We had innovation before we had patents. and we also had craft guilds, who's members were sworn to secrecy, and sometime even put to death for reveling guild secrets. The are several arts that I can think of were lost and only recently re-discovered such as forge welded folded steel used in swords. Much has been lost over the ages do to secrecy, which is one of the things patents are supposed to prevent, you can't patent something without disclosure.
Sounds like IT-Guy doesn't realise that all the good hacking tools available in linux are quickly ported over to windows where his darling students are going to smuggle them into the school on thumb-drives bigger than the hard-drive in most classroom computers. Any security gained through mono-culturalism would be quickly overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of script-kiddies that would be totaly lost on a non-Ms computer. So if his MCSE ass is depending on security afforded by Microsoft products and memorised click-streams his shit is truely weak.
Simple data program, so what's wrong with java? Actualy you could probably find most of it all ready written on the web.
well yeah you'd be forced to use java, at least untill the perl modules appeared on CPAN to duplicate the technology in an open source language, Java is only almost open so the OSS purests will complain bitterly. Then of course there would be a re-implimentation into PHP and put up on PEAR which of course would be a bit half-assed so there have to be 3 half-assed PHP implimentations on PEAR just to cover the whole feature set, you can't have anything on CPAN and not have it on PEAR. Now the Python guys will get into the act because god knows you can't read or maintain Perl and PHP is just Perl on anti-psycotic medication so it's only schizophrenic half the time instead of all the time like Perl. While all of this is going on Microsoft is working furiously on an implimentation in C#/.net, and of course because they playing catch-up they gloss over a few things like security and stability, never mind that the marketing-driods are pimping vaporware at this point; all of the Novelites will tie a blond to the stakes and start chanting "MONO MONO" to the Monkey God. By now everything will be so fubared that and Sun will announce they're discontinuing developement so we will not even have just a java implimentation that works.
No seriously, why is coding Apache in C, writing the server-side in java, Perl or PHP, sending everything to the browser that's coded in C, A language called HTML with the languages of javascript, Java and Flash embedded into it and the browser is almost guarenteed to manged your code any more difficult than just using java in a client/server mode on both end; I don't even know java much past "hello world" but I know that this is what its for.
You don't want to do that because your servers TCP/IP stack only has about 60K useable ports(64K ports - WKS and a few others), and each connection uses a port, then most real web pages connect to a database which means your down to 30K connections, now add in a couple connections for RSS feeds and your down to under 8K connectionsnow consider slashdot with almost a million registered user and have it setup so that only a thousand or so could connect to the site! I know we could do some hacks at the routers, but they're still computers and still have a ~ 60K ceiling, no it's far better to use the non-persistant connections and recycle the port amongst the users as needed else connection refused and service unavailable would be the order of the day.
it's their ass on the line if security is breached and damage is done, then having unknown (to them) systems with access is a vulnerability that should be addressed.
Explain to me how have a Linux or Mac OSed machine sitting on a properly DMZed intranet is any more of a security threat than have any machine on the intranet.
Whether Windows should be that standard is a matter for the particular organisation in question, but in academia, there may be strong argument that it should be since a lot of specialist software is available for Windows while there's very little that's Mac- or Linux-only.
Please control your troll, there maybe a smattering of educational administration programs that are windows only, but that's about it; and the reality is if the business/administration network is transperent to the academic network they have security problems a lot bigger than can be handle by the blue-smoke and mirrors type of security that MS Windows systems provide. The installation of Linux/Unix native specialty programs frequently is possible on windows machines, the results usually isn't pretty, lots of support problems.
WOW finaly an honest man, personally I don't buy the CO2 is destorying the enviroment thing, but if I'm wrong and it really is happening; then all Koyoto is doing is allowing the few who reach it's goals to feel self-rightious while destorying the world.
years ago my son was installing cable tv system's, the pole to pole stuff, not pole to house; well one day he came over and hooked up a state of the art stealth wavemeter to our cable system. It was quite obvious that adelphi was trying to push 850MHz of signal through a 500Mhz coax and the whole system needed a good sweeping just to get the 500MHz to come through to spec rather than good enough that most people don't complain.
I'm pretty much a free-market, keep the government's nose the hell outa our business kind of a guy, but it seems to me that the advertising about anything to do with the internet, bandwidth and transfer is pretty much a bald-faced lie and I just don't understand why the FTC doesn't fine a few of those bastards into bankruptcy over false advertising.
I got an idea, we'll just spin-off the infrastucture portion of the businesses; make the companies that provide the local-loop, the back-bone, and the service all sepparte companies and they'll sell access to content/service providers.
Claiming this as a 'reason' for needed net neutrality is like saying people who choose to shell out for a high rise apartment need to wall up thier windows because they have an unfair advanatge over a bum living in an alley! Actualy I see it like I'm paying for two one bedroom appartments, but one of the people I'm paying for is living in the High-rise and his expensive lifestyle is forcing the other to be a bum in the alley! If I'm paying for 768K of "best effort" DSL, that's what I want, but what I'll be getting isn't "best effort" it's what's left over after the sharks have feasted. Maybe I'm not understanding something here but to me net neutrality means each packet is treated equaly in each network segment, a packet bound for vonage is treated the same as a packet bound for Comcast voice on comcasts network untill one of them hits the edge of the network, then the packets are all treated equally by that network.
Enkido's 768 service is now available in Manhattan, where the company owns 3,500 route miles of optical fiber and is already within 200 feet of anywhere. Enkido's first 768 customer is Deutsche Telecom.... To clarify, T0 or DS0 is 56Kbps or 64Kbps. T1 is 1.5Mbps and T3 is 45Mbps. OC1 is 52Mbps, OC3 155Mbps, OC12 622Mbps, OC48 2.5Gbps, OC192 10Gbps, and OC768 is 40Gbps. Enkido's 768 service, Bob Metcalfe
Now that's what we're talking about it would be like getting a drink out of a firehose hooking your 'puter up to one of those puppies! Seriously you could run almost 900 T3 lines through one of those and google owns how many? Each dark fiber could be lit up to be an internet backbone straight to a google-box parked outside the Central Office of every phone company that slowing packets to gtalk; it's just a matter of what you light the fiber with.
CIOs aren't keen on spending money to help educate faculty, staff and the students on how to use a new product. I found this really great software product, called moodle, with very little effort you could use it to train your faculty to use it. The point is that our present world has become insanely dynamic, and very few fields have much if any knowlege that is able to last more than 5-7 years any way; look how fast web programming blew through the Perl-PHP-Java-PHP-Python-ROR cycles. The value of educational software is nothing compared to the value of the educational content it's delivering.
I'm not positive here but I think Toyota has more employees in Michigan than Ford does; and the last time I drove through Flint BOC (Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac) looked pretty dead as well.
United States Patent 6,988,138 Alcorn, et al. January 17, 2006 Filed: June 30, 2000 any newness would be relative to June 30, 2000, but I agree its a horrible patent, as well as a horrible law suit, but what would you expect from an attorney with a P.O. box for an snail mail address and a yahoo Email address!
BB might as well have a patent for all formal education... I'm not a patent attorney or anything but I did notice a few things that seemed strange in patent 6,988,138 such as in claim 1a
each role providing a level of access to a plurality of data files associated with a particular course and a level of control over the data files associated with the course
notice the "plurality of data files"; does that mean if we use a single data file such as a Relational Database where all the data is stored in a single file the patent doesn't apply? or even claim 1b
b) a server computer in communication with each of the user computers over a network, the server computer comprising: means for storing a plurality of data files associated with a course, means for assigning a level of access to and control of each data file based on a user of the system's predetermined role in a course;
which seems to imply that merely moving the storeage and or admin modules on to a seperate server make the server computer, server computers a plurality, and allow the admin computer to use htaccess make the use of roles un-necessary; just thoughts of an under-educated layman who just spent two days installing moodle.
Actualy it was an euro spec type 1, everything from about 6 inch in front of the windshield ended up under the track. Of course the non-DOT glass in the winshield just shreded their faces, I could tell one of them was black when I walk into our room, but his face was bandaged so much I couldn't tell if it was my roomy or not.
1 even if a the glove stop shark tooth penetration into the hand, the shark would still rip your arm off. I used to work in a dog grooming shop while in college, it's the head shake that does the real damage. After a few bites I learned to completely relax when they clamped much less pain and damage, with a shark, anything left is because he didn't take it. 2. maybe but probably not 3. not likely would probably be priced higher due to "higher protectction" or more comfortable is worth more and it's a patented technology. As an interesting aside I've been searching for patents involving chainmaille and butcher's glove and have come up dry so far. 4. I suspect that they are not water-proof at all, PEG polyethelene glycol is used as a thickener in all kinds of cosmetics, foods and medicines that are water soluble. I wouldn't be at all surprise if the kevlar/STF material isn't encased inside a waterproof bag and the whole thing needs replacement upon puncturing. 5. Kevlar is great, heat resistance almost as good as nomex and tear/cut resistance so it's used in fire suits and you can buy kevlar reinforced bluejeans pants and jackets for riding.
Your skin will resist penetration from a baseball or cricket bat too, so I'm sure you wouldn't mind letting me take a few wacks at you; the kenetic energies are reasonably close.
The stuff they use now is like wearing a winter coat and wearing a chemical protective suit for 6 hours isn't all that breathable either. I can remember lifting up my arms and having the sweat that collected inside the rubber gloves run down my arms and armpits and thinking it felt good!
Oh that would so suck, I can imagine like on saturday cartoon the 15 ton weight falling out of the sky, hitting you on the head and instantly stopping, only to start crushing you into red goo in slow-motion!
A couple of friends of mine ran into a M60A2 tank with volkswagen beatle, and I can assure you that any car has plenty of crumple zone when it hits a tank weighing 60-70 tons! Actualy they were quite lucky and both was thrown through the winshield and woke up on top of the tank rather than under it like their car.
Well because it's shear-thickening liquid, the more violent the impact, the more it locks up and spreads out the impact. One market that they are initially targeting is prison guards because the threat to them is from stabbing rather than gunshot or shrapnel, which the liquid armor stops yet remains flexable unlike plate armor that is rigid. The thing that will always annoy you when wearing armor is weight, heat build up and lack of flexability; this stuff should put a dent in all three.
OK I'm sorry for being a bit more trollish than I meant to be, but I still think it would be more honest of congress to give education more funding through an education appropriation and NASA funding through a NASA appropriation; the way they are doing it makes it look like education is underfunded and NASA is overfunded. NASA is providing a lot of support for K-12 education as it is right now, just look at what you guys are doing.
Slashdot Mirror
We had innovation before we had patents.
and we also had craft guilds, who's members were sworn to secrecy, and sometime even put to death for reveling guild secrets. The are several arts that I can think of were lost and only recently re-discovered such as forge welded folded steel used in swords. Much has been lost over the ages do to secrecy, which is one of the things patents are supposed to prevent, you can't patent something without disclosure.
Sounds like IT-Guy doesn't realise that all the good hacking tools available in linux are quickly ported over to windows where his darling students are going to smuggle them into the school on thumb-drives bigger than the hard-drive in most classroom computers. Any security gained through mono-culturalism would be quickly overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of script-kiddies that would be totaly lost on a non-Ms computer. So if his MCSE ass is depending on security afforded by Microsoft products and memorised click-streams his shit is truely weak.
Simple data program, so what's wrong with java? Actualy you could probably find most of it all ready written on the web.
well yeah you'd be forced to use java, at least untill the perl modules appeared on CPAN to duplicate the technology in an open source language, Java is only almost open so the OSS purests will complain bitterly. Then of course there would be a re-implimentation into PHP and put up on PEAR which of course would be a bit half-assed so there have to be 3 half-assed PHP implimentations on PEAR just to cover the whole feature set, you can't have anything on CPAN and not have it on PEAR. Now the Python guys will get into the act because god knows you can't read or maintain Perl and PHP is just Perl on anti-psycotic medication so it's only schizophrenic half the time instead of all the time like Perl.
While all of this is going on Microsoft is working furiously on an implimentation in C#/.net, and of course because they playing catch-up they gloss over a few things like security and stability, never mind that the marketing-driods are pimping vaporware at this point; all of the Novelites will tie a blond to the stakes and start chanting "MONO MONO" to the Monkey God. By now everything will be so fubared that and Sun will announce they're discontinuing developement so we will not even have just a java implimentation that works.
No seriously, why is coding Apache in C, writing the server-side in java, Perl or PHP, sending everything to the browser that's coded in C, A language called HTML with the languages of javascript, Java and Flash embedded into it and the browser is almost guarenteed to manged your code any more difficult than just using java in a client/server mode on both end; I don't even know java much past "hello world" but I know that this is what its for.
You don't want to do that because your servers TCP/IP stack only has about 60K useable ports(64K ports - WKS and a few others), and each connection uses a port, then most real web pages connect to a database which means your down to 30K connections, now add in a couple connections for RSS feeds and your down to under 8K connectionsnow consider slashdot with almost a million registered user and have it setup so that only a thousand or so could connect to the site! I know we could do some hacks at the routers, but they're still computers and still have a ~ 60K ceiling, no it's far better to use the non-persistant connections and recycle the port amongst the users as needed else connection refused and service unavailable would be the order of the day.
Please control your troll, there maybe a smattering of educational administration programs that are windows only, but that's about it; and the reality is if the business/administration network is transperent to the academic network they have security problems a lot bigger than can be handle by the blue-smoke and mirrors type of security that MS Windows systems provide. The installation of Linux/Unix native specialty programs frequently is possible on windows machines, the results usually isn't pretty, lots of support problems.
years ago my son was installing cable tv system's, the pole to pole stuff, not pole to house; well one day he came over and hooked up a state of the art stealth wavemeter to our cable system. It was quite obvious that adelphi was trying to push 850MHz of signal through a 500Mhz coax and the whole system needed a good sweeping just to get the 500MHz to come through to spec rather than good enough that most people don't complain.
I'm pretty much a free-market, keep the government's nose the hell outa our business kind of a guy, but it seems to me that the advertising about anything to do with the internet, bandwidth and transfer is pretty much a bald-faced lie and I just don't understand why the FTC doesn't fine a few of those bastards into bankruptcy over false advertising.
I got an idea, we'll just spin-off the infrastucture portion of the businesses; make the companies that provide the local-loop, the back-bone, and the service all sepparte companies and they'll sell access to content/service providers.
Claiming this as a 'reason' for needed net neutrality is like saying people who choose to shell out for a high rise apartment need to wall up thier windows because they have an unfair advanatge over a bum living in an alley!
Actualy I see it like I'm paying for two one bedroom appartments, but one of the people I'm paying for is living in the High-rise and his expensive lifestyle is forcing the other to be a bum in the alley! If I'm paying for 768K of "best effort" DSL, that's what I want, but what I'll be getting isn't "best effort" it's what's left over after the sharks have feasted. Maybe I'm not understanding something here but to me net neutrality means each packet is treated equaly in each network segment, a packet bound for vonage is treated the same as a packet bound for Comcast voice on comcasts network untill one of them hits the edge of the network, then the packets are all treated equally by that network.
Now that's what we're talking about it would be like getting a drink out of a firehose hooking your 'puter up to one of those puppies! Seriously you could run almost 900 T3 lines through one of those and google owns how many? Each dark fiber could be lit up to be an internet backbone straight to a google-box parked outside the Central Office of every phone company that slowing packets to gtalk; it's just a matter of what you light the fiber with.
CIOs aren't keen on spending money to help educate faculty, staff and the students on how to use a new product.
I found this really great software product, called moodle, with very little effort you could use it to train your faculty to use it. The point is that our present world has become insanely dynamic, and very few fields have much if any knowlege that is able to last more than 5-7 years any way; look how fast web programming blew through the Perl-PHP-Java-PHP-Python-ROR cycles. The value of educational software is nothing compared to the value of the educational content it's delivering.
I'm not positive here but I think Toyota has more employees in Michigan than Ford does; and the last time I drove through Flint BOC (Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac) looked pretty dead as well.
United States Patent 6,988,138 Alcorn, et al. January 17, 2006 Filed: June 30, 2000 any newness would be relative to June 30, 2000, but I agree its a horrible patent, as well as a horrible law suit, but what would you expect from an attorney with a P.O. box for an snail mail address and a yahoo Email address!
I'm not a patent attorney or anything but I did notice a few things that seemed strange in patent 6,988,138 such as in claim 1a
notice the "plurality of data files"; does that mean if we use a single data file such as a Relational Database where all the data is stored in a single file the patent doesn't apply? or even claim 1b
which seems to imply that merely moving the storeage and or admin modules on to a seperate server make the server computer, server computers a plurality, and allow the admin computer to use htaccess make the use of roles un-necessary; just thoughts of an under-educated layman who just spent two days installing moodle.
Actualy it was an euro spec type 1, everything from about 6 inch in front of the windshield ended up under the track. Of course the non-DOT glass in the winshield just shreded their faces, I could tell one of them was black when I walk into our room, but his face was bandaged so much I couldn't tell if it was my roomy or not.
Someplaces a yeild sign really means yeild
1 even if a the glove stop shark tooth penetration into the hand, the shark would still rip your arm off. I used to work in a dog grooming shop while in college, it's the head shake that does the real damage. After a few bites I learned to completely relax when they clamped much less pain and damage, with a shark, anything left is because he didn't take it.
2. maybe but probably not
3. not likely would probably be priced higher due to "higher protectction" or more comfortable is worth more and it's a patented technology. As an interesting aside I've been searching for patents involving chainmaille and butcher's glove and have come up dry so far.
4. I suspect that they are not water-proof at all, PEG polyethelene glycol is used as a thickener in all kinds of cosmetics, foods and medicines that are water soluble. I wouldn't be at all surprise if the kevlar/STF material isn't encased inside a waterproof bag and the whole thing needs replacement upon puncturing.
5. Kevlar is great, heat resistance almost as good as nomex and tear/cut resistance so it's used in fire suits and you can buy kevlar reinforced bluejeans pants and jackets for riding.
Your skin will resist penetration from a baseball or cricket bat too, so I'm sure you wouldn't mind letting me take a few wacks at you; the kenetic energies are reasonably close.
The stuff they use now is like wearing a winter coat and wearing a chemical protective suit for 6 hours isn't all that breathable either. I can remember lifting up my arms and having the sweat that collected inside the rubber gloves run down my arms and armpits and thinking it felt good!
depends on which MRE you get, sometime it is steaking-out.
Oh that would so suck, I can imagine like on saturday cartoon the 15 ton weight falling out of the sky, hitting you on the head and instantly stopping, only to start crushing you into red goo in slow-motion!
A couple of friends of mine ran into a M60A2 tank with volkswagen beatle, and I can assure you that any car has plenty of crumple zone when it hits a tank weighing 60-70 tons! Actualy they were quite lucky and both was thrown through the winshield and woke up on top of the tank rather than under it like their car.
Well because it's shear-thickening liquid, the more violent the impact, the more it locks up and spreads out the impact. One market that they are initially targeting is prison guards because the threat to them is from stabbing rather than gunshot or shrapnel, which the liquid armor stops yet remains flexable unlike plate armor that is rigid. The thing that will always annoy you when wearing armor is weight, heat build up and lack of flexability; this stuff should put a dent in all three.
OK I'm sorry for being a bit more trollish than I meant to be, but I still think it would be more honest of congress to give education more funding through an education appropriation and NASA funding through a NASA appropriation; the way they are doing it makes it look like education is underfunded and NASA is overfunded. NASA is providing a lot of support for K-12 education as it is right now, just look at what you guys are doing.