We might also note that the term "playmate" is being blatantly infringed by makers of toys, playground equipment, and publishers of elementary-education books and materials.
It's only a matter of time before Playboy goes after them, too. So they should start introducing a new term now. Of course, it might be difficult to find a word (even a made-up word) that isn't already registered as a trademark.
Of course, we should have known that the world had gone utterly insane when a court accepted Fox's suit against Al Franken over the phrase "fair and balanced". You might argue that Al won this one. But consider the implications of the fact that it even got into the courtroom, and the judge didn't just laugh and fine Fox for a frivolous filing.
Bankrupting via court costs has indeed become a business plan.
Smoke signals, eh? I've read the IP Over Avian Carrier RFC, and I read the report last year about the use of bongos to implement an IP link. But I haven't read of sending IP packets via smoke signals.
Where is it documented? Inquiring minds want to know.
(Yeah, I googled for "smoke signals" "IP packets", and got 26 hits, but none of them seem to actually describe a successful implementation.)
....do you even know any cattle ranchers or are you going from some city slicker point of view
Well, I lived on a farm (that produced both animals and plants) for part of my childhood (until we got the hell out and dad got a job at a military base;-).
I've always been somewhat bemused by the way that people can have a close personal relationship with an animal that they know is destined to become food. I can well remember some chickens, lambs and kids that followed me around because I was so friendly to them. Cute little critters. I also remember eating them.
It's not just us humans, either. I remember a cat who had a pet mouse for about a month. I saw her bring it in and play with it, and I often saw them eating out of the same bowl. They would even sleep together. Then one day, while playing with the mouse, she suddenly grabbed it, swallowed it, and went over to a corner for a nap.
In my experience, there's nothing at all odd about this. Humans, dogs and (domesticated) cats are (semi-)social predators that can form friendships with their prey. This is part of how "domestication" works.
My wife likes to tell about when she was a teenager, and her family had this calf that they named "Delicious". After a couple of years, she (the calf) was slaughtered and sent to the freezer. During meals people would inevitably remark "This is Delicious!" Usually with a knowing grin.
Go to google.com and ask it to search for "the only remaining superpower". It comes back in 0.35 sec with nearly 4000 matches.
Read a few dozen of them. You'll find that the phrase has been bandied about by a lot of people over the past decade or so. It's a phrase that appears frequently in discussions of world politics. You might try a few variants on the phrase, if you want a few thousand more things to read. Just "only superpower" gets too many matches, 200,000 of them, and a lot of them are from earlier texts, so you need another keyword or two to narrow the search.
Let's face it; the attitude of a lot of American politicians is "We're in charge now." This is often said in an extremely arrogant tone of voice, and this is not lost on the rest of the world. Whether you like it or not, along with power comes responsibility. If you delare yourself in charge, it doesn't work to sit there with an innocent look on your face when discussions of Bad Things come up. If you're in charge, you're responsible for the bad as well as the good.
For more than a decade now, Americans of all sorts have been loudly proclaiming that the US is "the only remaining superpower". Bush has started wars of conquest to enforce the idea that "we're in charge here". If you're not on our side, you're with the terrorists.
So, yes, everything that goes wrong in the world is now his fault. Any five-year-old understands that, if you're in charge, you get the blame for any problems. You could have fixed the problems; if you didn't, they're your fault now.
All this "Why do they hate us?" stuff is ridiculous. If you're the biggest bully on the block, of course everyone hates you. Why would you expect otherwise?
He won't. Read up a bit on his history, both as Texas governor and as US president.
His MO is to announce big, impressive new government efforts, get them passed - and then block their funding.
If his history is any guide, here's what he'd planning: He will get bills passed declaring missions to the moon, Mars, whatever. He'll get lots of publicity from this. Hidden in the bills will be the elimination of existing NASA programs. Then, when the funding bills come up, he and his cohort will work hard to make sure that the funding isn't passed.
The end result will be to terminate most existing NASA programs, and fund no new programs. But he'll talk loudly and often about the great space programs that he has established.
For further details, google for the phrase "starve the beast".
(But the US military will get funding for an expanded space effort. That should reassure everyone in the world.)
These aren't much useful after you purchase the product.
Oh, I dunno about that. I'm imagining that I'm in charge of the software that collects the RFID data. What I do is have the software note not only the articles that are placed on the counter at checkout, but also the tag number in the clothing that you're wearing as you leave the store. If any of those "extra" tags agree with articles that the store sells, with some low probability (1% or 5% maybe), the software adds it to your bill.
What I'm betting on is that you wouldn't even notice this. Even if you get a detailed statement that shows all your purchases, the fact is that you did buy that particular article. So it doesn't register, you skip over it, and I've just extracted a small amount of cash from your account. If you happen to notice it, our people are instructed to be very apologetic, and remove the charge without arguing.
Over a year, this could add a lot of money to the store's coffers.
It doesn't even matter if such charges are discovered an publicised. The news stories would just add to your image of the unreliability of all things computerish, while the store's cheerfully helpful staff would reassure you that all you have to do is bring it to their attention to get it fixed.
Unless you could get the source code subpoenaed, there's little chance you could ever fight this sort of larceny.
If they get away with what they're trying to do (jamming legal monkey wrenches in other companies in hopes of extorting money from them, while simultaneously boosting their stock price so insiders can sell) then it becomes a model way for OTHER unsavory characters to go around doing the same thing.
Yeah, but isn't this exactly why the "IP" laws were created?
The basic idea of patent/copyright/trademark law is that you own some abstract thing, and if anyone uses it without getting a license from you (at whatever price you like), you can take them to court and attempt to bankrupt them with legal costs.
SCO isn't setting any sort of precedent here. This is pretty much how "IP" cases have always worked.
And part of the legal game is to make the laws sufficiently fuzzy that it nearly always requires a lawsuit to decide between infringement and fair use. This is usually to the benefit of the big guys, since it's the little guys who can be driven to bankruptcy by legal costs. This setup is no accident, because it was the big guys who paid the legislators to pass the laws in the first place.
The one unusual thing about SCO is the way that they're going after some of the big guys. And, of course, we're familiar with the usual explanation for this: They're playing for a buyout.
Our main hope is that no Big Guy will fall for this. They probably won't, because the perceived value of SCO to most top managers is probably negative. The main question is whether that's a bigger negative than the legal fees of defending against SCO.
Our other main hope is that it won't be settled out of court. If this happens, we'll just have a future of more such attacks.
Way back in the 90's, the makers of lots of commercial and business software did the same sort of thing. They had "NO COPYING ALLOWED" clauses in the license. They had anti-copy gimmicks in the files.
The reaction of many businesses was "We back up our disks periodically. If a license doesn't permit copying, it will not be installed on any company computers. End of discussion." Lots of companies rigorously enforced this, on the advice of their lawyers.
After a while, the software makers caught on, and now most of them allow backup copies. Even the tech-challenged dummies in the US Congress caught on, and they passed a law that explicitly permits backup copies of software.
Most personal/home computers aren't backed up, for various reasons. The biggest is probably that historically backups have been done mostly to tapes, and a tape drive as big as your disk has either been not available at all, or if it's available, it costs more than the computer. But this is changing. Backup to DVD is now not only possible, but cheap, and a R/W DVD drive isn't that much more expensive than a read-only drive. Backup over the Net is becoming easier, and there are companies around who will do it for you cheaply. Or you can get a 200-MB USB disk drive for not too unreasonable a price.
So people are going to start backing up their own stuff. It's already happening with people who have gigabytes of digital photos that they don't want to lose. Many people have their personal financial records on their computer, and are backing those up (for when they get audited 8 or 10 years from now;-). And while you're doing that, why not just back up the whole disk? The DVD will hold it all.
A "no copying" clause in any commercial product is rapidly becoming a block to retail sales, just as it did in the business environment. I don't want to become a criminal just because I have the sense to back up my disk. One by one, every other computer owner on the planet is going to realize the same thing.
So I'm going to be looking for such clauses, and if I see them, I'll likely decide to wait until I can find something equivalent that I can back up.
Or maybe I'll just get a "pirate" copy. If I'm going to be labelled a criminal, I suppose I might as well be one.
They're shooting themselves in the foot. Nothing new there, I guess.
Yah; and with IBM and Sun jumping onto the linux bandwagon, it's about time that we start seriously working on the system that, 10 or 20 years from now, will start pushing linux aside.
We wouldn't to be responsible for another monoculture, now would we?
Yeah, I've heard that rumor, too. Probably here on/.;-)
And it's the significant part. After all, linux is an OS kernel. It isn't a UI. The phrase "linux desktop" is utterly nonsensical. Any X-Windows "desktop" will run on linux.
The sensible thing for IBM or any other vendor to do is settle on a reasonably good window manager, and start building an integrated UI based on it. Gnome would work fine, as would KDE or Enlightenment or FVWM or CDE or....
What wouldn't make sense if you're looking for a near-term market is starting your own window manager project. This would delay a lot of the integration work and put your "integrated desktop" package several years in the future.
This could be a deal with the devil for the Gnome folks, though. IBM has a long history of turning reasonable packages into bureaucratic monstrosities. If you think Gnome is bloated from featuritis now, just wait until you see IBM's extensions.
... glad they're supporting open-source software, but I wonder how much of their support is in recognition of the value of open-source, and how much is just to spite Microsoft?
Well, 20 years ago I worked for several employers that had a big IBM mainframe (and minis were just coming in). What did the mainframe run? It ran VM, of course, plus whatever subsystems the various departments liked.
And where did VM come from? Uh, it was developed in academia. It was an open-source project from the start, though the term hadn't been invented then. IBM tried to downplay it for a few years, and then embraced it as they realized it was a Good Thing for everyone.
VM came with full source (I saw a fair amount of it), and there wasn't any problem showing it to people. IBM supported it, and they also happily accepted bug fixes from anyone.
I was in the engineering department, and one day we brought in Amdahl's version of unix that ran on VM. We joked about installing it over the dead bodies of a lot of IBMers. But the IBM reps themselves didn't have a problem with it. They were curious, and several wished they could supply something so useful. The "dead IBMer bodies" were the local people who thought that IBM was a religion and we'd invited in a devil. The actual IBM employees thought these people were stupid. Their attitude was more like "If it help customers use our machines, we're all for it."
In fact, IBM has long supplied software like VM that they didn't develop. Having lots o useful apps has always been a good tool for selling the hardware. And they have long supported at least some non-IBM software, because much of their income comes from support contracts.
IBM has long been a mixed pack of very good guys and very bad guys, with a lot of people ethically in the middle. Like any other giant monopolistic corporation.
Hmmm... so where does all the "slashdotting" come from? Who are all those non-slashdot readers who are bringing down sites by following links on slashdot?
Well, I got my hands on a Powerbook a few months ago, and I've been using it and porting software. There are some cool things about it. But on balance, I wouldn't say it's better than my nearby linux box. Each is better than the other at some things.
One thing that is definitely not better is the UI. Yeah, maybe OSX looks flashier, but that's merely cosmetics, not functionality. What I've come to appreciate is how much slower the GUI is.
Thus, the one-button mouse is crippled if you're used to the conventional unix (X-Windows actually) 3-button mouse. Cut-and-paste takes roughly twice as long, because you have to switch between the mouse and keyboard several times. (And I like the metaphor of using the middle finger to do an insert.;-)
One real pain with OSX is resizing windows. It can only be done with the lower-right corner. If your window is toward the upper left, this is fine. If not, you have to go to the top of the window, move the window, then move to the bottom right and do the resize. If you didn't happen to move it up/left far enough, you repeat. It's a royal pain. Why the @#$@&*^ can't they just do resize thingies on all the border?
This is a growing problem with browsers, since so many web sites now force their pages to a particular size, and it's never the size that the window was. So you're constantly resizing the damned browser window, then doing it again for the next page. On my linux box, resizing a window is fast; I only really noticed what a waste of time it was when I started using the Powerbook.
Also, moving the button bar away from the windows and putting them all at the top of the screen mostly means that you spend more time moving the pointer up there and then back.
This is just a start of the awkwardnesses. OTOH, I would agree that the fonts usually look a bit better. And plugging something into the USB port tends to get the right window popping up, which only happens occasionally on the linux box.
Also, when are they going to do multiple desktops on the Mac?
(I'll rant about the portability problems some other time. The list is slowly growing...;-)
In general, I'd say that OSX is another unix-like system. Lots of good things, lots of not-so-good things. Which are which depends on what you're doing and what your tastes are like.
What would be nice would be if both factions would take a good look at the others' GUI, and start stealing ideas. But I'd rather see the Mac steal X11 ideas than the other direction. Maybe this is because the X11 gang has already done it, while the Apple gang knows that they're the best and don't have to learn from those other dummies.
My wife likes to talk about the drafting jobs she's had in the past, where she had a 16-button mouse (with reticle). Now wouldn't that be nice...
"This is good news for coffee drinkers, however it doesn't mean everyone should run out for a latte," said Frank Hu, senior author of the study...
Yeah; that milk is bad for ya; stick to the straight coffee and you'll be fine.
Seriously; I read the report looking for clues that for the usual sorts of problems. Did they have cause and effect straightened out? Did they really show it was related to the caffeine? Could you get the same effect by drinking (warm) water?
They did mention decaf having a lesser effect. But there are more differences than just caffeine level. The decaffeination processes all remove a variety of the more highly-soluble compounds, so any of them could be the explanation.
Maybe it's the caffeine. Maybe it's some other compound that's about as soluble as caffeine. Maybe it's the ritual of the warm drink. Maybe it's the heat of the coffee.
Some time back, I read an observation that the most important part of any scientific paper is the paragraph near the end that starts with "Further study is needed...".
Alternatively what about bluetooth adaptors that could be plugged into any camera with a mini USB connection?
My wife and I have a pair of digital cameras. They both have USB plugs. But the USB cables for each are not interchangeable, with each other or with any other USB cables that we have. Only the computer end is standard; the camera end is unique to the camera. We once misplaced one of the USB cables, and it took us a month to get a replacement. We had to special-order it from the camera manufacturer, for $40.
So a bluetooth-to-USB adapter would probably only work for one (or a very few) cameras. You'd find that you have to buy it from the camera maker, because nobody else would have one that fits your camera.
Yeah, you could make the bluetooth-to-USB adapter connect to the "computer" end of the camera maker's USB cable. But that's not how they'd do it. And if you could find one that worked this way, you'd have to have the maker's USB cable anyway. Since bluetooth only works within a few meters, you might as well just connect the camera to the computer as to the adapter.
once you start filtering - you loose your common carrier status
Good point! I hadn't though of that little twist.
Indeed. And this is a good excuse for following the other suggestion: Supply your customers with tools that let them do the filtering themselves. The latest mozilla/netscape browser is a good start. But start studying the subject, and try to collect tools to give the customers control. Put together a good web site that they can download from. Try setting up your own mailing list and/or newsgroup to discuss such things, and get your more tech-savvy customers involved in the problem.
But make it clear to them that you don't consider it your job to filter (or censor) anything. You just supply Internet access, and you want to help them do the filtering however they prefer.
You might also encourage your customers to discuss the topic of "spyware", and help them block it.
Similarly, our daughter just had a baby, and one could easily interpret this as her effort to prop up farming by adding one more mouth to the population. The government does encourage people forming families, and by blocking the disemmination of information about birth control, actively works to increase the population. I suppose this is also to encourage spending and help prop up farming, right?
Of course, one could also argue that by funding NASA, the intent is to pay money to the people who work there so they will go out and spend it on food, thus propping up farming. And when you look at all the fuel that a Mars probe uses, it's obvious that their real goal is to subsidize the companies that make rocket fuel.
Also, Social Security and Medicare are just to keep those old folks spending money on food and medicine, for the benefit of farmers and pharmaceutical companies.
One of the basic problems here is thinking that people are only motivated by money. It seems fairly obvious that NASA and JPL did not come into existence as money-making operations. If you think that profit is the only motive possible, you won't ever understand why people support such things. Or why someone might support helping old folks, for that matter.
Actually, a number of Mars experts have already commented on this. The main explanation is that, though Mars does have all those dust storms, the atmosphere is quite thin compared to ours. It doesn't have the power to pick much up, and the storms are made up of rather fine powder. The effect is more like a slow polishing rather than the sand blasting that you get in Earthly deserts. It really would take billions of years to wear those rocks down to sand by such feeble storms. Come back when Mars is twice as old as it is now, and the rocks will be smaller and smoother. Except, of course, for the ones more recently scattered by impacts that haven't yet happened.
I wonder if there's a NASA page with the numbers on this?
Well, now; maybe we should be suggestion to AOL that they start blocking all email. Just think of the improvement this would make in both their spam-blocking tally and the amount of junk on the Net.
Their customers could switch to good ISPs, and we'd all be better off.
The biggest problem with this legislation is the simple fact that you can't legislate common sense,
Nah; the biggest problem is that applies to the passenger as well as the driver.
On a recent vacation trip that included California, my wife and I took along our cute new Garmin iQue, a GPS-enabled Palm Pilot that was loaded with lots of maps. One of us would drive while the other navigated. This Garmin gadget was a great aid in navigating. It can show the street system at any scale, and can find routes for you (and modify them on the fly when you go off route). It's a huge improvement on printed maps, mostly because you can't carry detailed printed maps of the entire continent in your shirt pocket or purse.
This law would outlaw such useful gadgets, for no good reason. We do have the sense to not try to use it while driving. But with two people in the car, that's not a problem. And with separate driver and navigator, we didn't have to try to pull off on major highways, a risky operation in many situations.
Granted, a driver trying to use complex electronic gadgetry is stupid. But navigation equipment in the hands of a non-driver is emminently sensible. This law bans it, so it's an idiotic law.
he internet was not designed for such things as real time video, audio and broadcasting of any form.
True. But RTP (Real Time Protocol, RCC 1889) was added to the TCP/UDP list some years ago. Its implementation has been somewhat spotty. But most of the Net's infrastructure understands it, though your workstation may not. It's the main basis for VoIP.
So there is the possibility of the internet continuing to run side by side with other communication systems.
Or more likely, TCP and UDP will run side by side with RTP. That's the way it works now, where RTP is implemented. We just need to get all three extended to all IP "hosts".
Actually, for some purposes, TCP nearly works. That's what happens when you use your browser to connect to an "Internet broadcast". But those occasional pauses are an artifact of the use of TCP, which isn't a real-time protocol. If there's excess capacity all the way along the data path, this isn't a problem. If there's a bottleneck somewhere, TCP is supposed to produce those pauses. RTP is supposed to make sure there's sufficient capacity, and decline the connection if not.
(I'm sure others will expand on this cursory and wholly insufficient summary. Or just go read the RFC.;-)
As long as most (older) people I know have a 56k or 64k internet connection, and have to pay per minute online time, VoIP and the like will not become mainstream soon.
Actually, it's happening quite rapidly behind their backs. It's not just Japan that has converted to VoIP. In the past year or so, we've seen the reports here and elsewhere that much of the long-distance and high-capacity lines within the phone system have been silently converted to IP. Here in North America, if you make a call outside your local exchange, there is a rapidly growing probability that it will be packetized and sent over IP (RTP actually) to the other end's exchange, where it will be converted back to analog.
So all those people using 56K modems will have their data converted to analog voice in the modem, converted back to digital at the local TelCo. It will be sent over IP to the remote TelCo, where it will be converted back to analog and fed to a modem, which will convert it back to digital. Each translation will produce a roughly 100-times reduction in bit speed. Yeah, it's tremendously inefficient, compared with just doing IP for the whole thing. That's the way things are done in the modern commercial world.
We still have analog phones in our house. But a couple of years ago, we got a good deal from our cable supplier (RCN) to include phone service over the cable. They installed a little box that connects the incoming cable to the house phones. I asked someone at RCN what this did. The summary was that it "puts the phones on the Internet". I asked if this was what they called "VoIP", and he said "I think so".
It can be difficult to get a straight story in such cases. You may very well be using VoIP at home right now, without knowing it. And the people at the phone company might not know it, either.
Funny thing, in the project that I'm working on now, one thing we're trying to figure out is how to get our text messages converted to voice (solved), and sent out to a phone (not solved). We have digitized voice files, and the computers are on the Internet. You'd think it would be trivial to connect to a phone anywhere there's digital service. But it's far from trivial. Most of the people you talk to within the phone system are interested solely in selling you an expensive "total solution" in which you hand your entire company's data over to them, and can't be persuaded to talk about anything so mundane as delivering a single digital file to a single digital device. Information on how to talk device-to-device is exceedingly difficult to come by.
Slashdot Mirror
We might also note that the term "playmate" is being blatantly infringed by makers of toys, playground equipment, and publishers of elementary-education books and materials.
It's only a matter of time before Playboy goes after them, too. So they should start introducing a new term now. Of course, it might be difficult to find a word (even a made-up word) that isn't already registered as a trademark.
Of course, we should have known that the world had gone utterly insane when a court accepted Fox's suit against Al Franken over the phrase "fair and balanced". You might argue that Al won this one. But consider the implications of the fact that it even got into the courtroom, and the judge didn't just laugh and fine Fox for a frivolous filing.
Bankrupting via court costs has indeed become a business plan.
Smoke signals, eh? I've read the IP Over Avian Carrier RFC, and I read the report last year about the use of bongos to implement an IP link. But I haven't read of sending IP packets via smoke signals.
Where is it documented? Inquiring minds want to know.
(Yeah, I googled for "smoke signals" "IP packets", and got 26 hits, but none of them seem to actually describe a successful implementation.)
....do you even know any cattle ranchers or are you going from some city slicker point of view
;-).
Well, I lived on a farm (that produced both animals and plants) for part of my childhood (until we got the hell out and dad got a job at a military base
I've always been somewhat bemused by the way that people can have a close personal relationship with an animal that they know is destined to become food. I can well remember some chickens, lambs and kids that followed me around because I was so friendly to them. Cute little critters. I also remember eating them.
It's not just us humans, either. I remember a cat who had a pet mouse for about a month. I saw her bring it in and play with it, and I often saw them eating out of the same bowl. They would even sleep together. Then one day, while playing with the mouse, she suddenly grabbed it, swallowed it, and went over to a corner for a nap.
In my experience, there's nothing at all odd about this. Humans, dogs and (domesticated) cats are (semi-)social predators that can form friendships with their prey. This is part of how "domestication" works.
My wife likes to tell about when she was a teenager, and her family had this calf that they named "Delicious". After a couple of years, she (the calf) was slaughtered and sent to the freezer. During meals people would inevitably remark "This is Delicious!" Usually with a knowing grin.
At least I'm not that sick.
Google is your friend (TM;-).
Go to google.com and ask it to search for "the only remaining superpower". It comes back in 0.35 sec with nearly 4000 matches.
Read a few dozen of them. You'll find that the phrase has been bandied about by a lot of people over the past decade or so. It's a phrase that appears frequently in discussions of world politics. You might try a few variants on the phrase, if you want a few thousand more things to read. Just "only superpower" gets too many matches, 200,000 of them, and a lot of them are from earlier texts, so you need another keyword or two to narrow the search.
Let's face it; the attitude of a lot of American politicians is "We're in charge now." This is often said in an extremely arrogant tone of voice, and this is not lost on the rest of the world. Whether you like it or not, along with power comes responsibility. If you delare yourself in charge, it doesn't work to sit there with an innocent look on your face when discussions of Bad Things come up. If you're in charge, you're responsible for the bad as well as the good.
For more than a decade now, Americans of all sorts have been loudly proclaiming that the US is "the only remaining superpower". Bush has started wars of conquest to enforce the idea that "we're in charge here". If you're not on our side, you're with the terrorists.
...
So, yes, everything that goes wrong in the world is now his fault. Any five-year-old understands that, if you're in charge, you get the blame for any problems. You could have fixed the problems; if you didn't, they're your fault now.
All this "Why do they hate us?" stuff is ridiculous. If you're the biggest bully on the block, of course everyone hates you. Why would you expect otherwise?
Human psychology really isn't all that complex
Yeah; and they can hire Jason and Britney as spokescouple ...
He won't. Read up a bit on his history, both as Texas governor and as US president.
His MO is to announce big, impressive new government efforts, get them passed - and then block their funding.
If his history is any guide, here's what he'd planning: He will get bills passed declaring missions to the moon, Mars, whatever. He'll get lots of publicity from this. Hidden in the bills will be the elimination of existing NASA programs. Then, when the funding bills come up, he and his cohort will work hard to make sure that the funding isn't passed.
The end result will be to terminate most existing NASA programs, and fund no new programs. But he'll talk loudly and often about the great space programs that he has established.
For further details, google for the phrase "starve the beast".
(But the US military will get funding for an expanded space effort. That should reassure everyone in the world.)
These aren't much useful after you purchase the product.
Oh, I dunno about that. I'm imagining that I'm in charge of the software that collects the RFID data. What I do is have the software note not only the articles that are placed on the counter at checkout, but also the tag number in the clothing that you're wearing as you leave the store. If any of those "extra" tags agree with articles that the store sells, with some low probability (1% or 5% maybe), the software adds it to your bill.
What I'm betting on is that you wouldn't even notice this. Even if you get a detailed statement that shows all your purchases, the fact is that you did buy that particular article. So it doesn't register, you skip over it, and I've just extracted a small amount of cash from your account. If you happen to notice it, our people are instructed to be very apologetic, and remove the charge without arguing.
Over a year, this could add a lot of money to the store's coffers.
It doesn't even matter if such charges are discovered an publicised. The news stories would just add to your image of the unreliability of all things computerish, while the store's cheerfully helpful staff would reassure you that all you have to do is bring it to their attention to get it fixed.
Unless you could get the source code subpoenaed, there's little chance you could ever fight this sort of larceny.
If they get away with what they're trying to do (jamming legal monkey wrenches in other companies in hopes of extorting money from them, while simultaneously boosting their stock price so insiders can sell) then it becomes a model way for OTHER unsavory characters to go around doing the same thing.
Yeah, but isn't this exactly why the "IP" laws were created?
The basic idea of patent/copyright/trademark law is that you own some abstract thing, and if anyone uses it without getting a license from you (at whatever price you like), you can take them to court and attempt to bankrupt them with legal costs.
SCO isn't setting any sort of precedent here. This is pretty much how "IP" cases have always worked.
And part of the legal game is to make the laws sufficiently fuzzy that it nearly always requires a lawsuit to decide between infringement and fair use. This is usually to the benefit of the big guys, since it's the little guys who can be driven to bankruptcy by legal costs. This setup is no accident, because it was the big guys who paid the legislators to pass the laws in the first place.
The one unusual thing about SCO is the way that they're going after some of the big guys. And, of course, we're familiar with the usual explanation for this: They're playing for a buyout.
Our main hope is that no Big Guy will fall for this. They probably won't, because the perceived value of SCO to most top managers is probably negative. The main question is whether that's a bigger negative than the legal fees of defending against SCO.
Our other main hope is that it won't be settled out of court. If this happens, we'll just have a future of more such attacks.
Way back in the 90's, the makers of lots of commercial and business software did the same sort of thing. They had "NO COPYING ALLOWED" clauses in the license. They had anti-copy gimmicks in the files.
;-). And while you're doing that, why not just back up the whole disk? The DVD will hold it all.
The reaction of many businesses was "We back up our disks periodically. If a license doesn't permit copying, it will not be installed on any company computers. End of discussion." Lots of companies rigorously enforced this, on the advice of their lawyers.
After a while, the software makers caught on, and now most of them allow backup copies. Even the tech-challenged dummies in the US Congress caught on, and they passed a law that explicitly permits backup copies of software.
Most personal/home computers aren't backed up, for various reasons. The biggest is probably that historically backups have been done mostly to tapes, and a tape drive as big as your disk has either been not available at all, or if it's available, it costs more than the computer. But this is changing. Backup to DVD is now not only possible, but cheap, and a R/W DVD drive isn't that much more expensive than a read-only drive. Backup over the Net is becoming easier, and there are companies around who will do it for you cheaply. Or you can get a 200-MB USB disk drive for not too unreasonable a price.
So people are going to start backing up their own stuff. It's already happening with people who have gigabytes of digital photos that they don't want to lose. Many people have their personal financial records on their computer, and are backing those up (for when they get audited 8 or 10 years from now
A "no copying" clause in any commercial product is rapidly becoming a block to retail sales, just as it did in the business environment. I don't want to become a criminal just because I have the sense to back up my disk. One by one, every other computer owner on the planet is going to realize the same thing.
So I'm going to be looking for such clauses, and if I see them, I'll likely decide to wait until I can find something equivalent that I can back up.
Or maybe I'll just get a "pirate" copy. If I'm going to be labelled a criminal, I suppose I might as well be one.
They're shooting themselves in the foot. Nothing new there, I guess.
Yah; and with IBM and Sun jumping onto the linux bandwagon, it's about time that we start seriously working on the system that, 10 or 20 years from now, will start pushing linux aside.
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We wouldn't to be responsible for another monoculture, now would we?
Of course, there's always iTron
I believe IBM is in the GNOME camp.
/. ;-)
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Yeah, I've heard that rumor, too. Probably here on
And it's the significant part. After all, linux is an OS kernel. It isn't a UI. The phrase "linux desktop" is utterly nonsensical. Any X-Windows "desktop" will run on linux.
The sensible thing for IBM or any other vendor to do is settle on a reasonably good window manager, and start building an integrated UI based on it. Gnome would work fine, as would KDE or Enlightenment or FVWM or CDE or
What wouldn't make sense if you're looking for a near-term market is starting your own window manager project. This would delay a lot of the integration work and put your "integrated desktop" package several years in the future.
This could be a deal with the devil for the Gnome folks, though. IBM has a long history of turning reasonable packages into bureaucratic monstrosities. If you think Gnome is bloated from featuritis now, just wait until you see IBM's extensions.
Has anyone here seen PL/I? Or used JCL?
... glad they're supporting open-source software, but I wonder how much of their support is in recognition of the value of open-source, and how much is just to spite Microsoft?
Well, 20 years ago I worked for several employers that had a big IBM mainframe (and minis were just coming in). What did the mainframe run? It ran VM, of course, plus whatever subsystems the various departments liked.
And where did VM come from? Uh, it was developed in academia. It was an open-source project from the start, though the term hadn't been invented then. IBM tried to downplay it for a few years, and then embraced it as they realized it was a Good Thing for everyone.
VM came with full source (I saw a fair amount of it), and there wasn't any problem showing it to people. IBM supported it, and they also happily accepted bug fixes from anyone.
I was in the engineering department, and one day we brought in Amdahl's version of unix that ran on VM. We joked about installing it over the dead bodies of a lot of IBMers. But the IBM reps themselves didn't have a problem with it. They were curious, and several wished they could supply something so useful. The "dead IBMer bodies" were the local people who thought that IBM was a religion and we'd invited in a devil. The actual IBM employees thought these people were stupid. Their attitude was more like "If it help customers use our machines, we're all for it."
In fact, IBM has long supplied software like VM that they didn't develop. Having lots o useful apps has always been a good tool for selling the hardware. And they have long supported at least some non-IBM software, because much of their income comes from support contracts.
IBM has long been a mixed pack of very good guys and very bad guys, with a lot of people ethically in the middle. Like any other giant monopolistic corporation.
Hmmm ... so where does all the "slashdotting" come from? Who are all those non-slashdot readers who are bringing down sites by following links on slashdot?
Well, I got my hands on a Powerbook a few months ago, and I've been using it and porting software. There are some cool things about it. But on balance, I wouldn't say it's better than my nearby linux box. Each is better than the other at some things.
;-)
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One thing that is definitely not better is the UI. Yeah, maybe OSX looks flashier, but that's merely cosmetics, not functionality. What I've come to appreciate is how much slower the GUI is.
Thus, the one-button mouse is crippled if you're used to the conventional unix (X-Windows actually) 3-button mouse. Cut-and-paste takes roughly twice as long, because you have to switch between the mouse and keyboard several times. (And I like the metaphor of using the middle finger to do an insert.
One real pain with OSX is resizing windows. It can only be done with the lower-right corner. If your window is toward the upper left, this is fine. If not, you have to go to the top of the window, move the window, then move to the bottom right and do the resize. If you didn't happen to move it up/left far enough, you repeat. It's a royal pain. Why the @#$@&*^ can't they just do resize thingies on all the border?
This is a growing problem with browsers, since so many web sites now force their pages to a particular size, and it's never the size that the window was. So you're constantly resizing the damned browser window, then doing it again for the next page. On my linux box, resizing a window is fast; I only really noticed what a waste of time it was when I started using the Powerbook.
Also, moving the button bar away from the windows and putting them all at the top of the screen mostly means that you spend more time moving the pointer up there and then back.
This is just a start of the awkwardnesses. OTOH, I would agree that the fonts usually look a bit better. And plugging something into the USB port tends to get the right window popping up, which only happens occasionally on the linux box.
Also, when are they going to do multiple desktops on the Mac?
(I'll rant about the portability problems some other time. The list is slowly growing
In general, I'd say that OSX is another unix-like system. Lots of good things, lots of not-so-good things. Which are which depends on what you're doing and what your tastes are like.
What would be nice would be if both factions would take a good look at the others' GUI, and start stealing ideas. But I'd rather see the Mac steal X11 ideas than the other direction. Maybe this is because the X11 gang has already done it, while the Apple gang knows that they're the best and don't have to learn from those other dummies.
My wife likes to talk about the drafting jobs she's had in the past, where she had a 16-button mouse (with reticle). Now wouldn't that be nice
"This is good news for coffee drinkers, however it doesn't mean everyone should run out for a latte," said Frank Hu, senior author of the study ...
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Yeah; that milk is bad for ya; stick to the straight coffee and you'll be fine.
Seriously; I read the report looking for clues that for the usual sorts of problems. Did they have cause and effect straightened out? Did they really show it was related to the caffeine? Could you get the same effect by drinking (warm) water?
They did mention decaf having a lesser effect. But there are more differences than just caffeine level. The decaffeination processes all remove a variety of the more highly-soluble compounds, so any of them could be the explanation.
Maybe it's the caffeine. Maybe it's some other compound that's about as soluble as caffeine. Maybe it's the ritual of the warm drink. Maybe it's the heat of the coffee.
Some time back, I read an observation that the most important part of any scientific paper is the paragraph near the end that starts with "Further study is needed
Alternatively what about bluetooth adaptors that could be plugged into any camera with a mini USB connection?
My wife and I have a pair of digital cameras. They both have USB plugs. But the USB cables for each are not interchangeable, with each other or with any other USB cables that we have. Only the computer end is standard; the camera end is unique to the camera. We once misplaced one of the USB cables, and it took us a month to get a replacement. We had to special-order it from the camera manufacturer, for $40.
So a bluetooth-to-USB adapter would probably only work for one (or a very few) cameras. You'd find that you have to buy it from the camera maker, because nobody else would have one that fits your camera.
Yeah, you could make the bluetooth-to-USB adapter connect to the "computer" end of the camera maker's USB cable. But that's not how they'd do it. And if you could find one that worked this way, you'd have to have the maker's USB cable anyway. Since bluetooth only works within a few meters, you might as well just connect the camera to the computer as to the adapter.
Good point! I hadn't though of that little twist.
Indeed. And this is a good excuse for following the other suggestion: Supply your customers with tools that let them do the filtering themselves. The latest mozilla/netscape browser is a good start. But start studying the subject, and try to collect tools to give the customers control. Put together a good web site that they can download from. Try setting up your own mailing list and/or newsgroup to discuss such things, and get your more tech-savvy customers involved in the problem.
But make it clear to them that you don't consider it your job to filter (or censor) anything. You just supply Internet access, and you want to help them do the filtering however they prefer.
You might also encourage your customers to discuss the topic of "spyware", and help them block it.
Similarly, our daughter just had a baby, and one could easily interpret this as her effort to prop up farming by adding one more mouth to the population. The government does encourage people forming families, and by blocking the disemmination of information about birth control, actively works to increase the population. I suppose this is also to encourage spending and help prop up farming, right?
Of course, one could also argue that by funding NASA, the intent is to pay money to the people who work there so they will go out and spend it on food, thus propping up farming. And when you look at all the fuel that a Mars probe uses, it's obvious that their real goal is to subsidize the companies that make rocket fuel.
Also, Social Security and Medicare are just to keep those old folks spending money on food and medicine, for the benefit of farmers and pharmaceutical companies.
One of the basic problems here is thinking that people are only motivated by money. It seems fairly obvious that NASA and JPL did not come into existence as money-making operations. If you think that profit is the only motive possible, you won't ever understand why people support such things. Or why someone might support helping old folks, for that matter.
Actually, a number of Mars experts have already commented on this. The main explanation is that, though Mars does have all those dust storms, the atmosphere is quite thin compared to ours. It doesn't have the power to pick much up, and the storms are made up of rather fine powder. The effect is more like a slow polishing rather than the sand blasting that you get in Earthly deserts. It really would take billions of years to wear those rocks down to sand by such feeble storms. Come back when Mars is twice as old as it is now, and the rocks will be smaller and smoother. Except, of course, for the ones more recently scattered by impacts that haven't yet happened.
I wonder if there's a NASA page with the numbers on this?
Well, now; maybe we should be suggestion to AOL that they start blocking all email. Just think of the improvement this would make in both their spam-blocking tally and the amount of junk on the Net.
Their customers could switch to good ISPs, and we'd all be better off.
The biggest problem with this legislation is the simple fact that you can't legislate common sense,
Nah; the biggest problem is that applies to the passenger as well as the driver.
On a recent vacation trip that included California, my wife and I took along our cute new Garmin iQue, a GPS-enabled Palm Pilot that was loaded with lots of maps. One of us would drive while the other navigated. This Garmin gadget was a great aid in navigating. It can show the street system at any scale, and can find routes for you (and modify them on the fly when you go off route). It's a huge improvement on printed maps, mostly because you can't carry detailed printed maps of the entire continent in your shirt pocket or purse.
This law would outlaw such useful gadgets, for no good reason. We do have the sense to not try to use it while driving. But with two people in the car, that's not a problem. And with separate driver and navigator, we didn't have to try to pull off on major highways, a risky operation in many situations.
Granted, a driver trying to use complex electronic gadgetry is stupid. But navigation equipment in the hands of a non-driver is emminently sensible. This law bans it, so it's an idiotic law.
he internet was not designed for such things as real time video, audio and broadcasting of any form.
;-)
True. But RTP (Real Time Protocol, RCC 1889) was added to the TCP/UDP list some years ago. Its implementation has been somewhat spotty. But most of the Net's infrastructure understands it, though your workstation may not. It's the main basis for VoIP.
So there is the possibility of the internet continuing to run side by side with other communication systems.
Or more likely, TCP and UDP will run side by side with RTP. That's the way it works now, where RTP is implemented. We just need to get all three extended to all IP "hosts".
Actually, for some purposes, TCP nearly works. That's what happens when you use your browser to connect to an "Internet broadcast". But those occasional pauses are an artifact of the use of TCP, which isn't a real-time protocol. If there's excess capacity all the way along the data path, this isn't a problem. If there's a bottleneck somewhere, TCP is supposed to produce those pauses. RTP is supposed to make sure there's sufficient capacity, and decline the connection if not.
(I'm sure others will expand on this cursory and wholly insufficient summary. Or just go read the RFC.
As long as most (older) people I know have a 56k or 64k internet connection, and have to pay per minute online time, VoIP and the like will not become mainstream soon.
Actually, it's happening quite rapidly behind their backs. It's not just Japan that has converted to VoIP. In the past year or so, we've seen the reports here and elsewhere that much of the long-distance and high-capacity lines within the phone system have been silently converted to IP. Here in North America, if you make a call outside your local exchange, there is a rapidly growing probability that it will be packetized and sent over IP (RTP actually) to the other end's exchange, where it will be converted back to analog.
So all those people using 56K modems will have their data converted to analog voice in the modem, converted back to digital at the local TelCo. It will be sent over IP to the remote TelCo, where it will be converted back to analog and fed to a modem, which will convert it back to digital. Each translation will produce a roughly 100-times reduction in bit speed. Yeah, it's tremendously inefficient, compared with just doing IP for the whole thing. That's the way things are done in the modern commercial world.
We still have analog phones in our house. But a couple of years ago, we got a good deal from our cable supplier (RCN) to include phone service over the cable. They installed a little box that connects the incoming cable to the house phones. I asked someone at RCN what this did. The summary was that it "puts the phones on the Internet". I asked if this was what they called "VoIP", and he said "I think so".
It can be difficult to get a straight story in such cases. You may very well be using VoIP at home right now, without knowing it. And the people at the phone company might not know it, either.
Funny thing, in the project that I'm working on now, one thing we're trying to figure out is how to get our text messages converted to voice (solved), and sent out to a phone (not solved). We have digitized voice files, and the computers are on the Internet. You'd think it would be trivial to connect to a phone anywhere there's digital service. But it's far from trivial. Most of the people you talk to within the phone system are interested solely in selling you an expensive "total solution" in which you hand your entire company's data over to them, and can't be persuaded to talk about anything so mundane as delivering a single digital file to a single digital device. Information on how to talk device-to-device is exceedingly difficult to come by.
At a conference some years back, I noticed that Vint Cerf was wearing a t-shirt that said "IP on everything".
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Sorta sums it up