One problem with the patent system is that no single company or entity may have sufficient economic incentive for fighting the court case to have a patent which should never have been granted thrown out. Does your Office have any ideas about how to fix this problem? The whole economy benefits, but only a small number of actors currently bear the costs.
I guess you wouldn't support compensating those who do knock down bad patents out of the Patent Office Employees Pension Fund?:)
This is an outrageous misrepresentation of
Mr Justice Jacobs.
I was present in the courtroom (I'm the Martin
mentioned on Channel's website), and the judge
was extremely skeptical of Sony's claims,
as he knew that the technology could be used
to prevent fair uses and the development of
PS2 games by people who couldn't licence Sony's
system.
The judge had a perfect grasp of the implications
of the rulings, and made sure that Sony couldn't
stifle people from talking about the case or
about the chip, and prevented Sony from getting
the bank details of the people who had ordered
the chip.
In the Dr Who story "Logopolis", a major part
of the plot is the collapse into entropy
of significant chunks of the universe, so this
is probably the upper limit for body count.
Bill Gates stated that, given any seat at the
table (Linux, Java, whatever), he could blow
Microsoft away. I am not sure whether that is
true, for the following reason:
Businesses don't select things on technical
merit, they do it on usefulness to them. On
usefulness grounds, there is no choice but
MS, because you need to interoperate with the
huge MS installed base out there; using Linux
will compromise this, as the interoperability
with MS solutions is substandard, not least
because MS keeps moving the goalposts for the
Office file formats, SMB, Kerberos, what have
you.
As a business, is it possible to break the
Microsoft lock, given the interoperability
issues with MS's huge installed base?
CGI programmes need not run as the owner of the
web process. You can have a process with the
necessary privileges for switch userid interposed
between the webserver and the CGI process.
CGIwrap, Apache's suexec, etc support this
via setuid binaries. Zeus has some sort of
CGI spawning daemon. The webserver itself need not
and should not run as root. One or the other
method should work for almost any webserver
which runs on UNIX.
mod_php and mod_perl by definition do not use
the CGI interface. It is true that perl and PHP
may be run as CGIs, but that is utterly different
from mod_*, which involves running them with the
privileges and address-space of the webserver.
CGI, under UNIX, is the best method of allowing
secure dynamic content creation in the case of
multiple users. mod_perl, mod_php, etc, do not
permit security boundaries between the users.
Tying the OS to a particular machine is a
problem for users of that OS... I need to use
Windows occasionally, so it'd be a minor
inconvenience for me if I lost my original install
CD (assuming one can still get such CDs for
Whistler).
Where this becomes dangerous is if the hardware
manufacturers start making motherboards which
will only run a particular Windows licence. Then
Linux and the other free OSes are frozen out
completely.
The RPM format may have limitations. What's
being compared is RPM-based distributions
and Debian GNU/Linux. The Debian system is
in a different category, simply because it's
SO MUCH BIGGER. All the packages, even for
really obscure things, are managed by the
same organisation and forced to conform to
a set of rules, rather than there being a core
and a contrib section.
Don't look at the technology (RPM vs deb). Look
at what the people are doing. What's
going on in Debian's case is that they're doing
a lot less (shoehorning each bit of software
into their rule system) with a whole lot more.
The sorts of things one finds in/usr/local
(that is, not distributed with the OS) on
a Unix you may well expect in/usr on a Linux
system, since Linux distros ship them. The
sorts of things which may live in/usr/local
on a non-Debian system probably live (if they're
DFSG-free) in/usr on Debian, simply cause it's
broader.
This is another reason Debian's so anal about
its Free Software guidelines... if it doesn't
meet the litmus test, then you can't distribute
some version of it with all the paths changed
to match the Debian universe, essential for
integration and stability.
Here are a few reasons why I'm still skeptical about computers in the classroom:
Education is not just about transferring information, and isn't improved by transferring it more efficiently
Kids will always know more than the teachers. This will inevitably lead to huge conflicts. The teacher in charge of computing is often the one who wasn't any good at anything else.
Computers aren't programmable. Not anymore. They used to come with BASIC interpreters. Now you just get Windows on the home PC, or a Mac. Kids can't learn as they play.
A lot of the so-called educational software is a joke, rewarding little kids with visual stimuli too easily, leading them to fire at the programmes at random. Some studies have found that a lot of the educational software for very young kids discourages rational thought and promotes trial and error.
Multiuser systems in schools tend to be run on an utterly fascist basis, due to admin cluelessness and underfundedness.
The UK has something called the Data Protection Act. It utterly frustrates strategems like the one described here: all subjects of electronic data have the right to see what is being stored about them, and there are penalties for holding inaccurate data and for transferring the data to separate organisations.
The DPA has many flaws too, of course (e.g., effectively banning fingerd and log files), but that is a separate issue.
Currently you can get a pretty MS-less office with StarOffice. There are some people who really like it.
I'm waiting for Gnome and KDE to be finished. KDE is better overall, but what blew me away was Gnome's Gnumeric, a spreadsheet which has all the benefits of having been designed by MS without the drawbacks of having been implemented by them!
One of the tragedies of computing in the 1990s is the unavailability of programmable home compuetrs. In the 1980s, kids could experiment to their hearts' content on home computers, which had BASIC interpreters built in.
This is a civil case, not a criminal one; it just so happens that the plaintiff (not called the prosecution in civil cases) consists of a bunch of governments; in criminal cases the prosecution will be "The People" or "The Crown" (in Britain, Australia, etc).
In complicated civil cases where there's harm on both sides (e.g., two neighbours who have been making life difficult for each other), it's only fair for both parties to recommend to the judge what they want done. The judge can ignore them both, which is what Jackson may well do in this case.
There's nothing particularly interesting about
how many bits we can get from A to B these
days. Sure some of the tech might be cool
(e.g., the optical switching trickery in the
Vint Cerf interview), but what'll impress me
is when they get latency down to the point
where I can't as a human detect the difference
between the latency across the Pond and the
latency to the other nodes at my LAN party
Slashdot Mirror
Tensions between Free Software and Architectures of Control", which is very informative, as
well as quite funny in parts.
I guess you wouldn't support compensating those who do knock down bad patents out of the Patent Office Employees Pension Fund? :)
Mr Justice Jacobs.
I was present in the courtroom (I'm the Martin
mentioned on Channel's website), and the judge
was extremely skeptical of Sony's claims,
as he knew that the technology could be used
to prevent fair uses and the development of
PS2 games by people who couldn't licence Sony's
system.
The judge had a perfect grasp of the implications
of the rulings, and made sure that Sony couldn't
stifle people from talking about the case or
about the chip, and prevented Sony from getting
the bank details of the people who had ordered
the chip.
Do you expect the judge not to apply
the law?
In the Dr Who story "Logopolis", a major part
of the plot is the collapse into entropy
of significant chunks of the universe, so this
is probably the upper limit for body count.
table (Linux, Java, whatever), he could blow
Microsoft away. I am not sure whether that is
true, for the following reason:
Businesses don't select things on technical
merit, they do it on usefulness to them. On
usefulness grounds, there is no choice but
MS, because you need to interoperate with the
huge MS installed base out there; using Linux
will compromise this, as the interoperability
with MS solutions is substandard, not least
because MS keeps moving the goalposts for the
Office file formats, SMB, Kerberos, what have
you.
As a business, is it possible to break the
Microsoft lock, given the interoperability
issues with MS's huge installed base?
CGIwrap, Apache's suexec, etc support this via setuid binaries. Zeus has some sort of CGI spawning daemon. The webserver itself need not and should not run as root. One or the other method should work for almost any webserver which runs on UNIX.
mod_php and mod_perl by definition do not use the CGI interface. It is true that perl and PHP may be run as CGIs, but that is utterly different from mod_*, which involves running them with the privileges and address-space of the webserver.
CGI, under UNIX, is the best method of allowing
secure dynamic content creation in the case of
multiple users. mod_perl, mod_php, etc, do not
permit security boundaries between the users.
Where this becomes dangerous is if the hardware manufacturers start making motherboards which will only run a particular Windows licence. Then Linux and the other free OSes are frozen out completely.
a little out of date, but displays a lot of the relationships between early text-based MUDs
Doesn't this impinge on people's freedom of
speech? Ultimately, programmers will feel restrained from writing SCREW_MS.EXE.
I wonder if they're liable under UK law for ...
false advertising. After all, I read their
website from the UK
If you are a monopoly and using copyright to
protect your monopoly, you may lose the copyright,
IIRC. (IANAL)
I for one missed the more controversial stuff
you used to post!
Don't look at the technology (RPM vs deb). Look at what the people are doing. What's going on in Debian's case is that they're doing a lot less (shoehorning each bit of software into their rule system) with a whole lot more. The sorts of things one finds in /usr/local
(that is, not distributed with the OS) on
a Unix you may well expect in /usr on a Linux
system, since Linux distros ship them. The
sorts of things which may live in /usr/local
on a non-Debian system probably live (if they're
DFSG-free) in /usr on Debian, simply cause it's
broader.
This is another reason Debian's so anal about its Free Software guidelines ... if it doesn't
meet the litmus test, then you can't distribute
some version of it with all the paths changed
to match the Debian universe, essential for
integration and stability.
http://www.maths.lancs.ac.uk/~greenrm /its.html
I don't understand why the WIPO has ...
any jurisdiction whatsoever
- Education is not just about transferring information, and isn't improved by transferring it more efficiently
- Kids will always know more than the teachers. This will inevitably lead to huge conflicts. The teacher in charge of computing is often the one who wasn't any good at anything else.
- Computers aren't programmable. Not anymore. They used to come with BASIC interpreters. Now you just get Windows on the home PC, or a Mac. Kids can't learn as they play.
- A lot of the so-called educational software is a joke, rewarding little kids with visual stimuli too easily, leading them to fire at the programmes at random. Some studies have found that a lot of the educational software for very young kids discourages rational thought and promotes trial and error.
- Multiuser systems in schools tend to be run on an utterly fascist basis, due to admin cluelessness and underfundedness.
That really was an unordered list.The DPA has many flaws too, of course (e.g., effectively banning fingerd and log files), but that is a separate issue.
I'm waiting for Gnome and KDE to be finished. KDE is better overall, but what blew me away was Gnome's Gnumeric, a spreadsheet which has all the benefits of having been designed by MS without the drawbacks of having been implemented by them!
Nowadays, they have nothing.
In complicated civil cases where there's harm on both sides (e.g., two neighbours who have been making life difficult for each other), it's only fair for both parties to recommend to the judge what they want done. The judge can ignore them both, which is what Jackson may well do in this case.
There's nothing particularly interesting about
how many bits we can get from A to B these
days. Sure some of the tech might be cool
(e.g., the optical switching trickery in the
Vint Cerf interview), but what'll impress me
is when they get latency down to the point
where I can't as a human detect the difference
between the latency across the Pond and the
latency to the other nodes at my LAN party
If most of it is handled by the HOWTOs and Masq App, why bother posting ;)
the story?
No they aren't. Read the article.