I wrote a TCP client/server app along these lines to let me use Dragon Naturally Speaking on my Linux box. Basically, you run Dragon and the server on Windows in a small VMware (or whatever) window. You connect to the server via a client on the main PC, running Linux and X.
The server app displays a text window in the virtualized Windows window, and whatever text you enter there (via Dragon) is sent via the TCP connection to the Linux client app, which enters virtual keystrokes accordingly. It is a bit of a pain to set up but works great.
http://foss.eepatents.com/WinDictator
Microsoft made a statement in its recent motion for a new trial in Lucent vs. Microsoft, a patent infringement case that it lost back in February to the tune of $1,500,000,000. It argued that a jury in a new trial should have the opportunity to "hear and weigh the evidence" that Microsoft claims makes the Alcatel-Lucent patents invalid, under a new standard of obviousness recently established by the Supreme Court in KSR vs. Teleflex. Microsoft said:
KSR calls into question the very presumption of validity, since
it demonstrates that the PTO itself applied the wrong obviousness test to the patents-in-suit. Had
the PTO applied the KSR test, the patents-in-suit may well not have issued. While 35 U.S.C. 282
does establish a presumption of validity, it does not mandate the "clear and convincing" burden of
proof. This burden of proof could and should be altered by the courts because of KSR. See KSR,
slip op. at 22-23 ("We need not reach the question whether the failure to disclose Asano during the
prosecution of Engelgau voids the presumption of validity given to issued patents, for claim 4 is
obvious despite the presumption. We nevertheless think it appropriate to note that the rationale
underlying the presumption--that the PTO, in its expertise, has approved the claims--seems much
diminished here."). [Note 2, p. 10, emphasis added.]
So, given Microsoft's anti-patent assertion in this case where it found itself on the wrong side of someone's patents, it would seem hard for them to ask us to presume that these 200+ patents of their own, issued well before KSR vs. Teleflex, are valid over the prior art that the Linux world will undoubtedly find in abundance once Microsoft finally has to reveal their claims. That is, if it ever actually tries to enforce them rather than blabbing away at its current "my dad can beat up your dad" playground level of discourse.
Obligatory disclaimer: I am a registered patent agent and an independent inventor, but not a lawyer. I don't provide legal advice or services to anyone regarding issued patents. And this wouldn't be legal advice even if I did.
If they didn't have to support that other, lesser OS that is still polluting everybody's desktops, these folks could use the Secure Computing capability of Linux to wall off the grid client from the rest of the box, right at the kernel level: http://kerneltrap.org/node/4005
No, I'd rather have them try to add copy protection to every A/D converter, simply because any attempt to do so would result in catastrophically embarassing failure.
Don't be too sure of that. Unfortunately, we live in Orwellian times. Even some of my fellow social conservatives are none too happy about the way things have been going.
I do too, and have noticed that the entire hard disk contents of the previous computer usually fits onto a small fraction of the new computer's hard disk. The total was in the low tens of megabytes back around 1992 through 1994, jumped to the 1 GB mark in 1995 because of a certain operating system install, and was at around 2.5 GB in 2002.
To promote domestic stability, wealth and expertise, by securing for domestic workers the limited preference of employment over foreign labor
Why would this article be any better or worse than the one about patents, other than you happen to be a patent agent rather than an IT admin?
Uh, because it doesn't exist in the Constitution and has not the slightest chance of being enshrined there by amendment, which requires passage of both houses of congress by a 2/3 margin and 3/4 of either the state legislatures. See the Wikipedia page I just spent some of my lunch hour updating, in the spirit of voluntarily donated intellectual property.
The Constitution is the foundation of our nation. It is what presidents swear to protect and defend when they're inaugurated. It cannot be changed if even a small minority of the country's citizens object to that change, not even for "homeland security" or anything else that strikes the majority's fancy at the time. You can't just trivialize it by saying, "well, what if it said this or that?" And, by the way, here's the presidential candidate who has my vote (and a contribution), the one true conservative on the ballot who is raising concerns about preserving the integrity of that inspired document: Michael Peroutka
Since when does supporting capitalism imply any abrogation of our Constitutionally provided system for Congress
to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." [
Article I, section 8].
By the way, I think it's a real shame that our current Supreme Court failed to recognize the reality of "limited times" in the world of perpetual copyright extensions and software's brief shelf life. But they have just a bit more authority on the matter than I do.
Now, what you're apparently espousing is communism, where the fruits of an individual's labor is given up for the common good of all. Personally, I like the idea of having the hope of some type of payoff motivate me (six patents and counting) and my clients to invent new and different ways of doing things. And we can still choose to give some things over to the public good, like some open-source software I've written myself.
Regarding your abortion canard, my country has no more right to tell sovereign nations what to do about abortion (as opposed to handing out foreign aid) than it has to invade a sovereign nation, killing thousands, because its leader is a really rotten person.
It's human nature to respond to put the best possible light on a negative situation that doesn't appear to be changeable.
This may be somewhat OT, but I think it's a good example of this cognitive dissonance phenomenon: I am a social conservative (strongly support the right of an armed citizenry, believe abortion should be illegal during all 9 months, for example) who is not voting for either the Republican or Democrat presidential candidate. I simply can't see myself voting for someone who has proven himself as incompetent as Bush has, even though I actually agree with him on most of the issues I find important. (The Iraq war and the environment are exceptions.) I found it at turns amusing and exasperating so see how my conservative friends tried to defend Bush's "puzzled chimp" performance in the first debate: "It was 9PM Eastern time, and that's late at night for him," "I don't think he did that bad," "He's a plain-spoken man," etc. Imagine their reaction if things had been switched and Kerry had performed that dismally. There would have been a lot of gloating and pointing out that his fate was sealed.
Now, back onto the topic: Good luck with your theory that only programming grunt work is going to be offshored. Yeah, that's what we said about manufacturing some years back, maintaining that the real "brain work" will stay in the U.S. Not a chance.
Just take a look at what Google says about the topic. I found one of the first hits, "Offshore Outsourcing World" to be particularly interesting, and chilling. Ironically, the article talks about google itself.
I actually don't see any alternative to free trade, and firmly believe that capitalism is the only way to go (conservative there, again). But with the last barriers to global competition rapidly coming down, a re-distribution of wealth is in progress on a global scale. That means painful adjustments for those who have gotten used to having more of it than most of the world's people.
I am a registered patent agent, licensed to practice law in patent matters before the U.S Patent & Trademark Office. To get to where I'm now at, I've had to get a four-year technological degree, pass a really tough exam, and learn how to write by working under some experienced patent attorneys for that past five years or so. (Self-promotional but generally informative info here.)
So, does that mean my career is safe? See for yourself.
From what I've read, blind people are more impacted by plain ol' email spam than anyone. It takes a lot more time for them to listen for a screen reader start reciting off the latest anatomical enlargement offer than it does for a sighted person from scanning the text and just hitting "delete."
Imagine thousands of Flightgear fans all taking pictures from hilltops and airplanes and submitting them to a server that performs geometric transformations on the images, per the location data, and adds to a downloadable database of free scenery.
I write for a living. I have a license to Office 97, but I've been using OpenOffice for my work for nearly two years now. I've never found Word 97's grammar checker good for much of anything but a good laugh. Maybe things are better now, but I've never been inclined to "upgrade" to a version that seemed like it would need every motherboard change to be registered with Redmond.
The near-universal assumption of Word's dominance can have interesting effects. I once exchanged exported-to-Word copies of a document with a client a couple of times until we discovered that we were both using OpenOffice, both of us importing what we had exported to Word format for the other guy!
The most incredible display of stars I've seen was from a sailboat in the middle of the North Pacific. The combination of utter darkness, clear skies, and abundant time for reflection made for a deeply moving experience that I'll never forget.
It's probably not a coincidence that I now live about 10 miles from the nearest traffic light, in one of the few dark areas you can see left in the U.S. on that map.
It depends on your definition of "salvation". Personally I don't think Linux needs to be saved from anything. It's doing what it does well already.
How about Windows-only hardware? I'd love to be able to walk into the store and know that the whiz-bang all-in-one machine has a chance of actually using all its functionality under my preferred OS.
How about web browser compatibility? I've cancelled a useful subscription to a database service because they required some sort of Internet Explorer weirdness for their interface to work.
How about proprietary application support? A lot of vertical-market software (stuff in the $1,000+ range) isn't being coded for anything but the dominant OS. Even the speech recognition software I'm using to write this is actually running under Windows in VMware, with my own Python client/server code sending keystrokes over to the Linux side. Most people aren't going to go to that level of effort to use anything the dominant OS.
The rest of your comments make sense to me and I agree with them.
Thanks for a thoughtful reply from the other side.
Regarding your first point, a little bit of crypto experience taught me something about the entropy of large numbers: Time scales linearly, but the entropy of numbers B^N (here B=4) most definitely does not, given N. A 64-bit symmetric key is almost trivial to crack with a cluster of today's CPUs. A 128-bit key is 2^64 times longer than a 64-bit one, not twice as long, and will be well out of reach for a long time. That's why the NSA tried so hard to squash PGP.
Now, we're talking about the equivalent of 6 billion bits. I don't care how many billions of years you give for things to evolve, you can't get to 2^6,000,000,000. The complexity simply exceeds the abilities of our brains to grasp.
Note that the assumption that things will just evolve on their own is a charitable one. If my '66 Wagoneer had done any evolving in the 40 years it's been around, it might get better gas mileage and put out less harmful emissions than it does. But only more newly designed vehicles have those features.
Regarding your second point, perhaps the strongest concept of selflessness in humanity is that of laying down one's life for one's friend. Witness the outpouring of support for Pat Tillman, or the type of emotions stirred by the story of a mother who drowns saving her child, or the soldier who falls on a grenade to save his commander. Though I don't presume to be any judge of God's ways, what better way for the Creator to deliver a message about himself than to offer a part of him as a widely predicted and historically recorded sacrifice for his created humanity?
Meanwhile, Paul Davies writes that we should be conducting SETI in our DNA. In turns out that an alien message designed to last millenia should be 'inside a large number of self-replicating, self-repairing microscopic machines programmed to multiply and adapt to changing conditions', otherwise known as living cells. Are we the message?"
OK, I know this is Slashdot and all, but so far I've seen no one consider the obvious possibility that the incredible entropy of DNA's 6-billion bit quaternary code might actually be an indication that there is some creative intelligence behind life after all.
Years ago, I once asked a coworker who was an avowed atheist if he would be convinced that SETI had found a "hit" if it encountered an endlessly repeating quaternary code millions of symbols long. He replied, "Oh yeah!" and I pointed out that such a result was already in his own DNA. The length of time he took to stop and think about that was immensely satisfying.
To me, the idea that man can think he created God and not vice versa is the epitome of arrogance.
What is it with this hostility toward people making a profit?
My local Catholic hospital once treated me for pneumonia by putting expensive antibiotics into my bloodstream for a few days. Without treatment, my odds of survival were about 50%.
Are they good because they save people's lives whether or not those people can pay (as I could) and regardless of their creed (I'm Lutheran, which is not exactly a religous alliance with Catholicism)? Or are they somehow evil because they charged for their services? I think the answer is obviously the former, but it seems a lot of slashdotters would opt for the latter.
Note that they're selling their whole company, not just shares of it, which the language you've quoted would seem to permit:
Some business related items are not "securities" and may be listed on eBay. Examples of items that can be sold:
* 100% of the assets of a business (inventory, lease, good will) where no transfer of stock is involved.
Isn't it interesting, though, that the licensee they are proudly touting for Q3 has publicly expressed the wish that it had never signed up?
P.S. - I used to have a virtual private server running on an EV1 box. No more.
These will probably work fine in thin clients connected to a server running a stable, multitasking, multi-user OS. Actually, they may even be overkill for that.
Imagine a tiny motherboard using one of these with a basic amount of soldered-in RAM, on-board video and NIC, and an on-board boot flash containing LTSP. Voila, a compact, cheap license-free, diskless, plug-and-play, workstation! How's that for putting Linux on the desktop?
I am happy to report that I just today switched over to a server that is not tainted by an SCO license. I was really glad to ditch the one hosted by a certain provider in Texas who caved in to SCO's bluster a few months back.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote a TCP client/server app along these lines to let me use Dragon Naturally Speaking on my Linux box. Basically, you run Dragon and the server on Windows in a small VMware (or whatever) window. You connect to the server via a client on the main PC, running Linux and X. The server app displays a text window in the virtualized Windows window, and whatever text you enter there (via Dragon) is sent via the TCP connection to the Linux client app, which enters virtual keystrokes accordingly. It is a bit of a pain to set up but works great. http://foss.eepatents.com/WinDictator
Microsoft made a statement in its recent motion for a new trial in Lucent vs. Microsoft, a patent infringement case that it lost back in February to the tune of $1,500,000,000. It argued that a jury in a new trial should have the opportunity to "hear and weigh the evidence" that Microsoft claims makes the Alcatel-Lucent patents invalid, under a new standard of obviousness recently established by the Supreme Court in KSR vs. Teleflex. Microsoft said:
So, given Microsoft's anti-patent assertion in this case where it found itself on the wrong side of someone's patents, it would seem hard for them to ask us to presume that these 200+ patents of their own, issued well before KSR vs. Teleflex, are valid over the prior art that the Linux world will undoubtedly find in abundance once Microsoft finally has to reveal their claims. That is, if it ever actually tries to enforce them rather than blabbing away at its current "my dad can beat up your dad" playground level of discourse.
Obligatory disclaimer: I am a registered patent agent and an independent inventor, but not a lawyer. I don't provide legal advice or services to anyone regarding issued patents. And this wouldn't be legal advice even if I did.
If they didn't have to support that other, lesser OS that is still polluting everybody's desktops, these folks could use the Secure Computing capability of Linux to wall off the grid client from the rest of the box, right at the kernel level: http://kerneltrap.org/node/4005
Don't be too sure of that. Unfortunately, we live in Orwellian times. Even some of my fellow social conservatives are none too happy about the way things have been going.
I do too, and have noticed that the entire hard disk contents of the previous computer usually fits onto a small fraction of the new computer's hard disk. The total was in the low tens of megabytes back around 1992 through 1994, jumped to the 1 GB mark in 1995 because of a certain operating system install, and was at around 2.5 GB in 2002.
Say tomorrow the constitution will say:
Why would this article be any better or worse than the one about patents, other than you happen to be a patent agent rather than an IT admin?
Uh, because it doesn't exist in the Constitution and has not the slightest chance of being enshrined there by amendment, which requires passage of both houses of congress by a 2/3 margin and 3/4 of either the state legislatures. See the Wikipedia page I just spent some of my lunch hour updating, in the spirit of voluntarily donated intellectual property.
The Constitution is the foundation of our nation. It is what presidents swear to protect and defend when they're inaugurated. It cannot be changed if even a small minority of the country's citizens object to that change, not even for "homeland security" or anything else that strikes the majority's fancy at the time. You can't just trivialize it by saying, "well, what if it said this or that?" And, by the way, here's the presidential candidate who has my vote (and a contribution), the one true conservative on the ballot who is raising concerns about preserving the integrity of that inspired document: Michael Peroutka
Since when does supporting capitalism imply any abrogation of our Constitutionally provided system for Congress
By the way, I think it's a real shame that our current Supreme Court failed to recognize the reality of "limited times" in the world of perpetual copyright extensions and software's brief shelf life. But they have just a bit more authority on the matter than I do.
Now, what you're apparently espousing is communism, where the fruits of an individual's labor is given up for the common good of all. Personally, I like the idea of having the hope of some type of payoff motivate me (six patents and counting) and my clients to invent new and different ways of doing things. And we can still choose to give some things over to the public good, like some open-source software I've written myself.
Regarding your abortion canard, my country has no more right to tell sovereign nations what to do about abortion (as opposed to handing out foreign aid) than it has to invade a sovereign nation, killing thousands, because its leader is a really rotten person.
It's human nature to respond to put the best possible light on a negative situation that doesn't appear to be changeable.
This may be somewhat OT, but I think it's a good example of this cognitive dissonance phenomenon: I am a social conservative (strongly support the right of an armed citizenry, believe abortion should be illegal during all 9 months, for example) who is not voting for either the Republican or Democrat presidential candidate. I simply can't see myself voting for someone who has proven himself as incompetent as Bush has, even though I actually agree with him on most of the issues I find important. (The Iraq war and the environment are exceptions.) I found it at turns amusing and exasperating so see how my conservative friends tried to defend Bush's "puzzled chimp" performance in the first debate: "It was 9PM Eastern time, and that's late at night for him," "I don't think he did that bad," "He's a plain-spoken man," etc. Imagine their reaction if things had been switched and Kerry had performed that dismally. There would have been a lot of gloating and pointing out that his fate was sealed.
Now, back onto the topic: Good luck with your theory that only programming grunt work is going to be offshored. Yeah, that's what we said about manufacturing some years back, maintaining that the real "brain work" will stay in the U.S. Not a chance.
Just take a look at what Google says about the topic. I found one of the first hits, "Offshore Outsourcing World" to be particularly interesting, and chilling. Ironically, the article talks about google itself.
I actually don't see any alternative to free trade, and firmly believe that capitalism is the only way to go (conservative there, again). But with the last barriers to global competition rapidly coming down, a re-distribution of wealth is in progress on a global scale. That means painful adjustments for those who have gotten used to having more of it than most of the world's people.
I am a registered patent agent, licensed to practice law in patent matters before the U.S Patent & Trademark Office. To get to where I'm now at, I've had to get a four-year technological degree, pass a really tough exam, and learn how to write by working under some experienced patent attorneys for that past five years or so. (Self-promotional but generally informative info here.)
So, does that mean my career is safe? See for yourself.
From what I've read, blind people are more impacted by plain ol' email spam than anyone. It takes a lot more time for them to listen for a screen reader start reciting off the latest anatomical enlargement offer than it does for a sighted person from scanning the text and just hitting "delete."
Imagine thousands of Flightgear fans all taking pictures from hilltops and airplanes and submitting them to a server that performs geometric transformations on the images, per the location data, and adds to a downloadable database of free scenery.
I write for a living. I have a license to Office 97, but I've been using OpenOffice for my work for nearly two years now. I've never found Word 97's grammar checker good for much of anything but a good laugh. Maybe things are better now, but I've never been inclined to "upgrade" to a version that seemed like it would need every motherboard change to be registered with Redmond.
The near-universal assumption of Word's dominance can have interesting effects. I once exchanged exported-to-Word copies of a document with a client a couple of times until we discovered that we were both using OpenOffice, both of us importing what we had exported to Word format for the other guy!
The most incredible display of stars I've seen was from a sailboat in the middle of the North Pacific. The combination of utter darkness, clear skies, and abundant time for reflection made for a deeply moving experience that I'll never forget.
It's probably not a coincidence that I now live about 10 miles from the nearest traffic light, in one of the few dark areas you can see left in the U.S. on that map.
It depends on your definition of "salvation". Personally I don't think Linux needs to be saved from anything. It's doing what it does well already.
How about Windows-only hardware? I'd love to be able to walk into the store and know that the whiz-bang all-in-one machine has a chance of actually using all its functionality under my preferred OS.
How about web browser compatibility? I've cancelled a useful subscription to a database service because they required some sort of Internet Explorer weirdness for their interface to work.
How about proprietary application support? A lot of vertical-market software (stuff in the $1,000+ range) isn't being coded for anything but the dominant OS. Even the speech recognition software I'm using to write this is actually running under Windows in VMware, with my own Python client/server code sending keystrokes over to the Linux side. Most people aren't going to go to that level of effort to use anything the dominant OS.
The rest of your comments make sense to me and I agree with them.
Certainly. And thank you for the gracious reply!
./
IMHO we're managing to have a decent little discussion here down in the basement of
I am using entropy in the information theory sense, not in the physics sense. They are different.
P.S. If this doesn't make sense to you, please don't assume that terms have no widely accepted meanings other than the one you personally understand.
Thanks for a thoughtful reply from the other side.
Regarding your first point, a little bit of crypto experience taught me something about the entropy of large numbers: Time scales linearly, but the entropy of numbers B^N (here B=4) most definitely does not, given N. A 64-bit symmetric key is almost trivial to crack with a cluster of today's CPUs. A 128-bit key is 2^64 times longer than a 64-bit one, not twice as long, and will be well out of reach for a long time. That's why the NSA tried so hard to squash PGP.
Now, we're talking about the equivalent of 6 billion bits. I don't care how many billions of years you give for things to evolve, you can't get to 2^6,000,000,000. The complexity simply exceeds the abilities of our brains to grasp.
Note that the assumption that things will just evolve on their own is a charitable one. If my '66 Wagoneer had done any evolving in the 40 years it's been around, it might get better gas mileage and put out less harmful emissions than it does. But only more newly designed vehicles have those features.
Regarding your second point, perhaps the strongest concept of selflessness in humanity is that of laying down one's life for one's friend. Witness the outpouring of support for Pat Tillman, or the type of emotions stirred by the story of a mother who drowns saving her child, or the soldier who falls on a grenade to save his commander. Though I don't presume to be any judge of God's ways, what better way for the Creator to deliver a message about himself than to offer a part of him as a widely predicted and historically recorded sacrifice for his created humanity?
OK, I know this is Slashdot and all, but so far I've seen no one consider the obvious possibility that the incredible entropy of DNA's 6-billion bit quaternary code might actually be an indication that there is some creative intelligence behind life after all.
Years ago, I once asked a coworker who was an avowed atheist if he would be convinced that SETI had found a "hit" if it encountered an endlessly repeating quaternary code millions of symbols long. He replied, "Oh yeah!" and I pointed out that such a result was already in his own DNA. The length of time he took to stop and think about that was immensely satisfying.
To me, the idea that man can think he created God and not vice versa is the epitome of arrogance.
How will the open source chess engine Crafty do against the proprietary closed engines?
I'd check out some of the action if I didn't have to use playchess.com's proprietary closed client software to do so...
I think I'll stick with FICS, thanks.This ain't DSL... :-)
/usr/download/slackware-10.0-iso
file: slackware-10.0-iso
size: 682,819,837 (651.2 MB)
dest:
status:&nb sp; download succeeded!
speed: 0 B/s down - 414.7 KB/s up
totals: 652.2 MB down - 17.2 GB up
file: slackware-10.0-iso /usr/download/slackware-10.0-iso
size: 682,819,837 (651.2 MB)
dest:
status: finishing in 2:48:57 (2.4%)
speed: 85.4 KB/s down - 230.5 KB/s up
totals: 15.5 MB down - 34.0 MB up
What is it with this hostility toward people making a profit?
My local Catholic hospital once treated me for pneumonia by putting expensive antibiotics into my bloodstream for a few days. Without treatment, my odds of survival were about 50%.
Are they good because they save people's lives whether or not those people can pay (as I could) and regardless of their creed (I'm Lutheran, which is not exactly a religous alliance with Catholicism)? Or are they somehow evil because they charged for their services? I think the answer is obviously the former, but it seems a lot of slashdotters would opt for the latter.
Note that they're selling their whole company, not just shares of it, which the language you've quoted would seem to permit:
And yes, IANAL.
Isn't it interesting, though, that the licensee they are proudly touting for Q3 has publicly expressed the wish that it had never signed up? P.S. - I used to have a virtual private server running on an EV1 box. No more.
These will probably work fine in thin clients connected to a server running a stable, multitasking, multi-user OS. Actually, they may even be overkill for that.
Imagine a tiny motherboard using one of these with a basic amount of soldered-in RAM, on-board video and NIC, and an on-board boot flash containing LTSP. Voila, a compact, cheap license-free, diskless, plug-and-play, workstation! How's that for putting Linux on the desktop?
An open hardware project, anyone?
I am happy to report that I just today switched over to a server that is not tainted by an SCO license. I was really glad to ditch the one hosted by a certain provider in Texas who caved in to SCO's bluster a few months back.