The article made repeated references to the movie because it was based on a true story about one of the fired US attorneys, Iglesias.
The Cruise/Bacon dialogue was there because it's a TV transcript. Obviously the BBC thought the viewer would be more "captivated" if they included shots of Tom Cruise playing one of the US attorneys who was fired.
So the movie dialogue is there because of sensational TV editing.
If you read the article right through you'd find the official stats on 2004 election showed 3 million "challenged" (and over one million invalidated) votes. Not sure if that's the typical number under other governments, but it sure does sound like a huge number - using the government's own numbers.
The reason cited for Iglesias being fired was "too many days away from office".
But apparently in TA those days off were spent serving active duty in the Navy, something workers are legally protected from being fired for. Supposedly.
Bush can fire WHOMEVER HE WANTS, for WHATEVER REASON HE WANTS.
Actually, RTFA. The reason cited was "too many days absent from office". But those days off were for active duty in the Navy. Supposedly you guys have a law that says you can't be fired for being away from work for active duty in the military.
GWB could have fired Iglesias for some other reason - he picked the wrong one.
Running PcAnywhere on your XP laptop that happens to be a Toshiba, and apparently in combination with a Symantec AV product (NAV IIRC) would result in a guranteed blue screen on every shutdown.
Had never seen that before with this software combination on any laptop except some Toshibas at work back in the day.
Also, financial records are something that you REALLY don't want to leave up to a microsoft product.
You don't want to trust a multi-user Intuit product either. A place I used to work at had to support Quicken/Quickbooks, among other things. I don't recall any other software that reduced the poor book keepers almost to tears days before the tax reporting deadline and find that their.qbw and.qbb files have been silently corrupted for months and months, that no restore from backup will save the day and that there's just no hope of having the thing spit out the final reports.
We would setup a nightly scheduled task at these places to rebuild/verify data. Honestly, with 2-3 busy users, it needed daily rebuilds.
The newer versions are better but the Giant File Lock scheme they're using has become slower... oh no, I'm rambling about Quicken, I better stop there:-)
Fair enough. I don't mean to get on a high horse or anything, it's just frustrating when people avoid being responsible for their actions. Hell, I've used pirated software (see another post), but I don't prance around trying to justify it.
You can justify it all you want. I'm not saying your reasoning and circumstances are false.
But I'm not sure what your point is: nothing gives you the right to use other people's software except for their authorisation for you to do so. Without that, you're in the wrong. It's a pretty simple equation. Pretending you have every right to do it is just silly.
Not that I think end-users pirating apps for evaluation are bad people, nor do they deserve punishment (unless they use it for financial gain, then financial compensation seems fair) - but I don't agree that people should expect to be able to "evaluate" things on their own terms however they see fit, contrary to the provisions the original authors originally planned. Generally a lot of thought is put into these things: if the evaluation product is not sufficient for you to perform the evaluation, then perhaps you can try talking to their sales reps to get an extension, or maybe you're not part of their target market, or something along those lines.
Anyway, I don't really view "piracy for evaluation", but I do disagree with the "justification" for it.
How do you know for 100% sure that the product is worth the money for the particular need you have if you don't test the fully functional product first? You can research all you like but if the program costs, say 1000 dollars, you know you can't return the product if it still doesn't fit your needs after all the research and you just don't have that kind of money to throw away?
I've bought expensive software before, including a CAD package that was over $2k. All software I've ever used, even the commercial stuff I have _NOT_ purchased, has demonstration/evaluation versions that are sufficiently functional to determine whether it's what one needs.
Actually, no. There has been software that had no private evaluation version - a $10k SCADA package we were considering at work - and we had a salesperson come around to show it off, in person.
All software I've ever wanted to buy and HAVE bought has evaluation versions.
The "piracy for evaluation" excuse is a weak cop-out in my eyes.
The difference here is that Soghoian didn't merely point out the security flaw, but helped people take advantage of it
No, Mr Soghoian's little PHP script saves would-be terrorists (who have no doubt known about this stupid flaw, just as the government has for years) maybe at most 20 minutes in front of photoshop or 20 seconds with notepad:
This situtation is made even worse when you consider the fact that you can print your own boarding pass online at home. This is often a bunch of text/html, with one or two images (a barcode, and perhaps an airline logo). It is trivially easy - as in, 20 seconds with a text-editor, and not even requiring you to open photoshop - to open it up, and change the name.
And thus, I introduce a perfectly valid method for a terrorist - known to the government, and already on the domestic no fly list, to board a US commercial flight.
The point, I feel, was that people did not yet understand exactly how worthless watch-lists were just from a few paragraphs from an expert's report on how a terrorist "could" do something. With the example the PHP script provided, even idiots can appreciate how dim-witted the situation was.
Just like it is not illegal to disclose a software security flaw, but it is illegal to write a worm that exploits it.
Sometimes, mere "reports" of "theoretical" attacks are just too boring to the OS vendors. I liken it more to the "proof-of-concept" hacks which are written to prove security vulnerabilities exist and to bring the threat out of theory and into reality. This prompts a response from the OS vendor because only NOW do they have to take it seriously...
Since 2003, the problem has been outlined by several experts through official, public, and private channels to the relevant authorities and government officials. However it's remained the way it is without any apparent effort to remedy it.
Either they want to improve security (apparently not), or they can choose to leave watch-lists as they are, completely worthless. Chris is right: it's just theatre.
It seems whoever has the power and authority to fix this problem is either lazy, or incompetent, or both. There would have been no hope for improvement. What Chris has done is forced them to either fix the problem or continue to bury their heads in the sand, and divert attention from themselves by persecuting Chris for bringing shame to them by pointing out their incomptetent management of airport procedures.
It seems they aren't interested in security, just public opinion.
If anyone has been helping the terrorists, it's the idiots who have known about but haven't fixed such a gaping flaw in their security procedures for nearly three years now.
What law did he break? And why hasn't Senator Charles Schumer been arrested for making a public press release about the exact same thing in February 2005?
According to this Northrop Grumman security expert, "Bruce Schneier, a security expert who has done significant work for the US government, wrote about the exact same flaw in 2003".
So please, why would you be compelled to vote "guilty" on the jury?
You could just as easily substitute any number of other big players who hold lots of software patents.
I've yet to see any software developers, and I know dozens, who actually think software patents are a good idea. Then you can weigh up the attitudes of Oracle, Microsoft, IBM - and a slew of other large companies, to find that their attitudes towards software patents is differing shades of apathy, annoyance, and outrage.
Why don't you focus on the topic instead of nitpicking?
Sure, but I'm not the one who brought up an irrelevant "example".
If other implementations are already out there, it's called PRIOR ART, and the patent is INVALID.
This still costs money to prove. Especially if you're talking about US companies suing in your own nation, the court costs awarded to a successful defense are generally a ceremonial detail (supposedly, typically, extracting your court fees from a foreign US company requires setting up legal action in the USA).
That's funny, considering the amount of money that large companies pour into technological research.
This has nothing to do with patents.
But those companies hold patents, so they must be irrelevant to technological process. I see your point.
Irrelevant.
Here's what Bill Gates told Microsoft employees in 1991:
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today...A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose."
Oracle Corporation opposes the patentability of software. The Company believes that existing copyright law and available trade secret protections, as opposed to patent law, are better suited to protecting computer software developments.
I'm sure most businesses don't object to healthy competition. But pitting a tiny software shop against a billionaire giant like Microsoft hardly qualifies as healthy.
I have to wonder if you're just using hyperbole too much, or actually believe Microsoft is the biggest threat to small software companies...
In terms of dollars, employees, market cap... Microsoft is irrelevant in all but the most obscure software business discussions (i.e., mainstream desktop consumer apps). IBM grosses more in revenue in software services (IBM Global Services divison) alone than all of Microsoft put together!
Software businesses do NOT sell (m)any products that compete with anything microsoft has to offer. Microsoft is irrelevant.
You only get into the details of the implementation if REQUIRED to.
This approach is then a real problem. Do you really deserve to "own" the ideas in the patent you're writing? The second it's filed, how many real-world implementations out there are suddenly infringing because other developers had to follow similar logical processes to arrive at a solution that solves the same problem?
I can't help but think that the real innovators that advance technology in this world are disadvantaged, stifling progress - and that people benefiting from software patents who are irrelevant to technological progress are disproportionately advantaged.
Your naivety is scary. The problem isn't whether you can copy the idea -- it's whether you can actually COMPETE.
Your ignorance is scary. Do you really believe they need your help, and the patent office's help to continue succeed as they are already? They don't need software patents NOW, so what makes you think they need them at all?
Do you have millions of dollars to throw at advertising? Government lobbyists? Exclusive contracts with major institutions?
This is absolutely laughable. Why the hell do you think litigation should be the answer to everybody's problems?
Have you ever worked for a small company? Worked with one? Worked in a country outside the USA? _LARGE_ business names that you've never even heard of, let alone the ones you have, employ a tiny tiny fraction of employment to the workforce the world over. Consequently they also provide a tiny fraction of overall services to other businesses, and government.
Your understanding of business seems to be lacking, although I'll also admit I'm just an engineer that happens to work for a small company. This year we've done several contracts for the federal government of Australia; and one for a large multinational. The rest of our business is to other small businesses, but by no means do we need: government lobbyists (well, we do now - because we have software patents, thankyou FTA!), advertising dollars, or "exclusive" contracts with major institutions (we're already their best choice based on technical merit, we don't need secret handshakes to earn money).
I don't think you understand what it takes to be successful against these companies.... I can't respond to that statement without resorting to expletives... all I can suggest is try and open your eyes a little, and look before you think.
All these guys are asking for is the status quo, like he said. Not world domination - just to keep doing what they're doing. Patents are meant to encourage innovation which benefits mankind by way of enabling a temporary monopoly that rewards the inventor, NOT to encourage monopolies (using ideas that are often: obvious, duplicates of, or outright created by other inventors years earlier), NOR are they meant to simply act as a vehicle to crush competition.
MOST engineers I know from university are employed by small niche companies, some of them even employed by big names/big government for parts of contracts these guys tend to be best at. It's amusing that without even looking, they are fully aware of some of their products infringing on patents (thanks to industry journals publicising stupid patents) from their big-name competitors - the best they can do is hope they stay small enough to avoid attention. You do not need to be "number 1" to be a useful entity. Are you saying all small businesses should be abolished because they're useless? That there's no point to them, so stepping on their toes doesn't matter? The point is that without patents, small businesses are turning a profit, employing most of the workforce, but what you're saying is that you know better?
Next we'll see music patents. Seriously, the biggest threat to small business is other businesses ripping off their copyright, which is much simpler to prosecute even if the other side has a huge army of undead lawyers.
I'm an engineer at a small company (less than $2 million AUD a year), and I'm holding up a small system that's completely developed in-house used as part of our service business. We are profitable because my wages plus off-the-shelf hardware costs a fraction of what the license fees for an off-the-shelf software product with proprietary hardware would be. Thanks to the Free Trade Agreement with America, we're now open to frivilous patent litigation from the big name companies selling their solutions in the USA and elsewhere.
Where does that leave my small company? Up shit creek, actually. We have no interest in filing patents for "our" innovations; what the hell would we fight them with? A
Tasksel usually does a reasonable job. Laptop packages do need lots of tweaking. Even if I remember to install nm-applet myself, the security permissions for dbus means that I need to also remember that user accounts need to be members of the netdev group if they want to play with the wireless NIC.
Debian is big. Very big. It tries to be all things to all people. Indeed, it's known as the "universal operating system".
Offering multiple packages to satisfy a dependancy is a good thing: though I agree it would be nice to have a "recommended" item in these cases, it really shouldn't matter (in most cases I've seen) which one you use. And in cases where it does matter, it's usually when you're messing with dev/admin stuff that needs to be understood anyway (e.g. don't know the difference between PostgreSQL vs MySQL? Then why are you installing an SQL server at all?).
Debian's scope is so wide, that making any hard decision at the distro level to force choices onto users is not possible.
One of the hardest things to do in software is limit your scope and narrow it down to something manageable. Enter Ubuntu.
But without Debian, Ubuntu would not exist at all. Even if users aren't running it on their desktop, I think the Debian project's goals are beneficial to all of FLOSS-land, and the problems you're seeing are harder to solve than you think without damaging Debian's usefulness as it stands now.
Compared to RHEL, Slackware and Gentoo (the other distros I've worked with), Debian certainly takes a lot of complexity OUT of my life as a developer.
Debian's installation process is fantastic, as far as I'm concerned - the very same installer runs on everything from circa 1993 Mac pizza boxes to IBM AS/390 mainframes to Sharp Zaurus PDAs... remember the pre-sarge days? Nightmarish! The current install asks very few questions and comes up with a very sane default desktop system if you want it to.
Ubuntu polishes it all off nicely for the newbie, or the Debian user such as yourself who appreciates it.
All who disagree with this statement are hardcore nerds who only form a very, very small minority of all computer users in the world.
"hardcore nerds" is a bit of an exaggeration. I recommend and have seen reasonable success in the use of Ubuntu with about 2/3 people who have tried it. These people are not nerds, although they do enjoy exploring computers and alternative software.
They do not have the patience or depth of knowledge that a "hardcore nerd" has, but they still find it interesting/useable and in some cases even productive to the extent that it satisfies their daily computing needs without using Microsoft products.
Computing, even when running Microsoft Windows is a frustrating experience for many (most?) users. I would hazard a guess that given a situation where a professional admin can look after a user's PC, Linux can be as productive (potentially more, as I personally find it less distracting) as MS Windows.
I use Debian for ? 11 years or something and have worked as a Debian sysadmin.... Again IMHO, using Debian involves an unnecessary amount of effort just to get it running, simply because the mentality is that the system must be shiped naked with no configuration choices made
Wow. I've only been a Debian user for 5 years, some of that time as an admin.
I use Debian precisely because it saves me from having to configure stuff. I had a need to start developing with Zope the other day, I didn't have to edit a single.conf file to get it up and running - apt did everything for me.
Packages like gforge are utterly remarkable. The debian apt installer scripts ask you basic questions and will setup/configure/create (dbs, tables, domains, user accounts, etc) for every dependency: OpenLDAP, PostgreSQL, Exim, Apache... a fully working and configured system without touching a single configuration file.
For admin/dev stuff, Debian is remarkable. For the Desktop, you have to do some fiddling to get the final 1% functionality, but that's no problem for me. If a noob doesn't want to remember to install nm-applet to get a nice WLAN configuration applet, or which xmodmap commands will make his/her multimedia keys work - then Ubuntu is great.
From a quick glance at the ruling on chilling effects, the defene google put together (citing copyright law, database laws, etc) was not valid.
The ruling specifically talks about google's "cache". This would include the search cache.
In other words, they probably have good legal advice to remove these sites from the search cache (not just news) because these companies would be able to sue them again with exactly the same complaint for having their content in the search index.
It would be a legal liability to keep them in the search index.
The point is that there's nothing in the Debian Free Software Guidelines that prevents the use of the CDDL. Debian does *not* require GPL-compatibility. Usually. Personally I suspect they're really doing this because Schilling is such a PITA to deal with
No, it's because, and this has been reiterated a thousand times already, you can't mix CDDL patches onto GPL code. This is what Joerg is apparently doing - he's applying CDDL licensed patches into the GPL code base. He can't do that, because the two licenses are incompatible, legally (Section 6 of the GPL has a "no extra restrictions" clause).
He can certainly re-license whatever code that was previously GPL as CDDL, if he has the copyright to it. But there are many GPL patches out there to cdrecord that the DFSG guys will be wanting to use (and I assume the upstream cdrecord project has plenty of GPL patches from 3rd-parties that will need to re-license their code as CDDL too).
The point is the DFSG guys can't accept tainted, unlicensed code into Debian.
Hint to everyone: RTFA for yourself and ignore uninformed slashdot comments masquerading as authoritative ones.
as install two wireless cards
He speculates that triggering the race condition with a single NIC is possible, two NICs makes it easier. He was just telling the community what he found, and that steps should be taken by the vendors to fix it (and they did, if you read his message). Just because he couldn't trigger it with a single NIC, doesn't mean 1) We should ignore the issue 2) someone else can't
and a netcat listener.
The exploit would work on a machine that has any sort of UDP listener running on the interface being attacked. Netcat is merely useful for demonstration purposes, otherwise we'd have people concerned that e.g. a bug in Skype (if that UDP service was targeted instead) is the real vector for the exploit rather than the Intel NIC driver.
I'm sure Apple will fix it asap.
And if you had read his message, you'd see that 1) Apple has patched it already, 2) it's an Intel bug, not Apple's.
The last one is different, because it actually fucking works (as demonstrated by this story) while the other two just slightly annoy people.
It gives a very small minority an unfair leverage on the majority. Your views do not represent the majority, so you use violence to force them.
When all other options have been used, sometimes violence is the answer. Or maybe you believe that the United States should still be part of the British Empire.
1) This isn't a civil war! It's not the 1700s. We have things like electricity, laws, and civilisation now. 2) There was another colony that obtained independence from the British Empire - it was called India, and the guy was called Ghandi... read up about it. Yes, it's different to America's independence situation, that's because these events are centuries apart. I'm just saying your hyperbole doesn't make any sense.
And if "all the other options have been used" then perhaps it's a sign that you're wrong.
I've seen some Japanese phones that have apparently had this ability for quite some time now, I was absolutely amazed when a friend showed me one that even OCR'd english text out of a snapshot!
And there's a company called Grabba that makes commercial bar-code scanning solutions out of PDAs and PDA-phones (among other things). A friend of mine works there... interesting stuff; they also sell a dock thing that a PDA can clip into, which gives it a camera so you don't need to use a mobile phone. Popular with inventory/warehouse type applications, it also does 2D barcodes as well.
I think you understand SMPSs well, but it's not frequency that's changing, it's the duty cycle (amount of time ON) which regulates voltage in that feedback loop you're talking about, not frequency (at least in the SMPS circuits I studied).
Part of the reason is that I really don't think adjusting frequency will actually be a viable source of voltage control, unless you're taking advantage of the reduced efficiencies in the inductors at "improper" frequencies (generally you design the switching frequency around the numbers that will give you best efficiency in the inductor; this depends on properties of the coil wire, the properties of the core it's wound on, etc).
You're mostly right though, but I would suspect the audible switching frequency is just a harmonic of the noise that's being transmitted via loose coil windings (like on the yoke that guides the beam in old TV sets and CRTs) and/or a loose part on the PCB (like the inductor itself, or a part thereof).
Slashdot Mirror
The article made repeated references to the movie because it was based on a true story about one of the fired US attorneys, Iglesias.
The Cruise/Bacon dialogue was there because it's a TV transcript. Obviously the BBC thought the viewer would be more "captivated" if they included shots of Tom Cruise playing one of the US attorneys who was fired.
So the movie dialogue is there because of sensational TV editing.
If you read the article right through you'd find the official stats on 2004 election showed 3 million "challenged" (and over one million invalidated) votes. Not sure if that's the typical number under other governments, but it sure does sound like a huge number - using the government's own numbers.
The reason cited for Iglesias being fired was "too many days away from office".
But apparently in TA those days off were spent serving active duty in the Navy, something workers are legally protected from being fired for. Supposedly.
I suppose GWB should have picked a better reason.
Bush can fire WHOMEVER HE WANTS, for WHATEVER REASON HE WANTS.
Actually, RTFA. The reason cited was "too many days absent from office". But those days off were for active duty in the Navy. Supposedly you guys have a law that says you can't be fired for being away from work for active duty in the military.
GWB could have fired Iglesias for some other reason - he picked the wrong one.
Running PcAnywhere on your XP laptop that happens to be a Toshiba, and apparently in combination with a Symantec AV product (NAV IIRC) would result in a guranteed blue screen on every shutdown.
s ervice1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/pca.nsf/1ab3f998698d6 46f88256f48005b9e71/b998f8fb40c5dc3988256dea000204 6d%3FOpenDocument+site:symantec.com+toshiba+shutdo wn+pcanywhere&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=au&client=fire fox-a
Had never seen that before with this software combination on any laptop except some Toshibas at work back in the day.
Nearest KB article I could find on Symantec was 2003112516321112, but it's only available via Google cache at http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:FBy7QXRHzIIJ:
Also, financial records are something that you REALLY don't want to leave up to a microsoft product.
.qbw and .qbb files have been silently corrupted for months and months, that no restore from backup will save the day and that there's just no hope of having the thing spit out the final reports.
:-)
You don't want to trust a multi-user Intuit product either. A place I used to work at had to support Quicken/Quickbooks, among other things. I don't recall any other software that reduced the poor book keepers almost to tears days before the tax reporting deadline and find that their
We would setup a nightly scheduled task at these places to rebuild/verify data. Honestly, with 2-3 busy users, it needed daily rebuilds.
The newer versions are better but the Giant File Lock scheme they're using has become slower... oh no, I'm rambling about Quicken, I better stop there
Fair enough. I don't mean to get on a high horse or anything, it's just frustrating when people avoid being responsible for their actions. Hell, I've used pirated software (see another post), but I don't prance around trying to justify it.
You can justify it all you want. I'm not saying your reasoning and circumstances are false.
But I'm not sure what your point is: nothing gives you the right to use other people's software except for their authorisation for you to do so. Without that, you're in the wrong. It's a pretty simple equation. Pretending you have every right to do it is just silly.
Not that I think end-users pirating apps for evaluation are bad people, nor do they deserve punishment (unless they use it for financial gain, then financial compensation seems fair) - but I don't agree that people should expect to be able to "evaluate" things on their own terms however they see fit, contrary to the provisions the original authors originally planned. Generally a lot of thought is put into these things: if the evaluation product is not sufficient for you to perform the evaluation, then perhaps you can try talking to their sales reps to get an extension, or maybe you're not part of their target market, or something along those lines.
Anyway, I don't really view "piracy for evaluation", but I do disagree with the "justification" for it.
How do you know for 100% sure that the product is worth the money for the particular need you have if you don't test the fully functional product first? You can research all you like but if the program costs, say 1000 dollars, you know you can't return the product if it still doesn't fit your needs after all the research and you just don't have that kind of money to throw away?
I've bought expensive software before, including a CAD package that was over $2k. All software I've ever used, even the commercial stuff I have _NOT_ purchased, has demonstration/evaluation versions that are sufficiently functional to determine whether it's what one needs.
Actually, no. There has been software that had no private evaluation version - a $10k SCADA package we were considering at work - and we had a salesperson come around to show it off, in person.
All software I've ever wanted to buy and HAVE bought has evaluation versions.
The "piracy for evaluation" excuse is a weak cop-out in my eyes.
No, Mr Soghoian's little PHP script saves would-be terrorists (who have no doubt known about this stupid flaw, just as the government has for years) maybe at most 20 minutes in front of photoshop or 20 seconds with notepad:
The point, I feel, was that people did not yet understand exactly how worthless watch-lists were just from a few paragraphs from an expert's report on how a terrorist "could" do something. With the example the PHP script provided, even idiots can appreciate how dim-witted the situation was.
Just like it is not illegal to disclose a software security flaw, but it is illegal to write a worm that exploits it.
Sometimes, mere "reports" of "theoretical" attacks are just too boring to the OS vendors. I liken it more to the "proof-of-concept" hacks which are written to prove security vulnerabilities exist and to bring the threat out of theory and into reality. This prompts a response from the OS vendor because only NOW do they have to take it seriously...
Since 2003, the problem has been outlined by several experts through official, public, and private channels to the relevant authorities and government officials. However it's remained the way it is without any apparent effort to remedy it.
Either they want to improve security (apparently not), or they can choose to leave watch-lists as they are, completely worthless. Chris is right: it's just theatre.
It seems whoever has the power and authority to fix this problem is either lazy, or incompetent, or both. There would have been no hope for improvement. What Chris has done is forced them to either fix the problem or continue to bury their heads in the sand, and divert attention from themselves by persecuting Chris for bringing shame to them by pointing out their incomptetent management of airport procedures.
It seems they aren't interested in security, just public opinion.
If anyone has been helping the terrorists, it's the idiots who have known about but haven't fixed such a gaping flaw in their security procedures for nearly three years now.
What law did he break? And why hasn't Senator Charles Schumer been arrested for making a public press release about the exact same thing in February 2005?
According to this Northrop Grumman security expert, "Bruce Schneier, a security expert who has done significant work for the US government, wrote about the exact same flaw in 2003".
So please, why would you be compelled to vote "guilty" on the jury?
You could just as easily substitute any number of other big players who hold lots of software patents.
I've yet to see any software developers, and I know dozens, who actually think software patents are a good idea. Then you can weigh up the attitudes of Oracle, Microsoft, IBM - and a slew of other large companies, to find that their attitudes towards software patents is differing shades of apathy, annoyance, and outrage.
Why don't you focus on the topic instead of nitpicking?
Sure, but I'm not the one who brought up an irrelevant "example".
This still costs money to prove. Especially if you're talking about US companies suing in your own nation, the court costs awarded to a successful defense are generally a ceremonial detail (supposedly, typically, extracting your court fees from a foreign US company requires setting up legal action in the USA).
That's funny, considering the amount of money that large companies pour into technological research.
This has nothing to do with patents.
But those companies hold patents, so they must be irrelevant to technological process. I see your point.
Irrelevant.
Here's what Bill Gates told Microsoft employees in 1991:
(link)
And of interest:
(link)
I'm sure most businesses don't object to healthy competition. But pitting a tiny software shop against a billionaire giant like Microsoft hardly qualifies as healthy.
I have to wonder if you're just using hyperbole too much, or actually believe Microsoft is the biggest threat to small software companies...
In terms of dollars, employees, market cap... Microsoft is irrelevant in all but the most obscure software business discussions (i.e., mainstream desktop consumer apps). IBM grosses more in revenue in software services (IBM Global Services divison) alone than all of Microsoft put together!
Software businesses do NOT sell (m)any products that compete with anything microsoft has to offer. Microsoft is irrelevant.
You only get into the details of the implementation if REQUIRED to.
This approach is then a real problem. Do you really deserve to "own" the ideas in the patent you're writing? The second it's filed, how many real-world implementations out there are suddenly infringing because other developers had to follow similar logical processes to arrive at a solution that solves the same problem?
I can't help but think that the real innovators that advance technology in this world are disadvantaged, stifling progress - and that people benefiting from software patents who are irrelevant to technological progress are disproportionately advantaged.
I meant engineers. In general, at least in Australia, overall more than half the workforce is employed by small business.
Your naivety is scary. The problem isn't whether you can copy the idea -- it's whether you can actually COMPETE.
... I can't respond to that statement without resorting to expletives... all I can suggest is try and open your eyes a little, and look before you think.
Your ignorance is scary. Do you really believe they need your help, and the patent office's help to continue succeed as they are already? They don't need software patents NOW, so what makes you think they need them at all?
Do you have millions of dollars to throw at advertising? Government lobbyists? Exclusive contracts with major institutions?
This is absolutely laughable. Why the hell do you think litigation should be the answer to everybody's problems?
Have you ever worked for a small company? Worked with one? Worked in a country outside the USA? _LARGE_ business names that you've never even heard of, let alone the ones you have, employ a tiny tiny fraction of employment to the workforce the world over. Consequently they also provide a tiny fraction of overall services to other businesses, and government.
Your understanding of business seems to be lacking, although I'll also admit I'm just an engineer that happens to work for a small company. This year we've done several contracts for the federal government of Australia; and one for a large multinational. The rest of our business is to other small businesses, but by no means do we need: government lobbyists (well, we do now - because we have software patents, thankyou FTA!), advertising dollars, or "exclusive" contracts with major institutions (we're already their best choice based on technical merit, we don't need secret handshakes to earn money).
I don't think you understand what it takes to be successful against these companies.
All these guys are asking for is the status quo, like he said. Not world domination - just to keep doing what they're doing. Patents are meant to encourage innovation which benefits mankind by way of enabling a temporary monopoly that rewards the inventor, NOT to encourage monopolies (using ideas that are often: obvious, duplicates of, or outright created by other inventors years earlier), NOR are they meant to simply act as a vehicle to crush competition.
MOST engineers I know from university are employed by small niche companies, some of them even employed by big names/big government for parts of contracts these guys tend to be best at. It's amusing that without even looking, they are fully aware of some of their products infringing on patents (thanks to industry journals publicising stupid patents) from their big-name competitors - the best they can do is hope they stay small enough to avoid attention. You do not need to be "number 1" to be a useful entity. Are you saying all small businesses should be abolished because they're useless? That there's no point to them, so stepping on their toes doesn't matter? The point is that without patents, small businesses are turning a profit, employing most of the workforce, but what you're saying is that you know better?
Next we'll see music patents. Seriously, the biggest threat to small business is other businesses ripping off their copyright, which is much simpler to prosecute even if the other side has a huge army of undead lawyers.
I'm an engineer at a small company (less than $2 million AUD a year), and I'm holding up a small system that's completely developed in-house used as part of our service business. We are profitable because my wages plus off-the-shelf hardware costs a fraction of what the license fees for an off-the-shelf software product with proprietary hardware would be. Thanks to the Free Trade Agreement with America, we're now open to frivilous patent litigation from the big name companies selling their solutions in the USA and elsewhere.
Where does that leave my small company? Up shit creek, actually. We have no interest in filing patents for "our" innovations; what the hell would we fight them with? A
Tasksel usually does a reasonable job. Laptop packages do need lots of tweaking. Even if I remember to install nm-applet myself, the security permissions for dbus means that I need to also remember that user accounts need to be members of the netdev group if they want to play with the wireless NIC.
Debian is big. Very big. It tries to be all things to all people. Indeed, it's known as the "universal operating system".
Offering multiple packages to satisfy a dependancy is a good thing: though I agree it would be nice to have a "recommended" item in these cases, it really shouldn't matter (in most cases I've seen) which one you use. And in cases where it does matter, it's usually when you're messing with dev/admin stuff that needs to be understood anyway (e.g. don't know the difference between PostgreSQL vs MySQL? Then why are you installing an SQL server at all?).
Debian's scope is so wide, that making any hard decision at the distro level to force choices onto users is not possible.
One of the hardest things to do in software is limit your scope and narrow it down to something manageable. Enter Ubuntu.
But without Debian, Ubuntu would not exist at all. Even if users aren't running it on their desktop, I think the Debian project's goals are beneficial to all of FLOSS-land, and the problems you're seeing are harder to solve than you think without damaging Debian's usefulness as it stands now.
Compared to RHEL, Slackware and Gentoo (the other distros I've worked with), Debian certainly takes a lot of complexity OUT of my life as a developer.
Debian's installation process is fantastic, as far as I'm concerned - the very same installer runs on everything from circa 1993 Mac pizza boxes to IBM AS/390 mainframes to Sharp Zaurus PDAs... remember the pre-sarge days? Nightmarish! The current install asks very few questions and comes up with a very sane default desktop system if you want it to.
Ubuntu polishes it all off nicely for the newbie, or the Debian user such as yourself who appreciates it.
All who disagree with this statement are hardcore nerds who only form a very, very small minority of all computer users in the world.
"hardcore nerds" is a bit of an exaggeration. I recommend and have seen reasonable success in the use of Ubuntu with about 2/3 people who have tried it. These people are not nerds, although they do enjoy exploring computers and alternative software.
They do not have the patience or depth of knowledge that a "hardcore nerd" has, but they still find it interesting/useable and in some cases even productive to the extent that it satisfies their daily computing needs without using Microsoft products.
Computing, even when running Microsoft Windows is a frustrating experience for many (most?) users. I would hazard a guess that given a situation where a professional admin can look after a user's PC, Linux can be as productive (potentially more, as I personally find it less distracting) as MS Windows.
I use Debian for ? 11 years or something and have worked as a Debian sysadmin. ...
.conf file to get it up and running - apt did everything for me.
Again IMHO, using Debian involves an unnecessary amount of effort just to get it running, simply because the mentality is that the system must be shiped naked with no configuration choices made
Wow. I've only been a Debian user for 5 years, some of that time as an admin.
I use Debian precisely because it saves me from having to configure stuff. I had a need to start developing with Zope the other day, I didn't have to edit a single
Packages like gforge are utterly remarkable. The debian apt installer scripts ask you basic questions and will setup/configure/create (dbs, tables, domains, user accounts, etc) for every dependency: OpenLDAP, PostgreSQL, Exim, Apache... a fully working and configured system without touching a single configuration file.
For admin/dev stuff, Debian is remarkable. For the Desktop, you have to do some fiddling to get the final 1% functionality, but that's no problem for me. If a noob doesn't want to remember to install nm-applet to get a nice WLAN configuration applet, or which xmodmap commands will make his/her multimedia keys work - then Ubuntu is great.
From a quick glance at the ruling on chilling effects, the defene google put together (citing copyright law, database laws, etc) was not valid.
The ruling specifically talks about google's "cache". This would include the search cache.
In other words, they probably have good legal advice to remove these sites from the search cache (not just news) because these companies would be able to sue them again with exactly the same complaint for having their content in the search index.
It would be a legal liability to keep them in the search index.
The point is that there's nothing in the Debian Free Software Guidelines that prevents the use of the CDDL. Debian does *not* require GPL-compatibility. Usually. Personally I suspect they're really doing this because Schilling is such a PITA to deal with
No, it's because, and this has been reiterated a thousand times already, you can't mix CDDL patches onto GPL code. This is what Joerg is apparently doing - he's applying CDDL licensed patches into the GPL code base. He can't do that, because the two licenses are incompatible, legally (Section 6 of the GPL has a "no extra restrictions" clause).
He can certainly re-license whatever code that was previously GPL as CDDL, if he has the copyright to it. But there are many GPL patches out there to cdrecord that the DFSG guys will be wanting to use (and I assume the upstream cdrecord project has plenty of GPL patches from 3rd-parties that will need to re-license their code as CDDL too).
The point is the DFSG guys can't accept tainted, unlicensed code into Debian.
Hint to everyone: OSes do weird things
Hint to everyone: RTFA for yourself and ignore uninformed slashdot comments masquerading as authoritative ones.
as install two wireless cards
He speculates that triggering the race condition with a single NIC is possible, two NICs makes it easier. He was just telling the community what he found, and that steps should be taken by the vendors to fix it (and they did, if you read his message). Just because he couldn't trigger it with a single NIC, doesn't mean 1) We should ignore the issue 2) someone else can't
and a netcat listener.
The exploit would work on a machine that has any sort of UDP listener running on the interface being attacked. Netcat is merely useful for demonstration purposes, otherwise we'd have people concerned that e.g. a bug in Skype (if that UDP service was targeted instead) is the real vector for the exploit rather than the Intel NIC driver.
I'm sure Apple will fix it asap.
And if you had read his message, you'd see that 1) Apple has patched it already, 2) it's an Intel bug, not Apple's.
The last one is different, because it actually fucking works (as demonstrated by this story) while the other two just slightly annoy people.
It gives a very small minority an unfair leverage on the majority. Your views do not represent the majority, so you use violence to force them.
When all other options have been used, sometimes violence is the answer. Or maybe you believe that the United States should still be part of the British Empire.
1) This isn't a civil war! It's not the 1700s. We have things like electricity, laws, and civilisation now.
2) There was another colony that obtained independence from the British Empire - it was called India, and the guy was called Ghandi... read up about it. Yes, it's different to America's independence situation, that's because these events are centuries apart. I'm just saying your hyperbole doesn't make any sense.
And if "all the other options have been used" then perhaps it's a sign that you're wrong.
I've seen some Japanese phones that have apparently had this ability for quite some time now, I was absolutely amazed when a friend showed me one that even OCR'd english text out of a snapshot!
And there's a company called Grabba that makes commercial bar-code scanning solutions out of PDAs and PDA-phones (among other things). A friend of mine works there... interesting stuff; they also sell a dock thing that a PDA can clip into, which gives it a camera so you don't need to use a mobile phone. Popular with inventory/warehouse type applications, it also does 2D barcodes as well.
I think you understand SMPSs well, but it's not frequency that's changing, it's the duty cycle (amount of time ON) which regulates voltage in that feedback loop you're talking about, not frequency (at least in the SMPS circuits I studied).
Part of the reason is that I really don't think adjusting frequency will actually be a viable source of voltage control, unless you're taking advantage of the reduced efficiencies in the inductors at "improper" frequencies (generally you design the switching frequency around the numbers that will give you best efficiency in the inductor; this depends on properties of the coil wire, the properties of the core it's wound on, etc).
You're mostly right though, but I would suspect the audible switching frequency is just a harmonic of the noise that's being transmitted via loose coil windings (like on the yoke that guides the beam in old TV sets and CRTs) and/or a loose part on the PCB (like the inductor itself, or a part thereof).