In my opinion patents are evil, if you have to do a patent search (something that is not cheap I can tell) on every single idea you have before even start to implement. So to answer your question, no I bet no one do search patents, not even great enterprises like SCO, MS or IBM that defend this crazy system.
The way it happen is that when you launch your product the people qho have tons of patents (usually as generic as they can be) do a force match. That is they see if any of their patent can fit your product, if it does their lawyers send you a nice little note saying that you should aquire a license or be sued.
At this point you, if you have the money, can challenge the patent (witch is probably void due to been too obvious or due to prior-art) or you can use one of your own patents to bargain with your them (if they are a pure patent house, that have no products this will not work) or try to avoid the said patent (probably very hard due to the broadness of the claim).
Many small to medium enterprizes cannot survive this, simply because it is much expensive and time consuming. Even if they were able to solve the problems with the patent, it will be probably too late for their product. Opensource products usualy have worst problems, since they are not funded by anyone usualy a patent mine will most likely kill the product.
With patents you are not free to have ideas. The patent system was created to give some incentives to companies to disclosure their ideas to world. Software patents do not disclosure anything, they are broad and obvious and do not come acompanied with source code witch would be analogous to a blue-print for real-world itens (witch I believe is required).
Very interesting post, really, I will follow it with the conditions of our education here in Brazil. As many of you know soccer (what we call football) is major sport here and it gets the full attention of the nation. A game in the world cup where our national team is playing is a recognized (and almost official) national Holiday.
But soccer, or any other sport, is not tied to the education. You cannot get a spot in your university by playing football. Universities and schools do not have official teams, they can have a more then a few amateur teams, but those don't get any attention from the media.
Many people dream to be a great soccer player, mainly in the poorer class (where many of our greater players come). This is a way to get richer. You don't need a college degree to become a soccer, and many of those people have really poor educations. It is very common to see a soccer player making basic errors in the Brazilian Portuguese.
But we have a very bad educational system. There are the public schools that in many cases have fewer teachers that are needed. Pretion from the society and politics made common to approve a student even though he is not capable of that. public schools, with a few exceptions range from a poor school to a deposit of children ("at least they aren't on the street" is a common quote that I have the urge to hurl every time I hear it).
We have good to excellent private schools. The cost to go to a private school is high, but not impossible. Most of the middle class and all the higher class put their children in private schools.
Then you have the higher education, where the reverse is true. The public universities and colleges are the bests, with the private ones ranging (with a few exceptions) ranging from normal to very bad. The point is the selection to enter the private universities is very easy (a local TV station made an illiterate person pass through the selection of one of this bad universities by marking random answers in the multiple choices questions), so as long as you pay you get a degree. Many here call those a "factory of diplomas".
The selection of the public, good, universities is very hard. And since only the middle class and higher class had access to a good education, most of the people who gets to the pubilc (and free) education are from those environments. Poorer people had little or no education up to this point, so the selection (vestibular as we call it) it is very hard for them. Our public universities are indeed in an international level, I had more then a few friends that made PHDs in universities in Paris, Chicago, London and other places with the bases we have here (some of them ended up working there, witch is a bad thing but we do have a weaker economy and life stile then many of the European countries and the US and Canada).
ohh here we have a tipical troll. And since I am quite naive, I will bite his bait...
Sure Photoshop has huge advantages over gimp. And for the simple fact that gimp don't work natively with CMYK make it quite useless for people who want to create stuff for printing. But gimp is very useful and compares head to head with PS in other realms, like making images for the internet for instance.
Sure the PS (photoshop) cell pohone has a camera built in and maybe an MP3 player. But not all people need those. Sure the gimp cell phone may seem a little strange to some, but it is hardly two tin cans and a string.
Since there is no Photoshop for linux or many other SOs that gimp run (BSD, solaris...) the gimp allows people who want to use a Photoshop alike app to run from MSWindows.
But those people could run to MacOSX and keep their photoshop. But this would require a change of hardware.
Off course, I admit that my comentary isn't well written, but since when I posted it there were already two pages i assumed that no one would read it and did it quickly.:-D
What I meant is MS will adopt it, poorly like the css and html standards. This will be worst that if they didn't adopted it in the first place, because it will break existing applications when they attempr to understand the files created by MS office.
... eventualy, but is it good? Have you seen how well MS has adopted the W3 open standards for css and (x)html? If saving your document in this open format results in strange things, people will blame the format and not MS.
I do believe you are correct, but even if it 0.01% what if the number of guns in the hands of civilians is 1000s of times larger then in other countries?
I don't have numbers, but I do believe that your number that uses against people are indeed really small, but I also believe that the number of guns in common households are much higher.
I aways wondered who invented sex. I would like to send him a thank you note, it's the best invention ever!!!
Seriously, sex invented? Sex is as invented as a tree or a rock. Sex is natural consequence of how our bodies are made and it is naturaly prazerous (very some would say), so I guess it could be said that yes it is recreational.
Well, all I kwon is that I heard of it from at least 3 friends of mine. None of them are used to read slashdot or the like. I myself never downloaded it, I am not confortable in using closed stuff anymore.
wasn't the ability to call real phones? All the times I got to hear about it was because it could call real phones (and, yes, I know there were other services that did that before).
I agree with you. I want all my drivers to be open source, but I also want my machine to work as it was designed too. When you talk about desktops, you can avoid buying some hardware that simply don't work. but in laptops they come with hardware mounted in, and a least here in brazil is kind of hard of finding many options (you can find only HP, toshiba , sony and if you go knock on their doors IBM).
My toshiba laptop wireless card only have closed source, they say that if they would open all of the driver people would be able to abuse the hardware. Security from obscurity:-P, I could bet that sooner or latter people will start abusing the hardware anyway, not the point anyway.
The point is I love opensource but I have to taint my kernels daily, I use nvidia to work with accelerated graphics. I use my wireless card (madwify or something). All of those would be useless or much less functional of weren't for closed source drivers.
The way we have now dosen't work, they simply pass the hard work to the comunity and go away with it. They even get a little less evil sense, because they suport linux (not all linux people are so serious about the freedom anyawy). The way I look at things we get the worst of both worlds, nvidia, madwify make their closed source drivers that can or cannot work, we have to recompile or get a fresh binary driver for every kernel update. And companies don't feel any uncovinient from that position, and worst they may stop supporting those binary drivers at any moment witch will make then soon incompatible with newer kernels.
Don't get me wrong, but I think we should simply prohibit this binary modules or accomodate them in a nicer way. This middle position of closing our eyes is not getting us anywhere (once more, in my opinion). It is not forcing anyone to be more open about their pieces of hardware.
what I want? I want to know how the hardware I bought works, is that ask too much???
TPM??? In brazilian portuguese we use this as a shot for "Tensão pré-menstrual" or "pre menstruation tension" witch is the state that women will get on their nerves very easily. I wouldn't want my computer stop working or giving me a hard time every month...:-D
Couldn't be a compromise? I mean, and I am definitly an outsider here, couldn't we have a subset of the kernel interface that would remain stable (for say a major release code 2.4 -> 2.6). This subset would not guarantee that it would be the best and faster way to achieve things, so when a low level stuff had to be changed the kernel hackers would simply emulate the new api. Opensource drivers could jump to the new, faster api, while old closed source drivers would stay behind.
But as I said, I don't even know if I am not being compleatly dumb or something (I don't have much kernel hacking experience)...:-D
your site is a pure information, in the sense that is not a page-full of links in an attempt to get other pages rank better. That is what I got, good informationg could be comercial, I want to buy a car. google should be able to help me and give interesting car-buiyng pages (maybe I can order it over UPS).:-D
weird times we live in, where shoting living beings is better then shoting an unanimated thing. And people keeps saying niii to defenseless old lady...
Tiff is quite extensible standard, in fact it so extensible that it is usually a pain in the neck. The info that get's stored in the raw file could be easily stored in a tiff, and in fact I beliece that this is the idea behind this digital negative effort.
But those when we talk about those tiff outputs that are "ready to use", then you're right, they can and probably have a ton of lossy transformations in it.
I don't think adobe is whining. I believe that a photographer that buys Photoshop will expect it to work with his camera out of the box. When he install it and discover that the raw do not work, he will be very frustaded, and possibly ver angry with (guess who?) Adobe.
Some fingerprint reader require a live finger to activate. Unfortunaly when the thiefs discover that it will be a bit too late, and the frustation could get you killed, after all they are clearly violent people.
Why exactly is your password file is in an web-accessible place? All security information should be placed in non-accessible places, if possible off-line.
Tiff is way better then png. Tiff is an extensible file format witch suports both lossy and non-lossy compression, high-bit channels (16 bits, not sure about float though), cmyk and other color spaces, and more info like masks and etc.
If I am not mistaken the digital-negative standard is an extension to the tiff format (or tiff based).
Well tiff is very good format, the only downside is that there is so many tags and extendions to it, that is hard to find a decoder that compreends all of the tags embeded in every file.
Slashdot Mirror
In my opinion patents are evil, if you have to do a patent search (something that is not cheap I can tell) on every single idea you have before even start to implement. So to answer your question, no I bet no one do search patents, not even great enterprises like SCO, MS or IBM that defend this crazy system.
The way it happen is that when you launch your product the people qho have tons of patents (usually as generic as they can be) do a force match. That is they see if any of their patent can fit your product, if it does their lawyers send you a nice little note saying that you should aquire a license or be sued.
At this point you, if you have the money, can challenge the patent (witch is probably void due to been too obvious or due to prior-art) or you can use one of your own patents to bargain with your them (if they are a pure patent house, that have no products this will not work) or try to avoid the said patent (probably very hard due to the broadness of the claim).
Many small to medium enterprizes cannot survive this, simply because it is much expensive and time consuming. Even if they were able to solve the problems with the patent, it will be probably too late for their product. Opensource products usualy have worst problems, since they are not funded by anyone usualy a patent mine will most likely kill the product.
With patents you are not free to have ideas. The patent system was created to give some incentives to companies to disclosure their ideas to world. Software patents do not disclosure anything, they are broad and obvious and do not come acompanied with source code witch would be analogous to a blue-print for real-world itens (witch I believe is required).
In the patent world you're also don't have the right to have the same idea, independently.
Very interesting post, really, I will follow it with the conditions of our education here in Brazil. As many of you know soccer (what we call football) is major sport here and it gets the full attention of the nation. A game in the world cup where our national team is playing is a recognized (and almost official) national Holiday.
But soccer, or any other sport, is not tied to the education. You cannot get a spot in your university by playing football. Universities and schools do not have official teams, they can have a more then a few amateur teams, but those don't get any attention from the media.
Many people dream to be a great soccer player, mainly in the poorer class (where many of our greater players come). This is a way to get richer. You don't need a college degree to become a soccer, and many of those people have really poor educations. It is very common to see a soccer player making basic errors in the Brazilian Portuguese.
But we have a very bad educational system. There are the public schools that in many cases have fewer teachers that are needed. Pretion from the society and politics made common to approve a student even though he is not capable of that. public schools, with a few exceptions range from a poor school to a deposit of children ("at least they aren't on the street" is a common quote that I have the urge to hurl every time I hear it).
We have good to excellent private schools. The cost to go to a private school is high, but not impossible. Most of the middle class and all the higher class put their children in private schools.
Then you have the higher education, where the reverse is true. The public universities and colleges are the bests, with the private ones ranging (with a few exceptions) ranging from normal to very bad. The point is the selection to enter the private universities is very easy (a local TV station made an illiterate person pass through the selection of one of this bad universities by marking random answers in the multiple choices questions), so as long as you pay you get a degree. Many here call those a "factory of diplomas".
The selection of the public, good, universities is very hard. And since only the middle class and higher class had access to a good education, most of the people who gets to the pubilc (and free) education are from those environments. Poorer people had little or no education up to this point, so the selection (vestibular as we call it) it is very hard for them. Our public universities are indeed in an international level, I had more then a few friends that made PHDs in universities in Paris, Chicago, London and other places with the bases we have here (some of them ended up working there, witch is a bad thing but we do have a weaker economy and life stile then many of the European countries and the US and Canada).
ohh here we have a tipical troll. And since I am quite naive, I will bite his bait...
Sure Photoshop has huge advantages over gimp. And for the simple fact that gimp don't work natively with CMYK make it quite useless for people who want to create stuff for printing. But gimp is very useful and compares head to head with PS in other realms, like making images for the internet for instance.
Sure the PS (photoshop) cell pohone has a camera built in and maybe an MP3 player. But not all people need those. Sure the gimp cell phone may seem a little strange to some, but it is hardly two tin cans and a string.
Since there is no Photoshop for linux or many other SOs that gimp run (BSD, solaris ...) the gimp allows people who want to use a Photoshop alike app to run from MSWindows.
But those people could run to MacOSX and keep their photoshop. But this would require a change of hardware.
Off course, I admit that my comentary isn't well written, but since when I posted it there were already two pages i assumed that no one would read it and did it quickly. :-D
What I meant is MS will adopt it, poorly like the css and html standards. This will be worst that if they didn't adopted it in the first place, because it will break existing applications when they attempr to understand the files created by MS office.
... eventualy, but is it good? Have you seen how well MS has adopted the W3 open standards for css and (x)html? If saving your document in this open format results in strange things, people will blame the format and not MS.
I do believe you are correct, but even if it 0.01% what if the number of guns in the hands of civilians is 1000s of times larger then in other countries?
I don't have numbers, but I do believe that your number that uses against people are indeed really small, but I also believe that the number of guns in common households are much higher.
I aways wondered who invented sex. I would like to send him a thank you note, it's the best invention ever!!!
Seriously, sex invented? Sex is as invented as a tree or a rock. Sex is natural consequence of how our bodies are made and it is naturaly prazerous (very some would say), so I guess it could be said that yes it is recreational.
Well, all I kwon is that I heard of it from at least 3 friends of mine. None of them are used to read slashdot or the like. I myself never downloaded it, I am not confortable in using closed stuff anymore.
wasn't the ability to call real phones? All the times I got to hear about it was because it could call real phones (and, yes, I know there were other services that did that before).
Ops I think I shoot the wrong person. I should have replyed to other comment that I can no longer find... :-) Sorry...
RTFA, the patches for all the bugs fixed to be able to render the test are available in the page. :-)
I agree with you. I want all my drivers to be open source, but I also want my machine to work as it was designed too. When you talk about desktops, you can avoid buying some hardware that simply don't work. but in laptops they come with hardware mounted in, and a least here in brazil is kind of hard of finding many options (you can find only HP, toshiba , sony and if you go knock on their doors IBM).
:-P, I could bet that sooner or latter people will start abusing the hardware anyway, not the point anyway.
My toshiba laptop wireless card only have closed source, they say that if they would open all of the driver people would be able to abuse the hardware. Security from obscurity
The point is I love opensource but I have to taint my kernels daily, I use nvidia to work with accelerated graphics. I use my wireless card (madwify or something). All of those would be useless or much less functional of weren't for closed source drivers.
The way we have now dosen't work, they simply pass the hard work to the comunity and go away with it. They even get a little less evil sense, because they suport linux (not all linux people are so serious about the freedom anyawy). The way I look at things we get the worst of both worlds, nvidia, madwify make their closed source drivers that can or cannot work, we have to recompile or get a fresh binary driver for every kernel update. And companies don't feel any uncovinient from that position, and worst they may stop supporting those binary drivers at any moment witch will make then soon incompatible with newer kernels.
Don't get me wrong, but I think we should simply prohibit this binary modules or accomodate them in a nicer way. This middle position of closing our eyes is not getting us anywhere (once more, in my opinion). It is not forcing anyone to be more open about their pieces of hardware.
what I want? I want to know how the hardware I bought works, is that ask too much???
TPM??? In brazilian portuguese we use this as a shot for "Tensão pré-menstrual" or "pre menstruation tension" witch is the state that women will get on their nerves very easily. I wouldn't want my computer stop working or giving me a hard time every month... :-D
Couldn't be a compromise? I mean, and I am definitly an outsider here, couldn't we have a subset of the kernel interface that would remain stable (for say a major release code 2.4 -> 2.6). This subset would not guarantee that it would be the best and faster way to achieve things, so when a low level stuff had to be changed the kernel hackers would simply emulate the new api. Opensource drivers could jump to the new, faster api, while old closed source drivers would stay behind.
:-D
But as I said, I don't even know if I am not being compleatly dumb or something (I don't have much kernel hacking experience)...
your site is a pure information, in the sense that is not a page-full of links in an attempt to get other pages rank better. That is what I got, good informationg could be comercial, I want to buy a car. google should be able to help me and give interesting car-buiyng pages (maybe I can order it over UPS). :-D
True what we need is :
if (UA == MSN_SPIDER) THEN
REPORT JUST LIKE IIS
ELSE
REPORT DEFAULT SERVER GREETING
weird times we live in, where shoting living beings is better then shoting an unanimated thing. And people keeps saying niii to defenseless old lady...
Tiff is quite extensible standard, in fact it so extensible that it is usually a pain in the neck. The info that get's stored in the raw file could be easily stored in a tiff, and in fact I beliece that this is the idea behind this digital negative effort.
But those when we talk about those tiff outputs that are "ready to use", then you're right, they can and probably have a ton of lossy transformations in it.
I don't think adobe is whining. I believe that a photographer that buys Photoshop will expect it to work with his camera out of the box. When he install it and discover that the raw do not work, he will be very frustaded, and possibly ver angry with (guess who?) Adobe.
Some fingerprint reader require a live finger to activate. Unfortunaly when the thiefs discover that it will be a bit too late, and the frustation could get you killed, after all they are clearly violent people.
Why exactly is your password file is in an web-accessible place? All security information should be placed in non-accessible places, if possible off-line.
Tiff is way better then png. Tiff is an extensible file format witch suports both lossy and non-lossy compression, high-bit channels (16 bits, not sure about float though), cmyk and other color spaces, and more info like masks and etc.
If I am not mistaken the digital-negative standard is an extension to the tiff format (or tiff based).
Well tiff is very good format, the only downside is that there is so many tags and extendions to it, that is hard to find a decoder that compreends all of the tags embeded in every file.
Well this would require a brain transplant in the site owners. :-D