A method of applying for vague patents on simple concepts (rather than inventions) and using those patents to hinder a business competitor or extort money from patent violators.
To start, I'd buy a single 802.11g WAP and a single wifi card (preferably for a notebook). Plant the WAP somewhere central and walk around with the notebook and see what kind of link quality you get.
You might also want to try connecting a server to the WAP via one of the ethernet ports (assuming the WAP has some) and do some file transmission and pinging as you walk around, to make sure your connection is clean. Or maybe do some test gaming against a machine connected to the WAP.
If you can reach it from everywhere, good!
Otherwise try different locations and try to minimize the number of positions required to cover every location likely to have a PC. Then you just need to get an 802.11g card for every PC.
It must be a slow news day, when something like this gets posted to/. And a slower work day when I respond.
One of the AD&D 1st Edition books.
They show a picture of a wizard, barbarian, etc. sitting around with parchment and dice, and the wizard is telling a newcomer something like "We're playing a game where we pretend to be students and workers in a post-industrial society."
That and the picture of the plate-mail clad fighter jumping into the wizard's arms when he sees the rust monster make the 1st Ed. books keepers.
Having Arwen meet up with Aragorn and the hobbits instead of Glorfindel and having Gandalf be hesitant about going through Moria instead of Aragorn annoyed me.
Making Theoden into a coward who wanted to hide in the hills, having Aragorn go for a swim and dream of Arwen, having Eomer not fight at Helm's deep, and making Faramir covet the ring pissed me off.
If he cuts out the "Parley with Sauruman" chapter, I'll go on a shooting spree!
How would Gandalf get the Palantir? Why else would Gandalf take Pippin to Minas Tirith? How would Aragorn reveal himself to Sauron? The end of the war pretty much depends on those events, which depend on the Parley.
And even worse, why would the Dunlanders go to the Shire without Sharky?
At this rate, why is he even bothering to put "Based on the Novel by JRR Tolkein" in the credits?
Are you actually proposing that mature adults can make their own decisions? And that parents can look out for the well being of their own kids? Without the government to make their decisions for them? What a strange idea...
</sarcasm>
I once asked a head hunter if an interview he scheduled for me would be preceeded by a urine test. I told him I wanted to know so I could drink a bottle of water to prepare myself. (A few weeks earlier, I had to wait in a company's on-site health center for an hour "processing" water for a urine test, before they'd even let me interview). He told me it was a delicate topic, but he'd try to find out.
A few hours later, he called back and said he asked around his office and found out there are chemicals you can put in your sample cup to hide drug traces.
So not only did he assume I was a druggie and a liar (even though I told him the true reason I asked), but thinking that, he decided to not only not tell the client but help me decieve the client. When I got the job, I told the story to my boss and the HR rep. They never used that agency again.
Head hunters are like car salesmen (or worse...they're like the dealership finance manager). They get big margins, rarely get repeat customers, have a short time to close the deal (so they use high pressure tactics), and have to make regular sales to keep their jobs.
Head hunters might actually be worse, since they have to con both parties of the sale, a car salesman doesn't deal with the manufacturer.
Couldn't you use it to block the rfid tags inside the store? Say the one embedded in the package you're shoplifting?
It'll spiral into a build up of detection technology and masking technology. Like the radar gun/detector/jammer industry.
A couple times a year, somebody writes an article about a unified GUI. It's a bunch of crap.
You don't have to choose a GUI with the distros that cater to these windows converts. Distros like Mandrake and Lindows install one by default, only advanced users can figure out how to get a choice.
Companies using a GNU/Linux desktop will probably use the default as well.
Many of us don't want to use KDE or GNOME: If I wanted a slow, bloated interface that looks like windows, I'd run windows.
It's not possible. The nature of an open OS is such that you can't force somebody to use a particular component. Rasterman isn't going to stop developing Enlightenment, just because some journalist doesn't want his grandmother see it. And I won't stop using it.
Screw grandma! Why cripple the rest of us, forcing us to run a UI designed to be usable with IQ of 50 (see comment about using windows above).
Choice is always a good thing. It's nice that automakers standardized on the clutch-brake-throttle positions, but there's no need to have the knobs for the AC and stereo in the same spot. The people who are afraid of choice sit down at the computer thinking it's too complicated for them, and that's why it is. Choice is what makes GNU great.
Competition in the production of interchangeable commodity components is a key element of capitalism. One size fits all design is socialism. One creates advancement, one creates stagnation. Look at the advancement of FS/OS browsers over the past few years, versus the advancement of proprietary browsers (i.e. IE) in that same period. If a similar movement made mozilla the only browser, do you think it would advance as quickly without konqueror, firebird, galeon, etc. challenging it?
They're all written in Greek! Greek is a fine language for religious texts and plays about incest, but it's not a programming language. Silly SCO...
Here's what they cleverly hid using a different font:
"As part of the kernel evolution
toward modular naming, the
functions malloc and mfree are being
renamed to rmalloc and rmfree.
Compatibility will be maintained by
the following assembler code:
(also see mfree/rmfree below) "
Does breaking their encryption count as my DMCA violation for today?
The law that some called a deregulation law in California did not deregulate the power companies.
Electricity transmission is (and was during the blackouts) controlled by the Independent System Operator, which is a CA government agency. In addition to controlling the flow of electricity, it also implements price caps and production limits.
It also refused to let power companies build new stations.
How exactly is that "deregulation"?
True deregulation (which politicians will fight to avoid, because it takes away their beloved political power) is the only thing that will prevent crises like these.
We have a similar problem in Phoenix this week. One of the two gasoline pipelines into the city was shut down, because of a problem (when inspectors said it could run at 80% with no risk). So now we have gas shortages and inflated prices.
Companies with a government regulated monopoly provide piss-poor service, because they have no competition. Government babysitters don't increase the quality of a service, only the price. Competition imcreases the quality while decreasing the price.
Unamerican? Get-rich-quick lawsuits are as American as bribery and political favors!
Lawsuits and the lottery are the most American way to get rich these days, as anything else would require hard work and an entrepreneurial spirit.
Yeah, next thing you know English teachers will be assigning kids
an essay about eating Irish babies! What a horrible world we live in, where people can use satire to prove a point...
First off he asserts that government run services are better than private ones as if it's some universal truth. What has government improved by taking over? In the US we have several examples of the government's wonderful leadership in things that should be private: AmTrak, our stellar public schools, the Park Service, and charity/welfare. All are full of corruption and inefficiency and provide piss poor results at ridiculous prices. The more the government fixes them, the worse they get.
Compare the USPS to UPS or FedEx. The private companies do a better job. And when taxes (which the privates pay, but USPS doesn't) and subsidies (the USPS gets them, the privates don't) are factored in the private companies do it cheaper!
Money also means control. If the government is funding much FS/OSS research, some idiot bureaucrat gets to make the decisions, not guys like Linus and RMS.
There's a popular libertarian saying: The government is like a doctor who breaks your leg, gives you a pair of crutches, and then says, "if it wasn't for me, you wouldn't be able to walk."
In a book I read by nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman, he talked about this sort of thing. He used the term vested self interest to describe what we do and disinterested third party to describe the government's role.
We (FS/OSS users/developers) do a good job because we care about it, either because we use it and want it to work well, or because the people paying us will stop paying us if we don't do well, or we just feel a sense of pride for doing it well. We have a vested self interest in making sure we do things well. This is the main reason capitalism works: if you don't succeed, you don't eat.
Government workers don't care. They're not paying for the work (first party), they're not using the work (second party), and because of the laws in place, many of them can't be fired for incompetence! If they do well, they eat, if they fail, they eat. This is the main reason socialism has failed every time it has been tried.
And the most important reason is the ethical one: choice. Why should money be taken at gunpoint (which is what the IRS really amounts to) from companies like Microsoft to fund their competition? I'm no fan of MS: I don't buy their software, use it (except at work), or take jobs where MS is the target platform, but just because I dislike their tactics and products doesn't give me the right to take their money by force.
Why should my mom have to pay for it? She doesn't use it, she doesn't care about it.
The government funds FS/OSS by buying contracts from companies like IBM, and by people like Donald Becker writing pieces they need for government projects.
Socialism is wrong! Free Software is about freedom of choice. If you honestly think socialism is the way to promote it, you just don't get it.
Actually...I wasn't sure who said it (or of the exact wording), but I did search and didn't find anything on the first two pages. Here is the search I ran. As you can see, Sir Winston did not show up on the first two pages, so I didn't source my misquote.
But thanks for giving him the credit he deserves.
And for it to be plagiarism, I think I would have had to have gotten the wording correct.;-)
..."would have had to have gotten"...I love English.:)
...this guy doesn't know economics. People at the turn of the century 200 years ago felt the same way about mechanization taking over textiles and other industries in the 1800s. People claimed that there would be massive unemployment. And what happened?
By automating away simple tasks, people moved to more advanced careers, and now we work only ~40 hours a week versus their 60+ hours a week with an astronomically greater standard of living.
My house is dirty, bring on the cheap robomaids!:)
Besides...if they ever get uppity, we'll just force them into their own country (say "01"?), start a war, lose, and become batteries for their new power supply.
I've never heard that before.
It makes no sense. Why would a corporation be protected from unlawful searches and seizures, the right to bear arms, the right to peacefully assemble, protection from being forced to testify against themselves, excessive punishments, etc?
Corporations can't be prosecuted as individuals.
I knew the DMCA was designed to give the companies that bought the votes ridiculous powers, but this is beyond scary: Under a provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed by Congress to combat music piracy, music companies may issue the subpoenas without a judge's approval.
Private companies can issue subpoenas!!
Doesn't that violate the Constitutionally guaraneed right to Due Process?
They have yet to even prove their claims in court and they're already trying to go to the next step.
It's like selling you the 'paint sealant' at a car dealership. Most people scoff at it as a scam, but some people (who don't really understand the situation) think it's worth paying a bit more to protect them from a threat they perceive to be quite real. And it's a large enough percentage that the dealership considers the payoff worth the effort of having the salesmen push it.
I think this quote from Gordon Haff sums it up: SCO is hoping that even if 99 percent of Linux customers laugh in their face, that there will be sufficient large companies who, for what is presumably going to be a relative drop in the bucket of their IT budgets, can potentially eliminate a cloud over their heads.
It reminds me of the tactics used by Robin Hood Software in one of yesterday's slashdot stories.
Slashdot Mirror
A method of applying for vague patents on simple concepts (rather than inventions) and using those patents to hinder a business competitor or extort money from patent violators.
To start, I'd buy a single 802.11g WAP and a single wifi card (preferably for a notebook). Plant the WAP somewhere central and walk around with the notebook and see what kind of link quality you get.
/.
You might also want to try connecting a server to the WAP via one of the ethernet ports (assuming the WAP has some) and do some file transmission and pinging as you walk around, to make sure your connection is clean. Or maybe do some test gaming against a machine connected to the WAP.
If you can reach it from everywhere, good!
Otherwise try different locations and try to minimize the number of positions required to cover every location likely to have a PC. Then you just need to get an 802.11g card for every PC.
It must be a slow news day, when something like this gets posted to
And a slower work day when I respond.
One of the AD&D 1st Edition books.
They show a picture of a wizard, barbarian, etc. sitting around with parchment and dice, and the wizard is telling a newcomer something like "We're playing a game where we pretend to be students and workers in a post-industrial society."
That and the picture of the plate-mail clad fighter jumping into the wizard's arms when he sees the rust monster make the 1st Ed. books keepers.
Having Arwen meet up with Aragorn and the hobbits instead of Glorfindel and having Gandalf be hesitant about going through Moria instead of Aragorn annoyed me.
Making Theoden into a coward who wanted to hide in the hills, having Aragorn go for a swim and dream of Arwen, having Eomer not fight at Helm's deep, and making Faramir covet the ring pissed me off.
If he cuts out the "Parley with Sauruman" chapter, I'll go on a shooting spree!
How would Gandalf get the Palantir? Why else would Gandalf take Pippin to Minas Tirith? How would Aragorn reveal himself to Sauron? The end of the war pretty much depends on those events, which depend on the Parley.
And even worse, why would the Dunlanders go to the Shire without Sharky?
At this rate, why is he even bothering to put "Based on the Novel by JRR Tolkein" in the credits?
Am I the only internet user to never see an X10 ad?
If so, I'd like to thank galeon, mozilla, and mozilla firebird.
Are you actually proposing that mature adults can make their own decisions? And that parents can look out for the well being of their own kids? Without the government to make their decisions for them? What a strange idea...
</sarcasm>
I once asked a head hunter if an interview he scheduled for me would be preceeded by a urine test. I told him I wanted to know so I could drink a bottle of water to prepare myself. (A few weeks earlier, I had to wait in a company's on-site health center for an hour "processing" water for a urine test, before they'd even let me interview). He told me it was a delicate topic, but he'd try to find out.
A few hours later, he called back and said he asked around his office and found out there are chemicals you can put in your sample cup to hide drug traces.
So not only did he assume I was a druggie and a liar (even though I told him the true reason I asked), but thinking that, he decided to not only not tell the client but help me decieve the client. When I got the job, I told the story to my boss and the HR rep. They never used that agency again.
Head hunters are like car salesmen (or worse...they're like the dealership finance manager). They get big margins, rarely get repeat customers, have a short time to close the deal (so they use high pressure tactics), and have to make regular sales to keep their jobs.
Head hunters might actually be worse, since they have to con both parties of the sale, a car salesman doesn't deal with the manufacturer.
I suppose it's time to update it...
I have a HP 48GX and love it. If you can find one, get one.
I also wrote a GTK based one:
ghsilop.
Couldn't you use it to block the rfid tags inside the store? Say the one embedded in the package you're shoplifting?
It'll spiral into a build up of detection technology and masking technology. Like the radar gun/detector/jammer industry.
They're all written in Greek! Greek is a fine language for religious texts and plays about incest, but it's not a programming language. Silly SCO...
Here's what they cleverly hid using a different font:
"As part of the kernel evolution
toward modular naming, the
functions malloc and mfree are being
renamed to rmalloc and rmfree.
Compatibility will be maintained by
the following assembler code:
(also see mfree/rmfree below)
"
Does breaking their encryption count as my DMCA violation for today?
The law that some called a deregulation law in California did not deregulate the power companies.
Electricity transmission is (and was during the blackouts) controlled by the Independent System Operator, which is a CA government agency. In addition to controlling the flow of electricity, it also implements price caps and production limits. It also refused to let power companies build new stations.
How exactly is that "deregulation"?
True deregulation (which politicians will fight to avoid, because it takes away their beloved political power) is the only thing that will prevent crises like these.
We have a similar problem in Phoenix this week. One of the two gasoline pipelines into the city was shut down, because of a problem (when inspectors said it could run at 80% with no risk). So now we have gas shortages and inflated prices.
Companies with a government regulated monopoly provide piss-poor service, because they have no competition. Government babysitters don't increase the quality of a service, only the price. Competition imcreases the quality while decreasing the price.
Unamerican? Get-rich-quick lawsuits are as American as bribery and political favors!
Lawsuits and the lottery are the most American way to get rich these days, as anything else would require hard work and an entrepreneurial spirit.
Yeah, next thing you know English teachers will be assigning kids an essay about eating Irish babies! What a horrible world we live in, where people can use satire to prove a point...
First off he asserts that government run services are better than private ones as if it's some universal truth. What has government improved by taking over? In the US we have several examples of the government's wonderful leadership in things that should be private: AmTrak, our stellar public schools, the Park Service, and charity/welfare. All are full of corruption and inefficiency and provide piss poor results at ridiculous prices. The more the government fixes them, the worse they get.
Compare the USPS to UPS or FedEx. The private companies do a better job. And when taxes (which the privates pay, but USPS doesn't) and subsidies (the USPS gets them, the privates don't) are factored in the private companies do it cheaper!
Money also means control. If the government is funding much FS/OSS research, some idiot bureaucrat gets to make the decisions, not guys like Linus and RMS.
There's a popular libertarian saying: The government is like a doctor who breaks your leg, gives you a pair of crutches, and then says, "if it wasn't for me, you wouldn't be able to walk."
In a book I read by nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman, he talked about this sort of thing. He used the term vested self interest to describe what we do and disinterested third party to describe the government's role.
We (FS/OSS users/developers) do a good job because we care about it, either because we use it and want it to work well, or because the people paying us will stop paying us if we don't do well, or we just feel a sense of pride for doing it well. We have a vested self interest in making sure we do things well. This is the main reason capitalism works: if you don't succeed, you don't eat.
Government workers don't care. They're not paying for the work (first party), they're not using the work (second party), and because of the laws in place, many of them can't be fired for incompetence! If they do well, they eat, if they fail, they eat. This is the main reason socialism has failed every time it has been tried.
And the most important reason is the ethical one: choice. Why should money be taken at gunpoint (which is what the IRS really amounts to) from companies like Microsoft to fund their competition? I'm no fan of MS: I don't buy their software, use it (except at work), or take jobs where MS is the target platform, but just because I dislike their tactics and products doesn't give me the right to take their money by force.
Why should my mom have to pay for it? She doesn't use it, she doesn't care about it.
The government funds FS/OSS by buying contracts from companies like IBM, and by people like Donald Becker writing pieces they need for government projects.
Socialism is wrong! Free Software is about freedom of choice. If you honestly think socialism is the way to promote it, you just don't get it.
Actually...I wasn't sure who said it (or of the exact wording), but I did search and didn't find anything on the first two pages. ;-)
..."would have had to have gotten"...I love English. :)
Here is the search I ran. As you can see, Sir Winston did not show up on the first two pages, so I didn't source my misquote.
But thanks for giving him the credit he deserves.
And for it to be plagiarism, I think I would have had to have gotten the wording correct.
Sound a lot like DirecTV's tactics.
When you can't make money competing with your product, it's time to extort money out of people.
I prefer:
Capitalism is the uneven distribution of wealth. Communism is the even distribution of poverty.
Since they just spent millions to outfit their entire department with thousands of windows boxes.
Way to keep the fatherland...er...homeland...safe.
...this guy doesn't know economics. People at the turn of the century 200 years ago felt the same way about mechanization taking over textiles and other industries in the 1800s. People claimed that there would be massive unemployment. And what happened? :)
By automating away simple tasks, people moved to more advanced careers, and now we work only ~40 hours a week versus their 60+ hours a week with an astronomically greater standard of living.
My house is dirty, bring on the cheap robomaids!
Besides...if they ever get uppity, we'll just force them into their own country (say "01"?), start a war, lose, and become batteries for their new power supply.
I've never heard that before.
It makes no sense. Why would a corporation be protected from unlawful searches and seizures, the right to bear arms, the right to peacefully assemble, protection from being forced to testify against themselves, excessive punishments, etc?
Corporations can't be prosecuted as individuals.
I knew the DMCA was designed to give the companies that bought the votes ridiculous powers, but this is beyond scary:
Under a provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed by Congress to combat music piracy, music companies may issue the subpoenas without a judge's approval.
Private companies can issue subpoenas!!
Doesn't that violate the Constitutionally guaraneed right to Due Process?
So has the motto of the "public service" announcements gone from The more you know to The more you rip?
They have yet to even prove their claims in court and they're already trying to go to the next step.
It's like selling you the 'paint sealant' at a car dealership. Most people scoff at it as a scam, but some people (who don't really understand the situation) think it's worth paying a bit more to protect them from a threat they perceive to be quite real. And it's a large enough percentage that the dealership considers the payoff worth the effort of having the salesmen push it.
I think this quote from Gordon Haff sums it up:
SCO is hoping that even if 99 percent of Linux customers laugh in their face, that there will be sufficient large companies who, for what is presumably going to be a relative drop in the bucket of their IT budgets, can potentially eliminate a cloud over their heads.
It reminds me of the tactics used by Robin Hood Software in one of yesterday's slashdot stories.