Perhaps for traditional patent fields like machines and medicine it makes some sense to collaborate to increase the quality of patents. But in software, surely a better-quality software patent is just more of a threat and allows even more money to be extorted?
Why should people help to reduce the costs of doing business for patent trolls? If you have prior art, better to keep quiet about it and reveal it after the patent is granted to neutralize the patent - not before, so the lawyers can reword the patent to work around your prior art. Remember, the submitter of a patent is only interested in getting the strongest patent possible for himself, so it's a mistake to play the game assuming that all sides are altruistic and just want to improve the quality of the system as a whole.
As a result, said Dave Kappos, vice president of intellectual property law for IBM, it is taking big technology companies with huge patent portfolios longer and longer to get applications through the system.
Oh boo hoo hoo. The poor things. Of course people should volunteer their time to make sure those software patents are granted as swiftly as possible.
Business method patents truly suck, and anything which helps them to be granted more easily or legitimizes them is a bad thing.
If some asshat broke into one of my servers then told me how, I'd send his ass to jail too.
Trouble is, by having such a policy you are creating bad incentives. Because if he broke into your system and didn't tell you, he wouldn't go to jail. (Unless you are skilled enough to track down the attacker, which is pretty unlikely.) So all you are doing is making sure that when someone does break in, you don't find out about it and don't get the opportunity to fix the problem.
However, if he just up and did it one day, it would cost me tens of thousands of dollars in cleanup.
Whereas if he broke in and didn't tell you, you wouldn't have to spend any money cleaning it up, and so it would be okay?
Try using Linux: Fedora, for example, makes it really easy to set up separate user accounts and switch between them quickly. Much better than 'you left all these apps running, can I close them? what are all these files on the desktop? why is it logging in to gmail with someone else's details?' etc.
I believe recent versions of Windows also have fast user switching, though it might not work so well because of the legacy of assuming only one user (who is the administrator) in many third-party apps.
You have a login on your computer right? So that other people can't see your files? That means they cannot see your browsing history either. The only reason for a 'stealth mode' is to keep the browsing history secret from *yourself*, so it doesn't helpfully autosuggest embarrassing sites when you start typing in the awesome bar.
As long as you can read some Spanish text and it looks to you like assembly language for some long-dead processor, you retain your nerd points.
Re:Right, tell that to the Dinosaur Doomsayers...
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
I can't tell it to them because they are not here! If they were still here, then obviously they would be wrong!
Re:More than scientific learning
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
Yeah I guess I should have said 'by construction, a prediction of the end of the world always turns out to be wrong' or something, not 'by definition'.
Re:More than scientific learning
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
In this case, yes it does define being wrong in the future. If the doomsayers are correct, there won't *be* a future.
Re:More than scientific learning
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 5, Insightful
*By definition* the doomsayers are always wrong. If they had ever been correct in the past, we wouldn't be here to talk about it now.
By the same token, your claim that everything is going to be fine is a one-way bet. You can only be proved right.
Couldn't they just send the list of hashes of malware to your PC and it could be checked locally? It would be a long list and always growing, but not growing fast enough to put any kind of burden on a PC's memory or network capacity. (Suppose 100 new bad programs are identified every day and you need an SHA-256 hash of each one: that's still only about three kilobytes per day.)
The only way their system makes sense is if you send the whole lump of code back for analysis, not just a hash. A hash can just as well be checked locally.
Yes you must write everything to disk as you write it. I was kind of assuming a mostly-read data warehousing or website kind of application. However, in principle the DBMS or filesystem can record changes as a journal, which is fast to write because it's all in one place so you pretty much get the disk's raw throughput. During less busy times the journal data can be moved to its final position on disk. Eg with ext3 data=journal you can get a speedup under some loads, although ext3 is not really designed for such usage. I don't know whether the heavyweight database engines have provision to do this - I am just speculating.
Well it's about $600 in bulk. I imagine the retail price will be a bit more than that. But suppose you can get one for just $600. What else could you do with the money?
You can buy 8 gigabytes of RAM for about $150 (you can even get ECC for that price if it doesn't have to be the fastest clocked RAM). So $600 would let you pimp out your server with 32 gigabytes of RAM - actually, not so much these days. I'd bet that for many applications the RAM will give a better performance increase than going to SSDs. After all, SSDs are hugely faster than rotating disks, but RAM on the motherboard is faster still. It depends whether the data you're accessing would fit in the 32 gigs of cache - if you really are seeking randomly over the whole data set, then the SSD is better.
Similar calculations apply if you were thinking of buying ten SSDs: compare them with 320 gigabytes of RAM. Except that it can be hard to find a motherboard with that many RAM slots:-(.
I'm not saying it isn't a good buy, just pointing out that RAM itself is very cheap these days, and if you view the SSD as a kind of cut-price, extra-slow memory instead of an expensive, extra-fast disk, it doesn't sound as impressive.
...except that in many places, the electricity company _does_ have peak and off-peak rates: if you use power at the same time everybody else wants it, it's scarcer and costs more, whereas during the night there is less demand so you can get power cheaper. So it's conceivable that an ISP would allow you to Bittorrent basically all you want between midnight and 6am but charge for bandwidth usage during peak hours.
For cable TV the amount you use has no effect on anyone else. So it doesn't make sense to meter by usage. (There may be other reasons why the cable company wants to do so, connected more to their own profits.)
For local phone service there is some contention, but it's tiny compared to the cost of installing the phone wires to each house in the first place. It is very rare that the network gets full to capacity (have you ever lifted the receiver and not got dialtone? it happened to me just once on January 1st 2000). So in practice the amount you consume has no effect on other users and it's not a limited resource.
The right distinction is not 'information service' versus others, but whether it's a scarce resource. Sadly, bandwidth is still a scarce resource at the moment, and it looks like bandwidth-gobbling services like video will grow just as fast as the network is expanded. If we ever get to the point where bandwidth is practically unlimited, a flat fee will once again make sense.
Well, duh. If they built 100 times the bandwidth and it was still flat-fee, use-as-much-as-you-like then... guess what... people will use as much as they like. If bandwidth is a scarce resource then just charge people per gigabit of data sent and received. Or arrange that the first N gigabits of data you transfer each day are high-priority, with priority dropping off (relative to other users of the same ISP) as you use more and more.
Why should you have to keep your links 'up to date'? They chose the domain name and the web address; nobody forced them to pick the one they did. It's the webmaster's responsibility to pick addresses that others can rely on. See Cool URIs don't change.
After all, what makes more sense: a single webmaster maintaining a logical address which you can always use to get the right information, or thousands of websites all over the net scrambling to 'update' their links at exactly the right moment?
I don't understand what you mean. If someone knows nothing about DNS, they will be just as happy with www.unit.gov.uk as with www.unit.com. If someone does know what DNS is and how it works (a minority, surely), they won't mind either. Is there some in-between population of cluebies who check the web address of every link and won't use it unless it has its own TLD?
This illustrates why it's not always a good idea for every sub-organization, project and campaign to use its own top-level domain name. If the unit was part of the British government, surely a domain underneath.gov.uk would have been appropriate? Then you need not pay any fees to register it (except perhaps from one part of the government to another) and it can never be taken over by spammers.
In which case a review of a Windows-only program is surely not that interesting to you?
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
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· Score: 5, Insightful
It all started when idiotic websites started testing for 'Mozilla' in the User-agent string to make their sites break when you weren't using Netscape. So to keep compatibility, Microsoft decided to put 'Mozilla (compatible; blah blah)' in their User-agent string. The mess used by Chrome is the apex of User-agent stupidity, so far. All those strings are in there so that badly configured webservers won't serve the wrong content. The next browser that replaces Chrome will no doubt include this string and add even more words.
I wonder if Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Opera, Apple and others could get together to declare a User-agent flag day when, on the first of January 2009, all User-agent strings would remove the historic cruft and just tell you the browser and version. Sadly this has no chance of happening.
What exactly is the need to review a program which you can download and try free of charge? Only if there were some special insight the reviewer could provide that you wouldn't notice with a casual test drive: for example, some notes about security. But that is sadly not the case here.
Indeed, the middle 'reviewer' hasn't even tried running the browser!
I have yet to download Google's Chrome browser. As I said in my previous post, I'll adopt a wait and see stand on this after my experience with Firefox 3. I even wrote that I may try the product a month after its launch to make sure some of the bugs have been fixed. But after reading mostly favorable reviews, something tell me that I will abandon that stand sooner than planned. How about you, have you downloaded the Google Chrome web browser?
Did anyone else notice the number of current or former Firefox developers name-checked in that comic? Ben Goodger was the Firefox project lead until recently. The most significant part of this news may be that Google is pulling people off Firefox development (assuming they were contributing to Firefox while working there) and getting them to write a new browser. Still, Firefox is working pretty well and their financial future is secure for the next few years - thanks to wads of cash from Google - so we need not be too worried.
Apart from that, my verdict is 'show us the code'. Announcements of future plans and vapourware are not really interesting, even when it's Google.
That's mostly because if you upgrade to a more comfortable airline, it's your bum that enjoys the seat, but it's the company's money that pays for it. This is the whole point of 'business class' travel: most people are happy to spend someone else's money on their own comfort, but not their own money.
I always use the vendor perl on Fedora. Why should I pretend that I am cleverer than the people who did the work to package perl for my distribution? And this particular bug does not change my view of the our relative intelligence.
There's also the issue of using rpm to maintain your system, which like many good habits is a bit of a pain at first but soon becomes indispensible. Even when I wanted to upgrade perl to 5.10 (with Fedora 8, since 9 wasn't out yet), I preferred to build 5.10 as an RPM based on the Fedora source package for 5.8 and a new upstream tarball. That way I got a smooth upgrade when the official perl 5.10 package was included with Fedora 9 - the same smooth upgrade as all the other packages in the distro.
Multiple versions of perl on the system? No thanks. This isn't Java where you have a dozen crappy third-party apps all insisting on their own exact version of the interpreter or they won't be 'certified'. Just take one good version - preferably the package that comes with your distro, which you know thousands of others are using and testing - and stick with it.
Uh... are you saying that there is any practical difference between airline flights (between the same two destinations) other than price and time? Should passengers be discrimating based on the technical merits of Boeing versus Airbus planes, or something? What's your point?
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps for traditional patent fields like machines and medicine it makes some sense to collaborate to increase the quality of patents. But in software, surely a better-quality software patent is just more of a threat and allows even more money to be extorted?
Why should people help to reduce the costs of doing business for patent trolls? If you have prior art, better to keep quiet about it and reveal it after the patent is granted to neutralize the patent - not before, so the lawyers can reword the patent to work around your prior art. Remember, the submitter of a patent is only interested in getting the strongest patent possible for himself, so it's a mistake to play the game assuming that all sides are altruistic and just want to improve the quality of the system as a whole.
Oh boo hoo hoo. The poor things. Of course people should volunteer their time to make sure those software patents are granted as swiftly as possible.
Business method patents truly suck, and anything which helps them to be granted more easily or legitimizes them is a bad thing.
Trouble is, by having such a policy you are creating bad incentives. Because if he broke into your system and didn't tell you, he wouldn't go to jail. (Unless you are skilled enough to track down the attacker, which is pretty unlikely.) So all you are doing is making sure that when someone does break in, you don't find out about it and don't get the opportunity to fix the problem.
Whereas if he broke in and didn't tell you, you wouldn't have to spend any money cleaning it up, and so it would be okay?
Try using Linux: Fedora, for example, makes it really easy to set up separate user accounts and switch between them quickly. Much better than 'you left all these apps running, can I close them? what are all these files on the desktop? why is it logging in to gmail with someone else's details?' etc.
I believe recent versions of Windows also have fast user switching, though it might not work so well because of the legacy of assuming only one user (who is the administrator) in many third-party apps.
You have a login on your computer right? So that other people can't see your files? That means they cannot see your browsing history either. The only reason for a 'stealth mode' is to keep the browsing history secret from *yourself*, so it doesn't helpfully autosuggest embarrassing sites when you start typing in the awesome bar.
As long as you can read some Spanish text and it looks to you like assembly language for some long-dead processor, you retain your nerd points.
I can't tell it to them because they are not here! If they were still here, then obviously they would be wrong!
Yeah I guess I should have said 'by construction, a prediction of the end of the world always turns out to be wrong' or something, not 'by definition'.
In this case, yes it does define being wrong in the future. If the doomsayers are correct, there won't *be* a future.
*By definition* the doomsayers are always wrong. If they had ever been correct in the past, we wouldn't be here to talk about it now.
By the same token, your claim that everything is going to be fine is a one-way bet. You can only be proved right.
(+5, Inevitable)
Couldn't they just send the list of hashes of malware to your PC and it could be checked locally? It would be a long list and always growing, but not growing fast enough to put any kind of burden on a PC's memory or network capacity. (Suppose 100 new bad programs are identified every day and you need an SHA-256 hash of each one: that's still only about three kilobytes per day.)
The only way their system makes sense is if you send the whole lump of code back for analysis, not just a hash. A hash can just as well be checked locally.
Yes you must write everything to disk as you write it. I was kind of assuming a mostly-read data warehousing or website kind of application. However, in principle the DBMS or filesystem can record changes as a journal, which is fast to write because it's all in one place so you pretty much get the disk's raw throughput. During less busy times the journal data can be moved to its final position on disk. Eg with ext3 data=journal you can get a speedup under some loads, although ext3 is not really designed for such usage. I don't know whether the heavyweight database engines have provision to do this - I am just speculating.
Well it's about $600 in bulk. I imagine the retail price will be a bit more than that. But suppose you can get one for just $600. What else could you do with the money?
You can buy 8 gigabytes of RAM for about $150 (you can even get ECC for that price if it doesn't have to be the fastest clocked RAM). So $600 would let you pimp out your server with 32 gigabytes of RAM - actually, not so much these days. I'd bet that for many applications the RAM will give a better performance increase than going to SSDs. After all, SSDs are hugely faster than rotating disks, but RAM on the motherboard is faster still. It depends whether the data you're accessing would fit in the 32 gigs of cache - if you really are seeking randomly over the whole data set, then the SSD is better.
Similar calculations apply if you were thinking of buying ten SSDs: compare them with 320 gigabytes of RAM. Except that it can be hard to find a motherboard with that many RAM slots :-(.
I'm not saying it isn't a good buy, just pointing out that RAM itself is very cheap these days, and if you view the SSD as a kind of cut-price, extra-slow memory instead of an expensive, extra-fast disk, it doesn't sound as impressive.
...except that in many places, the electricity company _does_ have peak and off-peak rates: if you use power at the same time everybody else wants it, it's scarcer and costs more, whereas during the night there is less demand so you can get power cheaper. So it's conceivable that an ISP would allow you to Bittorrent basically all you want between midnight and 6am but charge for bandwidth usage during peak hours.
For cable TV the amount you use has no effect on anyone else. So it doesn't make sense to meter by usage. (There may be other reasons why the cable company wants to do so, connected more to their own profits.)
For local phone service there is some contention, but it's tiny compared to the cost of installing the phone wires to each house in the first place. It is very rare that the network gets full to capacity (have you ever lifted the receiver and not got dialtone? it happened to me just once on January 1st 2000). So in practice the amount you consume has no effect on other users and it's not a limited resource.
The right distinction is not 'information service' versus others, but whether it's a scarce resource. Sadly, bandwidth is still a scarce resource at the moment, and it looks like bandwidth-gobbling services like video will grow just as fast as the network is expanded. If we ever get to the point where bandwidth is practically unlimited, a flat fee will once again make sense.
Well, duh. If they built 100 times the bandwidth and it was still flat-fee, use-as-much-as-you-like then... guess what... people will use as much as they like. If bandwidth is a scarce resource then just charge people per gigabit of data sent and received. Or arrange that the first N gigabits of data you transfer each day are high-priority, with priority dropping off (relative to other users of the same ISP) as you use more and more.
Why should you have to keep your links 'up to date'? They chose the domain name and the web address; nobody forced them to pick the one they did. It's the webmaster's responsibility to pick addresses that others can rely on. See Cool URIs don't change.
After all, what makes more sense: a single webmaster maintaining a logical address which you can always use to get the right information, or thousands of websites all over the net scrambling to 'update' their links at exactly the right moment?
I don't understand what you mean. If someone knows nothing about DNS, they will be just as happy with www.unit.gov.uk as with www.unit.com. If someone does know what DNS is and how it works (a minority, surely), they won't mind either. Is there some in-between population of cluebies who check the web address of every link and won't use it unless it has its own TLD?
This illustrates why it's not always a good idea for every sub-organization, project and campaign to use its own top-level domain name. If the unit was part of the British government, surely a domain underneath .gov.uk would have been appropriate? Then you need not pay any fees to register it (except perhaps from one part of the government to another) and it can never be taken over by spammers.
In which case a review of a Windows-only program is surely not that interesting to you?
It all started when idiotic websites started testing for 'Mozilla' in the User-agent string to make their sites break when you weren't using Netscape. So to keep compatibility, Microsoft decided to put 'Mozilla (compatible; blah blah)' in their User-agent string. The mess used by Chrome is the apex of User-agent stupidity, so far. All those strings are in there so that badly configured webservers won't serve the wrong content. The next browser that replaces Chrome will no doubt include this string and add even more words.
I wonder if Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Opera, Apple and others could get together to declare a User-agent flag day when, on the first of January 2009, all User-agent strings would remove the historic cruft and just tell you the browser and version. Sadly this has no chance of happening.
What exactly is the need to review a program which you can download and try free of charge? Only if there were some special insight the reviewer could provide that you wouldn't notice with a casual test drive: for example, some notes about security. But that is sadly not the case here.
Indeed, the middle 'reviewer' hasn't even tried running the browser!
Did anyone else notice the number of current or former Firefox developers name-checked in that comic? Ben Goodger was the Firefox project lead until recently. The most significant part of this news may be that Google is pulling people off Firefox development (assuming they were contributing to Firefox while working there) and getting them to write a new browser. Still, Firefox is working pretty well and their financial future is secure for the next few years - thanks to wads of cash from Google - so we need not be too worried.
Apart from that, my verdict is 'show us the code'. Announcements of future plans and vapourware are not really interesting, even when it's Google.
That's mostly because if you upgrade to a more comfortable airline, it's your bum that enjoys the seat, but it's the company's money that pays for it. This is the whole point of 'business class' travel: most people are happy to spend someone else's money on their own comfort, but not their own money.
I always use the vendor perl on Fedora. Why should I pretend that I am cleverer than the people who did the work to package perl for my distribution? And this particular bug does not change my view of the our relative intelligence.
There's also the issue of using rpm to maintain your system, which like many good habits is a bit of a pain at first but soon becomes indispensible. Even when I wanted to upgrade perl to 5.10 (with Fedora 8, since 9 wasn't out yet), I preferred to build 5.10 as an RPM based on the Fedora source package for 5.8 and a new upstream tarball. That way I got a smooth upgrade when the official perl 5.10 package was included with Fedora 9 - the same smooth upgrade as all the other packages in the distro.
Multiple versions of perl on the system? No thanks. This isn't Java where you have a dozen crappy third-party apps all insisting on their own exact version of the interpreter or they won't be 'certified'. Just take one good version - preferably the package that comes with your distro, which you know thousands of others are using and testing - and stick with it.
Uh... are you saying that there is any practical difference between airline flights (between the same two destinations) other than price and time? Should passengers be discrimating based on the technical merits of Boeing versus Airbus planes, or something? What's your point?