Maricopa county is only one of many places that have laws against monopolies.
. Maricopa county does not have a law against monopolies. Otherwise they wouldn't have cable or local phone service. What they have is a law against purchasing from a company that was convicted of violating the Taft-Hartley or Sherman acts. VERY different.
In Belgium (Europe) for example, a telco company has succeeded in registering a COLOR as trademark.
Nothing new about that. Kodak Yellow has been a trademark for decades. As it should be. Trademark registration systems provide a valuable consumer service that prevents competing companies from copying packaging and names in a manner that would confuse the consumer into buying Modak Film, sold in yellow boxes. I am sure the Fuji green is similarly protected.
We already have tremendous problems with inferior goods in commerce sold under outright pirated trademarks. For example experts estimate 90% of Rolex watches sold today are fakes. Fake Viagra is another common problem. Imagine what would happen if the current system were weakened.
The site in question didn't exist before the registration was accepted and was created as a protest against it
So you guys deliberately copied the trademark, and are now outraged that the owner comoplained? Give me a break!
Trademark law is necessary and vital for consumer protection. Complaining about it is dumb.
However, I found that KDE's performance via Cygwin was extremely slow (AthlonXP 1900+ & GeForce 3), and quite unstable (Applications were crashing and there seemed to be tons of bugs). Some people hailed this as a desktop replacement for Windows 95 users... I think they're kidding themselves.
Ever run a Windows desktop over a remote connection? That is not exactly a fun proposition either.
KDE works well enough locally - as does Windows.Neither is really in it's element when run remotely.
Doesn't this seem just a little foolish to anyone? After all, running Linux on top of Windows loses any and all advantages Linux might have.
This is NOT running Linux on top of Windows. This is setting up all of your favorite GNU tools and running them from the command line on Windows. It's a great help for people who need to be in Windows for one reason or another - think of it as a reverse WINE.
I also dispute the concept that Windows has more programs than Linux! Sure, Windows has more GUI word processors and games, but it does NOT have more technologically oriented programs like bash,zsh, emacs, gcc, postfix, etc. etc.,and of course all those windows programs cost, and come without source code.
Additionally, the tools here are NOT slower than Windows tools, simply beacuse fast command line tools that UNIX features, unencumbered by the wonderful Microsoft MFC.
No, cygwin is a godsend for people who miss having a powerful command shell on their computer, complete with tools like sed and awk.
I've even heard tales that cygwin is heavily used by programmers at Microsoft.
But wait: doesn't M$ 0wn apple? (25% stock?) Does anyone know about DRM plans on mac?
The real question is going to be whether Intel, AMD and the motherboard and chipset vendors will go along with this. Intel has already voice opposition.
So long as you can buy and run hardware/OS choices that don't force you into this, it doesn't matter to me.
On the other hand if something like the Hollings bill passes, things will be very dark indeed.
Metallic glasses (trademark MetGlass) were invented over 30 years ago by AlliedSignal researchers and have been used for a wide range of industrial applications since. It is particularly important because of magnetic properties in transformers etc. I was with Allied when they first looked at the razor blade application - the razor companies didn't want to touch it with a 10 foot pole because the blades were so durable that you would only need one a year.
BTW, the original patents have long ago expired so that anyone can work with metallic glasses.
What this guy did was develop an alloy that could be cooled into parts of thicker cross section than was previously possible.
Rather than use of something like a genetic algoritm,I would recommend that you look at 3-mode (aka PID) control, possibly with auto-tuning. This algorithm has been used industrially for process control for 50+ years, and nobody has really found anything better. The first hardware implementations were pnuematic based analog computers. One of the biggest early applications was to control the massive banks of gas diffusion separators at Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project. They were critical for this project because it would not have been possible to control this plant using people due to the size of the operation. At the time this was the largest industrial facility ever built. The electrical demands were so large that Oak Ridge could not obtain enough copper for the electrical runs; silver had to be borrowed from the US Treasury.
Part of the confusion between SAN and NAS can be attributed to the current battle brewing over FC and GigE. There is no doubt that these two protocols are competing standards. FCIA ahs gone as far as endorsing the move to create a new standard where FC can operate over IP networks: FCIP. The only problem here is, as you envelope protocols within protocols, performance becomes an issue. Why not just use IP natively? What we need is "more SAN, but less fibre!" or a fibreless SAN that uses IP. It only makes sense.
Yes, actually I just finished installing a 10 TB EMC setup. While it uses FC internally, there is no block mode transfer to external applications in this setup, and everything outside the EMC equipment is GigE. The fact is that NAS is much more widely used than SAN, and a pure NAS installation does not use FC. In addition NAS vendors are encroaching on the SAN market by adding SAN features to their ethernet transport layers. With the commodity pricing of GigE (and soon 10GigE) I expect that what we currently know as SAN will disappear. As that happens so will FC.
Fibre channel? I don't think so. Fibre channel is dying out, and is being replaced by GigE and Gig10E. Fibre channel suffers tremendously from lack of standards, low production volume and high costs.
WD-40 is combustible, not flammable. It has a flash point at 110F. Flammable is usally defined as below 100F. 110F still puts it well above a material like jet fuel (140 flashpoint) in terms of fire hazard though.
I once saw a garage mechanic trying to free up a rusted mechanism by first heating it with a torch, and then spraying WD-40 on it. When the WD-40 hit the part it instantly ignited, and worked back to the spray can nozzle making a nice flaming blowtorch effect and making the mechanic shit his pants.
Some VCRs including my JVC can get a time signal that is broadcasted by PBS stations via cable. It's wonderful to never have to set that puppy.Combined with ntp for my computers, and WWV for my stand alone clocks (so called 'atomic alarm clocks' I am down to one clock that I have to set - my wristwatch.
That scenario doesn't seem very likely considering that AOL itself has severe financial problems, such as last quarter setting a record for the largest monetary loss ever experienced by any corporation ever at $52 billion. It makes WorldCom look like the very essence of fiscal responsibility.
Paper has historically been the cheapest part of book publishing.
Not correct at all. Paper has often been the most expensive component of publishing. Until the invention of the Fourdriner and widespread use of chemically treated wood fiber in mass production of paper, paper was hand made one sheet at a time from cotton, linen or similar high value fiber. In 17th century England the use of burial shrouds was banned so as to provide more fiber for printing. The circulation of Ben Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette was in fact often limited by the availability of paper.
The so called 'golden age' of newspapers was triggered by several major inventions - the electric lamp, giving people the ability to read after the sun went down, the web-fed printing press, Merganthaler's Linotype machine, and the Fourdriner.
The fact is that the mass production of paper is one of the key steps in the reduction in cost of the reproduction of information.
IANAL, but if I undestand correctly, the great deal of Western law is based on 'common law', the practice of allowing previous court decisions to affect future decisions.
That is a very limited point of view. Napolonic law is also widely used.
Since digital technology has forever completely erased the possibility of having a finite supply of any kind of information, the length and breadth of copyright law is dying-- screaming, kicking, doing it's best to cling to existance in a scary new world inhospitable to it, but dying nonetheless.
How is digital technology anything more than a continuation of the development of techologies that made information cheaper to reproduce that started in the 15th century?
Information technologies and the internet *are* different for a simple reason: information scarcities are almost puerly artificial.
The cost of reproduction of a piece of commercial software compared to its price has been negligable since the days of the 9 track tape. The cost of a piece of pvc with grooves in it compared to the cost of an LP has been trivial since the invention of the record player. The cost of a pond of paper is trivial compared to the selling price of a book.
The fact is that it was the industrial revolution that made IP laws necessary. The internet is just a continuation on the same theme of driving down the cost of transmission and reproduction that began with Gutenberg.
Programming skills and management skills are mutually-exclusive.
I don't agree with that at all - I think rather that the skill sets are nearly independent - you can be a perfectly good project manager with no programming skills, however being a good programmer doesn't mean that you would be a bad manager.
There are plenty of examples in industry of good programmers who also have turned out to be excellent managers. Bill Gates is the most famous case.
The main problem behind attribution of liability stems from the lack of "natural laws" governing programming itself, thus making the analysis of software failure a shaky endeavour.
Natural laws of programming not understod? Maybe not by your Chubb institute hackers, or their pointy-haired bosses. But clearly the mathematical foundations of software are understood.
The fact is that SOME software is unreliable because people are not willing to pay for making it reliable, or companies like Microsoft don't view software quality as something that will make a difference to them in the market place.
There are software systems that ARE reliable. Telephone switch software has an excellent reliability record. Software for embedded devices is generally written to much higher standards than PC software. Midrange and mainframe systems generally are far more reliable that what we run on PC's.
traditionally the only environment with legal resources adequate to deal with such liability has been the megalithic corporate one.
Professional engineers, doctors and lawyers are subject to liability claims arising from negligent behavior. There is also insurance available to cover these circumstances.
Megalithic corporations do not have any special exemption from disaster due to product liability claims. Many are driven into bankruptcy as a result of liability problems (Dow Corning, Johns-Manville, and Soon Arhter Anderson).
How is the receiver not being able to handle more stuff at the end different than an XML reader not being able to handle a new tag?
My first programming job included maintaining a perl script that processed a database table. The table had 97 data fields; the original programmer didn't know that he could extract the data into a hash, and reference the data using hash keys that matched the field names. The result was code that read something like:
$price = $row[17]*[$row[72]* sqrt($row[12] )
this meant a) the code was totally unreadable, and b) the only place you could add a field to the database was at the end. This is exactly the kind of programming structure that your CDF proposal leads to. If I were you I would worry that when I died and went to hell I might have to work on code like that.
Send: 2, "+", 3
Receive: 5
Where is the data typing that tells the server that you didn't mean to call add(string,string) and get 23?
XML solves some problems that CDF doesn't, like validation and extensibility. I can add a new field to an XML file without it affecting the receiver, try that with CDF ant the receiver gets very confused.
Then there are all the support facilities like SOAP and so on. They let me write a server like:
public class Adder {
public int sub(int a, int b) {
return a+b; }
}
Drop that source code in a web service enabled application server and I can send a message to it uusing any SOAP cleint and get my sum back.
Try that with CDF.
Re:I got started on the original IMSAI...
on
IMSAI Series Two
·
· Score: 2
Trenton Computer Festival (do they still have those?)
Slashdot Mirror
Does smoking cause Cancer or does Cancer cause smoking?
Cancer cures smoking.
Maricopa county is only one of many places that have laws against monopolies.
. Maricopa county does not have a law against monopolies. Otherwise they wouldn't have cable or local phone service. What they have is a law against purchasing from a company that was convicted of violating the Taft-Hartley or Sherman acts. VERY different.
In Belgium (Europe) for example, a telco company has succeeded in registering a COLOR as trademark.
Nothing new about that. Kodak Yellow has been a trademark for decades. As it should be. Trademark registration systems provide a valuable consumer service that prevents competing companies from copying packaging and names in a manner that would confuse the consumer into buying Modak Film, sold in yellow boxes. I am sure the Fuji green is similarly protected.
We already have tremendous problems with inferior goods in commerce sold under outright pirated trademarks. For example experts estimate 90% of Rolex watches sold today are fakes. Fake Viagra is another common problem. Imagine what would happen if the current system were weakened.
The site in question didn't exist before the registration was accepted and was created as a protest against it
So you guys deliberately copied the trademark, and are now outraged that the owner comoplained? Give me a break!
Trademark law is necessary and vital for consumer protection. Complaining about it is dumb.
However, I found that KDE's performance via Cygwin was extremely slow (AthlonXP 1900+ & GeForce 3), and quite unstable (Applications were crashing and there seemed to be tons of bugs). Some people hailed this as a desktop replacement for Windows 95 users... I think they're kidding themselves.
Ever run a Windows desktop over a remote connection? That is not exactly a fun proposition either.
KDE works well enough locally - as does Windows.Neither is really in it's element when run remotely.
Doesn't this seem just a little foolish to anyone? After all, running Linux on top of Windows loses any and all advantages Linux might have.
This is NOT running Linux on top of Windows. This is setting up all of your favorite GNU tools and running them from the command line on Windows. It's a great help for people who need to be in Windows for one reason or another - think of it as a reverse WINE.
I also dispute the concept that Windows has more programs than Linux! Sure, Windows has more GUI word processors and games, but it does NOT have more technologically oriented programs like bash,zsh, emacs, gcc, postfix, etc. etc.,and of course all those windows programs cost, and come without source code.
Additionally, the tools here are NOT slower than Windows tools, simply beacuse fast command line tools that UNIX features, unencumbered by the wonderful Microsoft MFC.
No, cygwin is a godsend for people who miss having a powerful command shell on their computer, complete with tools like sed and awk.
I've even heard tales that cygwin is heavily used by programmers at Microsoft.
But wait: doesn't M$ 0wn apple? (25% stock?) Does anyone know about DRM plans on mac?
The real question is going to be whether Intel, AMD and the motherboard and chipset vendors will go along with this. Intel has already voice opposition.
So long as you can buy and run hardware/OS choices that don't force you into this, it doesn't matter to me.
On the other hand if something like the Hollings bill passes, things will be very dark indeed.
Metallic glasses (trademark MetGlass) were invented over 30 years ago by AlliedSignal researchers and have been used for a wide range of industrial applications since. It is particularly important because of magnetic properties in transformers etc. I was with Allied when they first looked at the razor blade application - the razor companies didn't want to touch it with a 10 foot pole because the blades were so durable that you would only need one a year.
BTW, the original patents have long ago expired so that anyone can work with metallic glasses.
What this guy did was develop an alloy that could be cooled into parts of thicker cross section than was previously possible.
Rather than use of something like a genetic algoritm,I would recommend that you look at 3-mode (aka PID) control, possibly with auto-tuning. This algorithm has been used industrially for process control for 50+ years, and nobody has really found anything better. The first hardware implementations were pnuematic based analog computers. One of the biggest early applications was to control the massive banks of gas diffusion separators at Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project. They were critical for this project because it would not have been possible to control this plant using people due to the size of the operation. At the time this was the largest industrial facility ever built. The electrical demands were so large that Oak Ridge could not obtain enough copper for the electrical runs; silver had to be borrowed from the US Treasury.
http://www.jashaw.com/pid/description.htm
that's great. link please?
OK
Quotation:
Part of the confusion between SAN and NAS can be attributed to the current battle brewing over FC and GigE. There is no doubt that these two protocols are competing standards. FCIA ahs gone as far as endorsing the move to create a new standard where FC can operate over IP networks: FCIP. The only problem here is, as you envelope protocols within protocols, performance becomes an issue. Why not just use IP natively? What we need is "more SAN, but less fibre!" or a fibreless SAN that uses IP. It only makes sense.
Do you actually deal with high-end storage?
Yes, actually I just finished installing a 10 TB EMC setup. While it uses FC internally, there is no block mode transfer to external applications in this setup, and everything outside the EMC equipment is GigE. The fact is that NAS is much more widely used than SAN, and a pure NAS installation does not use FC. In addition NAS vendors are encroaching on the SAN market by adding SAN features to their ethernet transport layers. With the commodity pricing of GigE (and soon 10GigE) I expect that what we currently know as SAN will disappear. As that happens so will FC.
it's called Fibre Channel [cinonic.com]
Fibre channel? I don't think so. Fibre channel is dying out, and is being replaced by GigE and Gig10E. Fibre channel suffers tremendously from lack of standards, low production volume and high costs.
WD-40 is combustible, not flammable. It has a flash point at 110F. Flammable is usally defined as below 100F. 110F still puts it well above a material like jet fuel (140 flashpoint) in terms of fire hazard though.
I once saw a garage mechanic trying to free up a rusted mechanism by first heating it with a torch, and then spraying WD-40 on it. When the WD-40 hit the part it instantly ignited, and worked back to the spray can nozzle making a nice flaming blowtorch effect and making the mechanic shit his pants.
Some VCRs including my JVC can get a time signal that is broadcasted by PBS stations via cable. It's wonderful to never have to set that puppy.Combined with ntp for my computers, and WWV for my stand alone clocks (so called 'atomic alarm clocks' I am down to one clock that I have to set - my wristwatch.
AOL will buy the infrastructure
That scenario doesn't seem very likely considering that AOL itself has severe financial problems, such as last quarter setting a record for the largest monetary loss ever experienced by any corporation ever at $52 billion. It makes WorldCom look like the very essence of fiscal responsibility.
Paper has historically been the cheapest part of book publishing.
Not correct at all. Paper has often been the most expensive component of publishing. Until the invention of the Fourdriner and widespread use of chemically treated wood fiber in mass production of paper, paper was hand made one sheet at a time from cotton, linen or similar high value fiber. In 17th century England the use of burial shrouds was banned so as to provide more fiber for printing. The circulation of Ben Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette was in fact often limited by the availability of paper.
The so called 'golden age' of newspapers was triggered by several major inventions - the electric lamp, giving people the ability to read after the sun went down, the web-fed printing press, Merganthaler's Linotype machine, and the Fourdriner.
The fact is that the mass production of paper is one of the key steps in the reduction in cost of the reproduction of information.
IANAL, but if I undestand correctly, the great deal of Western law is based on 'common law', the practice of allowing previous court decisions to affect future decisions.
That is a very limited point of view. Napolonic law is also widely used.
Since digital technology has forever completely erased the possibility of having a finite supply of any kind of information, the length and breadth of copyright law is dying-- screaming, kicking, doing it's best to cling to existance in a scary new world inhospitable to it, but dying nonetheless.
How is digital technology anything more than a continuation of the development of techologies that made information cheaper to reproduce that started in the 15th century?
Information technologies and the internet *are* different for a simple reason: information scarcities are almost puerly artificial.
The cost of reproduction of a piece of commercial software compared to its price has been negligable since the days of the 9 track tape. The cost of a piece of pvc with grooves in it compared to the cost of an LP has been trivial since the invention of the record player. The cost of a pond of paper is trivial compared to the selling price of a book.
The fact is that it was the industrial revolution that made IP laws necessary. The internet is just a continuation on the same theme of driving down the cost of transmission and reproduction that began with Gutenberg.
well, it's $52 with free shipping at buy.com
Programming skills and management skills are mutually-exclusive.
I don't agree with that at all - I think rather that the skill sets are nearly independent - you can be a perfectly good project manager with no programming skills, however being a good programmer doesn't mean that you would be a bad manager.
There are plenty of examples in industry of good programmers who also have turned out to be excellent managers. Bill Gates is the most famous case.
Windows is king of the hill right now, and by the time Linux gets as easy and efficient it will be just as big and ugly.
There are alternatives to Windows that do not include Linux; ones that comes to mind immediately is Mac OS X.
The main problem behind attribution of liability stems from the lack of "natural laws" governing programming itself, thus making the analysis of software failure a shaky endeavour.
Natural laws of programming not understod? Maybe not by your Chubb institute hackers, or their pointy-haired bosses. But clearly the mathematical foundations of software are understood.
The fact is that SOME software is unreliable because people are not willing to pay for making it reliable, or companies like Microsoft don't view software quality as something that will make a difference to them in the market place.
There are software systems that ARE reliable. Telephone switch software has an excellent reliability record. Software for embedded devices is generally written to much higher standards than PC software. Midrange and mainframe systems generally are far more reliable that what we run on PC's.
traditionally the only environment with legal resources adequate to deal with such liability has been the megalithic corporate one.
Professional engineers, doctors and lawyers are subject to liability claims arising from negligent behavior. There is also insurance available to cover these circumstances.
Megalithic corporations do not have any special exemption from disaster due to product liability claims. Many are driven into bankruptcy as a result of liability problems (Dow Corning, Johns-Manville, and Soon Arhter Anderson).
How is the receiver not being able to handle more stuff at the end different than an XML reader not being able to handle a new tag?
My first programming job included maintaining a perl script that processed a database table. The table had 97 data fields; the original programmer didn't know that he could extract the data into a hash, and reference the data using hash keys that matched the field names. The result was code that read something like:
$price = $row[17]*[$row[72]* sqrt($row[12] )
this meant a) the code was totally unreadable, and b) the only place you could add a field to the database was at the end. This is exactly the kind of programming structure that your CDF proposal leads to. If I were you I would worry that when I died and went to hell I might have to work on code like that.
Send: 2, "+", 3
Receive: 5
Where is the data typing that tells the server that you didn't mean to call add(string,string) and get 23?
XML solves some problems that CDF doesn't, like validation and extensibility. I can add a new field to an XML file without it affecting the receiver, try that with CDF ant the receiver gets very confused.
Then there are all the support facilities like SOAP and so on. They let me write a server like:
public class Adder {
public int sub(int a, int b) {
return a+b;
}
}
Drop that source code in a web service enabled application server and I can send a message to it uusing any SOAP cleint and get my sum back.
Try that with CDF.
Trenton Computer Festival (do they still have those?)
Yup. http://www.tcf-nj.org/