One of the biggest fallacies of the computer world is this: license your IP, so you can become like Microsoft.
This is just dumb. Name 5 vendors that decided to license their core technology to the competition and are successful. I can think of one: Intel. Intel licences x86, mainly to prevent anti-trust issues.
One example on the unsucessful side is Palm. Palm survives, but is far from successful. It's PalmOS license caused massive cannibalization in its core hardware business, and became so bad that it basically bought its licensee/competitor. Doh!
Why should Apple open up the iPod or iTunes? To me, it sounds like industry executives are playing politics - Apple is bad, because they won't share. In other words, Apple is kicking our butts, and we're trying to change the game.
Why don't those vendors just convert their stuff to MP3? Audible.com has no problems selling content to iPod owners and non-iPod owners. WTF?
Those cards are great. Why bitch about them? If you're so paranoid, just put in your neighbor's address. They don't really check, nor do the employees care.
If you don't want items (like pregnancy tests) tracked, don't use your card. Simple enough.
Personally, I think the cards are great. For some useless information that'll drive someone else's imagination, I get steaks at half-off: $4.99/lb instead of $9.85/lb. That's not being a sheep, that's saving money.
We love the healthy/organic supermarket (New Seasons) down the way and go there sometimes, but dude, we save like $5-$25 a trip by heading to the local Safeway.
Does anyone really know what they do with that data anyway?
The reason those numbers are distorted is simple: that's $1 trillion that could be used to help the poor.
Indeed, the best thing the government could do to shut these "help the poor" peple out is to just give each man, woman, and child below the poverty line a trillion...then let them sink or float on their own.
What we'll find is that the vast majority of them will sink - meaning that any more $$ spent on them is wasted. It'll show the left in particular that helping the poor is mostly fruitless. And that it's not the lack of government funding that causes problems, it's the people who are the problem.
Where patent law is good
on
TiVo Will Die
·
· Score: 4, Informative
TiVo won't die because they have patents on the whole DVR idea.
This is one case where patents are good. TiVo, and DVRs in general, aren't really that obvious - VCRs and such aren't really prior art.
Now that everyone and their brothers are making DVRs, well, TiVo owns the IP behind all of it. They can go off and sue/license the technology to anyone, and they'll be hard to stop. Plus they learned from Apple's mistakes and filed the right kinds of patents.
Redmond, WA - Microsoft's new Pr0nMaster gives you pr0n on demand. Bring your pr0n with you - on the train, on the bus, at 12.000 meters - everwhere. It's large capacity drive means you won't have to explain what you're doing with "all those DVDs" when you pass through customs. The big screen means you won't have to squint while you watch. And it's small enough for you to bring it to the restroom or other enclosed space so you can "do your business."
The Pr0nMaster also comes in a sport enclosure, because "accidents happen" when things get exciting on-screen! Plus its handy video out lets you plug into the A/V equipment at your destination - so you can share the wealth!
The Microsoft Pr0nMaster - a peepshow in your pocket!
Realistically speaking, the biggest problem with Bittorrent is seeding. I think this is how bittorrent works:
* a file is seeded, and a.torrent file generated * that.torrent file is uploaded to a tracker * clients who want to download the file download the.torrent from the tracker * the user opens the.torrent file, which causes the the bittorrent client asks the tracker for the machines/locations of the seeds and people downloading the file(s) pointed to by the.torrent * the client downloads various chunks of the files from both the seeds and the other downloaders
The more people download a file, the better bittorrent is able to spread the bandwidth.
The downside is that if a file isn't seeded, it's no longer available. If a.torrent goes missing, the file is inaccessible. If the tracker goes away, the file is inaccessible.
Bittorrent's main problem right now, which is a client problem, is its upstream usage can easily swamp a home connection. That's just dumb client design.
Upload limiting works, but limits your download speed. The client develoeprs have to recognize that yes, sharing is nice and leeching is bad, but disrupting the users' connection is a Very Bad Thing.
Sounds like the DoD has some simple requirements. I thought some of these were taken care of by ip6?
The main requirement seems to be self-configuring mobile networks and services.
I suppose nobody wants to renumber IP addresses every time a battleship moves from one theatre to another. Imagine having to move a whole division from one place to another, and having to reconfigure all the appropriate devices. What a nightmare. Plus, you wouldn't be able to find anything anymore.
They could move to zeroconf/rendevous for their network service naming, which is a bit better than a static address/conf file.
But they still have routing issues. Maybe they should adapt the cell network routing? Cell providers seem to have a better idea about how to dynamically route information to devices that change location often. Phones have a unique address which is tracked by the network...or at least it behaves that way.
Then there's the security side. How do you authenticate/authorize someone when they try and join the network? You don't want to lose a laptop then have someone be able to watch your operation. Biometric stuff won't work so well, because they can always cut off a hand and use it without the user attached (ugh).
A closer reading of the article shows something odd:
HP suggested that the dispute stems from a defense department request for the company to process invoices for suppliers, whose work HP knew little about.
"DND's instructions to HP were to process invoices for these suppliers, although the nature of the work being performed was, in many instances, never disclosed by DND," HP said in a statement.
This implies that its a black billing project that government auditors stumbled onto. Black billing (I'm not sure what the real term is) is when you fund stuff off-budget by inflating other parts of your budget.
The $500 toilet seats back in the day weren't really $500, it's just some other government agency with an acronym as its name was getting $450 of that. This sounds like the same kind of thing...
You'd think that, and you might be right. Only the accountants will be able to tell. It's simple really:
* who submitted the invoces? * what checks were issued and when? * who cashed them?
If the RCMP and the auditors can find this information, then it'll be fairly simple.
However, there are lots of situations where the paper trail was destroyed. If someone inside the government was printing fake invoices and submitting them, then HP would be in the dark as to the invoices, which seems to be the case here.
It's unclear from the article if HP is denying fraud or denying submitting the invoice(s).
In any case, they'll just follow the money anyway. No need to fuss.
If you care about the HST write your senator, don't vent on slashdot. Words here mean nothing, but a cogent, well-reasoned letter to your senator may make a difference.
The last requirement may be a stretch for some readers, but one can always hope.
How is that any different from when NASA was started? I mean, get real - NASA's facilities are where they are because of the influence various Senators had during the old days. How many NASA facilities are there in smaller states (ie: ones with fewer electoral votes)?
After reading the comments, it seems blatantly obvious that most/. readers don't work in the industry.
Zones fix some really important, real world problems. The main problem that it will solve for organizations is migration of apps from development to production boxes.
In Real Life (and in the well run organizations) there's a separation between dev, production, and sometimes test. There are a number of implications for this, the main one being this: there are usually two sets of hardware (or three, if there's a separate test area).
Now with a few moments of thought, you can see the problem. By moving the software from place to place you introduce changes. Change is bad, because change causes software to break. How many times have you had problems with your apps because you forgot to change some config file, or a machine name, or whatever?
With zones you don't need to change the machine to change the machine. You just copy your zone from one machine to another. Ta-da! You have no problem with changes impacting your app. If the app worked in test, it'll work in production. Do you need to mirror production in a test environment? Just create a bunch of zones and do it. You don't have to change the IP addresses or anything.
Need to migrate your app to a bigger box? Heck, just move your zone. No need to reinstall your app, synchronize and adjust all the configs, and repoint everyone and everything to the new box. Move it from that ultra 5 in the basement to the big cat in the data center.
I suppose you'll be able to auto-migrate zones between machines in later releases, in a form of cross data-center load balancing. Hey, that E450 is unused, let's move the web server there on the fly.
Just another step on the road to virtualization...
I've cheked out macosx's cups, and it's one of the most arcane things I've ever seen. How in god's name am I supposed to know what the URL to my printer is? What's a "class", and why would I want to manage it?
That truly is a terrible interface. It's not the layout, it's the verbage.
Plus, I think (but I can't tell) that if you go in and modify a printer it doesn't show you the current settings - it shows you the defaults. I never bothered to check because it's unclear whether the settings are saved if you hit "next".
I had a w2k server box that I dragged out of the closet a few weeks ago. Turned it on, and after 3-4 minutes the box hung, like hung (no blue screen, everything just stopped).
I removed this dumb USB driver that got installed last time the server was up. It was for a smart card reader, and of course the smart card reader wasn't plugged in this time. So it froze the freaking system after a few minutes. I expect it got stuck in some kind of f*cked up polling loop.
This looks vaguely like self-modifying code, like back in the old days of copy protection.
The thing I don't understand about the article (and how it describes the PSCP process) is this: how will this make reverse engineering more difficult?
When you're starting to crack something, you work backwards from system calls, library calls, and known behaviors. "Known behaviors" are, well, patterns of code that people (or compilers) use to do things. Anyone good at low-level stuff can probably identify the compiler used to build the code. Likewise, if you think about something enough, you can probably figure out three or four ways to do something, and look for that pattern in the code.
PSCP prevents this...how? By making this process happens as the program runs? How else do you reverse engineer something?
Anyway, it sounds like this thing sits right before the.net runtime engine (or maybe it's loaded and spews bytecode to the runtime), then it can be removed...or the output intercepted..
And it's a pretty interesting statement, if you think about it. The forms of ID that I know about that are issued by the US government are:
tax ID social security # passport military ID green card
But citizenship is usually established by a state document, like a birth certificate. Natural US citizens have no real document proving that they're a US citizen. A birth certificate doesn't have a picture (and the picture wouldn't do much good anyway), and a drivers license doesn't have any real "citizenship" kinds of vibes.
In fact, it's a combination of documents that shows citizenship. But no one document, except for maybe a passport, would prove you're a US citizen.
If some cop wants your ID, do you have to give it to them? As far as I know, the answer is "no." I suspect this is what the supremes are going to be talking about.
If they want to arrest your ass, then they should arrest your ass. If they're not going to arrest your ass, then they should leave you well enough alone.
Did you know that you can say "no" if the police ask you if they can do something? Probably not - and the cops will jump all over you if you do that. But it's your right not to consent to a search.
One question is: if you saw another type of logic, would you be able to recognize it by itself instead of using your current frames of reference? Heh heh.
It's an interesting problem, because the things that computers do today are pretty straight-ahead. I'm sure that 40% of the people reading this can reverse-engineer most systems/programs just by hearing a description of how those systems behave.
So what kinds of systems are impossible to describe right now? I suppose those would be predictive systems, like weather or human behavior, drug modeling, etc. In fact, modeling is in need of its own type of language and logic, because in models things happen because of conditions that aren't necessarily known beforehand - the system is non-deterministic.
Right now (from what I gather) simulating a non-deterministic system is a real PITA. And they're hard to code, too, becuase everything is happening at once. So you timeslice everything, but it's not quite the same.
Now what would be really, really useful would be a general-purpose analog computer. When you deal in the analog realm, you don't really have to do a lot of the gruntwork because the nature and properties of the medium take care of a lot of that. I think what analog computing boils down to is designing feedback loops - I have a vague understanding of analog computing, most of it from a lot of layman reading of cognitive sciences, genetics/genomics, etc. The downside is there may be on the order of a few hundred thousand or million interactions that need to be designed, but that probably compares favorably to the amount of code that'd be written otherwise.
Anyway, I'm just sort of rambling on, but it's interesting stuff to think about.
for (etude=1; etude GRANDE_FRAB; etude++) {
va_sub(etude, FRIES); }
is valid. Keywords are just keywords, and if you really wanted to you could use macros to replace them with arbitrary words in your language of choice.
It's more accurate to say that programming languages are linear (or tend to be), because that's how computers work today. What a non-linear language would be is unclear - for the same reasons an OODL is unclear until you find problems where it's ideal.
If your sales engineers have to ask on/. for demo material, they must totally suck.
I'd short your stock and get the hell out of there, because if your SEs don't have enough imagination to come up with a demo, they'll never be able to sell anything.
If you don't have any SEs at all, then you're totally up the river and clueless...you (or your VP of sales) should get beaten with a rubber bat until they leave the industry.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the biggest fallacies of the computer world is this: license your IP, so you can become like Microsoft.
This is just dumb. Name 5 vendors that decided to license their core technology to the competition and are successful. I can think of one: Intel. Intel licences x86, mainly to prevent anti-trust issues.
One example on the unsucessful side is Palm. Palm survives, but is far from successful. It's PalmOS license caused massive cannibalization in its core hardware business, and became so bad that it basically bought its licensee/competitor. Doh!
Why should Apple open up the iPod or iTunes? To me, it sounds like industry executives are playing politics - Apple is bad, because they won't share. In other words, Apple is kicking our butts, and we're trying to change the game.
Why don't those vendors just convert their stuff to MP3? Audible.com has no problems selling content to iPod owners and non-iPod owners. WTF?
Those cards are great. Why bitch about them? If you're so paranoid, just put in your neighbor's address. They don't really check, nor do the employees care.
If you don't want items (like pregnancy tests) tracked, don't use your card. Simple enough.
Personally, I think the cards are great. For some useless information that'll drive someone else's imagination, I get steaks at half-off: $4.99/lb instead of $9.85/lb. That's not being a sheep, that's saving money.
We love the healthy/organic supermarket (New Seasons) down the way and go there sometimes, but dude, we save like $5-$25 a trip by heading to the local Safeway.
Does anyone really know what they do with that data anyway?
The reason those numbers are distorted is simple: that's $1 trillion that could be used to help the poor.
Indeed, the best thing the government could do to shut these "help the poor" peple out is to just give each man, woman, and child below the poverty line a trillion...then let them sink or float on their own.
What we'll find is that the vast majority of them will sink - meaning that any more $$ spent on them is wasted. It'll show the left in particular that helping the poor is mostly fruitless. And that it's not the lack of government funding that causes problems, it's the people who are the problem.
TiVo won't die because they have patents on the whole DVR idea.
This is one case where patents are good. TiVo, and DVRs in general, aren't really that obvious - VCRs and such aren't really prior art.
Now that everyone and their brothers are making DVRs, well, TiVo owns the IP behind all of it. They can go off and sue/license the technology to anyone, and they'll be hard to stop. Plus they learned from Apple's mistakes and filed the right kinds of patents.
There you go - patents aren't all bad.
Redmond, WA - Microsoft's new Pr0nMaster gives you pr0n on demand. Bring your pr0n with you - on the train, on the bus, at 12.000 meters - everwhere. It's large capacity drive means you won't have to explain what you're doing with "all those DVDs" when you pass through customs. The big screen means you won't have to squint while you watch. And it's small enough for you to bring it to the restroom or other enclosed space so you can "do your business."
The Pr0nMaster also comes in a sport enclosure, because "accidents happen" when things get exciting on-screen! Plus its handy video out lets you plug into the A/V equipment at your destination - so you can share the wealth!
The Microsoft Pr0nMaster - a peepshow in your pocket!
Realistically speaking, the biggest problem with Bittorrent is seeding. I think this is how bittorrent works:
.torrent file generated .torrent file is uploaded to a tracker .torrent from the tracker .torrent file, which causes the the bittorrent client asks the tracker for the machines/locations of the seeds and people downloading the file(s) pointed to by the .torrent
.torrent goes missing, the file is inaccessible. If the tracker goes away, the file is inaccessible.
* a file is seeded, and a
* that
* clients who want to download the file download the
* the user opens the
* the client downloads various chunks of the files from both the seeds and the other downloaders
The more people download a file, the better bittorrent is able to spread the bandwidth.
The downside is that if a file isn't seeded, it's no longer available. If a
Bittorrent's main problem right now, which is a client problem, is its upstream usage can easily swamp a home connection. That's just dumb client design.
Upload limiting works, but limits your download speed. The client develoeprs have to recognize that yes, sharing is nice and leeching is bad, but disrupting the users' connection is a Very Bad Thing.
Sounds like the DoD has some simple requirements. I thought some of these were taken care of by ip6?
The main requirement seems to be self-configuring mobile networks and services.
I suppose nobody wants to renumber IP addresses every time a battleship moves from one theatre to another. Imagine having to move a whole division from one place to another, and having to reconfigure all the appropriate devices. What a nightmare. Plus, you wouldn't be able to find anything anymore.
They could move to zeroconf/rendevous for their network service naming, which is a bit better than a static address/conf file.
But they still have routing issues. Maybe they should adapt the cell network routing? Cell providers seem to have a better idea about how to dynamically route information to devices that change location often. Phones have a unique address which is tracked by the network...or at least it behaves that way.
Then there's the security side. How do you authenticate/authorize someone when they try and join the network? You don't want to lose a laptop then have someone be able to watch your operation. Biometric stuff won't work so well, because they can always cut off a hand and use it without the user attached (ugh).
Pretty interesting problems, really.
A closer reading of the article shows something odd:
HP suggested that the dispute stems from a defense department request for the company to process invoices for suppliers, whose work HP knew little about.
"DND's instructions to HP were to process invoices for these suppliers, although the nature of the work being performed was, in many instances, never disclosed by DND," HP said in a statement.
This implies that its a black billing project that government auditors stumbled onto. Black billing (I'm not sure what the real term is) is when you fund stuff off-budget by inflating other parts of your budget.
The $500 toilet seats back in the day weren't really $500, it's just some other government agency with an acronym as its name was getting $450 of that. This sounds like the same kind of thing...
You'd think that, and you might be right. Only the accountants will be able to tell. It's simple really:
* who submitted the invoces?
* what checks were issued and when?
* who cashed them?
If the RCMP and the auditors can find this information, then it'll be fairly simple.
However, there are lots of situations where the paper trail was destroyed. If someone inside the government was printing fake invoices and submitting them, then HP would be in the dark as to the invoices, which seems to be the case here.
It's unclear from the article if HP is denying fraud or denying submitting the invoice(s).
In any case, they'll just follow the money anyway. No need to fuss.
If you care about the HST write your senator, don't vent on slashdot. Words here mean nothing, but a cogent, well-reasoned letter to your senator may make a difference.
The last requirement may be a stretch for some readers, but one can always hope.
Find your senator at: http://www.senate.gov/
How is that any different from when NASA was started? I mean, get real - NASA's facilities are where they are because of the influence various Senators had during the old days. How many NASA facilities are there in smaller states (ie: ones with fewer electoral votes)?
I think the Americans paid the French back already for those two minor incidents in the 1900s involving Germany.
It's not when the boys got there, it's that they got there.
maybe this is the beginning of the end. Hope those SCO licensing fees are refundable...
In other words, because you couldn't do it it's likely not possible? That's not the correct attitude if you practice the scientific method.
Instead of mouthing off, why not try and reproduce the results, then say what your results were?
After reading the comments, it seems blatantly obvious that most /. readers don't work in the industry.
Zones fix some really important, real world problems. The main problem that it will solve for organizations is migration of apps from development to production boxes.
In Real Life (and in the well run organizations) there's a separation between dev, production, and sometimes test. There are a number of implications for this, the main one being this: there are usually two sets of hardware (or three, if there's a separate test area).
Now with a few moments of thought, you can see the problem. By moving the software from place to place you introduce changes. Change is bad, because change causes software to break. How many times have you had problems with your apps because you forgot to change some config file, or a machine name, or whatever?
With zones you don't need to change the machine to change the machine. You just copy your zone from one machine to another. Ta-da! You have no problem with changes impacting your app. If the app worked in test, it'll work in production. Do you need to mirror production in a test environment? Just create a bunch of zones and do it. You don't have to change the IP addresses or anything.
Need to migrate your app to a bigger box? Heck, just move your zone. No need to reinstall your app, synchronize and adjust all the configs, and repoint everyone and everything to the new box. Move it from that ultra 5 in the basement to the big cat in the data center.
I suppose you'll be able to auto-migrate zones between machines in later releases, in a form of cross data-center load balancing. Hey, that E450 is unused, let's move the web server there on the fly.
Just another step on the road to virtualization...
I've cheked out macosx's cups, and it's one of the most arcane things I've ever seen. How in god's name am I supposed to know what the URL to my printer is? What's a "class", and why would I want to manage it?
That truly is a terrible interface. It's not the layout, it's the verbage.
Plus, I think (but I can't tell) that if you go in and modify a printer it doesn't show you the current settings - it shows you the defaults. I never bothered to check because it's unclear whether the settings are saved if you hit "next".
Truly terrible.
I had a w2k server box that I dragged out of the closet a few weeks ago. Turned it on, and after 3-4 minutes the box hung, like hung (no blue screen, everything just stopped).
I removed this dumb USB driver that got installed last time the server was up. It was for a smart card reader, and of course the smart card reader wasn't plugged in this time. So it froze the freaking system after a few minutes. I expect it got stuck in some kind of f*cked up polling loop.
Uninstalled, and voila! w2k server lived again.
people do!
This looks vaguely like self-modifying code, like back in the old days of copy protection.
.net runtime engine (or maybe it's loaded and spews bytecode to the runtime), then it can be removed...or the output intercepted. .
The thing I don't understand about the article (and how it describes the PSCP process) is this: how will this make reverse engineering more difficult?
When you're starting to crack something, you work backwards from system calls, library calls, and known behaviors. "Known behaviors" are, well, patterns of code that people (or compilers) use to do things. Anyone good at low-level stuff can probably identify the compiler used to build the code. Likewise, if you think about something enough, you can probably figure out three or four ways to do something, and look for that pattern in the code.
PSCP prevents this...how? By making this process happens as the program runs? How else do you reverse engineer something?
Anyway, it sounds like this thing sits right before the
What am I not getting here?
yeah the client sucks, but there's boatloads of free concerts out there for the downloading...legally. And they sure do suck up disk space.
And it's a pretty interesting statement, if you think about it. The forms of ID that I know about that are issued by the US government are:
tax ID
social security #
passport
military ID
green card
But citizenship is usually established by a state document, like a birth certificate. Natural US citizens have no real document proving that they're a US citizen. A birth certificate doesn't have a picture (and the picture wouldn't do much good anyway), and a drivers license doesn't have any real "citizenship" kinds of vibes.
In fact, it's a combination of documents that shows citizenship. But no one document, except for maybe a passport, would prove you're a US citizen.
Pretty neat.
If some cop wants your ID, do you have to give it to them? As far as I know, the answer is "no." I suspect this is what the supremes are going to be talking about.
If they want to arrest your ass, then they should arrest your ass. If they're not going to arrest your ass, then they should leave you well enough alone.
Did you know that you can say "no" if the police ask you if they can do something? Probably not - and the cops will jump all over you if you do that. But it's your right not to consent to a search.
One question is: if you saw another type of logic, would you be able to recognize it by itself instead of using your current frames of reference? Heh heh.
It's an interesting problem, because the things that computers do today are pretty straight-ahead. I'm sure that 40% of the people reading this can reverse-engineer most systems/programs just by hearing a description of how those systems behave.
So what kinds of systems are impossible to describe right now? I suppose those would be predictive systems, like weather or human behavior, drug modeling, etc. In fact, modeling is in need of its own type of language and logic, because in models things happen because of conditions that aren't necessarily known beforehand - the system is non-deterministic.
Right now (from what I gather) simulating a non-deterministic system is a real PITA. And they're hard to code, too, becuase everything is happening at once. So you timeslice everything, but it's not quite the same.
Now what would be really, really useful would be a general-purpose analog computer. When you deal in the analog realm, you don't really have to do a lot of the gruntwork because the nature and properties of the medium take care of a lot of that. I think what analog computing boils down to is designing feedback loops - I have a vague understanding of analog computing, most of it from a lot of layman reading of cognitive sciences, genetics/genomics, etc. The downside is there may be on the order of a few hundred thousand or million interactions that need to be designed, but that probably compares favorably to the amount of code that'd be written otherwise.
Anyway, I'm just sort of rambling on, but it's interesting stuff to think about.
They're not based on english, really:
for (etude=1; etude GRANDE_FRAB; etude++)
{
va_sub(etude, FRIES);
}
is valid. Keywords are just keywords, and if you really wanted to you could use macros to replace them with arbitrary words in your language of choice.
It's more accurate to say that programming languages are linear (or tend to be), because that's how computers work today. What a non-linear language would be is unclear - for the same reasons an OODL is unclear until you find problems where it's ideal.
If your sales engineers have to ask on /. for demo material, they must totally suck.
I'd short your stock and get the hell out of there, because if your SEs don't have enough imagination to come up with a demo, they'll never be able to sell anything.
If you don't have any SEs at all, then you're totally up the river and clueless...you (or your VP of sales) should get beaten with a rubber bat until they leave the industry.