1. Discovering infringement, sueing, battling in court and working out that settlement might be a good idea, AND
2. Threatning a community AND a comany on "alleged" patent infringements with non-existent patent numbers non-existent court case and demanding "settlement" before the case reaches the courts!
(1) is what happens in pretty much most of civil patent litigations! Lengthy court debacles only richens the lawyers! So people DO settle out of court you know ?
It is really targeted at poeple who find IT confusing and needs to get an idea of what it is. It categorises and simplifies - maybe in a useful way for people who need an introduction. But again: not for the slashdot audience. Move on.
Read the article again, it's focussed on the non-technical people managing technical people. Yeah, right - one of the "people who find IT confusing" can be YOUR boss tomorrow !! (Surprize!!!!)
When the sh*t hits the fan, you'd need to know what to point her to, and more-importantly - to know what the hell she's been reading!
When you need to babysit your boss, every bit of knowledge helps:-)
I think this problem applies to all software out there.
One has bigger problems than malicious people planting trojans if they can't audit every line of their "mission critical" software OR hardware.
Would you trust your respirator and other hospital life support system to unaudited code whether or not it has been written by malicious people ? If not, then why should anyone trust his defense system ?
I remember there was a story long back about "intelligent guns" that identify their owners. No one thought it'd be a good idea since no one really knew the "identification" part and no one had 100% trust in it (apart from other strategic issues). If one doesn't trust a gun, what chances are of trusting a missile defense system ?
Unaudited code is untrusted code! It doesn't matter who wrote it.
Ideas are dime a dozen! You can have an "idea" for a perpetual motion machine, but that doesn't mean you can sit on it. Execute something and then patent it!!!
Gosh, aren't we already sick of bozos patenting "idea" of 'doing an auction... uh.. using a computer' ? How'd google be any different if they did the same ?
And BTW, Google couldn't have pulled off execution of the idea. It isn't like you shove a truck load of white boxes in there and expect them to magically work given the heat outputs (except if you're running them in Antarctica)!
SUN and Google have a long partnership and SUN has some pretty cool (both metaphorically and literally!) processors and machines. 40 of the thumpers and may be a dozen of the T2K mean you have a real serious powerhouse with a petabyte of storage !!!
So its an answer that you should arrive at pretty quickly once you frame your questions right!
BTW, I'm research oriented, faced with same situation I'd have traded the offer from both Microsoft and Google to getting an offer at Microsoft Research (or second choice: SUN Research division)!
I am disheartened by reading the comments... people, PLEASE for once in life go and read Java EE specs and see what it is intended to do.
Java EE is a framework to write business applications, for any kind of business, from issue trackers to ERP, the "business" in it doesn't mean "$$$ business" literally.
When writing business applications, it tries to enforce you to separate your concerns, especially, the presentation layer (Servlets & JSP), the business logic (EJB) and enterprize information systems (EIS) (JDBC, EJB container managed persistence etc). Its a complete stack for developing applications.
AJAX deals with presentation layer, and more specifically, the interaction part of it. its a piece in the whole stack. The Java EE presentation layer does NOT depend on even having an HTML frontend even! (no sane framework does!).
So now, if you have an HTML/XML browser frontend and a human user using it, you may use AJAX for enhanced user experiece. There is nothing in Java EE that says you cannot take your favorite AJAX toolkit and use that to build your frontend.
So both technologies are not even competing on even a single issue. Both are complementary. You can use Java EE stack to develop your application, and when time comes to develop the frontend, you choose from plain old HTML, XHTML, XML, AJAX etc (or a combination thereof), to develop your application's "frontend".
Please stop this ignorant war. To make another bad/. analogy, its like car lovers and music system fans fighting with each other that the other is not like their's!
I have been tracking the "opensource Java" for quite sometime. One thing I could not understand is why all the hype behind SUN's implementation of Java ??
Java is an open standard, anyone can go and implement his own pet implementation of Java, except that but for few major sharks (SUN, IBM, BEA...) no ne has quite been able to get a production quality implementation out of the door!
So why is everyone after SUN's goat ? SUN's JDK/JRE are just damn ONE of the many implementations of Java that exist. Where is Open source's sugar daddy IBM (which makes quite a ton of money from its Java application servers etc) ? Why doesn't IBM jump into the fray and opensource its implementation to poke a finger at SUN etc ? Why not BEA ? Why only SUN ?
Repeat after me- The JDK/JRE from SUN is only ONE of the MANY implementations of Java available... others ARE infact available from IBM, BEA, GNU, Kaffe et al.
1. Erm, a Christian religious body is endorsing opensource 2. FreeBSD is opensource 3. FreeBSD mascot is a devil'ish cartoon with a pitchfork 4. => Religious society endorsing devil.
Heaven and Hell meeting... angels and devils hugging in sky, flowers falling down from sky!!!!!
If you're already running SAN over FC, then seriously look at SUN Solaris with ZFS. It would save you tons of headaches over RAID5 (write holes, bad data on disk... etc).
Sorry, but you're totally mistaken about BerkeleyDB. Its just a database engine. i.e. you give it a key and value pair and it stores them. You give it the key and it retrieves the value. There is support for foreign keys and its completely transactional, but there is no SQL interface and no 'datatypes' whatsoever.
It'd take some time to figure out what exactly is Oracle trying to do with it.
Yes it is disturbing that two leading browsers (IE and Safari) on two leading desktop OSs (Windows and OSX ) render this phishing site as HTML... thus playing their part in laying down the trap!
FILE A BUG REPORT !! Violation of standards is *not* a good thing and this is a clear cut baked and dried example of where it causes real agony to users who get trapped!
Side note: For unknown sites, I use Opera (near perfect record with security), and Firefox. Opera is better because most crap sites won't work with it anyways;)
Extension and content-type/MIME should matter for filtering.
The point in the case is that if someboy wants to share source of some page, and lets say save it as text file, he should be allowed to do so, as by nature and by public belief plain text files MUST NOT cause any damage. It is plain content and should be redistributable without restrictions! If we go along on that path of banning and filtering text files it would be a sad day of extremem censorship some time in future...
Another point, if extension/MIME cannot be reliably banked upon should filters scan EACH and EVERY file on the hosting server ? all.tar.gz, all.zips, all.bins ?? It puts a lot of unnecessary burden on resources for people who are trying to do a voluntary social service by filtering/tagging possible phishing content.
No it does NOT prevent phishing scams, but actually IE actually makes various online hosting providers' anti-phishing filters useless. If someone hosts a text (yeah,.txt) file with HTML, *only* IE renders it as an HTML page.
One of my friends who was drowsy late night after cramming for exams, got phished!!! All fault of IE and partially his (being too drowsy!)... by this site : http://newphotosfamyli.bravehost.com/link2.txt
(Yeah, the site is still up after being reported to concerned people! If someone knows this fellow please punch him in the gut for me, thanks!).
MS IE : Shell code execution exploit/DOS Firefox : DoS Mozilla : DoS Safari : DoS (Some versions reortedly unaffected) Opera : *Totally Immune*
Gosh, I'm wasting time here. Ever since I switched to Opera, I *never* had to deal with any of this browser DoS or exploit nonsense. (Yeah its immune to even "while(1) alert('haha');" type of DoS, [CTRL-W] takes care of it.)
" At a rated 1200MIPS per core a die with eight of them would net you close to 9600MIPS max. Of course you'd need some form of L2 cache and high speed internal bus."
Cache is not as small issue as you think. In most modern processors, 50%-75% of die is taken by cache alone. So do you math again taking half to quarter of die size.
How'd you figure out a patient's "personal details" from a CAT scan or MRI image ? As long as it just has a tag with it and no personally identifying information with the image, it should be ok.
"Cars are dead, trains are the future" "I didn't happen in 1994, it didn't happen in 1995,..."
And 2005... with gas upto $3/gallon in US and upto $15/gallon in several parts of world (esp after adjusting for purchasing power parity)... soon crude oil will be $100/barrel, so just wait!
Similarily, _someday_ PCs will become relics... and that day is not too far away. Sun saw the potential of cross platform solutions way earlier than everybody else.
Imagine, if they did get to make Java right from start, today major desktop applications would have been java based and transitioning people away from big-company-OS to alternative OS would have been piece of cake. Its the applications that matter to most people out there not OS, and Java would have removed the need to be bound to one OS/platform... but in '95 alternative OSs were hardly 'hot' as they are and need for transition not as much as now.
Ditto, I think ten year hence, we'd revisit this statement and realise its importance in areas not seen right now.
1. Unobstrusive ads (google text ads), commercial != bad, google makes money from ads and your pizza ain't free.
2. These people are pioneers of key browser features. Tabbed browsing, standards support, integrated mail/news/RSS/IRC/BT client, mail labels (what Gmail did later), etc etc
3. Opera folks are in staunch opposition to software patents. Inspite of fact that they did all those features waaay before anybody else, they haven't patented anything. Their CEO said in an statement that Opera is opposed to the concept of software patents.
Folks, the product is worth the money. They are good people(TM) and that is reason enough these days to support them.
It's virtually impossible to detonate a nuclear weapon (if not actually impossible), without arming it first. I don't think a five year old could manage that.
Aaaah, famous last words
psst... you either have a dumb kid, or you're a dumb father
I can't believe nobody wrote this yet... nobody reads articles and submissions anyways:=)
By World War II, in the United States, computing power was measured not in megahertz or teraflops, but in kilogirls.
WOW!! On side note, repetitive jokes involving 'kilogirls' are going to haunt/. for years to come just like beowulf jokes!!!!
Unrelated advice - switch the mouse
on
Advocating Dvorak
·
· Score: 1
Folks,
Dvorak Vs qwerty debates will go on for ages. However, there is one thing you *can* do now for your aching wrists - use mouse with the other hand (left hand if you're a righty, right if you're a lefty).
I got severe CSI problem around two years back. I tried dvorak, didn't find it much difficult, but couldn't stay on it. However, due to severe pain in right hand wrist, I tried using the mouse with left hand. Eureka! It was a little awkward at first, but in a couple of days, I got used to it. The pain in both wrists was gone in a week.
I found that I was using right hand much more due to constant shuffling between keyb and mouse, while left hand was not used as much. Shifting to left handed mouse, evened that out. It specially helps if you need to shuffle between mouse and arrow keys (most GUI editors).
Its been two years since I'm exclusively using mouse with my left hand. Except for FPS games, I don't have any issues and haven't had the throbbing pain in my wrists since then (touch wood!)
I was surprized the first time I came to know that you folks are allowed to use calculators in high school exams!! And can even use programmable graphing calculators in university.
Tell ya somthing. ditch those calculators, and you'll solve half of the problem!
PS: In India, calculators are banned from exams/classes till high school. In university exams/classes you're only allowed to use at max non-prgrammable scientific calculators!
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, an IBM weasel ain't you ?
There is a difference between -
1. Discovering infringement, sueing, battling in court and working out that settlement might be a good idea, AND
2. Threatning a community AND a comany on "alleged" patent infringements with non-existent patent numbers non-existent court case and demanding "settlement" before the case reaches the courts!
(1) is what happens in pretty much most of civil patent litigations! Lengthy court debacles only richens the lawyers! So people DO settle out of court you know ?
It is really targeted at poeple who find IT confusing and needs to get an idea of what it is. It categorises and simplifies - maybe in a useful way for people who need an introduction. But again: not for the slashdot audience. Move on.
:-)
Read the article again, it's focussed on the non-technical people managing technical people. Yeah, right - one of the "people who find IT confusing" can be YOUR boss tomorrow !! (Surprize!!!!)
When the sh*t hits the fan, you'd need to know what to point her to, and more-importantly - to know what the hell she's been reading!
When you need to babysit your boss, every bit of knowledge helps
I think this problem applies to all software out there.
One has bigger problems than malicious people planting trojans if they can't audit every line of their "mission critical" software OR hardware.
Would you trust your respirator and other hospital life support system to unaudited code whether or not it has been written by malicious people ? If not, then why should anyone trust his defense system ?
I remember there was a story long back about "intelligent guns" that identify their owners. No one thought it'd be a good idea since no one really knew the "identification" part and no one had 100% trust in it (apart from other strategic issues). If one doesn't trust a gun, what chances are of trusting a missile defense system ?
Unaudited code is untrusted code! It doesn't matter who wrote it.
So ?
Ideas are dime a dozen! You can have an "idea" for a perpetual motion machine, but that doesn't mean you can sit on it. Execute something and then patent it!!!
Gosh, aren't we already sick of bozos patenting "idea" of 'doing an auction... uh.. using a computer' ? How'd google be any different if they did the same ?
And BTW, Google couldn't have pulled off execution of the idea. It isn't like you shove a truck load of white boxes in there and expect them to magically work given the heat outputs (except if you're running them in Antarctica)!
SUN and Google have a long partnership and SUN has some pretty cool (both metaphorically and literally!) processors and machines. 40 of the thumpers and may be a dozen of the T2K mean you have a real serious powerhouse with a petabyte of storage !!!
So its an answer that you should arrive at pretty quickly once you frame your questions right!
BTW, I'm research oriented, faced with same situation I'd have traded the offer from both Microsoft and Google to getting an offer at Microsoft Research (or second choice: SUN Research division)!
- Akhilesh
I am disheartened by reading the comments... people, PLEASE for once in life go and read Java EE specs and see what it is intended to do.
/. analogy, its like car lovers and music system fans fighting with each other that the other is not like their's!
Java EE is a framework to write business applications, for any kind of business, from issue trackers to ERP, the "business" in it doesn't mean "$$$ business" literally.
When writing business applications, it tries to enforce you to separate your concerns, especially, the presentation layer (Servlets & JSP), the business logic (EJB) and enterprize information systems (EIS) (JDBC, EJB container managed persistence etc). Its a complete stack for developing applications.
AJAX deals with presentation layer, and more specifically, the interaction part of it. its a piece in the whole stack. The Java EE presentation layer does NOT depend on even having an HTML frontend even! (no sane framework does!).
So now, if you have an HTML/XML browser frontend and a human user using it, you may use AJAX for enhanced user experiece. There is nothing in Java EE that says you cannot take your favorite AJAX toolkit and use that to build your frontend.
So both technologies are not even competing on even a single issue. Both are complementary. You can use Java EE stack to develop your application, and when time comes to develop the frontend, you choose from plain old HTML, XHTML, XML, AJAX etc (or a combination thereof), to develop your application's "frontend".
Please stop this ignorant war. To make another bad
I have been tracking the "opensource Java" for quite sometime. One thing I could not understand is why all the hype behind SUN's implementation of Java ??
Java is an open standard, anyone can go and implement his own pet implementation of Java, except that but for few major sharks (SUN, IBM, BEA...) no ne has quite been able to get a production quality implementation out of the door!
So why is everyone after SUN's goat ? SUN's JDK/JRE are just damn ONE of the many implementations of Java that exist. Where is Open source's sugar daddy IBM (which makes quite a ton of money from its Java application servers etc) ? Why doesn't IBM jump into the fray and opensource its implementation to poke a finger at SUN etc ? Why not BEA ? Why only SUN ?
Repeat after me- The JDK/JRE from SUN is only ONE of the MANY implementations of Java available... others ARE infact available from IBM, BEA, GNU, Kaffe et al.
Lets get some facts straight-
1. Erm, a Christian religious body is endorsing opensource
2. FreeBSD is opensource
3. FreeBSD mascot is a devil'ish cartoon with a pitchfork
4. => Religious society endorsing devil.
Heaven and Hell meeting... angels and devils hugging in sky, flowers falling down from sky!!!!!
ewww. Where did I mess up ???
If you're already running SAN over FC, then seriously look at SUN Solaris with ZFS. It would save you tons of headaches over RAID5 (write holes, bad data on disk... etc).
Go through their docs on ZFS at http://www.opensolaris.org/ if your data is important to you.
Sorry, but you're totally mistaken about BerkeleyDB. Its just a database engine. i.e. you give it a key and value pair and it stores them. You give it the key and it retrieves the value. There is support for foreign keys and its completely transactional, but there is no SQL interface and no 'datatypes' whatsoever.
It'd take some time to figure out what exactly is Oracle trying to do with it.
Yes it is disturbing that two leading browsers (IE and Safari) on two leading desktop OSs (Windows and OSX ) render this phishing site as HTML... thus playing their part in laying down the trap!
;)
FILE A BUG REPORT !! Violation of standards is *not* a good thing and this is a clear cut baked and dried example of where it causes real agony to users who get trapped!
Side note: For unknown sites, I use Opera (near perfect record with security), and Firefox. Opera is better because most crap sites won't work with it anyways
Extension and content-type/MIME should matter for filtering.
.tar.gz, all .zips, all .bins ?? It puts a lot of unnecessary burden on resources for people who are trying to do a voluntary social service by filtering/tagging possible phishing content.
The point in the case is that if someboy wants to share source of some page, and lets say save it as text file, he should be allowed to do so, as by nature and by public belief plain text files MUST NOT cause any damage. It is plain content and should be redistributable without restrictions! If we go along on that path of banning and filtering text files it would be a sad day of extremem censorship some time in future...
Another point, if extension/MIME cannot be reliably banked upon should filters scan EACH and EVERY file on the hosting server ? all
No it does NOT prevent phishing scams, but actually IE actually makes various online hosting providers' anti-phishing filters useless. If someone hosts a text (yeah, .txt) file with HTML, *only* IE renders it as an HTML page.
One of my friends who was drowsy late night after cramming for exams, got phished!!! All fault of IE and partially his (being too drowsy!)... by this site : http://newphotosfamyli.bravehost.com/link2.txt
(Yeah, the site is still up after being reported to concerned people! If someone knows this fellow please punch him in the gut for me, thanks!).
More details and comparison of how Opera, Firefox and IE handle this phishing site are in my blog : http://blog.mritunjai.com/2006/04/23/gone-phishing /
Effect of this code:
MS IE : Shell code execution exploit/DOS
Firefox : DoS
Mozilla : DoS
Safari : DoS (Some versions reortedly unaffected)
Opera : *Totally Immune*
Gosh, I'm wasting time here. Ever since I switched to Opera, I *never* had to deal with any of this browser DoS or exploit nonsense. (Yeah its immune to even "while(1) alert('haha');" type of DoS, [CTRL-W] takes care of it.)
" At a rated 1200MIPS per core a die with eight of them would net you close to 9600MIPS max. Of course you'd need some form of L2 cache and high speed internal bus."
Cache is not as small issue as you think. In most modern processors, 50%-75% of die is taken by cache alone. So do you math again taking half to quarter of die size.
How'd you figure out a patient's "personal details" from a CAT scan or MRI image ? As long as it just has a tag with it and no personally identifying information with the image, it should be ok.
"Cars are dead, trains are the future"
"I didn't happen in 1994, it didn't happen in 1995,..."
And 2005... with gas upto $3/gallon in US and upto $15/gallon in several parts of world (esp after adjusting for purchasing power parity)... soon crude oil will be $100/barrel, so just wait!
Similarily, _someday_ PCs will become relics... and that day is not too far away. Sun saw the potential of cross platform solutions way earlier than everybody else.
Imagine, if they did get to make Java right from start, today major desktop applications would have been java based and transitioning people away from big-company-OS to alternative OS would have been piece of cake. Its the applications that matter to most people out there not OS, and Java would have removed the need to be bound to one OS/platform... but in '95 alternative OSs were hardly 'hot' as they are and need for transition not as much as now.
Ditto, I think ten year hence, we'd revisit this statement and realise its importance in areas not seen right now.
Opera inc are actually a nice bunch of folks:
1. Unobstrusive ads (google text ads), commercial != bad, google makes money from ads and your pizza ain't free.
2. These people are pioneers of key browser features. Tabbed browsing, standards support, integrated mail/news/RSS/IRC/BT client, mail labels (what Gmail did later), etc etc
3. Opera folks are in staunch opposition to software patents. Inspite of fact that they did all those features waaay before anybody else, they haven't patented anything. Their CEO said in an statement that Opera is opposed to the concept of software patents.
Folks, the product is worth the money. They are good people(TM) and that is reason enough these days to support them.
It's virtually impossible to detonate a nuclear weapon (if not actually impossible), without arming it first. I don't think a five year old could manage that.
Aaaah, famous last words
psst... you either have a dumb kid, or you're a dumb father
I'm sleep deprieved, but have a fundamental question... the article said they only simulated 'dark matter' and produced 'breath-taking images'!!
Breath-taking images of *DARK MATTER* ??? WTF
By World War II, in the United States, computing power was measured not in megahertz or teraflops, but in kilogirls.
WOW!! On side note, repetitive jokes involving 'kilogirls' are going to haunt /. for years to come just like beowulf jokes!!!!
Folks,
Dvorak Vs qwerty debates will go on for ages. However, there is one thing you *can* do now for your aching wrists - use mouse with the other hand (left hand if you're a righty, right if you're a lefty).
I got severe CSI problem around two years back. I tried dvorak, didn't find it much difficult, but couldn't stay on it. However, due to severe pain in right hand wrist, I tried using the mouse with left hand. Eureka! It was a little awkward at first, but in a couple of days, I got used to it. The pain in both wrists was gone in a week.
I found that I was using right hand much more due to constant shuffling between keyb and mouse, while left hand was not used as much. Shifting to left handed mouse, evened that out. It specially helps if you need to shuffle between mouse and arrow keys (most GUI editors).
Its been two years since I'm exclusively using mouse with my left hand. Except for FPS games, I don't have any issues and haven't had the throbbing pain in my wrists since then (touch wood!)
Did you mean "Kontextual Linkage Engine" ?? ;-)
I would rather put it this way-
I WANT the choice of umpteen skins and looks -- BUT I want at least ONE that WORKS PROPERLY/PERFECTLY!
Others are great for fun... but the 'proper' one is what I should have at my disposal when I need to deliver something on deadline!
I was surprized the first time I came to know that you folks are allowed to use calculators in high school exams!! And can even use programmable graphing calculators in university.
Tell ya somthing. ditch those calculators, and you'll solve half of the problem!
PS: In India, calculators are banned from exams/classes till high school. In university exams/classes you're only allowed to use at max non-prgrammable scientific calculators!