I suspect that few folks in a merger would call it particularly "smooth", especially when there are redundant positions.
However, HP/Compaq had numerous reports of pretty awful problems combining things. The press, at least, represented it as one of the messier major mergers in recent history.
However, Carly has been doing a sensationally poor job. She's cut HP's legendary calculator engineering team. She's managed to kill worker morale in a long running high-profile spat with the well-liked HP founding family. She's cut a lot of jobs, which is okay *as long as HP can continue to provide acceptable service*. She's moved HP back into the PC market, a market that has killed countless companies, and one that HP has been trying to extracate itself from for years, without any good justification of how HP is going to do better this time around. She took part in a high-profile and expensive merger with Compaq, a deal that has benefited few folks but those as Compaq. She's antagonized Microsoft in the high-profile "Tablet PC" incident and in snubbing their music system -- while this may make us Slashdotters chortle with glee, snubbing Microsoft is only a good move if you stand to gain significantly from doing so. Otherwise, you're just using poor diplomacy.
People get irritated because there's a perception (and one that is, I think, not unfounded) that she's getting awfully gentle handling because it looks good and modern for HP to have a female CEO, and she's female, and that a male CEO would have been fired by now.
In general, I tend to feel that Carly is doing a really, really awful job. I will admit that I am not on the board, and don't have all the information about what she's doing. I tend to find out about her when HP gets in the news. However, compare the times Carly has been in the news with the times that Steve Jobs has been in the news. While I'm sure that some of this is just that Apple is better than HP at manipulating the press, the press is still reporting facts. Jobs has pushed a number of things out that have done Apple good. While he has had rather hefty bonuses (ignoring his much-ballyhooed $1 salary), he also isn't making obscene bonuses for dubious mergers, as Carly is.
Of course, *Carly* isn't a one-button-mouse fetishist...:-(
Okay, let's say that this is the case. Howe often are people really running at full capacity? I mean, when you have ordinary modern desktops with incredible I/O and CPU capabilities, what's the chances that the database is running close enough to maximum load that it can't scale up by a factor of 40?
This is why Java sold for scalability reasons is so silly. Sun is big about "scalability" aspects of it. The problem is that this only applies to problems that can't work on one computer, but *can* work on one computer times some constant that's relatively small from a computer science standpoint. There just aren't a lot of problems in this range. Plus, a lot of problems that *would* require multiple machines can run on one machine simply by using C++ instead of Java.
I mean, let's say you have some program. Your desktop can do 2,000,000,000 operations per second, say. Making something that can "scale up" makes sense if your problem cannot be solved with 2,000,000,000 operations per second, but *can* be solved with 20,000,000,000 operations per second (though next year, that problem will be back down to the single computer range). A problem, on the other hand, that requires 2,000,000,000,000 operations per second may be out of range of a typical Sun "scalable" system. So there's an awfully small window of actual usefulness for these systems, though Sun likes to claim that "if you want to think about the future and scaling up, you should use our systems so that you can scale". Hell, compute power doubles every 18 months. You'd have to be unable to write software that runs more efficiently than 2,000,000,000 operations per second *and* is doubling every 18 months to stay in the "uncalculable by one computer" window. Which is not a lot of problems.
The only benefits I see to IBM's approach is that companies can theoretically replace their local Windows boxes with thin clients and fire their local IT staff, and have IBM do all their IT work. IBM can offshore their own IT work, and thus get computer maintenance done cheaply and efficiently. And that's predicated on the ability and willingness of the industry to move to thin clients. Given that many companies (including the same big players that are going for it now -- IBM, Sun, HP) have tried to jump-start industry-wide moves to thin clients before, and have all failed, I don't see a lot of success in their future.
However what makes them nervous is whoever makes this work seemlessly first will be a huge winner.
I disagree. Say some small company does this. The big company that comes along and does it cheaply will be the one that is a huge winner.
People place too much value on being the first to market with something. If you're, say, eight months ahead (which is pretty good, in Internet time), you have eight months to entrench yourself so tightly that the titans can't just brush you aside. Not that long, really, especially since said titans can benefit from your marketing the new technology.
She was at Lucent? Is this the same Lucent that has been consistently taking it in the ass for a couple of years because management scaled up too far, too fast?
You know, I'm not an embittered ex-HPer, which is what the grandparent sounds like.
However, I have to admit that many of her moves seem long-term damaging in the extreme. I'm not watching ultra-closely, but *none* of her moves that have made the news seem particularly clever.
"Know nothing about technology" is pushing it. She certainly knows less than a typical engineer -- that's just how modern CEOs are. They don't rise from the ranks. They come from business school, and move up through middle management.
She seems to be engaging in some kind of hopeless marketing moves at the moment with "utility computing". Nothing wrong with marketing, but ultimately you have to be selling something that's desireable to the consumer. Even Microsoft started out selling a GUI when everyone else was using the halfassed PC CLIs of the time, and got their lock-in inertia going when they had a superior product.
I still don't understand why a consumer would go for this -- it seems like it's extremely unlikely to be financially benficial to them. The only possibility would be if a consumer let their US IT staff go, and used IBM's workers, who could be offshored, to maintain their now-remote systems.
The problem is that, while this might be workable if everyone was still using VT100s, currently, the "terminal" of choice on everyone's desk is a Windows box. These things are flaky and complicated enough that most companies still need on-site IT personnel.
Now, *if* you could migrate everyone to a thin client platform of some sort, a la X terminals, then it might be worthwhile because you could cut IT costs to almost nothing -- you just need some maintenance company to drop by when a terminal goes down, and IBM does the rest of your IT work remotely. However, in today's environment, I don't see where this is going to go.
Initial disclaimer -- my understanding of what "utility computing" means has come from folks describing it in this discussion.
Utility computing appears to be beneficial for a customer in only one situation: where they need a wildly varying (and potentially extremely large) amount of compute power to solve compute-bounded problems. Furthermore, the amount of compute power required must not exceed the power of a desktop by about five orders of magnitude, and must exceed the power of a desktop by at least one order of magnitude. Bandwidth use must be minimal, and off-siting data must be acceptable from a security standpoint. Furthermore, there must be some kind of reason that I cannot run the task on multiple existing on-site computers.
There are simply not a heck of a lot of problems like this. Let's break this down.
* This is not worthwhile if you don't require a lot of compute power. I can run out to Dell and get a $500 headless system with a processor that can do a hell of a lot of computation and stick it in a back room somewhere. It can work for, say, five years. If I can make do with a single machine, HP's total fees would have to be less than $100 a year to compete. Given that you have to pay for HP to set up the machine and need to provide them with profit, this is unlikely.
* My compute demands must vary greatly over time. Otherwise, I'm better off just purchasing enough computers to do my work. HP's trying to take advantage of time-sharing economics, which lets them make money by increasing efficiency by reusing compute time that other folks are using.
* The amount of compute power required must not exceed the power of a desktop by more than five orders of magnitude, and must exceed the power of a desktop by at least one order of magnitude (furthermore, this target moves as desktop power doubles each year). The logic behind this is as follows -- if I need fewer than ten computers, it's pretty easy and cheap to just set them up myself. If I need more than ten thousand computers (perhaps a hundred thousand), it's dubious as to whether HP is going to be able to provide enough machines (though perhaps I'm underestimating the scope of their plan). The problem is that usually problems can be rewritten to be computed more efficiently. Hell, use C++ instead of Java, and you already have in the neighborhood an order-of-magnitude CPU efficiency improvement.
* Bandwidth use must be minimal. Based on my rough price estimates from servercove.com's colocation pricing, it costs about ten cents per gigabyte of data transfered. This is an additional cost incurred if your compute machines are remote that does not exist if you're only going over your LAN.
* Off-siting data must be acceptable from a security standpoint. If data that *cannot* get out (i.e. probably amost anything that companies are willing to pay a lot of money to chew on) is involved, either HP must accept liability for security breeches on these massively shared systems, indemnifying customers, or those customers are better off keeping data on their own private network.
* Finally, most companies already have a vast network of desktops in place. In many cases (and this has been done in scientific computing quite a bit) it seems like they would be better off simply reusing their workstations at night to do whatever compute task they have. The only issue I can think of is if perhaps the company is very small -- has few workers -- but has high compute requirements.
The only real examples I can think of off the top of my head would be perhaps CG labs. These have to have render farms running, and probably use large bursts of cycles when working on a project. Someone swiping a particular effect would not be a big security issue -- who the hell is a hacker going to sell it to, the same movie producers? CG houses tend to push the limits of available compute power -- they don't have the problem of "the computer used to access the shared system already has hundreds of times the com
Which is a shame, because it should only matter if a) the trademark is the same AND b) you are selling similar products to the trademark holder. Possibly c) you aren't making it obvious you aren't the trademark holder.
Keep in mind that Google, not interested in fighting legal battles, will generally comply with complaints.
Even if the complaint has no legal merit, they'll do the removal.
I dunno. Say I search for "dell buy", because Dell is the only major OEM I know of and I have friends that use Dell. Surely it would be legitimate for Micron to allow an ad to come up that says "We sell computers at lower-than-Dell prices!"
More to the point, I think that trademark law shouldn't cover this. The point of a trademark is to ensure that there is no consumer confusion between two brands.
Finally, the ruling was only "we won't throw your decision out out of hand -- you can try it in court". They didn't say that Playboy was in the right -- just that there was enough chance that they had something legitimate that they should get their day in court.
Yes, but then Bush would likely suddenly decide that the US Really Needs To Do Something about those weapons of mass destruction that India is accruing...
This patent is one of the clearest and more straightforward that I've ever read.
To read a patent, do the following:
1) If you already know what the patent is, skip the abstract. The abstract can be useful, but is also a nice place to include bullshit. It also has no legal significance.
2) Read the claims. The claims are where the meat -- the legally significant portion of the patent -- is. If anyone infringes on even one of these claims, they are infringing on the patent.
3) Skip the remaining description. This is nothing but "helpful" information. That means a place to include technobabble, jargon, random stuff that might appeal to people licensing the patent, half-baked ideas, and random diagrams. In this case, you're apparently trying to read a textual representation of some sort of diagram with 1000 steps, which is a waste of time.
This patent has only two claims, and for legalese, both are short and to the point.
The main difficulty in reading claims comes when there are many claims (perhaps 30 or so) and most of them refer back to a number of other claims.
Naw. Every generation and place has its crises, real or imagined. Humanity and civilization are remarkably resiliant. There was going to be the death of the world by heat death of the Sun. There was going to be a nuclear World War III during JFK's time that was going to wipe out civilization. There was the Black Plague, the fall of European royalty, the Great Depression, the US Civil War, World War I and II, and the Mongols invading China. There was the Spanish Inquisition. There was slavery. There were Pompeii and Krakatoa, the Big Earthquake that was going to split California off into the sea, and the melting of the ice caps. We had the mass immigration of Irish and Chinese laborers to the United States. We kept puttering along, even if things sucked for a while. A lot of folks worried that there was going to be an end to things. But, as long as there are lots of stubborn, self-interested, emotional, flawed, and oh-so-human hairless apes running around busily patching anything that upsets them too much, I suspect things are going to be more or less okay. Really, the best thing to do is to sit back and enjoy the wild and crazy stage we call life.
I think we're talking about two different online music stores. Someone mentioned magnatune.com, and so I took a look. This is different from Bleep, which is the online music store selling Warp.
I don't know about VBR, but I remember that at one point (perhaps a year ago, maybe more?), I was trying LAME's ABR feature, and in the particular copy that I had built, there were *definitely* artifacts being introduced. It wasn't a function of low bit rate.
That has since been fixed.
Currently, I far prefer VBR to anything else. The problem is that CBR currently provides a simple metric that can be seen in encoded files -- "What bitrate do you use?" I don't believe LAME embeds what quality level it uses in VBR files, so it's hard for folks to say "These are LAME quality level 4 VBR MP3s".
I got interested in blind testing of various bitrates of vorbis and mp3 at one point. I found that VBR made a significant difference with the music I was listening to -- I could reduce bitrate by something like 30% from the indistinguishable-from-uncompressed-audio CBR mp3s and get indistinguishable-from-uncompressed-audio VBR mp3s. I've found that a major factor in the general audio superiority of vorbis and other new formats is that they are *guaranteed* to be VBR. VBR MP3s are not that far off from vorbis quality (though I find the artifacts to be more disruptive).
If you're using 320 and don't care about space, then there really *isn't* any point in VBR. However, if size is an issue, VBR really is a no-brainer. Aside from certain situations involving streaming to devices with tiny buffers, there's no reason to use CBR.
Aside from Shoutcast/Icecast streaming purchase data links, it might also be a good idea to have an ID3 tag (as well as the Ogg equivalent) containing a purchase link. This would make it easy for online music providers to put out low-fi music files with "buy it" links to pages to let folks buy the music.
Furthermore, if this approach is taken, online music providers could even use P2P networks to distribute their low-fi samples.:-) No Internet radio bandwidth costs, and you still let folks try-before-they-buy.
Okay, I just went there for the first time. Now, their artist selection is small. Probably too small to go anywhere. However, from a technical standpoint, they are *spot* on. Besides offering music in the format folks want, they even provide a free Internet radio station that you can listen to. If you hear something that you like, you can zip over to their web site and buy it. That's a damned intelligent system.
If I were them, I'd put out a patch for Shoutcast/Icecast in xmms and talk to the Nullsoft folks about doing the same for WinAMP to stream a "buy it" (or at least "for more information on this song") link along with each song. When a song's getting streamed, the user can just click to bring up a page in their web browser to let them buy the song (or album containing the song, or whatnot). That'd make it ideal for folks who want to sell these things. I think you'd see a lot more try-before-you-buy Internet radio stations.
Thank you for your review. It was most informative.
Downloads did not remain in any way accessible after the initial post-purchase links were accessed, so you had better hope the download doesn't get broken or lost.
It's trivial for them to only "remove" a download after the HTTP connection is properly closed (or after three days, or something like that). I would guess that they do this. There's little way that this could be used against them, and there's clear benefits). At around a dollar per five megs or so, bandwidth is an awfully small cost. ServerCove sells bandwidth at $89 for 700GB/mo, or 12 cents a gigabyte, to get a rough benchmark. That's about a twentieth of a cent per MP3 in bandwidth. They could probably sequeeze in quite a few retransfers before they need to worry about losing money, given that this is less than a tenth of a percent of their profits.
* I'd like to see ogg vorbis support. Given that this is all automated, I don't see any reason that files couldn't be easily provided in Vorbis format.
--Quality encoding, even if it is VBR.
This confuses me. VBR is consistently more space efficient given the quality you get. Why on earth would you see VBR as a negative?
This is almost ideal news for the typical Slashdotter.
First, the existing patent system is widely complained about. This patent probably shouldn't have been granted in the first place. However, if Microsoft had won this case, all that would have happened is that this particular patent would have been invalidated. Now, a major tech company just took a half million dollar loss because the PTO is using silly rules. The tech industry now has serious reasons to argue for modification of tech patents. Microsoft's patent portfolio is doubtlessly valuable in terms of preventing newcomers from entering the market, but there's a significant question as to whether it's worth half a billion dollars (plus all the other copycats that are likely to run out and start suing large companies).
Second, someone had to take a nasty hit to get business folks upset about the state of things. And who would we rather have take the financial hit than Microsoft?
And as *I* posted above, instead of simply claiming that I'm wrong, I'd be interested in seeing whether you can refute any of my points instead of simply calling me a troll.
Read the SPF FAQ if you're curious about why his so-called DOS attack isn't a problem.
You're misunderstanding the nature of the spoofing we're discussing -- it's attacking DNS, not the SMTP spoofing that the SPF people are using as a straw man. No hacker is going to look at this and say "gee, let's attack SMTP". While, yes, theoretically you could attack SPF by spoofing SMTP, it is also non-trivial in that it will probably require many attempts to succeed for a single email. There is little reason for a spammer to try spoofing SMTP, however, when the infinitely easier to spoof DNS is considered a trusted system by SPF, and caching provides for many, many successes for a single attack. Read one of my past enumerations of the issues in SPF if you want a larger list of breakages.
The SPF guys are pretty clueful. There's a large number of smart people who have spent a lot of thought on it; they haven't missed anything obvious.
I disagree. I've looked at their documents, and they have the ring of knowledgeable network engineers with absolutely zero background in security (paradoxical as that sounds). And I've pointed out a number of flaws in the protocol with an off-the-cuff reading. There are probably more subtle problems that would require some good security folks a bit of pondering to turn up.
If you still feel that I'm "clueless or troll" after reading the document I linked to, I'd be interested in hearing what, exactly, you think I'm wrong about.
I don't really want to repeat all the flaws I've pointed out before, so I'll link to the last SPF discussion here
On the receiving MTA side, yes. The sending MTA side (DNS TXT record) is trivial.
True. I was referring to the MTA.
Such as...? And, doesn't everything have drawbacks? Eating food has the drawback that I might become poisoned, infected or obese, but it's the only way I know to avoid starvation.
Yes...as you pointed out, there are *major* benefits involved with eating food. There's a good deal of value associated with not starving for most people. SPF, unfortunately, does not provide major benefits, and does have some drawbacks.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that few folks in a merger would call it particularly "smooth", especially when there are redundant positions.
However, HP/Compaq had numerous reports of pretty awful problems combining things. The press, at least, represented it as one of the messier major mergers in recent history.
However, Carly has been doing a sensationally poor job. She's cut HP's legendary calculator engineering team. She's managed to kill worker morale in a long running high-profile spat with the well-liked HP founding family. She's cut a lot of jobs, which is okay *as long as HP can continue to provide acceptable service*. She's moved HP back into the PC market, a market that has killed countless companies, and one that HP has been trying to extracate itself from for years, without any good justification of how HP is going to do better this time around. She took part in a high-profile and expensive merger with Compaq, a deal that has benefited few folks but those as Compaq. She's antagonized Microsoft in the high-profile "Tablet PC" incident and in snubbing their music system -- while this may make us Slashdotters chortle with glee, snubbing Microsoft is only a good move if you stand to gain significantly from doing so. Otherwise, you're just using poor diplomacy.
:-(
People get irritated because there's a perception (and one that is, I think, not unfounded) that she's getting awfully gentle handling because it looks good and modern for HP to have a female CEO, and she's female, and that a male CEO would have been fired by now.
In general, I tend to feel that Carly is doing a really, really awful job. I will admit that I am not on the board, and don't have all the information about what she's doing. I tend to find out about her when HP gets in the news. However, compare the times Carly has been in the news with the times that Steve Jobs has been in the news. While I'm sure that some of this is just that Apple is better than HP at manipulating the press, the press is still reporting facts. Jobs has pushed a number of things out that have done Apple good. While he has had rather hefty bonuses (ignoring his much-ballyhooed $1 salary), he also isn't making obscene bonuses for dubious mergers, as Carly is.
Of course, *Carly* isn't a one-button-mouse fetishist...
Okay, let's say that this is the case. Howe often are people really running at full capacity? I mean, when you have ordinary modern desktops with incredible I/O and CPU capabilities, what's the chances that the database is running close enough to maximum load that it can't scale up by a factor of 40?
This is why Java sold for scalability reasons is so silly. Sun is big about "scalability" aspects of it. The problem is that this only applies to problems that can't work on one computer, but *can* work on one computer times some constant that's relatively small from a computer science standpoint. There just aren't a lot of problems in this range. Plus, a lot of problems that *would* require multiple machines can run on one machine simply by using C++ instead of Java.
I mean, let's say you have some program. Your desktop can do 2,000,000,000 operations per second, say. Making something that can "scale up" makes sense if your problem cannot be solved with 2,000,000,000 operations per second, but *can* be solved with 20,000,000,000 operations per second (though next year, that problem will be back down to the single computer range). A problem, on the other hand, that requires 2,000,000,000,000 operations per second may be out of range of a typical Sun "scalable" system. So there's an awfully small window of actual usefulness for these systems, though Sun likes to claim that "if you want to think about the future and scaling up, you should use our systems so that you can scale". Hell, compute power doubles every 18 months. You'd have to be unable to write software that runs more efficiently than 2,000,000,000 operations per second *and* is doubling every 18 months to stay in the "uncalculable by one computer" window. Which is not a lot of problems.
The only benefits I see to IBM's approach is that companies can theoretically replace their local Windows boxes with thin clients and fire their local IT staff, and have IBM do all their IT work. IBM can offshore their own IT work, and thus get computer maintenance done cheaply and efficiently. And that's predicated on the ability and willingness of the industry to move to thin clients. Given that many companies (including the same big players that are going for it now -- IBM, Sun, HP) have tried to jump-start industry-wide moves to thin clients before, and have all failed, I don't see a lot of success in their future.
However what makes them nervous is whoever makes this work seemlessly first will be a huge winner.
I disagree. Say some small company does this. The big company that comes along and does it cheaply will be the one that is a huge winner.
People place too much value on being the first to market with something. If you're, say, eight months ahead (which is pretty good, in Internet time), you have eight months to entrench yourself so tightly that the titans can't just brush you aside. Not that long, really, especially since said titans can benefit from your marketing the new technology.
XML is a framework for constructing standards for data interchange, not a standard for data interchange.
She was at Lucent? Is this the same Lucent that has been consistently taking it in the ass for a couple of years because management scaled up too far, too fast?
You know, I'm not an embittered ex-HPer, which is what the grandparent sounds like.
However, I have to admit that many of her moves seem long-term damaging in the extreme. I'm not watching ultra-closely, but *none* of her moves that have made the news seem particularly clever.
"Know nothing about technology" is pushing it. She certainly knows less than a typical engineer -- that's just how modern CEOs are. They don't rise from the ranks. They come from business school, and move up through middle management.
She seems to be engaging in some kind of hopeless marketing moves at the moment with "utility computing". Nothing wrong with marketing, but ultimately you have to be selling something that's desireable to the consumer. Even Microsoft started out selling a GUI when everyone else was using the halfassed PC CLIs of the time, and got their lock-in inertia going when they had a superior product.
I still don't understand why a consumer would go for this -- it seems like it's extremely unlikely to be financially benficial to them. The only possibility would be if a consumer let their US IT staff go, and used IBM's workers, who could be offshored, to maintain their now-remote systems.
The problem is that, while this might be workable if everyone was still using VT100s, currently, the "terminal" of choice on everyone's desk is a Windows box. These things are flaky and complicated enough that most companies still need on-site IT personnel.
Now, *if* you could migrate everyone to a thin client platform of some sort, a la X terminals, then it might be worthwhile because you could cut IT costs to almost nothing -- you just need some maintenance company to drop by when a terminal goes down, and IBM does the rest of your IT work remotely. However, in today's environment, I don't see where this is going to go.
Initial disclaimer -- my understanding of what "utility computing" means has come from folks describing it in this discussion.
Utility computing appears to be beneficial for a customer in only one situation: where they need a wildly varying (and potentially extremely large) amount of compute power to solve compute-bounded problems. Furthermore, the amount of compute power required must not exceed the power of a desktop by about five orders of magnitude, and must exceed the power of a desktop by at least one order of magnitude. Bandwidth use must be minimal, and off-siting data must be acceptable from a security standpoint. Furthermore, there must be some kind of reason that I cannot run the task on multiple existing on-site computers.
There are simply not a heck of a lot of problems like this. Let's break this down.
* This is not worthwhile if you don't require a lot of compute power. I can run out to Dell and get a $500 headless system with a processor that can do a hell of a lot of computation and stick it in a back room somewhere. It can work for, say, five years. If I can make do with a single machine, HP's total fees would have to be less than $100 a year to compete. Given that you have to pay for HP to set up the machine and need to provide them with profit, this is unlikely.
* My compute demands must vary greatly over time. Otherwise, I'm better off just purchasing enough computers to do my work. HP's trying to take advantage of time-sharing economics, which lets them make money by increasing efficiency by reusing compute time that other folks are using.
* The amount of compute power required must not exceed the power of a desktop by more than five orders of magnitude, and must exceed the power of a desktop by at least one order of magnitude (furthermore, this target moves as desktop power doubles each year). The logic behind this is as follows -- if I need fewer than ten computers, it's pretty easy and cheap to just set them up myself. If I need more than ten thousand computers (perhaps a hundred thousand), it's dubious as to whether HP is going to be able to provide enough machines (though perhaps I'm underestimating the scope of their plan). The problem is that usually problems can be rewritten to be computed more efficiently. Hell, use C++ instead of Java, and you already have in the neighborhood an order-of-magnitude CPU efficiency improvement.
* Bandwidth use must be minimal. Based on my rough price estimates from servercove.com's colocation pricing, it costs about ten cents per gigabyte of data transfered. This is an additional cost incurred if your compute machines are remote that does not exist if you're only going over your LAN.
* Off-siting data must be acceptable from a security standpoint. If data that *cannot* get out (i.e. probably amost anything that companies are willing to pay a lot of money to chew on) is involved, either HP must accept liability for security breeches on these massively shared systems, indemnifying customers, or those customers are better off keeping data on their own private network.
* Finally, most companies already have a vast network of desktops in place. In many cases (and this has been done in scientific computing quite a bit) it seems like they would be better off simply reusing their workstations at night to do whatever compute task they have. The only issue I can think of is if perhaps the company is very small -- has few workers -- but has high compute requirements.
The only real examples I can think of off the top of my head would be perhaps CG labs. These have to have render farms running, and probably use large bursts of cycles when working on a project. Someone swiping a particular effect would not be a big security issue -- who the hell is a hacker going to sell it to, the same movie producers? CG houses tend to push the limits of available compute power -- they don't have the problem of "the computer used to access the shared system already has hundreds of times the com
Which is a shame, because it should only matter if a) the trademark is the same AND b) you are selling similar products to the trademark holder. Possibly c) you aren't making it obvious you aren't the trademark holder.
Keep in mind that Google, not interested in fighting legal battles, will generally comply with complaints.
Even if the complaint has no legal merit, they'll do the removal.
I dunno. Say I search for "dell buy", because Dell is the only major OEM I know of and I have friends that use Dell. Surely it would be legitimate for Micron to allow an ad to come up that says "We sell computers at lower-than-Dell prices!"
More to the point, I think that trademark law shouldn't cover this. The point of a trademark is to ensure that there is no consumer confusion between two brands.
Finally, the ruling was only "we won't throw your decision out out of hand -- you can try it in court". They didn't say that Playboy was in the right -- just that there was enough chance that they had something legitimate that they should get their day in court.
Yes, but then Bush would likely suddenly decide that the US Really Needs To Do Something about those weapons of mass destruction that India is accruing...
This patent is one of the clearest and more straightforward that I've ever read.
To read a patent, do the following:
1) If you already know what the patent is, skip the abstract. The abstract can be useful, but is also a nice place to include bullshit. It also has no legal significance.
2) Read the claims. The claims are where the meat -- the legally significant portion of the patent -- is. If anyone infringes on even one of these claims, they are infringing on the patent.
3) Skip the remaining description. This is nothing but "helpful" information. That means a place to include technobabble, jargon, random stuff that might appeal to people licensing the patent, half-baked ideas, and random diagrams. In this case, you're apparently trying to read a textual representation of some sort of diagram with 1000 steps, which is a waste of time.
This patent has only two claims, and for legalese, both are short and to the point.
The main difficulty in reading claims comes when there are many claims (perhaps 30 or so) and most of them refer back to a number of other claims.
Disclaimer -- IANAL.
future of doom
Naw. Every generation and place has its crises, real or imagined. Humanity and civilization are remarkably resiliant. There was going to be the death of the world by heat death of the Sun. There was going to be a nuclear World War III during JFK's time that was going to wipe out civilization. There was the Black Plague, the fall of European royalty, the Great Depression, the US Civil War, World War I and II, and the Mongols invading China. There was the Spanish Inquisition. There was slavery. There were Pompeii and Krakatoa, the Big Earthquake that was going to split California off into the sea, and the melting of the ice caps. We had the mass immigration of Irish and Chinese laborers to the United States. We kept puttering along, even if things sucked for a while. A lot of folks worried that there was going to be an end to things. But, as long as there are lots of stubborn, self-interested, emotional, flawed, and oh-so-human hairless apes running around busily patching anything that upsets them too much, I suspect things are going to be more or less okay. Really, the best thing to do is to sit back and enjoy the wild and crazy stage we call life.
I think we're talking about two different online music stores. Someone mentioned magnatune.com, and so I took a look. This is different from Bleep, which is the online music store selling Warp.
Thanks. So all that's necessary is for media player software to support it nicely, eh?
I don't know about VBR, but I remember that at one point (perhaps a year ago, maybe more?), I was trying LAME's ABR feature, and in the particular copy that I had built, there were *definitely* artifacts being introduced. It wasn't a function of low bit rate.
That has since been fixed.
Currently, I far prefer VBR to anything else. The problem is that CBR currently provides a simple metric that can be seen in encoded files -- "What bitrate do you use?" I don't believe LAME embeds what quality level it uses in VBR files, so it's hard for folks to say "These are LAME quality level 4 VBR MP3s".
I got interested in blind testing of various bitrates of vorbis and mp3 at one point. I found that VBR made a significant difference with the music I was listening to -- I could reduce bitrate by something like 30% from the indistinguishable-from-uncompressed-audio CBR mp3s and get indistinguishable-from-uncompressed-audio VBR mp3s. I've found that a major factor in the general audio superiority of vorbis and other new formats is that they are *guaranteed* to be VBR. VBR MP3s are not that far off from vorbis quality (though I find the artifacts to be more disruptive).
If you're using 320 and don't care about space, then there really *isn't* any point in VBR. However, if size is an issue, VBR really is a no-brainer. Aside from certain situations involving streaming to devices with tiny buffers, there's no reason to use CBR.
Aside from Shoutcast/Icecast streaming purchase data links, it might also be a good idea to have an ID3 tag (as well as the Ogg equivalent) containing a purchase link. This would make it easy for online music providers to put out low-fi music files with "buy it" links to pages to let folks buy the music.
:-) No Internet radio bandwidth costs, and you still let folks try-before-they-buy.
Furthermore, if this approach is taken, online music providers could even use P2P networks to distribute their low-fi samples.
Okay, I just went there for the first time. Now, their artist selection is small. Probably too small to go anywhere. However, from a technical standpoint, they are *spot* on. Besides offering music in the format folks want, they even provide a free Internet radio station that you can listen to. If you hear something that you like, you can zip over to their web site and buy it. That's a damned intelligent system.
If I were them, I'd put out a patch for Shoutcast/Icecast in xmms and talk to the Nullsoft folks about doing the same for WinAMP to stream a "buy it" (or at least "for more information on this song") link along with each song. When a song's getting streamed, the user can just click to bring up a page in their web browser to let them buy the song (or album containing the song, or whatnot). That'd make it ideal for folks who want to sell these things. I think you'd see a lot more try-before-you-buy Internet radio stations.
Thank you for your review. It was most informative.
Downloads did not remain in any way accessible after the initial post-purchase links were accessed, so you had better hope the download doesn't get broken or lost.
It's trivial for them to only "remove" a download after the HTTP connection is properly closed (or after three days, or something like that). I would guess that they do this. There's little way that this could be used against them, and there's clear benefits). At around a dollar per five megs or so, bandwidth is an awfully small cost. ServerCove sells bandwidth at $89 for 700GB/mo, or 12 cents a gigabyte, to get a rough benchmark. That's about a twentieth of a cent per MP3 in bandwidth. They could probably sequeeze in quite a few retransfers before they need to worry about losing money, given that this is less than a tenth of a percent of their profits.
* I'd like to see ogg vorbis support. Given that this is all automated, I don't see any reason that files couldn't be easily provided in Vorbis format.
--Quality encoding, even if it is VBR.
This confuses me. VBR is consistently more space efficient given the quality you get. Why on earth would you see VBR as a negative?
This is almost ideal news for the typical Slashdotter.
First, the existing patent system is widely complained about. This patent probably shouldn't have been granted in the first place. However, if Microsoft had won this case, all that would have happened is that this particular patent would have been invalidated. Now, a major tech company just took a half million dollar loss because the PTO is using silly rules. The tech industry now has serious reasons to argue for modification of tech patents. Microsoft's patent portfolio is doubtlessly valuable in terms of preventing newcomers from entering the market, but there's a significant question as to whether it's worth half a billion dollars (plus all the other copycats that are likely to run out and start suing large companies).
Second, someone had to take a nasty hit to get business folks upset about the state of things. And who would we rather have take the financial hit than Microsoft?
Best patent news I've heard in a long time.
I hope Eolas leaves Mozilla alone (well, AOL).
I'm just curious -- unless you're, say, a parent reading to their child, how exactly is book reading a social activity?
And as *I* posted above, instead of simply claiming that I'm wrong, I'd be interested in seeing whether you can refute any of my points instead of simply calling me a troll.
Read the SPF FAQ if you're curious about why his so-called DOS attack isn't a problem.
You're misunderstanding the nature of the spoofing we're discussing -- it's attacking DNS, not the SMTP spoofing that the SPF people are using as a straw man. No hacker is going to look at this and say "gee, let's attack SMTP". While, yes, theoretically you could attack SPF by spoofing SMTP, it is also non-trivial in that it will probably require many attempts to succeed for a single email. There is little reason for a spammer to try spoofing SMTP, however, when the infinitely easier to spoof DNS is considered a trusted system by SPF, and caching provides for many, many successes for a single attack. Read one of my past enumerations of the issues in SPF if you want a larger list of breakages.
The SPF guys are pretty clueful. There's a large number of smart people who have spent a lot of thought on it; they haven't missed anything obvious.
I disagree. I've looked at their documents, and they have the ring of knowledgeable network engineers with absolutely zero background in security (paradoxical as that sounds). And I've pointed out a number of flaws in the protocol with an off-the-cuff reading. There are probably more subtle problems that would require some good security folks a bit of pondering to turn up.
If you still feel that I'm "clueless or troll" after reading the document I linked to, I'd be interested in hearing what, exactly, you think I'm wrong about.
Or provide a link
I don't really want to repeat all the flaws I've pointed out before, so I'll link to the last SPF discussion here
On the receiving MTA side, yes. The sending MTA side (DNS TXT record) is trivial.
True. I was referring to the MTA.
Such as...? And, doesn't everything have drawbacks? Eating food has the drawback that I might become poisoned, infected or obese, but it's the only way I know to avoid starvation.
Yes...as you pointed out, there are *major* benefits involved with eating food. There's a good deal of value associated with not starving for most people. SPF, unfortunately, does not provide major benefits, and does have some drawbacks.