Patents were originally created to promote creative thought. There is a very simple test of whether patents are promoting or hindering creative thought in a given field of engineering. Do engineers in the field routinely do a patent search to avoid reinventing the wheel? Or, instead, do they as a matter of policy avoid ever looking at any patents in the field to avoid paying triple damages to patent trolls? In many fields, patents are still beneficial. In software, however, they are a total bust. Very, very, few software patents actually disclose anything useful. They are used solely as offensive or defensive weapons - never as an actual source of technical knowlege.
I repaired many a hard drive (10, 20, 30 Megabytes with an M) by squirting WD-40 on the bearing. In those days, the bearings were exposed, and did not require opening the case.
I use LiveWires. I teach a high school programming class with 7th graders. The adult oriented tutorial is a little too steep for them. They move along just fine with the LiveWires course. Also, the example projects are games.:-)
An interactive (has an immediate mode prompt) language like Python is very helpful for first learning. BASIC used to fill that role, but I like starting with structured concepts. Kids have no problem "getting" that indentation marks blocks.
Some experts hate python because while the grammar is "context free", the lexing isn't. The grammar is defined in terms of INDENT and OUTDENT taking the place of '{' and '}' (or BEGIN and END). However, whether a given indent is an INDENT or OUTDENT depends on context. So you can't use a traditional lexical analyzer when programmatically generating/modifying python code. You have to translate leading whitespace to INDENT and OUTDENT based on lexical context when parsing, and translate INDENT and OUTDENT to the appropriate amount of leading whitespace when pasting code blocks.
Personally, I don't find that this is a problem. Sure 'lex' doesn't work out of the box, but the custom lexing code is pretty trivial. And the indentation sure is intuitive. Maybe that means I'm not an expert.
Our family uses LTSP terminals (1999 era PCs sans hard drive from peoples dumpsters). They are connected to a $400 Dell server running Linux. Kids logins are automatically disabled until they finish chores. We have a computer curfew (auto-logout at midnight) on school nights. Family policy website filtering via squid for younger kids (as opposed to paying some company who may or may not share our values). In short, you can automate a lot of policies (you don't have to like mine) without limiting functionality. LTSP supports sound and video (video over X uses a lot of LAN bandwidth - you'll want gigabit ethernet). Web, Email, Open Office, etc all work well.
The Groovix company offers a Debian based server with 4 or so screens and keyboards attached - with full telephone support. I haven't tried it, but it sounds like a viable solution for those who aren't linux experts.
At first, the kids complained about not having Windows games. But now, they like Linux games (some of our terminals can boot off local disk and have 3D cards to play Tux Racer, etc). They can play Windows games at any of their friends houses, but their friends come over to play Linux games.
Remind me again why we need Windows at home?
Ok, PC tax software is only available for Windows. Some years I fire up an old Win 98 box to run the tax software. Other years, I just do it manually. TaxAct and others offer free online tax software - but I dislike putting all my info in some companies remotely accessible database. When I fire up Win98, I pay $20 for the deluxe version. I wish I could buy electronic tax forms annually for $20 and run them on an open source engine. I guess the companies are afraid to do that without some kind of DRM.
Natural disasters evoke stoicism, or might make us mad at God. Depraved actions of another human being are fascinating because we are constantly struggling with our own desires to do what we know is wrong. "Would I do any better in the other guys shoes," we wonder. The more frenetic my denouciation of the evil terrorists, the more likely my own struggle against evil is on the brink of failure. Those who have hard won victories against the evil within know better - "there but for the grace of God go I".
There's a very good reason why Microsoft spends a lot of time on hardware compatibility - it's what people want.
Microsoft does not drive this. Hardware makers do. They build "Vista compatible" systems. Users don't "install" Windows. They get preinstalled Windows from the hardware OEM. When they reinstall the customized CD with all needed drivers that came with their system (because Windows crashed), they believe they are "installing" Windows. When they buy new hardware, it comes with Windows drivers.
Actually installing Windows on random hardware is a long and frustrating process. The drivers are all closed source, and the companies involved are understandably not interested in supporting old hardware (just in selling new). You have to google endlessly tracking down this and that power Windows user with drivers available for public download (in technical violation of the license). I've done this for two 1999 era PCs (to play games and run tax software). Sure, Windows will install in 16 color VGA mode with no sound, no problem (so will any Linux distro). To actually get all the hardware to work takes weeks.
The idea would be to go *through* Mexico to South America. Not looking for luxury, just more freedom. Things aren't that bad yet. I'm just worried that when they are, a big fence will be in the way. Remember the Berlin wall?
I have been rather disturbed by the proposed fence on the southern border. It is not at all clear to me whether its primary purpose is to keep illegal immigrants out, or to keep me in should I decide to try an escape on foot in the future as this country becomes ever more oppressive. Of course, Mexico is worse, so surviving the trek across Mexico would be a long shot. But still, I don't like seeing my options reduced.
You are correct, SPF only helps with bounces of forged email to the extent that receivers implement it. Furthermore, spammers often send forged bounces (as opposed to bounces of forged email) where there was no email to begin with! SPF only helps a little, but the percentage keeps growing.
In the interim, you need SRS. That's right. SRS is problematic when used to work around forwarding problems (for receivers that don't know their own forwarders). But it works wonders in a signing mode. Have SRS rewrite the envelope of all your outgoing mail (I omit the SRS domain when it's the same as the outgoing domain). Discard (reject) bounces (empty MAIL FROM) that lack a proper signature. It cans a *ton* of crap - both forged bounces and bounces of forgeries.
Now if people would only stop sending DSNs without an empty MAIL FROM. I've found it useful to treat mail from certain localparts, like postmaster and mailer-daemon, as if it was an empty MAIL FROM (bounce). Not RFC compliant, but neither are the idiots that send it.
I make my own drink: plain, unsweetened green tea with black pepper. I drink it on my 7-mile bike ride to work while fasting. My body has no choice but to burn fat - my wife loves the result. I suspect the sugar in Enviga is the problem. Also, the proven energy burning benefits of green tea require exercise - swigging Enviga while sitting in a chair is certainly not going to help.
The vulnerability also applies to browsing websites with a local X client (e.g. posting on slashdot). Even a non-malicious site can exhibit a DoS if it contains long INPUT fields. (I think that was visible, not logical size.) So you can get rooted while browsing random sites.
1) Why would I? I've never met my neighbors, and I don't really care what they do on their property. That's a problem of loss of community and has nothing to do with liability or terrorism.
He's talking about a service station. "Garage" is British for service station. When you're getting work done on your car, most service stations have a sign that says something like, "Due to insurance regulations, customers are not allowed on the shop floor."
That is the best description of why OLPC is needed that I've read. I was kind of on the fence before, "Cool, but do they *really* need it?"
I don't see a problem with *firmware* blobs - provided they have an eternal and unlimited license for use. Blobs are a security problem when they run in the kernel (e.g. nvidia, wireless drivers). Firmware blobs are just a way to save the cost of a ROM. (High speed chips typical copy ROM to RAM rather than run from ROM, because RAM is faster.) I still haven't figured out whether the OLPC blobs in question are binary drivers or firmware.
Because a key requirement was commercial support == you call someone to fix bugs for you, not fix them your self. I think the main problem was not shopping around for the required support.
As part of my sales pitch when convincing our company to start developing for unix, I explained that ordinary users can't remove system files. To demonstrate, I logged in to the newly installed SCO Xenix console, and logged in as a user. Then I did "rm -r/". I confidently explained that only that users files would get borked, and that was why all the "permission denied" errors were appearing. "What errors?" the boss asked. To my consternation, there were no errors, and after a few minutes, the shell prompt came back. But the filesystem was empty. How could that be? Several hours later, after reinstalling from diskette, I found the answer. SCO distributed their system with all files and directories set to rw/rwx. Everything.
Verizon has rolled out FTTH in my neighborhood. Because I'm a cheapskate, the main benefit for me is increased bandwidth and lower price on cable (2.5/5 Mbits/s).
The Wikipedia article dances around the core issue. Nobody is against QOS. The problem is that certain ISPs want to use QOS to extort money by threatening to degrade service. The intent of QOS technology was that ISPs would offer to honor QOS flags in traffic passing through their network for a fee. These are opposite approaches. The first has the ISP selecting which packets get high priority. The second has the ISP *customers* selecting which packets get high priority. The first approach is evil. The second is needed to make VOIP and other real-time protocols reliable.
It seems to me that ISPs can make plenty of money by simply charging by the real-time packet. End points can make as much or as little of their traffic real-time as they wish. It is probably necessary to reserve a certain bandwidth ahead of time to be guaranteed minimum latency. VOIP and similar applications also need a button or config option to enable real-time priority. Those on a budget may choose to put up with the dropouts and pops. Or they may have reserved a small amount of bandwidth, and need to save it for important calls.
The telco ISP threats to boost/degrade service based on endpoint is just greedy and evil.
For those surprised that Republicans hate unauditable voting also, here is an excerpt from a right wing political email.
This "Christian Response" e-Alert is a special message from RightMarch.com:
ALERT: You know how you hate it when liberals claim the election was stolen? The fact is, if we had paper trails, we wouldn't have to deal with that incessant whining any more.
But for the most part, we don't. Last November, as many as 50 million voters cast their ballots on electronic voting machines that lacked a voter-verified paper audit trail. As a result, there is NO way to resolve questions about reported tallies.
As former Congressman Bob Barr recently wrote, "The pell-mell rush to electronic voting machines was launched after the 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida. It was fueled by Congress' knee-jerk reaction to that fiasco in passing the 'Help America Vote Act' in 2002, along with a boatload of taxpayer dollars -- nearly $4 billion."
Unfortunately, this well-funded fascination with electronic voting machines has proceeded with virtually NO comprehensive study or development of national standards to ensure the integrity of the machines and how they're utilized. Each state sets its own standards -- or doesn't -- and follows its own rules in letting contracts for the machines.
...
As you can see, the only difference is who is to blame for electronic voting - those whiny Dems, or those slimy Reps. What is interesting to me, is that despite the grassroots of *both* sides being outraged by the shoddy e-voting - they continue to buy more of the machines. Clearly, both parties are just puppets.
OpenNIC is an alternative DNS root that does not depend on such corporations. Registering a non-ICANN toplevel domain under an opennic registrar would be good insurance against this kind of thing. Even going strictly with ICANN, registering more than one top level domain under different registrars is good insurance.
"while those guilty of distributing enabling devices and services to others through a variety of means"
you mean like.. computers?
Like general purpose computers. A literal interpretation of this law says
only "trusted" computers and operating systems (as in TCP with Windows) can
legally be sold. User programmable machines are "enabling" devices. I hope
you Aussies like the Microsoft OS.
In my Java classes, when a resource is freed by a destructor - as opposed to by a close() method or equivalent - it logs a warning. Optionally, the open() method can capture a stack trace - which can help track down the leak, but eats too much memory to do all the time.
Along the same line, the Boehm garbage collector for C/C++ has a mode where it can warn you about memory that has not had free() called as it collects it. This is very helpful for debugging manually collected C/C++ programs.
I noticed in the video that the box included a menu to select music by category and artist. Isn't this the patented tech that Apple just got sued for using in ipods? Another victim for the patent holder?
There are so many shelves full of US law on the books, that even a legal professional can only specialize in a tiny portion of it. I guarrantee you that everyone on slashdot has unknowingly (or maybe even knowingly) committed enough crimes to put us away for many years. Anyone that wants to get you just needs some legal research and enough access to power/money to bring a case against you.
You're extremely thirsty on your hike through Death Valley. You see a spring of water. The water is perfectly clear. No insects or slime. The thought of passing that delicious looking water by and slogging on is almost unbearable. Do you a) drink the crystal clear water b) slog on. Answer: your choice, but such springs in Death Valley are deadly poison - hopefully you took that into account.
in my experience usually those who subject themselves to chronic frustration develop serious long term side effects, none of which are positive.
There was no chronic frustration because I took the simple and obvious expedient of avoiding the problematic situation. If you're on a diet, frequenting the donut shop might not be the best course.
What *is* extremely unhealthy is sexual promiscuity. Sex glues you emotionally to your partner. When you switch partners, it is like ripping your tongue off a frozen flagpole - only it is your heart instead. I have seen the trauma and pain of fornication and divorce over and over again. It really doesn't have to be that way. You don't have to call it marriage or do a religious ceremony (though a public commitment is very helpful) - but just stick with one man and one woman until death. You'll save yourself and your spouse a world of grief.
Slashdot Mirror
Patents were originally created to promote creative thought. There is a very simple test of whether patents are promoting or hindering creative thought in a given field of engineering. Do engineers in the field routinely do a patent search to avoid reinventing the wheel? Or, instead, do they as a matter of policy avoid ever looking at any patents in the field to avoid paying triple damages to patent trolls? In many fields, patents are still beneficial. In software, however, they are a total bust. Very, very, few software patents actually disclose anything useful. They are used solely as offensive or defensive weapons - never as an actual source of technical knowlege.
I repaired many a hard drive (10, 20, 30 Megabytes with an M) by squirting WD-40 on the bearing. In those days, the bearings were exposed, and did not require opening the case.
An interactive (has an immediate mode prompt) language like Python is very helpful for first learning. BASIC used to fill that role, but I like starting with structured concepts. Kids have no problem "getting" that indentation marks blocks.
Some experts hate python because while the grammar is "context free", the lexing isn't. The grammar is defined in terms of INDENT and OUTDENT taking the place of '{' and '}' (or BEGIN and END). However, whether a given indent is an INDENT or OUTDENT depends on context. So you can't use a traditional lexical analyzer when programmatically generating/modifying python code. You have to translate leading whitespace to INDENT and OUTDENT based on lexical context when parsing, and translate INDENT and OUTDENT to the appropriate amount of leading whitespace when pasting code blocks.
Personally, I don't find that this is a problem. Sure 'lex' doesn't work out of the box, but the custom lexing code is pretty trivial. And the indentation sure is intuitive. Maybe that means I'm not an expert.
The Groovix company offers a Debian based server with 4 or so screens and keyboards attached - with full telephone support. I haven't tried it, but it sounds like a viable solution for those who aren't linux experts.
At first, the kids complained about not having Windows games. But now, they like Linux games (some of our terminals can boot off local disk and have 3D cards to play Tux Racer, etc). They can play Windows games at any of their friends houses, but their friends come over to play Linux games.
Remind me again why we need Windows at home?
Ok, PC tax software is only available for Windows. Some years I fire up an old Win 98 box to run the tax software. Other years, I just do it manually. TaxAct and others offer free online tax software - but I dislike putting all my info in some companies remotely accessible database. When I fire up Win98, I pay $20 for the deluxe version. I wish I could buy electronic tax forms annually for $20 and run them on an open source engine. I guess the companies are afraid to do that without some kind of DRM.
Natural disasters evoke stoicism, or might make us mad at God. Depraved actions of another human being are fascinating because we are constantly struggling with our own desires to do what we know is wrong. "Would I do any better in the other guys shoes," we wonder. The more frenetic my denouciation of the evil terrorists, the more likely my own struggle against evil is on the brink of failure. Those who have hard won victories against the evil within know better - "there but for the grace of God go I".
Microsoft does not drive this. Hardware makers do. They build "Vista compatible" systems. Users don't "install" Windows. They get preinstalled Windows from the hardware OEM. When they reinstall the customized CD with all needed drivers that came with their system (because Windows crashed), they believe they are "installing" Windows. When they buy new hardware, it comes with Windows drivers.
Actually installing Windows on random hardware is a long and frustrating process. The drivers are all closed source, and the companies involved are understandably not interested in supporting old hardware (just in selling new). You have to google endlessly tracking down this and that power Windows user with drivers available for public download (in technical violation of the license). I've done this for two 1999 era PCs (to play games and run tax software). Sure, Windows will install in 16 color VGA mode with no sound, no problem (so will any Linux distro). To actually get all the hardware to work takes weeks.
The idea would be to go *through* Mexico to South America. Not looking for luxury, just more freedom. Things aren't that bad yet. I'm just worried that when they are, a big fence will be in the way. Remember the Berlin wall?
I have been rather disturbed by the proposed fence on the southern border. It is not at all clear to me whether its primary purpose is to keep illegal immigrants out, or to keep me in should I decide to try an escape on foot in the future as this country becomes ever more oppressive. Of course, Mexico is worse, so surviving the trek across Mexico would be a long shot. But still, I don't like seeing my options reduced.
In the interim, you need SRS. That's right. SRS is problematic when used to work around forwarding problems (for receivers that don't know their own forwarders). But it works wonders in a signing mode. Have SRS rewrite the envelope of all your outgoing mail (I omit the SRS domain when it's the same as the outgoing domain). Discard (reject) bounces (empty MAIL FROM) that lack a proper signature. It cans a *ton* of crap - both forged bounces and bounces of forgeries.
Now if people would only stop sending DSNs without an empty MAIL FROM. I've found it useful to treat mail from certain localparts, like postmaster and mailer-daemon, as if it was an empty MAIL FROM (bounce). Not RFC compliant, but neither are the idiots that send it.
I make my own drink: plain, unsweetened green tea with black pepper. I drink it on my 7-mile bike ride to work while fasting. My body has no choice but to burn fat - my wife loves the result. I suspect the sugar in Enviga is the problem. Also, the proven energy burning benefits of green tea require exercise - swigging Enviga while sitting in a chair is certainly not going to help.
The vulnerability also applies to browsing websites with a local X client (e.g. posting on slashdot). Even a non-malicious site can exhibit a DoS if it contains long INPUT fields. (I think that was visible, not logical size.) So you can get rooted while browsing random sites.
He's talking about a service station. "Garage" is British for service station. When you're getting work done on your car, most service stations have a sign that says something like, "Due to insurance regulations, customers are not allowed on the shop floor."
Maybe due to malware, rather than Yahoo?
I don't see a problem with *firmware* blobs - provided they have an eternal and unlimited license for use. Blobs are a security problem when they run in the kernel (e.g. nvidia, wireless drivers). Firmware blobs are just a way to save the cost of a ROM. (High speed chips typical copy ROM to RAM rather than run from ROM, because RAM is faster.) I still haven't figured out whether the OLPC blobs in question are binary drivers or firmware.
Because a key requirement was commercial support == you call someone to fix bugs for you, not fix them your self. I think the main problem was not shopping around for the required support.
As part of my sales pitch when convincing our company to start developing for unix, I explained that ordinary users can't remove system files. To demonstrate, I logged in to the newly installed SCO Xenix console, and logged in as a user. Then I did "rm -r /". I confidently explained that only that users files would get borked, and that was why all the "permission denied" errors were appearing. "What errors?" the boss asked. To my consternation, there were no errors, and after a few minutes, the shell prompt came back. But the filesystem was empty. How could that be? Several hours later, after reinstalling from diskette, I found the answer. SCO distributed their system with all files and directories set to rw/rwx. Everything.
Verizon has rolled out FTTH in my neighborhood. Because I'm a cheapskate, the main benefit for me is increased bandwidth and lower price on cable (2.5/5 Mbits/s).
It seems to me that ISPs can make plenty of money by simply charging by the real-time packet. End points can make as much or as little of their traffic real-time as they wish. It is probably necessary to reserve a certain bandwidth ahead of time to be guaranteed minimum latency. VOIP and similar applications also need a button or config option to enable real-time priority. Those on a budget may choose to put up with the dropouts and pops. Or they may have reserved a small amount of bandwidth, and need to save it for important calls.
The telco ISP threats to boost/degrade service based on endpoint is just greedy and evil.
OpenNIC is an alternative DNS root that does not depend on such corporations. Registering a non-ICANN toplevel domain under an opennic registrar would be good insurance against this kind of thing. Even going strictly with ICANN, registering more than one top level domain under different registrars is good insurance.
you mean like.. computers?
Like general purpose computers. A literal interpretation of this law says only "trusted" computers and operating systems (as in TCP with Windows) can legally be sold. User programmable machines are "enabling" devices. I hope you Aussies like the Microsoft OS.
In my Java classes, when a resource is freed by a destructor - as opposed to by a close() method or equivalent - it logs a warning. Optionally, the open() method can capture a stack trace - which can help track down the leak, but eats too much memory to do all the time. Along the same line, the Boehm garbage collector for C/C++ has a mode where it can warn you about memory that has not had free() called as it collects it. This is very helpful for debugging manually collected C/C++ programs.
I noticed in the video that the box included a menu to select music by category and artist. Isn't this the patented tech that Apple just got sued for using in ipods? Another victim for the patent holder?
There are so many shelves full of US law on the books, that even a legal professional can only specialize in a tiny portion of it. I guarrantee you that everyone on slashdot has unknowingly (or maybe even knowingly) committed enough crimes to put us away for many years. Anyone that wants to get you just needs some legal research and enough access to power/money to bring a case against you.
in my experience usually those who subject themselves to chronic frustration develop serious long term side effects, none of which are positive.
There was no chronic frustration because I took the simple and obvious expedient of avoiding the problematic situation. If you're on a diet, frequenting the donut shop might not be the best course.
What *is* extremely unhealthy is sexual promiscuity. Sex glues you emotionally to your partner. When you switch partners, it is like ripping your tongue off a frozen flagpole - only it is your heart instead. I have seen the trauma and pain of fornication and divorce over and over again. It really doesn't have to be that way. You don't have to call it marriage or do a religious ceremony (though a public commitment is very helpful) - but just stick with one man and one woman until death. You'll save yourself and your spouse a world of grief.