It's time to put an end to the con-artists and crackpots who abuse patent and trademark law to try to make a quick buck off the hard work that others have done. As this particular fellow is clearly beyond redemption or reform, let's just save everyone the hassle and invest in a.30-06 shell and have done with the bastard.
I keep reading about sites that are IE-only, yet I rarely run into a site that doesn't render in Mozilla. The only exception I can think of is a gaming site whose patch downloader will only work with IE, and Microsoft's own update site.
Maybe if I were visiting more home-brewed sites instead of commercial/large sites I'd have more problems.
Lastly, HP can't just open up HP-UX without a huge amount of work; there is code in there which is licensed under arrangements incompatible with the GPL.
And why would HP expect that this isn't an issue for Sun or IBM? IBM in particular has a huge patent portfolio that it uses as a negotiation chip when it wants to acquire technology from other companies that it doesn't want to buy outright. The technology (code and patent use) exchanged as part of the deal is still the property of the respective originators, so you can't relicense those components under the GPL.
As far as I know, even the open-source version of Solaris isn't the entire Solaris code base. Releasing the code base under the GPL might well prevent Sun from retaining ownership of the components it hasn't released, particularly if they rely on linking to the running kernel.
Besides, how long do you think the lifespan of a CEO would be if they turned over control of the licensing to a third party instead of relying on the corp's own legal team? Thats what happens with the GPL -- the terms are defined by the authors of the GPL, and they can change those terms with a new release of the license.
I find it interesting that despite everyone's worry that Apple was moving to Intel for the sake of Intel's DRM chips (Another Theory on Apple's Move To Intel), it's an Infineon chip being used to enforce the DRM. Even more amusing is that it's the Rosetta emulation software that is using the DRM, not the kernel itself.
Personally I think it's a good move for Apple. It lets them lock down their proprietary components without impacting the open source core of the system.
It also provides a "how to" example of lock-down that isn't dependant on the kernel itself for implementation. You don't need to pay for and install an entire OS upgrade ala Microsoft just to lock down one component running on the system (e.g. a media player.)
Way back around 1988-1990 I had an interview with a company that had developed and marketed caller id triggered lookups. Before the receiver even picked up the phone, the computer would already be retrieving customer account information and other notes so the receiver wouldn't need to waste anyone's time retrieving the information manually. Obviously the information retrieved and stored was more detailed than just a generic note (which was only one data field in the system.)
Many IVR (interactive voice response aka automated answering services) also use such technology to do information retrieval and storage.
The patent applied for by Microsoft is a toy in comparison, and the only thing "new" is using the computing resources of an integrated device like a cell phone instead of multi-line call center hardware.
In other words, they seem to be trying to patent the idea of performing the processing for the case where n = 1. Pathetic, but typical of their single-user mentality.
But that's precisely the point -- the issue is handled by language or OS libraries and would be updated without changing the program code. Even mainframe applications have to be periodically rebound to the system libraries, though the source code itself may have been lost.
You have to go out of your way to have problems with leap seconds, time zones, etc.
I don't see how the problem occurs in the first place. The internal clock used by computers is integer based, and converted by the OS or programming APIs to readable strings.
Oracle, Sybase, DB/2, and presumably other RDBMS software stores date/time using internal numeric formats and converts that to YMD HMS strings when the values are retrieved by code.
Mainframe systems written in COBOL use library APIs for their date/time manipulation, which properly allow for leap seconds. IIRC, even ancient PL/I code relies on such libraries.
When I worked on HP RTE-A systems to do satellite control (almost 20 years ago), we used integers counting seconds and milliseconds as time references, not "human readable" date fields.
Unless some "not invented here" bozo is writing their own date/time manipulation code instead of relying on the system/language libraries there should be no problem with leap seconds.
And lets not forget that all the major systems code was re-examined and retooled to deal with Y2K, so there is absolutely no excuse for existing code that doesn't deal with date/time properly.
Given that Google is a known competitor for Microsoft both in terms of region and approach (search engines and other content), I don't understand what the big issue is with this fellow being blocked from taking the job with Google.
You wouldn't expect GM to allow an engineer that designed their fuel injection systems to go work on fuel injection systems for Ford without a fight, so why would you expect Microsoft to quietly allow one of their executives to jump ship to a competitor? Especially when the duties of the new position have so much overlap with the position he just left?
Telus has some notorious issues with how they run the business, service customers, and pay their subcontractors.
The union is, however, living in a fantasy world. Rates for telecom services have dropped over the past several years. There is competition from broadband phone services (including vonage.ca), alternative cellular providers, and alternative ISPs. The days of the near monopoly by the big provincial telcos are over, as are the obscene profits they used to generate.
Unions will simply have to accept that the telco and computer industries of 2005 are being hit by the same kind of competition that destroyed local manufacturing firms 15-20 years ago. Demanding huge salary increases, guaranteed jobs, etc. is completely unrealistic.
Telus, OTOH, needs to realize that pimp-slapping their customers, their staff, and their suppliers is no way to run a business. They're also living in an old fantasy world where the telcos got away with such nonsense because they were a near monopoly.
Ok, so we have this OS/2 computer locked up in a freakin' safe. It has no ASCII keyboard, no floppy, CD, or DVD drive. It uses a private network of hard encryption to communicate with a host, and it has no "default" services running on it.
Assuming you do find an exploit from the source code, just how do you intend to launch an attack on this literally iron-clad box in the ATM?
The ESRB Ratings (http://www.esrb.org/esrbratings_guide.asp) were properly applied to the published content of the game. You cannot expect the reviewers to examine content that is only accessible by modifying the game.
Rockstar should have removed the content from the game instead of just leaving it disconnected, but it's not the ESRB's fault it was hidden instead of removed.
What's next -- parents start ranting about Half-Life 2 because someone did a nude skin for Alyx? If someone creates a scripted mod that uses a video game engine to do virtual porn should the ESRB be blamed?
If the ESRB has already rated a game as Mature, what is it these rabid parent groups expect everyone else to do? It is up to the parents to ensure their children aren't buying these games. It is up to the parents to ensure their relatives aren't giving these games as gifts. It is up to the parents to ensure their children's friends aren't bringing the games over to play.
It is not society's responsibility to censor such content just in case some parents are too lazy or inept to keep an eye on their own kids.
TCG is currently comprised of a variety of vendors, including PC platform, operating system, and TPM vendors, with
the board of directors consisting of representatives from Intel, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Sony, Sun Microsystems, Seagate,
Verisign, and AMD. TPM vendors include Atmel, Infineon, National Semiconductor, and STMicroelectronics. Until
now, TCG has focused on specifying a TPM for the PC.
Over four million PCs have been shipped with version 1.1 TPMs installed, mostly by IBM and HP. However, Intel has
also begun delivering this technology and has just released the Intel® D865GRH Desktop Board, which has a version 1.1
TPM and ships with a software suite that provides better security for users' personal information. Version 1.2 of the
TPM specification was recently released, and TPMs conforming to the new specification are under development.
Now that TPM definition for the PC platform has evolved, the TCG is expanding its membership and beginning to
define TPMs for cell phones, handhelds, and servers--continuing to work toward the vision where all devices can talk
to one another and communicate their trust state. Work is also moving forward on defining protocols necessary for
communicating and interpreting the trust state.
In other words, there are other vendors producing TPM silicon. Intel is one of the late-comers for sample hardware, not the sole driving vendor that Larry Loeb seems to think they are.
You're right -- the format that has the most content (i.e. movies and games) available at local shops will be the one that wins the format war. The other may have some penetration in the computer industry for data, but it's content that sells the consumer.
Look at Sony's SACD. You can't find content other than what Sony themselves sell, and even that is almost impossible to find except by going online. DVD Audio may not be technically as good, but it's what people buy when given a choice. What's the point of buying a player that has nothing to play?
Far more likely is that some button-mashing shopper was "testing" the remote and played around with the settings. Sales staff in most stores don't have a real vested interest in getting you to buy one model or another, and fewer still would think of messing with the settings to make a model look bad.
The real margins are in selling "extended warranties", not the actual sets.
Linux is going to need a serious migration plan. It will need to install on machines next to Window, leaving that completely intact and easy to return to, and carry over all or nearly all of the user's data and settings.
For the mom & pop user, migration isn't really as much of an issue as it's being made out to be. I know far too many people who lost most or all of their data to a dead hard drive, a failed windows upgrade, or a virus attack.
What is an issue is that the typical home user doesn't have the technical knowledge to set up something so basic as an internet connection without guidance from their ISP, and far too few ISPs have any Linux experience. Some ISPs even go out of their way to ensure that you must use Windows-style DHCP to configure an internet connection, and poison the DNS cache if you just do a forward-first to their DNS servers.
Once a box is set up properly, the second issue becomes ease of use with websites. As dangerous as it is to do so, the mom & pop home users expect to be able to just click "Ok" when a website wants to install some ActiveX control. If they can't do that, or see an "IE only" website warning, they curse the computer as being broken, not the website as being poorly designed.
The focus needs to be on getting the overall user experience to be smooth and relatively seemless, not just spinning wheels on trying to migrate obfuscated Microsoft data.
This is a small company that uses canned software (POS systems), so they don't even have a company website, much less websites run by individual locations. The floppies are created and read by a POS package that is about 15-20 years old.
They toyed with the idea of a centralized inventory database, but scrapped the idea when they realized that a network outage would mean that a location would be unable to sell inventory. Retail doesn't tolerate "solutions" that put their ability to sell product at risk.
Canadian politicians waste a lot of their time on proposals and posturing, knowing full well that it's not going to pass into law. The one advantage to the public is that a few politicians gains some education as to why a proposal is a bad idea. Of course the politicians themselves see it primarily as an opportunity to grandstand and garner some attention for all the "work" they do.
Don't forget all the civil servants and contractors who'll be hired to "study" the issue so amendments and changes can be proposed. All in all it should take them a good five years and a half to a few million dollars to decide that it's ok for search engines to crawl websites that are implicitly copyrighted.
If you check http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html, you'll note that there are no date range options to the robots.txt file. In other words, you can't specify that historical data is to be excluded.
Aside from that, posting a robots.txt file after the lawsuit is like republishing source code under a different license. The new license does not affect the licensing of older copies of the code other people have saved away.
If you were allowed to expect caches to retroactively honor robots.txt, you could expect a flood of lawsuits from unscrupulous people adding robots.txt to their websites after they'd been added to archives.
A company I work with uses floppies for shipping invoices. They're sent with packages between their locations, and used to load the inventory information for the shipment.
I can't imagine them going to bulkier CDRW's just to move around a 100KB zip file of data, and USB keys would be horrendously expensive for the task. (The keys sell for about the same price as the shipping contents themselves!)
Maybe someday RFID will be a suitable replacement, but we're not there yet.
I have to admit video games are a great hook for the industry. The vast majority of good programmers I've known over the years were into gaming, and many got into the computer industry with dreams of writing games themselves.
One thing about learning to code those old systems is that you ran right on the metal with assembler or even machine code in some cases. Languages like C or C++ were just another way of expressing the same constructs a bit faster, allowing the experienced "metal coder" to turn out applications and tools that ran far better and faster than most people think reasonable.
With the never-ending crunch to support more users and data on shrinking hardware budgets, the hardcore techie still has work while the average programmer may take a couple years to find another job.
Of course the hardcore techie starts out being tough to manage, because what they really want to do often has little do do with the work that's actually to be done. But if you find a manager who can appease the hardcore techie while getting them to do the real work, you can end up with an extremely productive and cost-effective team -- especially if your "techies" have a knack for applying solutions from other problem spaces to the issues at hand.
Their "Honor" system patent has me worried, too. I know of several bank transaction systems and some credit card processing systems that already take this kind of an approach. I fail to see why the idea would be considered patentable -- especially when it's completely outside the product sales market that the judge defined for Amazon's existing patent.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously.
It's time to put an end to the con-artists and crackpots who abuse patent and trademark law to try to make a quick buck off the hard work that others have done. As this particular fellow is clearly beyond redemption or reform, let's just save everyone the hassle and invest in a .30-06 shell and have done with the bastard.
I keep reading about sites that are IE-only, yet I rarely run into a site that doesn't render in Mozilla. The only exception I can think of is a gaming site whose patch downloader will only work with IE, and Microsoft's own update site.
Maybe if I were visiting more home-brewed sites instead of commercial/large sites I'd have more problems.
And why would HP expect that this isn't an issue for Sun or IBM? IBM in particular has a huge patent portfolio that it uses as a negotiation chip when it wants to acquire technology from other companies that it doesn't want to buy outright. The technology (code and patent use) exchanged as part of the deal is still the property of the respective originators, so you can't relicense those components under the GPL.
As far as I know, even the open-source version of Solaris isn't the entire Solaris code base. Releasing the code base under the GPL might well prevent Sun from retaining ownership of the components it hasn't released, particularly if they rely on linking to the running kernel.
Besides, how long do you think the lifespan of a CEO would be if they turned over control of the licensing to a third party instead of relying on the corp's own legal team? Thats what happens with the GPL -- the terms are defined by the authors of the GPL, and they can change those terms with a new release of the license.
I find it interesting that despite everyone's worry that Apple was moving to Intel for the sake of Intel's DRM chips (Another Theory on Apple's Move To Intel), it's an Infineon chip being used to enforce the DRM. Even more amusing is that it's the Rosetta emulation software that is using the DRM, not the kernel itself.
Personally I think it's a good move for Apple. It lets them lock down their proprietary components without impacting the open source core of the system.
It also provides a "how to" example of lock-down that isn't dependant on the kernel itself for implementation. You don't need to pay for and install an entire OS upgrade ala Microsoft just to lock down one component running on the system (e.g. a media player.)
Way back around 1988-1990 I had an interview with a company that had developed and marketed caller id triggered lookups. Before the receiver even picked up the phone, the computer would already be retrieving customer account information and other notes so the receiver wouldn't need to waste anyone's time retrieving the information manually. Obviously the information retrieved and stored was more detailed than just a generic note (which was only one data field in the system.)
Many IVR (interactive voice response aka automated answering services) also use such technology to do information retrieval and storage.
The patent applied for by Microsoft is a toy in comparison, and the only thing "new" is using the computing resources of an integrated device like a cell phone instead of multi-line call center hardware.
In other words, they seem to be trying to patent the idea of performing the processing for the case where n = 1. Pathetic, but typical of their single-user mentality.
But that's precisely the point -- the issue is handled by language or OS libraries and would be updated without changing the program code. Even mainframe applications have to be periodically rebound to the system libraries, though the source code itself may have been lost.
You have to go out of your way to have problems with leap seconds, time zones, etc.
I don't see how the problem occurs in the first place. The internal clock used by computers is integer based, and converted by the OS or programming APIs to readable strings.
Oracle, Sybase, DB/2, and presumably other RDBMS software stores date/time using internal numeric formats and converts that to YMD HMS strings when the values are retrieved by code.
Mainframe systems written in COBOL use library APIs for their date/time manipulation, which properly allow for leap seconds. IIRC, even ancient PL/I code relies on such libraries.
When I worked on HP RTE-A systems to do satellite control (almost 20 years ago), we used integers counting seconds and milliseconds as time references, not "human readable" date fields.
Unless some "not invented here" bozo is writing their own date/time manipulation code instead of relying on the system/language libraries there should be no problem with leap seconds.
And lets not forget that all the major systems code was re-examined and retooled to deal with Y2K, so there is absolutely no excuse for existing code that doesn't deal with date/time properly.
Neither the article nor the patent application mentions anything about $500/mo. for maps, nor any of the other pricing that the /. text mentions.
Maybe the /. article itself should be modded as "flamebait." :)
Given that Google is a known competitor for Microsoft both in terms of region and approach (search engines and other content), I don't understand what the big issue is with this fellow being blocked from taking the job with Google.
You wouldn't expect GM to allow an engineer that designed their fuel injection systems to go work on fuel injection systems for Ford without a fight, so why would you expect Microsoft to quietly allow one of their executives to jump ship to a competitor? Especially when the duties of the new position have so much overlap with the position he just left?
Telus has some notorious issues with how they run the business, service customers, and pay their subcontractors.
The union is, however, living in a fantasy world. Rates for telecom services have dropped over the past several years. There is competition from broadband phone services (including vonage.ca), alternative cellular providers, and alternative ISPs. The days of the near monopoly by the big provincial telcos are over, as are the obscene profits they used to generate.
Unions will simply have to accept that the telco and computer industries of 2005 are being hit by the same kind of competition that destroyed local manufacturing firms 15-20 years ago. Demanding huge salary increases, guaranteed jobs, etc. is completely unrealistic.
Telus, OTOH, needs to realize that pimp-slapping their customers, their staff, and their suppliers is no way to run a business. They're also living in an old fantasy world where the telcos got away with such nonsense because they were a near monopoly.
Ok, so we have this OS/2 computer locked up in a freakin' safe. It has no ASCII keyboard, no floppy, CD, or DVD drive. It uses a private network of hard encryption to communicate with a host, and it has no "default" services running on it.
Assuming you do find an exploit from the source code, just how do you intend to launch an attack on this literally iron-clad box in the ATM?
It seems perfectly consistent to me. If you get behind the wheel while intoxicated, you've just pulled the trigger of a loaded gun.
Now it just remains to be seen if you're a "good shot" or not...
The ESRB Ratings (http://www.esrb.org/esrbratings_guide.asp) were properly applied to the published content of the game. You cannot expect the reviewers to examine content that is only accessible by modifying the game.
Rockstar should have removed the content from the game instead of just leaving it disconnected, but it's not the ESRB's fault it was hidden instead of removed.
What's next -- parents start ranting about Half-Life 2 because someone did a nude skin for Alyx? If someone creates a scripted mod that uses a video game engine to do virtual porn should the ESRB be blamed?
If the ESRB has already rated a game as Mature, what is it these rabid parent groups expect everyone else to do? It is up to the parents to ensure their children aren't buying these games. It is up to the parents to ensure their relatives aren't giving these games as gifts. It is up to the parents to ensure their children's friends aren't bringing the games over to play.
It is not society's responsibility to censor such content just in case some parents are too lazy or inept to keep an eye on their own kids.
From http://www.intel.com/technology/magazine/standards /st01041.pdf:
In other words, there are other vendors producing TPM silicon. Intel is one of the late-comers for sample hardware, not the sole driving vendor that Larry Loeb seems to think they are.
I'd file Larry's theory under "Tinfoil/Paranoia."
You're right -- the format that has the most content (i.e. movies and games) available at local shops will be the one that wins the format war. The other may have some penetration in the computer industry for data, but it's content that sells the consumer.
Look at Sony's SACD. You can't find content other than what Sony themselves sell, and even that is almost impossible to find except by going online. DVD Audio may not be technically as good, but it's what people buy when given a choice. What's the point of buying a player that has nothing to play?
Far more likely is that some button-mashing shopper was "testing" the remote and played around with the settings. Sales staff in most stores don't have a real vested interest in getting you to buy one model or another, and fewer still would think of messing with the settings to make a model look bad.
The real margins are in selling "extended warranties", not the actual sets.
For the mom & pop user, migration isn't really as much of an issue as it's being made out to be. I know far too many people who lost most or all of their data to a dead hard drive, a failed windows upgrade, or a virus attack.
What is an issue is that the typical home user doesn't have the technical knowledge to set up something so basic as an internet connection without guidance from their ISP, and far too few ISPs have any Linux experience. Some ISPs even go out of their way to ensure that you must use Windows-style DHCP to configure an internet connection, and poison the DNS cache if you just do a forward-first to their DNS servers.
Once a box is set up properly, the second issue becomes ease of use with websites. As dangerous as it is to do so, the mom & pop home users expect to be able to just click "Ok" when a website wants to install some ActiveX control. If they can't do that, or see an "IE only" website warning, they curse the computer as being broken, not the website as being poorly designed.
The focus needs to be on getting the overall user experience to be smooth and relatively seemless, not just spinning wheels on trying to migrate obfuscated Microsoft data.
This is a small company that uses canned software (POS systems), so they don't even have a company website, much less websites run by individual locations. The floppies are created and read by a POS package that is about 15-20 years old.
They toyed with the idea of a centralized inventory database, but scrapped the idea when they realized that a network outage would mean that a location would be unable to sell inventory. Retail doesn't tolerate "solutions" that put their ability to sell product at risk.
Canadian politicians waste a lot of their time on proposals and posturing, knowing full well that it's not going to pass into law. The one advantage to the public is that a few politicians gains some education as to why a proposal is a bad idea. Of course the politicians themselves see it primarily as an opportunity to grandstand and garner some attention for all the "work" they do.
Don't forget all the civil servants and contractors who'll be hired to "study" the issue so amendments and changes can be proposed. All in all it should take them a good five years and a half to a few million dollars to decide that it's ok for search engines to crawl websites that are implicitly copyrighted.
If you check http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html, you'll note that there are no date range options to the robots.txt file. In other words, you can't specify that historical data is to be excluded.
Aside from that, posting a robots.txt file after the lawsuit is like republishing source code under a different license. The new license does not affect the licensing of older copies of the code other people have saved away.
If you were allowed to expect caches to retroactively honor robots.txt, you could expect a flood of lawsuits from unscrupulous people adding robots.txt to their websites after they'd been added to archives.
A company I work with uses floppies for shipping invoices. They're sent with packages between their locations, and used to load the inventory information for the shipment. I can't imagine them going to bulkier CDRW's just to move around a 100KB zip file of data, and USB keys would be horrendously expensive for the task. (The keys sell for about the same price as the shipping contents themselves!) Maybe someday RFID will be a suitable replacement, but we're not there yet.
Given Microsoft's upcoming DRM support, that line should have read "... control over the MS-approved software that runs on their computers."
I have to admit video games are a great hook for the industry. The vast majority of good programmers I've known over the years were into gaming, and many got into the computer industry with dreams of writing games themselves.
One thing about learning to code those old systems is that you ran right on the metal with assembler or even machine code in some cases. Languages like C or C++ were just another way of expressing the same constructs a bit faster, allowing the experienced "metal coder" to turn out applications and tools that ran far better and faster than most people think reasonable.
With the never-ending crunch to support more users and data on shrinking hardware budgets, the hardcore techie still has work while the average programmer may take a couple years to find another job.
Of course the hardcore techie starts out being tough to manage, because what they really want to do often has little do do with the work that's actually to be done. But if you find a manager who can appease the hardcore techie while getting them to do the real work, you can end up with an extremely productive and cost-effective team -- especially if your "techies" have a knack for applying solutions from other problem spaces to the issues at hand.
Their "Honor" system patent has me worried, too. I know of several bank transaction systems and some credit card processing systems that already take this kind of an approach. I fail to see why the idea would be considered patentable -- especially when it's completely outside the product sales market that the judge defined for Amazon's existing patent.