You are just arguing for the sake of arguing, aren't you?..
Nope. There are real reasons why you don't want to jumper the DC supplies for everything on your desk together.
Somehow, my vacuum cleaner does not screw up my washer nor drier. My lady's hair-drier does not affect our microwave, and our DVD and VCR manage to co-exist peacefully. They probably all have power-converters built-in, but I don't care.
You would care if your VCR flipped out every time the washer was on.
Of if turning on your printer lead to an undervoltage situation that fried your scanner.
But our two cell phones have totally incompatible chargers -- justify that!
My cell uses lithium polymer batteries. My gf's uses ni-cad. This results in different cell voltages.
I'd need a lot less of them, than I have now. There being a standard of, say, 12V or 24V would give the designers and manufacturers a good incentive to stick to it, unless their specific product requires something different.
Nearly everything is still going to need a power contitioning stage, even if it does run on the same voltage. You don't want your electric razor screwing up writes to your external hard disk. Those wall warts (and their more manageable cousin the "line lump") help provide isolation between the diffent devices on your power lines.
What we have now is gratuitous diversity of the "bricks", which should be interchangible, but are not. Not all manufacturers even have the decency to standardize within their own products.
I would say that manufactuers do mostly restrain themselves to fairly standard supply voltages like 5V,9V,12V etc. The thing to remember is that most of these companies aren't making the wall bricks that come with their products. They're considered a fairly standard widget, and they have even somewhat standardized the connectors they use. Chances are you can that that Linksys wall wart into Radioshack and they'll be able to give you a functional replacement.
As to the "falling out" bit, one good solution is British Standard 1363 - I never did understand why people put-up with power cables that get disconnected every time you move them too far.
Because it's safer than ripping the outlet out of the wall or the wires out of the connector.
That's really the alternative. At some point something's gotta give. If not the connector, it's going to be the wall plate of the cable, either or which could lead to a fire. By compasion, the plug falling out of the socket is pretty safe.
Most electronics have a DC-DC converter built in these days. MY little linksys wireless router for example runs off a 12vDC wall wort but internally everything is running at 3.3v
You're kinda missing the point though.
Sure, it's possible, but that doesn't mean it's worth doing.
You're talking about going from AC to power to some sort of "standard" DC and then finally coverting to power the device actually uses. What you end up doing as adding ANOTHER brick to your desk to provide this "standard" DC power (while still needing a bunch of other bricks). Basiaclly, you've bought yourself nothing.
All these devices are still going to need a similar number of components as they were using previously to filter their new shared power supply and convert it to the proper voltage. The O.P. suggested that there was no standardization of DC power supplies but that's not reaslly true. Most supplies use a fairly standard voltage like 5V, 9V or 12V, and a standardized connector consistent with that voltage. If you loose the power supply for something, chances are you can buy an new supply online with the proper connector and voltage fairly easily. Heck, Radioshack stocks a whole bunch of that stuff.
Switching regulators are pretty damn effiecent, some text even refer to them as DC transformers.
Sure they're efficient, but two of then in series is less efficient than just using one of them. It costs more, is bigger and fails more often too.
They are also pretty small, ususally just a small 4 or 5 pin device with a few small inductors, resistors and capacitors.
If you ignore all the other stuff you need to make an actually decent power supply like input/output protection, filtering and storage capacitance.
Besides different devices needing different voltages and current capabilities, they also have other requrements. Like ripple current. Or transient response.
Why does every DC-using device come with its own adapter, and uses its own voltage? Why could not we standardize that?
Because if you did, you'd still need a bunch of DC-DC converter bricks.
An external hard disk has different power needs than a 5.1 speaker system which has different power needs than a cordless drill (charger), which also has different power needs than my cellphone. If you demanded that all that stuff have a plug on it for a certain DC voltage, all you're going to see is whole bunch of external DC-DC converter bricks.
Sure some manufacturers will build them into the box itself (just like all those products that DON'T need AC/DC bricks now) but many are going to use an external brick for all the same reasons they're already doing so.
What you're asking is like asking "Why do we have all these different types of screws, can't they just pick one size?"
Interesting concept... So lets say someone leaves there front door unlocked, should they go to jail if someone breaks in? Perhaps the front door is locked, but the dog door is unlocked? What if the the windows don't have bars on them?
Actually, it's more like leaving all you furniture out by the curb for someone to walk off with at will. You're broadcasting its presence to the rest of the world and you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
Wireless signals are accessible by EVERYBODY. They are not constrained by the notion of "private property" like your house is.
The most fitting analogy I can come up with is leaving a breifcase full of credit card information sitting on a park bench DELIBERATELY.
Yes, using that information for nefarious purposes is illegal, but leaving it laying around somewhere with no reasonable expectation of privacy is negligent. One might even consider it criminally negligent. If you were in the UK, it sounds like their privacy laws would agree with you.
What about the Corporate crime bosses who bilk millions or billions from people via fraud - they never get this level of sentence.
In our society, some people are more "equal" than others. It's fucked up but it's a given when you let someone have 1E9 dollars to themself. The only way it's ever going to get fixed is if we realize that capitalism != democracy, and adjust or society accordingly.
Of course the nice thing here is that these to companies are finally pointing out why.
Most people are still pretty clueless about why DRM sucks, but perhaps a public feud between real and Apple will serve to spread the word.
Re:"Digital Ready" headphones -- for digital ears?
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Unless you're approaching some quantum-mechanics related limit to were the solenoid can only switch states on at the same rate as your sample rate, then I would say that the act of vibrating the solenoid is your DAC in action.
Digital really refers to a simplfying operating principle, it does not mean for example that a "digital" microprocessor does not in reality contain analog voltages. (The argument you're making also implies that my computer is not digital.)
The key thing about digital tech, is that for the most part you ignore the subtle fluctations in the analog spectrum. Rather than worring about whether a node is a 4.5V or 5V, you just say it's a one and move on with life.
If you treat digital as what it really is, a set of simplifying principles applied to an analog system, then my idea is clearly "digital".
Re:"Digital Ready" headphones -- for digital ears?
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Actually, you're not far from describing a digital amplifier (such as Bel Canto and Spectron).
These amps generate a high frequency digital signal, which is pulse width modulated. Ordinary transducers cannot reproduce individual pulses due their inertia, but they do get "nudged" a little by each pulse. In affect, the transducer will average the signal out, converting the high frequency digital signal into a low frequency analog one -- the audio.
I'm not familiar with the specfic amps to which you are referring, but typically the low pass filtering is done with a few capacitors and inductors before the signal gets to the speakers. This is done because although the speaker will "integrate" the incident power over a period of time, you're still subjecting it to a series of very short, very strong magnetic forces instead of a more continuous weaker forces. This leaves you with a good chance of damaging the speaker (assuming it's a conventional type).* You might be able to get away with it on something like a piezo or ribbon tweeter though.
What type of speakers do these amps drive?
*This is also why amplifier "clipping" can be very damaging to speakers, even if the actual power output is well below the rated power of the speakers. A 10ns 100A pulse is going to contain the same amount of energy as a 1us 1A pulse, but the instantaneous force of the shorter pulse will be 100X as large, resulting in much higher stresses in whatever materials the speaker is made from.
Re:"Digital Ready" headphones -- for digital ears?
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Even if someone came up with a pair of headphones that had an S/PDIF or AES/EBU interface, it would still have to have a DAC and an analog transducer, because my ears are not digital nor will they ever be.
Actually, you could theoretically make actual digital headphones if you could get a solenoid to move back and forth at a few GHz (for decent fidelity). Then you'd probably need to place some sort of acoustic low pass filter between the transducer and your ears* but it is possible.
To be fair, I didn't really think you could have "digital" headphones either, until you said it couldn't be done. Then I had to ask myself "Is that really true?"
* To some extent our senses act as "low pass filters" by virture of their response time. They sort of integrate incident power over a time period. A sort of human "time constant".
To everyone: When does spin doctoring cross the line and become false advertising?"
In the consumer audio market, that's when.
From over-unity speakers (200W watts output from a 10W wall-wart), to "better-sounding" fiber optic cable, no claim seems too outrageous or fraudulent for a great many consumer audio manufacturers.
As an engineer who loves audio, it drives me nuts to see the bullshit that is constantly perpetrated in that market.
I'm sure there are tons of slashdotters who can post examples of incredibly unprofessional and possibly fraudulent specmanship in this arena.
There should be some feature in slashcode to remind people who inevitably try to post this that as soon as someone can fake your fingerprint or retinal scan, you are forked for life because you can never change those things.
And then there's also the problem of leaving them on everything you touch.
Fingerprint readers on PCs are hilarious because you've typically got tons of nice fingerprints all over the keyboard, mouse, display, etc.
Biometrics SUCK because the are NOT PRIVATE and they are UNCHANGEABLE.
The only thing they are good for is when people don't want to be identified.
4) While the FBI are busy smashing down your door: Take a hammer to your hard-drive's plateaus, and run like a screaming idiot while you think about how stupid you where to follow my instructions.
Somehow I don't think the FBI is going to give a shit about your slashdot account. Typically you need to be able to show thousands of dollars in damages before they'll to anything.
They just don't have the resources to go after after every violation.
I have a method just as good. The subway map for London is on my wall. The station names make great passwords, and there's plenty of them, and all i have to do is lookup to find the right one. The great thing about is that they're all in plain view for everyone to see. All anyone thinks is "hey that's a cool looking map".
Actually that's not a very good idea.
It's pretty much one step away from a note under your keyboard or your mother's maiden name.
Any text readable from your chair is an OBVIOUS password. It's also going to be part of a dictionary atteck, unlike "?pE94$vw".
Say I spend two years researching and developing an actually new idea:
I start my small company selling my new idea. Suddenly, XYZ corp starts claiming I'm violating their patent on "subtracting two numbers with a computer" or some other bullshit and demands we cross-liscense each other's patents. Now XYZ corp has a royalty-free liscense to my tech and can use their massive resources to squeeze me out of the marketplace.
Cross liscensing of this form keeps small companies with new ideas out of the market. In my example, XYZ corp now has the fruits of my labor at ZERO cost to them, and has crushed my company, so how exactly am I getting paid for my idea?
I'm not saying all cross-liscensing is bad, just that it's very often done with bullshit patents like the one this article is about and is symptomatic of the major failings of our current patent system.
The best thing that can happen to patent law is to have a big player like MS get screwed by it.
Then MS can start putting their lobbying bucks into fixing patent law.
You don't get it. Microsoft can affort to get screwed by it.
What happens when they want $400 million from the mozilla foundation?
The patent system is currently set up much like the "mutually assured destrucion" fo the cold war. If you're big enough to have a significant patent portfolio of your own, you're pretty much invulnerable. You might loose a case every now and then but you'll also get money from your own patents. You can rape and pillage small companies as you see and their only chance for protection is to ally with someone else big. What patents are really doing is killing innovation and small companies.
It's too risky to come up with a cool new idea and start selling it as a small company (the whole thing patents were SUPPOSED to protect). Even if your small business patents your idea, companies like IBM have about a bazillion patents which you probably violationg at least some of and they will be able to force you to either loose a bunch of money in court or "cross-liscense" your technology.
This whole case is bullshit. Technology like this is fucking obvious. That fact that this patent was even granted shows the total incompetence of the patent office. See my opinion on them here.
My company does pre-press work for marketing campaigns. If they need 15 minutes to render a postscript file (or PDF) they need better hardware. We use off-the-shelf gear (PC and Mac, none of it SMP) and nothing we do that is full-page size takes 15 minutes, even at 300 dpi.
What're they using, a PII-400???
That's a silly statement to make. A PS or PDF file can be arbitrily complex for a given page size.
I've personally caused a single 8.5x11 page to take twenty mintues to come out of a fast laser printer.
All you need to do is send it a postscript file of something with a hundred thousand elements or so. (I'm my case, the VLSI layout for a microcontroller.)
If you're starting out with a bitmap then DPI and page size are dominating factors. When you're starting with a list of names in a scaleable font, you're talk about VECTOR graphics.
That is a "proper" way for a professional to work in this instance since they can then produce a result of arbitrary DPI or page size.
Bullshit.
I'll give you $50 if you can back that claim up. I want to see two video files.
Always nice to see someone get called for talking out their ass.
This guy is absolutely correct that the chances of these two video files colliding is amazingly small. Although the article is about collisions in MD5 sums, a little common sense goes a long ways.
If grandparent had these files when he said he did it would have been a very big deal. I imagine they could have been sold to researchers for a nice sum of money.
Someone with the knowledge and will and time can come up with a way to circumvent almost any protective scheme they come up with. Likely the only way to really safeguard something like this is to do a very time consuming and cpu intensive comparison of the two files. It will come back to "do you trust the source of the file".
That's a silly conclusion to reach. It's like saying that we should give up on cryptography because some has found a way to crack the Caesar cipher.
Just because ONE IMPLEMENTATION of a technology is flawed does not mean the entire technology is flawed.
Hashing is a VERY useful process and only ONE particular implementation is being challenged here. The fundamental concept is still sound and extremely useful. Abandoning the entire idea would just be foolish.
No way. This just makes the system that much more inaccessible to the individual or small-time operator who can't afford a lawyer.
How so?
It's already massive expensive to obtain a patent, as opposed to registering copyright and if you're the defendant, you don't have any choice but to go to court now either.
The current system also actually much worse for small business than mine would be.
You were alright until you said "determined in court". Court costs are too expensive and land hardest on those fighting the patent.
First, the high cost of going to court is really a separate issue. I agree that it's a problem though. The court systems in the US are totally fucked, and a major reason for that is that you're only entitled to representation if someone tries to put you in jail, not if they try to ruin you financially.
Second, the solution I'm suggesting now puts the burden in court on the person that claims to have a valid patent, since it has never been "validated" before.
Right now there's this stupid presumption of validity because your application made it through the process. That forces the burden onto the person trying to defned themself. If they can't *prove* it invalid, they loose.
Without that silly presumption, the plaintiff is going to have to actually hire experts to prove that their claim is valid in the first place.
I've written software before that is used by state government to determine who gets audited. If that software was public and open there wouldn't be a single audit flagged by anyone. Accountants could pre-pare returns in very cleverly different ways with different numbers here and there to craft an audit-proof return.
That sounds like a problem with the criteria being used to determine who gets audited, not making the source code public. It sounds like the audit criteria are full of gaping holes and THAT is the problem.
The code are the rules in this system. And if everyone knew every rule, there would be no enforcement possible!
Ridiculous. It's sounds like the code/rules are already broken and only marginally effective.
The only case where your statements would actually be true is if it was actually impossible to change the criteria for an audit.
The right thing to do in this situation would be to fix the holes in the system, not blindly hope they're never found.
With a GOOD set of criteria, it wouldn't be trival to engineer yourself out of being flagged for an audit (other than not cheating on your taxes).
2 - Patents in general (not just software) should not be allowed for ideas that are already known within the community of inventors (or programmers in this case). The Patent office doesn't bother checking this requirement anymore (or at least if they are attempting to do so they are obviously failing at it). When this isn't done, the owner of an idea ends up being the one with no scruples who decided to usurp ownership of the public idea first, rather than the one that thought of the idea first.
Fix those two problems first, and then you can talk about supporting software patents.
The trouble is problem #2 isn't fixable.
Maybe when that patent office was created it made sense to have one organization the would claim to understand EVERY TECHNOLOGY ON THE PLANET in enough detail to decide if an invention is novel, but I submit that idea has become totally unworkable.
Instead, the patent office should admit what it has already become, a registry of "I invented this on this date." The presumption that a patent is valid because it has been rubberstamped by the patent office should be ceased immediately.
The validty of specfic patents can then be determined in court, as necessary, where both sides of the issue can call real experts from those fields.
Removing corporate personhood would hurt consumers in many ways as well. For instance, if GM makes a faulty product that injures you, if a they're not a person, who do you sue?
There's no reason GM *HAS* to be considered an ACTUAL PERSON by our legal system in order to be sued. Treating companies like people is just stupid. What if that faultiness is determined to be criminally negligent, who do we put in jail?
Just as a corporation cannot be subject to the same penalties and responsibilities as an actual person, it should not receive the same rights.
It's a double-edged sword, but if you learn more about it, you might realize it does more good than harm.
You must live in a different country than I do. In America, corporations are totally out of control. They routinely buy anything they want via political contributions.
what we have may not be a free market, but this band would have saved a lot of money by paying for media instead of signing up. Calling it a monopoly is going too far.
And this band would have got their CDs on store shelves how?
I don't think you understand the realities of the business right now. Stores are foced into exclusive agreements and good luck going platinum when you have to sell every disc yourself.
In an actually free market, price fixing for an extended period of time is impossible, because another company will just start up that charges less.
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You are just arguing for the sake of arguing, aren't you?..
Nope. There are real reasons why you don't want to jumper the DC supplies for everything on your desk together.
Somehow, my vacuum cleaner does not screw up my washer nor drier. My lady's hair-drier does not affect our microwave, and our DVD and VCR manage to co-exist peacefully. They probably all have power-converters built-in, but I don't care.
You would care if your VCR flipped out every time the washer was on.
Of if turning on your printer lead to an undervoltage situation that fried your scanner.
But our two cell phones have totally incompatible chargers -- justify that!
My cell uses lithium polymer batteries. My gf's uses ni-cad. This results in different cell voltages.
I'd need a lot less of them, than I have now. There being a standard of, say, 12V or 24V would give the designers and manufacturers a good incentive to stick to it, unless their specific product requires something different.
Nearly everything is still going to need a power contitioning stage, even if it does run on the same voltage. You don't want your electric razor screwing up writes to your external hard disk. Those wall warts (and their more manageable cousin the "line lump") help provide isolation between the diffent devices on your power lines.
What we have now is gratuitous diversity of the "bricks", which should be interchangible, but are not. Not all manufacturers even have the decency to standardize within their own products.
I would say that manufactuers do mostly restrain themselves to fairly standard supply voltages like 5V,9V,12V etc. The thing to remember is that most of these companies aren't making the wall bricks that come with their products. They're considered a fairly standard widget, and they have even somewhat standardized the connectors they use. Chances are you can that that Linksys wall wart into Radioshack and they'll be able to give you a functional replacement.
As to the "falling out" bit, one good solution is British Standard 1363 - I never did understand why people put-up with power cables that get disconnected every time you move them too far.
Because it's safer than ripping the outlet out of the wall or the wires out of the connector.
That's really the alternative. At some point something's gotta give. If not the connector, it's going to be the wall plate of the cable, either or which could lead to a fire. By compasion, the plug falling out of the socket is pretty safe.
Most electronics have a DC-DC converter built in these days. MY little linksys wireless router for example runs off a 12vDC wall wort but internally everything is running at 3.3v
You're kinda missing the point though.
Sure, it's possible, but that doesn't mean it's worth doing.
You're talking about going from AC to power to some sort of "standard" DC and then finally coverting to power the device actually uses. What you end up doing as adding ANOTHER brick to your desk to provide this "standard" DC power (while still needing a bunch of other bricks). Basiaclly, you've bought yourself nothing.
All these devices are still going to need a similar number of components as they were using previously to filter their new shared power supply and convert it to the proper voltage. The O.P. suggested that there was no standardization of DC power supplies but that's not reaslly true. Most supplies use a fairly standard voltage like 5V, 9V or 12V, and a standardized connector consistent with that voltage. If you loose the power supply for something, chances are you can buy an new supply online with the proper connector and voltage fairly easily. Heck, Radioshack stocks a whole bunch of that stuff.
Switching regulators are pretty damn effiecent, some text even refer to them as DC transformers.
Sure they're efficient, but two of then in series is less efficient than just using one of them. It costs more, is bigger and fails more often too.
They are also pretty small, ususally just a small 4 or 5 pin device with a few small inductors, resistors and capacitors.
If you ignore all the other stuff you need to make an actually decent power supply like input/output protection, filtering and storage capacitance.
Besides different devices needing different voltages and current capabilities, they also have other requrements. Like ripple current. Or transient response.
Why does every DC-using device come with its own adapter, and uses its own voltage? Why could not we standardize that?
Because if you did, you'd still need a bunch of DC-DC converter bricks.
An external hard disk has different power needs than a 5.1 speaker system which has different power needs than a cordless drill (charger), which also has different power needs than my cellphone. If you demanded that all that stuff have a plug on it for a certain DC voltage, all you're going to see is whole bunch of external DC-DC converter bricks.
Sure some manufacturers will build them into the box itself (just like all those products that DON'T need AC/DC bricks now) but many are going to use an external brick for all the same reasons they're already doing so.
What you're asking is like asking "Why do we have all these different types of screws, can't they just pick one size?"
Interesting concept... So lets say someone leaves there front door unlocked, should they go to jail if someone breaks in? Perhaps the front door is locked, but the dog door is unlocked? What if the the windows don't have bars on them?
Actually, it's more like leaving all you furniture out by the curb for someone to walk off with at will. You're broadcasting its presence to the rest of the world and you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
Wireless signals are accessible by EVERYBODY. They are not constrained by the notion of "private property" like your house is.
The most fitting analogy I can come up with is leaving a breifcase full of credit card information sitting on a park bench DELIBERATELY.
Yes, using that information for nefarious purposes is illegal, but leaving it laying around somewhere with no reasonable expectation of privacy is negligent. One might even consider it criminally negligent. If you were in the UK, it sounds like their privacy laws would agree with you.
What about the Corporate crime bosses who bilk millions or billions from people via fraud - they never get this level of sentence.
In our society, some people are more "equal" than others. It's fucked up but it's a given when you let someone have 1E9 dollars to themself. The only way it's ever going to get fixed is if we realize that capitalism != democracy, and adjust or society accordingly.
You shouldn't use DRM'd files anyway.
Of course the nice thing here is that these to companies are finally pointing out why.
Most people are still pretty clueless about why DRM sucks, but perhaps a public feud between real and Apple will serve to spread the word.
Unless you're approaching some quantum-mechanics related limit to were the solenoid can only switch states on at the same rate as your sample rate, then I would say that the act of vibrating the solenoid is your DAC in action.
Digital really refers to a simplfying operating principle, it does not mean for example that a "digital" microprocessor does not in reality contain analog voltages. (The argument you're making also implies that my computer is not digital.)
The key thing about digital tech, is that for the most part you ignore the subtle fluctations in the analog spectrum. Rather than worring about whether a node is a 4.5V or 5V, you just say it's a one and move on with life.
If you treat digital as what it really is, a set of simplifying principles applied to an analog system, then my idea is clearly "digital".
Actually, you're not far from describing a digital amplifier (such as Bel Canto and Spectron). These amps generate a high frequency digital signal, which is pulse width modulated. Ordinary transducers cannot reproduce individual pulses due their inertia, but they do get "nudged" a little by each pulse. In affect, the transducer will average the signal out, converting the high frequency digital signal into a low frequency analog one -- the audio.
I'm not familiar with the specfic amps to which you are referring, but typically the low pass filtering is done with a few capacitors and inductors before the signal gets to the speakers. This is done because although the speaker will "integrate" the incident power over a period of time, you're still subjecting it to a series of very short, very strong magnetic forces instead of a more continuous weaker forces. This leaves you with a good chance of damaging the speaker (assuming it's a conventional type).* You might be able to get away with it on something like a piezo or ribbon tweeter though.
What type of speakers do these amps drive?
*This is also why amplifier "clipping" can be very damaging to speakers, even if the actual power output is well below the rated power of the speakers. A 10ns 100A pulse is going to contain the same amount of energy as a 1us 1A pulse, but the instantaneous force of the shorter pulse will be 100X as large, resulting in much higher stresses in whatever materials the speaker is made from.
Even if someone came up with a pair of headphones that had an S/PDIF or AES/EBU interface, it would still have to have a DAC and an analog transducer, because my ears are not digital nor will they ever be.
Actually, you could theoretically make actual digital headphones if you could get a solenoid to move back and forth at a few GHz (for decent fidelity). Then you'd probably need to place some sort of acoustic low pass filter between the transducer and your ears* but it is possible.
To be fair, I didn't really think you could have "digital" headphones either, until you said it couldn't be done. Then I had to ask myself "Is that really true?"
* To some extent our senses act as "low pass filters" by virture of their response time. They sort of integrate incident power over a time period. A sort of human "time constant".
To everyone: When does spin doctoring cross the line and become false advertising?"
In the consumer audio market, that's when.
From over-unity speakers (200W watts output from a 10W wall-wart), to "better-sounding" fiber optic cable, no claim seems too outrageous or fraudulent for a great many consumer audio manufacturers.
As an engineer who loves audio, it drives me nuts to see the bullshit that is constantly perpetrated in that market.
I'm sure there are tons of slashdotters who can post examples of incredibly unprofessional and possibly fraudulent specmanship in this arena.
There should be some feature in slashcode to remind people who inevitably try to post this that as soon as someone can fake your fingerprint or retinal scan, you are forked for life because you can never change those things.
And then there's also the problem of leaving them on everything you touch.
Fingerprint readers on PCs are hilarious because you've typically got tons of nice fingerprints all over the keyboard, mouse, display, etc.
Biometrics SUCK because the are NOT PRIVATE and they are UNCHANGEABLE.
The only thing they are good for is when people don't want to be identified.
4) While the FBI are busy smashing down your door: Take a hammer to your hard-drive's plateaus, and run like a screaming idiot while you think about how stupid you where to follow my instructions.
Somehow I don't think the FBI is going to give a shit about your slashdot account. Typically you need to be able to show thousands of dollars in damages before they'll to anything.
They just don't have the resources to go after after every violation.
I have a method just as good. The subway map for London is on my wall. The station names make great passwords, and there's plenty of them, and all i have to do is lookup to find the right one. The great thing about is that they're all in plain view for everyone to see. All anyone thinks is "hey that's a cool looking map".
Actually that's not a very good idea.
It's pretty much one step away from a note under your keyboard or your mother's maiden name.
Any text readable from your chair is an OBVIOUS password. It's also going to be part of a dictionary atteck, unlike "?pE94$vw".
"Cross-liscencing" is fine and dandy.
No, it's not.
Say I spend two years researching and developing an actually new idea:
I start my small company selling my new idea. Suddenly, XYZ corp starts claiming I'm violating their patent on "subtracting two numbers with a computer" or some other bullshit and demands we cross-liscense each other's patents.
Now XYZ corp has a royalty-free liscense to my tech and can use their massive resources to squeeze me out of the marketplace.
Cross liscensing of this form keeps small companies with new ideas out of the market. In my example, XYZ corp now has the fruits of my labor at ZERO cost to them, and has crushed my company, so how exactly am I getting paid for my idea?
I'm not saying all cross-liscensing is bad, just that it's very often done with bullshit patents like the one this article is about and is symptomatic of the major failings of our current patent system.
The best thing that can happen to patent law is to have a big player like MS get screwed by it.
Then MS can start putting their lobbying bucks into fixing patent law.
You don't get it.
Microsoft can affort to get screwed by it.
What happens when they want $400 million from the mozilla foundation?
The patent system is currently set up much like the "mutually assured destrucion" fo the cold war. If you're big enough to have a significant patent portfolio of your own, you're pretty much invulnerable. You might loose a case every now and then but you'll also get money from your own patents. You can rape and pillage small companies as you see and their only chance for protection is to ally with someone else big.
What patents are really doing is killing innovation and small companies.
It's too risky to come up with a cool new idea and start selling it as a small company (the whole thing patents were SUPPOSED to protect). Even if your small business patents your idea, companies like IBM have about a bazillion patents which you probably violationg at least some of and they will be able to force you to either loose a bunch of money in court or "cross-liscense" your technology.
This whole case is bullshit. Technology like this is fucking obvious. That fact that this patent was even granted shows the total incompetence of the patent office. See my opinion on them here.
My company does pre-press work for marketing campaigns. If they need 15 minutes to render a postscript file (or PDF) they need better hardware. We use off-the-shelf gear (PC and Mac, none of it SMP) and nothing we do that is full-page size takes 15 minutes, even at 300 dpi. What're they using, a PII-400???
That's a silly statement to make.
A PS or PDF file can be arbitrily complex for a given page size.
I've personally caused a single 8.5x11 page to take twenty mintues to come out of a fast laser printer.
All you need to do is send it a postscript file of something with a hundred thousand elements or so. (I'm my case, the VLSI layout for a microcontroller.)
If you're starting out with a bitmap then DPI and page size are dominating factors. When you're starting with a list of names in a scaleable font, you're talk about VECTOR graphics.
That is a "proper" way for a professional to work in this instance since they can then produce a result of arbitrary DPI or page size.
Bullshit.
I'll give you $50 if you can back that claim up. I want to see two video files.
Always nice to see someone get called for talking out their ass.
This guy is absolutely correct that the chances of these two video files colliding is amazingly small. Although the article is about collisions in MD5 sums, a little common sense goes a long ways.
If grandparent had these files when he said he did it would have been a very big deal. I imagine they could have been sold to researchers for a nice sum of money.
Someone with the knowledge and will and time can come up with a way to circumvent almost any protective scheme they come up with. Likely the only way to really safeguard something like this is to do a very time consuming and cpu intensive comparison of the two files. It will come back to "do you trust the source of the file".
That's a silly conclusion to reach.
It's like saying that we should give up on cryptography because some has found a way to crack the Caesar cipher.
Just because ONE IMPLEMENTATION of a technology is flawed does not mean the entire technology is flawed.
Hashing is a VERY useful process and only ONE particular implementation is being challenged here. The fundamental concept is still sound and extremely useful. Abandoning the entire idea would just be foolish.
No way. This just makes the system that much more inaccessible to the individual or small-time operator who can't afford a lawyer.
How so?
It's already massive expensive to obtain a patent, as opposed to registering copyright and if you're the defendant, you don't have any choice but to go to court now either.
The current system also actually much worse for small business than mine would be.
You were alright until you said "determined in court". Court costs are too expensive and land hardest on those fighting the patent.
First, the high cost of going to court is really a separate issue. I agree that it's a problem though. The court systems in the US are totally fucked, and a major reason for that is that you're only entitled to representation if someone tries to put you in jail, not if they try to ruin you financially.
Second, the solution I'm suggesting now puts the burden in court on the person that claims to have a valid patent, since it has never been "validated" before.
Right now there's this stupid presumption of validity because your application made it through the process. That forces the burden onto the person trying to defned themself. If they can't *prove* it invalid, they loose.
Without that silly presumption, the plaintiff is going to have to actually hire experts to prove that their claim is valid in the first place.
I've written software before that is used by state government to determine who gets audited. If that software was public and open there wouldn't be a single audit flagged by anyone. Accountants could pre-pare returns in very cleverly different ways with different numbers here and there to craft an audit-proof return.
That sounds like a problem with the criteria being used to determine who gets audited, not making the source code public. It sounds like the audit criteria are full of gaping holes and THAT is the problem.
The code are the rules in this system. And if everyone knew every rule, there would be no enforcement possible!
Ridiculous. It's sounds like the code/rules are already broken and only marginally effective.
The only case where your statements would actually be true is if it was actually impossible to change the criteria for an audit.
The right thing to do in this situation would be to fix the holes in the system, not blindly hope they're never found.
With a GOOD set of criteria, it wouldn't be trival to engineer yourself out of being flagged for an audit (other than not cheating on your taxes).
2 - Patents in general (not just software) should not be allowed for ideas that are already known within the community of inventors (or programmers in this case). The Patent office doesn't bother checking this requirement anymore (or at least if they are attempting to do so they are obviously failing at it). When this isn't done, the owner of an idea ends up being the one with no scruples who decided to usurp ownership of the public idea first, rather than the one that thought of the idea first.
Fix those two problems first, and then you can talk about supporting software patents.
The trouble is problem #2 isn't fixable.
Maybe when that patent office was created it made sense to have one organization the would claim to understand EVERY TECHNOLOGY ON THE PLANET in enough detail to decide if an invention is novel, but I submit that idea has become totally unworkable.
Instead, the patent office should admit what it has already become, a registry of "I invented this on this date." The presumption that a patent is valid because it has been rubberstamped by the patent office should be ceased immediately.
The validty of specfic patents can then be determined in court, as necessary, where both sides of the issue can call real experts from those fields.
Removing corporate personhood would hurt consumers in many ways as well. For instance, if GM makes a faulty product that injures you, if a they're not a person, who do you sue?
There's no reason GM *HAS* to be considered an ACTUAL PERSON by our legal system in order to be sued. Treating companies like people is just stupid.
What if that faultiness is determined to be criminally negligent, who do we put in jail?
Just as a corporation cannot be subject to the same penalties and responsibilities as an actual person, it should not receive the same rights.
It's a double-edged sword, but if you learn more about it, you might realize it does more good than harm.
You must live in a different country than I do. In America, corporations are totally out of control. They routinely buy anything they want via political contributions.
what we have may not be a free market, but this band would have saved a lot of money by paying for media instead of signing up. Calling it a monopoly is going too far.
And this band would have got their CDs on store shelves how?
I don't think you understand the realities of the business right now. Stores are foced into exclusive agreements and good luck going platinum when you have to sell every disc yourself.
In an actually free market, price fixing for an extended period of time is impossible, because another company will just start up that charges less.