I'm not a Supreme Court expert (I'm not even an American), but I can't imagine a ruling that would allow people to start challenging patents on "obviousness". I imagine the ruling will be very narrowly confined to just the circumstances of this particular case.
I sincerely hope this does not affect the course of the distro, and that it continues to remain as user-friendly and true to it's founding values, but I'm beginning to think Ubuntu has replaced Mandrake/riva as the No 1 user-friendly distro.
I've been a Mandriva Club silver-level member for 2.5 years now, and I'm going to let my membership lapse in a few weeks. I downloaded the Ubuntu appliance from VMWare a while ago, and it is far superior to Mandriva for ease-of-use, ease-of-administration. I'm just waiting for the next version of Ubuntu in April to dump Mandriva from my desktop.
When I moved from Slackware to Mandrake, it was great, but Mandrake/Mandriva have not really kept up, IMHO.
I wonder if France and Canada and so-forth have subsidised internet from the government.
As a Canadian I can tell you the answer is "No" for Canada, at least as far as I know. However, until fairly recently, many provincial telcos were Crown coprorations, but most are private entities now.
Identity theft should really be called "identity fraud", since that more accurately describes what's going on. Someone is fraudulently claiming to be someone they are not.
There are a couple of ways. Here's one that I took from "Building Secure Software".
Debuggers tend to reset the processor instruction cache on every operation. Normally this doesn't happen except when a jump happens. So you can write code that changes instructions that should definitely be in the cache. If we're not running under the debugger, this has no effect, because the change doesn't cause the cache to refresh. Under a debugger, things can break:
1 cli
2 jmp lbl1
lbl1: 3 mov bx, offset lbl2
4 move byte ptr cs:[bx], 0C3h
lbl2: 5 nop
6 sti
; Continue normal operations here
Commentary:
1 Clear interrupt bit, so that code is sure to stay in the cache the entire time
2 Causes CPU I cache to reload
3 Store addr of lbl2
4 Store a RET over the nop at lbl2 (0C3h = RET)
5 nop to be clobbered only if under debugger
6 Remove interrupt bit
Of course you need to be a bit stealthier than this, but this is the basic idea.
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Somewhere, Noah Webster and Samuel Johnson weep.
- Andrew Carnegie
I'm not a Supreme Court expert (I'm not even an American), but I can't imagine a ruling that would allow people to start challenging patents on "obviousness". I imagine the ruling will be very narrowly confined to just the circumstances of this particular case.
Maybe that will change, but if the GPU can do the work, why invest in a separate piece of hardware?
I always thought that was a pretty good area of attack right there.
I believe the Ubuntu equivalent to PLF is the Multiverse.
When I moved from Slackware to Mandrake, it was great, but Mandrake/Mandriva have not really kept up, IMHO.
I wouldn't hold your breath if I were you.
Oh, now I see why you posted anonymously.
Yes, I occasionally "work the video card hard" doing some of my own OpenGL work, plus a little Enemy Territory now and then.
Since you claimed "every desktop" and "every video card", your argument is thus refuted.
Chronicles of Riddick - Director's Cut
Redneck Palmpilot.
The only acceptable plural of octopus is therefore octouses.
Linky
Correction: the Greek plural is -podes. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=octopus
Clicking links? Please...
Bravo.
How about when 80% of the consumers stop buying them?
Identity theft should really be called "identity fraud", since that more accurately describes what's going on. Someone is fraudulently claiming to be someone they are not.
I didn't claim this was a good or practical way. It was just "a way".
1 Clear interrupt bit, so that code is sure to stay in the cache the entire time
2 Causes CPU I cache to reload
3 Store addr of lbl2
4 Store a RET over the nop at lbl2 (0C3h = RET)
5 nop to be clobbered only if under debugger
6 Remove interrupt bit
Of course you need to be a bit stealthier than this, but this is the basic idea.
Yes