Prisoner"
It's called process capability analysis in the textbooks.
Six sigma arose out of a rigorous statistical method of analysis of manufacturing data. Basically you plot some measurement of some characteristic of a device being manufactured over a large number of samples. This provides a characterization of the manufacturing process. Hopefully the data you chose to gather is normally (in the formal sense) distributed and you can assign a mean and standard deviation (sigma) to the data. You also examine where the actual specification for the measured characteristic lies. A simple way to characterize the location of the specification is in terms of the number of standard deviations (sigmas) that the specification is away from the mean measurement. Six sigma is simply a statement that the specification is six standard deviations away from the mean. Measurements outside the six sigma range denote defects.
All of this is very cut and dry stuff that has been used in manufacturing for decades. Six sigma was 'popularized' when Motorola adopted it as a quality goal for their products company-wide.
How does this apply to software development? I don't have a clue. How the hell do you establish a process capability measurement for a software development process in a rigorous fashion? Good Luck.
IMHO this is just the latest quality fad that is rippling through the management/consultant community. What next? Re-engineering rises from the ashes again?
please list fifteen advanced features present in standard Linux in 2000 that were not already present in Unix/minix fifteen years ago.
You are joking, right? Tennenbaum was just graduating about then, The first X11 was just being released. NFS didn't exist..gcc had just started. This is just about the time Minix 1.0 was released. The GNU project just started in 1987. Sun didn't release an SMP tuned version of Solaris until 1991. Hell, this is even before TCP/IP was firmly standardized in it's Tahoe incarnation.
There has been a huge change in the feature set of whatever 'UNIX' is today vs. 15 years ago.
i can't wait for them to sue the united states government [umich.edu] for patent infringement.
Government use of a patented invention is viewed as a taking by eminent domain, not an infringement.
Infringement, by the Government, of privately owned patents, is governed by 28 U.S.C. 1498, which provides that a suit against the Government in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims is the exclusvie remedy for patent holders who allege their patented invention has been infringed by the U.S. Government or by one acting for the Government. The primary purpose of this statute is to protect and relieve contractors from any liability for infringement by the owner when an invention is used by or manufactured for the United States. By virtue of this statute, the Government may be held liable to the patent owner for payment of the "reasonable and entire compensation" for its unauthorized use of the patent. Unlike a private party, however, the Government cannot commit the tort of "patent infringement." Governmental use of a patented invention is viewed as an eminent domain taking of a license under the patent and not as a tort.
The Government may delegate its eminent domain power over patents to contractors acting on its behalf. This is accomplished through inclusion of the "Authorization and Consent" clause in the contract [FAR clause 52.227-1]. This clause is usually included in research and development contracts and is a very significant power to grant to a contractor as it makes the Government responsible for the contractors' infringement of any patents during the course of performance of the contract; the patent owner must bring her/his action against the Government, not the contractor.
Sometimes the Government does not wish to fully delegate its eminent domain power to a contractor. This is accomplished by inclusion in the contract of the "Patent Indemnity" clause [FAR clause 52.227-3] which obligates the contractor who infringes a patent to indemnify the Government for any liability it incurs.
With the gross swings in fortunes in the IT job market, overtly hostile actions of the US government towards the profession (ie H1-B and the Fair Labor Standards Act exemption for hourly paid programmers) and poor treatment by employers in general, why would any intelligent individual want to make a career of IT?
The declining enrollments plus the rejection of the field by anyone with any ability to interact with others on a person to person basis (i.e. NOT INTJ Myers-Brigg) spell continuing turmoil for this as a profession.
I have already told my children that there is no future in technology careers in the US... they are looking at humanities, not sciences as the road to a happy future.
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Software engineering is about being able to perform software development with repeatable and predictable results.
MicroSoft has acquired monopoly status in many aspects of IT, include net servers and OS.
Microsoft has monopoly status in the area of desktop OS's and certain enduser applications. It has no such status in the realm of servers, where it's market share is about 42%.
poses the threat (from frequent large changes in law) that it was created to stop.
I think that increasing expertise at the district is a sound concept, but having appeals go to the numbered circuits may result in precident being made by inexpert courts. The current body of law is not sufficient to prevent the Federal Circuit from issuing divergent opinions, so what will happen in the numbered circuits where surely an even wider range of views exist?
Is the only real answer to some of the issues like business process and equivalents in Congress?
To me the fact that such patents were ever granted is disturbing
Such patents were never granted. For any composition of matter patent you must show that the composition has utility of some sort.
change it, and then use the gene patent free on the basis that it is not _exactly_ the same sequence?
No, because patent coverage is rarely that narrow. If it was, you could take a molecule containing 30% A, 35% B and 35% C, and slightly vary the composition to escape the patent. If patent coverage was that narrow there would be no point to having a patent system.
There is something called 'the doctrine of equivalents' which essentially translates to if you are using essentially the same thing to obtain the same result you are infringing.
However, the Federal Circuit now has a twenty year history of ignoring the law and creating its own jurisprudence in favor of strong patent rights.
Perhaps, although my experience with this court led to a competitor's patent being invalidated.
This court was established for a pretty good reason - prior to its existance patent appeals were tried in a wide variety of courts with little or no patent experience all over the country, with a mish-mash of quite inconsistant results. Stuff like venue shopping was quite common. The result was chaos in the extreme, and something like 90% of challenged patents were being invalidated by judges with little or no patent law experience. This meant that any company with deep enough pockets could run over the actual inventor almost at will, with little regard to the actual value of the patent.
While this court may have gone too far in the other direction (in particlar in the area of business methods), the concept of a court of this nature, and the need to have more uniform interpretation of patent law was obvious at the time, and in fact this court has probably done more good than harm in the aggregate.
Do you really believe that someone halfway around the world is really going to understand what your needs in software are?
How many frontline programmers understand the business motivation for the project they are working on?
They don't have to. That is what the project managers are for.
If you really want a long term IT career, focus on making IT relevant to the business you work for.
The obvious difference is that you can update a RedHat installation for free,
It is not obvious at all that upgrading a server is free. Sysadmins don't work for free. And then there is the issue of software like Oracle - by the time Oracle gets around to supporting a given Red Hat version, it will likely be EOL.
The real problem with this 1 year cycle is that many third party apps are going to be usable only on EOL systems,
New Jersey has had a widely ignored use tax on its forms for many years.
I would say that if you are concerned about GUI performance and Swing, you should really take a lookat the SWT toolkit. It's available at eclipse.org.
It is sort of odd though that the field goal kicker wears number 4.
Now I can chase down those @#$$~~! birds after they shit on my newly waxed car!
Nah...the problem isn't entirely with Microsoft, but with lazy admins.
I don't think that is true at all. Microsoft just released SP3 last week - before that you had to use a hotfix to patch this. Hotfixes are not easy to manage. In addition the fact is that any organization that is serious about having their applications run properly is going to run a test/acceptance cycle before putting a patched product into full production. This testing costs real money, and an organization may well make a decision not to apply a patch because of the cost of validation.
Then there are the people running SQL Server on a box in a non-professional enviromenet - home, academic, whatever. Nobody can expect that they are going to take the care that would be expected of a professional sysop.
While there are cases where you can argue that a compromise is due to 'lazy sysadmins', I bet that most of the traffic due to this worm is not attributable to sysasdmin failures.
Where does that leave the blame? At the foot of the company that released grossly vulnerable software in the first place.
last time I checked the root-servers weren't running Windows and they went down like a date on prom night.
Actually NONE of the root nameservers went down, either during this worm incident, or during the Oct 21 incident. The network nameservers are generally highly overprovisioned, and do a very good job of responding to every request they receive, even under abnormal load.
What happened is that the increase in network traffic staturated some of the feeds to the root name servers making it impossible for requests to reach the name servers. This is the real danger of these attacks.
And as far as blaming negligent sysadmins for not patching their servers, well, sure. But sysadmins are not the only players in this game. Companies often have policies regarding software patches and validation that restrain what a sysadmin can do. And the fact is that the sysadmin did not put the vulnerability in the software, nor is this the first time a Microsoft product has servered as the vector for something like this.
we will not be writing programs bigger than about 10 million lines of code no matter how fast our processors become
And how is this a problem?
Is there actually ANY good reason to use the expensive MSQL over free Mysql or Postgresql?
Pg and mysql have limitations when it comes to failover, load balancing, clustering, etc.
Otherwise I would choose PostgreSQL every time.
The reason is that there's no financial detriment to having one of your own boxes act as a zombie and send out tons and tons of packets.
That's true until somebobdy writes a worm that starts deleting files on the servers it infects.
There is no way that the contrast range of an LCD is as good as a CRT. A typical LCD has a contrast range of 350:1, while CRTs are generally better than 800:1.
LCDs have other issues - especially color rendition.
And of course if you want to change the pixel resolution, LCD's don't do well.
Caterham Super Seven. Available in KIT form. The Superlight R500 version has the highest power/weight ratio of any street car and is the fastest 0-100-0 MPH (11.44 secs) road car in the world.
The Classic version is the car driven by Patrick McGoohan in the opening sequence of the TV series "The Prisoner"
In production for 40 years and kicking every day.
http://www.caterham.co.uk/news/index.htm
It's called process capability analysis in the textbooks.
Six sigma arose out of a rigorous statistical method of analysis of manufacturing data. Basically you plot some measurement of some characteristic of a device being manufactured over a large number of samples. This provides a characterization of the manufacturing process. Hopefully the data you chose to gather is normally (in the formal sense) distributed and you can assign a mean and standard deviation (sigma) to the data. You also examine where the actual specification for the measured characteristic lies. A simple way to characterize the location of the specification is in terms of the number of standard deviations (sigmas) that the specification is away from the mean measurement. Six sigma is simply a statement that the specification is six standard deviations away from the mean. Measurements outside the six sigma range denote defects.
All of this is very cut and dry stuff that has been used in manufacturing for decades. Six sigma was 'popularized' when Motorola adopted it as a quality goal for their products company-wide.
How does this apply to software development? I don't have a clue. How the hell do you establish a process capability measurement for a software development process in a rigorous fashion? Good Luck.
IMHO this is just the latest quality fad that is rippling through the management/consultant community. What next? Re-engineering rises from the ashes again?
please list fifteen advanced features present in standard Linux in 2000 that were not already present in Unix/minix fifteen years ago.
You are joking, right? Tennenbaum was just graduating about then, The first X11 was just being released. NFS didn't exist..gcc had just started. This is just about the time Minix 1.0 was released. The GNU project just started in 1987. Sun didn't release an SMP tuned version of Solaris until 1991. Hell, this is even before TCP/IP was firmly standardized in it's Tahoe incarnation.
There has been a huge change in the feature set of whatever 'UNIX' is today vs. 15 years ago.
And what actual data do you have to prove this? Our win200 advanced server smokes our Caldera server
m l
I don't szee any of your actual data.
Places that I do see actual data, like the SPECWeb results, show that IIS is a smoking hole in the ground.
http://www.specbench.org/web99/results/web99.ht
SBC's patent was filed for in 1999.
ISSUED 1999, filed 1996.
i can't wait for them to sue the united states government [umich.edu] for patent infringement.
Government use of a patented invention is viewed as a taking by eminent domain, not an infringement.
Infringement, by the Government, of privately owned patents, is governed by 28 U.S.C. 1498, which provides that a suit against the Government in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims is the exclusvie remedy for patent holders who allege their patented invention has been infringed by the U.S. Government or by one acting for the Government. The primary purpose of this statute is to protect and relieve contractors from any liability for infringement by the owner when an invention is used by or manufactured for the United States. By virtue of this statute, the Government may be held liable to the patent owner for payment of the "reasonable and entire compensation" for its unauthorized use of the patent. Unlike a private party, however, the Government cannot commit the tort of "patent infringement." Governmental use of a patented invention is viewed as an eminent domain taking of a license under the patent and not as a tort.
The Government may delegate its eminent domain power over patents to contractors acting on its behalf. This is accomplished through inclusion of the "Authorization and Consent" clause in the contract [FAR clause 52.227-1]. This clause is usually included in research and development contracts and is a very significant power to grant to a contractor as it makes the Government responsible for the contractors' infringement of any patents during the course of performance of the contract; the patent owner must bring her/his action against the Government, not the contractor.
Sometimes the Government does not wish to fully delegate its eminent domain power to a contractor. This is accomplished by inclusion in the contract of the "Patent Indemnity" clause [FAR clause 52.227-3] which obligates the contractor who infringes a patent to indemnify the Government for any liability it incurs.
With the gross swings in fortunes in the IT job market, overtly hostile actions of the US government towards the profession (ie H1-B and the Fair Labor Standards Act exemption for hourly paid programmers) and poor treatment by employers in general, why would any intelligent individual want to make a career of IT?
The declining enrollments plus the rejection of the field by anyone with any ability to interact with others on a person to person basis (i.e. NOT INTJ Myers-Brigg) spell continuing turmoil for this as a profession.
I have already told my children that there is no future in technology careers in the US... they are looking at humanities, not sciences as the road to a happy future.