Hey, if the telco's and cable companies charged per bit transported over their backbone or through their access points, they'd still see the money for transporting the bits from the city's wi-fi access points, wouldn't they?
But, of course, the telco's and cable companies don't do that, they sell access to one customer at a time, and (in the case of the cable companies, at least) threaten users who share the access via their own wireless links.
If the telco industry moved to charging for bits transported and nothing else, a lot of this concern about subsidized competition would fade away, as the subsidized competition would need to buy the long range bit transport from the telcos anyway.
f a company knowingly allows infringement, then they cannot enforce the patent. You either enforce it on all (via licensing, etc) or you loose the right.
This is incorrect. You're thinking of trademark law. In the United States (and presumably elsewhere), patents can be selectively enforced to the heart's delight of the patent holder.
GPL and Open Source is just another way that cheap bastards try to get software. It doesn't make anything better, it's just some people to too cheap to buy it. And with GPL/OSS, they can't be accused of stealing it.
Yeah, and the same goes with PBS/NPR and public libraries, too.
Sometimes there are rational reasons for not charging for access to a copyrighted work.. not all endeavors under the sun have to be for profit.
As others have said, the GPL can't force you to take any affirmative steps. All it says is, "you can't modify GPL'ed code and distribute it under terms other than GPL without executing a separate license with the original copyright holder."
If you try to make a commercial product on top of GPL'ed software with the idea that you'll distribute that code in contradiction of the GPL without getting licensed to do that, then yeah, you're kind of boned, but you'll have well and truly earned the difficulties you run into at that point.
I ditched Time Warner cable for DirecTV and Tivo because the SA-8000 sucked so badly (I had two of them die due to hardware problems, and the software showed every sign of being written by monkeys).
If Comcast is willing to get away from Scientific Atlanta's piss-poor product, maybe there's hope that the other cable corps will as well.
I mean its not as if anyone else on the network can change their UID and access anyone elses files via NFS, right?
You can control that to at least a host level by using NIS netgroups to restrict the filesystem exports.
NFSv4 has proper authentication and security baked into it, amongst many other wonderful things. The sooner everyone is using NFSv4 (or CIFS, if you like Spaghetti), the better.
It's widely known what the contents of that extra packet is these days, actually. Luke Howard's XAD takes advantage of it, and the Samba guys are coding with it as well.
Some of us have been working on that sort of thing for years. We master data from our tool into NIS, DNS, LDAP, SAMBA, and DHCP, and I suspect lots of places have various home grown tools to do likewise. Any large place will need things of this kind, anyway.
Sure, for the original bits, but Luke Howard of PADL.com has done an incredible amount of work in putting XAD together. Luke is one of the best of the best when it comes to LDAP, as well.. he's the original author of RFC 2307, which standardizes how NIS style directory objects should be mapped onto LDAP. RFC 2307 is the basis of directory service offerings from Apple, Sun, and other UNIX vendors.
Now, may I say, if you're looking for programmable metadirectory services for mastering data into NIS, DNS, LDAP, AD, and etc., I can humbly recommend Ganymede.. the current version is pretty spotty in some ways, but wwe are looking to release 2.0 in a few months with a lot of new features that will make it suitable for a lot more uses than it is now. Scalability, localization, SSL encryption, delta-based message queuing channels for change transmission, and much more is on tap.
Excuse me for being skeptical, but I know output from any star can and does fluctuate. If, prior to 2003, this data wasn't being collected, and if as far as I know, this data isn't being used in studies...I will remain skeptical.
We've certainly got data going back further than that, though perhaps not all collected in the same way. Anyone doing climatological studies in the peer reviewed literature obviously would have to account for solar influx, and I think you can rest assured that they do. Certainly the layman's popular press on this stuff (Scientific American, etc.) does speak to influx.
The entire CO2 warming theory is intimately involved with the planet's reaction to solar radiation, of course.
In any event, if you had read the linked article, you'd see that the reason this is news is that the kind of data they observed from the oceans match predictions made by computer models of CO2-based warming, and do not match models of increased solar influx.
That isn't determinative, by any means, as if there were 1000 climatological models and they only found 2 that matched, the predictive power might be due to the selective effect of looking for the models that matched the new data, but on the other hand it might be solid confirmation of those models.
The scientific jury will be out for awhile, I'm sure, but in some years we should have some better idea of how strongly to believe this correlation.
We can be pretty sure that the acceptance of this work won't be bound by the consensus of PhD climatologists forgetting to think about the Sun, however.
In TFA, the author traced the calls that this validation program was using. It specifically checks for a registry key named "SOFTWARE\Wine\Wine\Config" and then gives a generic error if found. So no, it's not a case of Wine being an inaccurate emulator.
Duh, it's just like the DR-DOS/Win 3.1 case.
Of course Wine is an inaccurate emulator. The fact that they are able to detect that Wine is running proves it.
If it were an accurate emulator, it would come with a Microsoft hologram and it would refuse to install until $100 had been sent to Microsoft.
The SPU's are something like general purpose processors, from the earlier reports, except they do their general purpose work on chunks (cells) of code and data that are sent to them. Each SPU has its own high-speed dedicated attached memory.
The SPU's are optimized for streaming vector operations, but it seems they have their own branch and conditional instructions as well.
Microsoft has become much more aggressive about obtaining software patents recently. Why, in your view, are they doing so, if not to build a weapon against their only significant competition?
In the case of the fabled IBM patent counter-offensive, how do you know that IBM's interest in the Linux kernel is greater than their interest in gaining access to Microsoft's ever-burgeoning patent portfolio? Large companies cross-license entire patent portfolios at the drop of a hat, it seems.. is it known that IBM and Micrsoft do not have any extant cross-licensing agreement in place? When Microsoft and Sun entered into a cross-licensing agreement, Microsoft was most careful not to allow that cross-license to leak into open source development..
I can agree that in some cases of extraordinary invention, a software patent might be a proper thing to grant. I can not agree, however, that there have been 150k-300k extraordinary inventions in software since software patents have been granted.
Software patents are bringing us to a regime where it is necessary to have lawyers in order to write and distribute software. Requiring lawyers to be involved isn't such a burden when producing a product involves the funding and creation of factories and of physical distribution channels, but it is a significant burden on software development. Yes, lawyers are involved in copyright, but the scope of copyright is much narrower than the scope of patent, and patents are cumulative. It takes a lot of effort for a software work to violate many copyrights, but a single work could violate just as many patents as the USPTO is willing to give out.
I fundamentally do not believe that software patents significantly advance the speed of technical development. Rather, I think they slow it down, to the benefit of the companies who obtain the patents, and not necessarily to society at large.
To take the most obvious example, the Internet could not have happened as it did if all those protocols and techniques in the RFCs had been patented. Companies would not have been motivated to invest in software services on the higher levels if a Microsoft (or an EOLAS, as you point out.. paging the Viola browser) had been extracting patent-driven monopoly rents for the use of Internet technologies.
Again, if it's solely for an internal project, then the company can continue using it. Microsoft has no way to find out about it - and no incentive, either. Stopping company X from using the ISNOT operator has no income potential for Microsoft.
Of course, in the hypothetical case we're discussing, Microsoft would have no moral right to stop company X in any event, income potential or no income potential, right?.
But for company X to establish that legal right, they would have to spend some significant money to have the patent invalidated. In the meantime, Microsoft has the presumption.
What do you make of open source software, and its viability in the face of such an extensive body of software patents? It seems that software patents have the potential to simply terminate open source software development and distribution. I believe this hasn't happened to any significant degree yet because Microsoft and other large patent holders are holding fire until the European Union ratifies software patentability, but with 150k-300k patents out there, such an assault seems inevitable. Even if in the future it costs less than $2 million to defend a patent suit, an open source development team with no resources won't be able to mount any defense whatsoever.
One of the practical limitations of patents is that enforcement implies discovery of an unauthorized use: the patentee must find defendants who are using it and must prosecute them. In the context of private use, this is completely impossible. If a company wants to develop their own BASIC compiler with an ISNOT operator, solely for internal use, then Microsoft can do nothing to stop them. This kind of infringmenet is not approved, but is widely acknowledged and tolerated (for lack of any workable alternative.)
But what if some company developed an ISNOT style operator for some internal project in the last 30 years? Then Microsoft would be unjustly taking the use of such operators away from any distributed software for a period of twenty years, despite the lack of true novelty.
As long as the original use is hidden, Microsoft has a weapon to take against public use of the operator, and if the original use is brought to light later, there's a $2 million lawsuit burden on the defendant who quite properly should be entitled to write software with a transitive negation test operator.
It's all well and good to say that business exigencies will limit the use of such a patent in a suit, but a patent doesn't have to be brought to action in order to generate a presumption of illegality about someone's obvious software development work.
...and they spend 20 seconds doing a global find-and-replace. An annoyance, to be sure, but hardly a crippling blow.
It doesn't take many incompatibilities to strongly discourage switching to another software platform. People today are refusing to look at Open Office because it is not 100% (not that it is not 99.9% compatible, not that it is not 99.99% compatible, but 100%) compatible with some version of MS Office.
Heck, Microsoft went to considerable lengths to put a deceptive error message into a Windows 3.1 beta, that appeared when someone tried to run Windows on top of DR-DOS. And that was in a case where there was no actual incompatibility at all.
Perhaps ISNOT can be worked around (though wouldn't any tool that did a function-specific search and replace fall afoul of an ISNOT patent?). Leave that aside. Perhaps some fraction of VB users would be willing to manually do a search and replace. How many other little incompatibilities are going to be forced through patents?
So there have been 150,000-300,000 software patents granted since 1998? Or is that merely when the appeals process for the lower court ruling ended?
The problem I have with software patents, David, is that such a very small percentage of software is written for sale. Most is written for use. The USPTO seems to have no reasonable way of knowing what techniques have and have not been used by some programmer somewhere in the country. They can look at previous patents (there were none, initially), they can look at journals, but there is no viable way to prove lack of previous invention and use in someone's in-house code development. There are just too many programmers doing too much work.
With 150-300k software patents out there, with some high fraction non-novel or obvious to experts in the field, programming has become a minefield.. even things that were nominally novel due to context, like writing software to do an old function on the Internet, are being locked away, and by companies that themselves benefited tremendously due to the use of software techniques developed and shared freely before software patentability.
How does anyone but Microsoft benefit by Microsoft patenting a wide swath of approaches to reducing Spam? Microsoft gained many tens of billions of dollars of additional revenue due to the surge in PC sales brought about by the widespread adoption of the Internet, yet they and others are now putting roadblocks up as fast as they can to control any further elaboration of the Internet, or competition in providing compatible services on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, if the telco's and cable companies charged per bit transported over their backbone or through their access points, they'd still see the money for transporting the bits from the city's wi-fi access points, wouldn't they?
But, of course, the telco's and cable companies don't do that, they sell access to one customer at a time, and (in the case of the cable companies, at least) threaten users who share the access via their own wireless links.
If the telco industry moved to charging for bits transported and nothing else, a lot of this concern about subsidized competition would fade away, as the subsidized competition would need to buy the long range bit transport from the telcos anyway.
f a company knowingly allows infringement, then they cannot enforce the patent. You either enforce it on all (via licensing, etc) or you loose the right.
This is incorrect. You're thinking of trademark law. In the United States (and presumably elsewhere), patents can be selectively enforced to the heart's delight of the patent holder.
s/the OSS community/one guy in the OSS community/g
GPL and Open Source is just another way that cheap bastards try to get software. It doesn't make anything better, it's just some people to too cheap to buy it. And with GPL/OSS, they can't be accused of stealing it.
Yeah, and the same goes with PBS/NPR and public libraries, too.
Sometimes there are rational reasons for not charging for access to a copyrighted work.. not all endeavors under the sun have to be for profit.
As others have said, the GPL can't force you to take any affirmative steps. All it says is, "you can't modify GPL'ed code and distribute it under terms other than GPL without executing a separate license with the original copyright holder."
If you try to make a commercial product on top of GPL'ed software with the idea that you'll distribute that code in contradiction of the GPL without getting licensed to do that, then yeah, you're kind of boned, but you'll have well and truly earned the difficulties you run into at that point.
Some of us do pay for it, yo.
2.0 / Star Office 8 is supposed to dramatically improve all of that. No more of that network install / workstation install crap.
I ditched Time Warner cable for DirecTV and Tivo because the SA-8000 sucked so badly (I had two of them die due to hardware problems, and the software showed every sign of being written by monkeys).
If Comcast is willing to get away from Scientific Atlanta's piss-poor product, maybe there's hope that the other cable corps will as well.
vive la revolution!
Merçi!
I mean its not as if anyone else on the network can change their UID and access anyone elses files via NFS, right?
You can control that to at least a host level by using NIS netgroups to restrict the filesystem exports.
NFSv4 has proper authentication and security baked into it, amongst many other wonderful things. The sooner everyone is using NFSv4 (or CIFS, if you like Spaghetti), the better.
It's widely known what the contents of that extra packet is these days, actually. Luke Howard's XAD takes advantage of it, and the Samba guys are coding with it as well.
Some of us have been working on that sort of thing for years. We master data from our tool into NIS, DNS, LDAP, SAMBA, and DHCP, and I suspect lots of places have various home grown tools to do likewise. Any large place will need things of this kind, anyway.
EDSAdmin looks very nice, though. Nice job!
Sure, for the original bits, but Luke Howard of PADL.com has done an incredible amount of work in putting XAD together. Luke is one of the best of the best when it comes to LDAP, as well.. he's the original author of RFC 2307, which standardizes how NIS style directory objects should be mapped onto LDAP. RFC 2307 is the basis of directory service offerings from Apple, Sun, and other UNIX vendors.
Luke also created the best solution for supporting legacy NIS clients in an LDAP network, and he created a lot of the pam_ldap stuff that major vendors ship today.
Now, may I say, if you're looking for programmable metadirectory services for mastering data into NIS, DNS, LDAP, AD, and etc., I can humbly recommend Ganymede.. the current version is pretty spotty in some ways, but wwe are looking to release 2.0 in a few months with a lot of new features that will make it suitable for a lot more uses than it is now. Scalability, localization, SSL encryption, delta-based message queuing channels for change transmission, and much more is on tap.
Excuse me for being skeptical, but I know output from any star can and does fluctuate. If, prior to 2003, this data wasn't being collected, and if as far as I know, this data isn't being used in studies...I will remain skeptical.
We've certainly got data going back further than that, though perhaps not all collected in the same way. Anyone doing climatological studies in the peer reviewed literature obviously would have to account for solar influx, and I think you can rest assured that they do. Certainly the layman's popular press on this stuff (Scientific American, etc.) does speak to influx.
The entire CO2 warming theory is intimately involved with the planet's reaction to solar radiation, of course.
In any event, if you had read the linked article, you'd see that the reason this is news is that the kind of data they observed from the oceans match predictions made by computer models of CO2-based warming, and do not match models of increased solar influx.
That isn't determinative, by any means, as if there were 1000 climatological models and they only found 2 that matched, the predictive power might be due to the selective effect of looking for the models that matched the new data, but on the other hand it might be solid confirmation of those models.
The scientific jury will be out for awhile, I'm sure, but in some years we should have some better idea of how strongly to believe this correlation.
We can be pretty sure that the acceptance of this work won't be bound by the consensus of PhD climatologists forgetting to think about the Sun, however.
In TFA, the author traced the calls that this validation program was using. It specifically checks for a registry key named "SOFTWARE\Wine\Wine\Config" and then gives a generic error if found. So no, it's not a case of Wine being an inaccurate emulator.
Duh, it's just like the DR-DOS/Win 3.1 case.
Of course Wine is an inaccurate emulator. The fact that they are able to detect that Wine is running proves it.
If it were an accurate emulator, it would come with a Microsoft hologram and it would refuse to install until $100 had been sent to Microsoft.
Sheesh, don't you know anything about technology?
Doh!
That page also supplies a Java applet designed to exploit a 2003 IE/Java bug.
The page also attempts to seize control with Javascript.
It's been out for five years on freshmeat, and supports CORBA, RMI, XML-RPC, nativ socket, or persistent HTTP.
See the link at http://freshmeat.net/projects/xmlblaster/.
Then how are people writing the kind of games that are coming out for it now?
The SPU's are something like general purpose processors, from the earlier reports, except they do their general purpose work on chunks (cells) of code and data that are sent to them. Each SPU has its own high-speed dedicated attached memory.
The SPU's are optimized for streaming vector operations, but it seems they have their own branch and conditional instructions as well.
Microsoft has become much more aggressive about obtaining software patents recently. Why, in your view, are they doing so, if not to build a weapon against their only significant competition?
In the case of the fabled IBM patent counter-offensive, how do you know that IBM's interest in the Linux kernel is greater than their interest in gaining access to Microsoft's ever-burgeoning patent portfolio? Large companies cross-license entire patent portfolios at the drop of a hat, it seems.. is it known that IBM and Micrsoft do not have any extant cross-licensing agreement in place? When Microsoft and Sun entered into a cross-licensing agreement, Microsoft was most careful not to allow that cross-license to leak into open source development..
And it's nice that Linus Torvalds says he is not concerned, but he has also very publicly called for them not to be approved in Europe.
I can agree that in some cases of extraordinary invention, a software patent might be a proper thing to grant. I can not agree, however, that there have been 150k-300k extraordinary inventions in software since software patents have been granted.
Software patents are bringing us to a regime where it is necessary to have lawyers in order to write and distribute software. Requiring lawyers to be involved isn't such a burden when producing a product involves the funding and creation of factories and of physical distribution channels, but it is a significant burden on software development. Yes, lawyers are involved in copyright, but the scope of copyright is much narrower than the scope of patent, and patents are cumulative. It takes a lot of effort for a software work to violate many copyrights, but a single work could violate just as many patents as the USPTO is willing to give out.
I fundamentally do not believe that software patents significantly advance the speed of technical development. Rather, I think they slow it down, to the benefit of the companies who obtain the patents, and not necessarily to society at large.
To take the most obvious example, the Internet could not have happened as it did if all those protocols and techniques in the RFCs had been patented. Companies would not have been motivated to invest in software services on the higher levels if a Microsoft (or an EOLAS, as you point out.. paging the Viola browser) had been extracting patent-driven monopoly rents for the use of Internet technologies.
Again, if it's solely for an internal project, then the company can continue using it. Microsoft has no way to find out about it - and no incentive, either. Stopping company X from using the ISNOT operator has no income potential for Microsoft.
Of course, in the hypothetical case we're discussing, Microsoft would have no moral right to stop company X in any event, income potential or no income potential, right?.
But for company X to establish that legal right, they would have to spend some significant money to have the patent invalidated. In the meantime, Microsoft has the presumption.
What do you make of open source software, and its viability in the face of such an extensive body of software patents? It seems that software patents have the potential to simply terminate open source software development and distribution. I believe this hasn't happened to any significant degree yet because Microsoft and other large patent holders are holding fire until the European Union ratifies software patentability, but with 150k-300k patents out there, such an assault seems inevitable. Even if in the future it costs less than $2 million to defend a patent suit, an open source development team with no resources won't be able to mount any defense whatsoever.
Does this concern you at all?
True, but that sword cuts both ways.
One of the practical limitations of patents is that enforcement implies discovery of an unauthorized use: the patentee must find defendants who are using it and must prosecute them. In the context of private use, this is completely impossible. If a company wants to develop their own BASIC compiler with an ISNOT operator, solely for internal use, then Microsoft can do nothing to stop them. This kind of infringmenet is not approved, but is widely acknowledged and tolerated (for lack of any workable alternative.)
But what if some company developed an ISNOT style operator for some internal project in the last 30 years? Then Microsoft would be unjustly taking the use of such operators away from any distributed software for a period of twenty years, despite the lack of true novelty.
As long as the original use is hidden, Microsoft has a weapon to take against public use of the operator, and if the original use is brought to light later, there's a $2 million lawsuit burden on the defendant who quite properly should be entitled to write software with a transitive negation test operator.
It's all well and good to say that business exigencies will limit the use of such a patent in a suit, but a patent doesn't have to be brought to action in order to generate a presumption of illegality about someone's obvious software development work.
It doesn't take many incompatibilities to strongly discourage switching to another software platform. People today are refusing to look at Open Office because it is not 100% (not that it is not 99.9% compatible, not that it is not 99.99% compatible, but 100%) compatible with some version of MS Office.
Heck, Microsoft went to considerable lengths to put a deceptive error message into a Windows 3.1 beta, that appeared when someone tried to run Windows on top of DR-DOS. And that was in a case where there was no actual incompatibility at all.
Perhaps ISNOT can be worked around (though wouldn't any tool that did a function-specific search and replace fall afoul of an ISNOT patent?). Leave that aside. Perhaps some fraction of VB users would be willing to manually do a search and replace. How many other little incompatibilities are going to be forced through patents?
Sorry, once more with paragraphs
So there have been 150,000-300,000 software patents granted since 1998? Or is that merely when the appeals process for the lower court ruling ended?
The problem I have with software patents, David, is that such a very small percentage of software is written for sale. Most is written for use. The USPTO seems to have no reasonable way of knowing what techniques have and have not been used by some programmer somewhere in the country. They can look at previous patents (there were none, initially), they can look at journals, but there is no viable way to prove lack of previous invention and use in someone's in-house code development. There are just too many programmers doing too much work.
With 150-300k software patents out there, with some high fraction non-novel or obvious to experts in the field, programming has become a minefield.. even things that were nominally novel due to context, like writing software to do an old function on the Internet, are being locked away, and by companies that themselves benefited tremendously due to the use of software techniques developed and shared freely before software patentability.
How does anyone but Microsoft benefit by Microsoft patenting a wide swath of approaches to reducing Spam? Microsoft gained many tens of billions of dollars of additional revenue due to the surge in PC sales brought about by the widespread adoption of the Internet, yet they and others are now putting roadblocks up as fast as they can to control any further elaboration of the Internet, or competition in providing compatible services on it.
How can this possibly be defended?