Britian, France and Germany (not to mention Spain and Portugal) were world powers because of centuries of mind-numbing warfare. That's what drove their military technology up to the point where they could easily conquer the world. They got a little carried away early in the previous century, and after that they stopped their warring -- and stopped being world powers. The USA took over as world power, and has been involved in one war or another ever since. The USA has caught on to the trick and has been able to retain a wartime economy even in times of nominal peace.
I think India has a lot of potential right now, and that concentrating on developing its own industry is exactly the right thing to do. Its nukes give it anti-bullying insurance, and building up domestic industry will make it less dependent on foreign investors. It'll take some time, but then you will see a real shakeup in the world order. A war with Pakistan could derail this, though -- better keep a close eye on the CIA.
The world already has far worse things than Microsoft. We may like to cast Microsoft as the Evil Empire, but I doubt it's about to overthrow the Indian government and install a brutal military regime. Compare this with the United Fruit Company, now affectionately known as Chiquita.
Patent #5,016,009.
It covers the genius-level idea of compressing data that has repeating sequences, by replacing any repetitions with a reference to the first occurrence. Gee! I would never have thought of that!
The patent doesn't even include a smart way to find repeating sequences, it covers just the dumb idea. I have no sympathy for Stac here.
Yahoo is responsible for the word "medireview".
Their policy of mangling users' email behind their backs makes me recommend strongly against them. Just search google for "reviewuate -yahoo" to see the kind of damage they have done.
The directive didn't fail at all. That a deadline was passed doesn't mean we're off the hooks -- in the contrary, it means increased pressure to get legislation passed soon.
This article is just the BSA moaning that it's going too slowly, but they're presenting it as a "serious blow" to their cause. My theory is that the article is based on a BSA press release (notice how it doesn't quote anyone else). Probably the BSA noticed the growing opposition movement, and they're trying to fool activists into thinking they've won so that they stop paying attention.
My demographic info would tell them "breeder, ready to pop". I would be buried under diaper ads and my life would become a living hell. At least the generic advertising scores an occasional random hit.
It's not intuition that makes people try to right-click. It's prior familiarity with a different system. That's exactly the force Dvorak was arguing against:)
As a wise man once said: The only intuitive interface is the nipple. All else is learned.
By the way, here's some research about that quote. Apparently some babies don't know what to do with a nipple. Maybe they tried to right-click it?
I live in Helsinki, close to the Nokia headquarters. When I go to a movie theater, I can reasonably assume that every member of the audience has a cell phone. But I've never heard one ring during a movie.
It's a matter of education and etiquette. People learned to scoop their doggie poo; they will learn how to use cell phones.
I went searching for useful links to actual patent texts, and I found that Amazon already has this patent:
6,473,738Multiple-person buying information system with application to on-line merchandizing
That patent already covers the stuff being talked about in this thread; the patent application referenced by the article just adds an extra feature, namely the ability to associate different billing addresses with different shopping carts.
The upload queues for Debian packages work this way. Developers upload packages using anonymous FTP, and finish by uploading a signed.changes file which identifies which files are part of the upload. A recurring problem is stray files, left by aborted uploads.
The main Incoming directory (which the upload queues feed into) can be used the same way, except that you would use scp instead of FTP.
HTTP is the protocol that lets you do authentication and file selection in one go, and starts the download or upload right away. It also lets you pipeline multiple commands, so that you don't have to wait for roundtrip latency when transferring multiple files.
FTP, on the other hand, is the protocol where you need multiple roundtrips to log in (USER... PASS...), to select a file (CWD... CWD...), to prepare a file transfer (TYPE I... PASV... RECV...), and where just about every implementation in existence supports only the Stream transfer mode which requires establishing a new TCP connection for every file.
If latency is the problem, then HTTP is superior to FTP in every way. FTP does offer a standard way to list a directory, but that only gives you raw filenames; it doesn't even say which of them are subdirectories. In practice, clients tend to ignore NLST, and instead use LIST and assume the server is using unix ls (even to the extent of issuing "LIST -al" commands).
I also don't understand why you call HTTP interactive compared to FTP. FTP is designed to be interactive, that's why it has those intricate session state machines. HTTP was designed from the start to be a simple request-response protocol with all the session state on the client side.
I can just see this becoming a trend once people realize that passive tokens are insecure in general. You'll have one watch for your laptop, another for the office building, one for the car, one for your gun, one for the community swimming pool...
What do you think the roads were for? In ancient times, having a well-maintained road system was the key to being able to move troops around, to supply them, and to maintain communications. Building roads was a military expense. I'll grant you the aqueducts, but they probably didn't seem wasteful to the thirsty people of Rome.
If the copyright holder really had exclusive rights to distribute content, then there would be no used book or CD stores. (Note that the RIAA is trying to make it that way).
What the copyright holder has is an exclusive right to make copies. What Clean Films is doing is no different from a book store selling, say, used books that have some pages torn out.
Amen to that, but it's not a simple answer: it doesn't make the patents go away. Even if Amazon goes bankrupt, someone will pick up the patents and probably be even more litigious about them. The best we can do is send a message that this sort of nonsense is not appreciated by customers.
Not pirating the CD, and not buying it either, undercuts them even more. Simply playing and having the CD will have the effect of promoting it to your friends, and promoting the artists that are in bed with RIAA. Boycott them all, I say.
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I think India has a lot of potential right now, and that concentrating on developing its own industry is exactly the right thing to do. Its nukes give it anti-bullying insurance, and building up domestic industry will make it less dependent on foreign investors. It'll take some time, but then you will see a real shakeup in the world order. A war with Pakistan could derail this, though -- better keep a close eye on the CIA.
The world already has far worse things than Microsoft. We may like to cast Microsoft as the Evil Empire, but I doubt it's about to overthrow the Indian government and install a brutal military regime. Compare this with the United Fruit Company, now affectionately known as Chiquita.
2) Get screwed by Microsoft
3) Sell company to Microsoft
4) Profit!
Of course, sometimes this backfires, in which case you start a new company and go back to step 1.
The patent doesn't even include a smart way to find repeating sequences, it covers just the dumb idea. I have no sympathy for Stac here.
The RIAA announced that it is expecting losses of $3.3 billion in 2003 due to "ring tone piracy".
Kannel, a free WAP and SMS gateway, for all your ringtoning needs.
Yahoo is responsible for the word "medireview". Their policy of mangling users' email behind their backs makes me recommend strongly against them. Just search google for "reviewuate -yahoo" to see the kind of damage they have done.
This article is just the BSA moaning that it's going too slowly, but they're presenting it as a "serious blow" to their cause. My theory is that the article is based on a BSA press release (notice how it doesn't quote anyone else). Probably the BSA noticed the growing opposition movement, and they're trying to fool activists into thinking they've won so that they stop paying attention.
My demographic info would tell them "breeder, ready to pop". I would be buried under diaper ads and my life would become a living hell. At least the generic advertising scores an occasional random hit.
As a wise man once said: The only intuitive interface is the nipple. All else is learned.
By the way, here's some research about that quote. Apparently some babies don't know what to do with a nipple. Maybe they tried to right-click it?
It's a matter of education and etiquette. People learned to scoop their doggie poo; they will learn how to use cell phones.
6,473,738 Multiple-person buying information system with application to on-line merchandizing
That patent already covers the stuff being talked about in this thread; the patent application referenced by the article just adds an extra feature, namely the ability to associate different billing addresses with different shopping carts.
The difference is that instead of adding "... in bed", you add "... on the Internet". Instant patent!
The EU is at risk of allowing software patents.
The main Incoming directory (which the upload queues feed into) can be used the same way, except that you would use scp instead of FTP.
FTP, on the other hand, is the protocol where you need multiple roundtrips to log in (USER... PASS...), to select a file (CWD... CWD...), to prepare a file transfer (TYPE I... PASV... RECV...), and where just about every implementation in existence supports only the Stream transfer mode which requires establishing a new TCP connection for every file.
If latency is the problem, then HTTP is superior to FTP in every way. FTP does offer a standard way to list a directory, but that only gives you raw filenames; it doesn't even say which of them are subdirectories. In practice, clients tend to ignore NLST, and instead use LIST and assume the server is using unix ls (even to the extent of issuing "LIST -al" commands).
I also don't understand why you call HTTP interactive compared to FTP. FTP is designed to be interactive, that's why it has those intricate session state machines. HTTP was designed from the start to be a simple request-response protocol with all the session state on the client side.
I can just see this becoming a trend once people realize that passive tokens are insecure in general. You'll have one watch for your laptop, another for the office building, one for the car, one for your gun, one for the community swimming pool...
If they lose this, then it's game over for Acacia and a victory for the human race.
What do you think the roads were for? In ancient times, having a well-maintained road system was the key to being able to move troops around, to supply them, and to maintain communications. Building roads was a military expense. I'll grant you the aqueducts, but they probably didn't seem wasteful to the thirsty people of Rome.
If the copyright holder really had exclusive rights to distribute content, then there would be no used book or CD stores. (Note that the RIAA is trying to make it that way).
What the copyright holder has is an exclusive right to make copies. What Clean Films is doing is no different from a book store selling, say, used books that have some pages torn out.
Amen to that, but it's not a simple answer: it doesn't make the patents go away. Even if Amazon goes bankrupt, someone will pick up the patents and probably be even more litigious about them. The best we can do is send a message that this sort of nonsense is not appreciated by customers.
Ship the disc in a sealed nitrogen/helium atmosphere, and make it out of a material that rapidly degrades in an oxygen atmosphere.
Not pirating the CD, and not buying it either, undercuts them even more. Simply playing and having the CD will have the effect of promoting it to your friends, and promoting the artists that are in bed with RIAA. Boycott them all, I say.