How big was the fucking crack rock you smoked this morning? Linux is -NOT- a threat to the Sun industry. Linux runs on cheap assed x86 based hardware (and more.. but x86 is where it's cost effective)... for mid-grade server environments and clustered computing. Go to Sun's online store sometime. They've got shit in "entry level" listed at over 30k per box.
Go tell that to the folks at symbolics, the price points are even the same. Oh and symbolics had their best year the year before they went under.
There is no high end in the computer business, never has been. The high end suppliers have always been killed by competition from below. That is what happened to SGI, you can go to Frys today and buy a $400 video card with a rendering engine that is more than adequate for most professional uses so why pay $30K for an SGI workstation?
Furthermore -- Where the hell do you think OS/X came from? They yanked the OS right from FreeBSD and put it on the PPC architecture.
Actually OS/X is NextStep which is the MACH kernel plus the original BSD distribution.
4% of the desktops is a heck of a lot more machines than 30% of the high end servers. If the desktops are so irrelevant then why the paranoia about Microsoft?
I get irate about this stuff; obviously. It amazes me that somebody that can actually use a keyboard would swallow anything less than a "thrash MS to death" mentality.
You don't say. Perhaps you should try an anger management class or a 'how to flame coherently on slashdot' course.
Why is it that as *soon* as.NET was announced, hordes of developers began talking about how to switch over and support it?
Because dotNET is what people had hoped to get from Java framework but didn't.
dotNET is language neutral. So I can take advantage of the framework from within my old FOTRAN or COBOL decks without having to rewrite them. Sun is on a religious trip with its 100% pure Java I would much prefer to use my old codes without having to have someone rewrite them.
dotNET also eliminates the performance penalty that is inevitable with the bytecode approach. Java has switched to JIT techniques because it is the only way to get acceptable performance, but if you are going to do JIT you will do a lot better if you use a code optimized for JIT rather than a code optimized for an interpreter.
There was absolutely nothing in either Java or dotNet that was not well understood in the language research community. C# and Java are nice packaging jobs, nothing more. C# packs in a bunch more features and has the advantages of 5 years extra experience and much less dogma.
The report you cite does not mention either Apple or Linux. They are the two factors I identified as threatening Sun's position. Apple shipped more UNIX machine last quarter than all the other proprietarty suppliers combined.
So weird of an idea that it scared the crap out of MS, the whole make the... yack yack
Self serving bullshit. Java died on the client because creating content as Java applets makes no sense. There are not that many Active X components either. Take out the flash component and the certificate enrollment plugin and you are left with a bunch of stock ticker applets.
Most rabid MS supporters want to ignore that MS was found to be a monopoly [internetnews.com] in Jude Jackson's findings of fact.
And rabid anti-Microsoft types completely ignore the fact that Jackson was found to have been biased by the appeals court who censured him for his conduct. They also stated that his 'findings of fact' contained many opinions that they are not bound by. So no, Jackson's findings of fact do not stand except in the most technical sense. The appeals court is certainly not going to reverse a lower court that rejects Jackson's opinions and has much more lattitude if it decides to reverse a court that depends on them without hearing evidence on an issue.
The monopoly finding by the appeals court does not rest on Jackson's opinion, they simply applied their own judgement to the evidence.
This whole Sun/Microsoft thing is a false dichotemy. You don't have to like the Democrats to loathe the Republicans. McNeally and Ellison are only upset at Microsoft for one reason alone and their complaints about Microsoft are largely projection.
Ellison is the guy whose company scammed $90 million out of the state of California and whose yatch cheated in the Americas cup by using a banned radar. OK so the other side was found to have cheated too, but a rational person says that both OneWorld and Oracle were cheating rather than saying that OneWorld cheated worse so anything Oracle did was OK.
J2EE is competing with.NET. Sun is saying (and I think its justified) that.NET has a good chance of beating J2EE not because of technical merits, but because of MS's past illegal
Sun is saying lots of things, that does not make them true.
Sun is the DEC of the 2000s. Its hardware business is stagnant and its software business has no real connection to the hardware. They are under attack from Open Source and from IBM. They are likely to face a very stiff challenge from Apple. However they spend 65% of their time whining about Microsoft.
The guys at Redmond are laughing their asses off at Sun. They are winning the battle and losing the war.
OEMs already have the right under the federal settlement to add Java if they chose. They also have the right under the same settlementto remove components they don't want to ship. What do you think the probability is that Dell and HP will choose to ship the Sun code? They don't think any more of Sun than Microsoft does, they are competitors in the hardware business and the sooner Sun dies the better as far as they are concerned.
I doubt that it will come to that as Microsoft will certainly appeal and the chances of blocking the temporary injunction are pretty good, they can win simply by spinning out the appeal.
Java on the client is a pretty wierd idea. Very few sites have ever used Java. I don't think we will suddenly see a rush to switch from flash to Java on the basis that Microsoft will be shipping the latest version for the next year.
The judgement has no effect on server side java. If you are going to do java on the server you are big enough to load it youself.
So where exactly does this rulling have any effect - except on the size of Scott's ego.
The Sun lawsuit is simply a way for a failed management team to cover up their mistakes while they make good on their exit strategy. They will survive as is for maybe a year or so but in the long term they are going to be bought by IBM once their market cap has settled to a more reasonable level.
I think what he's getting at is that it shouldn't be Microsoft's responsibility to make sure Java is there. I don't understand how Sun managed to create a product and then demand that it be included with it's competitor's product.
I don't think this is going to last long for a variety of reasons. IANAL but, heck this is slashy
First a preliminary injunction is subject to a number of tests, Sun has to have a better than even chance of winning the case, refusing the injunction would have to cause more harm than granting it might and so on.
I don't think the claim that sun are harmed holds water. It was their previous action that caused Microsoft to stop shipping the Java VM.
Microsoft have a very strong case that Sun suffers no harm if the status quo continues and that they would suffer substantial harm. Java is active code and active code has historically been subject to lots of security risks - including Java.
Secondly, I don't think that the judge's mention of Tonya Harding helps. The statements create an impression of bias. Equally the statements appear to go way beyond the issues that should be considered where a preliminary injunction are concerned and tend to indicate that the judge has formed a judgement before the hearing...
I don't have much sympathy for Sun here. It may be the US way for failing companies to go to the government or courts to try to win there what they failled to win in the market but it didn;t do Netscape any good. Scott is driving sun into the ground with his Microsoft obsession, the competition that will erase Sun completely comes from Linux and Apple. I am not an Apple fan but they are the worlds largest UNIX vendor by far, they have a solid O/S and if they can only get a powerful processor they can clean up the market for closed source Unix.
Re:what multi-million dollar bribes?
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Euro DMCA Fails
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· Score: 2
Now, how many Congresscritter equivalents does one have to buy to get a law passed in France? the UK?, Belgium?, the Netherlands?, Germany?, Italy? I suspect it wouldn't take too long before you are looking at serious money compared to the number of US Congresscritters needed.
There is certainly corruption in most countries. However there is a major difference between individual peculation and institutional corruption which is what we have in the US.
To get a legislative bill through the UK parliament you have to have the support of the government party. All members interests have to be declared in advance and it is a criminal breach of the rules to offer any sort of bribe to advance legislation. The corruption that brought the Conservative party down was very minor, involving asking questions for cash and lobbying for citizenship applications.
There is no way that you could get the corrupt Eli-Lilly exception that Bill Frist patriotically attached to the Homeland Security bill. There is no way that the government can claim ignorance of what is passed. Corruption of the Bill Frist type only survives because the Senate rules allow business to be conducted in secret. Go take a look at the UK Hansard web site, anyone can see the exact progress of any bill at any time. MPs go to the Web site to find what is going on.
Rather than change the constitution as you propose I think that it would suffice to change the rules of the senate. In particular no ammendment to be allows to any bill without a written mover and seconder. All business to be announced on the Congressional Web site.
The Democrats if they were smart would run the type of campaign that Gingrich ran, only instead of the citizens bill of rights make transparency of the congressional process the issue. Heck, Newt might even lend support since he is rally pissed off at what the party did to him. He thought they believed in what he did, he now realises he was wrong.
There is no reason why transparency should diminish the power of the Senate. In fact I am trying to convince folk that the only long term way to address the judiciary problem is to increase the threshold for confirmation to 60 votes. The reason for this is simple if you do game theory. At present a President has the effective power to stack the judiciary one way or the other if he can get a pliant congress. So as a result the parties and in particular the GOP have recently been trying to delay appointments until they have sufficient control to install idealogues. If the rules mandate a supermajority in perpetuity the President is forced to be reasonable and so is the Senate since there is nothing to be gained through delay.
why won't they protect their own companies from their property being stolen?
It is somewhat a mark of the polarization of this issue that a comment like that gets moderated as Troll.
Of course the issue for the EU parliaments is protecting property. Don't project from the corruption of the US Congress where this issue is decided with multi-million dollar bribes make you think that all countries are like that. The US is an aberation in that regard. While campaign contributions occasionally influence policies in Europe the blatant influence peddling simply does not exist. Politicians do not collect campaign contributions directly, their parties do. That makes a big difference on issues of this sort.
Reading the story I have to think that it was created by the BSA. The statements made simply do not add up.
It seems very unlikely that the EU council of ministers would issue a directive in April requiring legislative action by the end of the year. National parliaments are not merely a rubber stamp for EU directives, no matter how hard the BSA tries to make that claim. None of the European parliaments work at that pace. Legislation in the UK typically takes a minimum of two years and the legislative year starts in the autum. Time in the legislative calendar is very scarce and the idea that the government would allow Brussels to direct it to prioritize an IP bill is somewhat interesting.
This is just a story created by a self important industry association as a way of trying to keep an issue alive. They probably realise that the tide is starting to run against them and that unless they get their way soon they will have to make concessions and may not get their way at all.
Does anyone else think that if this happened it would be the absolute worst thing that ever happened to the web?
Not if Microsoft was really successful in killing flash completely.
I want someone to write a dummy flash plug in that does absolutely nothing, apart from stop the stupid 'do you want to download the latest Meglomedia Flash crud plug in and have adverts that take over your entire computer screen just because they can, oh and if you say no we will ask again in 30 seconds or less' dialog box.
It will support the new cards well, but what about the older cards, ie. Voodoo 3,4 and 5?
You got an expensive doorstop there.
I couldn't get Tombraider Chronicles to run on my Voodoo 3, so I don't think it is very likely you are going to find Direct X 9 support from anywhere. OK you might get something to run, but you can be certain Lara hasn't tested it.
However, if you could afford one of the cutting edge 3dfx cards when they were new you can certainly afford a replacement nvidia board of the same vintage, they have them at frys for $50. OK so they won't run as fast as the latest GForce but neither would the Voodoo.
Incidentally, I discovered that the chronic unreliability problem of my '98 machine went away as soon as I swapped out the voodoo for a GForce...
If Zeinfeld disdains any particular one of the 1500 claims he considers stupid, a more particularized argument might be to identify the specific reference that he claims antedates the patent, and to point out that each and every limitation of the claim appears in that reference. Otherwise, he is simply spitting into the wind.
The Xerox patents predate the Intertrust ones and they describe the essentials you need. As for having to disprove each and every one of the 1500 claims before having standing to dispute Intertrust, that position is so stupid that you can only be a shill for them.
Filing claims says nothing about their validity. I don't believe for a minute that the USPTO examiner actually read them all before giving them the rubber stamp.
If you actually have a real invention you don't need 1500 claims. It is like Saddam's 12,000 page treatise on his weapons, if he wasn't up to no good he would not need to say so much.
Intertrust may have some valid claims, I doubt they are interesting ones. Their main obsession was with developing eight ways from Sunday to exploit the consumer. Under the InterTrust scheme they would sell the music track for $15, then charge another $20 for the video and have sidebars open up to cross sell the T shirt, the mug etc. There is a reason why the RIAA and MPAA showed them the door.
Anybody who takes on one of the world's largest corporations (with probably the most high-paid lawyers on its payroll) and attempts to shut down 85% of their product line is very courageous indeed
Oh yeah? When the suit was filed Intertrust had failed to bring its own product to market and precious little income from licensing deals.
Filing the lawsuit has very little downside for Intertrust and only upside. Even if the patents are invalidated during the case they have not lost much since nobody was licensing them in any case.
This is the same kind of 'courage' that is talked about when politicians send troops off to war. The risks taken by the men do not make the leader courageous. Whatever you argue about the 'courage' of the 9/11 suicide bombers, the guy who sent them was a rank coward who didn't even stay and fight.
There's nothing stupid about Intertrust's DRM designs
There is everything stupid about them. One of their 26 patents is 500 pages and lists clsoe to 1500 claims, or was it 2000? The text showed every sign of having been produced using an automated tool.
The field of DRM long predates Intertrust and their patents.
At this point the company is down to a bunch of lawyers and they have staked the entire company on the Microsoft suit. They don't have any engineering at this point, it is pure patent exploitation.
Re:ABOVE commercial traffic?
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Wi-Fi From The Sky
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Okay, so you cant use WiFi on a commercial flight because it has a possibility of jamming the aircraft's comms and tracking. Wonder what, if anything, will be the consequence of flying through medium-high (it has to have a bit of juice to reach 13 miles through clouds and whatnot, right?) intensity WiFi transmissions?
Absolutely nothing. The interference issue is way overblown, particularly for WiFi which uses the same frequency as the microwave ovens that are used regularly on board aircraft without problems.
If there really was an issue with interference in aircraft the amount of stray electromagnetic radiation bouncing arround airports would have brought down plenty of planes already.
It is possible to measure an effect on certain navigation gear in certain circumstances. But don't think that the regulations about not using RF devices have anything to do with making you safer, like the airport security they are there to 1) make you feel safe and 2) make it easier and more convenient for the cabin crew to prepare the aircraft for landing.
Equally the complaints from the military about their radar have more to do with justifying a new round of apending on military boondogles than security. If a WiFi card can really take out US radar then hope that Saddam hasn't been reading slashdot or he might try to block US radar with a couple of hundred unshielded industrial microwave ovens... Remember that these complaints come from the same folk that are claiming SDI is ready for deployment on the basis of a string of failed tests and despite the fact that their own assesors believe that any country with the ability to build a ballistic missile has easily enough capability to build in countermeasures
Re:Teergrubes are the answer
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ISP Chief on Spam
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I run a tarpit on my mail server.
This is a prime example of a half assed solution that causes more problems than it solves.
Teergrubbing is really easy to detect, the sender simply measures the rate at which a link is accepting data and if it is below a threshold shuts down the connection. So don't think this sort of attack hurts the spammers, it doesn't, they take countermeasures.
Instead the attack takes out legitimate senders whose emails are incorrectly identified by the teergrubbing algorithm. It is a classic example of a counter attack that creates more problems than it solves.
There are similar problems with the much touted blacklists, many of which have been involved in blacklisting for arbitrary reasons. The problem being that the people who end up running the lists (as opposed to starting them) often turn out to be pretty involved in their own control freakery.
There is no sure fire solution to spam, but there are plenty of systems that provide a useful degree of mitigation and in compbination provide a pretty solid solution.
At the trial or upon any hearing, a part or all of a deposition, so far as otherwise admissible under the rules of evidence, may be used as substantive evidence if the witness is unavailable, as unavailability is defined in Rule 804(a) of the Federal Rules of Evidence
AS I understand it Dimitry was present in person at the trial so the use of the videotape does not appear to be legit.
However Dimitry does not really have the right to complain here since the trial is not about witnesses being able to make their case. At the recent David Irving libel trial in London Irving asked a witness if he had seen a picture of Adolf Hitler in Irving's house as had been reported. The witness answered 'no' and afterwards wrote an article where he said he did not see a picture of Adolf Hitler but Irving had served capapes with cocktail sticks carrying a swastika.
Maybe I don't understand, how can you use a tape as a substitute for testimony? Doesn't seem right.
You can't use the tape as a substitute for testimony, but you can use it for evidence.
The bit I don't understand is why the defense would allow this without objection. It is not usual to accept a videotaped deposition if the person giving it is available to testify in person. A videotape does not give an opportunity for cross examination. The only explanation would be if the defense did not think that the tape hurt their case or if the judge made some bizare ruling.
Using a tape in this way would seem to be bad for the prosecution. The jury will inevitably suspect that there is a problem with the testimony if the proescution have to use that type of tactic.
Given the political nature of the trial and the reported intention of the FBI to 'take out a high profile hacker' I would not be suprised if some jury nullification was going on here. This is not like the Napster case where piracy was the issue, the real issue here was the ability of the consumer to have any control over the content they purchased. It does not take much intelligence to realize that the same technology applied to TV means that it won't be possible to use a VCR in future.
OK so Bush has practically no credibility in this area. Between Ashcroft's military tribunals and the blatant opportunism of the administration there is absolutely no reason to believe any assurances they might give, either on the scope of such a system or the uses they might make of it.
Even so it is important to think of the level in the administration that this type of proposal comes from. This looks to me like something that the spooks have had on their shopping list for years and are simply putting it on the agenda now they smell that the administration will let them.
The news on Haliburton this morning makes this the first administration ever in which the President and Vice President were invesigated by the SEC for stock frauds. As if having the first President with a criminal conviction was not enough! It also means that there will be even more strenuous efforts to change the subject to Iraq, even if that means starting a war.
One thing to get really worried about is the lengths that the spooks may go to get their way. Peter Wright's autobigography 'Spycatcher' describes some of the dirty tricks that MI5 used against Harold Wilson's government. Given the character of the people in charge you have to wonder what additional information the spooks might have that they could use as leverage to get their way. After all this is what J. Edgar Hoover did and his name is still on the FBI HQ.
I'm amazed at the amount of telemarketing that goes on in the US, for one Simple reason; it doesn't seem to happen AT ALL in the UK.
I have had junk calls in the UK, usually trying to sell double glazing.
My usual tactic was to tell them that no, we did not have double glazing but it could not be fitted to the building. After the idiot canvaser assured me it was possible I would tell her that she had called the underground pumping station for the water works.
Wow, I've never heard of FTP being used as a control protocol. Sure, HTTP might have been a bit much (although I doubt it. people have run webservers computers the size of matchheads
Having implemented FTP and HTTP I find the choice bizare but not suprising. There are a lot of people who incorrectly belive that FTP is more efficient than HTTP. If you do an actual packet trace there are practically no circumstances in which FTP is more efficient, and all the cases where FTP wins are contrived (padding out the headers etc.)
HTTP is simply a bunch of RFC822 headers on top of a raw TCP socket. FTP has two channels, a control channel layered on telnet - if you don't believe me go read the specs. Data has a separate channel. That means that you have two sets of stream setup and maintenance. If you have a large file the control channel acks continuously to keep itself alive.
I would not be worried so much by the inefficiency here as the unnecessary fragility over a lossy channel. Twice as many moving parts means twice the chance of failure.
Reusing FTP because it is twenty five years old does not seem to me to be a good strategy. FTP has not progressed in the time since. It was never designed to serve this use.
Electronic TV is an American invention (Philo T. Farnsworth); the British had a mechanical TV that was earlier, but, frankly, that was, like the vacuum tube computer, another technological dead end.
This just gets back to my point in the other thread, pretty much any industrial country can lay a claim to just about anything by choosing to recognise another invention as the 'critical step'.
Logie Baird's system was flawed, but the system that ran against it in the bakeoff was a corporate development designed by the BBC engineers. True they used ideas from many sources, but it is one thing to dispute the claim TV is an exclusive British invention and quite another to prove that the US deserves the attribution.
It isn't invention per se that is the cause of American technical leads, it is the economy. America is more productive in this area, so technology tends to get developed faster and put to use faster.
It is more the pay structures. Engineers get paid between two and three times as much in the US than in the UK - before stock options are considered. Imigration is realatively easy and so the US can suck in most of the top talent in various fields. Most educated people speak English and the US is relatively culture neutral so it is pretty easy to hire a top team and locate it in the US, much harder to do that in say Norway or France.
The other effect that has been somewhat ignored is that the Clinton boom coincided with the end of the cold war and the winding down and cutting back of military research efforts. I believe that the relative commercial failure of US industry from 1950 to 1990 was due in large part to the best brains being wasted on military aggrandisement. In the 90s companies suddenly had to invest in consumer oriented technology and the economy grew at a sustained 4%. Back in the UK it was generally thought that the Japanese and German economies had done well for the same reason, both countries relative decline dates back from the US waking up.
I'm surprised that Acacia actually seems to have the balls to go through with their threats to bring this to court. It would only take one ruling that the patent is overly broad and inapplicable to ruin their business plan forever.
We have not seen anything more than the demand letters so far.
Taking the case to court is going to be massively risky, but it seems very unlikely that all the victims will pay up.
There is pretty solid prior art. The Compuserve Gif format predates the patent by many years. The earliest browsers were pre-1991 and would display images by means of a pop-up window.
There were plenty of other hypertext systems that had the same basic mechanism in a non-networked sense. At its coarsest you could even argue that Prestel had a multimedia delivery system.
The internal combustion engine is usually attributed to Benz, a German. The american inventor was a patent fraud whose claim to have invented the engine was thrown out by the US courts in the Ford case.
the sowing machine
The first functional sewing machine was invented by the French tailor, Barthelemy Thimonnier, in 1830. There were about 6 previous patents for sewing machines of which the first US one came in at number 5...
electricity
Try Faraday, Royal Society, London
the light bulb
Swan invented the light bulb first and actually filed his patent first to boot. Edison only got a patent because at the time the USPTO did not recognise foreign inventions or prior art.
bar-b-que
I don't think you can count that since the Hawaiian islanders were having BBQ before the US was founded, before Westerners had discovered it even. I don't think you can count inventions aquired by conquest.
Well since that leaves you with only the atom bomb, the telephone, cotton gin and the laser I don't think you should. I'll disallow the Internet and the computer since the first computer design was British, the first practical computer was german (Konrad Zues Z1 and z2), the first electronic computer was british - the programmable enigma machines but was classified research, the Internet is not an invention it is an implementation of packet switching which was invented on both sides of the pond.
Actually the Manchester machine which was a direct descendent of the machines Turing built during the war was the first real computer.
- Who invented nuclear power?
I tend to think that the Canadians deserve rather more credit for actually designing CANDU a nuclear system that was fail safe in fact, rather than the light water design that was only fail safe by assertion leading to three mile island and Chernobyl.
- Who put human beings on the moon and then brought them back safely 6 times
Would have been more impressive if you had sent Strom Thurmond to the moon and left the racist biggot there together with his Klan friends rather than let his disciple be senate majority leader while delivering coded messages about his KKK sympathies through his great friends in the CCC he claims afterwards not to have met...
If we wanted to get nasty we could ask who invented seggregation, the dimpled chad, the corn dog, Enron/Harken/Haliburton accounting etc.
The problem with lists of 'firsts' is that they all depend on exactly when you decide to claim that the thing is done. Do you count the Internet (yea uncle sam!) or the Web (those plucky Europeans!) ? And the media in each country thoughtfully concentrates only on their local claims so the fact that most technologies are actually developed using research from many countries rather the architypal single lone inventor.
Invention says nothing about industrial application of technology. The UK has over the past 50 years invented tons of stuff that has only been made commercial in the US or Japan.
The more salient issue would be whether the US is going to actually be allowed to participate fully in life sciences which is likely to be the cutting edge of technology for some time. The way things look today between the idiotic patent laws and the idiot in the Whitehouse there are not that many people who give the US much of a chance in that field.
who thinks that this is a totally made up troll of a submittal?
I was thinking that if we don't know the company name after 00 odd posts then it must be a troll. The chances that there would be only one slashdotter working at a company whose CEO makes $60 big ones...
However, I now know what to get the staff for Xmas...
What did the CEO do that is so special that it creates his/her expectation of 6-figure salaries with use of company assets and a golden parachute regardless of the time of year
Where are you working? It is hardly unusual for a programmer to be paid over a hundred K.
Slashdot Mirror
Go tell that to the folks at symbolics, the price points are even the same. Oh and symbolics had their best year the year before they went under.
There is no high end in the computer business, never has been. The high end suppliers have always been killed by competition from below. That is what happened to SGI, you can go to Frys today and buy a $400 video card with a rendering engine that is more than adequate for most professional uses so why pay $30K for an SGI workstation?
Furthermore -- Where the hell do you think OS/X came from? They yanked the OS right from FreeBSD and put it on the PPC architecture.
Actually OS/X is NextStep which is the MACH kernel plus the original BSD distribution. 4% of the desktops is a heck of a lot more machines than 30% of the high end servers. If the desktops are so irrelevant then why the paranoia about Microsoft?
I get irate about this stuff; obviously. It amazes me that somebody that can actually use a keyboard would swallow anything less than a "thrash MS to death" mentality.
You don't say. Perhaps you should try an anger management class or a 'how to flame coherently on slashdot' course.
Because dotNET is what people had hoped to get from Java framework but didn't.
dotNET is language neutral. So I can take advantage of the framework from within my old FOTRAN or COBOL decks without having to rewrite them. Sun is on a religious trip with its 100% pure Java I would much prefer to use my old codes without having to have someone rewrite them.
dotNET also eliminates the performance penalty that is inevitable with the bytecode approach. Java has switched to JIT techniques because it is the only way to get acceptable performance, but if you are going to do JIT you will do a lot better if you use a code optimized for JIT rather than a code optimized for an interpreter.
There was absolutely nothing in either Java or dotNet that was not well understood in the language research community. C# and Java are nice packaging jobs, nothing more. C# packs in a bunch more features and has the advantages of 5 years extra experience and much less dogma.
The report you cite does not mention either Apple or Linux. They are the two factors I identified as threatening Sun's position. Apple shipped more UNIX machine last quarter than all the other proprietarty suppliers combined.
So weird of an idea that it scared the crap out of MS, the whole make the ... yack yack
Self serving bullshit. Java died on the client because creating content as Java applets makes no sense. There are not that many Active X components either. Take out the flash component and the certificate enrollment plugin and you are left with a bunch of stock ticker applets.
Most rabid MS supporters want to ignore that MS was found to be a monopoly [internetnews.com] in Jude Jackson's findings of fact.
And rabid anti-Microsoft types completely ignore the fact that Jackson was found to have been biased by the appeals court who censured him for his conduct. They also stated that his 'findings of fact' contained many opinions that they are not bound by. So no, Jackson's findings of fact do not stand except in the most technical sense. The appeals court is certainly not going to reverse a lower court that rejects Jackson's opinions and has much more lattitude if it decides to reverse a court that depends on them without hearing evidence on an issue.
The monopoly finding by the appeals court does not rest on Jackson's opinion, they simply applied their own judgement to the evidence.
This whole Sun/Microsoft thing is a false dichotemy. You don't have to like the Democrats to loathe the Republicans. McNeally and Ellison are only upset at Microsoft for one reason alone and their complaints about Microsoft are largely projection.
Ellison is the guy whose company scammed $90 million out of the state of California and whose yatch cheated in the Americas cup by using a banned radar. OK so the other side was found to have cheated too, but a rational person says that both OneWorld and Oracle were cheating rather than saying that OneWorld cheated worse so anything Oracle did was OK.
Sun is saying lots of things, that does not make them true.
Sun is the DEC of the 2000s. Its hardware business is stagnant and its software business has no real connection to the hardware. They are under attack from Open Source and from IBM. They are likely to face a very stiff challenge from Apple. However they spend 65% of their time whining about Microsoft.
The guys at Redmond are laughing their asses off at Sun. They are winning the battle and losing the war.
OEMs already have the right under the federal settlement to add Java if they chose. They also have the right under the same settlementto remove components they don't want to ship. What do you think the probability is that Dell and HP will choose to ship the Sun code? They don't think any more of Sun than Microsoft does, they are competitors in the hardware business and the sooner Sun dies the better as far as they are concerned.
I doubt that it will come to that as Microsoft will certainly appeal and the chances of blocking the temporary injunction are pretty good, they can win simply by spinning out the appeal.
Java on the client is a pretty wierd idea. Very few sites have ever used Java. I don't think we will suddenly see a rush to switch from flash to Java on the basis that Microsoft will be shipping the latest version for the next year.
The judgement has no effect on server side java. If you are going to do java on the server you are big enough to load it youself.
So where exactly does this rulling have any effect - except on the size of Scott's ego.
The Sun lawsuit is simply a way for a failed management team to cover up their mistakes while they make good on their exit strategy. They will survive as is for maybe a year or so but in the long term they are going to be bought by IBM once their market cap has settled to a more reasonable level.
I don't think this is going to last long for a variety of reasons. IANAL but, heck this is slashy
First a preliminary injunction is subject to a number of tests, Sun has to have a better than even chance of winning the case, refusing the injunction would have to cause more harm than granting it might and so on.
I don't think the claim that sun are harmed holds water. It was their previous action that caused Microsoft to stop shipping the Java VM.
Microsoft have a very strong case that Sun suffers no harm if the status quo continues and that they would suffer substantial harm. Java is active code and active code has historically been subject to lots of security risks - including Java.
Secondly, I don't think that the judge's mention of Tonya Harding helps. The statements create an impression of bias. Equally the statements appear to go way beyond the issues that should be considered where a preliminary injunction are concerned and tend to indicate that the judge has formed a judgement before the hearing...
I don't have much sympathy for Sun here. It may be the US way for failing companies to go to the government or courts to try to win there what they failled to win in the market but it didn;t do Netscape any good. Scott is driving sun into the ground with his Microsoft obsession, the competition that will erase Sun completely comes from Linux and Apple. I am not an Apple fan but they are the worlds largest UNIX vendor by far, they have a solid O/S and if they can only get a powerful processor they can clean up the market for closed source Unix.
There is certainly corruption in most countries. However there is a major difference between individual peculation and institutional corruption which is what we have in the US.
To get a legislative bill through the UK parliament you have to have the support of the government party. All members interests have to be declared in advance and it is a criminal breach of the rules to offer any sort of bribe to advance legislation. The corruption that brought the Conservative party down was very minor, involving asking questions for cash and lobbying for citizenship applications.
There is no way that you could get the corrupt Eli-Lilly exception that Bill Frist patriotically attached to the Homeland Security bill. There is no way that the government can claim ignorance of what is passed. Corruption of the Bill Frist type only survives because the Senate rules allow business to be conducted in secret. Go take a look at the UK Hansard web site, anyone can see the exact progress of any bill at any time. MPs go to the Web site to find what is going on.
Rather than change the constitution as you propose I think that it would suffice to change the rules of the senate. In particular no ammendment to be allows to any bill without a written mover and seconder. All business to be announced on the Congressional Web site.
The Democrats if they were smart would run the type of campaign that Gingrich ran, only instead of the citizens bill of rights make transparency of the congressional process the issue. Heck, Newt might even lend support since he is rally pissed off at what the party did to him. He thought they believed in what he did, he now realises he was wrong.
There is no reason why transparency should diminish the power of the Senate. In fact I am trying to convince folk that the only long term way to address the judiciary problem is to increase the threshold for confirmation to 60 votes. The reason for this is simple if you do game theory. At present a President has the effective power to stack the judiciary one way or the other if he can get a pliant congress. So as a result the parties and in particular the GOP have recently been trying to delay appointments until they have sufficient control to install idealogues. If the rules mandate a supermajority in perpetuity the President is forced to be reasonable and so is the Senate since there is nothing to be gained through delay.
It is somewhat a mark of the polarization of this issue that a comment like that gets moderated as Troll.
Of course the issue for the EU parliaments is protecting property. Don't project from the corruption of the US Congress where this issue is decided with multi-million dollar bribes make you think that all countries are like that. The US is an aberation in that regard. While campaign contributions occasionally influence policies in Europe the blatant influence peddling simply does not exist. Politicians do not collect campaign contributions directly, their parties do. That makes a big difference on issues of this sort.
Reading the story I have to think that it was created by the BSA. The statements made simply do not add up.
It seems very unlikely that the EU council of ministers would issue a directive in April requiring legislative action by the end of the year. National parliaments are not merely a rubber stamp for EU directives, no matter how hard the BSA tries to make that claim. None of the European parliaments work at that pace. Legislation in the UK typically takes a minimum of two years and the legislative year starts in the autum. Time in the legislative calendar is very scarce and the idea that the government would allow Brussels to direct it to prioritize an IP bill is somewhat interesting.
This is just a story created by a self important industry association as a way of trying to keep an issue alive. They probably realise that the tide is starting to run against them and that unless they get their way soon they will have to make concessions and may not get their way at all.
Not if Microsoft was really successful in killing flash completely.
I want someone to write a dummy flash plug in that does absolutely nothing, apart from stop the stupid 'do you want to download the latest Meglomedia Flash crud plug in and have adverts that take over your entire computer screen just because they can, oh and if you say no we will ask again in 30 seconds or less' dialog box.
You got an expensive doorstop there.
I couldn't get Tombraider Chronicles to run on my Voodoo 3, so I don't think it is very likely you are going to find Direct X 9 support from anywhere. OK you might get something to run, but you can be certain Lara hasn't tested it.
However, if you could afford one of the cutting edge 3dfx cards when they were new you can certainly afford a replacement nvidia board of the same vintage, they have them at frys for $50. OK so they won't run as fast as the latest GForce but neither would the Voodoo.
Incidentally, I discovered that the chronic unreliability problem of my '98 machine went away as soon as I swapped out the voodoo for a GForce...
The Xerox patents predate the Intertrust ones and they describe the essentials you need. As for having to disprove each and every one of the 1500 claims before having standing to dispute Intertrust, that position is so stupid that you can only be a shill for them.
Filing claims says nothing about their validity. I don't believe for a minute that the USPTO examiner actually read them all before giving them the rubber stamp.
If you actually have a real invention you don't need 1500 claims. It is like Saddam's 12,000 page treatise on his weapons, if he wasn't up to no good he would not need to say so much.
Intertrust may have some valid claims, I doubt they are interesting ones. Their main obsession was with developing eight ways from Sunday to exploit the consumer. Under the InterTrust scheme they would sell the music track for $15, then charge another $20 for the video and have sidebars open up to cross sell the T shirt, the mug etc. There is a reason why the RIAA and MPAA showed them the door.
Filing the lawsuit has very little downside for Intertrust and only upside. Even if the patents are invalidated during the case they have not lost much since nobody was licensing them in any case.
This is the same kind of 'courage' that is talked about when politicians send troops off to war. The risks taken by the men do not make the leader courageous. Whatever you argue about the 'courage' of the 9/11 suicide bombers, the guy who sent them was a rank coward who didn't even stay and fight.
There is everything stupid about them. One of their 26 patents is 500 pages and lists clsoe to 1500 claims, or was it 2000? The text showed every sign of having been produced using an automated tool.
The field of DRM long predates Intertrust and their patents.
At this point the company is down to a bunch of lawyers and they have staked the entire company on the Microsoft suit. They don't have any engineering at this point, it is pure patent exploitation.
Absolutely nothing. The interference issue is way overblown, particularly for WiFi which uses the same frequency as the microwave ovens that are used regularly on board aircraft without problems.
If there really was an issue with interference in aircraft the amount of stray electromagnetic radiation bouncing arround airports would have brought down plenty of planes already.
It is possible to measure an effect on certain navigation gear in certain circumstances. But don't think that the regulations about not using RF devices have anything to do with making you safer, like the airport security they are there to 1) make you feel safe and 2) make it easier and more convenient for the cabin crew to prepare the aircraft for landing.
Equally the complaints from the military about their radar have more to do with justifying a new round of apending on military boondogles than security. If a WiFi card can really take out US radar then hope that Saddam hasn't been reading slashdot or he might try to block US radar with a couple of hundred unshielded industrial microwave ovens... Remember that these complaints come from the same folk that are claiming SDI is ready for deployment on the basis of a string of failed tests and despite the fact that their own assesors believe that any country with the ability to build a ballistic missile has easily enough capability to build in countermeasures
This is a prime example of a half assed solution that causes more problems than it solves.
Teergrubbing is really easy to detect, the sender simply measures the rate at which a link is accepting data and if it is below a threshold shuts down the connection. So don't think this sort of attack hurts the spammers, it doesn't, they take countermeasures.
Instead the attack takes out legitimate senders whose emails are incorrectly identified by the teergrubbing algorithm. It is a classic example of a counter attack that creates more problems than it solves.
There are similar problems with the much touted blacklists, many of which have been involved in blacklisting for arbitrary reasons. The problem being that the people who end up running the lists (as opposed to starting them) often turn out to be pretty involved in their own control freakery.
There is no sure fire solution to spam, but there are plenty of systems that provide a useful degree of mitigation and in compbination provide a pretty solid solution.
AS I understand it Dimitry was present in person at the trial so the use of the videotape does not appear to be legit.
However Dimitry does not really have the right to complain here since the trial is not about witnesses being able to make their case. At the recent David Irving libel trial in London Irving asked a witness if he had seen a picture of Adolf Hitler in Irving's house as had been reported. The witness answered 'no' and afterwards wrote an article where he said he did not see a picture of Adolf Hitler but Irving had served capapes with cocktail sticks carrying a swastika.
You can't use the tape as a substitute for testimony, but you can use it for evidence.
The bit I don't understand is why the defense would allow this without objection. It is not usual to accept a videotaped deposition if the person giving it is available to testify in person. A videotape does not give an opportunity for cross examination. The only explanation would be if the defense did not think that the tape hurt their case or if the judge made some bizare ruling.
Using a tape in this way would seem to be bad for the prosecution. The jury will inevitably suspect that there is a problem with the testimony if the proescution have to use that type of tactic.
Given the political nature of the trial and the reported intention of the FBI to 'take out a high profile hacker' I would not be suprised if some jury nullification was going on here. This is not like the Napster case where piracy was the issue, the real issue here was the ability of the consumer to have any control over the content they purchased. It does not take much intelligence to realize that the same technology applied to TV means that it won't be possible to use a VCR in future.
Even so it is important to think of the level in the administration that this type of proposal comes from. This looks to me like something that the spooks have had on their shopping list for years and are simply putting it on the agenda now they smell that the administration will let them.
The news on Haliburton this morning makes this the first administration ever in which the President and Vice President were invesigated by the SEC for stock frauds. As if having the first President with a criminal conviction was not enough! It also means that there will be even more strenuous efforts to change the subject to Iraq, even if that means starting a war.
One thing to get really worried about is the lengths that the spooks may go to get their way. Peter Wright's autobigography 'Spycatcher' describes some of the dirty tricks that MI5 used against Harold Wilson's government. Given the character of the people in charge you have to wonder what additional information the spooks might have that they could use as leverage to get their way. After all this is what J. Edgar Hoover did and his name is still on the FBI HQ.
I have had junk calls in the UK, usually trying to sell double glazing.
My usual tactic was to tell them that no, we did not have double glazing but it could not be fitted to the building. After the idiot canvaser assured me it was possible I would tell her that she had called the underground pumping station for the water works.
Having implemented FTP and HTTP I find the choice bizare but not suprising. There are a lot of people who incorrectly belive that FTP is more efficient than HTTP. If you do an actual packet trace there are practically no circumstances in which FTP is more efficient, and all the cases where FTP wins are contrived (padding out the headers etc.)
HTTP is simply a bunch of RFC822 headers on top of a raw TCP socket. FTP has two channels, a control channel layered on telnet - if you don't believe me go read the specs. Data has a separate channel. That means that you have two sets of stream setup and maintenance. If you have a large file the control channel acks continuously to keep itself alive.
I would not be worried so much by the inefficiency here as the unnecessary fragility over a lossy channel. Twice as many moving parts means twice the chance of failure.
Reusing FTP because it is twenty five years old does not seem to me to be a good strategy. FTP has not progressed in the time since. It was never designed to serve this use.
This just gets back to my point in the other thread, pretty much any industrial country can lay a claim to just about anything by choosing to recognise another invention as the 'critical step'.
Logie Baird's system was flawed, but the system that ran against it in the bakeoff was a corporate development designed by the BBC engineers. True they used ideas from many sources, but it is one thing to dispute the claim TV is an exclusive British invention and quite another to prove that the US deserves the attribution.
It isn't invention per se that is the cause of American technical leads, it is the economy. America is more productive in this area, so technology tends to get developed faster and put to use faster.
It is more the pay structures. Engineers get paid between two and three times as much in the US than in the UK - before stock options are considered. Imigration is realatively easy and so the US can suck in most of the top talent in various fields. Most educated people speak English and the US is relatively culture neutral so it is pretty easy to hire a top team and locate it in the US, much harder to do that in say Norway or France.
The other effect that has been somewhat ignored is that the Clinton boom coincided with the end of the cold war and the winding down and cutting back of military research efforts. I believe that the relative commercial failure of US industry from 1950 to 1990 was due in large part to the best brains being wasted on military aggrandisement. In the 90s companies suddenly had to invest in consumer oriented technology and the economy grew at a sustained 4%. Back in the UK it was generally thought that the Japanese and German economies had done well for the same reason, both countries relative decline dates back from the US waking up.
We have not seen anything more than the demand letters so far.
Taking the case to court is going to be massively risky, but it seems very unlikely that all the victims will pay up.
There is pretty solid prior art. The Compuserve Gif format predates the patent by many years. The earliest browsers were pre-1991 and would display images by means of a pop-up window.
There were plenty of other hypertext systems that had the same basic mechanism in a non-networked sense. At its coarsest you could even argue that Prestel had a multimedia delivery system.
The internal combustion engine is usually attributed to Benz, a German. The american inventor was a patent fraud whose claim to have invented the engine was thrown out by the US courts in the Ford case.
the sowing machine
The first functional sewing machine was invented by the French tailor, Barthelemy Thimonnier, in 1830. There were about 6 previous patents for sewing machines of which the first US one came in at number 5...
electricity
Try Faraday, Royal Society, London
the light bulb
Swan invented the light bulb first and actually filed his patent first to boot. Edison only got a patent because at the time the USPTO did not recognise foreign inventions or prior art.
bar-b-que
I don't think you can count that since the Hawaiian islanders were having BBQ before the US was founded, before Westerners had discovered it even. I don't think you can count inventions aquired by conquest.
the vaccine
"In 1796 English country doctor Edward Jenner found that if a small amount of material was taken from a cow suffering from cowpox and injected into a healthy human child, that child would become immune to smallpox. " - incidentally the term vaccine comes from the Latin for cows.
Should I continue?
Well since that leaves you with only the atom bomb, the telephone, cotton gin and the laser I don't think you should. I'll disallow the Internet and the computer since the first computer design was British, the first practical computer was german (Konrad Zues Z1 and z2), the first electronic computer was british - the programmable enigma machines but was classified research, the Internet is not an invention it is an implementation of packet switching which was invented on both sides of the pond.
Who invented the first semiconductor device?
- Who started the computer industry?
Actually the Manchester machine which was a direct descendent of the machines Turing built during the war was the first real computer.
- Who invented nuclear power?
I tend to think that the Canadians deserve rather more credit for actually designing CANDU a nuclear system that was fail safe in fact, rather than the light water design that was only fail safe by assertion leading to three mile island and Chernobyl.
- Who put human beings on the moon and then brought them back safely 6 times
Would have been more impressive if you had sent Strom Thurmond to the moon and left the racist biggot there together with his Klan friends rather than let his disciple be senate majority leader while delivering coded messages about his KKK sympathies through his great friends in the CCC he claims afterwards not to have met...
If we wanted to get nasty we could ask who invented seggregation, the dimpled chad, the corn dog, Enron/Harken/Haliburton accounting etc.
The problem with lists of 'firsts' is that they all depend on exactly when you decide to claim that the thing is done. Do you count the Internet (yea uncle sam!) or the Web (those plucky Europeans!) ? And the media in each country thoughtfully concentrates only on their local claims so the fact that most technologies are actually developed using research from many countries rather the architypal single lone inventor.
Invention says nothing about industrial application of technology. The UK has over the past 50 years invented tons of stuff that has only been made commercial in the US or Japan.
The more salient issue would be whether the US is going to actually be allowed to participate fully in life sciences which is likely to be the cutting edge of technology for some time. The way things look today between the idiotic patent laws and the idiot in the Whitehouse there are not that many people who give the US much of a chance in that field.
I was thinking that if we don't know the company name after 00 odd posts then it must be a troll. The chances that there would be only one slashdotter working at a company whose CEO makes $60 big ones...
However, I now know what to get the staff for Xmas...
Where are you working? It is hardly unusual for a programmer to be paid over a hundred K.
Oh you meant seven figures perhaps???