What happens 10 years down the line when I try to play a game or watch a Movie that has some funky DRM on it, but I can't because the company is out of business or has shutdown the DRM server.
You'll scoot on out to GameCopyWorld, or whatever equivalent of it exists in 2018, and you'll get yo'self a NoCD-hacked executable. Or, you'll just fire up your GigabyteTorrent client, hit an oldwarez site, and find the hacked-to-smithereens version.
Either way, you'll be able to run Spore there in your DosBox v500.0 emulator under Microsoft Windows 12.5 on your 1,024-bit processor. And it will work just dandy, even though the internet by which the original wanted to activate itself will have ceased to exist five years prior.
Why do I know that? Because you're posting on Slashdot. The odds that you have the technical wherewithal to defeat these lame-brain schemes are very good.
But for the average user (who - *gasp* - might never have visited Slashdot) will be out of luck. And that's very sad.
Making an unauthorized copy is a violation of the copyright holders rights.
Even in America, where copyright is more heavily imbalanced in favor of owners and at the expense of the public than any other nation in the world - even here, you're wrong.
Fair use exists to protect many actions that a purchaser of a copyrighted work might take, even if it's unauthorized. The DMCA may have warped some of that, but it's already eroding under court challenges, and it will continue to do so.
I worry that this portends a day when consoles (and even blu-ray movie players) will REQUIRE an internet connection and do something similar to verify their games/movies.
Some software apps do that. They store some of the data on a remote server, and the app has to go get it from the server in order to work properly - which, of course, involves an authentication step.
The pirate groups simply - shock horror! - capture the downloaded content and hack the app to fetch the data locally.
More and more apps are coming with increasingly exotic DRM: physical media locks that require both the media and a drive to play it in (and often don't work with certain kinds of drives); per-machine activation that resist application relocation; limited-time licenses; active internet connections.
By contrast, the hacked, no-CD versions don't have all of the checks and restrictions and foibles of the authentic software. It's an image that you can move anywhere and use however you want. Sometimes, they even rip out the key check, so you don't even have to type in a serial key!
The sad result is that, increasingly, a hacked version turns out to be better than the genuine deal. They just work, anytime, anywhere, no questions asked. More than once, I've found myself downloading a hacked executable to run software that I bought and legitimately own, even in ways that wholly comply with the original license - e.g., because the activation server for some defunct app had been taken offline.
Yet we're still dealing with this, twenty years after similar schemes proved inane on the Commodore 64. I fully grok that developers don't give a damn if they're making users' lives harder for no reason. But it puzzles me that they don't understand that it's worse for them, too: it wastes development resources on snake-oil protection schemes, and it diminishes consumers' view of the company name. But they just don't seem to learn.
The problem is that I work extensively with banks and I cannot allow banking data to be leaked...
TrueCrypt has a great "shadow volume" feature. As with other encryption apps, Truecrypt lets you create an encrypted volume that you mount as a drive after giving it a password. However, it will also let you assign the encrypted volume a second password that mounts it as a completely different drive.
For example, you can create a 30gb volume that mounts (1) with 25gb of data if you input a first password, and (2) with 5gb of other data if you input a second password. Both volumes look like a mounted 30gb volume. In fact, it's impossible to tell that the volume has two passwords - the unused space in either volume looks like random junk, exactly as if it were an ordinary 30gb volume.
The application to your problem should be obvious... problem solved. Even better, if you do it well, the TSA literally cannot prove that you're not telling the full truth.
Wait, stop right there. There's a discussion of a patent on Slashdot, and the first comment acknowledges that it's interesting, and not that software patents are the spawn of the devil?
If you took this exact same story and s/Google/Microsoft/'ed it, this thread would instantly fill up with "oh noes, Microsoft is patenting commercials in internet video" comments, and "there's no way that that's novel" comments, and "down with software patents!!!" comments. But I guess that since it's patented by Google, it's OK... or something... right? Help me out - my Slashdot Moral Compass is adrift at the moment.
I don't intend this as a trolling post - just an interesting reflection on the culture here at Slashdot. Don't get me wrong; I like this place - I've even got it tied to a "/." keyboard shortcut - but the community often appears very inept when discussing these sorts of issues.
And in fact, 6 x 7 = 42, so 6 x 9 was off by 2.:-)
Yeah, but that couldn't be the Ultimate Question. As it's defined in HGTTG, it's practically impossible to derive the Answer from the Question, or vice versa. (Yet the Answer is fully responsive to the Question.)
Actually, the Question is presented in the books. There's a conversation between Marvin and a mattress creature on Squornshellous Zeta in which - well, read it for yourself. It's right there, plain as day.
My geek duties for the day having been satisfied, I shall now go have breakfast...;)
As I am not a lawyer, it was not obvious to me what they were patenting.
Let's start first with the definition of "obviousness." Patent law doesn't go by the common English or Webster's definitions of the term - it has a very technical meaning, refined by probably a thousand patent law cases. Many nuances. And unhelpfully, the definitive section on the topic is circularly defined.
At least two reasons for the technicalities. First, virtually anything is "obvious" in hindsight. Second, what is "obvious" to one (unbiased) person may be completely non-obvious to another (unbiased) person, and the patent office would produce radically inconsistent results if examiners were permitted such subjectivity.
Suspended: A Cryogenic Nightmare A Mind Forever Voyaging Alter Ego Portal (the old game, not the new game)
And not just the ol' text games, neither -
Star Control II Dreamweb Uplink: Hacker Elite BioShock Mass Effect
These aren't mindless shooters. Among the topics presented (often in an open-ended manner) are existentialism, fascism, rationalistic and relativistic morality, survivalism, utopia and dystopia... all classic hard-lit sci-fi topics. Star Control II has at least as much literary value as Ender's Game or Asimov's Foundation.
*sigh* Let's migrate back to the real world for a second.
One of the central planks of American hegemony is our enormous GDP. And one of Congress's self-selected core objectives is protecting and promoting our GDP. Anything that even hints at reducing GDP must be really damn important to receive any support.
Guess what fraction of the US GDP is composed of intellectual property? 45%.
Moreover, consider who owns that IP, especially in the software front: IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Texas Instruments, Apple, Yahoo... and, yes, Google.
Now, seriously - what you think are the odds of Congress passing a law that tears out a large chunk of our GDP, produced by some of the U.S.'s largest, most profitable, and most successful high-tech companies (and, incidentally, also the strongest lobbyists?) Especially when we're on the verge of a recession, thanks to the completely unrelated greed and stupidity of mortgage lenders? Would that be anything but political suicide and gross stupidity courtesy of the U.S. Congress?
Now, I certainly don't Congress with many issues, *especially* protecting the privacy interests or civil rights of John Q. Public. But they *are* keenly attuned to perpetuating the welfare of large corporations - and whether or not you agree with that, it's really beyond debate where Congress as a whole would fall on this issue. So even if the CAFC gets it wrong and rips the guts out of State Street Bank, Congress will charge in and override them. Wait and see.
Actually it says that the production team has been eliminated (which kinda sucks just during this holiday seasons), and the ultimate fate of the site is still unresolved.
So, essentially, it's already dead and writing will do no good.
Wow. This just about says it all - CBS has so completely wrecked the franchise that it doesn't even want to maintain its own franchise group. It's difficult to imagine a more complete case of mismanagement. I mean, the show has had one of the strongest, most resilient, self-sustaining cult followings for almost forty years. It's not easy to kill something like that.
I suppose that for an encore, they'll sue Star Trek conventions into obsolescence for licensing violations. Or, maybe, Star Trek: The Musical. Either way, their scorched-earth policy can't leave any scrap of consumer interest in their franchise untorched!
Would such a similar trick work on our planet, could global warming or cooling be tamed by the action of thousands of dispersed devices?
They sure did in the Evan Chan game back in 2001.;)
(Synopsis: In this online game - an Alternate Reality Game that served as a marketing campaign for the movie A.I. - the scientists of the year 2142 created a network of thermoplankton capable of changing color from black to white, and that could be controlled by a satellite network. Despite the small size, these thermoplankton were deployed en masse, and the scientists could use their coloring to alter the visual albedo of the Earth enough to control the climate. Unfortunately, the thermoplankton network evolved into a collective intelligence that had conflicting ideas - or, at least, *different* ideas - and when it stopped responding to scientists' instructions, its color changes proved sufficiently chaotic to plunge the world into an ice age, killing humanity.)
(Yes, this was a free marketing campaign, and this story arc was one of many comprising a much larger, deeply fascinating story. Ahh, the memories... =) )
Ah, a fellow Commodork.;) Are you also a rabid fan of the Gamebase64 project?
I'll add M.U.L.E. to your list. In fact, I tried to make it - no fewer than three times! - during my much more laid-back undergrad days. Still one of the best games of all time, in terms of beautifully simple and fun gameplay.
There are several web sites out there that do nothing but publish your ideas (like these guys) so that they can be recorded as prior art.
Nope, that probably won't work.
One critical factor in the relevance of prior art is the publication date. With websites, that's difficult to establish with certainty, because it's always possible to fake the timestamp and post some kind of back-date on the page. Without a reliable timestamping mechanism, websites aren't really eligible for prior art status.
This is a pretty sensible rule, though. The relevant date of prior art is related to the date that the application was filed - yet most applications are first reviewed by the examiner many months after filing. So it's difficult to tell what was known (x) months ago based on what's on the internet now. Not having the rule would create a gaping vulnerability in the patent system: anyone (including, e.g., your competitor as a patentee) could keep track of the patent publication process, concoct some anticipatory prior art, and post it on a website backdated 2001 or whatever.
A related but more practical problem is that, in reality, prior art is only prior art if someone can find it - either the examiner at the patent office, or an accused infringer after the patent issues. If you discover cold fusion and then publish it on your weblog that no one reads, it will be irrelevant to the patent process, even if it's perfectly anticipatory.
The USPTO used to have its own service of this type - the Defensive Publications Program - which had both features (easily verifiable timestamping [since it's performed directly by the USPTO], and easily discoverable source.) Sadly, it abandoned that experiment years ago, and the current analogue (the Statutory Invention Registration process) is far too expensive for this sort of thing.
So, having read that summary, why the hell does anyone think there is anything wrong with that decision?
Because the rule will prompt businesses of all kinds to set up price floors, that's why.
By creating a "balancing test," the Court has changed the operative rule from "don't set price floors under any circumstances" to "you can go ahead and set price floors, so long as you can create a facade of competitiveness in case the DOJ brings an antitrust violation against you."
The sad reality is that the DOJ's antitrust division is toothless. It does nothing. Its last victory was in 1982, against the Ma Bell cartel. It has fought one significant case since then, against Microsoft, and it got whipped. Even clear-cut, admitted perpetrators of antitrust activities get off with a slap on the wrist (Samsung was caught red-handed in DRAM price fixing, and was fined $90MM... even though its annual *profits* are $3,000MM.)
So what has this rule done? It's shifted business from a "we can't, we'll get slapped" stance to a "we're gonna go ahead and do it - prove us wrong, we dare ya!" stance. Prepare to see every good in America sold at the same price through all outlets. This sucks.
Next thing, they'll be backing Cheney's notions he's not part of the executive branch.
Yep - and the use of executive privilege to ignore congressional subpoenas - and the evisceration of the Presidential Records Act...
We have a Court that's willing to let public schools strong-arm students into the confines of politically correct speech at an off-campus event.
We have a Supreme Court that believes that no one has standing to challenge the White House's massive donations of funds to religious organizations - that such spending is "discretionary." (That's funny; they neglected to teach me in law school that the Establishment Clause is optional.)
We have a chief justice expressing the opinion that the CIA is absolutely above the law, because a jury won't convict anyone of wrongdoing as long as they flash their nifty "War on Terror" badges.
Folks, what we have is an extremely deferential Court that's willing to give authority a pass for any old excuse: national security, executive privilege, whatever. We have five justices who see no problem in letting government do whatever the hell it wants. And so, we have the greenlight for fascist America.
Thanks, justices. You've wholly failed to uphold the Constitution, protect the American public, and preserve any teeth for the judicial branch of the federal government. You can go ahead and turn in your "jurisprudence" badges any time now.
Yeah, but that's purely manual, right? I appreciate your sending it to me, though - the only time I use IE instead of my beloved Firefox is when I need to save a "web archive".MHT file - IE has that down to a science.
But that wasn't my point. What most "offline browsing" features contemplate, and what I was describing, was an automated caching system, where every page I visit (and every page I subscribe to, even when I don't visit) gets cached for subsequent offline review. That's been offered as a browser feature for years, but it remains pure vaporware.
The difference between the FF 3.0 offline application support and web page caching is that FF simply provides a storage model.
I understand, and I think that the idea is both viable and important. However, I have great pessimism over web browser developers' capabilities in enacting that idea with skill and efficiency... because they've screwed up so many other browser features.
I hate programming for modern PCs; programming my C=64 was so much easier, faster, less error-prone, and more rewarding.
Hey, I had and loved a C64, too. Subscribed to Compute!'s Gazette and everything. I think I'm going to name my first two children "PEEK" and "POKE"...
However, this fondness is rooted in nostalgia. It was terrific in the age where computers weren't very capable - when BASIC was fine, because that's all we knew about computing. It doesn't fare as well in the modern world - not because the modern world is warped or intolerant, but because much more powerful alternatives are available.
You can bitch about how much IE6 sucks till the cows come home, but that doesn't mean that it's not how programs are, in increasing numbers, being written.
It's now some apps are being written - mostly apps which are intricately tied to the web, anyway. WordPress and MovableType, for instance - you may as well use a web interface, because you're creating your own website.
I posit this: Web apps like this are not being developed because of the state of web programming, but in spite of it. Moreover, many more apps aren't being written - either as web apps, or at all - because of the primitive state of web programming.
I'm not sure what you've used for web programming... but md5, encryption, image conversion? These are all readily available in almost any language used for web programming.
I'm not sure that's true. Googling "Javascript MD5" and "Javascript Rijndael" produce a bunch of hits for third-party code for such algorithms - implementations in Perl, in separate class libraries, etc. By contrast, Googling "C# MD5" and "C# Rijndael" produce a bunch of tutorials for algorithms in every implementation of the.Net Framework.
Last time I tried to create an installer for a windows app, it wasn't quite that easy. Especially if you had library dependencies and other necessary support.
When did you last try? Visual Studio does an outstanding job with versioning, GUIDs, etc. The only hiccups are automated patch generation (which it can't do) and.Net Framework versioning (which still causes it to stumble.) But for the most part, it's buttery-smooth.
As for web apps... what's the last one you had to install instead of just navigating to http://my.webapp.com/ ??
That's an inaccurate comparison. You're comparing the desktop administrator experience with the web user experience. From that perspective, desktop app users have it easy, too - just click on the Start Menu...
For the web admin, web app installation is still very primitive - it's shell scripts, custom code, and XCOPY. Desktop admins have a much easier time of it - both Windows (in its post-"DLL-Hell" days) and Linux (thanks to apt, which is just awesome.)
I'm going to point out that I said "Why not just leave the web to things that require the Internet and keep applications on the PC?" in a previous comment.
And in response, I'll assert that there are many contexts in which internet apps are better designed as locally installed, robust, high-performance desktop apps than as remotely deployed, hinky, inefficient browser-caged apps.
The term web application is not often applied to Java any more. The term "web app" these days often refers to AJAX (formerly known as DHTML) apps and, less often, Flash apps.
The "web programming" that we're discussing is a mishmash of all of the disparate technologies that, together, might get the job done. AJAX itself is an amalgam of Javascript, XML, and some server-side language like Java/Python/Python, all running against MySql and in an Apache environment... that's pretty messy. And, yes, if you want something more active than simple forms and Javascript graphics, then you're probably using either Java (terrible) or Flash (also terrible.)
...so use absolute positioning instead. You act like it doesn't exist...
Sure, it exists, but it's nowhere near as streamlined as positioning and sizing in modern desktop programming. If it weren't, web devs wouldn't still be struggling with DIVs and tables and invisible spacer graphics. But they are - they have to jam a half-dozen hacks into the page in order to get control placement to behave normally and uniformly on all browsers.
The sad state of affairs with web application GUIs is almost entirely Microsoft's fault. IE6 and its rather poor support for CSS2 and DOM, which weren't addressed for 6 years...
Do you really believe that?
Imagine what would happen if Mozilla came up with a truly easy-to-use, robust, predictable, high-performance, stable web programming language. Don't you think devs would flock to it? I would in a heartbeat! And what do you think would happen to IE's market share if Google Maps and a horder of other interesting web apps ran beautifully on everything except IE?
Desktop apps connecting to a remote DB should be web apps. That's all.
What about World of Warcraft? Or iTunes? Don't some of the Flickr submission tools run as desktop apps?
I absolutely agree with you that web programming has many uses where a desktop implementation would be inferior. But it doesn't solely own the multi-user-database software domain.
Learn CSS and get a good ajax library like prototype. You probably know html and if you can write desktop apps (presumably C#) then you can write javascript.
I've already done some web programming. I'm currently helping redesign a website with a traditional structure (DB back end, business logic middle, rendering front end.) I'm sure that I could become proficient in web development with not too much effort.
But my point is that I really doubt I'd ever feel nearly as quick or efficient developing a web app as I do developing a desktop app - not in today's state of the art, and likely not for a long while. No web development environment successfully embodies the RAD principles that make C# coding such a joy.
So, yeah - back then, web programming was much easier. Just some text and some tags.
But a lot has changed in the 2000's. Desktop programming (not just Windows programming, but also Mono code for all platforms) is refreshing - almost effortless! "Rapid application development" isn't just a buzzword; it's one of the best things to happen to programming in the past decade.
Sadly, web programming has not kept apace. Its capabilities grow - AJAX is certainly more powerful than its predecessors - but its ease of development has been stagnant. No, it's galloping in reverse - it's much harder. In order to do anything interesting, you have to know HTML, XML, SQL, Perl, Python, PHP, Javascript, Zope, Django, ASP/ASP.NET - the neuroses of various browsers - how to configure Apache or whatever... The interplay of this bazaar of technology silos is inefficient, frustrating, and detrimental to web development (and web developers' hairlines.)
Wait for Firefox 3.0 [readwriteweb.com]. Soon you'll be able to use your web apps, even if you're connected at 0 Mbps.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Sorry, I just can't be optimistic about this. You shouldn't be, either.
Look - today's web browsers can't even really get offline web page caching right. We're about a decade into the WWW revolution, yet browsers still can't passively save all of our web accesses and show 'em to us again when we're offline. I'd love to have my browser cache all of Slashdot's articles, and BoingBoing's, and Fark's links, for later offline browsing... yet it can't do that. The best we can get is RSS, which, frankly, is crap... it's like Gopher in HTML.
If browsers can't tackle the very simple task of caching routine HTML for offline access... what gives you confidence that it will cache complex AJAX applets with even minimal usability?
I sure hate the fact that I am so friggin tied, at least in theory, to which POINT RELEASE of.NET the user has installed.
Agreed. And you know what makes it worse? If your machine doesn't have the right.NET framework, the app doesn't politely tell you... it just friggin' dies. That's stupid.
ASP.NET has the same problem. I found out the hard way that if you build an ASP.NET 2.0 app and upload it to an ASP.NET 1.1 server, you get a cryptic, misleading error message that distracts you from diagnosing the real problem. Again, that's stupid.
Having a desktop data-driven app is lame lame lame.
:shrug: Not necessarily. A lot of my data-driven apps are intended for a single user on a single machine, that don't call for a publicly accessible webserver with MySql. A locally hosted, ad hoc database is perfectly fine for that. And consider what you can do with such desktop-based database/application combos - high-performance queries, for instance, or system tray applications...
I think you'll be writing desktop apps for a long time to come;)
:sigh: I know. And it irks me, because I want to be designing more web apps. But that desire doesn't justify spending 10x as much time (and frustration) developing a web app that looks bad, feels clunky, and runs more slowly in a crappy browser... you know?:(
I think Java/.NET/Mono and the like with a good forms front end and a really powerful matching backend infrastructure is going to be the next big thing along with XCOPY deployment and zero impact installs.
Completely agreed. I'm currently manning a six-person team on a moderately complex web programming task, and I'm insistent on using ASP.NET 2.0, because it's the least crappy option. (But it's still a whole lot of suckiness.)
I firmly believe that web programming will catch up and surpass desktop programming - but at the moment, the gap is huge, and it favors the latter.... The trick is that web programmers will first have to acknowledge that gap before they can address it. Currently, they're suffering from severe denial... as evidenced by the article that started this thread.
Slashdot Mirror
What happens 10 years down the line when I try to play a game or watch a Movie that has some funky DRM on it, but I can't because the company is out of business or has shutdown the DRM server.
You'll scoot on out to GameCopyWorld, or whatever equivalent of it exists in 2018, and you'll get yo'self a NoCD-hacked executable. Or, you'll just fire up your GigabyteTorrent client, hit an oldwarez site, and find the hacked-to-smithereens version.
Either way, you'll be able to run Spore there in your DosBox v500.0 emulator under Microsoft Windows 12.5 on your 1,024-bit processor. And it will work just dandy, even though the internet by which the original wanted to activate itself will have ceased to exist five years prior.
Why do I know that? Because you're posting on Slashdot. The odds that you have the technical wherewithal to defeat these lame-brain schemes are very good.
But for the average user (who - *gasp* - might never have visited Slashdot) will be out of luck. And that's very sad.
- David Stein
Making an unauthorized copy is a violation of the copyright holders rights.
Even in America, where copyright is more heavily imbalanced in favor of owners and at the expense of the public than any other nation in the world - even here, you're wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
Fair use exists to protect many actions that a purchaser of a copyrighted work might take, even if it's unauthorized. The DMCA may have warped some of that, but it's already eroding under court challenges, and it will continue to do so.
- David Stein
I worry that this portends a day when consoles (and even blu-ray movie players) will REQUIRE an internet connection and do something similar to verify their games/movies.
Some software apps do that. They store some of the data on a remote server, and the app has to go get it from the server in order to work properly - which, of course, involves an authentication step.
The pirate groups simply - shock horror! - capture the downloaded content and hack the app to fetch the data locally.
More and more apps are coming with increasingly exotic DRM: physical media locks that require both the media and a drive to play it in (and often don't work with certain kinds of drives); per-machine activation that resist application relocation; limited-time licenses; active internet connections.
By contrast, the hacked, no-CD versions don't have all of the checks and restrictions and foibles of the authentic software. It's an image that you can move anywhere and use however you want. Sometimes, they even rip out the key check, so you don't even have to type in a serial key!
The sad result is that, increasingly, a hacked version turns out to be better than the genuine deal. They just work, anytime, anywhere, no questions asked. More than once, I've found myself downloading a hacked executable to run software that I bought and legitimately own, even in ways that wholly comply with the original license - e.g., because the activation server for some defunct app had been taken offline.
Yet we're still dealing with this, twenty years after similar schemes proved inane on the Commodore 64. I fully grok that developers don't give a damn if they're making users' lives harder for no reason. But it puzzles me that they don't understand that it's worse for them, too: it wastes development resources on snake-oil protection schemes, and it diminishes consumers' view of the company name. But they just don't seem to learn.
- David Stein
The problem is that I work extensively with banks and I cannot allow banking data to be leaked...
TrueCrypt has a great "shadow volume" feature. As with other encryption apps, Truecrypt lets you create an encrypted volume that you mount as a drive after giving it a password. However, it will also let you assign the encrypted volume a second password that mounts it as a completely different drive.
For example, you can create a 30gb volume that mounts (1) with 25gb of data if you input a first password, and (2) with 5gb of other data if you input a second password. Both volumes look like a mounted 30gb volume. In fact, it's impossible to tell that the volume has two passwords - the unused space in either volume looks like random junk, exactly as if it were an ordinary 30gb volume.
The application to your problem should be obvious... problem solved. Even better, if you do it well, the TSA literally cannot prove that you're not telling the full truth.
- David Stein
Wait, stop right there. There's a discussion of a patent on Slashdot, and the first comment acknowledges that it's interesting, and not that software patents are the spawn of the devil?
If you took this exact same story and s/Google/Microsoft/'ed it, this thread would instantly fill up with "oh noes, Microsoft is patenting commercials in internet video" comments, and "there's no way that that's novel" comments, and "down with software patents!!!" comments. But I guess that since it's patented by Google, it's OK... or something... right? Help me out - my Slashdot Moral Compass is adrift at the moment.
I don't intend this as a trolling post - just an interesting reflection on the culture here at Slashdot. Don't get me wrong; I like this place - I've even got it tied to a "/." keyboard shortcut - but the community often appears very inept when discussing these sorts of issues.
- David Stein
Yeah, but that couldn't be the Ultimate Question. As it's defined in HGTTG, it's practically impossible to derive the Answer from the Question, or vice versa. (Yet the Answer is fully responsive to the Question.)
Actually, the Question is presented in the books. There's a conversation between Marvin and a mattress creature on Squornshellous Zeta in which - well, read it for yourself. It's right there, plain as day.
My geek duties for the day having been satisfied, I shall now go have breakfast... ;)
- David Stein
Let's start first with the definition of "obviousness." Patent law doesn't go by the common English or Webster's definitions of the term - it has a very technical meaning, refined by probably a thousand patent law cases. Many nuances. And unhelpfully, the definitive section on the topic is circularly defined.
At least two reasons for the technicalities. First, virtually anything is "obvious" in hindsight. Second, what is "obvious" to one (unbiased) person may be completely non-obvious to another (unbiased) person, and the patent office would produce radically inconsistent results if examiners were permitted such subjectivity.
- David Stein
Suspended: A Cryogenic Nightmare
A Mind Forever Voyaging
Alter Ego
Portal (the old game, not the new game)
And not just the ol' text games, neither -
Star Control II
Dreamweb
Uplink: Hacker Elite
BioShock
Mass Effect
These aren't mindless shooters. Among the topics presented (often in an open-ended manner) are existentialism, fascism, rationalistic and relativistic morality, survivalism, utopia and dystopia... all classic hard-lit sci-fi topics. Star Control II has at least as much literary value as Ender's Game or Asimov's Foundation.
- David Stein
*sigh* Let's migrate back to the real world for a second.
One of the central planks of American hegemony is our enormous GDP. And one of Congress's self-selected core objectives is protecting and promoting our GDP. Anything that even hints at reducing GDP must be really damn important to receive any support.
Guess what fraction of the US GDP is composed of intellectual property? 45%.
Moreover, consider who owns that IP, especially in the software front: IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Texas Instruments, Apple, Yahoo... and, yes, Google.
Now, seriously - what you think are the odds of Congress passing a law that tears out a large chunk of our GDP, produced by some of the U.S.'s largest, most profitable, and most successful high-tech companies (and, incidentally, also the strongest lobbyists?) Especially when we're on the verge of a recession, thanks to the completely unrelated greed and stupidity of mortgage lenders? Would that be anything but political suicide and gross stupidity courtesy of the U.S. Congress?
Now, I certainly don't Congress with many issues, *especially* protecting the privacy interests or civil rights of John Q. Public. But they *are* keenly attuned to perpetuating the welfare of large corporations - and whether or not you agree with that, it's really beyond debate where Congress as a whole would fall on this issue. So even if the CAFC gets it wrong and rips the guts out of State Street Bank, Congress will charge in and override them. Wait and see.
- David Stein
"Not a whole lot more" than algorithms, eh?
Is that like machines being "not a whole lot more" than some materials and a little physics?
Or chemistry being "not a whole lot more" than acid/base and atomic shell interactions?
Or human intelligence being "not a whole lot more" than interactions of some particularly configured neurons?
- David Stein
So, essentially, it's already dead and writing will do no good.
Wow. This just about says it all - CBS has so completely wrecked the franchise that it doesn't even want to maintain its own franchise group. It's difficult to imagine a more complete case of mismanagement. I mean, the show has had one of the strongest, most resilient, self-sustaining cult followings for almost forty years. It's not easy to kill something like that.
I suppose that for an encore, they'll sue Star Trek conventions into obsolescence for licensing violations. Or, maybe, Star Trek: The Musical. Either way, their scorched-earth policy can't leave any scrap of consumer interest in their franchise untorched!
- David Stein
They sure did in the Evan Chan game back in 2001. ;)
(Synopsis: In this online game - an Alternate Reality Game that served as a marketing campaign for the movie A.I. - the scientists of the year 2142 created a network of thermoplankton capable of changing color from black to white, and that could be controlled by a satellite network. Despite the small size, these thermoplankton were deployed en masse, and the scientists could use their coloring to alter the visual albedo of the Earth enough to control the climate. Unfortunately, the thermoplankton network evolved into a collective intelligence that had conflicting ideas - or, at least, *different* ideas - and when it stopped responding to scientists' instructions, its color changes proved sufficiently chaotic to plunge the world into an ice age, killing humanity.)
(Yes, this was a free marketing campaign, and this story arc was one of many comprising a much larger, deeply fascinating story. Ahh, the memories... =) )
- David Stein / sfsdfd / Cloudmaker
Archon
Ah, a fellow Commodork. ;) Are you also a rabid fan of the Gamebase64 project?
I'll add M.U.L.E. to your list. In fact, I tried to make it - no fewer than three times! - during my much more laid-back undergrad days. Still one of the best games of all time, in terms of beautifully simple and fun gameplay.
- David Stein
Nope, that probably won't work.
One critical factor in the relevance of prior art is the publication date. With websites, that's difficult to establish with certainty, because it's always possible to fake the timestamp and post some kind of back-date on the page. Without a reliable timestamping mechanism, websites aren't really eligible for prior art status.
This is a pretty sensible rule, though. The relevant date of prior art is related to the date that the application was filed - yet most applications are first reviewed by the examiner many months after filing. So it's difficult to tell what was known (x) months ago based on what's on the internet now. Not having the rule would create a gaping vulnerability in the patent system: anyone (including, e.g., your competitor as a patentee) could keep track of the patent publication process, concoct some anticipatory prior art, and post it on a website backdated 2001 or whatever.
A related but more practical problem is that, in reality, prior art is only prior art if someone can find it - either the examiner at the patent office, or an accused infringer after the patent issues. If you discover cold fusion and then publish it on your weblog that no one reads, it will be irrelevant to the patent process, even if it's perfectly anticipatory.
The USPTO used to have its own service of this type - the Defensive Publications Program - which had both features (easily verifiable timestamping [since it's performed directly by the USPTO], and easily discoverable source.) Sadly, it abandoned that experiment years ago, and the current analogue (the Statutory Invention Registration process) is far too expensive for this sort of thing.
- David Stein
Because the rule will prompt businesses of all kinds to set up price floors, that's why.
By creating a "balancing test," the Court has changed the operative rule from "don't set price floors under any circumstances" to "you can go ahead and set price floors, so long as you can create a facade of competitiveness in case the DOJ brings an antitrust violation against you."
The sad reality is that the DOJ's antitrust division is toothless. It does nothing. Its last victory was in 1982, against the Ma Bell cartel. It has fought one significant case since then, against Microsoft, and it got whipped. Even clear-cut, admitted perpetrators of antitrust activities get off with a slap on the wrist (Samsung was caught red-handed in DRAM price fixing, and was fined $90MM... even though its annual *profits* are $3,000MM.)
So what has this rule done? It's shifted business from a "we can't, we'll get slapped" stance to a "we're gonna go ahead and do it - prove us wrong, we dare ya!" stance. Prepare to see every good in America sold at the same price through all outlets. This sucks.
- David Stein
Yep - and the use of executive privilege to ignore congressional subpoenas - and the evisceration of the Presidential Records Act...
We have a Court that's willing to let public schools strong-arm students into the confines of politically correct speech at an off-campus event.
We have a Supreme Court that believes that no one has standing to challenge the White House's massive donations of funds to religious organizations - that such spending is "discretionary." (That's funny; they neglected to teach me in law school that the Establishment Clause is optional.)
We have a chief justice expressing the opinion that the CIA is absolutely above the law, because a jury won't convict anyone of wrongdoing as long as they flash their nifty "War on Terror" badges.
Folks, what we have is an extremely deferential Court that's willing to give authority a pass for any old excuse: national security, executive privilege, whatever. We have five justices who see no problem in letting government do whatever the hell it wants. And so, we have the greenlight for fascist America.
Thanks, justices. You've wholly failed to uphold the Constitution, protect the American public, and preserve any teeth for the judicial branch of the federal government. You can go ahead and turn in your "jurisprudence" badges any time now.
- David Stein
Yeah, but that's purely manual, right? I appreciate your sending it to me, though - the only time I use IE instead of my beloved Firefox is when I need to save a "web archive" .MHT file - IE has that down to a science.
But that wasn't my point. What most "offline browsing" features contemplate, and what I was describing, was an automated caching system, where every page I visit (and every page I subscribe to, even when I don't visit) gets cached for subsequent offline review. That's been offered as a browser feature for years, but it remains pure vaporware.
The difference between the FF 3.0 offline application support and web page caching is that FF simply provides a storage model.
I understand, and I think that the idea is both viable and important. However, I have great pessimism over web browser developers' capabilities in enacting that idea with skill and efficiency... because they've screwed up so many other browser features.
- David Stein
Hey, I had and loved a C64, too. Subscribed to Compute!'s Gazette and everything. I think I'm going to name my first two children "PEEK" and "POKE"...
However, this fondness is rooted in nostalgia. It was terrific in the age where computers weren't very capable - when BASIC was fine, because that's all we knew about computing. It doesn't fare as well in the modern world - not because the modern world is warped or intolerant, but because much more powerful alternatives are available.
You can bitch about how much IE6 sucks till the cows come home, but that doesn't mean that it's not how programs are, in increasing numbers, being written.
It's now some apps are being written - mostly apps which are intricately tied to the web, anyway. WordPress and MovableType, for instance - you may as well use a web interface, because you're creating your own website.
I posit this: Web apps like this are not being developed because of the state of web programming, but in spite of it. Moreover, many more apps aren't being written - either as web apps, or at all - because of the primitive state of web programming.
- David Stein
I'm not sure that's true. Googling "Javascript MD5" and "Javascript Rijndael" produce a bunch of hits for third-party code for such algorithms - implementations in Perl, in separate class libraries, etc. By contrast, Googling "C# MD5" and "C# Rijndael" produce a bunch of tutorials for algorithms in every implementation of the .Net Framework.
Last time I tried to create an installer for a windows app, it wasn't quite that easy. Especially if you had library dependencies and other necessary support.
When did you last try? Visual Studio does an outstanding job with versioning, GUIDs, etc. The only hiccups are automated patch generation (which it can't do) and .Net Framework versioning (which still causes it to stumble.) But for the most part, it's buttery-smooth.
As for web apps... what's the last one you had to install instead of just navigating to http://my.webapp.com/ ??
That's an inaccurate comparison. You're comparing the desktop administrator experience with the web user experience. From that perspective, desktop app users have it easy, too - just click on the Start Menu...
For the web admin, web app installation is still very primitive - it's shell scripts, custom code, and XCOPY. Desktop admins have a much easier time of it - both Windows (in its post-"DLL-Hell" days) and Linux (thanks to apt, which is just awesome.)
- David Stein
And in response, I'll assert that there are many contexts in which internet apps are better designed as locally installed, robust, high-performance desktop apps than as remotely deployed, hinky, inefficient browser-caged apps.
The term web application is not often applied to Java any more. The term "web app" these days often refers to AJAX (formerly known as DHTML) apps and, less often, Flash apps.
Google Maps Goes Java For Mobile Phones...
The "web programming" that we're discussing is a mishmash of all of the disparate technologies that, together, might get the job done. AJAX itself is an amalgam of Javascript, XML, and some server-side language like Java/Python/Python, all running against MySql and in an Apache environment... that's pretty messy. And, yes, if you want something more active than simple forms and Javascript graphics, then you're probably using either Java (terrible) or Flash (also terrible.)
Sure, it exists, but it's nowhere near as streamlined as positioning and sizing in modern desktop programming. If it weren't, web devs wouldn't still be struggling with DIVs and tables and invisible spacer graphics. But they are - they have to jam a half-dozen hacks into the page in order to get control placement to behave normally and uniformly on all browsers.
The sad state of affairs with web application GUIs is almost entirely Microsoft's fault. IE6 and its rather poor support for CSS2 and DOM, which weren't addressed for 6 years...
Do you really believe that?
Imagine what would happen if Mozilla came up with a truly easy-to-use, robust, predictable, high-performance, stable web programming language. Don't you think devs would flock to it? I would in a heartbeat! And what do you think would happen to IE's market share if Google Maps and a horder of other interesting web apps ran beautifully on everything except IE?
- David Stein
What about World of Warcraft? Or iTunes? Don't some of the Flickr submission tools run as desktop apps?
I absolutely agree with you that web programming has many uses where a desktop implementation would be inferior. But it doesn't solely own the multi-user-database software domain.
Learn CSS and get a good ajax library like prototype. You probably know html and if you can write desktop apps (presumably C#) then you can write javascript.
I've already done some web programming. I'm currently helping redesign a website with a traditional structure (DB back end, business logic middle, rendering front end.) I'm sure that I could become proficient in web development with not too much effort.
But my point is that I really doubt I'd ever feel nearly as quick or efficient developing a web app as I do developing a desktop app - not in today's state of the art, and likely not for a long while. No web development environment successfully embodies the RAD principles that make C# coding such a joy.
- David Stein
Yeah, that stuff sucked. I put in many attempts at desktop programming in the 90's, and it was terrible. Yuo had bizarre junk like this:
WNDCLASS winclass
winclass.style = CS_DBLCLKS | CS_OWNDC | CS_HREDRAW | CS_VREDRAW;
winclass.lpfnWndProc = WindowProc;
winclass.cbClsExtra = 0;
winclass.cbWndExtra = 0;
winclass.hInstance = hinstance;
winclass.hIcon = LoadIcon(NULL, IDI_APPLICATION);
winclass.hCursor = LoadCursor(NULL, IDC_ARROW);
winclass.hbrBackground = GetStockObject(BLACK_BRUSH);
winclass.lpszMenuName = NULL;
winclass.lpszClassName = WINDOW_CLASS_NAME;
if (!RegisterClass(&winclass))
return(0);
if (!(program_data.window_handle = CreateWindow(WINDOW_CLASS_NAME, "Watt Bar Analysis", WS_OVERLAPPEDWINDOW | WS_VISIBLE, 10, 10, 560, 410, NULL, NULL, hinstance, NULL)))
return(0);
So, yeah - back then, web programming was much easier. Just some text and some tags.
But a lot has changed in the 2000's. Desktop programming (not just Windows programming, but also Mono code for all platforms) is refreshing - almost effortless! "Rapid application development" isn't just a buzzword; it's one of the best things to happen to programming in the past decade.
Sadly, web programming has not kept apace. Its capabilities grow - AJAX is certainly more powerful than its predecessors - but its ease of development has been stagnant. No, it's galloping in reverse - it's much harder. In order to do anything interesting, you have to know HTML, XML, SQL, Perl, Python, PHP, Javascript, Zope, Django, ASP/ASP.NET - the neuroses of various browsers - how to configure Apache or whatever... The interplay of this bazaar of technology silos is inefficient, frustrating, and detrimental to web development (and web developers' hairlines.)
- David Stein
I'll believe it when I see it.
Sorry, I just can't be optimistic about this. You shouldn't be, either.
Look - today's web browsers can't even really get offline web page caching right. We're about a decade into the WWW revolution, yet browsers still can't passively save all of our web accesses and show 'em to us again when we're offline. I'd love to have my browser cache all of Slashdot's articles, and BoingBoing's, and Fark's links, for later offline browsing... yet it can't do that. The best we can get is RSS, which, frankly, is crap... it's like Gopher in HTML.
If browsers can't tackle the very simple task of caching routine HTML for offline access... what gives you confidence that it will cache complex AJAX applets with even minimal usability?
- David Stein
Agreed. And you know what makes it worse? If your machine doesn't have the right .NET framework, the app doesn't politely tell you... it just friggin' dies. That's stupid.
ASP.NET has the same problem. I found out the hard way that if you build an ASP.NET 2.0 app and upload it to an ASP.NET 1.1 server, you get a cryptic, misleading error message that distracts you from diagnosing the real problem. Again, that's stupid.
Having a desktop data-driven app is lame lame lame.
I think you'll be writing desktop apps for a long time to come ;)
- David Stein
Completely agreed. I'm currently manning a six-person team on a moderately complex web programming task, and I'm insistent on using ASP.NET 2.0, because it's the least crappy option. (But it's still a whole lot of suckiness.)
I firmly believe that web programming will catch up and surpass desktop programming - but at the moment, the gap is huge, and it favors the latter. ... The trick is that web programmers will first have to acknowledge that gap before they can address it. Currently, they're suffering from severe denial... as evidenced by the article that started this thread.
- David Stein