If the $40 billion per year figure is right then it is smaller than Dell's annual revenue and less than half HP's. Of course, selling high performance CD and DVD copying equipment is only a part of their business but you will find it hard to get a consumer PC that does not include at least the hardware you need for the unauthorised copying that ??AA like to call piracy. Looking up the financials, it looks as if the consumer PC hardware business for just those two is over $10 billion per year and there are quite a few other companies out there too. I don't have time to look up the size of the blank media business - what the ??AA probably think of as "piracy supplies" - but given the shelves full of the things I see in my local supermarket, I suspect we have a respectable sized business there too.
I suspect that if someone does the real numbers the economic argument will not be so favourable to ??AA.
Gopher was around before WWW but to run a Gopher server you had to do some sort of deal with some US University or something of the kind. Where I worked, it was just too much effort to try to get our management to negotiate the necessary agreement to put up a Gopher server so after a few brief internal experiments we dumped Gopher. We could just download an run a web server on the same host that was serving FTP and provide more convenient access to the data that was already public.
If getting started on the web had involved asking the boss for money we would just not have done it. I have no idea how many other people were in a similar position, but for me having code that was free in both senses made all the difference.
I believe that if those who started it had set out to get rich from the web from the start it would have failed completely.
won't that just mean that MS will fork every open source project
Microsoft may be very rich but they do not have enough income to hire enough developers to fork every open source project.
Customers and stockholders would be very angry if MSFT diverted a large part of their current staff to forking open source projects. They can't just pull the open source work into their existing teams because of the possibility of contamination of their precious source code assets with some Open Source or - horror! GPLv2 - licensed code.
MSFT forking the code would mean them hiring a whole lot more developers of the required skill level and as far as I know there is not currently a large pool of sufficiently skilled unemployed developers. Hiring enough to even make a start is going to be significant expenditure for no extra income and that means taking a substantial hit in profits. Financial analysts and stockholders are not going to be happy with that and if they start to sell the share price goes down and we see just how much of MSFT's money is real and how much is just a high P/E ratio that could collapse frighteningly fast if investors lose confidence.
MSFT's best bet is to try to cause divisions between different groups of open source developers but I think that the problem there is that whatever license they prefer, open source developers tend to have respect for technical contribution and contempt for the marketing bullshit and 'business' dirty tricks that are MSFT's stock in trade. Heated public arguments over the merits of different licenses are not a sign of the community fragmenting, they are a sign that the open source community does its thing in the open and collectively comes up with a set of variants that can satisfy everyone and an understanding of how to work together.
What we all need to do is to keep shining a light into the corners where MSFT is trying to play its dirty tricks - like the ballot stuffing in the standards committees - so that they are seen for what they are. The advantages of open source speak for themselves, even to businessmen, if we make sure that the real facts are available.
One thing I noticed reading the site is that the researcher who submits the vulnerability report gets a share of the net profit not the gross income or a guaranteed fee. This is a standard Hollywood tactic to avoid paying the people who do the real work. All the gross income gets eaten up in various expenses so there is little or no net profit.
The researcher also has to trust the company not to just steal their information by claiming someone who wishes to remain anonymous has already reported that vulnerability.
It reads like a scam to me. Maybe I am just old and cynical.
It seems to me that this bill is about establishing the principles used to decide what formats to use. It does not try to mandate some specific format so there is no "that one is no good" argument that Microsoft (or anyone else) can use. "We are being unfairly excluded" does not fly either - the state is just working out what it needs from a document format.
The question of whether or not Microsoft products meet the needs is for later.
"You should not be thinking about your real needs, you should just buy our stuff" is the kind of argument that even the least technical politician should be able to understand. Whether they will smell a rat or smell money is an interesting question.
This could just be an honest and unbiased attempt at requirements gathering or it could be a subtle device to position the state so that when product selection time comes the state officials will look like serious and well informed folk but Microsoft will look like a pack of greedy scoundrels let by a chair-throwing baboon.
59 is not so old. I am in my 50s and so are several of my colleagues. I have chatted to Sir Tim at international web conferences and was building web sites when the hot debate was whether to use the CERN server or NCSA httpd.
With that background, if asked "what is a web site?" I would not give the glib sort of response being trotted out by those who are trying to ridicule the judge. It really is a much deeper and more difficult question, and to a large extend the answer depends on why you are asking. Having also served on a jury in the UK, I have seen a judge asking for clarification of things we might assume everybody knows and it does not necessarily mean that the judge is ignorant or incompetent. I got the impression that the judge was sometimes pretending to know less than he did in order to avoid being rude to the jury by saying they might not understand what was being talked about. I don't know if that is what is going on in this case, but the judge has to make sure that the jury gets the information they need and this may be more than you get by a bit of casual web surfing and online shopping.
One other point that the US readers may not know is that in the UK there is no questioning of the knowledge or background of jurors. Jurors must stand down if they know the defendant or any witnesses personally, but their profession or expertise remains unknown to anyone but themselves. If you happen to get a jury of Professors of Computer Science, professional web designers and web server-farm design engineers for a case involving the web, that's just the luck of the draw - you don't know and couldn't do much about it if you did.
I have not used the D2 version of moderation yet, but I don't think I will like the immediate reaction feature. I tend to dislike drop down lists that have a permanent effect as soon as you select something.
As others have said, I like to select a few things and think about it before committing the moderation.
Would it be possible to have another floating box which shows what you have selected to moderate, lets you jump to the selected comments and has a 'moderate' button that apply the selections? I think that would give a useful combination of reminder that you have selected something, and opportunity for reflection before making a final decision. (Yes, this is yet another idea without any code, but maybe if I had some spare time...)
My main concern here is that the proposed GPLv3 is hostile to strong integrity. The motivation is hatred of DRM, but the narrow focus on DRM seems to have blinded people to what else will be affected.
Fortunately Linus Torvalds seems to one of those who can see beyond the narrow DRM focus and he has apparently come to the conclusion that GPLv3 will be inappropriate for Linux. I agree with him in that - GPLv3 will be a very bad license for infrastructure software such as an OS where GPLv2 has been a good license.
Yes, people have a choice about which license to use. Linus seems to have looked clearly, thought carefully, and made a choice. Some people are now besmirching his good name by asserting that he has "misunderstood" GPLv3 and ought to be persuaded to adopt it.
Perhaps the strong GPLv3 advocates should put some effort into getting Hurd up to scratch - I assume it will be GPLv3 licensed given its provenance. If you really think Linus is wrong, get on with making something that will displace Linux by sheer force of merit, and its vastly superior license.
The problem with GPLv3 is that it goes beyond requiring that you be able to run modified software. It requires that if a signed binary could access content that belongs to someone else, you must be given the keys to let a modified version access that content.
This is the essence of being anti-DRM - it demands the right to ignore other people's rights.
If you read GPLv3 and think outside the "it's all about DRM" box you find that GPLv3 requires that you give away everything it takes to create perfect rootkits. The "cannot distinguish" words mean that it must be impossible to perform any kind of post-installation integrity test of the system. If you always boot from verified read-only media, you may be able to protect your own system but a GPLv3 OS would otherwise guarantee that your system can be controlled by anyone who has managed to acquire your rights for a moment.
The region coding is an issue that deserves to be held up to scrutiny but the part about expiry is rather misleading. Very few of HP's ink cartridges have an expiry mechanism but the article seems to suggest that they all do.
Just because someone sued it does not automatically mean that the claim has any merit. I am very disappointed that EFF has used such a weak example here, and to make it worse, they go on to say that DMCA has not been used in this case.
There are plenty of good examples to show the bad effects of DMCA, adding these weak and poorly researched cases just gives ammunition to the other side.
I have been using Ant for a while now and my experience is that although it is possible to do things other than build Java, I am fighting against a lot of strongly built in assumptions to get it to do anything else well.
Given that Ant uses XML and has an XSLT task, you might think that it would be good for doing XSLT processing, but if you need to use a more advanced XSLT processor (e.g. Saxon) you immediately run into problems. It would not be a big issue if I was working on my own - I could just dump all the extra jars into my Ant lib directory, but that is an administrative nightmare if you are one of a team. You can't even give a colleague a copy of Ant with the extra jars in place - if they have Ant installed and ANT_HOME set, it takes priority and chaos follows.
The review also refers to "excellent online documentation" but I have to disagree with that assessment. After using the online documentation most days for several months I have learned how to find what information there is on the things that are not used much in the endlessly repeated trivial examples, and that what is there can be rather misleading.
Having just looked at what you can get at the O'Reilley Safari site without subscribing, I am not going to get this book. The chapter outlines and summaries cover the same old stuff, heavily Java focused, and not straying far from the conventional view of what people might want to do.
Ant is better than nothing, for Java development it is better than make, and for things I am doing on my own I can bend it to be useful beyond those narrow limits. It falls far short of the hype put about by its advocates.
As others have explained in other comments, some HP printers have separate print heads, and ink cartridges that expire; these are the ones designed for higher usage. The cheaper HP printers aimed at home users have heads in the cartridge and these do not expire (but they may dry out unused and fail to work - which is why every HP ink cartridge I have seen has a use by date printed on the outside of the box).
The quoted news story is written to imply that all HP printer cartridges have programmed expiry; without seeing the court papers, we can't know if the suit itself is like that. This looks to me like a dirty trick to get a public outcry from people who are not affected, and who will not actually be eligible for any reward from a class action suit. This is the kind of dirty trick I expect from lawyers who are hoping that HP will settle in order to avoid the cost of going to court.
You must be thinking of Dounreay. The reactors there are now closed, and it will only take another 30 years or so to clean up the site.
Perhaps Sellafield was chosen as a site because the English did not want their weapons grade plutonium manufacturing plant to be in the hands of the Scots. The fire in Windscale reactor 1 in 1957 did bring its plutonium manufacturing to an end. It also left us with a dead contaminated reactor, and no real idea how to clean it up nearly 50 years later.
Those who have bothered to read the spec know TCPA is intended to prevent you (or J Random Cracker) from telling lies about what your machine is running. You can make whatever modifications you like, but you can't then get a TPM to swear that you have not made those modifications. If some cracker has broken into your machine, TPM will not swear to you that you are running the unmodified code you downloaded from someone you have decided to trust. There is nothing to stop you building your own system from (modified) source, then using TCPA to assure yourself that you are running an unhacked copy of your own code.
If you ask your TCPA computer manufacturer to let you sign things in their name, what do you expect them to say? Any trustworthy manufacturer must say no. There is no problem wiping the manufacturer's key and installing one of your own so that you can sign in your own name.
People with a clue will see an interesting challenge in creating a system where you can preserve the chain of trust where you want, but still have freedom to do anything that does not break that chain. It is an opportunity to put control of the trust relationship in the hands of the people directly involved, rather than in the hands of some monolithic and corrupt software supplier.
Can this technology be used to the detriment of users?
Of course it can.
Is that all it can be used for?
Absolutely not.
Is controlling the user the main goal?
Absolutely not.
Will it make it harder for me to lie and cheat?
Yes.
What's the point of using Linux if it will not let me lie and cheat?
Supply your own answer here
Try using a system with Mandatory Access Control. Not necessarily with the Multi-Level Security information flow model, but certainly with privilege separation and compartmentalisation. It is a very interesting experience to have UID 0 (having an acount named 'root' is not significant), but have less capability than an ordinary user. It is also fairly typical to not have a root user at all on that kind of system.
I am aware of several systems of that kind that are based on Unix, one of the BSDs has some of that sort of machinery, and there are some things you can add to Linux to go a long way in that direction. Writing applications to run well on that kind of system is not particularly difficult but it requires some thought, and that is why the experience tends to be painful.
As far as I am aware, those sort of facilities have never been added to Windows. I did read a report once that said it was possible, but my impression was that there were a lot of fundamental conflicts in the design that would make it a very difficult task.
There a plenty of technical measures that could be used to make systems much more secure, but doing it requires that the decision makers both have a clue and think ahead, and I am not expecting that to happen any time soon for widely deployed commercial systems. I would not be surprised to see a few hobbyists fooling around with high security features in either Linux of one of the BSDs creating systems that are far more intrinsically robust that the commercial offerings.
People who build fault-tolerant systems start with the assumption that things will go wrong, and that includes software bugs and malicious injected code. Rather than trying to make faults never happen, an impossible task in practice, the system is designed to survive in the presence of faults, and minimise the damage they do. One of the key lessons from that work is that you create real boundaries around things, and prevent the faults crossing those boundaries. All Unix-like systems tend to have at least some kind of boundaries that are enforced, and it is relatively easy to tighten them up so that when things go bad, the damage does not spread too far or too fast.
These hard boundaries are also interfaces where you have to be explicit about how the pieces fit together, and so it is easy to substitute one implementation for another, and from a different supplier. Well defined boundaries make it hard to tweak the API to dislodge inconvenient competitors. Making everything deeply intertwined makes it hard for anyone to interface to your system without your permission, but those vital barriers to the propagation of faults go away.
We are never going to eliminate all faults, but there is a lot that can be done to reduce the damage they cause by using the right underlying system architecture and attitude to the overall system design. Robust design seems to require a significant degree of openness, and I think that this is where Windows is lacking.
... the missus says she's never heard Linux mentioned at HP, even though she's involved in their internal IT support.
Internal IT support is not the best place in HP to hear about Linux. The people who use Linux tend to need much less help from IT support, which is just as well, because IT support is probably one of the few places in HP that still denies the existence or value of Linux. The idea of HP as a hardware arm of Microsoft is how IT support would like it to be, it is not an accurate picture of either internal use or external offerings.
As for changes that came with Carly, before she came, mentioning Linux was a very risky thing to do. Saying that a project used Linux was a good way to get it cancelled. It turned around to being a good thing to be connected with fairly soon after Carly arrived. There is a very active Linux community inside HP, as anyone who really worked there, and had any interest in the question would know.
I think you have missed the point that is actually contained in what you wrote. The problem is not that patenting machines is acceptable but software bad, but that patenting genuinely new ideas is acceptable but trivial modifications is not. I think the reform would be much more likely to succeed if we managed to change the slogan from "software patents are bad" to "trivial patents are bad". If the examination process had better ways to filter out the trivial and the obvious it would go a long way towards fixing the problems.
One way to make a significant improvement to the system would be to reverse the way vagueness is handled. At the moment it seems that ideas described in vague and general language are considered to be covered by the patent, and the idea is considered new enough if it is not a blatant direct copy of something that has already been described (which is usually interpreted to mean patented).
If the assumptions were reversed, the vague and general patents that are close to things that have already been done should be eliminated. It seems to me that those are the ones doing the most harm, so this would be a big step in the right direction. If there was a penalty (no protection) for any part of the idea hidden in obscure language, it would make the whole process much easier to use, and harder to abuse. Clear and simple descriptions would be much easier to relate to existing ideas, so you would need real novelty in the idea rather than a novel way to create a convoluted description of the idea.
A corporation could still write its server under the GPL, but still _never_ release the code because technically it never got distributed anywher. I think a new GPLish license type is needed to cover server code.
The proposed new GPLish license would presumably require that if you run a GPL(ish)ed web server then all the pages it delivers come under the GPL(ish) license, as do all the scripts that generated them. If you use something like PHP under that kind of license you have to give away the sources that generate the pages. If you use CGI, you have to give away your scripts. If the pages are generated from a database, you have to give away the database engine at least, but the spirit of the proposed license seems to require that you give away your database too.
Presumable this GPLish license would mean that if you run your web server on a Linux host, then it counts as a GPL(ish)ed server, so the "give everything away" provisions apply.
Letting someone else use an application that runs on a GPL(ish)ed OS could also be considered to be delivering a service, so presumably your application has to be GPL(ish)ed too.
My memory of some of the comments I saw at the time is that the decision to go public and have a press conference was made by the administrators rather than the scientists. I had the impression that the scientists were more or less compelled to present results under a title aimed at the press before they had enough to be ready to present results through the proper scientific channels. It all seemed to be wrapped up in the politics of funding and intellectual property rights
I remember feeling that an unexplained result which ought to be investigated was being buried under a mountain of over-inflated claims and denunciations. It is good to see that some people have been following up in a proper scientific way
HP owns two class A networks (15.* is old HP's, and 16.* is old DEC's which came with the Compaq merger). If you have that much network of your own, you want to suppress infected machines in order to defend your own network. It's not the Internet they are trying to defend. Other companies with big networks may also have similar problems, so they are the potential customers for this technology.
I suspect that the problem is not that HP can't get something to work on some particular Windows configuration, but that they can't create a commercially viable product that can be deployed to all kinds of corporate Windows desktops without an XP SP2 kind of incompatibility nightmare. Remember that it's the corporates who are holding back on SP2 because of compatibility issues, and no sane company wants to stare into that support black hole with no control over the main engines.
Note also that the article did not say that HP were abandoning the work, it is going back into the labs and they are looking for other ways to use it.
Re:'Flaws' Not that big of a deal
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The specific flaws may not be big deal today, but Jürgen Schmidt's article Microsoft: A matter of trust makes some very good points about what the response says about Microsoft's attitude to the problem. One of the biggest obstacles to security it the "it hasn't been exploited yet so it isn't a problem" attitude in those who hold the purse strings. It is a recipe for always doing too little, too late.
At home I have a Win98SE machine, the last one in the shop before ME was launched (I got a discount, and the option of a cheap upgrade to ME, but fortunately, I didn't follow up on it). I might prefer Linux myself, but it would be an uphill struggle to persuade other family members to convert.
I don't trust a Microsoft OS upgrade to work without a lot of pain, and if I have to spend money, I would rather replace the whole machine anyway. One thing that puts me off is the effort of getting all the applications we use installed on a new machine. It looks like a lot of effort for little reward. For now I will make do with free anti-virus and adware removal tools, and an ADSL modem/router that runs Linux with some nice firewall rules.
I could do more, but I don't want to spend my free time doing tech support, there are too many other things to do.
Slashdot Mirror
If the $40 billion per year figure is right then it is smaller than Dell's annual revenue and less than half HP's. Of course, selling high performance CD and DVD copying equipment is only a part of their business but you will find it hard to get a consumer PC that does not include at least the hardware you need for the unauthorised copying that ??AA like to call piracy. Looking up the financials, it looks as if the consumer PC hardware business for just those two is over $10 billion per year and there are quite a few other companies out there too. I don't have time to look up the size of the blank media business - what the ??AA probably think of as "piracy supplies" - but given the shelves full of the things I see in my local supermarket, I suspect we have a respectable sized business there too.
I suspect that if someone does the real numbers the economic argument will not be so favourable to ??AA.
Gopher was around before WWW but to run a Gopher server you had to do some sort of deal with some US University or something of the kind. Where I worked, it was just too much effort to try to get our management to negotiate the necessary agreement to put up a Gopher server so after a few brief internal experiments we dumped Gopher. We could just download an run a web server on the same host that was serving FTP and provide more convenient access to the data that was already public.
If getting started on the web had involved asking the boss for money we would just not have done it. I have no idea how many other people were in a similar position, but for me having code that was free in both senses made all the difference.
I believe that if those who started it had set out to get rich from the web from the start it would have failed completely.
Microsoft may be very rich but they do not have enough income to hire enough developers to fork every open source project.
Customers and stockholders would be very angry if MSFT diverted a large part of their current staff to forking open source projects. They can't just pull the open source work into their existing teams because of the possibility of contamination of their precious source code assets with some Open Source or - horror! GPLv2 - licensed code.
MSFT forking the code would mean them hiring a whole lot more developers of the required skill level and as far as I know there is not currently a large pool of sufficiently skilled unemployed developers. Hiring enough to even make a start is going to be significant expenditure for no extra income and that means taking a substantial hit in profits. Financial analysts and stockholders are not going to be happy with that and if they start to sell the share price goes down and we see just how much of MSFT's money is real and how much is just a high P/E ratio that could collapse frighteningly fast if investors lose confidence.
MSFT's best bet is to try to cause divisions between different groups of open source developers but I think that the problem there is that whatever license they prefer, open source developers tend to have respect for technical contribution and contempt for the marketing bullshit and 'business' dirty tricks that are MSFT's stock in trade. Heated public arguments over the merits of different licenses are not a sign of the community fragmenting, they are a sign that the open source community does its thing in the open and collectively comes up with a set of variants that can satisfy everyone and an understanding of how to work together.
What we all need to do is to keep shining a light into the corners where MSFT is trying to play its dirty tricks - like the ballot stuffing in the standards committees - so that they are seen for what they are. The advantages of open source speak for themselves, even to businessmen, if we make sure that the real facts are available.
One thing I noticed reading the site is that the researcher who submits the vulnerability report gets a share of the net profit not the gross income or a guaranteed fee. This is a standard Hollywood tactic to avoid paying the people who do the real work. All the gross income gets eaten up in various expenses so there is little or no net profit.
The researcher also has to trust the company not to just steal their information by claiming someone who wishes to remain anonymous has already reported that vulnerability.
It reads like a scam to me. Maybe I am just old and cynical.
It seems to me that this bill is about establishing the principles used to decide what formats to use. It does not try to mandate some specific format so there is no "that one is no good" argument that Microsoft (or anyone else) can use. "We are being unfairly excluded" does not fly either - the state is just working out what it needs from a document format.
The question of whether or not Microsoft products meet the needs is for later.
"You should not be thinking about your real needs, you should just buy our stuff" is the kind of argument that even the least technical politician should be able to understand. Whether they will smell a rat or smell money is an interesting question.
This could just be an honest and unbiased attempt at requirements gathering or it could be a subtle device to position the state so that when product selection time comes the state officials will look like serious and well informed folk but Microsoft will look like a pack of greedy scoundrels let by a chair-throwing baboon.
59 is not so old. I am in my 50s and so are several of my colleagues. I have chatted to Sir Tim at international web conferences and was building web sites when the hot debate was whether to use the CERN server or NCSA httpd.
With that background, if asked "what is a web site?" I would not give the glib sort of response being trotted out by those who are trying to ridicule the judge. It really is a much deeper and more difficult question, and to a large extend the answer depends on why you are asking. Having also served on a jury in the UK, I have seen a judge asking for clarification of things we might assume everybody knows and it does not necessarily mean that the judge is ignorant or incompetent. I got the impression that the judge was sometimes pretending to know less than he did in order to avoid being rude to the jury by saying they might not understand what was being talked about. I don't know if that is what is going on in this case, but the judge has to make sure that the jury gets the information they need and this may be more than you get by a bit of casual web surfing and online shopping.
One other point that the US readers may not know is that in the UK there is no questioning of the knowledge or background of jurors. Jurors must stand down if they know the defendant or any witnesses personally, but their profession or expertise remains unknown to anyone but themselves. If you happen to get a jury of Professors of Computer Science, professional web designers and web server-farm design engineers for a case involving the web, that's just the luck of the draw - you don't know and couldn't do much about it if you did.
I have not used the D2 version of moderation yet, but I don't think I will like the immediate reaction feature. I tend to dislike drop down lists that have a permanent effect as soon as you select something.
As others have said, I like to select a few things and think about it before committing the moderation.
Would it be possible to have another floating box which shows what you have selected to moderate, lets you jump to the selected comments and has a 'moderate' button that apply the selections? I think that would give a useful combination of reminder that you have selected something, and opportunity for reflection before making a final decision. (Yes, this is yet another idea without any code, but maybe if I had some spare time ...)
My main concern here is that the proposed GPLv3 is hostile to strong integrity. The motivation is hatred of DRM, but the narrow focus on DRM seems to have blinded people to what else will be affected.
Fortunately Linus Torvalds seems to one of those who can see beyond the narrow DRM focus and he has apparently come to the conclusion that GPLv3 will be inappropriate for Linux. I agree with him in that - GPLv3 will be a very bad license for infrastructure software such as an OS where GPLv2 has been a good license.
Yes, people have a choice about which license to use. Linus seems to have looked clearly, thought carefully, and made a choice. Some people are now besmirching his good name by asserting that he has "misunderstood" GPLv3 and ought to be persuaded to adopt it.
Perhaps the strong GPLv3 advocates should put some effort into getting Hurd up to scratch - I assume it will be GPLv3 licensed given its provenance. If you really think Linus is wrong, get on with making something that will displace Linux by sheer force of merit, and its vastly superior license.
The problem with GPLv3 is that it goes beyond requiring that you be able to run modified software. It requires that if a signed binary could access content that belongs to someone else, you must be given the keys to let a modified version access that content.
This is the essence of being anti-DRM - it demands the right to ignore other people's rights.
If you read GPLv3 and think outside the "it's all about DRM" box you find that GPLv3 requires that you give away everything it takes to create perfect rootkits. The "cannot distinguish" words mean that it must be impossible to perform any kind of post-installation integrity test of the system. If you always boot from verified read-only media, you may be able to protect your own system but a GPLv3 OS would otherwise guarantee that your system can be controlled by anyone who has managed to acquire your rights for a moment.
The region coding is an issue that deserves to be held up to scrutiny but the part about expiry is rather misleading. Very few of HP's ink cartridges have an expiry mechanism but the article seems to suggest that they all do.
Just because someone sued it does not automatically mean that the claim has any merit. I am very disappointed that EFF has used such a weak example here, and to make it worse, they go on to say that DMCA has not been used in this case.
There are plenty of good examples to show the bad effects of DMCA, adding these weak and poorly researched cases just gives ammunition to the other side.
I have been using Ant for a while now and my experience is that although it is possible to do things other than build Java, I am fighting against a lot of strongly built in assumptions to get it to do anything else well.
Given that Ant uses XML and has an XSLT task, you might think that it would be good for doing XSLT processing, but if you need to use a more advanced XSLT processor (e.g. Saxon) you immediately run into problems. It would not be a big issue if I was working on my own - I could just dump all the extra jars into my Ant lib directory, but that is an administrative nightmare if you are one of a team. You can't even give a colleague a copy of Ant with the extra jars in place - if they have Ant installed and ANT_HOME set, it takes priority and chaos follows.
The review also refers to "excellent online documentation" but I have to disagree with that assessment. After using the online documentation most days for several months I have learned how to find what information there is on the things that are not used much in the endlessly repeated trivial examples, and that what is there can be rather misleading.
Having just looked at what you can get at the O'Reilley Safari site without subscribing, I am not going to get this book. The chapter outlines and summaries cover the same old stuff, heavily Java focused, and not straying far from the conventional view of what people might want to do.
Ant is better than nothing, for Java development it is better than make, and for things I am doing on my own I can bend it to be useful beyond those narrow limits. It falls far short of the hype put about by its advocates.
As others have explained in other comments, some HP printers have separate print heads, and ink cartridges that expire; these are the ones designed for higher usage. The cheaper HP printers aimed at home users have heads in the cartridge and these do not expire (but they may dry out unused and fail to work - which is why every HP ink cartridge I have seen has a use by date printed on the outside of the box).
The quoted news story is written to imply that all HP printer cartridges have programmed expiry; without seeing the court papers, we can't know if the suit itself is like that. This looks to me like a dirty trick to get a public outcry from people who are not affected, and who will not actually be eligible for any reward from a class action suit. This is the kind of dirty trick I expect from lawyers who are hoping that HP will settle in order to avoid the cost of going to court.
You must be thinking of Dounreay. The reactors there are now closed, and it will only take another 30 years or so to clean up the site.
Perhaps Sellafield was chosen as a site because the English did not want their weapons grade plutonium manufacturing plant to be in the hands of the Scots. The fire in Windscale reactor 1 in 1957 did bring its plutonium manufacturing to an end. It also left us with a dead contaminated reactor, and no real idea how to clean it up nearly 50 years later.
Those who have bothered to read the spec know TCPA is intended to prevent you (or J Random Cracker) from telling lies about what your machine is running. You can make whatever modifications you like, but you can't then get a TPM to swear that you have not made those modifications. If some cracker has broken into your machine, TPM will not swear to you that you are running the unmodified code you downloaded from someone you have decided to trust. There is nothing to stop you building your own system from (modified) source, then using TCPA to assure yourself that you are running an unhacked copy of your own code.
If you ask your TCPA computer manufacturer to let you sign things in their name, what do you expect them to say? Any trustworthy manufacturer must say no. There is no problem wiping the manufacturer's key and installing one of your own so that you can sign in your own name.
People with a clue will see an interesting challenge in creating a system where you can preserve the chain of trust where you want, but still have freedom to do anything that does not break that chain. It is an opportunity to put control of the trust relationship in the hands of the people directly involved, rather than in the hands of some monolithic and corrupt software supplier.
Can this technology be used to the detriment of users? Of course it can. Is that all it can be used for? Absolutely not. Is controlling the user the main goal? Absolutely not. Will it make it harder for me to lie and cheat? Yes. What's the point of using Linux if it will not let me lie and cheat? Supply your own answer hereTry using a system with Mandatory Access Control. Not necessarily with the Multi-Level Security information flow model, but certainly with privilege separation and compartmentalisation. It is a very interesting experience to have UID 0 (having an acount named 'root' is not significant), but have less capability than an ordinary user. It is also fairly typical to not have a root user at all on that kind of system.
I am aware of several systems of that kind that are based on Unix, one of the BSDs has some of that sort of machinery, and there are some things you can add to Linux to go a long way in that direction. Writing applications to run well on that kind of system is not particularly difficult but it requires some thought, and that is why the experience tends to be painful.
As far as I am aware, those sort of facilities have never been added to Windows. I did read a report once that said it was possible, but my impression was that there were a lot of fundamental conflicts in the design that would make it a very difficult task.
There a plenty of technical measures that could be used to make systems much more secure, but doing it requires that the decision makers both have a clue and think ahead, and I am not expecting that to happen any time soon for widely deployed commercial systems. I would not be surprised to see a few hobbyists fooling around with high security features in either Linux of one of the BSDs creating systems that are far more intrinsically robust that the commercial offerings.
People who build fault-tolerant systems start with the assumption that things will go wrong, and that includes software bugs and malicious injected code. Rather than trying to make faults never happen, an impossible task in practice, the system is designed to survive in the presence of faults, and minimise the damage they do. One of the key lessons from that work is that you create real boundaries around things, and prevent the faults crossing those boundaries. All Unix-like systems tend to have at least some kind of boundaries that are enforced, and it is relatively easy to tighten them up so that when things go bad, the damage does not spread too far or too fast.
These hard boundaries are also interfaces where you have to be explicit about how the pieces fit together, and so it is easy to substitute one implementation for another, and from a different supplier. Well defined boundaries make it hard to tweak the API to dislodge inconvenient competitors. Making everything deeply intertwined makes it hard for anyone to interface to your system without your permission, but those vital barriers to the propagation of faults go away.
We are never going to eliminate all faults, but there is a lot that can be done to reduce the damage they cause by using the right underlying system architecture and attitude to the overall system design. Robust design seems to require a significant degree of openness, and I think that this is where Windows is lacking.
Internal IT support is not the best place in HP to hear about Linux. The people who use Linux tend to need much less help from IT support, which is just as well, because IT support is probably one of the few places in HP that still denies the existence or value of Linux. The idea of HP as a hardware arm of Microsoft is how IT support would like it to be, it is not an accurate picture of either internal use or external offerings.
As for changes that came with Carly, before she came, mentioning Linux was a very risky thing to do. Saying that a project used Linux was a good way to get it cancelled. It turned around to being a good thing to be connected with fairly soon after Carly arrived. There is a very active Linux community inside HP, as anyone who really worked there, and had any interest in the question would know.
I think you have missed the point that is actually contained in what you wrote. The problem is not that patenting machines is acceptable but software bad, but that patenting genuinely new ideas is acceptable but trivial modifications is not. I think the reform would be much more likely to succeed if we managed to change the slogan from "software patents are bad" to "trivial patents are bad". If the examination process had better ways to filter out the trivial and the obvious it would go a long way towards fixing the problems.
One way to make a significant improvement to the system would be to reverse the way vagueness is handled. At the moment it seems that ideas described in vague and general language are considered to be covered by the patent, and the idea is considered new enough if it is not a blatant direct copy of something that has already been described (which is usually interpreted to mean patented).
If the assumptions were reversed, the vague and general patents that are close to things that have already been done should be eliminated. It seems to me that those are the ones doing the most harm, so this would be a big step in the right direction. If there was a penalty (no protection) for any part of the idea hidden in obscure language, it would make the whole process much easier to use, and harder to abuse. Clear and simple descriptions would be much easier to relate to existing ideas, so you would need real novelty in the idea rather than a novel way to create a convoluted description of the idea.
The proposed new GPLish license would presumably require that if you run a GPL(ish)ed web server then all the pages it delivers come under the GPL(ish) license, as do all the scripts that generated them. If you use something like PHP under that kind of license you have to give away the sources that generate the pages. If you use CGI, you have to give away your scripts. If the pages are generated from a database, you have to give away the database engine at least, but the spirit of the proposed license seems to require that you give away your database too.
Presumable this GPLish license would mean that if you run your web server on a Linux host, then it counts as a GPL(ish)ed server, so the "give everything away" provisions apply.
Letting someone else use an application that runs on a GPL(ish)ed OS could also be considered to be delivering a service, so presumably your application has to be GPL(ish)ed too.
On the whole, I think I prefer GPL as it is.
My memory of some of the comments I saw at the time is that the decision to go public and have a press conference was made by the administrators rather than the scientists. I had the impression that the scientists were more or less compelled to present results under a title aimed at the press before they had enough to be ready to present results through the proper scientific channels. It all seemed to be wrapped up in the politics of funding and intellectual property rights
I remember feeling that an unexplained result which ought to be investigated was being buried under a mountain of over-inflated claims and denunciations. It is good to see that some people have been following up in a proper scientific way
HP owns two class A networks (15.* is old HP's, and 16.* is old DEC's which came with the Compaq merger). If you have that much network of your own, you want to suppress infected machines in order to defend your own network. It's not the Internet they are trying to defend. Other companies with big networks may also have similar problems, so they are the potential customers for this technology.
I suspect that the problem is not that HP can't get something to work on some particular Windows configuration, but that they can't create a commercially viable product that can be deployed to all kinds of corporate Windows desktops without an XP SP2 kind of incompatibility nightmare. Remember that it's the corporates who are holding back on SP2 because of compatibility issues, and no sane company wants to stare into that support black hole with no control over the main engines.
Note also that the article did not say that HP were abandoning the work, it is going back into the labs and they are looking for other ways to use it.
The specific flaws may not be big deal today, but Jürgen Schmidt's article Microsoft: A matter of trust makes some very good points about what the response says about Microsoft's attitude to the problem. One of the biggest obstacles to security it the "it hasn't been exploited yet so it isn't a problem" attitude in those who hold the purse strings. It is a recipe for always doing too little, too late.
At home I have a Win98SE machine, the last one in the shop before ME was launched (I got a discount, and the option of a cheap upgrade to ME, but fortunately, I didn't follow up on it). I might prefer Linux myself, but it would be an uphill struggle to persuade other family members to convert.
I don't trust a Microsoft OS upgrade to work without a lot of pain, and if I have to spend money, I would rather replace the whole machine anyway. One thing that puts me off is the effort of getting all the applications we use installed on a new machine. It looks like a lot of effort for little reward. For now I will make do with free anti-virus and adware removal tools, and an ADSL modem/router that runs Linux with some nice firewall rules.
I could do more, but I don't want to spend my free time doing tech support, there are too many other things to do.
Another goods thing about Novell exposing SCO's games is that Judge Kimball is also presiding over the SCO v IBM case.