#1 "Key Escrow" - All your keys are simply registered with big brother. To reduce the logistical nightmare, you would likely just register special backdoor keys used to encrypt the session key, which would then be included with the message.
#2 Big brother publishes one or more public keys, to be used to encrypt each session key, which is then included with each message.
The BXA/NSA guidelines for getting permission to export strong crypto include full disclosure on your data formatting, headers, compression, etc. The review process includes submission and approval of test vectors.
It should be noted that once these are required by law, compliance testing could be automated by building systems holding the private keys and testing recovery on live data.
It should also be noted that since (1) no terrorists would use such software; and (2) terrorists are already using steganography to obscure their encrypted data from trivial recognition as ciphertext: This entire effort will have ZERO impact on real terrorism. Its just an attempt by the NSA/FBI to retain their historical ability to eavesdrop trivially on all ordinary civilians everywhere without warrants or oversight. Last weeks events were just the pretext they've been waiting for. Anyone telling you different is ignorant or has an agenda...
Competitive advantages w/ hardware often turn on clever use of data flow within chip designs, and it is often possible to obtain patents on such designs. At the same time, aspects of these designs are often exposed in driver API's.
It is a common beleif (I've had lawyers give conflicting advice in this area) that protecting API's under NDA's helps defend against a competitor figuring out what you're doing from "public domain" information and thereby having a legal basis to circumvent a patent.
The technical and legal merit of this position are certainly arguable.
You could also add that "opening" an API requires spending some effort (and $) spent on creating publicly readable documentation (although I've had to work with documentation from many non-English companies that apparently hired elementary school students to translate...)
Closed source drivers for such cards seem like a great solution for this problem, but many people in the open source community have 'religious' problems with this.
I write 3d game engines for a living, and have been fighting this issue for a decent part of my career.
The OpenGL ARB really doesn't give a crap about games. Sure, there are a number of vocal game advocates, but the majority of the membership is far more interested in maintaining backwards compatability to older SGI and Evans and Sutherland hardware than keeping up with accelerator progress.
If the ARB did care about games, there would be a concerted effort to standardize on vertex and pixel shader instructions between card vendors, and a move to get these into the standard AS FAST AS POSSIBLE, and a push to actively participate in ongoing features. Instead, it took them years to drag in a few interesting extensions, and Microsoft has assumed the unifying role in the gaping vacuum.
As a game developer who has spent too many man-years fighting abysmal M$ API bugs and design limitations since Win 3.0, even I will admit that Direct3D has completely exceeded OpenGL as a 3d game development platform. Why should I invest six+ months tuning seperate nVidia and ATI shader support engine features under their respective OpenGL extensions, knowning that this GL code is barely reusable and is tied to a VERY limited set of cards?
Add to that M$'s role at the ARB, and the influence they throw around with their money to keep other members in line (remember Farenheight?)
Unless the ARB makes tremendous changes in its policy of staying 3 years behind the hardware, I strongly feel OpenGL is relagated to the niche BASIC fell into. Sure, you can get it on all platforms, but its so slow and feature poor, why bother?
Look at the capabilities of "pixel shaders" before you assume hardware manufacturers _need_ to do the algorithm. Pixel shaders provide the equivelant of microcode level access to the innermost aspects of the rendering pipeline. This may already be possible today with the G3. Ask me in a week...:)
Next generation game engines will be doing this.
Fine, I'm replying late enough that this post 'll get ignored and/or flamed, but cest 'la vie.
I remember when I started into science, and the publications all talked about climate cycles and how we were starting into a new ice age. A few decades later and "oops", were actually warming the earth.
I've been reading the literature on this subject for years, pro and con, and am convinced that the "pro" camp uses peer pressure more than good science.
Specifically:
1. The role of feedback mechanisms such as oceanic phytoplankton and cloud albedo is not understood sufficiently to create an accurate model of the climate feedback mechanisms that would counter any signifigant effect. In the case of cloud albedo, NASA has only started measuring solar flux reflectivitity across the entire atmosphere during the last few years! The potential impact of this mechanism alone (on reflecting solar IR back into space) is _orders_ of magnitude greater than _all_ other declared effects combined, and guess what - it counters warming.
2. The claims regarding rising temperature trends from monitoring stations in urban areas covered with increasing percentages of materials that hold heat such as concrete and asphalt introducing a rising error bias into measurements remains more statistically signifigant than the reported rise in temperature.
You can't claim X is happening based on measured trends in A, B, and C, when the margin of error in A, B, and C are greater than your measured trends! You can't claim Y is happening because of A and B when M can negate A-L combined!
And as for human impact, the Greenland ice core samples show orders of magnitude greater temperature swings without any industrial contribution whatsoever during the geologic past.
Until the science community can address these valid arguments with real data instead of ad-hoc attacks and "look at all these reports we smart people published" (and got our budgets preserved or even increased based upon the threats therein with a little help from media alarmism and an uneducated, unquestioning public), there will remain plenty of skeptics.
In addition to the Mode C transponders mentioned by other posters for safe civilian airspace transit, if you look at almost any picture of stealth aircraft in a non-combat setting, you can see several double-diamond shaped protuberances at various locations around the airframe.
These are essentially corner cube reflectors, designed to give nice bright returns on radar frequencies.
One important aspect of these devices is to make it difficult for an adversary to bring RCS (radar cross section) profiling equipment into an airshow or other venue and take detailed measurements of just how big that "little bird" is.
Java took off in part because it was free. One of the reason JINI flopped so hard, unlike Java, was that it was a technology tied to licensing agreements intended to make Sun money.
They patented key aspects of their discovery and RPC mechanism, and developers I know who wanted to use it in products paid license fees starting in the tens of thousands of $.
Sun even squashed an open source developer trying to distribute a free version of JINI.
JXTA is their attempt to get back mindshare and clout in the agent space, where other P2P groups have left them far behind. Its still insufficient for most interesting applications.
I was the original lead programmer on EnterTelevision / CyberTalk / OnLive Technologies that did Traveler, I've done tons of similar projects before and after for various game companies (SSI, Bethesda, Accolade), and I still design highly scalable VR systems today for fun...
Everything in that patent is already in the public domain, in the system as they describe it, predating their application. All claims can be invalidated.
If anyone has _real_ need of prior art, I'd be happy to dig through my reference collection and make everything available. I've spent years collecting docs and papers for just this event.
As a previous poster mentioned, this is the "new economy" business model. Patent office is now ran by patent sharks and incompetent examiners, so patent all you can and launch shakedown.
I currently live just outside of good DSL range, but I have a friend close to the CO. I've been considering buying a wireless bridge (like Cisco/Aironet 340), but I'd like to know if its going to work before I spend >$5k on equipment! I've got a low hill just obscuring LOS, but the straight distance is only about 3 miles.
Are there are low cost ways to determine the quality of the signal path? I can't find anyone who can loan me the equipment, are there any other options?
Thanks!
Most employment contracts state that anything you do on your own time and equipment, unless it relates to the current or likely future business of your employer. In this case you are in trouble.
Personally, I always negotate a employment agreement addendum in which I enumerate all my external projects which may conflict, so I can keep working on them. Even then, they generally require conflicting projects to be non-commercial.
My recommendation - get a lawyer. Otherwise, you could take vacation, finish and sell your version, update your resume, then come back and announce that you have a pre-existing side project meeting that need. They'll either claim ownership under employment agreement, have you recreate one for them from scratch, or fire you.
Good luck! (I'm stuck in same conversation w/ boss right now, and mine's only non-commercial!)
I love it when the Drake equation is invoked as a way to calculate a meaningful result with some relavance to human or alien civilization.
The Drake equation is calcualted by multiplying seven terms together. 3 of those may be obtained from reasonable sources in astrophysics and planetary formation research (albeit they are continually changing as we learn more!). The other 5 terms are picked essentially at random, and therefore have no meaningful value.
The only thing the Drake equation is good for is exploring the relative impact that manipulating various terms may have on hypothetical contact. Due to 5/7 of the numbers being completely arbitrary, it has no value beyond that limited application.
Use of the Drake equation is a great example of "subjective" science. Adding an additional term defining the probabability of the society creating Twinkie's and eating themselves to death in a cream filled orgy before transmitting would have no detrimental impact on the reliability of the answer.
Your reply is well intentioned but misinformed. I dbout the original poster was slighting the potential exploits of the script kiddie crowd, but there is a problem with your position.
Smart card hacking has in the past been possible with little to no equipment when manufacturers made really stupid mistakes, allowing things like timing and power attacks against crypto, power attacks on secure key storage, and some low cost forms of probing.
However, the "bar" of equipment cost needed to access your average smart card is continuing to raise, and at a substantially faster rate than the cost of lab equipment is dropping.
Work in conformal coating and tamper detection processes have currently raised the bar to the point where even normal e-beam probing is insufficient for a good chip, and that equipment costs 2+ orders of magnitude more than a PC, placing it slightly out of reach of your script kiddie crowd. Newer chips require handling in remote manipilation cells to avoid triggering various tamper devices, and there's another 1-2 orders of magnitude just for a support item.
I'm not trying to say that smart cards are secure, or ever will be - thin plastic just doesn't cut ut. But I think its nieve to extrapolate the pervasive threat of the script kiddie into a problem space requiring at least several days access to equipement costing as much as a few million USD.
I've been watching (and occasionally participating) with VRML since its earliest days, and my career track has focused on large scale distributed 3d for most of the last 15 years. VRML fell through for lots of reasons, including bad tools and poor support by browser vendors with other proprietary plans.
X3D is simply a mapping of the VRML language into XML. While this does buy you a good deal of cool XML features, like using XSL to completely remodel what/how your modeling, it doesn't address any of the core technical problems remaining to acheive large scale distributed 3d, and it in the name of backwards compatability it doesn't fix any of the remaining problems in the original standard that make VRML browsers "non-trivial" and hard to scale.
In order to acheive truly large scale distribtued 3d, it will take a different approach. X3D/VRML may be able to play a role as an import pathway for relatively static content or inefficiently scripted content, but little more.
[SHAMELESS_PLUG] For some time now I've been working to put the stuff I've been working on (that's raised tens of millions at startups like OnLive[Traveler]) into a public domain source base at www.vscape.com - It needs only a few more competent coders. I know there are other people who want to make this happen, we just need to work together. The technology now exists, the implementation and design decisions are challenging and fun. [/SHAMELESS_PLUG]
The Hitachi patent claim basically covers combining the output of one stage with a bit shitfed copy of that same output to create a new output, in a reversable format.
i.e., they patented: a2 = a1 ^ ( a1 << 1 );
The patent examiner should be fired. His boss should be fired, and his boss, ad nauseum.
'course this is how things work today, so now we have a, AES cipher with weaknesses especially suited to hardware cryptanalysis. Sure that was entirely coincidental.
Its the modern way. According to modern business and patent practices, they did great. Their stockholders love them, the lawyers are happy, just us consumers picking up the tab, as usual, and we don't count where it counts.
The patent office doesn't want to reform anything, that would mean fewer patents and fewer fees. The legal system doesn't want to reform, that would mean less laws and/or less lawyers. The companies don't want to reform, most are just pissed they didn't think about this first and are busy looking for a scam they can pull...
Until "unethical" behavior is punished, the rest is just standard practice of playing games with legal language and looking 'for angles'.
If JEDEC members don't sue the *&^@#%#@ out of RAMBUS for fundamental violation of the spirit, if not the letter of their agreements, its over. The modern patent system just makes it easy to collect.
What I want to know is, why didn't JEDEC do anything substantial???!?
As pointed out by another poster, this was 'cause Half-Life was based on the Quake 1 engine, which was written for OpenGL. The guys at Valve rewrote and extended its lighting model to take advantage of GL's multipass texturing and enhanced mixing modes, which were not available under Direct3D at the time.
FWIW, I'm not trying to diss GL, I write 3d engines today exclusively over OpenGL <www.vscape.com>. Problem is that due to the API issues most developers have had to move GL to an optional second place.
It is getting harder all the time to port a game from Windows due to what is occuring in the Direct3D vs. OpenGL wars.
Short version of API war: Direct3D sucks as an API, but over time its feature set has grown to signifigantly surpass OpenGL. The OpenGL ARB has its head stuck in (the sand), doesn't want to make "short term" API compromises and add all these new-fangled game features, and would prefer to have 4 years of debate per feature. Companies like nVidia have been opening a plethora of OpenGL extensions to allow game developers access to features otherwise only available under DirectX, but their use now requires card-specific programming, which both sucks in general and sucks even more under OpenGL which hides certain critical info (like texture memory issues.)
Game companies pressured to produce the latest and greatest looking game would now rather code to DirectX/3D than OpenGL. OpenGL support comes later, if at all, and uses only a subset of the graphics functionality the windows game has, unless a trememdous ammount of additional work occurs.
Its great if Bungee is still stating they will release for the Mac, but it remains to be seen how they handle the API issue. Most companies writing cross-platform games tend to wrote to the lowest common denominator of Direct3D and their best card donator, this is between nVidia, 3dfx, and ATI.
If other ports are made, they would likely be using the Mac graphic code base with new platform code, which is non-trivial in and of itself.
While Microsoft may not prevent them from porting, they may not have the time and/or resources to do it...
In the specific area of multiplayer games, where I'm a 11+ year senior programmer (and also happen to be a paralegal with patent experience), I'm not exagerating at all.
"This isn't so" 'cause it costs 10-30k to get a single patent. Even megacorps like M$ only need target choke points, beyond basic research.
In the very specific case of Hoppe's patent on CLOD methods, he did have a novel way of treating part of the process. The problem is the patent as written was sufficiently broad to cover many similar approaches, which includes ones presented publicly at SigGraph's the previous few years by many different parties.
Most companies in business for the long haul devote signifigant resources to R&D, which is simply good business. However, when the output is primarily a patent portfolio, as opposed to actual products, the motives are reasonably suspect.
I've read some of the patents that have come out of this group. Among _many_ other areas, they have been attempting to patent critical technologies for the future of 3D and online gaming.
They are doing a great job making small extensions to material in the public domain and then receiving typically broad patents. Many game companies are already in violation of one of Hoppe's patents on continuous level of detail systems, and many more will be infringing on related patents in the near future.
I agree that Microsoft Research is full of smart people doing great work. I also know the comparison to Lucent is certainly valid - more lawyers work there than engineers now.
If you factor in the USPTO and the growing M$ patent portfolio, Microsoft Research is in many ways more evil then any other part of the empire today: Even if they are broken up, they are collecting 17+ year monopolies on future enabling techologies.
I've found that unless the task is extrememly simple, or an existing specification exists that covers every aspect of the project to the most minute implementation and testing detail, it is generally faster to do it myself then to spec the problem to the point the result is usable.
The time spent reworking the results for all the unhandled error paths, ect. eats up all the time I theoritically saved by outsourcing.
I must repeat the disclaimer though, I have found that if the spec already exists (RFC's w/ test vectors, ect.) than it can work fine.
I would second the comment that this should be left to black box items, never design issues or anything that a room full of interns couldn't handle.
I spent most of the last 10 years in the video games industry, my responsibilities usually revolved around lead programmer of tools group, lead (3D) engine developer, and more recently lead developer of cross platform distributed systems for massively multiplayer. I'm currently ranked a "Programmer 4" in the industry HR vernacular, which is as senior as I can get without putting on a manager hat as CTO.
During this time I've participated in the hiring (and firing) of a decent number or people, and I've seen many more come and go. One of the more interesting things I've noticed over the years is the statistical signifigance of an observed inverse correlation between college experience and raw creativity for complex problems.
In the games industry, understanding the implementation and optimization details of Knuth-Morris-Pratt is useful only in the abstract. You must then understand how and where it is applicable, and know when to use Quicksort or merging presorted lists instead.
The level of design creativity needed, at larger and more complex system levels, quickly surpasses the mindset of most college trained programmers I've seen. They seem incredibly well prepared to calculate a good O() factor for an algorithm, but lack the more important ability to understand how to balance several algorithms whose O() terms are interdependant.
Most game programmers today are not "hackers" in the old school sense. Yes, the idiotic schedules force most to skip the formal prototyping stage (the prototype becomes the game almost invariably), but the design complexity and elegance signifigantly exceeds that of most catagories of software in use today. (This is an educated opinion, I've also worked in CAD/CAD/CAE, embedded systems, distributed networks, and avionics before getting bored and coming to games.)
Bottom line, your assertions about the ignorance of non-college educated programmers is true only for some subset of self-educated programmers. Yes, I would agree that many web site coders fit your description. But I know for a fact that in games, one of the most demanding programming carreers, _most_ of us (including myself) do not have degrees. Also, the more senior level the programmer, the less likely they are to have one.
By the way, most of the better game programmers continue to spend 1-4 hours a _day_ on pure and applied research. (What percentage of CS grads can say this?) My personal CS library is better than the community college I grew up near. Most of us continue to read confrence proceedings, and if we were patenting our innovations most of the senior programmers I know would have hundreds of actually non-obvious and unique inventions filed. (Instead we have an unwritten code that lets us continually steal them from each other once we see them on screen from a legitimately obtained demo.)
You would be surprised how well rounded some of us uneducated programmers are.
You subject line advances a flawed hypothesis - accelerating into the event horizon of a black hole, all elements are fair game for being vaporized, heated to plasma, and torn apart at the subatomic if not quantum level. This applies to organic compounds just as much as inorganics, gravity has no favorites and no compound is strong enough to resist those gravatational tidal forces. Someday we may learn how to shield machines from this, but that is a different argument.
the durability and precision of robotic machines will always be greater
One of the more interesting properties of organic materials is that they are far more resilient in the long term. If you bend a metal bar far enough, the bend is permamanant. Increase the stiffness of the bar, and the same load can shatter the metal beam. Organic systems are similar, except they hold more stress, without permanant deformation, at signifigantly less weight. If they do break, they can heal themselves (with the assistance of nearby and integrated systems.)
Also noteworthy is that a properly functioning organic joint operate at far lower wear levels than even the best mechanical ones. Nearly all aspects of moving systems are more efficient in organic systems. Show me ANY pump that can operate at the reliability levels of the human heart! At its size/weight/power/load/output statistics, I dare you to try and show me a pump with 1/1000 of its MTBF rating. 1/100000 even?
I would argue that inorganic augmentation allows organic systems to incorportate the best of both worlds, and the likely end result is a more efficient hybrid.
Slashdot Mirror
There's several ways to do it, for example:
#1 "Key Escrow" - All your keys are simply registered with big brother. To reduce the logistical nightmare, you would likely just register special backdoor keys used to encrypt the session key, which would then be included with the message.
#2 Big brother publishes one or more public keys, to be used to encrypt each session key, which is then included with each message.
The BXA/NSA guidelines for getting permission to export strong crypto include full disclosure on your data formatting, headers, compression, etc. The review process includes submission and approval of test vectors.
It should be noted that once these are required by law, compliance testing could be automated by building systems holding the private keys and testing recovery on live data.
It should also be noted that since (1) no terrorists would use such software; and (2) terrorists are already using steganography to obscure their encrypted data from trivial recognition as ciphertext: This entire effort will have ZERO impact on real terrorism. Its just an attempt by the NSA/FBI to retain their historical ability to eavesdrop trivially on all ordinary civilians everywhere without warrants or oversight. Last weeks events were just the pretext they've been waiting for. Anyone telling you different is ignorant or has an agenda...
Competitive advantages w/ hardware often turn on clever use of data flow within chip designs, and it is often possible to obtain patents on such designs. At the same time, aspects of these designs are often exposed in driver API's.
It is a common beleif (I've had lawyers give conflicting advice in this area) that protecting API's under NDA's helps defend against a competitor figuring out what you're doing from "public domain" information and thereby having a legal basis to circumvent a patent.
The technical and legal merit of this position are certainly arguable.
You could also add that "opening" an API requires spending some effort (and $) spent on creating publicly readable documentation (although I've had to work with documentation from many non-English companies that apparently hired elementary school students to translate...)
Closed source drivers for such cards seem like a great solution for this problem, but many people in the open source community have 'religious' problems with this.
I write 3d game engines for a living, and have been fighting this issue for a decent part of my career.
The OpenGL ARB really doesn't give a crap about games. Sure, there are a number of vocal game advocates, but the majority of the membership is far more interested in maintaining backwards compatability to older SGI and Evans and Sutherland hardware than keeping up with accelerator progress.
If the ARB did care about games, there would be a concerted effort to standardize on vertex and pixel shader instructions between card vendors, and a move to get these into the standard AS FAST AS POSSIBLE, and a push to actively participate in ongoing features. Instead, it took them years to drag in a few interesting extensions, and Microsoft has assumed the unifying role in the gaping vacuum.
As a game developer who has spent too many man-years fighting abysmal M$ API bugs and design limitations since Win 3.0, even I will admit that Direct3D has completely exceeded OpenGL as a 3d game development platform. Why should I invest six+ months tuning seperate nVidia and ATI shader support engine features under their respective OpenGL extensions, knowning that this GL code is barely reusable and is tied to a VERY limited set of cards?
Add to that M$'s role at the ARB, and the influence they throw around with their money to keep other members in line (remember Farenheight?)
Unless the ARB makes tremendous changes in its policy of staying 3 years behind the hardware, I strongly feel OpenGL is relagated to the niche BASIC fell into. Sure, you can get it on all platforms, but its so slow and feature poor, why bother?
I wouldn't hold my breath...
Look at the capabilities of "pixel shaders" before you assume hardware manufacturers _need_ to do the algorithm. Pixel shaders provide the equivelant of microcode level access to the innermost aspects of the rendering pipeline. This may already be possible today with the G3. Ask me in a week... :)
Next generation game engines will be doing this.
I remember when I started into science, and the publications all talked about climate cycles and how we were starting into a new ice age. A few decades later and "oops", were actually warming the earth.
I've been reading the literature on this subject for years, pro and con, and am convinced that the "pro" camp uses peer pressure more than good science.
Specifically:
1. The role of feedback mechanisms such as oceanic phytoplankton and cloud albedo is not understood sufficiently to create an accurate model of the climate feedback mechanisms that would counter any signifigant effect. In the case of cloud albedo, NASA has only started measuring solar flux reflectivitity across the entire atmosphere during the last few years! The potential impact of this mechanism alone (on reflecting solar IR back into space) is _orders_ of magnitude greater than _all_ other declared effects combined, and guess what - it counters warming.
2. The claims regarding rising temperature trends from monitoring stations in urban areas covered with increasing percentages of materials that hold heat such as concrete and asphalt introducing a rising error bias into measurements remains more statistically signifigant than the reported rise in temperature.
You can't claim X is happening based on measured trends in A, B, and C, when the margin of error in A, B, and C are greater than your measured trends! You can't claim Y is happening because of A and B when M can negate A-L combined!
And as for human impact, the Greenland ice core samples show orders of magnitude greater temperature swings without any industrial contribution whatsoever during the geologic past.
Until the science community can address these valid arguments with real data instead of ad-hoc attacks and "look at all these reports we smart people published" (and got our budgets preserved or even increased based upon the threats therein with a little help from media alarmism and an uneducated, unquestioning public), there will remain plenty of skeptics.
Depends on who you are and what you have access to. Your average internet user? No. If you're the NRO, its a different story...
In addition to the Mode C transponders mentioned by other posters for safe civilian airspace transit, if you look at almost any picture of stealth aircraft in a non-combat setting, you can see several double-diamond shaped protuberances at various locations around the airframe.
These are essentially corner cube reflectors, designed to give nice bright returns on radar frequencies.
One important aspect of these devices is to make it difficult for an adversary to bring RCS (radar cross section) profiling equipment into an airshow or other venue and take detailed measurements of just how big that "little bird" is.
Java took off in part because it was free. One of the reason JINI flopped so hard, unlike Java, was that it was a technology tied to licensing agreements intended to make Sun money.
They patented key aspects of their discovery and RPC mechanism, and developers I know who wanted to use it in products paid license fees starting in the tens of thousands of $.
Sun even squashed an open source developer trying to distribute a free version of JINI.
JXTA is their attempt to get back mindshare and clout in the agent space, where other P2P groups have left them far behind. Its still insufficient for most interesting applications.
Yep - they were on the list, as was I. All of this stuff has been discussed in public forums.
I was the original lead programmer on EnterTelevision / CyberTalk / OnLive Technologies that did Traveler, I've done tons of similar projects before and after for various game companies (SSI, Bethesda, Accolade), and I still design highly scalable VR systems today for fun...
Everything in that patent is already in the public domain, in the system as they describe it, predating their application. All claims can be invalidated.
If anyone has _real_ need of prior art, I'd be happy to dig through my reference collection and make everything available. I've spent years collecting docs and papers for just this event.
As a previous poster mentioned, this is the "new economy" business model. Patent office is now ran by patent sharks and incompetent examiners, so patent all you can and launch shakedown.
I currently live just outside of good DSL range, but I have a friend close to the CO. I've been considering buying a wireless bridge (like Cisco/Aironet 340), but I'd like to know if its going to work before I spend >$5k on equipment! I've got a low hill just obscuring LOS, but the straight distance is only about 3 miles. Are there are low cost ways to determine the quality of the signal path? I can't find anyone who can loan me the equipment, are there any other options? Thanks!
Personally, I always negotate a employment agreement addendum in which I enumerate all my external projects which may conflict, so I can keep working on them. Even then, they generally require conflicting projects to be non-commercial.
My recommendation - get a lawyer. Otherwise, you could take vacation, finish and sell your version, update your resume, then come back and announce that you have a pre-existing side project meeting that need. They'll either claim ownership under employment agreement, have you recreate one for them from scratch, or fire you.
Good luck! (I'm stuck in same conversation w/ boss right now, and mine's only non-commercial!)
Hah! Got me there. That's what I get for posting after 4 hours sleep. Hit submit instead of preview, too. :)
I love it when the Drake equation is invoked as a way to calculate a meaningful result with some relavance to human or alien civilization.
The Drake equation is calcualted by multiplying seven terms together. 3 of those may be obtained from reasonable sources in astrophysics and planetary formation research (albeit they are continually changing as we learn more!). The other 5 terms are picked essentially at random, and therefore have no meaningful value.
The only thing the Drake equation is good for is exploring the relative impact that manipulating various terms may have on hypothetical contact. Due to 5/7 of the numbers being completely arbitrary, it has no value beyond that limited application.
Use of the Drake equation is a great example of "subjective" science. Adding an additional term defining the probabability of the society creating Twinkie's and eating themselves to death in a cream filled orgy before transmitting would have no detrimental impact on the reliability of the answer.
Your reply is well intentioned but misinformed. I dbout the original poster was slighting the potential exploits of the script kiddie crowd, but there is a problem with your position. Smart card hacking has in the past been possible with little to no equipment when manufacturers made really stupid mistakes, allowing things like timing and power attacks against crypto, power attacks on secure key storage, and some low cost forms of probing. However, the "bar" of equipment cost needed to access your average smart card is continuing to raise, and at a substantially faster rate than the cost of lab equipment is dropping. Work in conformal coating and tamper detection processes have currently raised the bar to the point where even normal e-beam probing is insufficient for a good chip, and that equipment costs 2+ orders of magnitude more than a PC, placing it slightly out of reach of your script kiddie crowd. Newer chips require handling in remote manipilation cells to avoid triggering various tamper devices, and there's another 1-2 orders of magnitude just for a support item. I'm not trying to say that smart cards are secure, or ever will be - thin plastic just doesn't cut ut. But I think its nieve to extrapolate the pervasive threat of the script kiddie into a problem space requiring at least several days access to equipement costing as much as a few million USD.
X3D is simply a mapping of the VRML language into XML. While this does buy you a good deal of cool XML features, like using XSL to completely remodel what/how your modeling, it doesn't address any of the core technical problems remaining to acheive large scale distributed 3d, and it in the name of backwards compatability it doesn't fix any of the remaining problems in the original standard that make VRML browsers "non-trivial" and hard to scale.
In order to acheive truly large scale distribtued 3d, it will take a different approach. X3D/VRML may be able to play a role as an import pathway for relatively static content or inefficiently scripted content, but little more.
[SHAMELESS_PLUG] For some time now I've been working to put the stuff I've been working on (that's raised tens of millions at startups like OnLive[Traveler]) into a public domain source base at www.vscape.com - It needs only a few more competent coders. I know there are other people who want to make this happen, we just need to work together. The technology now exists, the implementation and design decisions are challenging and fun. [/SHAMELESS_PLUG]
The Hitachi patent claim basically covers combining the output of one stage with a bit shitfed copy of that same output to create a new output, in a reversable format.
i.e., they patented: a2 = a1 ^ ( a1 << 1 );
The patent examiner should be fired. His boss should be fired, and his boss, ad nauseum.
'course this is how things work today, so now we have a, AES cipher with weaknesses especially suited to hardware cryptanalysis. Sure that was entirely coincidental.
Its the modern way. According to modern business and patent practices, they did great. Their stockholders love them, the lawyers are happy, just us consumers picking up the tab, as usual, and we don't count where it counts.
The patent office doesn't want to reform anything, that would mean fewer patents and fewer fees. The legal system doesn't want to reform, that would mean less laws and/or less lawyers. The companies don't want to reform, most are just pissed they didn't think about this first and are busy looking for a scam they can pull...
Until "unethical" behavior is punished, the rest is just standard practice of playing games with legal language and looking 'for angles'.
If JEDEC members don't sue the *&^@#%#@ out of RAMBUS for fundamental violation of the spirit, if not the letter of their agreements, its over. The modern patent system just makes it easy to collect.
What I want to know is, why didn't JEDEC do anything substantial???!?
As pointed out by another poster, this was 'cause Half-Life was based on the Quake 1 engine, which was written for OpenGL. The guys at Valve rewrote and extended its lighting model to take advantage of GL's multipass texturing and enhanced mixing modes, which were not available under Direct3D at the time.
FWIW, I'm not trying to diss GL, I write 3d engines today exclusively over OpenGL <www.vscape.com>. Problem is that due to the API issues most developers have had to move GL to an optional second place.
It is getting harder all the time to port a game from Windows due to what is occuring in the Direct3D vs. OpenGL wars.
Short version of API war: Direct3D sucks as an API, but over time its feature set has grown to signifigantly surpass OpenGL. The OpenGL ARB has its head stuck in (the sand), doesn't want to make "short term" API compromises and add all these new-fangled game features, and would prefer to have 4 years of debate per feature. Companies like nVidia have been opening a plethora of OpenGL extensions to allow game developers access to features otherwise only available under DirectX, but their use now requires card-specific programming, which both sucks in general and sucks even more under OpenGL which hides certain critical info (like texture memory issues.)
Game companies pressured to produce the latest and greatest looking game would now rather code to DirectX/3D than OpenGL. OpenGL support comes later, if at all, and uses only a subset of the graphics functionality the windows game has, unless a trememdous ammount of additional work occurs.
Its great if Bungee is still stating they will release for the Mac, but it remains to be seen how they handle the API issue. Most companies writing cross-platform games tend to wrote to the lowest common denominator of Direct3D and their best card donator, this is between nVidia, 3dfx, and ATI.
If other ports are made, they would likely be using the Mac graphic code base with new platform code, which is non-trivial in and of itself.
While Microsoft may not prevent them from porting, they may not have the time and/or resources to do it...
In the specific area of multiplayer games, where I'm a 11+ year senior programmer (and also happen to be a paralegal with patent experience), I'm not exagerating at all.
"This isn't so" 'cause it costs 10-30k to get a single patent. Even megacorps like M$ only need target choke points, beyond basic research.
In the very specific case of Hoppe's patent on CLOD methods, he did have a novel way of treating part of the process. The problem is the patent as written was sufficiently broad to cover many similar approaches, which includes ones presented publicly at SigGraph's the previous few years by many different parties.
Most companies in business for the long haul devote signifigant resources to R&D, which is simply good business. However, when the output is primarily a patent portfolio, as opposed to actual products, the motives are reasonably suspect.
I've read some of the patents that have come out of this group. Among _many_ other areas, they have been attempting to patent critical technologies for the future of 3D and online gaming.
They are doing a great job making small extensions to material in the public domain and then receiving typically broad patents. Many game companies are already in violation of one of Hoppe's patents on continuous level of detail systems, and many more will be infringing on related patents in the near future.
I agree that Microsoft Research is full of smart people doing great work. I also know the comparison to Lucent is certainly valid - more lawyers work there than engineers now.
If you factor in the USPTO and the growing M$ patent portfolio, Microsoft Research is in many ways more evil then any other part of the empire today: Even if they are broken up, they are collecting 17+ year monopolies on future enabling techologies.
I've found that unless the task is extrememly simple, or an existing specification exists that covers every aspect of the project to the most minute implementation and testing detail, it is generally faster to do it myself then to spec the problem to the point the result is usable.
The time spent reworking the results for all the unhandled error paths, ect. eats up all the time I theoritically saved by outsourcing.
I must repeat the disclaimer though, I have found that if the spec already exists (RFC's w/ test vectors, ect.) than it can work fine.
I would second the comment that this should be left to black box items, never design issues or anything that a room full of interns couldn't handle.
I spent most of the last 10 years in the video games industry, my responsibilities usually revolved around lead programmer of tools group, lead (3D) engine developer, and more recently lead developer of cross platform distributed systems for massively multiplayer. I'm currently ranked a "Programmer 4" in the industry HR vernacular, which is as senior as I can get without putting on a manager hat as CTO.
During this time I've participated in the hiring (and firing) of a decent number or people, and I've seen many more come and go. One of the more interesting things I've noticed over the years is the statistical signifigance of an observed inverse correlation between college experience and raw creativity for complex problems.
In the games industry, understanding the implementation and optimization details of Knuth-Morris-Pratt is useful only in the abstract. You must then understand how and where it is applicable, and know when to use Quicksort or merging presorted lists instead.
The level of design creativity needed, at larger and more complex system levels, quickly surpasses the mindset of most college trained programmers I've seen. They seem incredibly well prepared to calculate a good O() factor for an algorithm, but lack the more important ability to understand how to balance several algorithms whose O() terms are interdependant.
Most game programmers today are not "hackers" in the old school sense. Yes, the idiotic schedules force most to skip the formal prototyping stage (the prototype becomes the game almost invariably), but the design complexity and elegance signifigantly exceeds that of most catagories of software in use today. (This is an educated opinion, I've also worked in CAD/CAD/CAE, embedded systems, distributed networks, and avionics before getting bored and coming to games.)
Bottom line, your assertions about the ignorance of non-college educated programmers is true only for some subset of self-educated programmers. Yes, I would agree that many web site coders fit your description. But I know for a fact that in games, one of the most demanding programming carreers, _most_ of us (including myself) do not have degrees. Also, the more senior level the programmer, the less likely they are to have one.
By the way, most of the better game programmers continue to spend 1-4 hours a _day_ on pure and applied research. (What percentage of CS grads can say this?) My personal CS library is better than the community college I grew up near. Most of us continue to read confrence proceedings, and if we were patenting our innovations most of the senior programmers I know would have hundreds of actually non-obvious and unique inventions filed. (Instead we have an unwritten code that lets us continually steal them from each other once we see them on screen from a legitimately obtained demo.)
You would be surprised how well rounded some of us uneducated programmers are.
the durability and precision of robotic machines will always be greater
One of the more interesting properties of organic materials is that they are far more resilient in the long term. If you bend a metal bar far enough, the bend is permamanant. Increase the stiffness of the bar, and the same load can shatter the metal beam. Organic systems are similar, except they hold more stress, without permanant deformation, at signifigantly less weight. If they do break, they can heal themselves (with the assistance of nearby and integrated systems.)
Also noteworthy is that a properly functioning organic joint operate at far lower wear levels than even the best mechanical ones. Nearly all aspects of moving systems are more efficient in organic systems. Show me ANY pump that can operate at the reliability levels of the human heart! At its size/weight/power/load/output statistics, I dare you to try and show me a pump with 1/1000 of its MTBF rating. 1/100000 even?
I would argue that inorganic augmentation allows organic systems to incorportate the best of both worlds, and the likely end result is a more efficient hybrid.