I'll add to that list; the automotive industry is full of them. First of all there's the night-vision cameras (arguably invented by the Germans pre WWII), radar parking aids, and heads-up displays.
At home you can cook using a microwave oven (invented by a researcher at Raytheon), which probably itself uses a Liquid Crystal Display (much of the development of which was done at the UK Radar Research Establishment at Malvern, formerly the Army Radar Establishment). Or maybe you'd like to listen to some music on a set of flat-panel loudspeakers (offshoot of research done by the British DERA into quiet 'stealth' helicopters).
A list like this could go on practically forever; in fact it's hard to find a product -- any product -- which hasn't been touched by military R&D at some point in its history. To be honest, dollar for dollar, I think it is quite possible that the American public (and other countries too, but particularly the U.S. because we consume so much technology) gets as much if not more out of the money spent on military research by contractors, than we do out of pure research at universities. Not to say that pure research doesn't have it's place, and is almost always inventive in nature, military research is usually directed and innovative, and produces useful devices in relatively short timescales.
Take a look around your home, unless you live on an Amish farm, you're probably surrounded by things, the initial development of which were paid for with defense dollars.
It doesn't require you to drill through the concrete wall?
That seems like a big advantage to me. That means it's a lot faster to use, and there's less risk of tipping off the occupants. Also it's field-portable (if they can actually make it into a rugged handheld unit) and doesn't require all of the ancillary equipment that an endoscope / camera snake does.
In short, it's much more likely to actually be used by troops, and anything that reduces the number of hot entries that soldiers have to do is a good thing -- it's one of the more hazardous and stressful things that a soldier will ever do in an urban combat scenario (perhaps in combat, period).
Actually I think that technology was millimeter-wave radar, for use in free space, not through walls -- I'm not sure if it was the same exact technology. It was originally being marketed to firefighters and rescue personnel, but it got canned when there were a lot of exaggerated stories on NPR about how it could be used to search people remotely for weapons, and get a vague idea of what they looked like without clothes. I don't think it was ever deployed except to the military.
This sounds like there is the possibility of similar arguments happening -- the ACLU and their pet media outlets will drag out the same tired old arguments in order to get a cheap kneejerk response out of a lot of people on their way to work in the morning. Maybe the war in Iraq and the recent mining accident will be far enough forward in people's minds that they'll give the idea some semblance of a fair hearing before they decide it's an Evil Oppression Tool.
I'm not a NV resident, but I think it would be perfectly legal to carry it through the lobby in a locked container, unloaded. You can get pistol cases that look like regular hardsided metallic briefcases, they wouldn't look that far out of place in a hotel like that. And depending on what the State's CCW laws are like, you might be able to carry concealed through the lobby if you have a permit -- it would depend on what the restrictions are on carrying in a place that has a permit to serve alcohol. (If there are any such restrictions, some do and some don't.)
Everything that you say may be totally true, and it would only make me want to support biodiesel and ethanol more.
Sure, biodiesel and ethanol would benefit the states that produce them: Iowa, Minnesota, and the other bread basket states; but what does the current petro-fuel system funnel money into? What doesn't get sucked into foreign economies mostly goes to the big petroleum companies.
I would rather that Pataki's cronies in Iowa benefited from what I paid at the pump, than the Supreme Leader of Iran's cronies.
Well the player -- at least an iPod-style one -- ought to have a pretty good idea of your tastes, since the file metadata contains playcount, rating (one to five stars) and genre. Assuming you actually use the rating feature and set the genre correctly, I think it would be pretty straightforward to only retrieve music that's somewhat similar to what you enjoy.
Here's what I'd want on such a player: 25% of the space would just be for my music, and the other 75% would be a cache of music taken from other players, constantly refreshed whenever it "talked" to a player whose owner had tastes similar to mine. When listening to music I'd have the option to move it into my permanent collection, dump it immediately, or do nothing. Music would be slowly expired from the public portion of the player, oldest first, as it got full. That way you wouldn't get it clogged up with music that might not be your style anymore.
Of course if you shared a music player with anyone else, it would probably get very confused.
But was it obvious a decade ago when Burst developed this technology?
Yes. Not only had other people come up with (and probably wrote/published articles about) similar ideas, they had actually implemented them in other products.
From this page, written by someone who was involved in the development of Apple's Quicktime:
Burst.com claimed to have a revolutionary way of delivering streaming content. Lossless. Faster than realtime.
Well, golly. You can deliver content losslessly and faster than real time via HTTP and FTP, too. Only Burst.com did this with a magical, proprietary protocol that required a magical, proprietary server that they would be happy to sell to you. The secret of the "secret sauce" that Burst.com CEO Richard Lang mentions in the feature is that there is no secret sauce....
If you have a really fast conneciton and there are no bottlenecks along the way, it lets you see/hear media almost instantly. It works by putting a huge buffer at the client, and then filling that buffer as fast as possible so that buffering time is minimized.
QuickTime's "Fast Start" provided much of this functionality with QuickTime 3's progressive streaming (1998), and QuickTime 6 added the final missing piece (random access) with its Instant-On feature earlier this year. RealNetworks uses a similar method to optimize the viewing experience in RealSystem 9.
Burst has 10 U.S. patents, according to their own page here. It's hard to tell which ones are really at issue (I haven't seen a list of the ones Apple is trying to have invalidated) but it almost certainly includes 5,262,875 which in my reading is the most general one.
This is their main claim:
We claim:
1. An audio/video file server for decompressing and distributing selected audio/video program information stored in a compressed digital format within the file server to one or more external playback stations for real-time viewing by users at those playback stations, the audio/video file server comprising:
storage means for storing compressed digital audio/video program information;
transceiver means, connected to the storage means, for receiving compressed digital audio/video program information from an external source over a time period that is less than a real time period required to view the audio/video program information to thereby update the compressed digital audio/video program information stored in the storage means;
a plurality of playback units, each associated with an external playback line and an external playback station and each including decompression means, for receiving selected compressed digital audio/video program information stored in the storage means, for decompressing the selected compressed digital audio/video program information received from the storage means, and for playing the decompressed selected audio/video program information in real time over the associated playback line to the associated playback station;
network interface means, connected to the storage means, transceiver means, playback units, and plurality of playback stations, for receiving playback requests from the plurality of playback stations; and
processing means, connected to the storage means, transceiver means, playback units, and network interface means, the processing means being responsive to the network interface means, following receipt of a playback request, for controlling the associated playback unit to play the decompressed selected audio/video program information in real time.
Of course, if I had been issued a patent on something stupid and general, of course I'd try milk the hell out of it. If I were the CEO of a corporation, doing anything less would probably be construed by the shareholders as a failure to do my job.
That wouldn't mean that the patent isn't a bad one, or that it was stupid of the USPTO to issue it in the first place. The mistake here isn't Burst's -- they're just working with the hand of cards they've been dealt -- but the patent clerk's who let this slip through, even though there was reams of prior art: a feature in Apple's Quicktime and possibly something in Windows Media Player also.
Because this patent got issued, and the leadership of Burst.com has an obligation to try to make money (as does Apple), we have go witness this song and dance as the issue is worked out in the courts. Hopefully Apple won't shoot themselves in the foot the same way that Microsoft did, and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Burst.com's patent -- at least according to Groklaw -- seems like it's definitely invalidated by prior art. According to this article, both Apple and Real (and possibly Microsoft) had their own versions of the same functionality, predating the patent by Burst.
Honestly the fact that Burst.com (or whatever company it was before it became Burst.com) produced a number of useful products doesn't matter a whit to the fact that they have a crummy patent that they're obviously trying to make a buck off of. That said, I can't blame them either -- the USPTO issued this piece of trash that they're trying to litigate, and there's no way that it's going to go away unless it gets invalidated by a judge.
The MS suit ended in what to me is a draw -- an out of court settlement where MS effectively bought Burst's cooperation. Apple doesn't have a history of doing that, so I think this time we'll see a resolution. Arguably MS's solution happened because Microsoft was under criticism for deleting evidence and not otherwise behaving fairly -- so saying that Burst's patent has been held in prior trials really doesn't wash.
I respect Burst as a company, but based on what I've read from the Microsoft and now the Apple case, they're a company on their last legs, looking to capitalize on a few shoddy patents that they managed to get issued while someone at the USPTO wasn't doing what ought to be their job: looking for prior art. If Apple wins and Burst goes out of business, I'll be slightly sad, but not terribly upset -- when a company sinks to the level of litigating obviously general patents, they have no place staying in business. The fact that they might have made real contributions to the art of computing in the past only makes the company's death more painful, but no less necessary, to everyone involved.
Re:My issue with Gnome is....
on
Why KDE Rules
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· Score: 1
Understood. Okay, well I feel much better about Gnome, then.:)
I actually use KDE on my Linux box (I'm primarily a Mac user, but I have a Linux machine so I can run Windows software in Cedega/Wine) right now, but I've been considering going back into Gnome. Initially I put Ubuntu on, took one look at Gnome, hated it, switched to KDE. But I was starting to think of giving it a more fair shot -- but I wasn't going to waste my time on anything that follows dumb Windows concepts like those auto-hiding menus.
This is a valid point, but I wouldn't regard the solution to this problem as "maintenance". Rather the solution is repair, followed by user training to correct the problem.
Of course a contributor to this might be inherent security vunerabilities in Windows that allow the ad/spyware to get there in the first place -- a claim I can't really go one way or the other on, although it certainly seems to be the case.
Still, if you find yourself having to regularly "maintain" a computer when it's not being used outside of it's intended functions, then it would lead me to conclude several things: 1) you have a crummy OS, 2) you have crummy or unstable software, or 3) you as the user are doing something wrong, or 4) a combination of some or all of the previous options. Fixing those things may be out of your control (as it is in mine, at work) however you shouldn't be lured into thinking that a computer has to or worse yet should be this way. It doesn't and shouldn't. The fact that it is, is something we should fix, not brush under the rug.
Thanks for the deep lake cooling link. That's fairly interesting, and makes perfect sense if you ask me.
Conceptually similar but on the residential side, I once (several years back) saw an add-on for people with pools: it was a "cap" that went around and over your whole-house air conditioner's compressor/condensor unit, and was filled with coils through which pool water was pumped. The air conditioner compressor's fan pulled warm air through these coils, warming the pool water and cooling the air, and then used the chilled air to cool the compressor coils. The warm air was then blown over more pool-water coils on top, further warming the pool water. Allegedly under certain conditions (a very cold pool on a very warm day) it would raise the efficiency of your air conditioner, while heating your pool up to 10 degrees F or so in the process. Obviously it was a bit of a hack; air isn't a great medium to use in a heat exchanger like this, but that's how they did it without modification to the A/C compressor. But effectively it used your outdoor pool as a heat sink for your house.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure there's no way to remote-root a system that doesn't have a networking stack. Or a network interface, for that matter.
Yeah I'd be interested to see a metric of "bug days" per distribution/OS. If a bug goes unpatched for a day, that's 7 bug days. Maybe we could be nice and only count business days, but it's not like the virus writers are taking weekends off.
Perhaps also there could be a factor for the seriousness of the bug. So for every day that a critical bug is unpatched, it's worth 14 days of a non-critical unpatched bug. Or something like that -- the factor is inherently arbitrary, but maybe we could agree on something that seems to be a fair measure of how much effort a company ought to put into fixing a critical bug, relative to a noncritical one, and use that.
I'd be very curious to see even how various distributions of Linux stack up against each other in this regard.
Whatever Apple announces at the MacWorld keynote will make the regular Fox/CNN news cycle, I guarantee it. At the very least during their business or tech blurb sections, if not during the regular rotation. It will probably appear somewhere in the Wall Street Journal within a few days, once it's had a chance to affect their stock price, and if it's anything significant (like a DVR, or like the video iPod was).
In fact if Apple doesn't release anything, that by itself will probably generate a certain amount of mainstream press non-coverage coverage. There will be articles like "2006 Not the Year For Video?" or "Computers in the Living Room? Jobs says no", ad infinium. Those might not make television news, but they'll get filler space in the sunday papers or on web sites.
Every time Apple farts, the world listens. In fact there are whole articles in mainstream publications about the amount of press coverage Apple receives, even when nothing is going on (meta-meta stories?).
Although I'm not offering this as conclusive proof of anything, it is suggestive. I did a quick search of the Google News aggregator: Microsoft - 47,100 Apple - 24,200 IBM - 9,110 Linux - 5,290 Sun Microsystems - 2,140 (a search on "sun" turns up mostly articles unrelated to the company) "Red Hat" - 1,480
If nobody cares about Apple, explain how a company with less than a twentieth of the marketshare of Microsoft manages to get 50% of the press coverage?
Now I'm usually a big fan of Apple, but I think you're not really giving credit where credit is due (although not your fault, virtually nobody does). The decision to kill Copland and buy someone else's OS -- the key decision that led to the return of Jobs, the production of Mac OS X, and perhaps saved the company -- was not Jobs'. It's usually attributed to Ellen Hancock, originally of IBM, and who Jobs ridiculed and later basically ran out of the company.
Jobs is brilliant, don't get me wrong, but I'm not sure that the credit for Mac OS X and for acquiring NeXT should be entirely his. If it hadn't been for Hancock, someone from outside the company who basically had to tell them when it was time to pull the plug, Apple might have continued along the twisted road that was Copland until finially running out of steam. And the acquisition of NeXT, along with Jobs, might never have happened.
On the contrary, this could potentially be a big issue, if whatever method they're using to get cellphone numbers is useful on phones owned by celebrities and other high-profile individuals. Especially because once you get one person's records, you have in your hands a list of other numbers which you can also pull up the calls for, thereby getting you more numbers. It's a social network -- except it's not your network, it's somebody else's. I'm sure an intelligent person with enough money could easily begin with someone totally random and work through the web, up to people with skeletons in the closet. The obvious target is celebrities, and therefore it's guaranteed a lot of media attention.
I'd be surprised if somebody out there isn't working their way up the lists of numbers right now, starting with some third-rate agent's phone, working their way up to big fish.
As I've said elsewhere, this issue is mostly one which affects people at the higher end of the social spectrum: people who have money, connections, and secrets. Expect to see the whole gig get shut down quickly; it's those same people who stand to lose from something like this that have the most political influence. Nobody in Washington wants their call log being poured over every month by some intern in the Post's news room, and they're the ones with the power to make it stop.
To be perfectly honest, I'd almost rather have some information broker be making money off of my data, than Verizon or Cingular or TMobile making money off of it. First, just because they already get enough of my money, but second (and most importantly) because on some level I feel like they're supposed to be doing some level of due diligence to protect my personal information. Call my naieve, but they're supposed to be on my side. I don't want them to be taking money from both directions.
As other people have pointed out, what this basically does is put everyone on the same footing as the priviledged: you no longer have to have a good friend down at the police station or have the squeeze on a judge to pull up somebody's phone records. It's not people in trailer parks or the "average american" who's at risk from these cell phone records sales, it's the rich, the high profile, and the corrupt. As such, it disrupts the carefully and jealously guarded power structure. Expect to see it made quickly illegal. As it happens, watch to see who is most vociferous: they're the ones who have the most to fear from a change in the status quo.
It's always fascinating to watch our normally grinding political processes go into high gear "defensive mode" when something potentially disruptive to their gravy train is afoot.
I think that the vast majority of people would reasonably come to the conclusion that law enforcement could request those dumps of call data, but that Joe Blow citizen would not have access to them, any more than they'd have access to the transaction details of your banking records.
I think, based on the article, that not only did Joe Blow Citizen think this, but a lot of FBI agents -- some working undercover -- were operating under this assumption as well. They naturally assumed that the Good Guys could pull up somebody's cell phone records but that the Bad Guys couldn't. So it's tough to fault anyone for making that assumption.
The question isn't whether as a company you have a policy that says you sell them, the question is "does any employee have unfettered access to them?" If that answer is yes, and I assume it is, then you have a person who can be pressured or bribed. $160 isn't much, but $16,000 is: and although I don't know how cell companies systems operate, if they have any kind of batch processing modes it might be quite easy to pull up and print out 100 records at a time. Just imagine if you were an employee with a big gambling debt, for which your kneecaps were going to be smashed on Friday...all of a sudden somebody offers you the amount of your debt plus a few bucks for yourself, to print some things for them. Easy enough. I'm not saying that YOU would do it, but in a big enough organization (even government organizations where people are supposedly vetted against having such vunerabilities) chances are there's somebody who would.
Or alternately, does your company give out records if a customer calls up? And if so what verification does the customer have to provide that they're who they say they are? The information broker could just call up and pose as an irate customer ("I'm at work -- I don't have my account number!") who wants to know if their kid has been racking up cellphone calls or something.
It's 'human engineering;' as long as the money is there, the risk of getting caught is low, and the punishment isn't too serious (or isn't perceived as being too serious), it's easy to find people who don't mind breaking the law.
Maybe because for someone working undercover, who assumes that only the police (meaning, them) have access to cell phone call logs, this could easily get them killed.
Just think: you're a gang leader and suspect that someone in your organization is a narc. You have all of their cell phone numbers, because that's how you communicate, so you call up Locatecell and get the logs. The one who has the local PD in their logs gets a pair of cement shoes for Christmas.
While the rest of us could certainly be inconvenienced, or perhaps lose our jobs / marriages / etc., because of this, probably we won't have the same risk of ending up dead.
To me, a "bug" is when a piece of software acts in a way that's contrary to how its specification dictates. Obviously this assumes that you have a well-written and complete specification, but it also involves some common sense. Sometimes the specification might not say something explicitly, and there's a bit of a grey area as to whether a behavior is a bug or not. This is why the software development process contains analysts and testers in addition to developers. Generally when a situation like that comes up, you can go back and have the spec clarified, and then easily see whether it's a bug or not.
However even in the community-developed free software model, where most pieces of code aren't written to follow any well-definted specifications, you can imagine what the specification for something might be, based on its use, and then compare the behavior to that. This leads to differences of opinion as to whether behaviors in open-source projects are bugs or not, I think, because everyone has a slightly different idea of what the 'specification' would be, if it existed.
I'm interested to know -- does anyone know if there are any open source development projects with a large community involvement which have anything remotely similar to the commercial software development cycle?
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up.
a y#Brief_history LCDsi cation_gp.htm#The%20Defence%20Industry Flat Panel Loudspeakers (and many others)
I'll add to that list; the automotive industry is full of them. First of all there's the night-vision cameras (arguably invented by the Germans pre WWII), radar parking aids, and heads-up displays.
At home you can cook using a microwave oven (invented by a researcher at Raytheon), which probably itself uses a Liquid Crystal Display (much of the development of which was done at the UK Radar Research Establishment at Malvern, formerly the Army Radar Establishment). Or maybe you'd like to listen to some music on a set of flat-panel loudspeakers (offshoot of research done by the British DERA into quiet 'stealth' helicopters).
A list like this could go on practically forever; in fact it's hard to find a product -- any product -- which hasn't been touched by military R&D at some point in its history. To be honest, dollar for dollar, I think it is quite possible that the American public (and other countries too, but particularly the U.S. because we consume so much technology) gets as much if not more out of the money spent on military research by contractors, than we do out of pure research at universities. Not to say that pure research doesn't have it's place, and is almost always inventive in nature, military research is usually directed and innovative, and produces useful devices in relatively short timescales.
Take a look around your home, unless you live on an Amish farm, you're probably surrounded by things, the initial development of which were paid for with defense dollars.
References:
http://www.achtungpanzer.com/ir.htm Infrared and Night Vision Scopes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_crystal_displ
http://www.mod.uk/issues/diversification/diversif
It doesn't require you to drill through the concrete wall?
That seems like a big advantage to me. That means it's a lot faster to use, and there's less risk of tipping off the occupants. Also it's field-portable (if they can actually make it into a rugged handheld unit) and doesn't require all of the ancillary equipment that an endoscope / camera snake does.
In short, it's much more likely to actually be used by troops, and anything that reduces the number of hot entries that soldiers have to do is a good thing -- it's one of the more hazardous and stressful things that a soldier will ever do in an urban combat scenario (perhaps in combat, period).
Actually I think that technology was millimeter-wave radar, for use in free space, not through walls -- I'm not sure if it was the same exact technology. It was originally being marketed to firefighters and rescue personnel, but it got canned when there were a lot of exaggerated stories on NPR about how it could be used to search people remotely for weapons, and get a vague idea of what they looked like without clothes. I don't think it was ever deployed except to the military.
This sounds like there is the possibility of similar arguments happening -- the ACLU and their pet media outlets will drag out the same tired old arguments in order to get a cheap kneejerk response out of a lot of people on their way to work in the morning. Maybe the war in Iraq and the recent mining accident will be far enough forward in people's minds that they'll give the idea some semblance of a fair hearing before they decide it's an Evil Oppression Tool.
I'm not a NV resident, but I think it would be perfectly legal to carry it through the lobby in a locked container, unloaded. You can get pistol cases that look like regular hardsided metallic briefcases, they wouldn't look that far out of place in a hotel like that. And depending on what the State's CCW laws are like, you might be able to carry concealed through the lobby if you have a permit -- it would depend on what the restrictions are on carrying in a place that has a permit to serve alcohol. (If there are any such restrictions, some do and some don't.)
By "runs like a dream" do you mean, it only runs that well in your dreams?
Because that's what I've heard the stability and hardware support is like for Win x64... just hearsay, since I'm not going to touch it, of course.
Everything that you say may be totally true, and it would only make me want to support biodiesel and ethanol more.
Sure, biodiesel and ethanol would benefit the states that produce them: Iowa, Minnesota, and the other bread basket states; but what does the current petro-fuel system funnel money into? What doesn't get sucked into foreign economies mostly goes to the big petroleum companies.
I would rather that Pataki's cronies in Iowa benefited from what I paid at the pump, than the Supreme Leader of Iran's cronies.
Well the player -- at least an iPod-style one -- ought to have a pretty good idea of your tastes, since the file metadata contains playcount, rating (one to five stars) and genre. Assuming you actually use the rating feature and set the genre correctly, I think it would be pretty straightforward to only retrieve music that's somewhat similar to what you enjoy.
Here's what I'd want on such a player: 25% of the space would just be for my music, and the other 75% would be a cache of music taken from other players, constantly refreshed whenever it "talked" to a player whose owner had tastes similar to mine. When listening to music I'd have the option to move it into my permanent collection, dump it immediately, or do nothing. Music would be slowly expired from the public portion of the player, oldest first, as it got full. That way you wouldn't get it clogged up with music that might not be your style anymore.
Of course if you shared a music player with anyone else, it would probably get very confused.
Yes. Not only had other people come up with (and probably wrote/published articles about) similar ideas, they had actually implemented them in other products.
From this page, written by someone who was involved in the development of Apple's Quicktime:
Burst has 10 U.S. patents, according to their own page here. It's hard to tell which ones are really at issue (I haven't seen a list of the ones Apple is trying to have invalidated) but it almost certainly includes 5,262,875 which in my reading is the most general one.
This is their main claim:
To me, that's pre
Of course, if I had been issued a patent on something stupid and general, of course I'd try milk the hell out of it. If I were the CEO of a corporation, doing anything less would probably be construed by the shareholders as a failure to do my job.
That wouldn't mean that the patent isn't a bad one, or that it was stupid of the USPTO to issue it in the first place. The mistake here isn't Burst's -- they're just working with the hand of cards they've been dealt -- but the patent clerk's who let this slip through, even though there was reams of prior art: a feature in Apple's Quicktime and possibly something in Windows Media Player also.
Because this patent got issued, and the leadership of Burst.com has an obligation to try to make money (as does Apple), we have go witness this song and dance as the issue is worked out in the courts. Hopefully Apple won't shoot themselves in the foot the same way that Microsoft did, and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Well, speaking only for myself, no.
Burst.com's patent -- at least according to Groklaw -- seems like it's definitely invalidated by prior art. According to this article, both Apple and Real (and possibly Microsoft) had their own versions of the same functionality, predating the patent by Burst.
Honestly the fact that Burst.com (or whatever company it was before it became Burst.com) produced a number of useful products doesn't matter a whit to the fact that they have a crummy patent that they're obviously trying to make a buck off of. That said, I can't blame them either -- the USPTO issued this piece of trash that they're trying to litigate, and there's no way that it's going to go away unless it gets invalidated by a judge.
The MS suit ended in what to me is a draw -- an out of court settlement where MS effectively bought Burst's cooperation. Apple doesn't have a history of doing that, so I think this time we'll see a resolution. Arguably MS's solution happened because Microsoft was under criticism for deleting evidence and not otherwise behaving fairly -- so saying that Burst's patent has been held in prior trials really doesn't wash.
I respect Burst as a company, but based on what I've read from the Microsoft and now the Apple case, they're a company on their last legs, looking to capitalize on a few shoddy patents that they managed to get issued while someone at the USPTO wasn't doing what ought to be their job: looking for prior art. If Apple wins and Burst goes out of business, I'll be slightly sad, but not terribly upset -- when a company sinks to the level of litigating obviously general patents, they have no place staying in business. The fact that they might have made real contributions to the art of computing in the past only makes the company's death more painful, but no less necessary, to everyone involved.
Understood. Okay, well I feel much better about Gnome, then. :)
I actually use KDE on my Linux box (I'm primarily a Mac user, but I have a Linux machine so I can run Windows software in Cedega/Wine) right now, but I've been considering going back into Gnome. Initially I put Ubuntu on, took one look at Gnome, hated it, switched to KDE. But I was starting to think of giving it a more fair shot -- but I wasn't going to waste my time on anything that follows dumb Windows concepts like those auto-hiding menus.
Thanks for the clarification.
This is a valid point, but I wouldn't regard the solution to this problem as "maintenance". Rather the solution is repair, followed by user training to correct the problem.
Of course a contributor to this might be inherent security vunerabilities in Windows that allow the ad/spyware to get there in the first place -- a claim I can't really go one way or the other on, although it certainly seems to be the case.
Still, if you find yourself having to regularly "maintain" a computer when it's not being used outside of it's intended functions, then it would lead me to conclude several things: 1) you have a crummy OS, 2) you have crummy or unstable software, or 3) you as the user are doing something wrong, or 4) a combination of some or all of the previous options. Fixing those things may be out of your control (as it is in mine, at work) however you shouldn't be lured into thinking that a computer has to or worse yet should be this way. It doesn't and shouldn't. The fact that it is, is something we should fix, not brush under the rug.
Thanks for the deep lake cooling link. That's fairly interesting, and makes perfect sense if you ask me.
Conceptually similar but on the residential side, I once (several years back) saw an add-on for people with pools: it was a "cap" that went around and over your whole-house air conditioner's compressor/condensor unit, and was filled with coils through which pool water was pumped. The air conditioner compressor's fan pulled warm air through these coils, warming the pool water and cooling the air, and then used the chilled air to cool the compressor coils. The warm air was then blown over more pool-water coils on top, further warming the pool water. Allegedly under certain conditions (a very cold pool on a very warm day) it would raise the efficiency of your air conditioner, while heating your pool up to 10 degrees F or so in the process. Obviously it was a bit of a hack; air isn't a great medium to use in a heat exchanger like this, but that's how they did it without modification to the A/C compressor. But effectively it used your outdoor pool as a heat sink for your house.
If the intro isn't clear, why bother reading the article?
To figure out what the hell they're talking about in the intro, perhaps? That's the main reason I read the articles.
I would pick an Apple IIc.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure there's no way to remote-root a system that doesn't have a networking stack. Or a network interface, for that matter.
If a bug goes unpatched for a day, that's 7 bug days.
Should have read:
If a bug goes unpatched for a week, that's 7 bug days.
And I even used Preview that time...
Yeah I'd be interested to see a metric of "bug days" per distribution/OS. If a bug goes unpatched for a day, that's 7 bug days. Maybe we could be nice and only count business days, but it's not like the virus writers are taking weekends off.
Perhaps also there could be a factor for the seriousness of the bug. So for every day that a critical bug is unpatched, it's worth 14 days of a non-critical unpatched bug. Or something like that -- the factor is inherently arbitrary, but maybe we could agree on something that seems to be a fair measure of how much effort a company ought to put into fixing a critical bug, relative to a noncritical one, and use that.
I'd be very curious to see even how various distributions of Linux stack up against each other in this regard.
Are you kidding?
Whatever Apple announces at the MacWorld keynote will make the regular Fox/CNN news cycle, I guarantee it. At the very least during their business or tech blurb sections, if not during the regular rotation. It will probably appear somewhere in the Wall Street Journal within a few days, once it's had a chance to affect their stock price, and if it's anything significant (like a DVR, or like the video iPod was).
In fact if Apple doesn't release anything, that by itself will probably generate a certain amount of mainstream press non-coverage coverage. There will be articles like "2006 Not the Year For Video?" or "Computers in the Living Room? Jobs says no", ad infinium. Those might not make television news, but they'll get filler space in the sunday papers or on web sites.
Every time Apple farts, the world listens. In fact there are whole articles in mainstream publications about the amount of press coverage Apple receives, even when nothing is going on (meta-meta stories?).
Although I'm not offering this as conclusive proof of anything, it is suggestive. I did a quick search of the Google News aggregator:
Microsoft - 47,100
Apple - 24,200
IBM - 9,110
Linux - 5,290
Sun Microsystems - 2,140 (a search on "sun" turns up mostly articles unrelated to the company)
"Red Hat" - 1,480
If nobody cares about Apple, explain how a company with less than a twentieth of the marketshare of Microsoft manages to get 50% of the press coverage?
Now I'm usually a big fan of Apple, but I think you're not really giving credit where credit is due (although not your fault, virtually nobody does). The decision to kill Copland and buy someone else's OS -- the key decision that led to the return of Jobs, the production of Mac OS X, and perhaps saved the company -- was not Jobs'. It's usually attributed to Ellen Hancock, originally of IBM, and who Jobs ridiculed and later basically ran out of the company.
Jobs is brilliant, don't get me wrong, but I'm not sure that the credit for Mac OS X and for acquiring NeXT should be entirely his. If it hadn't been for Hancock, someone from outside the company who basically had to tell them when it was time to pull the plug, Apple might have continued along the twisted road that was Copland until finially running out of steam. And the acquisition of NeXT, along with Jobs, might never have happened.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Hancock
On the contrary, this could potentially be a big issue, if whatever method they're using to get cellphone numbers is useful on phones owned by celebrities and other high-profile individuals. Especially because once you get one person's records, you have in your hands a list of other numbers which you can also pull up the calls for, thereby getting you more numbers. It's a social network -- except it's not your network, it's somebody else's. I'm sure an intelligent person with enough money could easily begin with someone totally random and work through the web, up to people with skeletons in the closet. The obvious target is celebrities, and therefore it's guaranteed a lot of media attention.
I'd be surprised if somebody out there isn't working their way up the lists of numbers right now, starting with some third-rate agent's phone, working their way up to big fish.
As I've said elsewhere, this issue is mostly one which affects people at the higher end of the social spectrum: people who have money, connections, and secrets. Expect to see the whole gig get shut down quickly; it's those same people who stand to lose from something like this that have the most political influence. Nobody in Washington wants their call log being poured over every month by some intern in the Post's news room, and they're the ones with the power to make it stop.
To be perfectly honest, I'd almost rather have some information broker be making money off of my data, than Verizon or Cingular or TMobile making money off of it. First, just because they already get enough of my money, but second (and most importantly) because on some level I feel like they're supposed to be doing some level of due diligence to protect my personal information. Call my naieve, but they're supposed to be on my side. I don't want them to be taking money from both directions.
As other people have pointed out, what this basically does is put everyone on the same footing as the priviledged: you no longer have to have a good friend down at the police station or have the squeeze on a judge to pull up somebody's phone records. It's not people in trailer parks or the "average american" who's at risk from these cell phone records sales, it's the rich, the high profile, and the corrupt. As such, it disrupts the carefully and jealously guarded power structure. Expect to see it made quickly illegal. As it happens, watch to see who is most vociferous: they're the ones who have the most to fear from a change in the status quo.
It's always fascinating to watch our normally grinding political processes go into high gear "defensive mode" when something potentially disruptive to their gravy train is afoot.
I think that the vast majority of people would reasonably come to the conclusion that law enforcement could request those dumps of call data, but that Joe Blow citizen would not have access to them, any more than they'd have access to the transaction details of your banking records.
I think, based on the article, that not only did Joe Blow Citizen think this, but a lot of FBI agents -- some working undercover -- were operating under this assumption as well. They naturally assumed that the Good Guys could pull up somebody's cell phone records but that the Bad Guys couldn't. So it's tough to fault anyone for making that assumption.
The question isn't whether as a company you have a policy that says you sell them, the question is "does any employee have unfettered access to them?" If that answer is yes, and I assume it is, then you have a person who can be pressured or bribed. $160 isn't much, but $16,000 is: and although I don't know how cell companies systems operate, if they have any kind of batch processing modes it might be quite easy to pull up and print out 100 records at a time. Just imagine if you were an employee with a big gambling debt, for which your kneecaps were going to be smashed on Friday...all of a sudden somebody offers you the amount of your debt plus a few bucks for yourself, to print some things for them. Easy enough. I'm not saying that YOU would do it, but in a big enough organization (even government organizations where people are supposedly vetted against having such vunerabilities) chances are there's somebody who would.
Or alternately, does your company give out records if a customer calls up? And if so what verification does the customer have to provide that they're who they say they are? The information broker could just call up and pose as an irate customer ("I'm at work -- I don't have my account number!") who wants to know if their kid has been racking up cellphone calls or something.
It's 'human engineering;' as long as the money is there, the risk of getting caught is low, and the punishment isn't too serious (or isn't perceived as being too serious), it's easy to find people who don't mind breaking the law.
Maybe because for someone working undercover, who assumes that only the police (meaning, them) have access to cell phone call logs, this could easily get them killed.
Just think: you're a gang leader and suspect that someone in your organization is a narc. You have all of their cell phone numbers, because that's how you communicate, so you call up Locatecell and get the logs. The one who has the local PD in their logs gets a pair of cement shoes for Christmas.
While the rest of us could certainly be inconvenienced, or perhaps lose our jobs / marriages / etc., because of this, probably we won't have the same risk of ending up dead.
To me, a "bug" is when a piece of software acts in a way that's contrary to how its specification dictates. Obviously this assumes that you have a well-written and complete specification, but it also involves some common sense. Sometimes the specification might not say something explicitly, and there's a bit of a grey area as to whether a behavior is a bug or not. This is why the software development process contains analysts and testers in addition to developers. Generally when a situation like that comes up, you can go back and have the spec clarified, and then easily see whether it's a bug or not.
However even in the community-developed free software model, where most pieces of code aren't written to follow any well-definted specifications, you can imagine what the specification for something might be, based on its use, and then compare the behavior to that. This leads to differences of opinion as to whether behaviors in open-source projects are bugs or not, I think, because everyone has a slightly different idea of what the 'specification' would be, if it existed.
I'm interested to know -- does anyone know if there are any open source development projects with a large community involvement which have anything remotely similar to the commercial software development cycle?