Isn't that internet enable Myst ? Or is this REALLY fancy with each person seeing their own powerpoint which can be updated ?
Myst has to be from a tech perspective one of the simplest games to net-enable, what it will be is bandwidth intensive, what it isn't however is time restricted.
Do people have a right to their phone number ? As long as they pay the bills can another organisation grab hold of their phone number and start taking orders ?
This for me is a direct link with domain names. If previous cases have covered phone number theft or transfer then surely they will be taken into consideration. After all a phone number is associated with a person or company rather than a physical location, you move house and you can often take your number with you, move out of the same TLA or sub-domain (area code) and you have to get a new number.
As ever with the internet, this isn't actually new, but the lawyers will make money arguing that it is.
It's intangible and value (or price if you prefer to put it that way) differ for every single domain
This is the same for _real_ property too. An acre in Manhatten and an acre in the middle of Arizona will not have the same price. The value of the element and its variability of value is not a reason to not classify it as property.
It isn't intellectual property as it represents an artefact.
Don't you think that maybe, just maybe, the Library ISN'T allowed to make lots of copies of books for free ? Otherwise they could copy all of those paper books too.
Its a very cheap TAG rip-off I bought in Turkey. This explains the wide range of the estimations, its out several percent a minute so over a few billions years that could be loads.
If they'd used a real TAG they would have had it down to the second, but you can't admit that its a fake if they don't spot can you ?
Most people are going to go for Wireless, its simpler to install, you can move around, don't need new sockets for new devices, and every network should have a wireless element in it.
BUT if you are connecting key elements together, like a primary desktop, a server or even just the major working at home point (in front of the TV with the laptop on my lap) then wired rules the world. Why ? Well apart from being able to transfer things around the network quicker, no drop in quality if the next door neighbour sets up their own wireless LAN with the packet clash party that can grow into. There is one bigger advantage to wires (no not security as you do need wireless to work in the garden).
Wires are maintainance free, they won't require upgrading as broadband gets broader. Legacy kit comes with the connections built in.
Wires for infrastructure and key sections. Wireless for roaming.
A large part of the issue here is that US Goverment is OPENLY proposing that it monitors the communications of ALL people, not just its own citizens.
What does George Bush claim gives him this right ?
The only way this would be semi-valid would be if it was a proposal of the UN and maintained and monitored by an independent judiciary and analysis organisation.
Or of course you could act like a total bigot and claim that everyone else in the world should be answerable to the US.
1) XML, SOAP and all these new technologies were pioneered by Microsoft
2) They killed all the standards they didn't pioneer (CORBA anyone ?).
3) There is NOTHING in the XML spec that _requires_ people to open up their schema definitions. Its purely a structure definition in the same way as Microsoft's old Word documents were stored, its just that now the markers are in Text format and any standard XML parser will be able to read the file.
4) Open Office can already read word documents even though they aren't in XML.
5) So can Word Perfect.
6) Using XML doesn't stop you embedding binary into the document, often people do this to store data (images for instance), thus an OLE reference might still be binary.
7) Pure XML and XSLT are great ways to use up all the power on your processor. Binary has previously been used here because its inefficient, if MS had opened the format up everyone would just complain that its too inefficient and its quicker to save using an older format. So MS are either trying to burn cycles or are customising the XML or their application for speed, is that wrong ? Would it be wrong if KDE did it ?
8) People won't switch to or from Word because of XML, Open Office and other tools will be able to read the Word files because other tools (Google for instance) need the format and MS can see real business need to allow them to see it.
9) XML is a meta-language as such anything can be written. Hell they could have a bitch of an external format and then a simple parser that makes it useful, but not tell anyone about the simple parser so everyone elses documents take years to load.
10) XML is the buzzword of today, OLE to be replaced by SOAP as the buzzword for Office next ?
Get off the high horse guys, whether its binary or XML is irrelevant, making something XML doesn't make it open. Thats like saying that everything you do makes sense, but just because people don't understand the Mayan Calendar and Ancient Greek they complain.
MS will always use Mayan and Ancient Greek, and we _can_ understand them, its just easier for them as its their native language and calendar.
talk, wall etc were all in non-windowed. xtalk and lots of others were windows. The "unique" element is being able to see who is online before you talk to them.
We used to achieve this by use of the advanced commands
"who" which gave you a list of who was on the server. This refreshed every few minutes (sys admins didn't like the number being too low) then you could just use write. Everyone specified a write terminal and you just used that.
Now when we got TWO servers we had to modify the script to use rwho and unfortunately there wasn't an rwrite (is there now?) which was okay because we got X displays anyway.
So in X you start ONE instance of the application, and when people log-on you send a request to the main server (i.e. you send a special email) which fires up a window on your display. The email contained the name of the person, you could then do lots of things including writing to each other.
Oh and the application was called Emacs and we were trying to do a group project.
Pity we didn't realise that we could patent "Open on New Display".
So if its single server using thin clients then there is lots of prior art, if its multiple applications being aware when new people join there is, for me, and even better one.
Jini is all about joining federations, annoucing you are there, requesting services, starting conversations et al. This is surely proof that it fails the "not obvious" test as someone has written a whole environment that can do, in effect, IM between people, computers, printers, machines, PDAs etc etc etc.
I've now just decided to patent syntax highlighting.
Cable is Better in YOUR area
on
DSL Rising
·
· Score: 5, Informative
My DSL has DHCP, an accessible IP, has a small cable I plug into the phone socket which isn't exactly much.
Oh and Cable isn't in my area. In most of Europe Satellite TV rules the roost, except for major cities and even there Sat tends to have an edge. Europe didn't spend the 50s,60s and 70s installing a cable TV network, it went straight from terrestrial to Satellite. This means that the only network that is EVERYWHERE is the Phone network hence DSL.
So you'd want DSL if you were in a place where the investment in the Phone infrastructure has been going for the 40 years that cable investment has been going in the US.
This is why no-one is suprised (except the Slashdot editor) that Cable is big in the US and DSL big everywhere else. Its sort of like saying "Hey look CDMA is big in the US but GSM is big everywhere else".
A plug for a mate IPSky talks about the market and the issues and is a pretty good starting doc on this sort of stuff from a technical/management perspective. The interesting part of some of these elements is that it enables additional information to the pilots and potentially between planes. Getting the internet to the passengers is relatively simple, combining it with elements like TCAS to reduce the risk of collisions and also to enable less reliance on Air Traffic Controllers in areas where they have no Radar coverage.
One interesting element about these three chaps is that when they had their great ideas there was no way to make money from it so no-one is interested. What we are talking about here are experimental scientists where there is a direct effect of their work. "Blue sky" scientists were less prone to these problems in the past because companies tended not to fund them. With the rise of "corporate universities" and corporate science the drive has been to be more accountable.
Einstein didn't get funding for his research 100 years ago, what would happen if the next Einstein comes along and demonstrates that cold fusion is possible, clean and safe... but is sponsored by Exxon ?
The corporatisation of science means the ethics of corporations now apply. Science will have an "Enron" scenario within the next few years.
Changing the licenses and refunds..
on
Windows Refund Day II
·
· Score: 5, Informative
We all know that MS are trying to move towards a licensing model where you pay every 3years/1 year/1 month/every day to use the software. This is interesting when you think about software as a service.
So the software is FREE, but the service is paid for. Thus the service enables the "free" software to be used and you have paid for a period of n to use that software. This could make getting a refund harder as the service is provided by Microsoft and not the OEM, also as its paid up front from the OEM to Microsoft it blurs how refunds can be obtained. Its like car insurance, you have it, you pay for it up front, the fact that you don't have a car crash doesn't mean that you can say it wasn't used and ask for a refund.
IANAL (Thank god) but a licensing change could make refunds even harder to get hold of.
My mobile usage is well over 15 minutes a day, normally around 1 hour a day.
I totally agree that if people use this then the revenues are high, but if it is low quality at the start then it will die (ala WAP, its now good but people don't care very much) and the revenues won't exist.
The problem increases when you consider that much of this is going to be cross-network interconnects so the efficent routing to average the bandwidth will be harder. I don't disagree that if they saw this money they would put the network there, but the issue is that the quality of network has to be very high before this becomes viable.
MMS is being pushed because its got low QoS issues, as long as the message gets there its okay. Streamed video is a different issue as it requires a greater QoS than the standard voice call (you can still hear the voice on a poor connection, but a poor connection == no video) which will be difficult to provide at a reasonable cost.
But without a doubt the mobile operators are going to have to get the biggest fattest pipes onto the internet, and have their own dedicated backbones to route traffic effectively. This is the internet on demand like no-one has seen it before.
Makes MMS look positively naff, why send a single picture when you can send a video stream ?
BUT if you think about the bandwidth requirements of streaming then it becomes hard for the mobile infrastructure to support.
20 million phones, say only 1% active at a time means 200,000 phones active, each streaming at 256 kilobits means 6400000 kilo bytes of bandwidth required. In other words that is 6.4 GigaBYTES of bandwith required by the mobile network.
Video is a nice idea, and for low usage it works okay within a network, but either the quality has to be crap, or the network investment has to be huge to support video-phone technology over IP. There are better compression elements out there that could work at 64 kilobits, but that is still over a Gigabyte per second network.
AND that is just for a country with only 20 million mobiles.
The UK has less murders in a year than several, if not most, US Cities. The proportion of these which are gun related is small.
So yes the number in the UK has been increasing. But Washington is still more dangerous to live in than Northern Ireland, even back when the troubles were in full sway.
The numbers in the US are falling from a level that was MORE in some cities than when several TERRORIST organisations were shooting each other for fun. Not for the whole US, for ONE city.
If a crimial commits a gun-crime in the UK he will be much more of a focus for the police than if he doesn't use a gun. Thus using guns is the best way to get caught.
Isn't it great how people can release things for hardware you wouldn't even know how to buy if you wanted to. I've often wondered how elements like the FreeBSD team and Linux get people interested in doing these things. Its not like an "itch you need to scratch" because you don't even have the body part to have the itch on!
Slashdot Mirror
Helix 2 or "Double Helix" as it becomes known.
The year after they patent "double helix" as a term in the scientific community. Then the sue everyone who dares to publish double helix material.
Twelve months on they go bust.
Isn't that internet enable Myst ? Or is this REALLY fancy with each person seeing their own powerpoint which can be updated ?
Myst has to be from a tech perspective one of the simplest games to net-enable, what it will be is bandwidth intensive, what it isn't however is time restricted.
Do people have a right to their phone number ? As long as they pay the bills can another organisation grab hold of their phone number and start taking orders ?
This for me is a direct link with domain names. If previous cases have covered phone number theft or transfer then surely they will be taken into consideration. After all a phone number is associated with a person or company rather than a physical location, you move house and you can often take your number with you, move out of the same TLA or sub-domain (area code) and you have to get a new number.
As ever with the internet, this isn't actually new, but the lawyers will make money arguing that it is.
It's intangible and value (or price if you prefer to put it that way) differ for every single domain
This is the same for _real_ property too. An acre in Manhatten and an acre in the middle of Arizona will not have the same price. The value of the element and its variability of value is not a reason to not classify it as property.
It isn't intellectual property as it represents an artefact.
Don't you think that maybe, just maybe, the Library ISN'T allowed to make lots of copies of books for free ? Otherwise they could copy all of those paper books too.
Sheesh
Its a very cheap TAG rip-off I bought in Turkey. This explains the wide range of the estimations, its out several percent a minute so over a few billions years that could be loads.
If they'd used a real TAG they would have had it down to the second, but you can't admit that its a fake if they don't spot can you ?
Most people are going to go for Wireless, its simpler to install, you can move around, don't need new sockets for new devices, and every network should have a wireless element in it.
BUT if you are connecting key elements together, like a primary desktop, a server or even just the major working at home point (in front of the TV with the laptop on my lap) then wired rules the world. Why ? Well apart from being able to transfer things around the network quicker, no drop in quality if the next door neighbour sets up their own wireless LAN with the packet clash party that can grow into. There is one bigger advantage to wires (no not security as you do need wireless to work in the garden).
Wires are maintainance free, they won't require upgrading as broadband gets broader. Legacy kit comes with the connections built in.
Wires for infrastructure and key sections. Wireless for roaming.
Try Concorde....
Then it takes less than half the time...
IN 1975.
Slashdot lameness compliant
Assumes people are genetically engineered by Aliens.
RIIIIGHT, okay pass the pills, pass the needles and pass on.
Next on Slashdot "Creationism explained", "Why computers are actually alive" and "Einstein, what a moron".
News for nerds, or bollocks for brains ?
Yours Sincerely
Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Scott McNealy.
PS And we need to buy more Islands, Ferraris and Houses.
A large part of the issue here is that US Goverment is OPENLY proposing that it monitors the communications of ALL people, not just its own citizens.
What does George Bush claim gives him this right ?
The only way this would be semi-valid would be if it was a proposal of the UN and maintained and monitored by an independent judiciary and analysis organisation.
Or of course you could act like a total bigot and claim that everyone else in the world should be answerable to the US.
Most expanded Female chest in an Action Game
Largest amount of gore created from a shotgun blast
Largest gun
Largest impact on work productivity
Smallest number of patches before it would work properly
Smallest slip from proposed date to actual date
1) XML, SOAP and all these new technologies were pioneered by Microsoft
2) They killed all the standards they didn't pioneer (CORBA anyone ?).
3) There is NOTHING in the XML spec that _requires_ people to open up their schema definitions. Its purely a structure definition in the same way as Microsoft's old Word documents were stored, its just that now the markers are in Text format and any standard XML parser will be able to read the file.
4) Open Office can already read word documents even though they aren't in XML.
5) So can Word Perfect.
6) Using XML doesn't stop you embedding binary into the document, often people do this to store data (images for instance), thus an OLE reference might still be binary.
7) Pure XML and XSLT are great ways to use up all the power on your processor. Binary has previously been used here because its inefficient, if MS had opened the format up everyone would just complain that its too inefficient and its quicker to save using an older format. So MS are either trying to burn cycles or are customising the XML or their application for speed, is that wrong ? Would it be wrong if KDE did it ?
8) People won't switch to or from Word because of XML, Open Office and other tools will be able to read the Word files because other tools (Google for instance) need the format and MS can see real business need to allow them to see it.
9) XML is a meta-language as such anything can be written. Hell they could have a bitch of an external format and then a simple parser that makes it useful, but not tell anyone about the simple parser so everyone elses documents take years to load.
10) XML is the buzzword of today, OLE to be replaced by SOAP as the buzzword for Office next ?
Get off the high horse guys, whether its binary or XML is irrelevant, making something XML doesn't make it open. Thats like saying that everything you do makes sense, but just because people don't understand the Mayan Calendar and Ancient Greek they complain.
MS will always use Mayan and Ancient Greek, and we _can_ understand them, its just easier for them as its their native language and calendar.
Sometimes I sit back and admire the educations systems that exist within the world.
Then along comes a Sociology student like yourself to depress me.
And someone tell me how this is different from "save for later" but with "save for later" detailed as "Johnny" ?
Hell doesn't everyone already do that ?
talk, wall etc were all in non-windowed. xtalk and lots of others were windows. The "unique" element is being able to see who is online before you talk to them.
We used to achieve this by use of the advanced commands
"who" which gave you a list of who was on the server. This refreshed every few minutes (sys admins didn't like the number being too low) then you could just use write. Everyone specified a write terminal and you just used that.
Now when we got TWO servers we had to modify the script to use rwho and unfortunately there wasn't an rwrite (is there now?) which was okay because we got X displays anyway.
So in X you start ONE instance of the application, and when people log-on you send a request to the main server (i.e. you send a special email) which fires up a window on your display. The email contained the name of the person, you could then do lots of things including writing to each other.
Oh and the application was called Emacs and we were trying to do a group project.
Pity we didn't realise that we could patent "Open on New Display".
So if its single server using thin clients then there is lots of prior art, if its multiple applications being aware when new people join there is, for me, and even better one.
Jini is all about joining federations, annoucing you are there, requesting services, starting conversations et al. This is surely proof that it fails the "not obvious" test as someone has written a whole environment that can do, in effect, IM between people, computers, printers, machines, PDAs etc etc etc.
I've now just decided to patent syntax highlighting.
My DSL has DHCP, an accessible IP, has a small cable I plug into the phone socket which isn't exactly much.
Oh and Cable isn't in my area. In most of Europe Satellite TV rules the roost, except for major cities and even there Sat tends to have an edge. Europe didn't spend the 50s,60s and 70s installing a cable TV network, it went straight from terrestrial to Satellite. This means that the only network that is EVERYWHERE is the Phone network hence DSL.
So you'd want DSL if you were in a place where the investment in the Phone infrastructure has been going for the 40 years that cable investment has been going in the US.
This is why no-one is suprised (except the Slashdot editor) that Cable is big in the US and DSL big everywhere else. Its sort of like saying "Hey look CDMA is big in the US but GSM is big everywhere else".
A plug for a mate IPSky talks about the market and the issues and is a pretty good starting doc on this sort of stuff from a technical/management perspective. The interesting part of some of these elements is that it enables additional information to the pilots and potentially between planes. Getting the internet to the passengers is relatively simple, combining it with elements like TCAS to reduce the risk of collisions and also to enable less reliance on Air Traffic Controllers in areas where they have no Radar coverage.
One interesting element about these three chaps is that when they had their great ideas there was no way to make money from it so no-one is interested. What we are talking about here are experimental scientists where there is a direct effect of their work. "Blue sky" scientists were less prone to these problems in the past because companies tended not to fund them. With the rise of "corporate universities" and corporate science the drive has been to be more accountable.
Einstein didn't get funding for his research 100 years ago, what would happen if the next Einstein comes along and demonstrates that cold fusion is possible, clean and safe... but is sponsored by Exxon ?
The corporatisation of science means the ethics of corporations now apply. Science will have an "Enron" scenario within the next few years.
We all know that MS are trying to move towards a licensing model where you pay every 3years/1 year/1 month/every day to use the software. This is interesting when you think about software as a service.
So the software is FREE, but the service is paid for. Thus the service enables the "free" software to be used and you have paid for a period of n to use that software. This could make getting a refund harder as the service is provided by Microsoft and not the OEM, also as its paid up front from the OEM to Microsoft it blurs how refunds can be obtained. Its like car insurance, you have it, you pay for it up front, the fact that you don't have a car crash doesn't mean that you can say it wasn't used and ask for a refund.
IANAL (Thank god) but a licensing change could make refunds even harder to get hold of.
My mobile usage is well over 15 minutes a day, normally around 1 hour a day.
I totally agree that if people use this then the revenues are high, but if it is low quality at the start then it will die (ala WAP, its now good but people don't care very much) and the revenues won't exist.
The problem increases when you consider that much of this is going to be cross-network interconnects so the efficent routing to average the bandwidth will be harder. I don't disagree that if they saw this money they would put the network there, but the issue is that the quality of network has to be very high before this becomes viable.
MMS is being pushed because its got low QoS issues, as long as the message gets there its okay. Streamed video is a different issue as it requires a greater QoS than the standard voice call (you can still hear the voice on a poor connection, but a poor connection == no video) which will be difficult to provide at a reasonable cost.
But without a doubt the mobile operators are going to have to get the biggest fattest pipes onto the internet, and have their own dedicated backbones to route traffic effectively. This is the internet on demand like no-one has seen it before.
Makes MMS look positively naff, why send a single picture when you can send a video stream ?
BUT if you think about the bandwidth requirements of streaming then it becomes hard for the mobile infrastructure to support.
20 million phones, say only 1% active at a time means 200,000 phones active, each streaming at 256 kilobits means 6400000 kilo bytes of bandwidth required. In other words that is 6.4 GigaBYTES of bandwith required by the mobile network.
Video is a nice idea, and for low usage it works okay within a network, but either the quality has to be crap, or the network investment has to be huge to support video-phone technology over IP. There are better compression elements out there that could work at 64 kilobits, but that is still over a Gigabyte per second network.
AND that is just for a country with only 20 million mobiles.
The UK has less murders in a year than several, if not most, US Cities. The proportion of these which are gun related is small.
So yes the number in the UK has been increasing. But Washington is still more dangerous to live in than Northern Ireland, even back when the troubles were in full sway.
The numbers in the US are falling from a level that was MORE in some cities than when several TERRORIST organisations were shooting each other for fun. Not for the whole US, for ONE city.
If a crimial commits a gun-crime in the UK he will be much more of a focus for the police than if he doesn't use a gun. Thus using guns is the best way to get caught.
Do you really think that an editor that includes the mayan calendar by default wouldn't ALREADY have had clippy created.
Of course in Emacs he is called Pinhead and is much more helpful.
Isn't it great how people can release things for hardware you wouldn't even know how to buy if you wanted to. I've often wondered how elements like the FreeBSD team and Linux get people interested in doing these things. Its not like an "itch you need to scratch" because you don't even have the body part to have the itch on!