They forgot to add a comment field to say what originating server the MD5 hash was taken from.... um.... so you'll recognize your own result right away.
If Microsoft is not going to address the security problems fast enough, then obviously the industry is going to do it for them. Point blank. It will hit Microsoft's pocket book, but they have a lot of cash to burn anyway. Microsoft does not have all the luxury of time and market-share they often think they have.
However I do expect Microsoft to make a sudden and brutal comeback as they often do. They've learned alot from past software experience. We had better be wary because they aren't gonna' let their browser market share be taken away easily.
Heck, considering the large costs associated with even a single patent, only Microsoft (ok, and large companies, or companies making piles of money) can afford to pick up patents for every little thing. It doesn't seem fair for the small guy, or for the OSS community. However many of us live on a large capitalistic continent (North America) where large business can continue. And Microsoft can afford to spend years in court fighting small patents. Will Microsoft enforce them? I assume it's their only strong avenue to fight OSS, so I expect they will sometime in the future. If the OSS community had a bunch of patents for small things too then maybe that would help equal things out so to speak, so everybody leaves well enough alone. At least IBM has a lot of patents. Let's hope they stay on the side of OSS for a long time to come.
And thank goodness for the prior art patent rules, otherwise we could be in deeper faster.
Is there a way to take preemptive action against patents for which prior art exits?
Or do we have to wait for one of these seemingly foolish patents to go to court someday?
If it hasn't been done already, somebody in the OSS community (Red Hat?, IBM?) should set up a fund that is devoted to obtaining patents and putting them under a free license or something. Maybe sales of a popular software product (or portion of sales of services from OSS software) could be funnelled into the fund.
Conceptually similar, yes. However the implementation of some concepts can vary greatly between platforms. The more high-level the talk is, the more similar the two systems appear to be. For example, I can say "They are both operating systems and perform the same types of services for the user". That's true, however the proof is in the pudding. Obviously Linux is a good server pudding and Windows is a good desktop pudding. I'm interesting in seeing the best quality product being produced on top of the those concepts. Likewise it can be argued that Windows is trying to be like Linux, and therefore the need for Windows is diminishing!
For a company the size of Microsoft, who is not used to sharing, to be taking these steps towards a more open software base seems a bit unprecedented. They don't need to be as open as Open Source. Indeed that probably wouldn't be feasible for their survival. However they just need to be open enough to draw more developers and customers and increase market share. I think a lot of people here (including myself) assumed Microsoft would not (could not) start taking such steps. They are either fighting to remain in the market, or else a lot smarter than they have been credited with in the past (they've been credited with sly-ness in the past). As a result Open source may have more of a fight on its hands now with Microsoft than ever before. It might even make SCO look like a walk in the park.
Or who just want to work with the console? What console-based apps, that are undergoing just as much development as their X counterparts, do you use?
Is there some kind of X client that can mimic the X environment on a text screen -- kind of like ASCII art is to imagery?
First, I don't know if it exists, but would be interested in hearing what other people have to say. Secondly, I don't think this is necessarily a good idea, however I do find the concept interesting.
With the seemingly small amount of summer we get here in the UK, the last thing I want to be doing on a sunny day is mow the lawn. ...
Then I started thinking about stuff like obstacle avoidance, optimum path planning, guidance system, how to get pretty-looking stripes, and I realised that it's actually a potentially complex (read: fun) thing to do. By the time you get that thing built you'll need a bush hog to cut down the long grass.
So the first thing you want to do on a sunny day during your short summer is build a complex lawn mower? It sounds to me like a priority thing rather than a summer thing. I should insert a comment about "true geek" here, but this reference should suffice.
How about getting around that specific patent by associating an external text file containing comments with positions in the code, and so the external text file contains comments that are not inline to the source code (not part of it).
Of course in the IDE (e.g. Eclipse) sections of the external text file could be "linked" into the visual display and boxed appropriately to indicate such. So now we have inline and external comments associated with the code in the IDE. So now just put all your TODO comments inside the external file (automated through the IDE), and the external file doesn't need explicit comment delimiters because it only contains comments.
Voila, we broke the specificity of the patent and might just get away with it. ???
Ok, so possibly not a great idea. However I wanted to expound it anyways to the Slashdot crowd as a kind of sounding board.
Does anybody have other suggestions about how to write code to get around this specific patent but acheive almost the same functionality? I'm sure many others including myself would be interested in reading such ideas...
Oh wow -- free licensing for computers that are turned off! I can't wait to load up that baby and turn off the computer to see how it runs.
Well, it's a step in the right direction anyways.
Bob Wiley: Baby step to four o'clock. Baby step to four o'clock.
Good for disaster situations, but I'm sure a lot of people have already been using this "new" licensing scheme for a while now.
Archive the whole lot of it, and/or copmress it and store it. Don't even try to sift through it all. If and when it is needed, then get it out and pay somebody to sort through it.
Then it's not clogging anything anymore, and also it's there if you ever need it.
I've been involved with using PGP to encrypt data before storing it to a Sql Server db. PGP allows us to ensur the data is secure, even if the database password is compromised. We don't keep the PGP private key on the server, but only the public key used to encrypt the data before storing it (the data is also protected by SSL while in transit and never touches the disk until after it's been encrypted). The customer unlocks the data with the private key after downloading it from the server. It's very secure, but also very hard to work with. For example, we have to leave the db Primary Key (and various other miscellaneous fields) unencrypted to be able to target individual records later (e.g. after a payment gateway returns a transaction status to the server). So it's equally a pain in the butt and lengthens development time. I would like to see some sort of public/private key scheme be integrated into Sql Server. How that would look exactly, I'm unsure.
Slashdot Mirror
All of them.
They forgot to add a comment field to say what originating server the MD5 hash was taken from .... um .... so you'll recognize your own result right away.
Use the cached Google version while the site is being /.ed.
If Microsoft is not going to address the security problems fast enough, then obviously the industry is going to do it for them. Point blank. It will hit Microsoft's pocket book, but they have a lot of cash to burn anyway. Microsoft does not have all the luxury of time and market-share they often think they have. However I do expect Microsoft to make a sudden and brutal comeback as they often do. They've learned alot from past software experience. We had better be wary because they aren't gonna' let their browser market share be taken away easily.
Darn, I wanted to be the first one in Holland to patent the grouped task bar buttons.
And thank goodness for the prior art patent rules, otherwise we could be in deeper faster.
If it hasn't been done already, somebody in the OSS community (Red Hat?, IBM?) should set up a fund that is devoted to obtaining patents and putting them under a free license or something. Maybe sales of a popular software product (or portion of sales of services from OSS software) could be funnelled into the fund.
Sounds like it could be a case of favortism bordering on nepotism. Better call in the cold squad.
He looks like Mr Burns.
Conceptually similar, yes. However the implementation of some concepts can vary greatly between platforms. The more high-level the talk is, the more similar the two systems appear to be. For example, I can say "They are both operating systems and perform the same types of services for the user". That's true, however the proof is in the pudding. Obviously Linux is a good server pudding and Windows is a good desktop pudding. I'm interesting in seeing the best quality product being produced on top of the those concepts. Likewise it can be argued that Windows is trying to be like Linux, and therefore the need for Windows is diminishing!
A ton of credit has to go to Bill Pope, who has shot himself
For a company the size of Microsoft, who is not used to sharing, to be taking these steps towards a more open software base seems a bit unprecedented. They don't need to be as open as Open Source. Indeed that probably wouldn't be feasible for their survival. However they just need to be open enough to draw more developers and customers and increase market share. I think a lot of people here (including myself) assumed Microsoft would not (could not) start taking such steps. They are either fighting to remain in the market, or else a lot smarter than they have been credited with in the past (they've been credited with sly-ness in the past). As a result Open source may have more of a fight on its hands now with Microsoft than ever before. It might even make SCO look like a walk in the park.
What the heck did they strip out?
Oh I know, maybe the the "Starter Edition" includes Microsoft Bob to make the OS easier to use.
Hey buddy, a Brazilian Official already tried that line of reasoning . That one's a real lead balloon, I'll warn ya.
However Thailand can have this nice stripped down version of XP.
Is there some kind of X client that can mimic the X environment on a text screen -- kind of like ASCII art is to imagery?
First, I don't know if it exists, but would be interested in hearing what other people have to say. Secondly, I don't think this is necessarily a good idea, however I do find the concept interesting.
...
Then I started thinking about stuff like obstacle avoidance, optimum path planning, guidance system, how to get pretty-looking stripes, and I realised that it's actually a potentially complex (read: fun) thing to do. By the time you get that thing built you'll need a bush hog to cut down the long grass.
So the first thing you want to do on a sunny day during your short summer is build a complex lawn mower? It sounds to me like a priority thing rather than a summer thing. I should insert a comment about "true geek" here, but this reference should suffice.
There doesn't appear to be much eye-sight wise through the small portals of space-ship one anyways. I find it interesting none-the-less.
You can't use the money if you're dead.
trashed my profile
Pinstripe is quite ugly
theme affects the download manager
That {man} deserves {his} revenge... and we deserve to die.
i hope he sends us all a letter of apology to back up his words
Ok, so possibly not a great idea. However I wanted to expound it anyways to the Slashdot crowd as a kind of sounding board.
Does anybody have other suggestions about how to write code to get around this specific patent but acheive almost the same functionality? I'm sure many others including myself would be interested in reading such ideas ...
Well, it's a step in the right direction anyways.
Bob Wiley: Baby step to four o'clock. Baby step to four o'clock.
Good for disaster situations, but I'm sure a lot of people have already been using this "new" licensing scheme for a while now.
Archive the whole lot of it, and/or copmress it and store it. Don't even try to sift through it all. If and when it is needed, then get it out and pay somebody to sort through it.
Then it's not clogging anything anymore, and also it's there if you ever need it.
I've been involved with using PGP to encrypt data before storing it to a Sql Server db. PGP allows us to ensur the data is secure, even if the database password is compromised. We don't keep the PGP private key on the server, but only the public key used to encrypt the data before storing it (the data is also protected by SSL while in transit and never touches the disk until after it's been encrypted). The customer unlocks the data with the private key after downloading it from the server. It's very secure, but also very hard to work with. For example, we have to leave the db Primary Key (and various other miscellaneous fields) unencrypted to be able to target individual records later (e.g. after a payment gateway returns a transaction status to the server). So it's equally a pain in the butt and lengthens development time. I would like to see some sort of public/private key scheme be integrated into Sql Server. How that would look exactly, I'm unsure.