For those who find it odd that a law firm would own such a patent, they don't. The editors managed to munge this somehow... a quick trip to the patent database here
shows that th epatent is currently assigned to Tektronix, which makes a bit more sense.
As an old, slowly dying company, Tektronix is doing what many companies do and seeking to "monetize their intellectual property assets", which unfortunately involves suing the living bejezus out of everyone in sight.
Linus Torvalds: ''Desktop Market has already started'' Preston St. Pierre of Linux Times interviews Linus Torvalds.
Linus Torvalds tells of some other programming venues than the Linux kernel, predicts a shadowy outcome for GNU/Hurd, gives some advice to anyone wanting to undertake a large software project and updates us on the latest in kernel development in this email interview by Preston St. Pierre.
Preston: Your life has been dedicated for quite some time to the Linux kernel. If this project was no longer yours, what kind of project would you most like to take on next (games, user applications, another kernel, development tools, etc)?
Linus Torvalds: I like being close to the hardware, and doing good visuals (ie games or GUI's) is not my forte, so I'd probably work on development tools or similar.
In fact, the only project I've actually spent some time on in the last year (apart from the kernel, of course) has been this source checker application that does some extended type-checking for the kernel. So very much a development tool.
Preston: What is your favorite interpreted programming language, and why?
Linus Torvalds: Heh. I don't much do interpreters. The only one I end up using consciously (ie not part of somebody else's scripts) end up being just the regular shell. It's not that I dislike things like perl/python, it's just that I tend to either just write C, or do _so_ simple things that shell works fine for me.
I might admit to having a soft spot for basic, but I haven't actually used it in closer to twenty years or so. But it was what I started with, so it will always be special;)
Preston: Do you have any advice for people starting to undertake large open source projects? What have you learned by managing the Linux kernel?
Linus Torvalds: Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small _trivial_ project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision.
So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way _useful_ first, and then others will say "hey, that _almost_ works for me", and they'll get involved in the project.
And if there is anything I've learnt from Linux, it's that projects have a life of their own, and you should _not_ try to enforce your "vision" too strongly on them. Most often you're wrong anyway, and if you're not flexible and willing to take input from others (and willing to change direction when it turned out your vision was flawed), you'll never get anything good done.
In other words, be willing to admit your mistakes, and don't expect to get anywhere big in any kind of short timeframe. I've been doing Linux for thirteen years, and I expect to do it for quite some time still. If I had _expected_ to do something that big, I'd never have started. It started out small and insignificant, and that's how I thought about it.
Preston: From a user's prospective, what improvements do you see the Linux kernel offering over Hurd? Do you think Hurd might eventually become as popular as Linux?
Linus Torvalds: I think Hurd is dead. See above on why. It has a "big vision", and people forgot about the details, and forgot about admitting when they went wrong. So the project stumbled, and _still_ didn't bother to look down on the ground. But hey, I might be wrong. I haven't actually followed Hurd in any detail, and maybe the project is more down-to-earth now, and more concerned about getting things working, and less about "design". And less
The twist is that these LDPC codes were actually proposed in a 1963 PhD thesis, but were disregarded as beyond the computational abilities of the time. They were only "rediscovered" in 1996, after the Turbo code furore.
The article also mentions that the latency associated with turbo codes is too high for most voice applications and that LDPC codes, while more computationally intensive, have a low latency. (At least, that's what I remember from the article).
I thought it was funny that their sponsor, Alcatel or whoever, never patented it in Asia so NTT has been using turbo codes in Japan for years, free.
OK,so I'm not American, but that guy is one hell of a great patriot. Amazing how many people hate the guy when he's out to defend America's #1 institution. Oh wait... democracy was replaced by "don't bug me about my quasi-legal business practices" a few years back. Right.
You are only partially correct, but partially wrong as well. Going to an unknown school and building a network of morons is not nearly as good as going to a good school and building a network of brilliant hard-working people.
Hmmm... yes. How could I disagree? I have only one caveat. It's often hard to tell the morons from the guys who will one day be running Internet22 in first year. It gets a little clearer in upper year but even then your classmates are only part of the picture.
Go to conferences. Take jobs at great companies for possibly lousy pay. Then again, never take a joe job - always take intern positions that will push you & challenge you. Keep in touch with your bosses. Actually try to get to know those "old people" you work with.
My networking has improved a lot over the years (mostly due to how bad it was in the first place). I missed a lot of opportunities as a student mostly because I had no idea what I wanted to do. If you know you want to work on computer networks, then start meeting the right people today.
And yes, if you get into a top-tier school, that never hurt either. All the top schools are equally good. Apply to Waterloo up here in Canada!
The trick is simple to explain... it's a conditional DHCP server.
RTFA. It's not a conditional DHCP server. It uses ARP and works even with clients that have hardcoded IP addresses who don't go looking for a DHCP lease.
So, by extension, anyone who uses DHCP, redirection and allow/deny lists is not infringing.
Please read the patent before you go and say exactly how it works.
Yes, Java uses pointers under the hood. Object references are by definition in the language spec a 32-bit data type.
There is a 64-bit VM for Solaris from Sun and there may also be one from IBM for AIX.
I saw a presentation at JavaOne from someone using the 64-bit VM to bring massive datasets into memory and not do any I/O during a large dataset transformation operation.
The 64 bit VM team fron Sun said, in a different session, that the base performance is about 75% that of the normal VM. So you pay some penalty for using 64 bits, but you presumably rearchitect your app and make it up somehow.
plus there are lots more that do other sorts of monitoring but without the geolocation angle. But I didn't just hand in a marketing assignment about them.
I broke the trackpoint (aka "the nipple") on my ol' Thinkpad 600X. You need to replace the whole keyboard thoug, so I bought one on eBay... and 3 keys were dead. Out $50. But there are IBM service depots EVERYWHERE and I had it fixed for $350 (CDN) in 2 days. For an old, discontinued model I think it was pretty cheap. I'll probably be able to get parts for this old thing in 2013.
"I have this song stuck in my head where the girl sings about things she can't get out of her head. Here's the.wav file of me humming it. What is it?"
Shockingly enough, CBC Radio, on the now defunct show "Basic Black", had an hour long segment, every week, that did exactly that. It was HUGE. People would call in with the more horribly rendered tunes and they'd identify them. People loved it.
The/. editors would never start it becuase they'd be unable to stop.
1 - company discovers that they have IP that is actually work something! Wow! Fire up the lawyers!
2 - Identify the big targets (HP, MSFT, etc)
3 - Start with the small players. They'll either settle, in which case you have money for future lawsuits AND legal precedent or you'll go to court. If you win in court, you now have money and legal precedent. If you lose, you go try again on some other small company.
4 - Now you have some money and precedent so you go hit up the big players. Generally they'll just settle with you and give you some fixed amount or some fractional royalty.
So, perhaps I should be more specific: As a Canadian IEEE member I feel that there is a conflict of interest between the IEEE and IEEE-USA. I have no problem with a professional association that does political lobbying for US IT workers but please don't associate it with an international technically-oriented association.
Now, as a Canadian I have it a lot easier via NAFTA and the popular TN-1 "free trade visa", which is unlikely to get rolled back without scrapping the whole of NAFTA. However, I still dislike the IEEE-USA on the grounds of conflict of interest.
We need to get involved in our professional societies (IEEE-USA, ACM), and push them to lobby for us (instead of letting the Corporations "speak" for us. we know where they stand!).
Right. I'm sure all the due-paying members of the IEEE and the ACM in India and China will be really happy about that. As will members in Canada and Europe who will see their ability to work in the US slashed as well.
As a card-carrying IEEE member for 10 years I will write letters until I'm blue in the face to oppose any political lobbying on the part of these organizations. They are technical societies. You want to raise hell? Call your congress-person.
Re:They're not talking about used ads.
on
Recycling TV Ads
·
· Score: 1
I was wondering, how do they go about with the copyright implications
Did you read that article? He goes and gets sign-off from all parties involved. There's always the possibility of missing someone but he goes out of his way to deal with this. No SAG actors for example.
It's not politically correct to say so, but the West really is a superior culture when it comes to making practical use of theoretical discoveries.
Check out Guns, Germs & Steel which will go a pretty long way to refuting your argument.
Diamond's thesis, in a nutshell, is that there are no better societies, just better geographic locations and various wierd outcomes that derive from these lucky locations.
IMO it deserves more than a Pulitzer - it deserves to be legally mandated required reading.
The CBC and BBC serve pretty important roles in the culture of their respective countries... I think CBC radio is my biggest source of news. Lots of local stuff that no one else covers.
Slashdot Mirror
For those who find it odd that a law firm would own such a patent, they don't. The editors managed to munge this somehow... a quick trip to the patent database here shows that th epatent is currently assigned to Tektronix, which makes a bit more sense. As an old, slowly dying company, Tektronix is doing what many companies do and seeking to "monetize their intellectual property assets", which unfortunately involves suing the living bejezus out of everyone in sight.
This is moments from being /.'ed to death...
;)
Article text
Linus Torvalds: ''Desktop Market has already started''
Preston St. Pierre of Linux Times interviews Linus Torvalds.
Linus Torvalds tells of some other programming venues than the Linux kernel, predicts a shadowy outcome for GNU/Hurd, gives some advice to anyone wanting to undertake a large software project and updates us on the latest in kernel development in this email interview by Preston St. Pierre.
Preston: Your life has been dedicated for quite some time to the Linux kernel. If this project was no longer yours, what kind of project would you most like to take on next (games, user applications, another kernel, development tools, etc)?
Linus Torvalds: I like being close to the hardware, and doing good visuals (ie games or GUI's) is not my forte, so I'd probably work on development tools or similar.
In fact, the only project I've actually spent some time on in the last year (apart from the kernel, of course) has been this source checker application that does some extended type-checking for the kernel. So very much a development tool.
Preston: What is your favorite interpreted programming language, and why?
Linus Torvalds: Heh. I don't much do interpreters. The only one I end up using consciously (ie not part of somebody else's scripts) end up being just the regular shell. It's not that I dislike things like perl/python, it's just that I tend to either just write C, or do _so_ simple things that shell works fine for me.
I might admit to having a soft spot for basic, but I haven't actually used it in closer to twenty years or so. But it was what I started with, so it will always be special
Preston: Do you have any advice for people starting to undertake large open source projects? What have you learned by managing the Linux kernel?
Linus Torvalds: Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small _trivial_ project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision.
So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way _useful_ first, and then others will say "hey, that _almost_ works for me", and they'll get involved in the project.
And if there is anything I've learnt from Linux, it's that projects have a life of their own, and you should _not_ try to enforce your "vision" too strongly on them. Most often you're wrong anyway, and if you're not flexible and willing to take input from others (and willing to change direction when it turned out your vision was flawed), you'll never get anything good done.
In other words, be willing to admit your mistakes, and don't expect to get anywhere big in any kind of short timeframe. I've been doing Linux for thirteen years, and I expect to do it for quite some time still. If I had _expected_ to do something that big, I'd never have started. It started out small and insignificant, and that's how I thought about it.
Preston: From a user's prospective, what improvements do you see the Linux kernel offering over Hurd? Do you think Hurd might eventually become as popular as Linux?
Linus Torvalds: I think Hurd is dead. See above on why. It has a "big vision", and people forgot about the details, and forgot about admitting when they went wrong. So the project stumbled, and _still_ didn't bother to look down on the ground. But hey, I might be wrong. I haven't actually followed Hurd in any detail, and maybe the project is more down-to-earth now, and more concerned about getting things working, and less about "design". And less
That was truly an excellent retort. My compliments to the chef.
"Oh God, I'm Cumming!"
Yeah, sure, I'm cummingtonite!
((Mg, Fe)7Si8O22(OH)2 , Magnesium Iron Silicate Hydroxide)
I for one welcome our new Zeppelin-borne overlords!
The twist is that these LDPC codes were actually proposed in a 1963 PhD thesis, but were disregarded as beyond the computational abilities of the time. They were only "rediscovered" in 1996, after the Turbo code furore.
The article also mentions that the latency associated with turbo codes is too high for most voice applications and that LDPC codes, while more computationally intensive, have a low latency. (At least, that's what I remember from the article).
I thought it was funny that their sponsor, Alcatel or whoever, never patented it in Asia so NTT has been using turbo codes in Japan for years, free.
OK,so I'm not American, but that guy is one hell of a great patriot. Amazing how many people hate the guy when he's out to defend America's #1 institution. Oh wait... democracy was replaced by "don't bug me about my quasi-legal business practices" a few years back. Right.
You are only partially correct, but partially wrong as well. Going to an unknown school and building a network of morons is not nearly as good as going to a good school and building a network of brilliant hard-working people.
Hmmm... yes. How could I disagree? I have only one caveat. It's often hard to tell the morons from the guys who will one day be running Internet22 in first year. It gets a little clearer in upper year but even then your classmates are only part of the picture.
Go to conferences. Take jobs at great companies for possibly lousy pay. Then again, never take a joe job - always take intern positions that will push you & challenge you. Keep in touch with your bosses. Actually try to get to know those "old people" you work with.
My networking has improved a lot over the years (mostly due to how bad it was in the first place). I missed a lot of opportunities as a student mostly because I had no idea what I wanted to do. If you know you want to work on computer networks, then start meeting the right people today.
And yes, if you get into a top-tier school, that never hurt either. All the top schools are equally good. Apply to Waterloo up here in Canada!
It's about your own networks. People from unknown schools get onto interesting projects becuas hey know who's running them.
Get networking... with humans.
The trick is simple to explain... it's a conditional DHCP server.
RTFA. It's not a conditional DHCP server. It uses ARP and works even with clients that have hardcoded IP addresses who don't go looking for a DHCP lease.
So, by extension, anyone who uses DHCP, redirection and allow/deny lists is not infringing.
Please read the patent before you go and say exactly how it works.
Yes, Java uses pointers under the hood. Object references are by definition in the language spec a 32-bit data type.
There is a 64-bit VM for Solaris from Sun and there may also be one from IBM for AIX.
I saw a presentation at JavaOne from someone using the 64-bit VM to bring massive datasets into memory and not do any I/O during a large dataset transformation operation.
The 64 bit VM team fron Sun said, in a different session, that the base performance is about 75% that of the normal VM. So you pay some penalty for using 64 bits, but you presumably rearchitect your app and make it up somehow.
Well, you can buy lots of cool products that will thell you exactly where all your wireless clients are!
plus there are lots more that do other sorts of monitoring but without the geolocation angle. But I didn't just hand in a marketing assignment about them.
Damn, no mod points... I'm all up with the Ali G references.
I broke the trackpoint (aka "the nipple") on my ol' Thinkpad 600X. You need to replace the whole keyboard thoug, so I bought one on eBay... and 3 keys were dead. Out $50. But there are IBM service depots EVERYWHERE and I had it fixed for $350 (CDN) in 2 days. For an old, discontinued model I think it was pretty cheap. I'll probably be able to get parts for this old thing in 2013.
Shockingly enough, CBC Radio, on the now defunct show "Basic Black", had an hour long segment, every week, that did exactly that. It was HUGE. People would call in with the more horribly rendered tunes and they'd identify them. People loved it.
The /. editors would never start it becuase they'd be unable to stop.
Though they never did a Kylie song...
er, make that worth something.
Don't follow IP lawsuits much do you?
Here's the process:
1 - company discovers that they have IP that is actually work something! Wow! Fire up the lawyers!
2 - Identify the big targets (HP, MSFT, etc)
3 - Start with the small players. They'll either settle, in which case you have money for future lawsuits AND legal precedent or you'll go to court. If you win in court, you now have money and legal precedent. If you lose, you go try again on some other small company.
4 - Now you have some money and precedent so you go hit up the big players. Generally they'll just settle with you and give you some fixed amount or some fractional royalty.
5 - Put your feet up and watch the money roll in.
Refer to NTP and others.
So, perhaps I should be more specific: As a Canadian IEEE member I feel that there is a conflict of interest between the IEEE and IEEE-USA. I have no problem with a professional association that does political lobbying for US IT workers but please don't associate it with an international technically-oriented association.
Now, as a Canadian I have it a lot easier via NAFTA and the popular TN-1 "free trade visa", which is unlikely to get rolled back without scrapping the whole of NAFTA. However, I still dislike the IEEE-USA on the grounds of conflict of interest.
We need to get involved in our professional societies (IEEE-USA, ACM), and push them to lobby for us (instead of letting the Corporations "speak" for us. we know where they stand!).
Right. I'm sure all the due-paying members of the IEEE and the ACM in India and China will be really happy about that. As will members in Canada and Europe who will see their ability to work in the US slashed as well.
As a card-carrying IEEE member for 10 years I will write letters until I'm blue in the face to oppose any political lobbying on the part of these organizations. They are technical societies. You want to raise hell? Call your congress-person.
Outsourcing managers is a big no-no. Suddenly, the company is not American anymore.
Isn't that what Chrysler did?
really?
I was wondering, how do they go about with the copyright implications
Did you read that article? He goes and gets sign-off from all parties involved. There's always the possibility of missing someone but he goes out of his way to deal with this. No SAG actors for example.
It's not politically correct to say so, but the West really is a superior culture when it comes to making practical use of theoretical discoveries.
Check out Guns, Germs & Steel which will go a pretty long way to refuting your argument.
Diamond's thesis, in a nutshell, is that there are no better societies, just better geographic locations and various wierd outcomes that derive from these lucky locations.
IMO it deserves more than a Pulitzer - it deserves to be legally mandated required reading.
Right - and real anarchists use it too. Sure.
The CBC and BBC serve pretty important roles in the culture of their respective countries... I think CBC radio is my biggest source of news. Lots of local stuff that no one else covers.