Here is the thing I can't quite figure out. Software patents, and your particularly atrocious "business method" patents clearly don't help innovation. Hardware patents are too easily a form of software patent and protect things that aren't innovation. But it isn't clear to me that all classes of patents are flawed. For example, pharmaceutical patents, as odious as a concept as they are, seem to be the thing that pays the bills for the research, and without them there would be a lot less medicine being developed. And I'm sorry, but I think thats a pretty serious concern for our society.
So here is my question. How do you discern? What clear standard would you suggest they apply to the system to weed out the good from the bad?
I like the idea of the thing being patented *actually being a physical thing* instead of just information, a process, or a way of processing information, but that doesn't seem to go far enough to prevent silly hardware patents.
Agreed, and smart users will do the same. However, in the long run applications will have to avoid causing UAC prompts and eventually it will be possible to secure the "windows ecosystem" without breaking common programs. So I'd say Microsoft is doing the right thing, just that doing the right thing when it comes to security is rarely popular. Possibly I'm being optimistic, but I think they may have thought this one through.
Ok, here is what I'm wondering. If you have a single-user desktop and administer it yourself, what is the point of having a seperate administrative account? Any program that acquires *your privileges* will have access to all the sensitive data on the machine. So you are screwed anyhow.
Honestly I'd argue that running your OS in a virtual machine and having a virus and rootkit scanner running from outside that virtual machine is much more meaningful desktop security. At least that way you have some still security left after handing off administrative powers to random daily operations like installing windows stuff off the net.
Lets face it, forget technology, Linux is more secure simply because you typically download all your programs from a single distro's repository and those programs are already trained to handle limits on their permissions.
Ok then, can anyone name a file on my XP box that has a standard name that they could use a copy to do some damage with?
Then I'll make an evil JavaScript version of typing tutor...
Oh, and if were comparing notes I'm surfing as an administrator in XP using firefox, and my sound does work. And I disabled the ability to transfer money out of my account using my online banking.
This algorithm is exactly how my first year comp-sci teacher taught radix sort. I'm guessing "VirusFree" stole his lecture notes.
It's actually much cheaper to use arrays of indices or arrays of pointers internally instead of linked list operations, but "BitFast" is a good naive implementation if you don't wasn't to confuse first year comp-sci students who only just learned about linked lists.
Canada has the same problem in general. E.g. $50 a month with few features and limited airtime. But recently I went travelling and discovered SIMD cards. In Bali you can get a prepaid SIMD phone number with no contract for $2, and additional minutes are about 10c, a text is 2.5c. So I did some digging and discovered two of the carriers also sold pay as you go SIMD in Canada, and now I'm paying about $10 a month, although I do only use that phone to coordinate meeting up with people. Anyway, they just don't advertise this kind of thing, you have to know what to ask for, but seeing that the rest of the world works this way, they do sell them. Anyone find anything like this in the US? Surely they can't be screwing over an entire country like that?
Trick is to *actually read* the review and not allow any gushing along the lines of "amazing book/game with just a few flaws" to blind you to the criticisms that will still be there regardless of how much advertising the publisher buys.
E.g. use metacritic to get a feel for it's overall quality (80% is ok, 83% is good, over 86% is excellent) and then read IGN for any downside that resonates even slightly with you.
I can't believe Linus, who has probably dropped more patches than anyone else alive, would think that sending in unwanted patches along with a *fuck you too* for good measure would think that somehow the GNOME people would suddenly change their minds.
Furthermore, projects should avoid contributors that are unable to get along even if they would make a valuable contribution. Having the additional useful developer doesn't balance out loosing the contribution of others who are offended and the loss of community around your project. I'm not making this up, just ask any HR department whether they would hire an all around offensive individual regardless of how good he is.
Honestly, I have a lot of respect for Linus, and respect someone who cares so much about the right solution. However in this case he has gone way over the line from being passionate about technology and perhaps a little quirky, into being embarrassingly out of touch with the norms of human interaction in a public forum.
That pretty much sums it up. ISPs trying to save a buck. Indeed some ISPs may have oversubscribed themselves when considering the possible demand for video. However there seems to be lots of room on the backbones, and fatter backbones are relatively cheap to put in place, being a few big fat pipes, not that problematic "last mile." So this is a per-ISP problem, not a "global" problem. Simply put, some ISPs will have difficulty providing the quality of service (able to stream video all day) that some customers may expect. How that qualifies as "global" or "crisis" is a mystery to me. If you want a global crisis, lets talk about climate change or diminishing oil supplies.
So, this means that I get to download anything I want while in Canada free of guilt and cost... right?
Actually yeah. In Canada we pay a small tax on blank tapes and a special kind of recordable cd that nobody buys. The upside is that it is perfectly legal for Canadians to share their music with each other and to download music off the internet. Making files available on the web is brodcasting and therefore illegal, and charging money for copying is also illegal. However, if you want to set up an mp3 server at work, there is no law preventing that.
What it comes down to is you cannot tax illegal behaviour. Our courts would never accept it. So this isn't that scary, in that there an upside because they also enshrine the right to share music with those players. As for digital photography? That would result in too many pissed off taxpayers. Probably the worst would be some brand of memory card being released with an absurd tax just like for cds. And it will quietly be ignored by consumers, if they ever see it.
Finally, just because they are asking for $25 doesn't mean the politicians won't just give them $2.50 and tell them to keep quiet. We have a minority government right now so the politicians are far too busy kissing voter but.
Like mutating the connection requests just enough to evade blocking? Because that would be a "new" trick they were not already doing... Patentable perhaps, but not something that would require more than a few seconds thought.
This technique could be considered something to slow worm propagation, but no more.
Why, that's just ~32 tons of CO2 per second. Piece of cake.
And that 5 million is 0.05c per ton if you are using it to meet the requirements for the first 10 years. 5 or even 25 million is pocket change for large industrial projects, this story is a joke. I might take the 25 million to build an apartment block, but not save the world.
I mentioned ogg to the lead sound programmer at the last games company I worked at and they started using it at their generic format. It still had to be converted to a console specific format for the runtime, because the hardware was designed to handle certain types of streams, and audio isn't cheap to transform cpu-wise. Of course that was ps2/xbox/gc and I'm under the impression that they were able to do a lot more runtime processing of the audio on the "next gen" consoles, but I don't know what role ogg played. Certainly the memory bandwidth savings off ogg in the runtime may outweigh the cpu costs, but again, that's probably something most companies are still working out and I don't know from experience.
I care. When EA bought Renderware a few years back they created a vacuum that Unreal was filling. But now Unreal sucks on the PS3 and won't run on the Wii which is shockingly turning out to be a more compelling platform than the PS3 and competitive with the 360. So this means that all the big game companies who have to target all platforms for simple financial reasons (Unreal's real-world technical concerns meaning nothing to the people who tie their ties right in the morning) cannot turn to Unreal as the video game console "OS" of choice. Lacking a industry wide engine, there will be a lot more jobs in the industry for people who are interested in lower level gaming technology as everyone rolls their own. (Which is good for me.) Expect to see more diversity and performance per-game being made because the engine will continue to be more customized to the game being made. Where does that leave us? Going in the same direction as always. Smaller and independent developers cannot afford to play, and the big companies continue to churn out predictable titles with larger and larger teams.
Besides, why just Novell? IBM has patent agreements with Microsoft. IBM sells Windows Servers. This seems like nothing more that "We don't like the MS/Novell deal, so let's punish them!"
This is why IBM doesn't provide a legally defended and supported distribution. If they did it would kill Linux because companies would be afraid to use anything but the vetted IBM version, and Linus wouldn't be the "mainline" any more. Of course the fact that IBM doesn't need to handle all the lawsuits is a nice touch also.
Regardless, IBM's arms length support of Linux keeps it clear of the patent related issues that we are talking about here.
This is an international forum, being used to discuss a state-specific legal issue. People from all over the world, and from all different states will discuss what the "law" is without realizing that they may not be discussing the same thing. Thankfully, this post had the decency to mention the jurisdiction, but what percentage of the people reading *and posting responses* are from Texas?!?
Next, this post would be 100x more interesting if we learned the outcome of the situation. So what if somebody's ex-employer was a dick and said some shit about suing? Like that won't happen again. If this individual was telling us about an actual outcome based on real law, then this might actually be worth reading about.
Finally, the "editor" should be fired *and* sued for posting this kind of clueless "get a frickin' lawyer when and if it happens" crap.
With the exception of the SPU, most modern hardware spends almost all of it's time on cache misses and branch stalls. The spu however, doesn't have a deep pipeline, or have cache misses, meaning it gets a lot more done than the PPU even while running non-vector math code. Just because you haven't switched up your code to take advantage of vector math optimizations doesn't make it under-utilized, it just means that you skip past the typical bottle-neck and now vector math *may* be your next bottle-neck.
However, programming for only 256k ram with a modern workload is hell. Once you have a task that doesn't naturally stream via DMA, and requires you to mangle your data structures and algorithms to DMA tiny buffers around, well then you are in the suck. Think 3x programming, debugging and overall lines of code. Forget nice deep call stacks, you don't have code space for that, instead you are going to spend your time juggling buffers of indices to things that aren't in local memory.
Assembly optimization is the least of your SPU utilization problems. Just getting code and data to fit is.
Is that $150 per cd "sold through" or $150 per customer who is aware of the lawsuit and actually files to get their cheque? Because I imagine those are entirely different numbers. Also, for those who would like to see Sony hurt worse for this, do remember that that this is more than enough. Any company pulling a stunt like that again will be ignorant, not unconcerned.
So when are desktop OS's going to come installed inside a secure virtual machine OS that is capable of detecting rootkits and possibly doing a little extra scanning on the side? That is long overdue.
If all you have is $20 in your pocket and no idea how you are going to earn money, getting another $20 means a lot more than handing a second billion to a billionaire. Processing speed is becoming meaningless on the desktop for most users. This is mostly relevant to servers now that we are moving to thin clients in the form of web-browsers, and expecting more an more processing from webservers.
Actually, an offer by a company is a legally binding contract and if they fire you without cause that is illegal as well. And there is a huge difference between not keeping the promises of someone who is not an employee and breaking promises the company put in writing.
I think this is a simple case of the scumbag recruiter making promises the company is not aware of. And the company feeling bitter about you being stupid enough to use a recruiter. Freelance recruiters are evil. They make hiring you more expensive when you should be perfectly capable of finding these employers yourself. Also if the company is desperate enough for new hires they use recruiters, there is probably a reason they have a hard time keeping people. Lastly, you will always have a black mark on you from HR's point of view, as the person so stupid they couldn't find the company in the phonebook. And they will be reminded of your stupidity every time they cut a fat cheque to the scumbag recruiter who is exploiting your stupidity.
Finally, I have to add that a company that employs a full time recruiter on staff is an entirely different story. That is just a professional approach to the situation by the company, which shows intelligence, and doesn't have all the downsides of freelance recruiters.
Ok I'll ask it. Is seeing Microsoft selling Linux to an insanely large customer a major victory or is this a SCO tax? Do we congratulate or mail-bomb Novell? And wow, eight years ago, running Slackware this was a slightly absurd scenario you would joke about while trying to fix your rc.d scripts after an update.
You are right that breaking the shackles of backwards compatibility at the same time as an OS upgrade is a smart move by Microsoft. But it won't be compelling for developers like Carmack or customers.
Don't expect developers to stop supporting DX9 for years. An extra 20% visual polish just isn't worth 20% customer incompatibility these days. I like prettier graphics as much as the next guy, but the difference it makes to a game just isn't the same any more.
This means that only a very small hardcore demographic will *upgrade* for gaming reasons. So the games industry will just have to wait years for Vista to replace XP via new hardware sales.
One last question -- why would you want virtual memory on a graphics card? I thought virtual memory is for programmers who don't want to deal with the performance implications of limited memory. Since when did hardcore game development have that luxury?
I for one am happy to see the smart people spread around evenly, not just going to google. Competition between smart people encourages innovation, and like it or not, given their market share, having a few smart people sucked into M$ from time to time will reduce global suffering due to technology. Wonder how it feels to have quitting your job will end up on slashdot!?! I don't know how many people *at my last job* noticed when I quit.
Slashdot Mirror
The US patent system is fundamentally wrong.
I think everyone here feels your pain.
Here is the thing I can't quite figure out. Software patents, and your particularly atrocious "business method" patents clearly don't help innovation. Hardware patents are too easily a form of software patent and protect things that aren't innovation. But it isn't clear to me that all classes of patents are flawed. For example, pharmaceutical patents, as odious as a concept as they are, seem to be the thing that pays the bills for the research, and without them there would be a lot less medicine being developed. And I'm sorry, but I think thats a pretty serious concern for our society.
So here is my question. How do you discern? What clear standard would you suggest they apply to the system to weed out the good from the bad?
I like the idea of the thing being patented *actually being a physical thing* instead of just information, a process, or a way of processing information, but that doesn't seem to go far enough to prevent silly hardware patents.
You want to do your work, right?
Agreed, and smart users will do the same. However, in the long run applications will have to avoid causing UAC prompts and eventually it will be possible to secure the "windows ecosystem" without breaking common programs. So I'd say Microsoft is doing the right thing, just that doing the right thing when it comes to security is rarely popular. Possibly I'm being optimistic, but I think they may have thought this one through.
Ok, here is what I'm wondering. If you have a single-user desktop and administer it yourself, what is the point of having a seperate administrative account? Any program that acquires *your privileges* will have access to all the sensitive data on the machine. So you are screwed anyhow.
Honestly I'd argue that running your OS in a virtual machine and having a virus and rootkit scanner running from outside that virtual machine is much more meaningful desktop security. At least that way you have some still security left after handing off administrative powers to random daily operations like installing windows stuff off the net.
Lets face it, forget technology, Linux is more secure simply because you typically download all your programs from a single distro's repository and those programs are already trained to handle limits on their permissions.
Ok then, can anyone name a file on my XP box that has a standard name that they could use a copy to do some damage with?
Then I'll make an evil JavaScript version of typing tutor...
Oh, and if were comparing notes I'm surfing as an administrator in XP using firefox, and my sound does work. And I disabled the ability to transfer money out of my account using my online banking.
This algorithm is exactly how my first year comp-sci teacher taught radix sort. I'm guessing "VirusFree" stole his lecture notes.
It's actually much cheaper to use arrays of indices or arrays of pointers internally instead of linked list operations, but "BitFast" is a good naive implementation if you don't wasn't to confuse first year comp-sci students who only just learned about linked lists.
Here is a good paper of radix sort optimization, and it covers using radix sort with floating point.
...and they cached an "account suspended" page. Thanks...
Canada has the same problem in general. E.g. $50 a month with few features and limited airtime. But recently I went travelling and discovered SIMD cards. In Bali you can get a prepaid SIMD phone number with no contract for $2, and additional minutes are about 10c, a text is 2.5c. So I did some digging and discovered two of the carriers also sold pay as you go SIMD in Canada, and now I'm paying about $10 a month, although I do only use that phone to coordinate meeting up with people. Anyway, they just don't advertise this kind of thing, you have to know what to ask for, but seeing that the rest of the world works this way, they do sell them. Anyone find anything like this in the US? Surely they can't be screwing over an entire country like that?
Trick is to *actually read* the review and not allow any gushing along the lines of "amazing book/game with just a few flaws" to blind you to the criticisms that will still be there regardless of how much advertising the publisher buys.
E.g. use metacritic to get a feel for it's overall quality (80% is ok, 83% is good, over 86% is excellent) and then read IGN for any downside that resonates even slightly with you.
"there will be hell to pay for ignoring it"
I can't believe Linus, who has probably dropped more patches than anyone else alive, would think that sending in unwanted patches along with a *fuck you too* for good measure would think that somehow the GNOME people would suddenly change their minds.
Furthermore, projects should avoid contributors that are unable to get along even if they would make a valuable contribution. Having the additional useful developer doesn't balance out loosing the contribution of others who are offended and the loss of community around your project. I'm not making this up, just ask any HR department whether they would hire an all around offensive individual regardless of how good he is.
Honestly, I have a lot of respect for Linus, and respect someone who cares so much about the right solution. However in this case he has gone way over the line from being passionate about technology and perhaps a little quirky, into being embarrassingly out of touch with the norms of human interaction in a public forum.
That pretty much sums it up. ISPs trying to save a buck. Indeed some ISPs may have oversubscribed themselves when considering the possible demand for video. However there seems to be lots of room on the backbones, and fatter backbones are relatively cheap to put in place, being a few big fat pipes, not that problematic "last mile." So this is a per-ISP problem, not a "global" problem. Simply put, some ISPs will have difficulty providing the quality of service (able to stream video all day) that some customers may expect. How that qualifies as "global" or "crisis" is a mystery to me. If you want a global crisis, lets talk about climate change or diminishing oil supplies.
So, this means that I get to download anything I want while in Canada free of guilt and cost... right?
Actually yeah. In Canada we pay a small tax on blank tapes and a special kind of recordable cd that nobody buys. The upside is that it is perfectly legal for Canadians to share their music with each other and to download music off the internet. Making files available on the web is brodcasting and therefore illegal, and charging money for copying is also illegal. However, if you want to set up an mp3 server at work, there is no law preventing that.
What it comes down to is you cannot tax illegal behaviour. Our courts would never accept it. So this isn't that scary, in that there an upside because they also enshrine the right to share music with those players. As for digital photography? That would result in too many pissed off taxpayers. Probably the worst would be some brand of memory card being released with an absurd tax just like for cds. And it will quietly be ignored by consumers, if they ever see it.
Finally, just because they are asking for $25 doesn't mean the politicians won't just give them $2.50 and tell them to keep quiet. We have a minority government right now so the politicians are far too busy kissing voter but.
Everything old is new again!
Like mutating the connection requests just enough to evade blocking? Because that would be a "new" trick they were not already doing... Patentable perhaps, but not something that would require more than a few seconds thought.
This technique could be considered something to slow worm propagation, but no more.
Why, that's just ~32 tons of CO2 per second. Piece of cake.
And that 5 million is 0.05c per ton if you are using it to meet the requirements for the first 10 years. 5 or even 25 million is pocket change for large industrial projects, this story is a joke. I might take the 25 million to build an apartment block, but not save the world.
what if you are in a position with a security clearance?
Then you accept your role as cooperate bitch and use your fat pay cheque to buy what they are telling you to.
I mentioned ogg to the lead sound programmer at the last games company I worked at and they started using it at their generic format. It still had to be converted to a console specific format for the runtime, because the hardware was designed to handle certain types of streams, and audio isn't cheap to transform cpu-wise. Of course that was ps2/xbox/gc and I'm under the impression that they were able to do a lot more runtime processing of the audio on the "next gen" consoles, but I don't know what role ogg played. Certainly the memory bandwidth savings off ogg in the runtime may outweigh the cpu costs, but again, that's probably something most companies are still working out and I don't know from experience.
I care. When EA bought Renderware a few years back they created a vacuum that Unreal was filling. But now Unreal sucks on the PS3 and won't run on the Wii which is shockingly turning out to be a more compelling platform than the PS3 and competitive with the 360. So this means that all the big game companies who have to target all platforms for simple financial reasons (Unreal's real-world technical concerns meaning nothing to the people who tie their ties right in the morning) cannot turn to Unreal as the video game console "OS" of choice. Lacking a industry wide engine, there will be a lot more jobs in the industry for people who are interested in lower level gaming technology as everyone rolls their own. (Which is good for me.) Expect to see more diversity and performance per-game being made because the engine will continue to be more customized to the game being made. Where does that leave us? Going in the same direction as always. Smaller and independent developers cannot afford to play, and the big companies continue to churn out predictable titles with larger and larger teams.
Besides, why just Novell? IBM has patent agreements with Microsoft. IBM sells Windows Servers. This seems like nothing more that "We don't like the MS/Novell deal, so let's punish them!"
This is why IBM doesn't provide a legally defended and supported distribution. If they did it would kill Linux because companies would be afraid to use anything but the vetted IBM version, and Linus wouldn't be the "mainline" any more. Of course the fact that IBM doesn't need to handle all the lawsuits is a nice touch also.
Regardless, IBM's arms length support of Linux keeps it clear of the patent related issues that we are talking about here.
This is an international forum, being used to discuss a state-specific legal issue. People from all over the world, and from all different states will discuss what the "law" is without realizing that they may not be discussing the same thing. Thankfully, this post had the decency to mention the jurisdiction, but what percentage of the people reading *and posting responses* are from Texas?!?
Next, this post would be 100x more interesting if we learned the outcome of the situation. So what if somebody's ex-employer was a dick and said some shit about suing? Like that won't happen again. If this individual was telling us about an actual outcome based on real law, then this might actually be worth reading about.
Finally, the "editor" should be fired *and* sued for posting this kind of clueless "get a frickin' lawyer when and if it happens" crap.
With the exception of the SPU, most modern hardware spends almost all of it's time on cache misses and branch stalls. The spu however, doesn't have a deep pipeline, or have cache misses, meaning it gets a lot more done than the PPU even while running non-vector math code. Just because you haven't switched up your code to take advantage of vector math optimizations doesn't make it under-utilized, it just means that you skip past the typical bottle-neck and now vector math *may* be your next bottle-neck.
However, programming for only 256k ram with a modern workload is hell. Once you have a task that doesn't naturally stream via DMA, and requires you to mangle your data structures and algorithms to DMA tiny buffers around, well then you are in the suck. Think 3x programming, debugging and overall lines of code. Forget nice deep call stacks, you don't have code space for that, instead you are going to spend your time juggling buffers of indices to things that aren't in local memory.
Assembly optimization is the least of your SPU utilization problems. Just getting code and data to fit is.
Is that $150 per cd "sold through" or $150 per customer who is aware of the lawsuit and actually files to get their cheque? Because I imagine those are entirely different numbers. Also, for those who would like to see Sony hurt worse for this, do remember that that this is more than enough. Any company pulling a stunt like that again will be ignorant, not unconcerned.
So when are desktop OS's going to come installed inside a secure virtual machine OS that is capable of detecting rootkits and possibly doing a little extra scanning on the side? That is long overdue.
If all you have is $20 in your pocket and no idea how you are going to earn money, getting another $20 means a lot more than handing a second billion to a billionaire. Processing speed is becoming meaningless on the desktop for most users. This is mostly relevant to servers now that we are moving to thin clients in the form of web-browsers, and expecting more an more processing from webservers.
400,000 people who bought PS3s got a BluRay drive because you can't get a PS3 without one.
Actually, why else would they have bought a PS3?
I'd love to see disc sale comparisons because that will give a truer indication of who is in the lead than player numbers.
I saw a chart recently that showed BluRay disc sales taking the lead, but I can't remember the url, sorry.
Actually, an offer by a company is a legally binding contract and if they fire you without cause that is illegal as well. And there is a huge difference between not keeping the promises of someone who is not an employee and breaking promises the company put in writing.
I think this is a simple case of the scumbag recruiter making promises the company is not aware of. And the company feeling bitter about you being stupid enough to use a recruiter. Freelance recruiters are evil. They make hiring you more expensive when you should be perfectly capable of finding these employers yourself. Also if the company is desperate enough for new hires they use recruiters, there is probably a reason they have a hard time keeping people. Lastly, you will always have a black mark on you from HR's point of view, as the person so stupid they couldn't find the company in the phonebook. And they will be reminded of your stupidity every time they cut a fat cheque to the scumbag recruiter who is exploiting your stupidity.
Finally, I have to add that a company that employs a full time recruiter on staff is an entirely different story. That is just a professional approach to the situation by the company, which shows intelligence, and doesn't have all the downsides of freelance recruiters.
Ok I'll ask it. Is seeing Microsoft selling Linux to an insanely large customer a major victory or is this a SCO tax? Do we congratulate or mail-bomb Novell? And wow, eight years ago, running Slackware this was a slightly absurd scenario you would joke about while trying to fix your rc.d scripts after an update.
You are right that breaking the shackles of backwards compatibility at the same time as an OS upgrade is a smart move by Microsoft. But it won't be compelling for developers like Carmack or customers.
Don't expect developers to stop supporting DX9 for years. An extra 20% visual polish just isn't worth 20% customer incompatibility these days. I like prettier graphics as much as the next guy, but the difference it makes to a game just isn't the same any more.
This means that only a very small hardcore demographic will *upgrade* for gaming reasons. So the games industry will just have to wait years for Vista to replace XP via new hardware sales.
One last question -- why would you want virtual memory on a graphics card? I thought virtual memory is for programmers who don't want to deal with the performance implications of limited memory. Since when did hardcore game development have that luxury?
I for one am happy to see the smart people spread around evenly, not just going to google. Competition between smart people encourages innovation, and like it or not, given their market share, having a few smart people sucked into M$ from time to time will reduce global suffering due to technology. Wonder how it feels to have quitting your job will end up on slashdot!?! I don't know how many people *at my last job* noticed when I quit.