First and foremost, and very generally: just because a patent is superficially like something that already exists, that in itself doesn't mean the patent was either obvious, or automatically invalidated by prior art.
Second, and more topically, I don't know when this IntelliScreen softwareâ"which, by the way, is NOT an SDK app, but only for people who have a jailbroken iPhoneâ"came out, but the AppleInsider article clearly states that the "quick settings" patent was filed last December, and the "notification screen" patent was filed a few months before that! That is a little hazy, but could easily mean that it was filed before the iPhone was actually released to the public.
So while it is certainly possible that the filing still post-dates the release of the IntelliScreen software, I don't see how Apple can be expected to troll through every completely unsupported hacked up app for the iPhone just to see if something they've got planned to patent has already been thought up. That may not prevent the patent from being invalidated by the (potential) prior art of IntelliScreen, but it certainly puts the kibosh on the idea that Apple "stole" the idea. (I pay pretty close attention to news & stuff about the iPhone myself, and this is the first time I've heard about anything remotely resembling IntelliScreen, so it can't be a ubiquitous killer app).
But no, the truth, however obvious it may be, is boring. It's far, far more fun to run around screaming and pointing at Apple and saying, "THEY'RE STEALING OUR IDEAS! EVIL! EVIL!"
Good bleeding grief, Jonathan Zdziarski, grow up, get a clue, and stop trying to get page hits on your blog.
You repeatedly use the word "Libertarian". I am no Libertarian.
You have stated this repeatedly, but I must say that that leaves me wondering what you call yourself. Are you just attempting to distance yourself from the American Libertarian party? Or do you really believe that your ideals are distinct from what is generally called libertarianism? (Not trying to claim that they are not distinct; merely that they appear, from my perspective, to be similar...)
On that level, door locks, bank vaults and body armor don't work either. There is always a way around a protection mechanism.
Your analogy only works if, as soon as someone first picks a Master Lock Model 72365-A3, every other lock of that model in the world unlocks, and as soon as one person finds a weakness in body armour design UBA-3X4C5/6A, every other body armour of that type simply falls apart.
No, I know it's not *quite* that simple, but it approaches that. DRM isn't like a physical lock because it isn't required to carefully examine every single copy of a game locked with that DRM scheme and carefully hand-craft a one-off crack. Once {Insert New AAA Game Here} is cracked once by someone (or some group) who does this all the time, possibly even for money (directly or indirectly), everyone in the world has the opportunity to download the crack and the game, or just the cracked version of the game.
So you are correct that it will deter many casual pirates, especially if it is itself unobtrusive, but no, DRM does not work anything like a door lock or a suit of body armour.
Forgive me for my ignorance (and I haven't RTFA), but my understanding of RFID is the only way to tell what an RFID device is is by listening to it broadcast. Well, if you listen to a device broadcast enough, particularly if you listen in on a conversation between it and what it's supposed to talk to...doesn't it then become relatively simple to create your own RFID device that broadcasts all the same things as the original chip, and responds in all the same ways to input?
Seems to me it's just another instance of "DRM doesn't work," only in this case all the communication between supposedly secure nodes literally has to take place in the open air...
The need for a refund is not because you got Windows when you bought the laptop and want to get rid of it. If all you want to do is get rid of Windows, that's not difficult.
The need for a refund is because you paid for Windows when you bought the laptop. How much of the price was the Windows license? I dunno, but unless they're going to start claiming that putting Windows on something is bad and thus should make it cheaper (which I personally agree with, but doubt that most would;-) ), it should be some non-zero dollar amount.
It isn't at all unreasonable to be willing to sell a domain you own to someone with more use for it.
However, there have been some prominent instances in which a domain owner was successfully sued for control of the domain on the basis that they were willing to accept money for it, and thus, they were just domain-squatters.
Whether we like it—or agree with it—or not, the Bible is something that is very important to a very large number of people on Earth. Genesis, in particular (and much of the rest of the Old Testament) represents a creation myth believed to lesser or greater extent by 3.8 billion of our 6 billion-odd people (Wikipedia's estimate of the number of believers in Abrahamic religions).
Just because we agnostic or atheist geeks think that such things are embarrassing doesn't make it any less representative of the world we live in.
Fair enough—and I agree. It's just that I've come across far, far too many people who think that Javascript is another version of Java, or another name for Java, or derived from Java, or otherwise related to Java, simply because of the unfortunate similarity in their names.
Yeah, great. Now you just have to put in the whole thermodynamic cycle:
1. Switch on
2. Establish thermal contact to hot side, wait for heat to leak.
3. Cut thermal contact to hot side.
4. Switch off.
5. Establish thermal contact to cold side, wait for "cold" to leak.
6. Cut thermal contact to cold side.
7. GOTO 1.
8. ????
9. Profit!!
I like how the last 2 steps are unreachable...are you trying to say something about the viability of this technology?;-)
Learn to read, Anonymous Moron. His choices are 1) pay money, 2) pay money, 3) go unsupported. Your suggestion will not work for someone with a simple shared hosting account like his.
First, I think that the most important line in the article is this one:
But there is absolutely no excuse for it to be significanly less inviting to a normal user than an unencrypted site.
The FF3 behaviour will make most normal users just think, "Oh, the website is broken. I guess I can't go there." They won't even read the error message: they'll just see that there is one, and give up.
Or, depending on IE's behaviour (which I do not know in this particular case), they'll see, "Oh, I can't get to this website in Firefox. But hey, it works fine in Internet Explorer! I guess Firefox is broken, and I won't use it anymore."
Second, and probably more importantly, either you missed a very, very important demographic among those who use self-signed certificates, or otherwise don't want to pay the extortionate fees charged by the corporate CAs, or you severely misunderstand and underestimate the importance of "unprofessional" and "hobbyist" webmasters.
Just because I want to have the possibility of encrypted traffic for visitors to my website doesn't mean that I'm bringing in loads of money by said website, or that I want to spend some not insignificant sum on a recurring basis for what is, for me, just a fun hobby, for which I'm already shelling out a not insignificant sum for hosting.
I'm seriously hoping that your definition of "unprofessional webhosters" means "people running for-profit websites (that actually make a profit) who are just too cheap to actually buy a certificate," and not simply "amateurs," because it is on the backs of those amateurs that the web was built.
What were some of the applications X and Y where you couldn't copy from X to Y? Do you happen to know what versions of what toolkits they were using?
Afraid I don't recall offhand right now. This was a while ago: fortunately, I don't often need the ability to copy text back and forth in Linux (largely because I don't use it an awful lot, beyond command-line stuff that I almost always do through SSH from my Mac).
Given that the same problems appear on *BSD, Solaris, etc., it's not due to the anything of Linux, unless it's "the X11-based window system of Linux".
Bah. Pedantry. You know what I meant.:-P
Actually, there is a pasteboard/clipboard mechanism that all toolkits can count on and, if they all use it, apps can count on it as well. It's the X11 "selections" mechanism, combined with the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD selections from the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual; see the X11 clipboard convention document.
In that case, it's even more unforgivable that it's not universally followed.
So what? Why is it not good for Google to have competition? Are "not evil" monopolies desireable?
Did I say anything of the kind?
My assumption, from the fact that PageRank is patented (and which several people have said is erroneous), was that the algorithm itself, or at least a version of it, was made public knowledge when it was patented. That is, after all, the entire original purpose of a patent: you make the means of creating your invention completely public, and in return, you are granted a limited monopoly on the ability to produce it.
If the PageRank patent were declared invalid, the algorithm would still be exposed to the public (if it was, in fact, exposed in the first place), and others would be able to use the algorithm Google came up with (and which Google probably would not have revealed to the public in the first place if it were not patentable, instead keeping it as a trade secret) to compete with Google, rather than having to come up with their own search algorithms, which might or might not work along the same lines as PageRank.
So no, I don't think that Google is somehow special, and should be exempted from the law: I was merely using them as a prominent example, and one already mentioned in the summary, of the type of problem that will be likely to arise if this rule change actually happens.
You've got to decide whether software patents are good or bad. If it's good for Google to patent the idea of page ranking, then software patents, in general, must be a good idea. If software patents are a bad idea, then allowing Google to have a software patent on the PageRank algorithm is a bad idea.
Oh, I'm not claiming that Google's patent on PageRank should be upheld, or that we should otherwise cherry-pick some software patents to keep and others to throw away. I'm just saying that with a change like this, there will, almost inevitably, be some negative consequences, and one of those may be to Google.
Like I said before, this is clearly a good thing overall.
First of all, can I just say, WOO HOO! This has been far too long in coming!
If this is what it sounds like (and no, I didn't RTFA; way too many links that look like they're probably rich in legalese!), it could pull the rug out from under many patent trolls, and allow a lot more innovation to come back into the US software world.
However, precisely because it has been so long in coming, it could mean a major shakeup of a number of things. One important example is listed right in the summary: Google's PageRank patent. With that invalidated, other search engines can legally use PageRank, without giving Google a dime, which could give them the same searching power as Google.
I can't even begin to speculate what the fallout of this would end up including, but I think it's important not to underestimate it. However, even if there are some short-term negative consequences, I think most of us here will agree that in the long term, at least, this is a big win for everyone (well, everyone but the patent trolls, that is!).
As with an earlier post, that's probably app-specific. I'm sure any developer could (if they wanted) write a new app for OS X and it wouldn't necessarily support copy and paste of everything.
Actually, that would be very difficult, unless you were writing it for X11 on OS X.
If you're using text fields from either of the 2 official OS X APIs (Carbon and Cocoa), you automatically get copy and paste support. You have to deliberately use something nonstandard and unsupported to break it.
On Linux, there are multiple different pasteboard implementations that aren't always cross-compatible. Sometimes I can copy from Application X and paste into Application Y, but not from Y to X. Other times they just won't talk to each other at all. This is, so far as I can tell, due to the highly modular nature of Linux and the often fragmented nature of OSS: there is no one pasteboard implementation, or even one pasteboard API that can be implemented by different libraries, that all apps can count on having available to them on all Linux systems.
And thus does the vast array of choices that Linux offers become a liability. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux—but I'm a programmer, and a sysadmin, and I'm fully capable of using it and dealing with its shortcomings in the user experience area. Many people aren't.
Oh well. Well, remember that OS X runs on top of Darwin, so anything you do via a nice friendly interface you can do via command line. (hint: man niutil to learn how to use it)
Actually, niutil is deprecated now (10.5+). I believe it's been replaced by dscl.
The Mac mini is more expensive than Dell and other generic low-end systems because it's the size of a large hardcover book.
Sure, if all you care about is the specs, that makes it overpriced. But if you actually like having a machine with a small footprint that is quiet and low-power-consumption, the Mac mini might actually be worth it...even before you take into account the fact that you're getting the ability to run OS X. Which, for some people, is pretty obviously a serious plus.
Slashdot Mirror
First and foremost, and very generally: just because a patent is superficially like something that already exists, that in itself doesn't mean the patent was either obvious, or automatically invalidated by prior art.
Second, and more topically, I don't know when this IntelliScreen softwareâ"which, by the way, is NOT an SDK app, but only for people who have a jailbroken iPhoneâ"came out, but the AppleInsider article clearly states that the "quick settings" patent was filed last December, and the "notification screen" patent was filed a few months before that! That is a little hazy, but could easily mean that it was filed before the iPhone was actually released to the public.
So while it is certainly possible that the filing still post-dates the release of the IntelliScreen software, I don't see how Apple can be expected to troll through every completely unsupported hacked up app for the iPhone just to see if something they've got planned to patent has already been thought up. That may not prevent the patent from being invalidated by the (potential) prior art of IntelliScreen, but it certainly puts the kibosh on the idea that Apple "stole" the idea. (I pay pretty close attention to news & stuff about the iPhone myself, and this is the first time I've heard about anything remotely resembling IntelliScreen, so it can't be a ubiquitous killer app).
But no, the truth, however obvious it may be, is boring. It's far, far more fun to run around screaming and pointing at Apple and saying, "THEY'RE STEALING OUR IDEAS! EVIL! EVIL!"
Good bleeding grief, Jonathan Zdziarski, grow up, get a clue, and stop trying to get page hits on your blog.
We have been trolled.
Dan Aris
You repeatedly use the word "Libertarian". I am no Libertarian.
You have stated this repeatedly, but I must say that that leaves me wondering what you call yourself. Are you just attempting to distance yourself from the American Libertarian party? Or do you really believe that your ideals are distinct from what is generally called libertarianism? (Not trying to claim that they are not distinct; merely that they appear, from my perspective, to be similar...)
Dan Aris
On that level, door locks, bank vaults and body armor don't work either. There is always a way around a protection mechanism.
Your analogy only works if, as soon as someone first picks a Master Lock Model 72365-A3, every other lock of that model in the world unlocks, and as soon as one person finds a weakness in body armour design UBA-3X4C5/6A, every other body armour of that type simply falls apart.
No, I know it's not *quite* that simple, but it approaches that. DRM isn't like a physical lock because it isn't required to carefully examine every single copy of a game locked with that DRM scheme and carefully hand-craft a one-off crack. Once {Insert New AAA Game Here} is cracked once by someone (or some group) who does this all the time, possibly even for money (directly or indirectly), everyone in the world has the opportunity to download the crack and the game, or just the cracked version of the game.
So you are correct that it will deter many casual pirates, especially if it is itself unobtrusive, but no, DRM does not work anything like a door lock or a suit of body armour.
Dan Aris
Forgive me for my ignorance (and I haven't RTFA), but my understanding of RFID is the only way to tell what an RFID device is is by listening to it broadcast. Well, if you listen to a device broadcast enough, particularly if you listen in on a conversation between it and what it's supposed to talk to...doesn't it then become relatively simple to create your own RFID device that broadcasts all the same things as the original chip, and responds in all the same ways to input?
Seems to me it's just another instance of "DRM doesn't work," only in this case all the communication between supposedly secure nodes literally has to take place in the open air...
Dan Aris
it does obviate the need for a refund
No, it bloody well doesn't!
The need for a refund is not because you got Windows when you bought the laptop and want to get rid of it. If all you want to do is get rid of Windows, that's not difficult.
The need for a refund is because you paid for Windows when you bought the laptop. How much of the price was the Windows license? I dunno, but unless they're going to start claiming that putting Windows on something is bad and thus should make it cheaper (which I personally agree with, but doubt that most would ;-) ), it should be some non-zero dollar amount.
Dan Aris
Not at all.
It isn't at all unreasonable to be willing to sell a domain you own to someone with more use for it.
However, there have been some prominent instances in which a domain owner was successfully sued for control of the domain on the basis that they were willing to accept money for it, and thus, they were just domain-squatters.
Dan Aris
He may have meant "she works, thus she is in better condition," but he didn't actually say it.
Seems to me you're just looking for someone to argue with.
Oh, wait...this is Slashdot. Carry on, you're in good company ;-)
Dan Aris
Whether we like it—or agree with it—or not, the Bible is something that is very important to a very large number of people on Earth. Genesis, in particular (and much of the rest of the Old Testament) represents a creation myth believed to lesser or greater extent by 3.8 billion of our 6 billion-odd people (Wikipedia's estimate of the number of believers in Abrahamic religions).
Just because we agnostic or atheist geeks think that such things are embarrassing doesn't make it any less representative of the world we live in.
Dan Aris
Oh and once again don't dump on us web programmers.
Heheh, you won't catch me doing that. I'm one myself—I actually code both the front end and the back end. (Our IT team is pretty small.)
Dan Aris
Fair enough—and I agree. It's just that I've come across far, far too many people who think that Javascript is another version of Java, or another name for Java, or derived from Java, or otherwise related to Java, simply because of the unfortunate similarity in their names.
Dan Aris
Javascript is, fundamentally, just as good as Java (and the qualities of Java as a language are, of course, highly debatable).
While that may be true, it's not particularly relevant. Javascript and Java have nothing to do with each other besides the name.
Yes, they both have C-derived syntax, but they are not otherwise related in any way.
Dan Aris
Yeah, great. Now you just have to put in the whole thermodynamic cycle:
1. Switch on
2. Establish thermal contact to hot side, wait for heat to leak.
3. Cut thermal contact to hot side.
4. Switch off.
5. Establish thermal contact to cold side, wait for "cold" to leak.
6. Cut thermal contact to cold side.
7. GOTO 1.
8. ????
9. Profit!!
I like how the last 2 steps are unreachable...are you trying to say something about the viability of this technology? ;-)
Dan Aris
OK, thanks for demonstrating IE's behaviour. That does negate one of my points.
It still bugs me.
Dan Aris
Learn to read, Anonymous Moron. His choices are 1) pay money, 2) pay money, 3) go unsupported. Your suggestion will not work for someone with a simple shared hosting account like his.
Dan Aris
First, I think that the most important line in the article is this one:
But there is absolutely no excuse for it to be significanly less inviting to a normal user than an unencrypted site.
The FF3 behaviour will make most normal users just think, "Oh, the website is broken. I guess I can't go there." They won't even read the error message: they'll just see that there is one, and give up.
Or, depending on IE's behaviour (which I do not know in this particular case), they'll see, "Oh, I can't get to this website in Firefox. But hey, it works fine in Internet Explorer! I guess Firefox is broken, and I won't use it anymore."
Second, and probably more importantly, either you missed a very, very important demographic among those who use self-signed certificates, or otherwise don't want to pay the extortionate fees charged by the corporate CAs, or you severely misunderstand and underestimate the importance of "unprofessional" and "hobbyist" webmasters.
Just because I want to have the possibility of encrypted traffic for visitors to my website doesn't mean that I'm bringing in loads of money by said website, or that I want to spend some not insignificant sum on a recurring basis for what is, for me, just a fun hobby, for which I'm already shelling out a not insignificant sum for hosting.
I'm seriously hoping that your definition of "unprofessional webhosters" means "people running for-profit websites (that actually make a profit) who are just too cheap to actually buy a certificate," and not simply "amateurs," because it is on the backs of those amateurs that the web was built.
Dan Aris
What were some of the applications X and Y where you couldn't copy from X to Y? Do you happen to know what versions of what toolkits they were using?
Afraid I don't recall offhand right now. This was a while ago: fortunately, I don't often need the ability to copy text back and forth in Linux (largely because I don't use it an awful lot, beyond command-line stuff that I almost always do through SSH from my Mac).
Dan Aris
Given that the same problems appear on *BSD, Solaris, etc., it's not due to the anything of Linux, unless it's "the X11-based window system of Linux".
Bah. Pedantry. You know what I meant. :-P
Actually, there is a pasteboard/clipboard mechanism that all toolkits can count on and, if they all use it, apps can count on it as well. It's the X11 "selections" mechanism, combined with the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD selections from the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual; see the X11 clipboard convention document.
In that case, it's even more unforgivable that it's not universally followed.
Dan Aris
So what? Why is it not good for Google to have competition? Are "not evil" monopolies desireable?
Did I say anything of the kind?
My assumption, from the fact that PageRank is patented (and which several people have said is erroneous), was that the algorithm itself, or at least a version of it, was made public knowledge when it was patented. That is, after all, the entire original purpose of a patent: you make the means of creating your invention completely public, and in return, you are granted a limited monopoly on the ability to produce it.
If the PageRank patent were declared invalid, the algorithm would still be exposed to the public (if it was, in fact, exposed in the first place), and others would be able to use the algorithm Google came up with (and which Google probably would not have revealed to the public in the first place if it were not patentable, instead keeping it as a trade secret) to compete with Google, rather than having to come up with their own search algorithms, which might or might not work along the same lines as PageRank.
So no, I don't think that Google is somehow special, and should be exempted from the law: I was merely using them as a prominent example, and one already mentioned in the summary, of the type of problem that will be likely to arise if this rule change actually happens.
Dan Aris
Did you not read the part where I said "big win"?
Dan Aris
You've got to decide whether software patents are good or bad. If it's good for Google to patent the idea of page ranking, then software patents, in general, must be a good idea. If software patents are a bad idea, then allowing Google to have a software patent on the PageRank algorithm is a bad idea.
Oh, I'm not claiming that Google's patent on PageRank should be upheld, or that we should otherwise cherry-pick some software patents to keep and others to throw away. I'm just saying that with a change like this, there will, almost inevitably, be some negative consequences, and one of those may be to Google.
Like I said before, this is clearly a good thing overall.
Dan Aris
First of all, can I just say, WOO HOO! This has been far too long in coming!
If this is what it sounds like (and no, I didn't RTFA; way too many links that look like they're probably rich in legalese!), it could pull the rug out from under many patent trolls, and allow a lot more innovation to come back into the US software world.
However, precisely because it has been so long in coming, it could mean a major shakeup of a number of things. One important example is listed right in the summary: Google's PageRank patent. With that invalidated, other search engines can legally use PageRank, without giving Google a dime, which could give them the same searching power as Google.
I can't even begin to speculate what the fallout of this would end up including, but I think it's important not to underestimate it. However, even if there are some short-term negative consequences, I think most of us here will agree that in the long term, at least, this is a big win for everyone (well, everyone but the patent trolls, that is!).
Dan Aris
As with an earlier post, that's probably app-specific. I'm sure any developer could (if they wanted) write a new app for OS X and it wouldn't necessarily support copy and paste of everything.
Actually, that would be very difficult, unless you were writing it for X11 on OS X.
If you're using text fields from either of the 2 official OS X APIs (Carbon and Cocoa), you automatically get copy and paste support. You have to deliberately use something nonstandard and unsupported to break it.
On Linux, there are multiple different pasteboard implementations that aren't always cross-compatible. Sometimes I can copy from Application X and paste into Application Y, but not from Y to X. Other times they just won't talk to each other at all. This is, so far as I can tell, due to the highly modular nature of Linux and the often fragmented nature of OSS: there is no one pasteboard implementation, or even one pasteboard API that can be implemented by different libraries, that all apps can count on having available to them on all Linux systems.
And thus does the vast array of choices that Linux offers become a liability. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux—but I'm a programmer, and a sysadmin, and I'm fully capable of using it and dealing with its shortcomings in the user experience area. Many people aren't.
Dan Aris
Oh well. Well, remember that OS X runs on top of Darwin, so anything you do via a nice friendly interface you can do via command line. (hint: man niutil to learn how to use it)
Actually, niutil is deprecated now (10.5+). I believe it's been replaced by dscl.
Dan Aris
The Mac mini is more expensive than Dell and other generic low-end systems because it's the size of a large hardcover book.
Sure, if all you care about is the specs, that makes it overpriced. But if you actually like having a machine with a small footprint that is quiet and low-power-consumption, the Mac mini might actually be worth it...even before you take into account the fact that you're getting the ability to run OS X. Which, for some people, is pretty obviously a serious plus.
Dan Aris
...And now that I've turned my brain on, I realize that I b0rked the link.
Let's try that again, shall we?
http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter7/tpmdrmmyth/
Dan Aris