Of course how do we know the form we use submit our posts isn't their code either? Especially when panIP's site doesn't exactly go into detail about how they patented a web form.
Automatic Business and Financial Transaction Processing System (U.S. '319) Automatic Information, Goods, and Services Dispensing System (Canada '216)
These appear to be the patents that panip is using for the case (these are right off of their page). Seriously, how many people are going to patent this stuff (one-click and all that shit falls under this too). Obviously the patent agency needs to figure out who holds what, because I've got a feeling that a whole bunch of companies hold overlapping patents.
haha, whether you get modded or not i commend you for your humour in time of danger. This reminds me of how Stallman was explaining how his friend patented part of kirchoff's law just to prove how stupid the patent system worked. Oh well... haha.
While don't your company and the other smaller pool together to fight back? That way since you're all being attacked on the same basis it'll save each of you money and maybe get a better lawyer. Obviously in the courts you guys will win just due to prior art, like the case recently where that company claimed that hyperlinking was their invention and it took an 80+ year old to say "umm, no we've been doing this for 30+ years". Also, licensing is not a good way to go because you will certainly be tied to them. Hell, maybe you guys can contact IBM's ebusiness department to see if they could lend any help in this case due to the fact that it would be in their best interest to not let this get out of hand. Just my 2 cents...
Hopefully all their studies work out and they determine that the north pole is livable. Then I finally might be able to boot my damn AMD box without turning my room into hell.
its not really surprising... in that linux supposedly compiles and runs on anything with a gcc compiler... while i'm not sure what processor its running... it appears to be intel based. With that in mind, booting it shouldn't be an issue. Setting up drives and getting the "led thing" as he puts it, to work may be an issue. But again if its intel, the drives and memory shouldn't be much of an issue. Definitly an interesting hack... but I'm not sure how impressive it is.
Thanks, I had missed *slightly embarassed* that part while skimming the article. However, I still don't think it completely explains everything, and the machine is still impressive even if it was nothing more that a midget in block of wood filled with gears. Its a shame it was destroyed in that fire, before anyone could really figure out how the whole thing worked (including the "Turk"'s movements, how the person inside could view the board and make appropriate movements, etc).
Exactly what I was trying to say. So if there are any mechanical engineers out there who have any ideas what-so-ever, it would be great if you could post them on how such a machine (even if it is a hoax) could be pulled off.
Very interesting article... however I find it unfortunate that we don't know how he pulled the hoax off. Based on what I know about automata, it may be very possible to build a chess playing machine. However doing this a hundred+ years ago? I doubt it mostly due to the fact that creating the gears and other mechanisms needed required an amazing amount of time, skill and perfection. In fact this is why I heard Babbage's machine didn't work and the project fell through. I believe someone recently (if someone can find a article for this) built babbage's machine using the old blue-prints and it worked. Another thing is, if this is a hoax I wonder who was the playing the chess. The article definitly points out that the machine was very good at what it did. They only mention one case of it being beaten (along with the napoleon incident), which would mean whoever was playing was damn good. If someone was that good, why would they hide behind the guise of a machine and not reap the benefits of being one of the best chess players in the world? Oh well, definitly a good read though.
Oh one more thing, the duck? They mention that it could take food out of a hand... how the hell did it do this? The last time I checked, motion sensors, digital cameras and such hadn't been invented yet. How the hell did the thing see where it was going, and have the ability to interact with a specific location?
Re:Score 0: Bad '70s Reference *Offtopic*
on
GeekPAC
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· Score: 2
Haha, funniest thing I've seen on slashdot in a long time. Thanks /powerlinekid
Silly people *tsk,tsk,tsk*
on
Unix Isn't Dead
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Unix has been around 30 odd years. It runs graphic development machines (IRIX), industrial big iron (AIX, Solaris), desktop machines (Linux, MacOS X), gateways, routers, firewalls (*BSDs). And its been doing this for years. As the saying goes "if windows was built for the internet, then the internet was built for unix". Unix is clean and well thought out. It mixes commercial and open source and has a 30 year track record of being reliable, stable and once you get the hang of it amazingly easy. Windows on the other hand has been reliable for 2 years (Win 2k in my opinion is the only MS OS i'd trust for critical stuff, XP is too bloated and buggy, and we won't even get into the 9x line or older NT's). I think that this whole anti-unix campaign is pure Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Microsoft is scared. All of the markets (server, desktop, big iron, embedded systems) that MS is interested in, have unix challengers. I choose Mandrake and OS X over windows any day, even if it means some things I can't do as of now. But the thing about Unix is it's ability to adapt and grow. Between Irix, Aix, the hundred and 20 Linux distros, Free/Open/Net BSD, Solaris, MacOS X and countless others, thats a hell of a community working together. Most of these systems use GNU software (emacs, gcc, etc). Microsoft realizes now that they're not breaking into those markets as easy as they thought. They're not gaining server market share. They're not gaining embedded market share. They're definitly not gaining big iron market share (datacenter from what i hear is a disaster). And all this time, their one true market possession (desktop) is stagnet and is in danger of slipping in the future. MS realizes they can't compete with the raw numbers, and are hoping to save themselves some time or kill any chance of unix expansion. They're in a hell of a fight, the Unix world isn't netscape, lotus or any of those little companies. Unix is the big guys, like IBM, Sun, Sony (linux for ps/2 I imagine is going to be a future trend), Apple but more importantly Unix is also the faceless targets. The guy up at 3 in the morning hacking on gcc, or linux's vm system. MS just can't compete with that, and thats something I like to see. MS losing its own game.
Actually the linked articles talk very much so about some of the biggest warhol exploitation possibilities come from ms's updater. But again, I'll trust MS over Brilliant anyday. Brilliant really doesn't have anything to lose from bad pr, because well noone really knows who they are anyway.
People don't want to sit and watch a 5 hour show or movie. Yes they have no problems watching tv for 5 hours, but even the best shows lose your interest after 2 hours. Again which is why we people complaining about how long a movie is when its longer than an hour and a half. Anyway, the last unicorn is an excellent movie. When i was a little kid (80s) i used to watch it all the time, and about 6 months ago i saw it again for the first time in about 15 years. It wasn't as good as i used to think it was, but it was still pretty amazing.
Well if my girlfriend watched "Martha Stewart Living" it wouldn't be a problem. A simple tkinter python strip would make this extrememly easy. Just make a little gui that takes input like the name of the show, the date and time of it, how long it is and what channel. And then sets up a cron job for you. She wouldn't have to do anything.
Xawtv, Vcr and a crond job and my box will record any tv show at anytime i tell it to... for example say i want southpark every wensday at 10, just have to set the script to channel 25 and set the time and then have crond run it every wensday at 10. It helps that i have bttv card though;)
Its sitting right next to my tivo and dvd player... well its not the same one as mentioned above but it has: ogg support, with mp3 and cd 110 gig of storage space burns cds internet connectivity (p2p) and usb support linux a java compatible browser a beautiful ui running through a huge screen 2 processors and a whole hell of alot of memory
if you haven't guessed its called a "computer" and is availabe from parts at pricewatch.com for about 600 dollars, i really suggest you get one (they're great). It also plays dvds flawlessly (in linux), plays divx (again in linux, hell thats all i have on it), and acts as a tivo using simple bash scripting and some good old fashion c/c++. We won't even get into the fact that its dream console, capable of playing all your favorite games from nintendo and sega
Wow, theres alot more active people on slashdot today. It appears that that one Anonymous Coward guy was replaced by probably hundreds of new users. Its great the support slashdot is getting in these difficult times.
The point is that they could smooth it out alittle bit. Gnome always looked too clunky for me. Maybe blend the taskbar alittle. Try not to be so angular... then again now i'm just arguing for it to look more like kde and any other nice wm out there.
Amazingly it looks just like gnome 1.4. This isn't flamebait but i still think gnome lacks the smoothness and grace of kde. This is coming from a former gnome user, one who after playing with mac os switched to kde, because at least its functional and looks good.
Hell, why bother even writing software anymore? They should just tell everyone straight up what they can do and watch the money keep coming in. Joe Desktop-User doesn't know what his computer can do unless microsoft magically does it for him. I think this is probably the only way microsoft could ever be a true inovator... because they'd be the only one left to do anything.
MY point was that the guy responded to me saying that hacking OFS would be illegal, basically i was saying that if hacking OFS was illegal than ntfs is too. I think the problem lies in reverse-engineering because there is no way microsoft released specifications for the file system free. Most likely someone had to reverse-engineer it which is illegal under the dmca (i don't agree with this, but thats the fct).
Technically hacking ntfs is illegal... its a proprietary fs backed I'm sure by some patents. I'd also like to point out that
1)it doesn't matter if its illegal for alot of people... downloading mp3s is illegal, using decss based dvd players (i believe ogle???) is illegal, things like that. Once the code is out there, if someone has a use for it, they'll use it.
2)I doubt this will be an issue. By the time longhorn comes out, things probably will be very different in the tech world as they always are for every new windows release. If the aol stuff happens, Microsofts control will slip alittle. If thats the case they won't be able to force upgrades as easy as they did with xp which means they won't get as much software tailored for the new fs, which again hurts the chances of people upgrading. Microsoft should stick to what it has, 20 years of backwards compatibility. If they really wanted to make a drastic change, they should of done away with the 9x line long long ago (like around 95) and stuck with nt and fixed that. Starting fresh is only going to hurt them, especially when their application base is their greatest avantage.
I believe NTFS was designed that way too (although it was just a rip of OS/2's fs) and we (linux people) can at least read from it. While I understand your concerns, I think you underestimate the reverse-engineering skills of hackers. There hasn't been something yet that hasn't been hacked one way or another (well, if there actually is a need to hack it), so I say give it time.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course how do we know the form we use submit our posts isn't their code either? Especially when panIP's site doesn't exactly go into detail about how they patented a web form.
Automatic Business and Financial Transaction Processing System (U.S. '319)
Automatic Information, Goods, and Services Dispensing System (Canada '216)
These appear to be the patents that panip is using for the case (these are right off of their page). Seriously, how many people are going to patent this stuff (one-click and all that shit falls under this too). Obviously the patent agency needs to figure out who holds what, because I've got a feeling that a whole bunch of companies hold overlapping patents.
haha, whether you get modded or not i commend you for your humour in time of danger. This reminds me of how Stallman was explaining how his friend patented part of kirchoff's law just to prove how stupid the patent system worked. Oh well... haha.
While don't your company and the other smaller pool together to fight back? That way since you're all being attacked on the same basis it'll save each of you money and maybe get a better lawyer. Obviously in the courts you guys will win just due to prior art, like the case recently where that company claimed that hyperlinking was their invention and it took an 80+ year old to say "umm, no we've been doing this for 30+ years". Also, licensing is not a good way to go because you will certainly be tied to them. Hell, maybe you guys can contact IBM's ebusiness department to see if they could lend any help in this case due to the fact that it would be in their best interest to not let this get out of hand. Just my 2 cents...
Hopefully all their studies work out and they determine that the north pole is livable. Then I finally might be able to boot my damn AMD box without turning my room into hell.
its not really surprising... in that linux supposedly compiles and runs on anything with a gcc compiler... while i'm not sure what processor its running... it appears to be intel based. With that in mind, booting it shouldn't be an issue. Setting up drives and getting the "led thing" as he puts it, to work may be an issue. But again if its intel, the drives and memory shouldn't be much of an issue. Definitly an interesting hack... but I'm not sure how impressive it is.
Post on Babbage's machne
Thank you, see i knew i was right.
Thanks, I had missed *slightly embarassed* that part while skimming the article. However, I still don't think it completely explains everything, and the machine is still impressive even if it was nothing more that a midget in block of wood filled with gears. Its a shame it was destroyed in that fire, before anyone could really figure out how the whole thing worked (including the "Turk"'s movements, how the person inside could view the board and make appropriate movements, etc).
Exactly what I was trying to say. So if there are any mechanical engineers out there who have any ideas what-so-ever, it would be great if you could post them on how such a machine (even if it is a hoax) could be pulled off.
/powerlinekid
Very interesting article... however I find it unfortunate that we don't know how he pulled the hoax off. Based on what I know about automata, it may be very possible to build a chess playing machine. However doing this a hundred+ years ago? I doubt it mostly due to the fact that creating the gears and other mechanisms needed required an amazing amount of time, skill and perfection. In fact this is why I heard Babbage's machine didn't work and the project fell through. I believe someone recently (if someone can find a article for this) built babbage's machine using the old blue-prints and it worked. Another thing is, if this is a hoax I wonder who was the playing the chess. The article definitly points out that the machine was very good at what it did. They only mention one case of it being beaten (along with the napoleon incident), which would mean whoever was playing was damn good. If someone was that good, why would they hide behind the guise of a machine and not reap the benefits of being one of the best chess players in the world? Oh well, definitly a good read though.
Oh one more thing, the duck? They mention that it could take food out of a hand... how the hell did it do this? The last time I checked, motion sensors, digital cameras and such hadn't been invented yet. How the hell did the thing see where it was going, and have the ability to interact with a specific location?
Haha, funniest thing I've seen on slashdot in a long time. Thanks
/powerlinekid
Unix has been around 30 odd years. It runs graphic development machines (IRIX), industrial big iron (AIX, Solaris), desktop machines (Linux, MacOS X), gateways, routers, firewalls (*BSDs). And its been doing this for years. As the saying goes "if windows was built for the internet, then the internet was built for unix". Unix is clean and well thought out. It mixes commercial and open source and has a 30 year track record of being reliable, stable and once you get the hang of it amazingly easy. Windows on the other hand has been reliable for 2 years (Win 2k in my opinion is the only MS OS i'd trust for critical stuff, XP is too bloated and buggy, and we won't even get into the 9x line or older NT's). I think that this whole anti-unix campaign is pure Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Microsoft is scared. All of the markets (server, desktop, big iron, embedded systems) that MS is interested in, have unix challengers. I choose Mandrake and OS X over windows any day, even if it means some things I can't do as of now. But the thing about Unix is it's ability to adapt and grow. Between Irix, Aix, the hundred and 20 Linux distros, Free/Open/Net BSD, Solaris, MacOS X and countless others, thats a hell of a community working together. Most of these systems use GNU software (emacs, gcc, etc). Microsoft realizes now that they're not breaking into those markets as easy as they thought. They're not gaining server market share. They're not gaining embedded market share. They're definitly not gaining big iron market share (datacenter from what i hear is a disaster). And all this time, their one true market possession (desktop) is stagnet and is in danger of slipping in the future. MS realizes they can't compete with the raw numbers, and are hoping to save themselves some time or kill any chance of unix expansion. They're in a hell of a fight, the Unix world isn't netscape, lotus or any of those little companies. Unix is the big guys, like IBM, Sun, Sony (linux for ps/2 I imagine is going to be a future trend), Apple but more importantly Unix is also the faceless targets. The guy up at 3 in the morning hacking on gcc, or linux's vm system. MS just can't compete with that, and thats something I like to see. MS losing its own game.
/powerlinekid
Actually the linked articles talk very much so about some of the biggest warhol exploitation possibilities come from ms's updater. But again, I'll trust MS over Brilliant anyday. Brilliant really doesn't have anything to lose from bad pr, because well noone really knows who they are anyway.
People don't want to sit and watch a 5 hour show or movie. Yes they have no problems watching tv for 5 hours, but even the best shows lose your interest after 2 hours. Again which is why we people complaining about how long a movie is when its longer than an hour and a half. Anyway, the last unicorn is an excellent movie. When i was a little kid (80s) i used to watch it all the time, and about 6 months ago i saw it again for the first time in about 15 years. It wasn't as good as i used to think it was, but it was still pretty amazing.
Well if my girlfriend watched "Martha Stewart Living" it wouldn't be a problem. A simple tkinter python strip would make this extrememly easy. Just make a little gui that takes input like the name of the show, the date and time of it, how long it is and what channel. And then sets up a cron job for you. She wouldn't have to do anything.
Xawtv, Vcr and a crond job and my box will record any tv show at anytime i tell it to... for example say i want southpark every wensday at 10, just have to set the script to channel 25 and set the time and then have crond run it every wensday at 10. It helps that i have bttv card though ;)
Its sitting right next to my tivo and dvd player... well its not the same one as mentioned above but it has:
ogg support, with mp3 and cd
110 gig of storage space
burns cds
internet connectivity (p2p) and usb support
linux
a java compatible browser
a beautiful ui running through a huge screen
2 processors and a whole hell of alot of memory
if you haven't guessed its called a "computer" and is availabe from parts at pricewatch.com
for about 600 dollars, i really suggest you get one (they're great). It also plays dvds flawlessly (in linux), plays divx (again in linux, hell thats all i have on it), and acts as a tivo using simple bash scripting and some good old fashion c/c++. We won't even get into the fact that its dream console, capable of playing all your favorite games from nintendo and sega
How long until slashdot does this. Although they'd probably at least give us options of how stupid they make our browser look. Like maybe a poll:
How do you want your browser to look this week?
1: Linux themed
2: Flashing slashot (looks like vegas strip club)
3: Cowboyneal
*shudder*
Wow, theres alot more active people on slashdot today. It appears that that one Anonymous Coward guy was replaced by probably hundreds of new users. Its great the support slashdot is getting in these difficult times.
The point is that they could smooth it out alittle bit. Gnome always looked too clunky for me. Maybe blend the taskbar alittle. Try not to be so angular... then again now i'm just arguing for it to look more like kde and any other nice wm out there.
Amazingly it looks just like gnome 1.4. This isn't flamebait but i still think gnome lacks the smoothness and grace of kde. This is coming from a former gnome user, one who after playing with mac os switched to kde, because at least its functional and looks good.
Hell, why bother even writing software anymore? They should just tell everyone straight up what they can do and watch the money keep coming in. Joe Desktop-User doesn't know what his computer can do unless microsoft magically does it for him. I think this is probably the only way microsoft could ever be a true inovator... because they'd be the only one left to do anything.
MY point was that the guy responded to me saying that hacking OFS would be illegal, basically i was saying that if hacking OFS was illegal than ntfs is too. I think the problem lies in reverse-engineering because there is no way microsoft released specifications for the file system free. Most likely someone had to reverse-engineer it which is illegal under the dmca (i don't agree with this, but thats the fct).
Technically hacking ntfs is illegal... its a proprietary fs backed I'm sure by some patents. I'd also like to point out that
1)it doesn't matter if its illegal for alot of people... downloading mp3s is illegal, using decss based dvd players (i believe ogle???) is illegal, things like that. Once the code is out there, if someone has a use for it, they'll use it.
2)I doubt this will be an issue. By the time longhorn comes out, things probably will be very different in the tech world as they always are for every new windows release. If the aol stuff happens, Microsofts control will slip alittle. If thats the case they won't be able to force upgrades as easy as they did with xp which means they won't get as much software tailored for the new fs, which again hurts the chances of people upgrading. Microsoft should stick to what it has, 20 years of backwards compatibility. If they really wanted to make a drastic change, they should of done away with the 9x line long long ago (like around 95) and stuck with nt and fixed that. Starting fresh is only going to hurt them, especially when their application base is their greatest avantage.
I believe NTFS was designed that way too (although it was just a rip of OS/2's fs) and we (linux people) can at least read from it. While I understand your concerns, I think you underestimate the reverse-engineering skills of hackers. There hasn't been something yet that hasn't been hacked one way or another (well, if there actually is a need to hack it), so I say give it time.