Almost any class can be applied to a career with computers, it all depends on what you end up working on.
If you are going to end up working in a corporate IT group implementing accounting or finance software, then accounting and finance classes will help out. These classes would also be useful if you are going to begin your own startup.
If you are going to develop games then art, music and creative writing classes would be useful.
What it comes down to is that you will not learn all the skills for any given job in school. You will learn them on the job. So you should take the time you have to broaden your exposure to other areas that interest you. Take art, music, biology, physics, food science, weight lifting, philosophy, history, etc. Whatever you find interesting that is not part of your requirements.
So what we need to do is have someone use RC5 instead of rot13. RC5 is at least as 'effective' as CSS. Then we can sue all the folks that have software that tries to break it, distributed.net, etc.;)
As a follow up, it sounds like they will be using what I refered to as 'metal masters', glass coated with nickel. There shouldn't be any problem with the glass 'flowing' even if this does occur. Very little gravity to worry about in orbit.
CD's are made from plastic, not glass. The base is polycarbonate, then the metallic reflective layer, finally an acrylic plastic layer.
The original master disk is created on glass coated with a photosensitive material. This 'glass master' is then coated with nickel to make a 'metal master'. This is in turn used to create 'mothers', which are used to create the actual molds that are used to produce the polycarbonate layer mentioned above.
"If you can do [computer-to-computer] currency conversions, file customs electronically, or calculate air, sea or truck freight, then you must obtain a license from us."
Haven't companies like DHL and FedEx been using computers in international shipping for decades? Seems that this patient is just way to broad if this statement from the article is correct.
Their C/C++ compilier was/is used a fair amount for embedded systems based on 86 and 386 processorsand was supported for a number of different OS/RTOS. It was also, until they stopped selling it last year, one of the few comercial comipliers that could still produce 16 bit x86 executables.
With the open source move there will be a number of people that will breath a little easier, because they will not have to switch to another platform for their embedded products.
The problem is that for the past 3-4 years it is basically a different group of people in charge of the con each year. First TSR in it's death throws, then Andon, then WOTC disbands Andon, etc.
When it was purely a TSR show they had their own problems, but at least the problems, and the staff, were the same every year.
The biggest change staff wise is that TSR's headquarters are no longer a 30 minute drive away. TSR basically shut down during Gen COn and 90% of their employees worked the con. WOTC now relies on mostly vonluteers and temp services. Most of these folks haven't worked the con year after year and thus are not up to speed on how things are and should be.
As others have said poping off the keycaps works very well. The only problem is getting the keys back where they belong if you pop off all the keys at one time. Here's the routine I follow about once a year.
1) Shut off PC and unplug keyboard.
2) Place keyboard on photocopier, keys down of course, and make a 'copy'. This way I have a picture of the key layout. You might also be able to do this with a flatbed scanner.
3) Fill one bowl with warm water and a little dish soap. Fill another with warm water without any soap. Place bowls and a large towel on table or desk.
4) Pop off all the keys and put them bowl of soapy water.
5) Use an old toothbrush to scrub the keys one by one. Dropping them into the clean water. This is a bit tedious, but does a very good job and should take only 10-15 minutes.
6) Pulling the clean keys out of the water and spread them out on the towel to dry. This may take a few hours depending on humidity.
7) While the keys are drying use either a vacum or can of compressed air to suck or blow the dust and crumbs out of the keyboard itself.
8) Place the keycaps back on the keyboard according to the picture you made earlier.
One example that is just plan bad is "The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak", released in the mid 80's. Very bad movie who's only redeeming quality is the shear volume of nudity displayed.
If you want information about donations to charities on a specific company check out their Annual Report and SEC 10-K filing. Donations will be listed in one of both of these. They can usually be found at a companies web site. If not there check the SEC site at http://www.sec.gov/.
Microsoft doesn't even come close to being the "largest company on earth" unless you are only talking about stock market valuation. In last years SEC Form 10-K they claim to have 31,396 employees.
There are dozens if not hundreds of companies that have more employees and/or physical assests, i.e. 3M(~70,000 employees), McDonalds (~314,000 employees), Walmart(~1,140,000 employees), etc.
As for revenues companies like Walmart are way ahead with 1999 revenue of $165 billion, vs Microsoft's $37 billion.
Even if you are talking about market capitalization, doesn't Cisco currently beat them out.
Actually the freedom of speach applies regardless of one being a US citizen or not. Just as freedom of thought and religion. Some things such as the right to vote only apply to citizens, but speach applies to everyone that is 'speaking' within the US.
Also, the original creators are not the ones being sued in the US it is organizations and/or individuals that posted DeCSS on their web sites in this country.
Actually they get more of a tax write off by having Slashdot within the VA organization. You only get to write off donations if the recieving party is a recognized non-profit organization, which Slashdot never was AFAIK. Running a non-profit, and staying within the governements rules about them, is a pain. By having Slashdot within VA they can write off every last penny as corporate operating costs.
As for 'trusting' Slashdot now and in the future, nothing has really changed. If you are worried about undo influence on Slashdot now you should have been worried about it all along. They have had adverstisers for quite a while now and if Rob and Jeff were subject to 'outside influence' it would have occured then. Now at least they have a specific contract that spells out the details of Slashdot operation, thier control of it and their compensation.
In the long run SDMI will probably go the way of DIVX. Not because it sucks, but because MP3 has more 'brand' recognition. There are two or three orders of magnitude more references to MP3 then there are to SDMI in the press. People have heard of MP3, so when they go shopping that is what they will look for.
Also MP3 as an accronym just plain rolls off the tounge better. Believe it or not this can make a difference to the mainstream buying public.
First you will need to clarify what it is that you have reverse engineered. You mention both patents and trade secrets.
If patents are involved you will have little or no protection, regardless of what you do. With a patent it doesn't matter how you 'discover' the technique or process. Whoever has the patent 'owns' the idea under US law. Unless you are willing to take them to court over it and can prove prior art, etc.
If only trade secrets are invovled you are in much better shape. Assuming of course that you haven't broken any NDA you may have agreed to. If you were able to figure out a trade secret via publicly available information, and you can show this is the case, you will probably win out in the long run. You may well have a few years of court battles on your hands however.
As for general protection make sure you have copies of ALL of you work and work related items, i.e. source code, notes, correspondance, etc.
Also talk to a real lawyer. It is all fine and good to get comments here, but only a lawyer will be able to help you with all the details.
Not as bad as you might think
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 4
Yes the details of this meager should be scrutinized with a fine tooth comb, but by no means does it foreshadow doomsday. It is yet another media/entertainment mega-corp, but so what there are at least a dozen others out there. If this deal is that dangerous, what about things like MSNBC? That put's Micorsoft, NBC and GE all in one bed.
There are plenty of competitors in the internet/media arena that provide both service and content.
One potentially interesting outcome is that AOL has been fighting to access to other companies cable modem networks. Will they now have to open up the cable networks that Time/Warner owns, or end up looking like hipocrites?
They have X-Stop where I work and it's blocking is just plain weird. When first put in place it blocked things like news.com, the city of Chicago web site, and all of Ohio State university. It didn't block things like salon, attrition or HNN. Even though the 'reason' given for blocking the sites they did was because they were classified as being 'opinion' sites. Say what? We have since gotten many sites unblocked for our service, but what they block is just plain wierd.
You could always try the Sky Rocket Syrup , 100mg/oz. Yeah it's a syrup that is supposed to be used in coffee, talk about a double whammy, but I know of a guy that does this stuff as shots.
I've been using vservers.com for a couple of years now with incident. I had a couple of initial setup problems, mostly with majordomo, when I first started with them, but they fixed the problems quickly and I have had none since.
So are they going to raid Fisher Price because they make and sell 'baby monitors' that can and have been used surreptitiously? What the people that set up a video camera to tape what the babysitter does? That's surreptitious as well.
It sounds like another case of overzealous law enforcement.
sound pretty fair - corel prob have enough lawyers to have them say that anything even looking like a contract would require something like that - is it standard practise?
In the US the 18 and older thing is pretty standard in contracts. By law a minor may enter into a contract directly, thus can not be bound to the terms of a contract. The interesting thing here is that if a liciense agreement is considered a contract, then the terms of said contract can not be enforced on a minor, except for those terms that site laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost any class can be applied to a career with computers, it all depends on what you end up working on.
If you are going to end up working in a corporate IT group implementing accounting or finance software, then accounting and finance classes will help out. These classes would also be useful if you are going to begin your own startup.
If you are going to develop games then art, music and creative writing classes would be useful.
What it comes down to is that you will not learn all the skills for any given job in school. You will learn them on the job. So you should take the time you have to broaden your exposure to other areas that interest you. Take art, music, biology, physics, food science, weight lifting, philosophy, history, etc. Whatever you find interesting that is not part of your requirements.
So what we need to do is have someone use RC5 instead of rot13. RC5 is at least as 'effective' as CSS. Then we can sue all the folks that have software that tries to break it, distributed.net, etc. ;)
As a follow up, it sounds like they will be using what I refered to as 'metal masters', glass coated with nickel. There shouldn't be any problem with the glass 'flowing' even if this does occur. Very little gravity to worry about in orbit.
CD's are made from plastic, not glass. The base is polycarbonate, then the metallic reflective layer, finally an acrylic plastic layer.
The original master disk is created on glass coated with a photosensitive material. This 'glass master' is then coated with nickel to make a 'metal master'. This is in turn used to create 'mothers', which are used to create the actual molds that are used to produce the polycarbonate layer mentioned above.
Most viruii actually a perform the task they were created for without crashing. ;)
Haven't companies like DHL and FedEx been using computers in international shipping for decades? Seems that this patient is just way to broad if this statement from the article is correct.
Their C/C++ compilier was/is used a fair amount for embedded systems based on 86 and 386 processorsand was supported for a number of different OS/RTOS. It was also, until they stopped selling it last year, one of the few comercial comipliers that could still produce 16 bit x86 executables.
With the open source move there will be a number of people that will breath a little easier, because they will not have to switch to another platform for their embedded products.
Now this is funny, seeing as Compuserve is now part of the AOL empire. I guess AOL should be sued for almost everything. ;)
The problem is that for the past 3-4 years it is basically a different group of people in charge of the con each year. First TSR in it's death throws, then Andon, then WOTC disbands Andon, etc.
When it was purely a TSR show they had their own problems, but at least the problems, and the staff, were the same every year.
The biggest change staff wise is that TSR's headquarters are no longer a 30 minute drive away. TSR basically shut down during Gen COn and 90% of their employees worked the con. WOTC now relies on mostly vonluteers and temp services. Most of these folks haven't worked the con year after year and thus are not up to speed on how things are and should be.
As others have said poping off the keycaps works very well. The only problem is getting the keys back where they belong if you pop off all the keys at one time. Here's the routine I follow about once a year.
1) Shut off PC and unplug keyboard.
2) Place keyboard on photocopier, keys down of course, and make a 'copy'. This way I have a picture of the key layout. You might also be able to do this with a flatbed scanner.
3) Fill one bowl with warm water and a little dish soap. Fill another with warm water without any soap. Place bowls and a large towel on table or desk.
4) Pop off all the keys and put them bowl of soapy water.
5) Use an old toothbrush to scrub the keys one by one. Dropping them into the clean water. This is a bit tedious, but does a very good job and should take only 10-15 minutes.
6) Pulling the clean keys out of the water and spread them out on the towel to dry. This may take a few hours depending on humidity.
7) While the keys are drying use either a vacum or can of compressed air to suck or blow the dust and crumbs out of the keyboard itself.
8) Place the keycaps back on the keyboard according to the picture you made earlier.
One example that is just plan bad is "The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak", released in the mid 80's. Very bad movie who's only redeeming quality is the shear volume of nudity displayed.
If you want information about donations to charities on a specific company check out their Annual Report and SEC 10-K filing. Donations will be listed in one of both of these. They can usually be found at a companies web site. If not there check the SEC site at http://www.sec.gov/.
Microsoft doesn't even come close to being the "largest company on earth" unless you are only talking about stock market valuation. In last years SEC Form 10-K they claim to have 31,396 employees.
There are dozens if not hundreds of companies that have more employees and/or physical assests, i.e. 3M(~70,000 employees), McDonalds (~314,000 employees), Walmart(~1,140,000 employees), etc.
As for revenues companies like Walmart are way ahead with 1999 revenue of $165 billion, vs Microsoft's $37 billion.
Even if you are talking about market capitalization, doesn't Cisco currently beat them out.
Actually the freedom of speach applies regardless of one being a US citizen or not. Just as freedom of thought and religion. Some things such as the right to vote only apply to citizens, but speach applies to everyone that is 'speaking' within the US.
Also, the original creators are not the ones being sued in the US it is organizations and/or individuals that posted DeCSS on their web sites in this country.
Actually they get more of a tax write off by having Slashdot within the VA organization. You only get to write off donations if the recieving party is a recognized non-profit organization, which Slashdot never was AFAIK. Running a non-profit, and staying within the governements rules about them, is a pain. By having Slashdot within VA they can write off every last penny as corporate operating costs.
As for 'trusting' Slashdot now and in the future, nothing has really changed. If you are worried about undo influence on Slashdot now you should have been worried about it all along. They have had adverstisers for quite a while now and if Rob and Jeff were subject to 'outside influence' it would have occured then. Now at least they have a specific contract that spells out the details of Slashdot operation, thier control of it and their compensation.
Yeah this brings a whole new meaning to the phrase 'Lego my Eggo'. ;)
I am thinking that in a few weeks there will be a rash of Lego devestated Eggo's found in a dumpster somewhere.
In the long run SDMI will probably go the way of DIVX. Not because it sucks, but because MP3 has more 'brand' recognition. There are two or three orders of magnitude more references to MP3 then there are to SDMI in the press. People have heard of MP3, so when they go shopping that is what they will look for.
Also MP3 as an accronym just plain rolls off the tounge better. Believe it or not this can make a difference to the mainstream buying public.
First you will need to clarify what it is that you have reverse engineered. You mention both patents and trade secrets.
If patents are involved you will have little or no protection, regardless of what you do. With a patent it doesn't matter how you 'discover' the technique or process. Whoever has the patent 'owns' the idea under US law. Unless you are willing to take them to court over it and can prove prior art, etc.
If only trade secrets are invovled you are in much better shape. Assuming of course that you haven't broken any NDA you may have agreed to. If you were able to figure out a trade secret via publicly available information, and you can show this is the case, you will probably win out in the long run. You may well have a few years of court battles on your hands however.
As for general protection make sure you have copies of ALL of you work and work related items, i.e. source code, notes, correspondance, etc.
Also talk to a real lawyer. It is all fine and good to get comments here, but only a lawyer will be able to help you with all the details.
Yes the details of this meager should be scrutinized with a fine tooth comb, but by no means does it foreshadow doomsday. It is yet another media/entertainment mega-corp, but so what there are at least a dozen others out there. If this deal is that dangerous, what about things like MSNBC? That put's Micorsoft, NBC and GE all in one bed.
There are plenty of competitors in the internet/media arena that provide both service and content.
One potentially interesting outcome is that AOL has been fighting to access to other companies cable modem networks. Will they now have to open up the cable networks that Time/Warner owns, or end up looking like hipocrites?
They have X-Stop where I work and it's blocking is just plain weird. When first put in place it blocked things like news.com, the city of Chicago web site, and all of Ohio State university. It didn't block things like salon, attrition or HNN. Even though the 'reason' given for blocking the sites they did was because they were classified as being 'opinion' sites. Say what? We have since gotten many sites unblocked for our service, but what they block is just plain wierd.
You could always try the Sky Rocket Syrup , 100mg/oz. Yeah it's a syrup that is supposed to be used in coffee, talk about a double whammy, but I know of a guy that does this stuff as shots.
I've been using vservers.com for a couple of years now with incident. I had a couple of initial setup problems, mostly with majordomo, when I first started with them, but they fixed the problems quickly and I have had none since.
So are they going to raid Fisher Price because they make and sell 'baby monitors' that can and have been used surreptitiously? What the people that set up a video camera to tape what the babysitter does? That's surreptitious as well.
It sounds like another case of overzealous law enforcement.
Two questions.
1) Do you have any regrets about where Slashdot has gone or how it got there?
2) With 20/20 hindsight, what would you have done differently regarding Slashdot?
John
In the US the 18 and older thing is pretty standard in contracts. By law a minor may enter into a contract directly, thus can not be bound to the terms of a contract. The interesting thing here is that if a liciense agreement is considered a contract, then the terms of said contract can not be enforced on a minor, except for those terms that site laws.