This is MS, when is the last time you saw them sue someone? they very rarely sue
MS are known for aggressively going after software pirates. However they do not habitually go in for some of the stoopid lawsuits beloved by other CEOs, possibly because they are often the subject of stoopid suits themselves.
In particular I don't think that MS is likely to start behaving like the SDMI consortium. Hack our code! - oh wait we will sue you if you publish the results! - oh wait it is not a good idea to threaten lawsuits against crypto profs! - please can we withdraw? what we can't get the suit dismissed?
Everyone in the DRM industry knows that every scheme is breakable. Long before the recording industry started to get hurt, software piracy cost the software industry megabucks.
If enough people will pay $1000 for a copy of MS Exchange rather than go to the inconvenience of ripping it off for MS to make the profits it does there will be enough people who purchase CDs for $12 rather than rip it off for the record labels to be profitable.
I don't need another watch. I used to be a consultant so I have one of those watches designed for the express purpose of indicating to the potential customer that they should not expect your fees to be inexpensive. This watch would tell the client 'hey you can buy him off with some cheap geek toys'.
I could use a pen however, something pen shaped would be much easier to use unobtrusively.
It also really needs to have a much better resolution. 180x160 really does not cut it. 480x360 is a heck of a lot better.
Someone just pointed out to me that I can't wear a Casio watch after signing with Rolex to endorse their product (no not even in strip clubs).
So that begs the question, how long before those swiss folk come up with a mechanical version of this dohickey?
Don't laugh! They already have a watch with a mechanical adding machine in the works. All they need to do is to get some of that Logie Baird mechano-analogue TV system implemented.
Gregg backed off his proposal after the Bush administration told him they had no intention of supporting him. A major reason for their position is the amount of political capital the Clinton administration spent on the scheme unsuccessfully.
Behind the scenes a major reason for the change is the considerable change in the standing of Freeh amongst Congress and in particular the GOP. When Freeh was supporting the GOP in their impeachment machinations he was flavor of the month. Since then there have been more and more questions about his effectiveness.
There are several in Congress who will behind closed doors blame Freeh for spending effort on his encryption obsession he should have spent stopping the 9/11 attacks. Even before 9/11 there were many complaints about FBI competence. The witholding of evidence in the Oaklahoma City bomb trials, the Wen Ho Lee incident, renewed questions about Ruby Ridge etc.
With Freeh gone and Mueller now in charge it is very unlikely he would want to resurect a crusade that is strongly associated with a successor now widely considered to have been a failure.
I was in a patent meeting when we were discussing filling a bunch of patents so that we would have amunition to fire back should some company come and fire at usthe patents that they orginialy filed for the same reason.
The reason I don't like doing that sort of thing is that besides being essentially fraudulent the fact is that no company has prospered long on the basis of a patent portfolio alone. Polaroid and Xerox are two prime examples of the long term effect of management thinking they have a monopoly in their market.
I never heard that Internet time had a 'beat'. I thought it was the ludicrous notion that things took less time in the Internet world. Like I have been doing Web stuff for ten years now. It is still like watching paint dry to see things gegt finished. It took us what? six years to get HTTP 1.1 to RFC.
Push was equaly clueless, make the Web look like the TV, only it won't because there isn't really the bandwidth. People prefer the Web to TV because it is interactive. Interactive means pull, not push. The suits loved push because what they really wanted to do was bombard people with ads and to make the new media look more like the old media they understood.
Voice over IP on the other hand has a real purpose. The current generation is pretty clunky. A modem simply ain't ever going to cut it. But if you have a T1 pipe into your building you can probably send most of your voice data over it without noticeable loss of quality and at zero marginal cost per call.
The real problem with VoIP is the need to connect to the old telco system this is what ENUM is all about.
VoIP on its own is just an arbitrage play. The real value comes from being able to go multi-media so you get voice, video, powerpoint etc. in the same feed, seemlessly integrated with your email messaging system.
Portals were not a bad idea. They have a function. The clueless part was the idea that the portals would be able to extract extortionate monopoly rents from their position. If that was the case the yellow pages would really clean up big, which they do to an extent.
The trully clueless concept I would add to the list is Priceline. At one point the market cap of Priceline was greater than that of all the airlines in the US and Europe combined.
My theory is that fads become big because they tap into some pre-existing ideology that makes the believers in the ideology go 'ahaaaaa' and the rest of us go 'so what?'. So the e-tail fad was driven by the people that think that advertising and taking orders is the major cost of mail order (rather than packaging, shiping and carrying costs for the inventory). The Web would eliminate the costs of mail order Yahooo!.
Push played to the predjudices of self appointed 'mejah' experts'. Internet time to the conceits of the journalists pushing the meme. Portals played to the prejudices of those who thought that they had worked out how to corner the market in cyberspace. Priceline played to the predjudices of people who believe that the only thing that matters is price and the free market is the absolute good.
In each case the fad is ancilliary to the ideology that supports it. The fad is explained to the masses as a means of converting them to the core ideology.
It's lyrics from a song for chrissakes (Cannibal Corpse-Fucked with a Knife on 'The Bleeding' album)... it's a fucking JOKE.
If you think rape is a joke then expect to get modded down.
I think you are unlikely to be quite so clueless. More likely you are trolling.
The mod system is not censorship, it is an evaluation system. The readers of slashdot are telling you that they consider your opinions to be worthless. They are not stopping you airing them.
If I saw someone post something with a sig like "fuck all niggers... hang a nigger from a tree for me" I would most likely interpret it as a joke or whatever...
The vast majority of people posting such views do not consider them to be a joke, they believe in racism, they just don't want to be bothered to defend their views so they call them 'jokes' when it suits.
If he had something insightfull to add, on topic, modding him down because you dont like his sig is small and misguided, also its abuse of the mod system.
The guy asked why folk were modding him down, the post didn't appear to be the reason, the flamebait.sig did. Hey the guy asked why people were modding him down, I thought I would give him a clue.
Sounds like whoever moderated made a reasonable use of the mod system to me. The.sig makes him sound like some sort of psycho-rapist.
Odd ting about people who rail against 'PC' thought is how often they turn out to really be out an out racists or chauvanist pigs whose real complaint is that society today considers their ideas to be repulsive. If you have to have a sig that appears to promote rape then expect to get modded down plenty.
What reason could you possibly have had for modding me down? If I squint really hard I can maybe make out a reason for modding me offtopic... but troll? Isn't this a legitimate question?
Change your.sig to something that doesn't make you appear to be a demented psycho. If my mod points hadn't expired a few hours ago I'd have modded you down as well.
Each time I have moved into a new house we have had serious trouble with some credit beureux calling up for the previous user of the line. I used to think that this was simply because we had by chance been assigned numbers that had been used by deadbeats.
Then I made the mistake of buying a washing machine from Best Buy on its 'interest free credit'. The scumbag finance company deliberately credited the final payment to the account late so they could claim a huge interest penalty. I pointed out that NACHA credits take hours to clear, not 10 days. We had the scumbags calling up every day for months trying to get us to pay $650 that was definitely not owed.
Interesting fact was that sending the original finance co a cease and desist had no effect. When they put the alleged debt out to a third party collection agency they stopped calling almost imediately they recieved my cease and desist.
It seems that a lot of Americans just pay up when faced with this type of fraud - which is why the stores can offer 'no interest' credit I guess. If you need credit (which I don't) then they can get you blacklisted with Equifax or TRW. In Europe the directors of the companies concerned would be sitting in jail, in the US they purchase legislation.
I have spent the last four years of my life implementing the dialing systems that instead of bothering you with an operator during dinner, hung up on you because our only goal was to leave spam on your answering machine!
You utter bastard.
I think I'll set my PROCMAIL filters to send all the SPAM to jawatts@pacbell.net.
The problem with PGP is that it only solved the Privacy problem well. The Web of Trust concept is not intended to support the establishment of the real world identity of the individual signing a message in a legally binding manner.
That is the problem that F500 enterprises have really been interested in spending money to solve. If you can solve that problem you can then go on to deploy a whole rack of true e-commerce systems.
That is why the vast majority of corporate spending has been on certificate based email security systems.
There are still crypto companies making good money but times are tough. Over the past five years a lot of enterprises bought a lot of software they never deployed. As a result a lot of IT depts are being told to deploy their 'shelfware' before they buy more stuff. The software product model is definitely not doing well, buying software as a service on the other hand is doing very well.
Companies that sell 'plug ins' have been doing worst of all. Plug-ins have a pretty bad record in the enterprise space. They tend to cost as much as and often more than the applications they plug-into and tend to be a pain to manage with version number incompatibilities, configuration glitches and other issues that are annoying if its just one slashdot reader but a help desk catastrophe if you have several thousand clueless users to support.
And she was a film student, no doubt, learning how to properly work with film; an entirely different matter than video.
In which case she was probably going to be outta luck. The cinema has been headed digital for both production and distribution for years. While there is some purpose to learning the old technology nobody uses super 8 film for quality purposes.
The market for professional film is nowhere near big enough to support a company the size of Polaroid. The Professional and serious amateur market for film is negligible compared to the market for holiday snaps. Polaroid's share of the professional market was much smaller proportionately than that of Kodak or Fuji. For a start you have to use a medium or large format camera.
The only part of the professional market that uses film in quantities big enough to support major corporations has been movies. A movie camera eats 12 35 mm snaps worth of film a second. To make an hour of movie takes ten hours (at least) of film stock.
The shift at the moment is on the production side. Digital editing has been arround for some time. Directors like Lucas have been moving towards shooting with digital cameras. While some directors will stick with film for years the bulk of the market will go digital. Remember that a bad movie takes as much film stock to shoot it as an art house flick. The transition will be complete in three to five years time when low cost digital projectors become available. The $10K cost of striking a print is what keeps many makers of celluloid film in business.
There will always be people who have to bore us with the reasons why celluloid was better. Just as there are still bores who will explain at inordinate length why vinyl is better than CD or why gas light is much better than electricity.
Recently I talked to an audiophile type who went on for hours about the spiffy new CD player he had bought for several thousand dollars which allegedly had a precision made drive that rotated the CD at exactly the 'right' rate. As if the circuitry feeding the D2A converter would be affected by the rate at which the input buffer was filled.
The fact is that within a couple more generations the top end digital cameras will outstrip the resolution of 35 mm film. There are also interesting possibilities for configuring digital film that are impossible with analog, logarithmic response to light for example giving a much greater dynamic range than the 100:1 that is possible with film.
Some celluloid use will continue, but it will be a minority even amongst the professional market.
Could we have slightly less sun propaganda?
on
J#
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
Hey folk, before prostrating ourselves at the shrine of Sun's 'open standard' remember that Sun has exclusive control over the future of that language.
The whole Java thing was more in Sun's interest than the developers from the start. In return for a somewhat better objective extension of C than C++ you wrote your code so it would run on Sun hardware as well as Intel and it would run at a tenth the speed on both. JIT compilers closed the gap somewhat but there is still a major performance penalty. A good C coder will write faster code than a good java coder.
The 100% pure stuff is ridiculous. If I am writing a program to run on Windows I want to make use of the extensive APIs. I want the program to look and feel like a windows program, and definitely not like a Java applet.
Sure platform independence is a good thing, but it should not be forced. Sun's little tantrum was about preventing people writing the programs they wanted to in 'their' language. So Microsoft have invented their own. I don't give a hoot about running on Solaris, Linux and NT are the only platforms I can be confident will be mainstream in 5 years time. Sun will go the way of the rest of the *nix hardware vendors in the end. (and blame their bad management on Gates to the end).
There is not a great deal of innovation in C#, but there wasn't much in Java either. The big step forward in both comes from junking bits of C that were really bad ideas.
There are a number of features of C# that make it much better to write programs for manipulating XML etc. than Java. If I did not anticipate ever wanting to port to another platform (and did not think C# for linux would arrive) I might use J#.
In the meantime J# means that you can still use Java to teach intro to programming.
You should learn some history. Apple ripped off the Xerox GUI technology when it rolled out first the Lisa then the Mac.
Then when Microsoft, Atari and others tried to bring out their copies of the Xerox desktopo Apple sued them claiming that they 'owned' the GUI metaphor.
Apple drove Atari into bankrupcy. The Atari O/S was better than any Apple produced until release X last year. They had true pre-emtive multi-tasking with protected memory working.
Apple also sued Microsoft which is what I was refering to. Microsoft refused to submit to blackmail. The suit was settled as part of the Microsoft rescue package when Jobs took over.
The Apple management believed that they didn't need to invest in the MacOS because they owned the desktop metaphor. They wasted their R&D on whizzy projects like the Newton and Dylan thinking they could eliminate the competition to their cash cow in the law courts.
While this must be true, any things that he was running for will now have some greater attention from the Democratic Party next time.
The exact opposite has happened. Nader has caused the Democrats to move away from the green party position.
The Dems are not going to respond to Nader by moving to the left to pick up part of the 3% of the vote he won. They are going to move further to the right to pick up votes in the center.
Nader's attack claiming that there was no difference between Bush and Gore devalued the Democrats lead on environmental issues. At the next election Gore (and it will be him since no other Dem will run against Bush now) will be running against broken campaign pledges on the environment.
Nader's campaign was really not about the 'environment', his real issue was a barely articulated anti-corporativism that tied in with 'anti-globalism'. The Dems can't move in that direction because it is an ideology of opposition. Nader has nothing practical to replace the thing he attacks. He doesn't need to because he knows he won't be president. The Dems cannot adopt Nader's anti-capitalism without proposing an alternative.
Unfortunately Love and the rest of the Naderite faction have pretty much destroyed any influence they might have had. The GOP's sole objective is furthering the corporate interest. Nader cost the Democrats the Whitehouse.
As a result it isn't too surprising that Love isn't spending much time on Capitol Hill. He doesn't have a constituency there.
Love's slam of Microsoft on the patent front is somewhat unfair. Unlike Apple, Sun, Rambus, Entrust etc. Microsoft is one of the few major computing companies that has played the IP game with a straight cue. (That is not to say they have played every game with a straight cue). But Microsoft has not sued to prevent others using the Xerox windows GUI as apple did, sued to prevent extension of an 'open' language standard as Sun did, or steer standards bodies towards a technique they owned an undisclosed patent on.
After the 9/11 attack it is unlikely that there will be a great deal of political capital that the US can expend to further extend its idea of Intelectual Property and errect more barbed wire accross the plains.
The new jounal is being hosted by the AI lab at MIT. The bandwidth cost will be insignificant compared to the cost of buying just one journal for the AI lab library. The internal charge was something like $40 a month per machine for the non Tech Sq. parts of MIT. AI just paid a fixed amount and maintained its own machines.
When I was there we were publishing all Clinton's press releases out of the AI lab before they moved the publications system down to the Whitehouse. The biggest bandwidth hog though was the 'Stockmaster' hack that took on a life of its own and eventually spun out as a business.
The whole point of the AI lab is to work on projects of that sort. The more interesting question is how the funding model is to be scalled to more journals.
What is needed is a repository that can provide a guarantee of persistence. This would need to be maintained at multiple sites with disaster recovery etc.
Ultimately the world copyright libraries will step into this role, the Library of Congress, British Library, Oxford, Cambridge etc. The cost of running servers to deliver several thousand journals would be no more than a few million a year. That is much less than is currently spent on journals.
The other part of the puzzle is finding the money to fund the publication process. However the editors generally give their time for free today and what admin support the publishers provide tends to be focused on the printing and distribution side of the process.
It is even quite likely that there will be commercial sponsorship available. The naming rights for such a journal repository would be quite valuable.
For the past ten (fifteen?) years RMS has been living in his office at 545 Tech Square. The most appropriate term to describe him is a techno-hippy.
I did not make the claim that RMS's position on paying for software was consistent, far from it. So identification of an inconsistency between
RMS's behavior and his theology does not contradict my argument. My point is that RMS is an absolutist and his opposition to any attempt to compromise with reality on the issue can be taken as inevitable.
On the open license front, we have put significant IP into the public domain recently. As for licensing our patents, the problem there is that the license you suggest is not compatible with Royalty Free.
Good. All the more reason to keep it out of standards.
The consequence of that approach is worse, proprietary control of the content distribution chain.
In Europe Murdoch's Sky TV gained a stranglehold on the satelite TV market through control of the ViaCrypt DRM system.
Murdoch's politics are to support whatever party will suit his financial interests. In Australia he is a Socialist, in the US a screaming conservative. In the UK his support for the Conservative party was probably decisive in their winning the 1992 election 'it was the sun wot won it' one of his tabloids cried. Now Murdoch supports the Labour party but is trying to resist UK entry into the Euro. Like an Australian should be deciding UK monetary policy.
If there is a proprietary DRM system controlled by the record labels their control over artists will be reinforced instead of abolished.
There are many problems with patents, and with US patents in particular
You can't ever know if an idea is the subject of a USPTO patent application
In every other civilized country you can tell if a patent has been applied for on an invention. In the US the PTO encourages patent ambushes. The 'inventor' applies for a patent, then works to get their idea adopted in a standard. There is no means whatsoever by which the standards body can check to see if their spec is encumbered.
The USPTO excuse is that an inventor should not have to reveal their trade secrets when they apply for a patent, thus risking the loss of trade secret protection if the patent is denied. This argument is utterly bogus, as is evidenced by the fact that every other PTO has a public review period. The real reason the USPTO hates the idea is that they would have to do respond to the objections filled which would be a lot more expensive than their current policy of grant everythin that isn't a perpetual motion machine.
Someone can read the draft standard and apply for a patent on it
This happens quite frequently. The most eggregious case being applying for a continuation of an existing patent application, thus gaining the benefit of a filling date that was prior to anybody on earth including the 'inventor' having invented the invention. One of the worst cases of this scam being the Lemelson patent claim covering bar codes which everyone agrees he had absolutely nothing to do with the invention of.
The USPTO grants ridicuolously overbroad patents which are obvious to a novice in the art.
The chopped logic the PTO uses to defend their negligence is that the legal 'standard' for 'obvious' is not that of English but a different language called patenteese. However when the value of granting 20 year monopolies for trivial inventions is attacked the USPTO immediately asserts that patents are not granted for 'obvious' inventions. So what is it, is the bar low or high?
What this means for the W3C process is that there are certain areas in which there is no unencumbered solution.
What does W3C do? Should they refuse to allow any work at all in those areas? RMS would certainly prefer that option, however RMS is a fanatic for whom the idea of paying for software for any reason whatsoever is a theological evil.
The IETF has faced this problem in the past, with the RSA/Diffie Hellman patents for example. PEM was not possible without some form of public key crypto and Public Key Partners had the whole field locked up.
The DRM area is pretty much a patent deadlock area. There is no approach that is not encumbered by multiple patents, even those based on thirty year old technology. Go figure what that says about the competence of the USPTO.
Patent policy for companies is hard. I would like nothing better than that software patents be abolished in their entirety, despite owning several of the paradigmatic ones. However given that patents do exist, I can't afford to disarm unless everyone else does. I need my patent collateral in case I need access to someone else's IP.
If you think you have seen this before, you have. It is exactly the same concept as Mutually Assured Destruction.
Slashdot Mirror
MS are known for aggressively going after software pirates. However they do not habitually go in for some of the stoopid lawsuits beloved by other CEOs, possibly because they are often the subject of stoopid suits themselves.
In particular I don't think that MS is likely to start behaving like the SDMI consortium. Hack our code! - oh wait we will sue you if you publish the results! - oh wait it is not a good idea to threaten lawsuits against crypto profs! - please can we withdraw? what we can't get the suit dismissed?
Everyone in the DRM industry knows that every scheme is breakable. Long before the recording industry started to get hurt, software piracy cost the software industry megabucks.
If enough people will pay $1000 for a copy of MS Exchange rather than go to the inconvenience of ripping it off for MS to make the profits it does there will be enough people who purchase CDs for $12 rather than rip it off for the record labels to be profitable.
I could use a pen however, something pen shaped would be much easier to use unobtrusively.
It also really needs to have a much better resolution. 180x160 really does not cut it. 480x360 is a heck of a lot better.
So that begs the question, how long before those swiss folk come up with a mechanical version of this dohickey?
Don't laugh! They already have a watch with a mechanical adding machine in the works. All they need to do is to get some of that Logie Baird mechano-analogue TV system implemented.
Is there a mode where you can take pictures and have the camera still show the time?
I don't want the girl seeing a picture of herself on the watch as she is bending over to pick up the tip.
Behind the scenes a major reason for the change is the considerable change in the standing of Freeh amongst Congress and in particular the GOP. When Freeh was supporting the GOP in their impeachment machinations he was flavor of the month. Since then there have been more and more questions about his effectiveness.
There are several in Congress who will behind closed doors blame Freeh for spending effort on his encryption obsession he should have spent stopping the 9/11 attacks. Even before 9/11 there were many complaints about FBI competence. The witholding of evidence in the Oaklahoma City bomb trials, the Wen Ho Lee incident, renewed questions about Ruby Ridge etc.
With Freeh gone and Mueller now in charge it is very unlikely he would want to resurect a crusade that is strongly associated with a successor now widely considered to have been a failure.
I was in a patent meeting when we were discussing filling a bunch of patents so that we would have amunition to fire back should some company come and fire at usthe patents that they orginialy filed for the same reason.
The reason I don't like doing that sort of thing is that besides being essentially fraudulent the fact is that no company has prospered long on the basis of a patent portfolio alone. Polaroid and Xerox are two prime examples of the long term effect of management thinking they have a monopoly in their market.
Push was equaly clueless, make the Web look like the TV, only it won't because there isn't really the bandwidth. People prefer the Web to TV because it is interactive. Interactive means pull, not push. The suits loved push because what they really wanted to do was bombard people with ads and to make the new media look more like the old media they understood.
Voice over IP on the other hand has a real purpose. The current generation is pretty clunky. A modem simply ain't ever going to cut it. But if you have a T1 pipe into your building you can probably send most of your voice data over it without noticeable loss of quality and at zero marginal cost per call.
The real problem with VoIP is the need to connect to the old telco system this is what ENUM is all about.
VoIP on its own is just an arbitrage play. The real value comes from being able to go multi-media so you get voice, video, powerpoint etc. in the same feed, seemlessly integrated with your email messaging system.
Portals were not a bad idea. They have a function. The clueless part was the idea that the portals would be able to extract extortionate monopoly rents from their position. If that was the case the yellow pages would really clean up big, which they do to an extent.
The trully clueless concept I would add to the list is Priceline. At one point the market cap of Priceline was greater than that of all the airlines in the US and Europe combined.
My theory is that fads become big because they tap into some pre-existing ideology that makes the believers in the ideology go 'ahaaaaa' and the rest of us go 'so what?'. So the e-tail fad was driven by the people that think that advertising and taking orders is the major cost of mail order (rather than packaging, shiping and carrying costs for the inventory). The Web would eliminate the costs of mail order Yahooo!.
Push played to the predjudices of self appointed 'mejah' experts'. Internet time to the conceits of the journalists pushing the meme. Portals played to the prejudices of those who thought that they had worked out how to corner the market in cyberspace. Priceline played to the predjudices of people who believe that the only thing that matters is price and the free market is the absolute good.
In each case the fad is ancilliary to the ideology that supports it. The fad is explained to the masses as a means of converting them to the core ideology.
If you think rape is a joke then expect to get modded down.
I think you are unlikely to be quite so clueless. More likely you are trolling.
The mod system is not censorship, it is an evaluation system. The readers of slashdot are telling you that they consider your opinions to be worthless. They are not stopping you airing them.
If I saw someone post something with a sig like "fuck all niggers... hang a nigger from a tree for me" I would most likely interpret it as a joke or whatever...
The vast majority of people posting such views do not consider them to be a joke, they believe in racism, they just don't want to be bothered to defend their views so they call them 'jokes' when it suits.
The guy asked why folk were modding him down, the post didn't appear to be the reason, the flamebait .sig did. Hey the guy asked why people were modding him down, I thought I would give him a clue.
Sounds like whoever moderated made a reasonable use of the mod system to me. The .sig makes him sound like some sort of psycho-rapist.
Odd ting about people who rail against 'PC' thought is how often they turn out to really be out an out racists or chauvanist pigs whose real complaint is that society today considers their ideas to be repulsive. If you have to have a sig that appears to promote rape then expect to get modded down plenty.
Change your .sig to something that doesn't make you appear to be a demented psycho. If my mod points hadn't expired a few hours ago I'd have modded you down as well.
Then I made the mistake of buying a washing machine from Best Buy on its 'interest free credit'. The scumbag finance company deliberately credited the final payment to the account late so they could claim a huge interest penalty. I pointed out that NACHA credits take hours to clear, not 10 days. We had the scumbags calling up every day for months trying to get us to pay $650 that was definitely not owed.
Interesting fact was that sending the original finance co a cease and desist had no effect. When they put the alleged debt out to a third party collection agency they stopped calling almost imediately they recieved my cease and desist.
It seems that a lot of Americans just pay up when faced with this type of fraud - which is why the stores can offer 'no interest' credit I guess. If you need credit (which I don't) then they can get you blacklisted with Equifax or TRW. In Europe the directors of the companies concerned would be sitting in jail, in the US they purchase legislation.
You utter bastard.
I think I'll set my PROCMAIL filters to send all the SPAM to jawatts@pacbell.net.
NME: Could I speak to XYZ
Me: Hello is that Alice?
NME: [It really doesn't matter at this point]
Me: [Distractedly] Alice said she would call
Me: [Asside] Shoo, goddam pidgeons.
NME: We would like to ofer you XYZ
Me: Well that all depends on whether I jump or not.
NME: Where are you
Me: Twelfth floor
etc. etc. etc.
That is the problem that F500 enterprises have really been interested in spending money to solve. If you can solve that problem you can then go on to deploy a whole rack of true e-commerce systems.
That is why the vast majority of corporate spending has been on certificate based email security systems.
There are still crypto companies making good money but times are tough. Over the past five years a lot of enterprises bought a lot of software they never deployed. As a result a lot of IT depts are being told to deploy their 'shelfware' before they buy more stuff. The software product model is definitely not doing well, buying software as a service on the other hand is doing very well.
Companies that sell 'plug ins' have been doing worst of all. Plug-ins have a pretty bad record in the enterprise space. They tend to cost as much as and often more than the applications they plug-into and tend to be a pain to manage with version number incompatibilities, configuration glitches and other issues that are annoying if its just one slashdot reader but a help desk catastrophe if you have several thousand clueless users to support.
In which case she was probably going to be outta luck. The cinema has been headed digital for both production and distribution for years. While there is some purpose to learning the old technology nobody uses super 8 film for quality purposes.
The market for professional film is nowhere near big enough to support a company the size of Polaroid. The Professional and serious amateur market for film is negligible compared to the market for holiday snaps. Polaroid's share of the professional market was much smaller proportionately than that of Kodak or Fuji. For a start you have to use a medium or large format camera.
The only part of the professional market that uses film in quantities big enough to support major corporations has been movies. A movie camera eats 12 35 mm snaps worth of film a second. To make an hour of movie takes ten hours (at least) of film stock.
The shift at the moment is on the production side. Digital editing has been arround for some time. Directors like Lucas have been moving towards shooting with digital cameras. While some directors will stick with film for years the bulk of the market will go digital. Remember that a bad movie takes as much film stock to shoot it as an art house flick. The transition will be complete in three to five years time when low cost digital projectors become available. The $10K cost of striking a print is what keeps many makers of celluloid film in business.
There will always be people who have to bore us with the reasons why celluloid was better. Just as there are still bores who will explain at inordinate length why vinyl is better than CD or why gas light is much better than electricity.
Recently I talked to an audiophile type who went on for hours about the spiffy new CD player he had bought for several thousand dollars which allegedly had a precision made drive that rotated the CD at exactly the 'right' rate. As if the circuitry feeding the D2A converter would be affected by the rate at which the input buffer was filled.
The fact is that within a couple more generations the top end digital cameras will outstrip the resolution of 35 mm film. There are also interesting possibilities for configuring digital film that are impossible with analog, logarithmic response to light for example giving a much greater dynamic range than the 100:1 that is possible with film.
Some celluloid use will continue, but it will be a minority even amongst the professional market.
The whole Java thing was more in Sun's interest than the developers from the start. In return for a somewhat better objective extension of C than C++ you wrote your code so it would run on Sun hardware as well as Intel and it would run at a tenth the speed on both. JIT compilers closed the gap somewhat but there is still a major performance penalty. A good C coder will write faster code than a good java coder.
The 100% pure stuff is ridiculous. If I am writing a program to run on Windows I want to make use of the extensive APIs. I want the program to look and feel like a windows program, and definitely not like a Java applet.
Sure platform independence is a good thing, but it should not be forced. Sun's little tantrum was about preventing people writing the programs they wanted to in 'their' language. So Microsoft have invented their own. I don't give a hoot about running on Solaris, Linux and NT are the only platforms I can be confident will be mainstream in 5 years time. Sun will go the way of the rest of the *nix hardware vendors in the end. (and blame their bad management on Gates to the end).
There is not a great deal of innovation in C#, but there wasn't much in Java either. The big step forward in both comes from junking bits of C that were really bad ideas.
There are a number of features of C# that make it much better to write programs for manipulating XML etc. than Java. If I did not anticipate ever wanting to port to another platform (and did not think C# for linux would arrive) I might use J#.
In the meantime J# means that you can still use Java to teach intro to programming.
You should learn some history. Apple ripped off the Xerox GUI technology when it rolled out first the Lisa then the Mac.
Then when Microsoft, Atari and others tried to bring out their copies of the Xerox desktopo Apple sued them claiming that they 'owned' the GUI metaphor.
Apple drove Atari into bankrupcy. The Atari O/S was better than any Apple produced until release X last year. They had true pre-emtive multi-tasking with protected memory working.
Apple also sued Microsoft which is what I was refering to. Microsoft refused to submit to blackmail. The suit was settled as part of the Microsoft rescue package when Jobs took over.
The Apple management believed that they didn't need to invest in the MacOS because they owned the desktop metaphor. They wasted their R&D on whizzy projects like the Newton and Dylan thinking they could eliminate the competition to their cash cow in the law courts.
The exact opposite has happened. Nader has caused the Democrats to move away from the green party position.
The Dems are not going to respond to Nader by moving to the left to pick up part of the 3% of the vote he won. They are going to move further to the right to pick up votes in the center.
Nader's attack claiming that there was no difference between Bush and Gore devalued the Democrats lead on environmental issues. At the next election Gore (and it will be him since no other Dem will run against Bush now) will be running against broken campaign pledges on the environment.
Nader's campaign was really not about the 'environment', his real issue was a barely articulated anti-corporativism that tied in with 'anti-globalism'. The Dems can't move in that direction because it is an ideology of opposition. Nader has nothing practical to replace the thing he attacks. He doesn't need to because he knows he won't be president. The Dems cannot adopt Nader's anti-capitalism without proposing an alternative.
As a result it isn't too surprising that Love isn't spending much time on Capitol Hill. He doesn't have a constituency there.
Love's slam of Microsoft on the patent front is somewhat unfair. Unlike Apple, Sun, Rambus, Entrust etc. Microsoft is one of the few major computing companies that has played the IP game with a straight cue. (That is not to say they have played every game with a straight cue). But Microsoft has not sued to prevent others using the Xerox windows GUI as apple did, sued to prevent extension of an 'open' language standard as Sun did, or steer standards bodies towards a technique they owned an undisclosed patent on.
After the 9/11 attack it is unlikely that there will be a great deal of political capital that the US can expend to further extend its idea of Intelectual Property and errect more barbed wire accross the plains.
The new jounal is being hosted by the AI lab at MIT. The bandwidth cost will be insignificant compared to the cost of buying just one journal for the AI lab library. The internal charge was something like $40 a month per machine for the non Tech Sq. parts of MIT. AI just paid a fixed amount and maintained its own machines.
When I was there we were publishing all Clinton's press releases out of the AI lab before they moved the publications system down to the Whitehouse. The biggest bandwidth hog though was the 'Stockmaster' hack that took on a life of its own and eventually spun out as a business.
The whole point of the AI lab is to work on projects of that sort. The more interesting question is how the funding model is to be scalled to more journals.
What is needed is a repository that can provide a guarantee of persistence. This would need to be maintained at multiple sites with disaster recovery etc.
Ultimately the world copyright libraries will step into this role, the Library of Congress, British Library, Oxford, Cambridge etc. The cost of running servers to deliver several thousand journals would be no more than a few million a year. That is much less than is currently spent on journals.
The other part of the puzzle is finding the money to fund the publication process. However the editors generally give their time for free today and what admin support the publishers provide tends to be focused on the printing and distribution side of the process.
It is even quite likely that there will be commercial sponsorship available. The naming rights for such a journal repository would be quite valuable.
Yeah a whole new channel for sending SPAM
You do realize this is in a bathroom, right? Hey, they have to pay off their student loans somehow you know.
For the past ten (fifteen?) years RMS has been living in his office at 545 Tech Square. The most appropriate term to describe him is a techno-hippy.
I did not make the claim that RMS's position on paying for software was consistent, far from it. So identification of an inconsistency between RMS's behavior and his theology does not contradict my argument. My point is that RMS is an absolutist and his opposition to any attempt to compromise with reality on the issue can be taken as inevitable.
On the open license front, we have put significant IP into the public domain recently. As for licensing our patents, the problem there is that the license you suggest is not compatible with Royalty Free.
The consequence of that approach is worse, proprietary control of the content distribution chain.
In Europe Murdoch's Sky TV gained a stranglehold on the satelite TV market through control of the ViaCrypt DRM system.
Murdoch's politics are to support whatever party will suit his financial interests. In Australia he is a Socialist, in the US a screaming conservative. In the UK his support for the Conservative party was probably decisive in their winning the 1992 election 'it was the sun wot won it' one of his tabloids cried. Now Murdoch supports the Labour party but is trying to resist UK entry into the Euro. Like an Australian should be deciding UK monetary policy.
If there is a proprietary DRM system controlled by the record labels their control over artists will be reinforced instead of abolished.
You can't ever know if an idea is the subject of a USPTO patent application
In every other civilized country you can tell if a patent has been applied for on an invention. In the US the PTO encourages patent ambushes. The 'inventor' applies for a patent, then works to get their idea adopted in a standard. There is no means whatsoever by which the standards body can check to see if their spec is encumbered.
The USPTO excuse is that an inventor should not have to reveal their trade secrets when they apply for a patent, thus risking the loss of trade secret protection if the patent is denied. This argument is utterly bogus, as is evidenced by the fact that every other PTO has a public review period. The real reason the USPTO hates the idea is that they would have to do respond to the objections filled which would be a lot more expensive than their current policy of grant everythin that isn't a perpetual motion machine.
Someone can read the draft standard and apply for a patent on it
This happens quite frequently. The most eggregious case being applying for a continuation of an existing patent application, thus gaining the benefit of a filling date that was prior to anybody on earth including the 'inventor' having invented the invention. One of the worst cases of this scam being the Lemelson patent claim covering bar codes which everyone agrees he had absolutely nothing to do with the invention of.
The USPTO grants ridicuolously overbroad patents which are obvious to a novice in the art.
The chopped logic the PTO uses to defend their negligence is that the legal 'standard' for 'obvious' is not that of English but a different language called patenteese. However when the value of granting 20 year monopolies for trivial inventions is attacked the USPTO immediately asserts that patents are not granted for 'obvious' inventions. So what is it, is the bar low or high?
What this means for the W3C process is that there are certain areas in which there is no unencumbered solution.
What does W3C do? Should they refuse to allow any work at all in those areas? RMS would certainly prefer that option, however RMS is a fanatic for whom the idea of paying for software for any reason whatsoever is a theological evil.
The IETF has faced this problem in the past, with the RSA/Diffie Hellman patents for example. PEM was not possible without some form of public key crypto and Public Key Partners had the whole field locked up.
The DRM area is pretty much a patent deadlock area. There is no approach that is not encumbered by multiple patents, even those based on thirty year old technology. Go figure what that says about the competence of the USPTO.
Patent policy for companies is hard. I would like nothing better than that software patents be abolished in their entirety, despite owning several of the paradigmatic ones. However given that patents do exist, I can't afford to disarm unless everyone else does. I need my patent collateral in case I need access to someone else's IP.
If you think you have seen this before, you have. It is exactly the same concept as Mutually Assured Destruction.