Currently 3com is shipping their 3com nbx 100 phone system with a single exe that includes GNU Tar, GNU Zip and the IMAP tool kit. Some of the players have know about it for over a year but so far I don't have source and since the thing is buggy and I code, I would like to fix the bugs my self.
The problem is how do you know they stole they code? If they do anything to keep you from looking at the code, there is a very good chance that you'll be violating DMCA when you do. So if they encrypt the executables and hide the stolen code under threat od DMCA, the original owner is screwed either way. All GNU code needs to have a "you can reverse engineer this code" clause to counter recent US laws.
Its my understanding the 3com was one of the few IT compaines that was a supporter of the DMCA.
What needs to happen is someone like the FSF or EFF need to set up a patent application for something about as generic as the pattent lawyers can think of. Then add every neat trick in the linux kernel and other free software as claim. Provide a database of "prior art" since the patent office can't disclose what you tell them is prior art, I would recomend finding a way to send them a copy of google's archives as a source for prior art. Once this nonsense has happend, it will be impossable for the patent office to issue a patent on it or any other software or business methods patent for at least a decade while they try to fiugre out whats going on. It will cost a bit of money (there may be a charge per claim)
Whne I was a student working at a goverment office, one of the long time engineers told me that changing the goverment was like tring to stop a boulder rolling down a hill, you can't stop it but you can nudge it in a better direction. The problem is this nudge will cost a fortune but is worth it.
Chem supply phone Sales Guy: So you want to buy a bunch of explosive chemicals, Right? John: Yep. Its for my rocket. I want to win the X prize. Sales Guy [while flipping through a FBI provided book]: I'm not sure I can sell you this stuff. It says here that your affiliated with scray people. John: What kind of scary people? Sales Guy: Head on a Pike kind of scary people. Sales Guy: Didn't you hang out with that John Romero guy? John: That was a while ago... Sales Guy: It looks like I can't sell you any of that anyway our computer says were out. John: Fine, I'll make my own [ckick] Sales Guy: FBI, you may want to hear about this...
Thats why tens of millions of authentic ones get replaced ever year in the US cable TV market. Credit card mag stripe fraud is has only recently gotten into the high 5 figures for fake cards. The same vendors pushing this are pushing the ever so insecure but more buzzword bingo compliant smart cards for other things.
Ghandi is a good one to bring up in this discussion. He was an Indian living in South Africa and the people there got fed up with the cheap foreign labor and kicked out the Indians. He leared when to keep his mounth shut and to never hit back because the something like 10,000 other people in his situation ended up dead for things like hitting back or talking at the wrong time.
He took what he learned in South Africa and tought it to millions in India.
Thats the problem with democracy. Most people aren't going to pick the best long term solution. The founders of the US knew that and thats the reason its a Republic and not a Democracy. Its also why top judges get their job for life and why majority doesn't win in many cases. Most serious things require 2:3 or in a few cases even more because "the majority rules" concept quickly wipes out the minority.
What content are you talking about? Look at the long term top 40 albums over the last 3 years, not the top 40 of the week. What do you see? About 1/4 of them are from England and another 1/4 have major British components. Add in people from other bits of the world and your up to about 1/2 have overseas involvment.
How about movies? Where were the last top 10 movies made? Harry Potter, Lord or the Rings, Star Wars, 007... All filmed outside of the US in part or in total.
How about the Simpsons? Animated in India.
How about the comericals on TV? Many of them are now filmed in Sydney.
Americans buy more content than anyone else they have a higer buy ratio than a production ratio.
Re:The job category that'll never get outsourced..
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 1
Warren E. Buffett agreeed with Greenspan as well. Now he seems to be collecting IT comapines.
As an American living in Australia I've got an interesting point of view.
Aussies allow ANY young American to come and visit here and work for up to a year. Its called a "Working Hoiday Visa". It allows young (as in under 25 or so) to visit here and work with odd jobs (cleaning toilets or coding crypto libs) while visiting the place for a year. This offer is open to people from all over the world including the US, England, North Korea and Cuba. I turns out that the US doesn't seem to understand this concept of young travelers unless they are from Mexico and willing to be deported as part of the game. Of course the US travel industry is hurting and the Aussie tourist industry on a down turn. Its something that the US goverment hasn't seemed to understand.
Australia was where Samba was born. Any one remember SSLeay? It was illegal to do that in the US when a few guys did it here. Per capita Australia has more game, Linux and KDE developers than the US. The technical quality of the coders is as good as I have ever seen even though most have a strange ability to absorb much beer. Most of the Aussie geeks I know have girlfriends and get laid, where do American geeks stand with that?
RSA is a pain to decypher because the assumed 1:1 for public and private keys. That isn't true. Its 1:N where N is a very larage number and may be N:M.
this code shows a simple 10 bit RSA in perl (its too slow to do much more) and it will generage one public key and several private keys. Doing it for 1024 bit is left as an exercise for the reader.
RSA's 1:1 is based on a short cut of a nasty operation via the Euclidian algorithm and it turns out the math works quite well if you do things the hard way but it takes a long time even on a modern computer.
One of the big ideas for sys v r 4 was the/proc file system and SCO may have the patent for it. It was done in the early days of software patents and either AT&T or Sun or both might have a patent on it. It would be good to find out for sure since I do know some people that might have prior art.
Sys V R 4 or Sys V R 3? They are vastly different things. Sun owns a major chunk of the Sys V R 4 IP and has rights to all of it under their joint development agreement.
Modern Sys V init is very little like the sys v r 2 stuff which took a bunch of bsd like scripts and ran them out of the very old init program.
"kill -9 them all and let init sort them out" is at least a 20 year old quote
So 1+10 gives 2 billion extra numbers. There is a better way.
There are 4 classes of calls: 1) Local 2) local town 3) metro area 4) US 5) World
The true local area is a small area a 4 or 5 digit number works in almost all cases. This could be a small town or extentions in a large company.
The town and metro areas are sometimes the same, or spread way out (like Atlanta). The metro area needs 10 digits.
The US/World issue can be delt with by a country code. Remember the US's country code is 1.
I think the current hack of overlays and then +1 local dialing is tring to fix the wrong problem. The real problem is that we don't have 16+ digit numbers that can be organized in a reasonable way. I think the best solution to this is issue every phone line a 16 digit number and then issue people 7 or 10 digit numbers that are linked to the big phone numbers. Some of us would be happy with a 16 digit number and there wouldn't be the constant hacks. Some study showed that wrong numbers go way up (like 50% or so) when you from 7 to 10 digits so any new system should include check digits. An 18 digit number is enough for every phone in the US till the population doubles even if ever toster ends up with its own number.
This is just another solution looking a problem. Keyboard typing is about pressing buttons. Its been that way since the 1st typewriter. This is about simulating that since people know it but the finger suffer too much shock hitting a non spring loaded surface. It becomes a major issue to use this often.
Years ago when I had toys to play with that would do most of this, it became painful typeing on a bit of paper and detecting where the finger where. It just didn't work but looked like a good idea on paper and the sparc 1 could cope with the image processing needed. The major problem was people tend to drift if they don't have the physical feedback so you know where the key "centers" are. Modern keyboards suck with that compared with old 3270 keyboards which had an indent on J & F while the new ones tend to use some sort of raised edge. A projected keyboard won't have either.
A cheap $10 rubber keyboard will roll up and go anywhere and it doens't abuse the finger tips so I don't see these expensive things going anywhere people have a real need to type. The projection things are ok for "yes/no" and "Enter your Name" but not useful for much of anything else.
It would be very bad for someone somewhere to say "you violated the terms of your parole because you accessed the net before noon local time as implied by US CFR...."
Look! Another/. IP expert who's confused trademark vs copyright.
You can't lose copyright because of lack of "due dilligence" You can lose trade marks which is why Kleenex wants you to use the word "tissue" just enough that their trademark doesn't disappear. You can lose royalties for lack of protecting a patent but you can't lose the patent for not taking action.
I figure it will be about 3 months after the S-ATA drive hit the shops that someone will start putting both the new power connector and the old molex connector on the drives.
My Nokia 8310 is soo poorly designed that you have to watch the screen to know if its sent the message. Then once its sent, its back in the same mode where it had been so if your distracted, you don't know if its gone through or not. The delivery notifications are fine execpt that when you get one of them, you don't have the easy access to read it (since its not a "new" message) and you have to go to messages, then inbox (then wait and wait and wait since the don't have a clue how to cache whats on the sim in memory) then read the message (which isn't marked as read or not) and then figure out which delivery message went with with message.
Later Nokia phones have lots of little "feautres" that tend to add up to $.20 here and there for the phone companies. A few million people doing that every day and it adds up to real money and Nokia knows who its real customers are (the phone co's not the people who buy the phones).
I've had a few SMSs go missing for a while. Most of my NYE messages were delivered within two days.
From what I've seen of most RFID tags, a few meters is pushing it. The little Tiris tags work great for about 10cm (6 in). Many people buy into the RFID concept thinking they can get a little device that will point at the tag they are looking at but someone has to design a much better reciver to pull that off. (I have a buyer if you've got the design)
If Google IPOs then its time to start over again. A search engine can only work well in some enviroments and if Google is a public company, they won't have the ability to do some of the things they are doing now.
Remember altavista used to be av.dec.com and then it was moved into its own company and then it started to suck when they had to keep the thousands of stock holders happy. Googles current owners should look at the long term and hold on to what they have and let it run the way it has been running.
Better rates than I got the last time I was there
on
1KM 802.11b @ 2MB
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· Score: 1
When I was at Sharm El Sheikh (a dive location on the south end of the Sinai) a few years ago I was getting nearly 50 baud. It sounds like at least the Internet cafes there can provide reasonable access.
Isn't System V the ugly bastard child that results when Sun and AT&T shack up for a while? It should have been a lesson to other compaines but they never learn do they?
AT&T may have patents to the/proc file system concept but I know about published prior art as well as one of the people who came up with the idea.
There is the issue of how thouse rights were transferred. As far as I know, no part of AT&T gave up any rights to any of it patents when they were split up. What they gave up was rights to some markets. I suspect tring to get SBC to pay for a license to use an old AT&T patent would be pointless.
There is also the issue that Sun owns all the rights to all of Unix as well. When things started going bad for SCO (or was it novel or whoever), they bought a non-exclusive right to everything. Since they helped develop System V, they are in a very good position to keep themselves covered in this case.
Of course the all new code could be written released under a new license. One that specificly excludes all rights to use the software from any company that has ever brought a patent suit aginst anyone. That would be an interesting twist. The concept goes aginst free software in a bad way but its the only big stick free software has left and it will be needed if the dmca line nonsense keeps going on.
If your in the area where the court hosue is, you can go to the court and claim the $20 is way too low and you should be getting closer to $10 per CD. with typical fines for this sort of thing, the fines should be closer to the entire price of the CD but no point aruging that.
So you can send in your form and get your $20 back unless someone starts a chain mail thing of "click here and get $20" in which case the amount might be lower. If the amount goes below $5 then no one gets anything and the money goes to the RIAA's home for boy band want to bes or some other charity they like.
If someone is going to the court house to object in person, let me know because I'm willing to risk the loosing my $20 if there is the slightest chance the court will increase the award. Fair is fair and if the company did illegal things that will cause them to ceas to exist, then thats the way it should be.
Australia has 2 major cities 3 minor ones and just about no other population centers. Sydney or Melbourne are big cities (one of the two will be the largest English speaking cities in the world by 2012 when they both will be bigger than London) GSM works well in the big cities because they are high density (higher than most US cities). The demographics just aren't the same. The city density in the US midwest is lower than smaller towns in Australia and they are spread out much differently. Victoria and Missouri have about the same area and same population but there are about 10 times as many areas in Missouri that have a population density to support a small airport. In GSM terms that means more towers where the Analog systems work much better.
GSM was designed so that one countries signal would not work in a bordering country. If you had tried GSM in Europe before the roaming agreements came in, you would find that the cell towers were quite selective near the borders of other countries. The signal was fine, the cell just wouldn't accept a signal that was in the wrong time slot because it was too far away and in a different countries area.
When they turned off the Analog system in Australia, many farmers lost their mobile phones since the CDMA stuff just didn't work as far away. With the exception of the big cities, the analog system worked very well for what it needed to do.
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Currently 3com is shipping their 3com nbx 100 phone system with a single exe that includes GNU Tar, GNU Zip and the IMAP tool kit. Some of the players have know about it for over a year but so far I don't have source and since the thing is buggy and I code, I would like to fix the bugs my self.
The problem is how do you know they stole they code? If they do anything to keep you from looking at the code, there is a very good chance that you'll be violating DMCA when you do. So if they encrypt the executables and hide the stolen code under threat od DMCA, the original owner is screwed either way. All GNU code needs to have a "you can reverse engineer this code" clause to counter recent US laws.
Its my understanding the 3com was one of the few IT compaines that was a supporter of the DMCA.
What needs to happen is someone like the FSF or EFF need to set up a patent application for something about as generic as the pattent lawyers can think of. Then add every neat trick in the linux kernel and other free software as claim. Provide a database of "prior art" since the patent office can't disclose what you tell them is prior art, I would recomend finding a way to send them a copy of google's archives as a source for prior art. Once this nonsense has happend, it will be impossable for the patent office to issue a patent on it or any other software or business methods patent for at least a decade while they try to fiugre out whats going on. It will cost a bit of money (there may be a charge per claim)
Whne I was a student working at a goverment office, one of the long time engineers told me that changing the goverment was like tring to stop a boulder rolling down a hill, you can't stop it but you can nudge it in a better direction. The problem is this nudge will cost a fortune but is worth it.
Chem supply phone Sales Guy: So you want to buy a bunch of explosive chemicals, Right?
John: Yep. Its for my rocket. I want to win the X prize.
Sales Guy [while flipping through a FBI provided book]: I'm not sure I can sell you this stuff. It says here that your affiliated with scray people.
John: What kind of scary people?
Sales Guy: Head on a Pike kind of scary people.
Sales Guy: Didn't you hang out with that John Romero guy?
John: That was a while ago...
Sales Guy: It looks like I can't sell you any of that anyway our computer says were out.
John: Fine, I'll make my own [ckick]
Sales Guy: FBI, you may want to hear about this...
Thats why tens of millions of authentic ones get replaced ever year in the US cable TV market. Credit card mag stripe fraud is has only recently gotten into the high 5 figures for fake cards. The same vendors pushing this are pushing the ever so insecure but more buzzword bingo compliant smart cards for other things.
Ghandi is a good one to bring up in this discussion. He was an Indian living in South Africa and the people there got fed up with the cheap foreign labor and kicked out the Indians. He leared when to keep his mounth shut and to never hit back because the something like 10,000 other people in his situation ended up dead for things like hitting back or talking at the wrong time.
He took what he learned in South Africa and tought it to millions in India.
Thats the problem with democracy. Most people aren't going to pick the best long term solution. The founders of the US knew that and thats the reason its a Republic and not a Democracy. Its also why top judges get their job for life and why majority doesn't win in many cases. Most serious things require 2:3 or in a few cases even more because "the majority rules" concept quickly wipes out the minority.
What content are you talking about? Look at the long term top 40 albums over the last 3 years, not the top 40 of the week. What do you see? About 1/4 of them are from England and another 1/4 have major British components. Add in people from other bits of the world and your up to about 1/2 have overseas involvment.
How about movies? Where were the last top 10 movies made? Harry Potter, Lord or the Rings, Star Wars, 007... All filmed outside of the US in part or in total.
How about the Simpsons? Animated in India.
How about the comericals on TV? Many of them are now filmed in Sydney.
Americans buy more content than anyone else they have a higer buy ratio than a production ratio.
Warren E. Buffett agreeed with Greenspan as well. Now he seems to be collecting IT comapines.
As an American living in Australia I've got an interesting point of view.
Aussies allow ANY young American to come and visit here and work for up to a year. Its called a "Working Hoiday Visa". It allows young (as in under 25 or so) to visit here and work with odd jobs (cleaning toilets or coding crypto libs) while visiting the place for a year. This offer is open to people from all over the world including the US, England, North Korea and Cuba. I turns out that the US doesn't seem to understand this concept of young travelers unless they are from Mexico and willing to be deported as part of the game. Of course the US travel industry is hurting and the Aussie tourist industry on a down turn. Its something that the US goverment hasn't seemed to understand.
Australia was where Samba was born. Any one remember SSLeay? It was illegal to do that in the US when a few guys did it here. Per capita Australia has more game, Linux and KDE developers than the US. The technical quality of the coders is as good as I have ever seen even though most have a strange ability to absorb much beer. Most of the Aussie geeks I know have girlfriends and get laid, where do American geeks stand with that?
RSA is a pain to decypher because the assumed 1:1 for public and private keys. That isn't true. Its 1:N where N is a very larage number and may be N:M.
this code shows a simple 10 bit RSA in perl (its too slow to do much more) and it will generage one public key and several private keys. Doing it for 1024 bit is left as an exercise for the reader.
RSA's 1:1 is based on a short cut of a nasty operation via the Euclidian algorithm and it turns out the math works quite well if you do things the hard way but it takes a long time even on a modern computer.
Anyone up for some research?
/proc file system and SCO may have the patent for it. It was done in the early days of software patents and either AT&T or Sun or both might have a patent on it. It would be good to find out for sure since I do know some people that might have prior art.
One of the big ideas for sys v r 4 was the
Sys V R 4 or Sys V R 3? They are vastly different things. Sun owns a major chunk of the Sys V R 4 IP and has rights to all of it under their joint development agreement.
Modern Sys V init is very little like the sys v r 2 stuff which took a bunch of bsd like scripts and ran them out of the very old init program.
"kill -9 them all and let init sort them out" is at least a 20 year old quote
So 1+10 gives 2 billion extra numbers. There is a better way.
There are 4 classes of calls:
1) Local
2) local town
3) metro area
4) US
5) World
The true local area is a small area a 4 or 5 digit number works in almost all cases. This could be a small town or extentions in a large company.
The town and metro areas are sometimes the same, or spread way out (like Atlanta). The metro area needs 10 digits.
The US/World issue can be delt with by a country code. Remember the US's country code is 1.
I think the current hack of overlays and then +1 local dialing is tring to fix the wrong problem. The real problem is that we don't have 16+ digit numbers that can be organized in a reasonable way. I think the best solution to this is issue every phone line a 16 digit number and then issue people 7 or 10 digit numbers that are linked to the big phone numbers. Some of us would be happy with a 16 digit number and there wouldn't be the constant hacks. Some study showed that wrong numbers go way up (like 50% or so) when you from 7 to 10 digits so any new system should include check digits. An 18 digit number is enough for every phone in the US till the population doubles even if ever toster ends up with its own number.
This is just another solution looking a problem. Keyboard typing is about pressing buttons. Its been that way since the 1st typewriter. This is about simulating that since people know it but the finger suffer too much shock hitting a non spring loaded surface. It becomes a major issue to use this often.
Years ago when I had toys to play with that would do most of this, it became painful typeing on a bit of paper and detecting where the finger where. It just didn't work but looked like a good idea on paper and the sparc 1 could cope with the image processing needed. The major problem was people tend to drift if they don't have the physical feedback so you know where the key "centers" are. Modern keyboards suck with that compared with old 3270 keyboards which had an indent on J & F while the new ones tend to use some sort of raised edge. A projected keyboard won't have either.
A cheap $10 rubber keyboard will roll up and go anywhere and it doens't abuse the finger tips so I don't see these expensive things going anywhere people have a real need to type. The projection things are ok for "yes/no" and "Enter your Name" but not useful for much of anything else.
If I were him, I would wait 24 hrs.
...."
It would be very bad for someone somewhere to say "you violated the terms of your parole because you accessed the net before noon local time as implied by US CFR
Look! Another /. IP expert who's confused trademark vs copyright.
You can't lose copyright because of lack of "due dilligence" You can lose trade marks which is why Kleenex wants you to use the word "tissue" just enough that their trademark doesn't disappear. You can lose royalties for lack of protecting a patent but you can't lose the patent for not taking action.
I figure it will be about 3 months after the S-ATA drive hit the shops that someone will start putting both the new power connector and the old molex connector on the drives.
My Nokia 8310 is soo poorly designed that you have to watch the screen to know if its sent the message. Then once its sent, its back in the same mode where it had been so if your distracted, you don't know if its gone through or not. The delivery notifications are fine execpt that when you get one of them, you don't have the easy access to read it (since its not a "new" message) and you have to go to messages, then inbox (then wait and wait and wait since the don't have a clue how to cache whats on the sim in memory) then read the message (which isn't marked as read or not) and then figure out which delivery message went with with message.
Later Nokia phones have lots of little "feautres" that tend to add up to $.20 here and there for the phone companies. A few million people doing that every day and it adds up to real money and Nokia knows who its real customers are (the phone co's not the people who buy the phones).
I've had a few SMSs go missing for a while. Most of my NYE messages were delivered within two days.
From what I've seen of most RFID tags, a few meters is pushing it. The little Tiris tags work great for about 10cm (6 in). Many people buy into the RFID concept thinking they can get a little device that will point at the tag they are looking at but someone has to design a much better reciver to pull that off. (I have a buyer if you've got the design)
If Google IPOs then its time to start over again. A search engine can only work well in some enviroments and if Google is a public company, they won't have the ability to do some of the things they are doing now.
Remember altavista used to be av.dec.com and then it was moved into its own company and then it started to suck when they had to keep the thousands of stock holders happy. Googles current owners should look at the long term and hold on to what they have and let it run the way it has been running.
When I was at Sharm El Sheikh (a dive location on the south end of the Sinai) a few years ago I was getting nearly 50 baud. It sounds like at least the Internet cafes there can provide reasonable access.
Isn't System V the ugly bastard child that results when Sun and AT&T shack up for a while? It should have been a lesson to other compaines but they never learn do they?
AT&T may have patents to the /proc file system concept but I know about published prior art as well as one of the people who came up with the idea.
There is the issue of how thouse rights were transferred. As far as I know, no part of AT&T gave up any rights to any of it patents when they were split up. What they gave up was rights to some markets. I suspect tring to get SBC to pay for a license to use an old AT&T patent would be pointless.
There is also the issue that Sun owns all the rights to all of Unix as well. When things started going bad for SCO (or was it novel or whoever), they bought a non-exclusive right to everything. Since they helped develop System V, they are in a very good position to keep themselves covered in this case.
Of course the all new code could be written released under a new license. One that specificly excludes all rights to use the software from any company that has ever brought a patent suit aginst anyone. That would be an interesting twist. The concept goes aginst free software in a bad way but its the only big stick free software has left and it will be needed if the dmca line nonsense keeps going on.
If your in the area where the court hosue is, you can go to the court and claim the $20 is way too low and you should be getting closer to $10 per CD. with typical fines for this sort of thing, the fines should be closer to the entire price of the CD but no point aruging that.
So you can send in your form and get your $20 back unless someone starts a chain mail thing of "click here and get $20" in which case the amount might be lower. If the amount goes below $5 then no one gets anything and the money goes to the RIAA's home for boy band want to bes or some other charity they like.
If someone is going to the court house to object in person, let me know because I'm willing to risk the loosing my $20 if there is the slightest chance the court will increase the award. Fair is fair and if the company did illegal things that will cause them to ceas to exist, then thats the way it should be.
Australia has 2 major cities 3 minor ones and just about no other population centers. Sydney or Melbourne are big cities (one of the two will be the largest English speaking cities in the world by 2012 when they both will be bigger than London) GSM works well in the big cities because they are high density (higher than most US cities). The demographics just aren't the same. The city density in the US midwest is lower than smaller towns in Australia and they are spread out much differently. Victoria and Missouri have about the same area and same population but there are about 10 times as many areas in Missouri that have a population density to support a small airport. In GSM terms that means more towers where the Analog systems work much better.
GSM was designed so that one countries signal would not work in a bordering country. If you had tried GSM in Europe before the roaming agreements came in, you would find that the cell towers were quite selective near the borders of other countries. The signal was fine, the cell just wouldn't accept a signal that was in the wrong time slot because it was too far away and in a different countries area.
When they turned off the Analog system in Australia, many farmers lost their mobile phones since the CDMA stuff just didn't work as far away. With the exception of the big cities, the analog system worked very well for what it needed to do.