In order to make effective "prior art", you need to make what are called enabling disclosures. That is, you need to not only explain what the idea is but also how to do/implement/build it.
That's also a point about a lot of the patents that some Slashdot readers object to; *what* they do is not novel but *how* they do it may be. The exact way eBay run online auctions is clever and innovative (whoever it was thought of it first!). The idea of auctions themselves, even online, is not.
After all, inside of a year this crowd has gone from whining and complaining about the iPod to asking for Ogg support
Erm... you can only make that assumption if you can show that new posts are coming the same posters who previously complained. People tend to comment on the stories that they relate to (of course), so you've seen posts from one set of Slashdotters before and now you're seeing posts from another set.
To quote Walt Whitman: Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Hang on.... here we are on Slashdot, where every mention of possibly privacy-invading technology provokes an intense discussion involving civil liberties... and this phrase gets posted in a headline story?
Just a little sexual politics for y'all - pointing hidden cameras at girls (or anyone else for that matter) is not nice. It's offensive. It's rude. It's an invasion of privacy.
The submission seems almost a word-for-word copy/paste
Well, I think that's a tad unfair - yeah, I saw it linked from NTK, followed the link and thought "that's worth checking to see if SlashDot has it". It didn't, so I submitted it with my own words. Jeez, if you appreciated the story fine, but leave the poor submitter alone!
Anyway, aren't nearly all SlashDot stories submitted by people who have seen them linked somewhere else (or are the originators of the story hoping for attention)? And isn't this an inevitable and even beneficial part of the whole web-zine thing? What do you want, roving reporters already?
I have no idea if you lot over in the USA have these, but here in the UK you can get government grants to convert your gasoline (petrol)-powered car to dual-fuel LPG (Liquified Petroleum Gas, a mixture of propane and butane, also called Autogas). Whilst this is, of course, still a fossil fuel, there are benefits in terms of emissions and fuel economy.
Bill Gates is indeed such a businessman in terms of deals, but negotiations with MS involve teams of hard-boiled negotiators. And, yes, I'm generalising wildly, but most geeks are just not the type who can control a high-level meeting by force of personality. I'm speak as a (girl) geek here who's been in those sorts of meetings...
Or it's one day of 50 channels, if only TiVo could record multiple channels in parallel. Since much programming is still broadcast at primetime, I find the bottleneck on my expanded (UK, Sky) TiVo is not disk space, it's the damn limit of being able to tune to and record ONE broadcast at a time. Here in the UK, it's widely rumoured that the Sky+ PVR, which has 2 satellite feeds and can record from one whilst showing live TV from the other, will shortly be upgraded to allow it to record from both simultaneously.
I work for a company that generates patents as well as exploits existing ones. So I know a fair bit about this. IANAL, I'm the techie who writes a lot of patents, though, so bear that in mind.
First off, getting the patent is only stage one. To exploit it, you need to license it or litigate against infringers. Both are fraught with peril. To license, you need to disclose what it is your licensing, so you risk being ripped off. To litigate, you need to show infringement and large companies can tie you up in legal hassles forever. Or they may well just ignore you. We're lucky - we have extensive financial backing and we're known as "psychopathic litigants", so we can play hardball.
When negotiating licensing deals, you need a hardball alpha-male businessman. Full stop. Sorry, that's the reality (and hey, this is a girl talking). Techies usually can't do high-level negotiations.
When we take an existing patent for exploitation, the deal is simple. Assume you come to us with a patent, or at least a filed application. You're going to have to give up 66% of it immeidately (typically this would be done by assigning rights to a new company and assigning shares appropriately). 33% of it will go to the financial backers who put up the money to drive the licensing or litigating process. 33% goes to us because we know how the game is played. If you want money up front or to retain control, then fine, it's been nice talking, don't call us.
So, the summary: patents are just the first step on the road. It's scary and beset by vultures every step. We have done very nicely out of it but we've had to learn how the game is really played. Good luck!
Anna B
And of course Led Zeppelin's In Through The Out Door LP had a "magic paint" inner sleeve... For the generation that don't know what I mean, one of those where you paint with water and the colours magically appear. Apparently unpainted versions are worth a lot more than painted ones. Damn my little brother and his wanton paintbrush...
But the serious point here (if there is one) is that buying that LP was more than just the music. It was the pictures, the sleeve, the lyrics... the whole "I am a LZ fan" thing. Having the mp3s to hand is only a way of listening to the music and doesn't replace that experience.
Actually... this is sort of changing the nature of smilies. Ever noticed how the icon that, say, MSN Messenger uses to replace the:( is that bit more expressive? I used to use a Linux IM client that couldn't handle the "emoticons", so I'd type:( meaning "a bit sad" and the reader would see this expressive face with not only a sad mouth, but eyes looking to heaven.
That's a rather different expression than I intended to convey. Some graphic designer at Microsoft has overloaded the:( so that it becomes far more expressive but also far more limiting.
Once upon a time, people could communicate emotions effectively simply through the tone of their writing.
Well, skilled writers can still do that. Not everybody is a skilled writer, or has the time to read and re-read what they have written to ensure that the emotion will come across. Much also depends on the context in which the reader reads the text. Look at the thread in which the smiley was first proposed (it's linked from the article); it's evident that the discussion was also about what was and was not a joke. Sometimes, especially with deadpan humour, it's not at all obvious.
For readers whose first language is not that in which the text is composed it can be very helpful to have the context signalled like this. Even for me, an English speaker from the UK, occasionally I value a smiley if reading something from the US, since I don't have all the cultural references in common with the writer.
Text doesn't have tone of voice, of course, so what exactly is wrong with developing conventions that convey some of the non-verbal signals that would normally be expressed in conversational language?
In summary - if you don't like smileys, leave those of us who do alone, ok?
Back in 1996, I built a very early dynamic websites with a database back end. This was so long ago that IIS (yes, it was on NT) hadn't been released when we started; we had to use Purveyor's server. The site ran an ISAPI DLL written in C that ate HTML templates and inserted database data... just like your ColdFusion or whatever today, but all handcrafted.
Bandwidth was very costly, so I made the engine strip out EVERYTHING in the HTML that wasn't needed. That way, the templates (all written by hand, in vi) could be human-readable and commented to heck and the end result was as compressed as HTML could be.
We also made up some custom attributes that we put in comments... the engine translated these into more complex HTML on the fly, letting us do things like put in odd bits of JavaScript once and have them propagate onto every page. The engine also knew what version of browser was accessing it and could adjust pages for that target.
The chief techie of the company took real exception to this and insisted that the HTML the end user "saw" met a set of "HTML written guidelines". I overruled him (by threatening to resign) and it stayed compressed until a while after I left, when someone disabled the compression. Their bandwidth costs... rocketed!
But ever since then, I've always hand-written HTML if it's anything minor. I have a bandwidth cap on the few tiny personal websites I run and I manage to get hit rates far beyond those that friends of mine who use Frontpage or Dreamweaver achieve. Because they're so damn complex to do by hand, I ignore the CSS, FONT and other stuff and stick to H, H1, H2 and P tags for most everything.
A useful side effect is that most of my pages display fine on any browser back to Netscape 2.
Binary encoding of files usually increases their size by around 30% (typical figure for uuencoding). Formats like mp3 don't compress anymore worth a damn, so you're stuck with that increase. So you gain some efficiency, but you also lose.
I never understood the economics of internet (streaming radio) anyway. Consider the difference between (radio) broadcast and internet in terms of cost per listener. With broadcast, you have a relatively big initial cost for the transmission kit, but your cost per additional listener is then zero. With internet streaming, you have a lower initial cost, but each listener consumes, say, 40Kbps of bandwidth. Each and every listener. So your bandwidth costs rapidly become the dominant factor.
And yes, there's multicast and the MBone... but they're not used, are they?
Patent trials in the US are, I believe, heard before a jury. The company I work for specialises in technical patents and we litigate in many areas. In the US, hardly any patent trials actually go to court because once you bring in a jury, the odds are around 50/50; nobody likes those odds. 99% of cases are settled out of court.
But the thing is... old satellites don't die. They just sit up there, cluttering up the orbital space. The GPS system, for example, expects to retire satellites at a regular rate into "parking orbits". In fact recently, as this article in Space Daily shows, it was discovered that the parking orbits chosen will degrade and pose a threat to the operating GPS satellites in 20 to 40 years. This is a long-term problem that is only getting worse.
Refueling satellites at least gives us the control of them needed to take them out of orbit if required.
How many of us (and by "us" I mean the technically-literate) have a strong influence on the buying decisions of friends and family? I know that I get asked to help many, many of my non-technical acquaintances decide what nature of PC or other home technology device to buy.
Given that most of us would be fairly dismissive of these devices, it follows that our influence in the market for them is pretty strong. Bear that in mind next time you feel we're in a minority...
This comment was prompted in part by overhearing a conversation in PC World when I was buying a new laptop yesterday. A non-techie was looking at laptops and commented "this one doesn't have Intel Inside... isn't that bad?". Her techie friend explained the pros and cons of AMD and Intel to her so that she could make a decision. Her purchase. His influence.
I can buy them in my local supermarket. They're energy efficient and last for ages. Most of the lights in my house have them in. They're essentially small-form-factor flourescents. They're mostly produced (for the UK) by Philips. If you don't have them in the USA, that's probably a factor of your economy, but don't extrapolate to the rest of the world.
Mesh networks. Fine, in a trusted environment. And we all know how trusted the world is, don't we?
All your packets will flow over kit owned by other people. Other people you don't know and shouldn't trust. Yes, you may encrypt it all, but it can be stored to decrypt at leisure.
Your traffic can be throttled or disrupted by anyone who cares to do so.
Why should I use the battery of my mobile device to support your pr0n habit?
On another note... 3G vs 802.11. A friend and I spend a short while doing some back-of-a-napkin calculations about the issues. Given the typical range of an 802.11 AP, how many are needed to cover a freeway? How fast does a vehicle travelling at 70mph (UK motorway speed) move from one to another? How much time does the accessing device spend handing off from one AP to another? The results don't argue for 802.11 as a general replacement for 3G at all.
Anna B
Cellphones don't make people stupid. Talking on one does distract one from whatever else one is doing, such as walking, paying attention to traffic or driving. But so does an intense conversation to a friend, or listening to involving music, or spotting that ever-so-attractive person-of-the-appropriate-gender who just walked past. I've seen all of the above cause people to walk off pavements (sidewalks to you colonials) at inappropriate times:-)
Anna B
As has been pointed out in other replies to this story:
it's easy to sniff for data traffic and thus ignore the fake access points,
this is a useful DoS tool more than a way of securing networks.
Seems to me that as long as network admins, users or Jo-average-computer-at-home-user keeps thinking of 802.11 kit as a "alternative to wires", we'll be stuck with all the security problems. Wireless = broadcast. That will inevitably involve sending your data out to anyone who cares to set up an antenna and kit to recieve it. You trade the convenience of not having to run wires for the insecurity of broadcasting your bits to the world.
Anyway, given that this unpleasantly insecure technology is spreading worldwide, it's interesting to see this article at CNet about small, cheap 802.11 chipsets destined for set-top boxes. I contentedly predict that in a couple of years there'll be scares about wardrivers sniffing what people are watching on their wireless TVs:)
Anna B
Slashdot Mirror
That's also a point about a lot of the patents that some Slashdot readers object to; *what* they do is not novel but *how* they do it may be. The exact way eBay run online auctions is clever and innovative (whoever it was thought of it first!). The idea of auctions themselves, even online, is not.
Anna B
Erm... you can only make that assumption if you can show that new posts are coming the same posters who previously complained. People tend to comment on the stories that they relate to (of course), so you've seen posts from one set of Slashdotters before and now you're seeing posts from another set.
To quote Walt Whitman:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Anna B
Hang on.... here we are on Slashdot, where every mention of possibly privacy-invading technology provokes an intense discussion involving civil liberties... and this phrase gets posted in a headline story?
Just a little sexual politics for y'all - pointing hidden cameras at girls (or anyone else for that matter) is not nice. It's offensive. It's rude. It's an invasion of privacy.
Anna B
Well, I think that's a tad unfair - yeah, I saw it linked from NTK, followed the link and thought "that's worth checking to see if SlashDot has it". It didn't, so I submitted it with my own words. Jeez, if you appreciated the story fine, but leave the poor submitter alone!
Anyway, aren't nearly all SlashDot stories submitted by people who have seen them linked somewhere else (or are the originators of the story hoping for attention)? And isn't this an inevitable and even beneficial part of the whole web-zine thing? What do you want, roving reporters already?
Anna
I have no idea if you lot over in the USA have these, but here in the UK you can get government grants to convert your gasoline (petrol)-powered car to dual-fuel LPG (Liquified Petroleum Gas, a mixture of propane and butane, also called Autogas). Whilst this is, of course, still a fossil fuel, there are benefits in terms of emissions and fuel economy.
Bill Gates is indeed such a businessman in terms of deals, but negotiations with MS involve teams of hard-boiled negotiators. And, yes, I'm generalising wildly, but most geeks are just not the type who can control a high-level meeting by force of personality. I'm speak as a (girl) geek here who's been in those sorts of meetings...
Because this was written way before CSS was even proposed. We're talking days-of-Netscape-2 here...
But I agree, start with what's valid and work out from there.
Anna
Or it's one day of 50 channels, if only TiVo could record multiple channels in parallel. Since much programming is still broadcast at primetime, I find the bottleneck on my expanded (UK, Sky) TiVo is not disk space, it's the damn limit of being able to tune to and record ONE broadcast at a time. Here in the UK, it's widely rumoured that the Sky+ PVR, which has 2 satellite feeds and can record from one whilst showing live TV from the other, will shortly be upgraded to allow it to record from both simultaneously.
I work for a company that generates patents as well as exploits existing ones. So I know a fair bit about this. IANAL, I'm the techie who writes a lot of patents, though, so bear that in mind.
First off, getting the patent is only stage one. To exploit it, you need to license it or litigate against infringers. Both are fraught with peril. To license, you need to disclose what it is your licensing, so you risk being ripped off. To litigate, you need to show infringement and large companies can tie you up in legal hassles forever. Or they may well just ignore you. We're lucky - we have extensive financial backing and we're known as "psychopathic litigants", so we can play hardball.
When negotiating licensing deals, you need a hardball alpha-male businessman. Full stop. Sorry, that's the reality (and hey, this is a girl talking). Techies usually can't do high-level negotiations.
When we take an existing patent for exploitation, the deal is simple. Assume you come to us with a patent, or at least a filed application. You're going to have to give up 66% of it immeidately (typically this would be done by assigning rights to a new company and assigning shares appropriately). 33% of it will go to the financial backers who put up the money to drive the licensing or litigating process. 33% goes to us because we know how the game is played. If you want money up front or to retain control, then fine, it's been nice talking, don't call us.
So, the summary: patents are just the first step on the road. It's scary and beset by vultures every step. We have done very nicely out of it but we've had to learn how the game is really played. Good luck! Anna B
And of course Led Zeppelin's In Through The Out Door LP had a "magic paint" inner sleeve... For the generation that don't know what I mean, one of those where you paint with water and the colours magically appear. Apparently unpainted versions are worth a lot more than painted ones. Damn my little brother and his wanton paintbrush...
But the serious point here (if there is one) is that buying that LP was more than just the music. It was the pictures, the sleeve, the lyrics... the whole "I am a LZ fan" thing. Having the mp3s to hand is only a way of listening to the music and doesn't replace that experience.
Actually... this is sort of changing the nature of smilies. Ever noticed how the icon that, say, MSN Messenger uses to replace the :( is that bit more expressive? I used to use a Linux IM client that couldn't handle the "emoticons", so I'd type :( meaning "a bit sad" and the reader would see this expressive face with not only a sad mouth, but eyes looking to heaven.
That's a rather different expression than I intended to convey. Some graphic designer at Microsoft has overloaded the :( so that it becomes far more expressive but also far more limiting.
Conspiracy theorists... go!
Anna
Well, skilled writers can still do that. Not everybody is a skilled writer, or has the time to read and re-read what they have written to ensure that the emotion will come across. Much also depends on the context in which the reader reads the text. Look at the thread in which the smiley was first proposed (it's linked from the article); it's evident that the discussion was also about what was and was not a joke. Sometimes, especially with deadpan humour, it's not at all obvious.
For readers whose first language is not that in which the text is composed it can be very helpful to have the context signalled like this. Even for me, an English speaker from the UK, occasionally I value a smiley if reading something from the US, since I don't have all the cultural references in common with the writer.
Text doesn't have tone of voice, of course, so what exactly is wrong with developing conventions that convey some of the non-verbal signals that would normally be expressed in conversational language?
In summary - if you don't like smileys, leave those of us who do alone, ok?
Anna B :)
Back in 1996, I built a very early dynamic websites with a database back end. This was so long ago that IIS (yes, it was on NT) hadn't been released when we started; we had to use Purveyor's server. The site ran an ISAPI DLL written in C that ate HTML templates and inserted database data... just like your ColdFusion or whatever today, but all handcrafted.
Bandwidth was very costly, so I made the engine strip out EVERYTHING in the HTML that wasn't needed. That way, the templates (all written by hand, in vi) could be human-readable and commented to heck and the end result was as compressed as HTML could be.
We also made up some custom attributes that we put in comments... the engine translated these into more complex HTML on the fly, letting us do things like put in odd bits of JavaScript once and have them propagate onto every page. The engine also knew what version of browser was accessing it and could adjust pages for that target.
The chief techie of the company took real exception to this and insisted that the HTML the end user "saw" met a set of "HTML written guidelines". I overruled him (by threatening to resign) and it stayed compressed until a while after I left, when someone disabled the compression. Their bandwidth costs... rocketed!
But ever since then, I've always hand-written HTML if it's anything minor. I have a bandwidth cap on the few tiny personal websites I run and I manage to get hit rates far beyond those that friends of mine who use Frontpage or Dreamweaver achieve. Because they're so damn complex to do by hand, I ignore the CSS, FONT and other stuff and stick to H, H1, H2 and P tags for most everything.
A useful side effect is that most of my pages display fine on any browser back to Netscape 2.
Anna B
Binary encoding of files usually increases their size by around 30% (typical figure for uuencoding). Formats like mp3 don't compress anymore worth a damn, so you're stuck with that increase. So you gain some efficiency, but you also lose.
Anna B
I never understood the economics of internet (streaming radio) anyway. Consider the difference between (radio) broadcast and internet in terms of cost per listener. With broadcast, you have a relatively big initial cost for the transmission kit, but your cost per additional listener is then zero. With internet streaming, you have a lower initial cost, but each listener consumes, say, 40Kbps of bandwidth. Each and every listener. So your bandwidth costs rapidly become the dominant factor.
And yes, there's multicast and the MBone... but they're not used, are they?
Anna B
Patent trials in the US are, I believe, heard before a jury. The company I work for specialises in technical patents and we litigate in many areas. In the US, hardly any patent trials actually go to court because once you bring in a jury, the odds are around 50/50; nobody likes those odds. 99% of cases are settled out of court.
The Enum initiative. I refer you to this IETF page and also this article on Enum in NetworkWorldFusion.
Anna B
But the thing is... old satellites don't die. They just sit up there, cluttering up the orbital space. The GPS system, for example, expects to retire satellites at a regular rate into "parking orbits". In fact recently, as this article in Space Daily shows, it was discovered that the parking orbits chosen will degrade and pose a threat to the operating GPS satellites in 20 to 40 years. This is a long-term problem that is only getting worse.
Refueling satellites at least gives us the control of them needed to take them out of orbit if required.
Anna B
How many of us (and by "us" I mean the technically-literate) have a strong influence on the buying decisions of friends and family? I know that I get asked to help many, many of my non-technical acquaintances decide what nature of PC or other home technology device to buy.
Given that most of us would be fairly dismissive of these devices, it follows that our influence in the market for them is pretty strong. Bear that in mind next time you feel we're in a minority...
This comment was prompted in part by overhearing a conversation in PC World when I was buying a new laptop yesterday. A non-techie was looking at laptops and commented "this one doesn't have Intel Inside... isn't that bad?". Her techie friend explained the pros and cons of AMD and Intel to her so that she could make a decision. Her purchase. His influence.
Anna B
Anna B
All your packets will flow over kit owned by other people. Other people you don't know and shouldn't trust. Yes, you may encrypt it all, but it can be stored to decrypt at leisure.
Your traffic can be throttled or disrupted by anyone who cares to do so.
Why should I use the battery of my mobile device to support your pr0n habit?
On another note... 3G vs 802.11. A friend and I spend a short while doing some back-of-a-napkin calculations about the issues. Given the typical range of an 802.11 AP, how many are needed to cover a freeway? How fast does a vehicle travelling at 70mph (UK motorway speed) move from one to another? How much time does the accessing device spend handing off from one AP to another? The results don't argue for 802.11 as a general replacement for 3G at all. Anna B
Cellphones don't make people stupid. Talking on one does distract one from whatever else one is doing, such as walking, paying attention to traffic or driving. But so does an intense conversation to a friend, or listening to involving music, or spotting that ever-so-attractive person-of-the-appropriate-gender who just walked past. I've seen all of the above cause people to walk off pavements (sidewalks to you colonials) at inappropriate times :-)
Anna B
As has been pointed out in other replies to this story:
it's easy to sniff for data traffic and thus ignore the fake access points,
this is a useful DoS tool more than a way of securing networks.
Seems to me that as long as network admins, users or Jo-average-computer-at-home-user keeps thinking of 802.11 kit as a "alternative to wires", we'll be stuck with all the security problems. Wireless = broadcast. That will inevitably involve sending your data out to anyone who cares to set up an antenna and kit to recieve it. You trade the convenience of not having to run wires for the insecurity of broadcasting your bits to the world. Anyway, given that this unpleasantly insecure technology is spreading worldwide, it's interesting to see this article at CNet about small, cheap 802.11 chipsets destined for set-top boxes. I contentedly predict that in a couple of years there'll be scares about wardrivers sniffing what people are watching on their wireless TVs :)
Anna B