About 10 years ago, I was chastized by the marketing department of the company I was then employed by for using the term "promiscuous" in a networking interface data sheet. The marketeers only relented when I proved to them that this was a technical term by showing our competitors data sheets. The above company is no longer in business...
When you don't know anything about the product you are buying or selling, others may find cluelessness as offensive.
Of course, being so clueless as to try to remedy the situation by removing possibly offensive language only proves how clueless the offender is.
Sometimes the most obvious things amaze me. Here the thing that amazes me is the fact that people would work so hard to develop a fantasy world when they could do the same in the real world. And be more productive/contributing/whatever.
Maybe it is I that am so booringly deviant that I prefer to toil in the real world instead of in cyberspace/simspace. Are the real world societal constraints that are placed on me in the real world confining boundaries that I am clinging to for security, or are the relatively lax consequence free boundaries in simspace an easy place for people to thrive who are otherwise insecure in the real world.
The juristictional obstructions to the enforcement of the various entities involved in KaZaa, and others should provide a real sanity check for some of the more draconian copyright enforcement laws currently being enforced by the US at the behest of the RIAA.
Some copyright laws are respected internaltionally, more or less. By this I mean that if a CD pirate is burning copies of commercial CDs and distributing them, the US will ask and work with the sovereign state in which the pirates are operating. The fact that the sovereign state cooperates with the US demonstrates that there is a mutual respect for the given rule, even though the penalties may differ from state to state.
As the KaZaa example demonstrates, pursuing legal action against them will only work if their host states agree with the position of the US governmant. If they don't then there will be little to no assistance.
If the RIAA looks at this, they may realize that their lobbying efforts here have not worked as well in the international arena. They may need to rethink their strategy to one which relies less on using the government as their policman and more about providing a good product to the consumers and equitable share to their artists.
Remember when machine rooms contained computers that were lined with lots of 'blinken lights'? Think Wargames. Think of the Thinking Machines TM-5. Most computers don't have much in the way of lights on them anymore. All the information in conveyed using a network connection, an LCD or a video output.
Communication gear is a little better. There is usually a light for each link and data. When there is lots of traffic, the data lights blink furiously.
Marketing generally doesn't have are product requirements for the coolness factor of a given piece of equipment. They may have indicator requirements (red indicators are vary bad in may places). But sometimes some cool code gets through that uses otherwise unused or idle lights. I remember one vendor who programmed their network switch to have a waterfall pattern on the LEDs of their unused ports. A rack of these devices added some color to an otherwise dull machine room or equipment rack.
I want ubiquitous storage with strong encryption. By ubiquitous storage, I mean that I want the storage accessible by all of my devices; my various computers, PDAs, cell phones, set top boxes, TiVo units and everything else.
I want each of the above devices to be able to read/write a common format so I can share my various profiles phonebooks and calendars and they are all different views into the same large database.
I also want each of these devices to be able to use the same strong encryption algorithm. The encryption is performed at the application level within the device. That is, when a device writes a record, the record is encrypted, then sent to the central repository where it is stored in its encrypted form.
I believe that in this way, I can have ubiquitous access to my data, shares across multiple devices without requiring me to hand over my data to a trusted third party. All I need is a ubiquitous third party. I provide the trust using strong encryption and good keys.
Then a good patent attorney should provide more than the formating and submission of your patent. I have been granted several patents and have several pending. I've worked with several patent attorneys.
Today, patents are pretty easy to get. Just look at all the fuss that is raised every time someone get a software or business model patented that looks obvious to most of the SlashDot readers. That should tell you a little something about the state of patent examination today. I belive that because of that, it's easy to get a patent, but much more difficult to have a defensible patent granted.
By defensible, I mean if someone claims either prior art, after the patent has been granted or you try to enforce your rights as a patent holder against someone who is infringing. The civil litigation in cases such as these are before a jury of our peers. Not our technical peers, but the ordinary, not necessarily technical folk who inhabit our society. A patent needs to be written in such a way that it is easily understandable to this jury and the presiding judge. I believe a good patent attorney can greatly assist in writing a patent in such a way that it is understandable to lay people who may ultimately decide its fate.
Additionally, there are many rules and arcana surrounding how a patent is written, the details of the legalese used and many other conventions that, as far as I know, are not really written down. Failing these small items can cause your patent to be rejected by the patent office on non-technical ground.
That said, there are several reasons why one wants to patent an idea. You might just want to have a patent (it's cool!). The idea might be truly revolutionary and worthwhile in a business sense. You might want to patent additional small changes to build a patent fence around an existing strong patent. Each one of these has various costs associated with them.
I view submitting patent applications as a business decision. There are many costs involved. Not the least being my own time to write and review the patent application, even with the patent attorney. The second cost is the cost of the patent attorney and the third cost is the cost of the patent application itsself. This final fee goes to the USPTO. There are additional fees when applying for international patents.
In closing, if your idea is a good idea from a business point of view, meaning there is monetary value in having the patent granted, then the cost of having a good patent attorney should be a good investment.
-tpg
[disclaimer- I am not an attorney, nor do I play one. I just use them when I need their expertise.]
If Microsoft can restrict our ability to use and/or copy media, how come they are seemingly unable to prevent virii from using and/or replicating on our machines?
I was trying to buy up a whole mess of them for my monkeys and typewriters project. Now I'll just have to write [insert favorite OS or project here] myself.
Of course, I did manage to recreate the blue screen of death with three monkeys in ten minutes...
This reminds me of the time I wrote up a datasheet for the wireless LAN controller chip I was working on, pre-802.11. We designed it to be ethernet compatible, so the chip had a promiscuous mode. I wrote it up just that way. Some some butthead in marketing thought this was offensive and takes it to the division general manager. Now my boss gets a phone call about one of his engineers putting crude language in the technical literature that is destined for customers.
After providing them with copies of our competitors datasheets to prove that this was a standard industry term, they backed down.
Several years later they were acquired for pennies on the dollar.
This one in a million thread got me thinking... As we work with higher and higher data rates, with bit error rates remaining relatively constant, things that use to happen infrequently happen alot. On a gigabit ethernet, which has a bit error rate of 10^-12, there will be a bit error once every 1000 seconds or once every 16 minutes. Luckely, most phys seem to have a much better BER than that. With the advent of 10G ethernet that number drops to 1.6 minutes. Good error detection (CRC-32) is useful here.
Along a similar line- a friend of a friend was an EMT in LA and had a license plate with LA MEDIC on it. Until one day he was in a local bar with some friends when some lady walked in and asked "who has the license plate with LAME DIC on it?" He soon got a new plate...:-)
And you can remotely control your chair. Or allow a program to subtly change your seating position to reduce fatiugue. Of course there should be some safeguards to prevent the seat from performing the Christine manuver...
When a product is designed, especially when the product is part of an evolving line of similar products, the product may contain bits of technology that are there to test various design points or manufacturing methods. While these are part of the product, if the features these technology pieces provide are not advertised, then the manufacturer has no duty to provide support for them.
Support is one of the most costly items in a products lifecycle. I remember a statistic (I can't quote the source) that 50% of the cost of software is in the support and maintainance of it after release. I would venture that Handspring has looked at what it would take to support this feature and decided that there is not enough margin in the product to support it even if the capability is provided in the hardware.
A final thought, they may have discovered some sort of performance or reliability problem with the flash ROM and instead of correcting the problem (potentially quite costly), they removed the feature so they did not have to support it.
It amazes me that for all of our advances in technology over that past 20 years, we are still fighting some of the same battles with the same tactics.
The tactics I am referring to are, of course, copy protecting the distribution media of the software. 20 years ago it was apple ][ software on floppy disks. The apple ][ disk controller didn't really process the data. It fed the raw flux transitions to the disk operating system. The software for the DOS was contained in the boot sector of each disk. To make a disk difficult to copy, you tweak how the DOS functioned to include things like positioning the heads between tracks or working around intentional imperfections in the disk media. These imperfections would cause errors for the standard DOS read routines, but the modified DOS would know to just skip around certain sectors.
To combat these and other copy protection schemes, many disk copying programs appear on various BBSs. Over time people built up a list of which copy programs to use against which type of protection scheme.
In the end, bit by bit copiers could copy most everything that was out there. Over time software publishers went the route of tying software to something that was less easily copyable like a word or number from the paper manual. Just like the licensing schemes of today.
As time went on, the apple ][ (][+,//c,...) were superceeded by Macs and PCs. I don't remember if the same issues appeared in software distributed on floppys for PCs; they may have learned something from the earlier apple ][ experience and tied their copy prevention system to something that was distributed in addition to the electronic media.
From my point of view, we are repeating those same old steps. The difference is that users will probably accept some sort of copy protection scheme for software, such as software activation keys (the shareware world lives on this model). While this model is quite workable for software, it fails miserably when it is applied to pure data such as CDs. CD copying will continue, because it is data and not an executable program which can check for some sort of authentication or activation model.
Audio CDs are data. I repeat this because that is what sets them apart from software. That is also what sets them apart in the mind of the public.
Security through obsolescence may be a bit of a misnomer. When I take an older OS release and apply all of the relevant patches, I know that the patch OS is considerably more mature that a newer version. Espicially a new major release with a newer or different components which have not been extensibly tested.
This is not to say that OS and software companies do not try to thoroughly test their software. They do. But even in the largest, most sophisticated test lab, one cannot recreate all of the possible conditions that will be revealed when the software is released into the real world.
The reasons older (obsolete) software may be more secure are really two fold. Older software, due to creaping featurism which haunts all software development activities adds features, which adds chances for security holes and errors. I assert the increased features, and espicially increased interfaces (user, programmatic and otherwise) increases the likelyness of security issues. The second issue with older (obsolete) software is that it is more mature. Please understand this carefully- older software that has been patched ot the current patch level will be more secure than software that has not been patched.
I think equating obsolete software with security is quite a stretch. I do agree with the thought that mature software will have fewer security issues. Added to this the fewer interfaces on older software gives it a greater chance to be free from security issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Slots 1-49 should be pr0n and #50 should be Star Wars.
About 10 years ago, I was chastized by the marketing department of the company I was then employed by for using the term "promiscuous" in a networking interface data sheet. The marketeers only relented when I proved to them that this was a technical term by showing our competitors data sheets. The above company is no longer in business...
When you don't know anything about the product you are buying or selling, others may find cluelessness as offensive.
Of course, being so clueless as to try to remedy the situation by removing possibly offensive language only proves how clueless the offender is.
-tpg
Of course, it's unclear if this title implies that one is a clueless manager or someone with exceptional managment skills...
-tpg
Sometimes the most obvious things amaze me. Here the thing that amazes me is the fact that people would work so hard to develop a fantasy world when they could do the same in the real world. And be more productive/contributing/whatever.
Maybe it is I that am so booringly deviant that I prefer to toil in the real world instead of in cyberspace/simspace. Are the real world societal constraints that are placed on me in the real world confining boundaries that I am clinging to for security, or are the relatively lax consequence free boundaries in simspace an easy place for people to thrive who are otherwise insecure in the real world.
-tpg
The juristictional obstructions to the enforcement of the various entities involved in KaZaa, and others should provide a real sanity check for some of the more draconian copyright enforcement laws currently being enforced by the US at the behest of the RIAA.
Some copyright laws are respected internaltionally, more or less. By this I mean that if a CD pirate is burning copies of commercial CDs and distributing them, the US will ask and work with the sovereign state in which the pirates are operating. The fact that the sovereign state cooperates with the US demonstrates that there is a mutual respect for the given rule, even though the penalties may differ from state to state.
As the KaZaa example demonstrates, pursuing legal action against them will only work if their host states agree with the position of the US governmant. If they don't then there will be little to no assistance.
If the RIAA looks at this, they may realize that their lobbying efforts here have not worked as well in the international arena. They may need to rethink their strategy to one which relies less on using the government as their policman and more about providing a good product to the consumers and equitable share to their artists.
-tpg
Remember when machine rooms contained computers that were lined with lots of 'blinken lights'? Think Wargames. Think of the Thinking Machines TM-5. Most computers don't have much in the way of lights on them anymore. All the information in conveyed using a network connection, an LCD or a video output.
Communication gear is a little better. There is usually a light for each link and data. When there is lots of traffic, the data lights blink furiously.
Marketing generally doesn't have are product requirements for the coolness factor of a given piece of equipment. They may have indicator requirements (red indicators are vary bad in may places). But sometimes some cool code gets through that uses otherwise unused or idle lights. I remember one vendor who programmed their network switch to have a waterfall pattern on the LEDs of their unused ports. A rack of these devices added some color to an otherwise dull machine room or equipment rack.
-tpg
I want ubiquitous storage with strong encryption. By ubiquitous storage, I mean that I want the storage accessible by all of my devices; my various computers, PDAs, cell phones, set top boxes, TiVo units and everything else.
I want each of the above devices to be able to read/write a common format so I can share my various profiles phonebooks and calendars and they are all different views into the same large database.
I also want each of these devices to be able to use the same strong encryption algorithm. The encryption is performed at the application level within the device. That is, when a device writes a record, the record is encrypted, then sent to the central repository where it is stored in its encrypted form.
I believe that in this way, I can have ubiquitous access to my data, shares across multiple devices without requiring me to hand over my data to a trusted third party. All I need is a ubiquitous third party. I provide the trust using strong encryption and good keys.
-tpg
It's a start... :-)
I just emailed my patent idea to myself. Now it's been sucked up by my spam catcher and sent off to be compared against other potential spam emails.
I guess if it triggers on then someone else thought of this idea too...
-tpg
Then a good patent attorney should provide more than the formating and submission of your patent. I have been granted several patents and have several pending. I've worked with several patent attorneys.
Today, patents are pretty easy to get. Just look at all the fuss that is raised every time someone get a software or business model patented that looks obvious to most of the SlashDot readers. That should tell you a little something about the state of patent examination today. I belive that because of that, it's easy to get a patent, but much more difficult to have a defensible patent granted.
By defensible, I mean if someone claims either prior art, after the patent has been granted or you try to enforce your rights as a patent holder against someone who is infringing. The civil litigation in cases such as these are before a jury of our peers. Not our technical peers, but the ordinary, not necessarily technical folk who inhabit our society. A patent needs to be written in such a way that it is easily understandable to this jury and the presiding judge. I believe a good patent attorney can greatly assist in writing a patent in such a way that it is understandable to lay people who may ultimately decide its fate.
Additionally, there are many rules and arcana surrounding how a patent is written, the details of the legalese used and many other conventions that, as far as I know, are not really written down. Failing these small items can cause your patent to be rejected by the patent office on non-technical ground.
That said, there are several reasons why one wants to patent an idea. You might just want to have a patent (it's cool!). The idea might be truly revolutionary and worthwhile in a business sense. You might want to patent additional small changes to build a patent fence around an existing strong patent. Each one of these has various costs associated with them.
I view submitting patent applications as a business decision. There are many costs involved. Not the least being my own time to write and review the patent application, even with the patent attorney. The second cost is the cost of the patent attorney and the third cost is the cost of the patent application itsself. This final fee goes to the USPTO. There are additional fees when applying for international patents.
In closing, if your idea is a good idea from a business point of view, meaning there is monetary value in having the patent granted, then the cost of having a good patent attorney should be a good investment.
-tpg
[disclaimer- I am not an attorney, nor do I play one. I just use them when I need their expertise.]
If Microsoft can restrict our ability to use and/or copy media, how come they are seemingly unable to prevent virii from using and/or replicating on our machines?
-tpg
I was trying to buy up a whole mess of them for my monkeys and typewriters project. Now I'll just have to write [insert favorite OS or project here] myself.
Of course, I did manage to recreate the blue screen of death with three monkeys in ten minutes...
-tpg
I wonder if they will back it up before the clock runs out...
Gigabit ethernet (IEEE 802.3ab) uses 4 pairs (all 8 wires). Other versions of ethernet can get by with fewer pairs.
-tpg
This reminds me of the time I wrote up a datasheet for the wireless LAN controller chip I was working on, pre-802.11. We designed it to be ethernet compatible, so the chip had a promiscuous mode. I wrote it up just that way. Some some butthead in marketing thought this was offensive and takes it to the division general manager. Now my boss gets a phone call about one of his engineers putting crude language in the technical literature that is destined for customers.
After providing them with copies of our competitors datasheets to prove that this was a standard industry term, they backed down.
Several years later they were acquired for pennies on the dollar.
-tpg
Tie fighters show up all the time on ebay, but I haven't found an X-wing yet.
-tpg
I saw a yugo once with a custom plate. I don't know why...
Your code without algebra:
10 print "I never learned algebra"
20 goto 10
Your code with algebra:
for (i=0; i<10; i++) {
printf("I learned my algebra!!!\n");
}
-tpg
This one in a million thread got me thinking... As we work with higher and higher data rates, with bit error rates remaining relatively constant, things that use to happen infrequently happen alot. On a gigabit ethernet, which has a bit error rate of 10^-12, there will be a bit error once every 1000 seconds or once every 16 minutes. Luckely, most phys seem to have a much better BER than that. With the advent of 10G ethernet that number drops to 1.6 minutes. Good error detection (CRC-32) is useful here.
enough rambling for now...
-tpg
Along a similar line- a friend of a friend was an EMT in LA and had a license plate with LA MEDIC on it. Until one day he was in a local bar with some friends when some lady walked in and asked "who has the license plate with LAME DIC on it?" He soon got a new plate... :-)
-tpg
And you can remotely control your chair. Or allow a program to subtly change your seating position to reduce fatiugue. Of course there should be some safeguards to prevent the seat from performing the Christine manuver...
-tpg
In the long run, some things really don't warrant automation. Even though automating them may be a very cool and interesting exercise.
Personally, I'd rather have some of the more important sw I have work, or work better...
-tpg
When a product is designed, especially when the product is part of an evolving line of similar products, the product may contain bits of technology that are there to test various design points or manufacturing methods. While these are part of the product, if the features these technology pieces provide are not advertised, then the manufacturer has no duty to provide support for them.
Support is one of the most costly items in a products lifecycle. I remember a statistic (I can't quote the source) that 50% of the cost of software is in the support and maintainance of it after release. I would venture that Handspring has looked at what it would take to support this feature and decided that there is not enough margin in the product to support it even if the capability is provided in the hardware.
A final thought, they may have discovered some sort of performance or reliability problem with the flash ROM and instead of correcting the problem (potentially quite costly), they removed the feature so they did not have to support it.
-tpg.
It amazes me that for all of our advances in technology over that past 20 years, we are still fighting some of the same battles with the same tactics.
//c, ...) were superceeded by Macs and PCs. I don't remember if the same issues appeared in software distributed on floppys for PCs; they may have learned something from the earlier apple ][ experience and tied their copy prevention system to something that was distributed in addition to the electronic media.
The tactics I am referring to are, of course, copy protecting the distribution media of the software. 20 years ago it was apple ][ software on floppy disks. The apple ][ disk controller didn't really process the data. It fed the raw flux transitions to the disk operating system. The software for the DOS was contained in the boot sector of each disk. To make a disk difficult to copy, you tweak how the DOS functioned to include things like positioning the heads between tracks or working around intentional imperfections in the disk media. These imperfections would cause errors for the standard DOS read routines, but the modified DOS would know to just skip around certain sectors.
To combat these and other copy protection schemes, many disk copying programs appear on various BBSs. Over time people built up a list of which copy programs to use against which type of protection scheme.
In the end, bit by bit copiers could copy most everything that was out there. Over time software publishers went the route of tying software to something that was less easily copyable like a word or number from the paper manual. Just like the licensing schemes of today.
As time went on, the apple ][ (][+,
From my point of view, we are repeating those same old steps. The difference is that users will probably accept some sort of copy protection scheme for software, such as software activation keys (the shareware world lives on this model). While this model is quite workable for software, it fails miserably when it is applied to pure data such as CDs. CD copying will continue, because it is data and not an executable program which can check for some sort of authentication or activation model.
Audio CDs are data. I repeat this because that is what sets them apart from software. That is also what sets them apart in the mind of the public.
-tpg.
Security through obsolescence may be a bit of a misnomer. When I take an older OS release and apply all of the relevant patches, I know that the patch OS is considerably more mature that a newer version. Espicially a new major release with a newer or different components which have not been extensibly tested.
This is not to say that OS and software companies do not try to thoroughly test their software. They do. But even in the largest, most sophisticated test lab, one cannot recreate all of the possible conditions that will be revealed when the software is released into the real world.
The reasons older (obsolete) software may be more secure are really two fold. Older software, due to creaping featurism which haunts all software development activities adds features, which adds chances for security holes and errors. I assert the increased features, and espicially increased interfaces (user, programmatic and otherwise) increases the likelyness of security issues. The second issue with older (obsolete) software is that it is more mature. Please understand this carefully- older software that has been patched ot the current patch level will be more secure than software that has not been patched.
I think equating obsolete software with security is quite a stretch. I do agree with the thought that mature software will have fewer security issues. Added to this the fewer interfaces on older software gives it a greater chance to be free from security issues.
-tpg.