Mr. Karn was just doing his job for Qualcomm, and doing a service for the rest of us.
I suspect it's much more than that. For those not familiar with the name Phil Karn, he was one of the original tcp/ip implementation guys way back in the day. He also has significant interest in wireless data transmission. He was the author of a networking/packet radio package called ka9q, one of the first packages that supported virtually every networking protocol and supported packet radio -> internet. I believe his reasons for investigating the VMSK proposal were largely linked to personal interests. The fact that he is employed by qualcomm only gives him even more credit.
BTW: a Google search on "Phil Karn" will yield virtually infinite interesting results. I highly recommend doing it.
The kicker is the "free time" part. Define "free time" when you're salaried. It was easy when I punched a clock. Now, it is really fuzzy...
Not at all. Any time spent not at the office doing anything not explicitly asked of you by your employer is your "free time". This is a pretty easy definition.
In this particular, the "not asked of him by his employer is pretty obvious", something tells me that AOL isn't going to ask him to write a clone of their software minus advertisements. So, the only thing left is, was it done at the "office".
I'll make the guess that justin is really working to piss off AOL and would want to protect his ass, so it likely was really done at home during non work hours.
I stream full quality mpeg dvd rips (ooops, is that legal?) over 10baseT at home. Man I love my Creative Labs dxr3 mpeg decoder card, plays mpegs on my TV at perfect quality.
That's right. If these magazines have the cajones to tell Apple to fuck off and keep printing the rumors I'll get a subscription for each one! Of course, I have no use for apple magazines so i'll just end up burning them or something, but still.
** Martin
-- Already pissed at Jobs for killing the Newton. . .
They have no patent. As other posts have pointed out, they've not listed any patent numbers, so it's reasonable that they do not hold a patent on what was reverse engineered.
Secondly, the "protect it or lose it" defense does not apply to patents. This only applies to trademarks. Since there are most likely no trademarks being infringed upon in the reverse engineered drivers, this does not apply either.
I would say the fact that they are attempting insuate both of these in their letters, without providing proof of either (probably because they don't have either) is a fairly bogus thing to do. The best it will do is upset people, the worst it will do is bring legal action back against them.
I would think that if it took you guys 5 years to write software that was reverse engineered in 2 weeks then perhaps you didn't do so great a job.
I'm betting that if the CueCat developers had dumped the "encryption" part they could have had a product to market in much less time. ..not to mention that they still would have a good quality, extremely cheap scanner available that people would still have to pay money for since you can't copy a scanner.
Oh but wait. We can't just sue God, there's a whole host of deities which are responsible for creation in the various forms of creationism. And just in case, you better find those first two particles that collided to make the big bang since that theory may be correct too.
Wow, you could keep the courts died up for millenia!
** Martin
Re:For those experiencing the "Slashdot Effect"
on
Gnutella Vs. SPAM
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· Score: 1
Since the response to the search does not include any return address, ShareZilla uses Gnutella Net's natural anonimity to keep your home IP address from being discovered. This way you don't have to wory about any number of hack attacks, which can only be done once the hacker knows your home IP.
Uh. Presumably you're using this advertising method to drive people to something that is yours. Whether it's a website or an email address or a realworld place. ..which ever it is, that is still vulnerable to attacks. Are people really this dumb?
** Martin
Fun Project. . .DDoS people like that!
on
Gnutella Vs. SPAM
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· Score: 1
Someone should write a gnutella client that sits and monitors all search results for urls & email addresses and starts a DDoS against those sites as they are detected.
Note: this is a sarcastic comment and i'm not actually encouraging anyone to perform any illegal acts.
OK. So, I used to read Mr. Katz writing till I realized that he had NO idea what my life as a geek was about. ..So, I'll explain why I think he's absolutely full of shit. . .
Yes. I'm a "geek" (Mr. Katz word). Yes, I was different than many other people in high school. I was smart, not particularly outgoing, didn't enjoy sports, etc. Had Mr. Katz seen me, he would have likely written that I was an outcast. He would have gone on for paragraphs of poor grammar about how bad my life was and how hard it was for me to get along. . .
Well, you know what, in my schools there were dozens of other kids just like me! We hung out together. Were we all outcasts? Consider this: We also had jocks, burnouts, and people who fit into category. The jocks didn't talk to the geeks or the burnouts. The burnouts didn't talk to the jocks or the geeks and the geeks didn't talk to the jocks or the burnouts. So, we've got lots of seperate groups, all of who do not talk to each other.
So, which ones are really the "outcasts"? Which ones are different? We ALL were different. There was nothing unusual about the geeks being a group that hung out together because there were other groups that did the same thing. But our dear dear Mr Katz always talks about us "geeks" like it was our life that was so bad and everyone else was normal. Sorry Jon, my life was as normal as the next guy's.
How does that relate to your movie review? Simple, we geeks are smart enough to know that "Magneto" is not spelled "Magento" (Who is "Magento"'s nemesis anyway, "Cyano"?)
Mr. Katz, Please do NOT ever review a movie ever again.
Slashdot webmasters, Please do NOT ever again put a piece jon katz writing in a post that can't be filtered by the "don't show me these authors" filter. . .
Thank you both for your cooperation in keeping us sane.
** Martin (from Cleveland, Oh. for those who heard katz on the Diane Rehm Show)
Re:Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .
on
X Windows Must Die!
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· Score: 1
Lars? Is that you? You finally used a computer?
Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .
on
X Windows Must Die!
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· Score: 1
. ..maybe then I'll understand why X is bad!
X is the one thing that makes me LOVE unix. Remote displays. Platform/architecture independence. LOTS of toolkits. 20 years of develepment. Almost the same qualifications for greatness as Un*x itself and you hate it? Wow. that's some serious wackiness.
Uhm. for those of you who didn't actually READ the whole rant, it's really about how hypocritical politicians are. That is, they allow all of this violence against animals to put them on the dinner plate but when it's shown in a video game it's wrong. (Note: I don't necassarily agree that putting meat on my dinner plate is bad, but I'm not going to argue that point). The rant against the animal violence is really just demonstrating the point, rather graphically (hmmm, maybe his post will be banned in.ca also!), that animals being eviscerated, beheaded and the like are common everyday occurances.
All in all, if you don't agree that slaughtering animals to provide a delicious baby cow roast for your dinner table is bad, at least accept that there are people who do feel it's wrong. And, if they feel that way, then they most certainly are allowed to get upset when politicians do things that do not agree with their beliefs. At least they're being consistant, unlike the people who rant and rave against the slaugher of little kitties in china but go on eating huge steaks once a week. (aawwww, the little kitty is cute so we can't kill it, but a cow is the ugliest thing i ever did see so kill it and serve me up its ass.)
The real problem isn't the computers existance. It's that there are so few good teachers anymore. A decent teacher should be able to integrate the computer as a source of information, just like the dictionary, encyclopedia and other print mediums.
That Calvert school the article mentions could do just as well if there were computers in each classroom! The existance of the computer shouldn't exclude kids from writing hand written assignments and papers. The existance of the computer shouldn't mean that kids don't have to think on their own. The existance of the computer is exactly the same as any other source of information and if people don't treat it as such, THEN it is bad for education!
I'm not going to try to parse the math behind it, but advances like this are why I advocate laws to protect fair use of copyrighted materials -- sooner or later a successful crypto-system to prevent all non-permitted use of materials will be developed, complete with tamper-proof hardware in your PC, and then where will we be?
Same place we are now. ..someone will buy it, record it off a virtual sound driver or something, take the.mp3 and distribute it. ..Wow, lots gained for so much time, money and effort put into it. . .
As a person who's known the owner of flashline.com for quite some time, I hope I can shed a little light on that. Basically, he thought it was a really cool idea that he wanted to throw some money at. Sure, there was the fact that it was some advertising for flashline.com, but that wasn't the primary reason for doing it. To quote him as best I can when he mentioned the sponsorship to us late last year, "Yea, we could have spent some money on sponsoring a sporting event or something, but here I feel like the money is doing something good" ** Martin
Re:ARGH! a note on "best tool for the job".
on
Why Not MySQL?
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· Score: 2
While "the best tool for the job is the one that works" is a good thing to work by, remember one little thing. A tool may seem like it's working until one critical point of failure. Kind of like using a 7/16 inch socket on an 11mm nut. Yea, it'll work most of the time, until you hit that one soft nut that you end up stripping. Then you sit there all pissed off that you didn't use the 11mm like you should have.
And this is exactly what the article was about. Being sure to evaluate the tools you use properly and safegaurding your valuable critical data as best you possibly can!
Of course they'll sue home depot for selling the pipe that killed professor plum. They'll also sue the manufacturer for being negligent in producing the lead pipe that killed him, and the vehicle maker that made the vehicle that transported the pipe to Mr Body's house, and construction company that laid the roads that the vehicle drove on to get to his house.
Of course, at some time they'll have to sue some ancient cultures for inventing the smelting methods that are used to produce the the metals that are used. ..ad nausem. ..you get the idea.
Why so cynical? cuz some people have already started suing gun manufacturers cuz some other moron used a gun to kill some other moron.
Yes. The latest version of gnutella is here: http://gnutella.nerdherd.net/ BEWARE! There is apparently a trojan floating around..50c is the latest version of gnutella. As of yet, there is NO source available. Though that page lists a number of projects that are in the works.
I think you're missing a few important things here.
First there is the fact that cross platform development under linux is much easier. So easy, actually that once you've developed a program for Linux on any platform it's essentially just a recompile away from running on another platform. This is a big boon to developers, especially game developers because they automatically have a bigger market.
But, even more important is the Game Consoles. ..who says Linux can't run on them? As a matter of fact, I'ld make that bold statement that it's an inevitablility ("Do you hear that? That is the sound of inevitibility."). Linux will be ported to game consoles. Then, developing for a game console will mean Linux development, which will mean that those games will be playable on all Linux systems. What a market that would be! All game consoles and all PCs!
This is more of several closely linked questions than anything else.
It's well known that Loki is not posting any business figures. There are one of two possible conclusions one can draw from this: 1) Loki is doing very poorly and they don't want to talk about how poorly or 2) Loki is doing extremely well and is fearfull of losing business if other publishers realize how rich the Linux game market really is.
Now, question number #1, if you're not going to give us numbers, could you indicate, in general terms, how Loki is doing. Will you be around in a year? 5 years? What is the rate of growth of companies agreeing to let you port? What are the near future projections of this rate?
Next, IF, as I suspect, the 2nd conclusion I draw above is correct, then at soem point companies will realize that they maybe better off designing and developping with a Linux port in mind to begin with. As several other posters have also wondered, where will this leave Loki? What are your plans for the time when a seperate company to port linux games is no longer needed? Are you shooting for a buy out from one of these bigger companies? I see this as a viable option as it would give some company a big edge in the Linux gaming market.
Slashdot Mirror
Mr. Karn was just doing his job for Qualcomm, and doing a service for the rest of us.
I suspect it's much more than that. For those not familiar with the name Phil Karn, he was one of the original tcp/ip implementation guys way back in the day. He also has significant interest in wireless data transmission. He was the author of a networking/packet radio package called ka9q, one of the first packages that supported virtually every networking protocol and supported packet radio -> internet. I believe his reasons for investigating the VMSK proposal were largely linked to personal interests. The fact that he is employed by qualcomm only gives him even more credit.
BTW: a Google search on "Phil Karn" will yield virtually infinite interesting results. I highly recommend doing it.
** Martin
The kicker is the "free time" part. Define "free time" when you're salaried. It was easy when I punched a clock. Now, it is really fuzzy...
Not at all. Any time spent not at the office doing anything not explicitly asked of you by your employer is your "free time". This is a pretty easy definition.
In this particular, the "not asked of him by his employer is pretty obvious", something tells me that AOL isn't going to ask him to write a clone of their software minus advertisements. So, the only thing left is, was it done at the "office".
I'll make the guess that justin is really working to piss off AOL and would want to protect his ass, so it likely was really done at home during non work hours.
** Martin
I stream full quality mpeg dvd rips (ooops, is that legal?) over 10baseT at home. Man I love my Creative Labs dxr3 mpeg decoder card, plays mpegs on my TV at perfect quality.
** Martin
That's right. If these magazines have the cajones to tell Apple to fuck off and keep printing the rumors I'll get a subscription for each one! Of course, I have no use for apple magazines so i'll just end up burning them or something, but still.
** Martin
-- Already pissed at Jobs for killing the Newton. . .
They have no patent. As other posts have pointed out, they've not listed any patent numbers, so it's reasonable that they do not hold a patent on what was reverse engineered.
Secondly, the "protect it or lose it" defense does not apply to patents. This only applies to trademarks. Since there are most likely no trademarks being infringed upon in the reverse engineered drivers, this does not apply either.
I would say the fact that they are attempting insuate both of these in their letters, without providing proof of either (probably because they don't have either) is a fairly bogus thing to do. The best it will do is upset people, the worst it will do is bring legal action back against them.
** Martin
I would think that if it took you guys 5 years to write software that was reverse engineered in 2 weeks then perhaps you didn't do so great a job.
.not to mention that they still would have a good quality, extremely cheap scanner available that people would still have to pay money for since you can't copy a scanner.
I'm betting that if the CueCat developers had dumped the "encryption" part they could have had a product to market in much less time. .
But, what do I know about business. . .
** Martin
Oh but wait. We can't just sue God, there's a whole host of deities which are responsible for creation in the various forms of creationism. And just in case, you better find those first two particles that collided to make the big bang since that theory may be correct too.
Wow, you could keep the courts died up for millenia!
** Martin
Uh. Presumably you're using this advertising method to drive people to something that is yours. Whether it's a website or an email address or a realworld place. . .which ever it is, that is still vulnerable to attacks. Are people really this dumb?
** Martin
Someone should write a gnutella client that sits and monitors all search results for urls & email addresses and starts a DDoS against those sites as they are detected.
Note: this is a sarcastic comment and i'm not actually encouraging anyone to perform any illegal acts.
** Martin
I suspect that there's a bit on the cutting room floor where she drains someone who was trying to sneak up on him outside the truck.
** Martin
OK. So, I used to read Mr. Katz writing till I realized that he had NO idea what my life as a geek was about. . .So, I'll explain why I think he's absolutely full of shit. . .
Yes. I'm a "geek" (Mr. Katz word). Yes, I was different than many other people in high school. I was smart, not particularly outgoing, didn't enjoy sports, etc. Had Mr. Katz seen me, he would have likely written that I was an outcast. He would have gone on for paragraphs of poor grammar about how bad my life was and how hard it was for me to get along. . .
Well, you know what, in my schools there were dozens of other kids just like me! We hung out together. Were we all outcasts? Consider this: We also had jocks, burnouts, and people who fit into category. The jocks didn't talk to the geeks or the burnouts. The burnouts didn't talk to the jocks or the geeks and the geeks didn't talk to the jocks or the burnouts. So, we've got lots of seperate groups, all of who do not talk to each other.
So, which ones are really the "outcasts"? Which ones are different? We ALL were different. There was nothing unusual about the geeks being a group that hung out together because there were other groups that did the same thing. But our dear dear Mr Katz always talks about us "geeks" like it was our life that was so bad and everyone else was normal. Sorry Jon, my life was as normal as the next guy's.
How does that relate to your movie review? Simple, we geeks are smart enough to know that "Magneto" is not spelled "Magento" (Who is "Magento"'s nemesis anyway, "Cyano"?)
** Martin
Mr. Katz,
Please do NOT ever review a movie ever again.
Slashdot webmasters,
Please do NOT ever again put a piece jon katz writing in a post that can't be filtered by the "don't show me these authors" filter. . .
Thank you both for your cooperation in keeping us sane.
** Martin
(from Cleveland, Oh. for those who heard katz on the Diane Rehm Show)
Lars? Is that you? You finally used a computer?
. . .maybe then I'll understand why X is bad!
X is the one thing that makes me LOVE unix. Remote displays. Platform/architecture independence. LOTS of toolkits. 20 years of develepment. Almost the same qualifications for greatness as Un*x itself and you hate it? Wow. that's some serious wackiness.
** Martin
Uhm. for those of you who didn't actually READ the whole rant, it's really about how hypocritical politicians are. That is, they allow all of this violence against animals to put them on the dinner plate but when it's shown in a video game it's wrong. (Note: I don't necassarily agree that putting meat on my dinner plate is bad, but I'm not going to argue that point). The rant against the animal violence is really just demonstrating the point, rather graphically (hmmm, maybe his post will be banned in .ca also!), that animals being eviscerated, beheaded and the like are common everyday occurances.
All in all, if you don't agree that slaughtering animals to provide a delicious baby cow roast for your dinner table is bad, at least accept that there are people who do feel it's wrong. And, if they feel that way, then they most certainly are allowed to get upset when politicians do things that do not agree with their beliefs. At least they're being consistant, unlike the people who rant and rave against the slaugher of little kitties in china but go on eating huge steaks once a week. (aawwww, the little kitty is cute so we can't kill it, but a cow is the ugliest thing i ever did see so kill it and serve me up its ass.)
** Martin
The real problem isn't the computers existance. It's that there are so few good teachers anymore. A decent teacher should be able to integrate the computer as a source of information, just like the dictionary, encyclopedia and other print mediums.
That Calvert school the article mentions could do just as well if there were computers in each classroom! The existance of the computer shouldn't exclude kids from writing hand written assignments and papers. The existance of the computer shouldn't mean that kids don't have to think on their own. The existance of the computer is exactly the same as any other source of information and if people don't treat it as such, THEN it is bad for education!
** Martin
Same place we are now. . .someone will buy it, record it off a virtual sound driver or something, take the .mp3 and distribute it. . .Wow, lots gained for so much time, money and effort put into it. . .
** Martin
As a person who's known the owner of flashline.com for quite some time, I hope I can shed a little light on that. Basically, he thought it was a really cool idea that he wanted to throw some money at. Sure, there was the fact that it was some advertising for flashline.com, but that wasn't the primary reason for doing it. To quote him as best I can when he mentioned the sponsorship to us late last year, "Yea, we could have spent some money on sponsoring a sporting event or something, but here I feel like the money is doing something good" ** Martin
While "the best tool for the job is the one that works" is a good thing to work by, remember one little thing. A tool may seem like it's working until one critical point of failure. Kind of like using a 7/16 inch socket on an 11mm nut. Yea, it'll work most of the time, until you hit that one soft nut that you end up stripping. Then you sit there all pissed off that you didn't use the 11mm like you should have.
And this is exactly what the article was about. Being sure to evaluate the tools you use properly and safegaurding your valuable critical data as best you possibly can!
** Martin
Are we commenting on a page that has its own built in comment system?
** Martin
Oh please! we've all seen Ghostbusters! We ALL know how dangerous marshmallows of any type can be!
** Martin
Of course they'll sue home depot for selling the pipe that killed professor plum. They'll also sue the manufacturer for being negligent in producing the lead pipe that killed him, and the vehicle maker that made the vehicle that transported the pipe to Mr Body's house, and construction company that laid the roads that the vehicle drove on to get to his house.
.ad nausem. . .you get the idea.
Of course, at some time they'll have to sue some ancient cultures for inventing the smelting methods that are used to produce the the metals that are used. .
Why so cynical? cuz some people have already started suing gun manufacturers cuz some other moron used a gun to kill some other moron.
** Martin
http://gnutella.nerdherd.net/
BEWARE! There is apparently a trojan floating around.
** Martin
I think you're missing a few important things here.
.who says Linux can't run on them? As a matter of fact, I'ld make that bold statement that it's an inevitablility ("Do you hear that? That is the sound of inevitibility."). Linux will be ported to game consoles. Then, developing for a game console will mean Linux development, which will mean that those games will be playable on all Linux systems. What a market that would be! All game consoles and all PCs!
First there is the fact that cross platform development under linux is much easier. So easy, actually that once you've developed a program for Linux on any platform it's essentially just a recompile away from running on another platform. This is a big boon to developers, especially game developers because they automatically have a bigger market.
But, even more important is the Game Consoles. .
** Martin
This is more of several closely linked questions than anything else.
It's well known that Loki is not posting any business figures. There are one of two possible conclusions one can draw from this: 1) Loki is doing very poorly and they don't want to talk about how poorly or 2) Loki is doing extremely well and is fearfull of losing business if other publishers realize how rich the Linux game market really is.
Now, question number #1, if you're not going to give us numbers, could you indicate, in general terms, how Loki is doing. Will you be around in a year? 5 years? What is the rate of growth of companies agreeing to let you port? What are the near future projections of this rate?
Next, IF, as I suspect, the 2nd conclusion I draw above is correct, then at soem point companies will realize that they maybe better off designing and developping with a Linux port in mind to begin with. As several other posters have also wondered, where will this leave Loki? What are your plans for the time when a seperate company to port linux games is no longer needed? Are you shooting for a buy out from one of these bigger companies? I see this as a viable option as it would give some company a big edge in the Linux gaming market.
** Martin