No, I don't know which patents, there are simply too many of them out there. But given the shear number of patents approved for so many stupid things, odds are pretty high (I'd guess 99%) that Linux infringes on at least a few of them. And the odds aren't all that bad the MS is behind a few of those patents.
In the same measure, I'd guess that 99% of the US population has violated at least one law in the past year. And a fair number of you violated a few laws just going to work this morning.
So the most likely result of all of this is that it's all just a bunch of marketing FUD and nothing will come of it. MS has much more to lose by going public with the patent list (backlash, prior art discovery, etc).
I tried to send an email. The email only contained text. The text Cox objected to was "http://my_homebox_IP_number/"
On Tuesday 29 January 2008 12:45 pm, Brad Bendily wrote: > Are you sending an email > from your cox connection through a linux box to an email address on > the internet? Or the other way around?
Like I said, I know what tripped the filter because I changed that one detail to get the message through.
On Tuesday 29 January 2008 1:32 pm, Scott Harney wrote: > Maybe you will get some more details about what actually tripped the > filter and blocked the message by sending your message to > "thisisnotspam at cox.net".
So your position is that if we do all those things, we'll stop being a target for terrorists? You don't think that maybe lots of them will continue to hate us anyway simply because we have religious and personal freedom?
The terrorists will simply get a bigger bang for the buck with conventional explosives.
And they get an even bigger bang for their buck by scaring us to defend ourselves. By constantly changing, from crashing planes to anthrax in the mail to dirty bombs to chemicals in our water supply to heat seeking missiles aimed at planes, we are spending untold amounts to defend ourselves.
Makes me wonder how much it would cost to not have the world hate us. Stop funding Israel (whether you're for or against it, how many lives should we lose supporting a religious war?), remove our bases from sensitive areas, and stop parking our aircraft carriers off the coasts of hostile countries. Maybe we could spend some of that money fixing our health care problems, preventing car crashes, researching alternative energy, or *gasp* paying down our debt.
But seriously, this is good news! It is always good news (for law-abiding people) when crooks start feeding off each other.
This would only be a good thing if phishers were stealing the account information of other phishers. But since they are just spreading your number to more phishers, your best hope is that competing phishers raise the fraud alert on your credit cards faster (credit card companies look for unusual purchases, and placing multiple orders in stores on opposite sides of the country at the same time is a pretty easy flag for them).
Personally, I still want to see financial institutions implement a system where you can get trojan account numbers to give to the phishers that appear just like real numbers. If the phisher uses them, immediately the institution knows to look for fraudulent activity from that source. Then everyone receiving this spam can provide so many bad account numbers that phishing is very difficult to do without drawing attention to yourself.
From my impression of how it worked, yes, you'll still see your logs. Even when it preempts a reply from the server, the request is still sent to the server, but you may get your simulated reply before the server generates it, so your log timestamps my be a tad off. Otherwise, it's just doing intelligent compression by looking at the protocol when possible, and doing general compression when an unknown protocol is being used. They even compress ssl data if you're willing to give it your encryption keys (presumably you keep this as secure as you'd keep your webserver in the main data center, and they do it in such a way that SOX, HIPPA, and PCI are ok with it).
I've done a light evaluation of riverbed's steelhead appliances in the past (less from the efficiency stand point and more for manageability). To call it a dell server with centos is an understatement since there's a lot of software intelligence intercepting various protocols and caching the data that may be transmitted. Handling file locking, multiple email recipients of the same large attachment, and be transparent to the network, aren't easy problems to solve at the protocol level, so I'd say they deserve a few kudos. They weren't a simple WAFS, multiple protocols were included, it would simulate the reply from the remote server when possible, and all traffic to another data center or office with a steelhead would be compressed regardless of protocol (it's been a few years, so feel free to double check those facts). I believe they also included some physical bypass hardware so if the box completely died or needed to be rebooted, you wouldn't lose your network. All in all, I thought it was a nice solution. And no, I have no affiliation with the company.
This is a little confusing to me, however, as I would expect that if the we are "Assuming the peak is at 2h00m UT", then I would back 7 hours out of that and I would assume that the peak time in Denver would be 7:00 p.m. MST on Jan 3rd.
I haven't bothered to check the applets and I'm no astrophysicist, so take this with a grain of salt. Perhaps the results are accounting for your location, including interference from daylight and the tilt of the earth? The overall peak for the planet may be several hours back over an ocean, but if you're on the other side of the planet, that won't be your peak. As the earth rotates, your side of the earth gets a better tilt and hits its own peak viewing rate at a different time.
This may be a silly question, but how to they know when there's going to be a meteor shower? Is there some sort of radar? Or do the meteors run predictable laps around the solar system?
As has been said above, it goes on a regular schedule. They have a list of them up on wikipedia if you want to plan for the next event.
I'm an independent consultant, so our equivalent is the "work-for-hire" clause which says everything I do belongs to them. I typically start the statement of work off on my paper/template that says the following:
Client appreciates the value of reusing works created by Consultant at previous engagements and understands the need for the Company to reuse non-confidential portions of works created during this engagement with future clients. Any work, including but not limited to, patentable works; designs; drawings; specifications; models; software; source codes; and object codes, created by Consultant during this engagement shall be provided with a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free license, with no rights to sublicense, to use in the context of this engagement to the Client at no additional cost to the Client.
Translation: they get the knowledge I developed at other customers if other customers get the benefit of knowledge I developed with them. When HR/legal tries to change the agreement, I start off by saying these are the terms I use when dealing with IP. If they push harder, I tell them that I'm willing to use their terms, but:
My rate will increase because I can't use this work elsewhere and could potentially be working at another client where my work could be reused and make me more valuable.
My time estimates will at least double since I have to recreate everything I've done elsewhere that I had previously planned on using for this project
When companies realize they get a benefit from not using non-competes, they quickly change their mind, and so far, not one has forced their version of the IP agreement on me.
Not one Democrat opposed the SAFE Act. Two Republicans did: Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning presidential candidate from Texas, and Rep. Paul Broun from Georgia.
Once you have a voter verifiable paper trail the rest becomes redundant. Though having enough security on the machine so you don't have to rely on the paper trail is a good thing.
But honestly, I don't see why the geeks are so upset here. This is our chance to rock the vote, and make sure that our votes actually count... more than once. If the current politicians aren't going to fix the voting machines, then lets flip a few bits, "elect" the EFF into office, and have this, plus copyright, patent, and net neutrality issues solved in one quick term.
Re:IBM doesn't do much well at all...
on
What If Yoda Ran IBM?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
IBM is a sales company first, a hardware company second, and a software company third, in that order.
I've come into deals where I have to take my hat off to the sales person because I have no understanding how they made the deal happen. That's as much a complement as it is a criticism.
The hardware is pretty decent, but you have to pay for quality and support. I don't know how many other vendors out there will be on-site in IBM's timeframe.
The software lineup is made by acquisition. The one line that I know a fair bit about, Tivoli, has dozens of products under the umbrella, and most all of them were other companies that used to be best of breed. So saying they suck makes an overly broad statement about a lineup of security, backup, monitoring, automation, and other tools where even the pickiest customer can find something they like. What the develop by acquisition strategy leads to are issues with consistency, direction, and migration paths which is bad if you're an existing customer on the old software. But at least theoretically (I'm too busy maintaining the old stuff) the new software shouldn't suck. Where you do hear a lot of disgruntled users are in the monitoring space where the old products aren't dying easily and IBM is acquiring too many new products leading to confusion and wait-and-see users, but that's one of many product lines under the umbrella.
Also, I'd say that Lotus deserves a bit of credit not as an email platform (square peg in a round hole), but as a collaboration and distributed database system. They had the corner on that market long before anyone else knew it existed.
Obviously this guy is clueless about the true costs of things
Or at least he has no understanding of the costs associated with larger businesses. The internal rate for the (likely outsourced) consultant is probably $100/hr give or take, which they will mark up anywhere from $150-200/hr to cover sales commission, billing and other overhead, profit margin, etc. And for any IBM project, it really requires two people onsite, so that means you're being charged $300-400/hr, possibly more if travel is involved.
So that ends up with two weeks, maybe less, of services. In that time, you might have some planning meetings with a project manager, some upper management meetings to get buy-in and some direction, and a high level discovery in the first week.
And then you need to start looking at each system within the organization to determine if and how it would be recovered from the network, to the OS's, to the DBs, to the apps. Not to mention the requirement to identify the DR facility, testing plans, handling future growth, etc. Finally, you need to document your plan, make sure it's approved by management, and make any changes. All of that won't be happening in a week, not even a month, 3 months would be fast.
This whole article seems to sum up a person that wants to get the local college grad rate on craigslist from big blue. If I were Sequoia, I'd be seeing if $25k could handle the head hunter's fee and signing bonus on a replacement for their CIO that could build the plan himself. Of course, I'm not Sequoia. I am, however, one of the $100/hr consultants that IBM uses.
Congress loves to use their power over funding to push the (just barely) majority agenda and encourage lots of special interest lobbying. What if we gave the tax payers the right to send something like 50% of their taxes to government projects of their choice similar to how we handle non-profit donations now. If people like to fund space travel, feeding the homeless, stem cell research, or a war against terror, they can send their own tax dollars. This would only be on our income taxes (social security, medicare, unemployment, etc would all be untouched), and it still leaves at least half of our taxes to go to the less popular projects.
Absolutely correct. The current system really discourages competition. I'd much rather see a policy that forbids exclusive local rights for cable companies. Then, instead of the 30% limit, let the companies get as large as they want, but regulate them if they get too large and some portion of their customers only have one choice for either cable, internet, or telephone access. This would encourage unregulated small startups to fill a market need, but if one company destroys all the competition they can't turn around and raise all the rates on their customers.
Maybe they break into the home computer of Sam Gov Lacky who is fond of downloading iTunes and putting them on CD. Sam takes it to work, slips it in, his supervisor wouldn't care if they noticed, and now everything Sam's computer touches is trying to bundle information into an invisible location on the hard drive. Now all they have to do is bribe for or luck into the hard drive with the information they want and decrypt.
Not that this is impossible, but it's a lot more difficult than that. Friends that work there in secure places like the pentagon don't even take in their cell phone, let alone a laptop. When a vendor wants to see logs to troubleshoot an issue, there's a month lag while the logs are de-classified. And if you aren't cleared for a machine, you aren't allowed to physically touch the keyboard or mouse, someone else is assigned to type everything for you. Back in the old days, floppies were color coded which made for some interesting stories about non-cleared people picking the wrong color from a store bought rainbow pack.
Don't forget that these people tend to be very in demand as long as they keep their clearance, they've gone through their share of background checks and polygraphs, and that all goes away and replaced with a treason charge if they decide to do something that puts national secrets at risk. This isn't to say it's impossible, just not as likely as it would be if the geek squad was their model employee.
Don't connect critical infrastructure to public networks?? Seriously, what use could Pentagon users possibly have for the public internet?
You mean like the SIPRNet? And just because you're working on military computers doesn't mean you aren't working with COTS software and hardware. There are far too many reasons to list why they'd need the public internet, but with government spending, it's easier to buy two of everything to keep one away from the public.
Of course the phone knows that tower it's connected to, though technically all it really needs to know is what frequency has the best signal. The towers and the phone company have to keep track of what tower the phone is connected to, not necessarily the phone. But I digress, lets make the likely correct assumption that the phone knows exactly what tower it's connected to.
The point of the post is that phone companies are very sensitive about applications running on their phones wrecking havoc on their networks. So apps tend to run in a sandbox that can't access all of the phone's antenna/transmission capabilities. I'm just wondering if google is using published API's that we all have access to, or if something worse is going on.
Of course if I had done a little google searching, I would have found things like http://www.j2melbs.com/ that show this isn't some google evilness going on here. That being said, if an app can transmit your cell tower and signal strength to a 3rd party, how hard is it to write a stalking app for a phone that constantly records your location for someone else to view later? And do I even want to know if there is a mic api to make bugging easy?
Where are they getting the information about what tower you're connected to and how strong the signal is? If it's from the app running on the phone, and you selected to install the app (plus agree to a very long disclaimer) then I have fewer issues. But if they are getting the information from the phone company or from the network requests (e.g. http headers added by phone company) then I'd question if the phone company is giving away private information on their customers.
And if they get the information from the app on the phone, I'd be curious of what api's there are to do this ourselves and if that access infringes on some kind of separation between the phone and app that users and phone companies may want (e.g. apps dialing 900 numbers or racking up charges for sms messages without your knowledge).
(And FYI, testing this on a Sprint Treo 600 claims to download the 2.0 version, but it's really the 1.2 version after the installer runs, so it doesn't work for me yet.)
I'm losing a mod to say this, but thought this article was a good one, and the site isn't half bad for something thinking about the photography business:
My first thought was "why not the EFF?" I'd prefer the FSF to work on things like patent issues that prevent software from being free and let the EFF worry about the abuse of rights over the data.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I don't know which patents, there are simply too many of them out there. But given the shear number of patents approved for so many stupid things, odds are pretty high (I'd guess 99%) that Linux infringes on at least a few of them. And the odds aren't all that bad the MS is behind a few of those patents.
In the same measure, I'd guess that 99% of the US population has violated at least one law in the past year. And a fair number of you violated a few laws just going to work this morning.
So the most likely result of all of this is that it's all just a bunch of marketing FUD and nothing will come of it. MS has much more to lose by going public with the patent list (backlash, prior art discovery, etc).
Further down the thread you find the important detail:
and a few more messages in was the comment:
You mean like Switzerland?
Makes me wonder how much it would cost to not have the world hate us. Stop funding Israel (whether you're for or against it, how many lives should we lose supporting a religious war?), remove our bases from sensitive areas, and stop parking our aircraft carriers off the coasts of hostile countries. Maybe we could spend some of that money fixing our health care problems, preventing car crashes, researching alternative energy, or *gasp* paying down our debt.
Personally, I still want to see financial institutions implement a system where you can get trojan account numbers to give to the phishers that appear just like real numbers. If the phisher uses them, immediately the institution knows to look for fraudulent activity from that source. Then everyone receiving this spam can provide so many bad account numbers that phishing is very difficult to do without drawing attention to yourself.
From my impression of how it worked, yes, you'll still see your logs. Even when it preempts a reply from the server, the request is still sent to the server, but you may get your simulated reply before the server generates it, so your log timestamps my be a tad off. Otherwise, it's just doing intelligent compression by looking at the protocol when possible, and doing general compression when an unknown protocol is being used. They even compress ssl data if you're willing to give it your encryption keys (presumably you keep this as secure as you'd keep your webserver in the main data center, and they do it in such a way that SOX, HIPPA, and PCI are ok with it).
I've done a light evaluation of riverbed's steelhead appliances in the past (less from the efficiency stand point and more for manageability). To call it a dell server with centos is an understatement since there's a lot of software intelligence intercepting various protocols and caching the data that may be transmitted. Handling file locking, multiple email recipients of the same large attachment, and be transparent to the network, aren't easy problems to solve at the protocol level, so I'd say they deserve a few kudos. They weren't a simple WAFS, multiple protocols were included, it would simulate the reply from the remote server when possible, and all traffic to another data center or office with a steelhead would be compressed regardless of protocol (it's been a few years, so feel free to double check those facts). I believe they also included some physical bypass hardware so if the box completely died or needed to be rebooted, you wouldn't lose your network. All in all, I thought it was a nice solution. And no, I have no affiliation with the company.
children everywhere are being hospitalized due to uncontrolled fits of laughter.
And later, nerds who read news want to create a blacklist to block stupid politicians and law makers from being able to make new laws.
1 Gbyte should be enough for anyone :-)
- My rate will increase because I can't use this work elsewhere and could potentially be working at another client where my work could be reused and make me more valuable.
- My time estimates will at least double since I have to recreate everything I've done elsewhere that I had previously planned on using for this project
When companies realize they get a benefit from not using non-competes, they quickly change their mind, and so far, not one has forced their version of the IP agreement on me.Not one Democrat opposed the SAFE Act. Two Republicans did: Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning presidential candidate from Texas, and Rep. Paul Broun from Georgia.
Once you have a voter verifiable paper trail the rest becomes redundant. Though having enough security on the machine so you don't have to rely on the paper trail is a good thing.
But honestly, I don't see why the geeks are so upset here. This is our chance to rock the vote, and make sure that our votes actually count... more than once. If the current politicians aren't going to fix the voting machines, then lets flip a few bits, "elect" the EFF into office, and have this, plus copyright, patent, and net neutrality issues solved in one quick term.
IBM is a sales company first, a hardware company second, and a software company third, in that order.
I've come into deals where I have to take my hat off to the sales person because I have no understanding how they made the deal happen. That's as much a complement as it is a criticism.
The hardware is pretty decent, but you have to pay for quality and support. I don't know how many other vendors out there will be on-site in IBM's timeframe.
The software lineup is made by acquisition. The one line that I know a fair bit about, Tivoli, has dozens of products under the umbrella, and most all of them were other companies that used to be best of breed. So saying they suck makes an overly broad statement about a lineup of security, backup, monitoring, automation, and other tools where even the pickiest customer can find something they like. What the develop by acquisition strategy leads to are issues with consistency, direction, and migration paths which is bad if you're an existing customer on the old software. But at least theoretically (I'm too busy maintaining the old stuff) the new software shouldn't suck. Where you do hear a lot of disgruntled users are in the monitoring space where the old products aren't dying easily and IBM is acquiring too many new products leading to confusion and wait-and-see users, but that's one of many product lines under the umbrella.
Also, I'd say that Lotus deserves a bit of credit not as an email platform (square peg in a round hole), but as a collaboration and distributed database system. They had the corner on that market long before anyone else knew it existed.
So that ends up with two weeks, maybe less, of services. In that time, you might have some planning meetings with a project manager, some upper management meetings to get buy-in and some direction, and a high level discovery in the first week.
And then you need to start looking at each system within the organization to determine if and how it would be recovered from the network, to the OS's, to the DBs, to the apps. Not to mention the requirement to identify the DR facility, testing plans, handling future growth, etc. Finally, you need to document your plan, make sure it's approved by management, and make any changes. All of that won't be happening in a week, not even a month, 3 months would be fast.
This whole article seems to sum up a person that wants to get the local college grad rate on craigslist from big blue. If I were Sequoia, I'd be seeing if $25k could handle the head hunter's fee and signing bonus on a replacement for their CIO that could build the plan himself. Of course, I'm not Sequoia. I am, however, one of the $100/hr consultants that IBM uses.
Congress loves to use their power over funding to push the (just barely) majority agenda and encourage lots of special interest lobbying. What if we gave the tax payers the right to send something like 50% of their taxes to government projects of their choice similar to how we handle non-profit donations now. If people like to fund space travel, feeding the homeless, stem cell research, or a war against terror, they can send their own tax dollars. This would only be on our income taxes (social security, medicare, unemployment, etc would all be untouched), and it still leaves at least half of our taxes to go to the less popular projects.
Absolutely correct. The current system really discourages competition. I'd much rather see a policy that forbids exclusive local rights for cable companies. Then, instead of the 30% limit, let the companies get as large as they want, but regulate them if they get too large and some portion of their customers only have one choice for either cable, internet, or telephone access. This would encourage unregulated small startups to fill a market need, but if one company destroys all the competition they can't turn around and raise all the rates on their customers.
Don't forget that these people tend to be very in demand as long as they keep their clearance, they've gone through their share of background checks and polygraphs, and that all goes away and replaced with a treason charge if they decide to do something that puts national secrets at risk. This isn't to say it's impossible, just not as likely as it would be if the geek squad was their model employee.
Of course the phone knows that tower it's connected to, though technically all it really needs to know is what frequency has the best signal. The towers and the phone company have to keep track of what tower the phone is connected to, not necessarily the phone. But I digress, lets make the likely correct assumption that the phone knows exactly what tower it's connected to.
The point of the post is that phone companies are very sensitive about applications running on their phones wrecking havoc on their networks. So apps tend to run in a sandbox that can't access all of the phone's antenna/transmission capabilities. I'm just wondering if google is using published API's that we all have access to, or if something worse is going on.
Of course if I had done a little google searching, I would have found things like http://www.j2melbs.com/ that show this isn't some google evilness going on here. That being said, if an app can transmit your cell tower and signal strength to a 3rd party, how hard is it to write a stalking app for a phone that constantly records your location for someone else to view later? And do I even want to know if there is a mic api to make bugging easy?
Where are they getting the information about what tower you're connected to and how strong the signal is? If it's from the app running on the phone, and you selected to install the app (plus agree to a very long disclaimer) then I have fewer issues. But if they are getting the information from the phone company or from the network requests (e.g. http headers added by phone company) then I'd question if the phone company is giving away private information on their customers.
And if they get the information from the app on the phone, I'd be curious of what api's there are to do this ourselves and if that access infringes on some kind of separation between the phone and app that users and phone companies may want (e.g. apps dialing 900 numbers or racking up charges for sms messages without your knowledge).
(And FYI, testing this on a Sprint Treo 600 claims to download the 2.0 version, but it's really the 1.2 version after the installer runs, so it doesn't work for me yet.)
I forgot the source of this one, but it helps put things in perspective:
If no one ever reinvented the wheel, we'd be rolling around on stone tires now.
I'm losing a mod to say this, but thought this article was a good one, and the site isn't half bad for something thinking about the photography business:
http://www.danheller.com/biz-trademarks.html
My first thought was "why not the EFF?" I'd prefer the FSF to work on things like patent issues that prevent software from being free and let the EFF worry about the abuse of rights over the data.