It's not surprising that 64-bit processors are rated much slower than 32-bit ones. The fastest 64-bit AMD is rated 2.0ghz while the fastest AMD 32-bit is 2.2ghz.
The fastest Opterons now selling are 2.2Ghz.
64 bits does not actually change the CPU very much at all. In this case the AMD64 ISA does have a few more registers so that will speed it up a little and 64 bit memcpy's will push the memory subsystems a bit more so this is all good. The real issue is the extra memory requirements to load and store 64 bit pointers. This makes the memory footprint a little larger and hence causes some programs to run somewhat slower.
I would hang tight for a while on the purchase front and see what happens to the prices.
if our universe exists within a gravastar - then how can it be expanding?
Because we're shrinking ? Seriously, look at some of the string theory about "brane's". There are far more than the classic 4 dimensions (at least in that theory).
Errr...then why would the universe seem to expand from a certain direction? Wouldn't everything be shrinking at the same rate, so we wouldn't be able to observe it?
Does it ? There are anomolies that can be explained by imploding instead of exploding, for example, it appears that the universe is expanding at a *faster* rate now than it did after the "big suck/bang", while an explosion would theoretically expand at a slower rate after the "big suck/bang". Some astronomers discuss a mysterious force pushing things apart faster. So I think some the anomolies being observed may need to be viewed from a different perspective. I have not done an in depth analysis - it just seems to me that it's somthing that may fit the puzzle a little better.
..then how do they explain that our universe seems to be accellerating in its expansion?
Ah... If this theory is true, then there are more than 4 dimensions. If you look at some of the string theory stuff, you'll see that it's quite possible it's inside a new "brane" (a special case string than is a mem'brane'). This is but one answer.
It's also quite possible if you look at the universe, we are not "expanding" at all, in fact it is just as likely that we are imploding. (that faint sound you hear is the "BIG SUCK", not the big bang after-all !)
Some of the "dark matter" observations may be explained by this kind of theory.
This is somthing I wrote a while back:
I call it the Imploding Universe.
So, a sigularity is where all the formulas blow up... right ? The IMPLODING hypothesis goes a bit like this; all matter in the black hole becomes a single point in which the space/time fabric is re-ignited in a whole new universe.
So what appears to be an expanding universe is really a remnant effect of the imploding nature. The reason the universe appears to be expanding is because matter is uniformly shrinking and space is expanding to take it's place. The quantum mechanics is explained as a rebirth of the matter.
The "dark energy" observation may well be effects of implosion....
Since then, string theory talks about 'Brane's. So it is quite concievable that "our" universe is within one of these "Branes" and that the "seeping of matter into the brane happens when a "tear" in the current brane is formed from the extreme acitivity of gravitons (since the hypothesis is that gravitons pass through branes while EM and Nuclear forces do not.
This is really spooky.
Yep, thats MY theory. You have to admit it's cute. Universe's popping up all over the place...
Has anyone succesfully executed a SC escrow action
on
Source Code Escrow
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If I was a software supplier, I would certainly agree to somthing like this - there simply is no downside. For one, I can usually put the "source" in escrow but no-one really know if it's enough for someone to move forward.
Also, if the company goes into bankruptcy, the bankruptcy judge may have some reasons to intervene in such agreements.
An escrow contract simply does not compete with true open source software.
IANAL. I don't think you can "copyright" and ABI because it can be expressed in many different ways, however some people think you can "Patent" and ABI (check some of MS's patents on WM.). Now, if SCO thinks they have a patent, they're SO out of luck because it's expired by now and they can't file for one now because it's been out for too long.... As for trade secrets, they're also SOL because, well, it's not secret. SCO can complain all they want about Linus & CO "copying" the ABI but there is no legal obligation to SCO for anything.
Due to my excessive paranoia, I'd hesitate to ever do a spam purchase online with a credit card... but, that bit seems like a genius way to take a spammer down.
You would need to use a "CREDIT" card not a "DEBIT" card. I had one company in the past mess with me on a warranty issue. I simply called the bank I had the credit card with and the company finally resolved the issue, but not after having the money ripped out of their hands while they messed around trying to fix things.
When MC/VISA/AMEX start loosing money on spammers, you can bet that they will shut down their merchant accounts.
The thing I fear the most however is dangerous criminal activity from spammers to people who choose to do this. This can only be safe if lots and lots of people do this.
The other danger is bad guys deciding to do this to a legitimate buisness. Say I was an unscrupulous nasty SPAMINAL and I wanted to take out the competition, you could easily generate lots and lots of spam and then link to your competitions web site and watch them go down in a sea of bad transactions. This is what concerns me the most with this scheme.
I was told by a friend of mine (mortgage broker) that his company stopped using ileads.com because they were getting too many "bad quality" leads.
It seems that some people are starting to fill out these forms and having the brokers contact them and then after taking all the contact information from the broker, they inform them that if they don't a) divulge the information of where they got the lead and b) agree to stop using companies that use SPAM to generate leads that they will hand their contact details to the foaming at the mouth public.
Spammers fighting amongst themselves? How could that be a bad thing?
Just say these spaminals (spamming criminal) decided to destroy my legitimate mortgage buisness by sending out millions of spam messages to all known honey pots ?
There may be a price to pay for this. The more active anti spammers I know get an abnormally large number of attempted breakins and hacks.
Forwarned is forarmed. But I think perhaps it's worth a try.
Yes, this is scary. Many spammers are outright criminals and will stop at nothing to snuff this out.
That's why I think we need small "cells" and we need to hit the merchants where it hurts. If you build a trust network where you put in place schemes to fight spammers and then you basically communicate in stealth mode when spammers don't know who is who.
The other thing is synchronization. If 100,000 people did what I did yesterday all at the same time, (somthing like Critical Mass in San Francisco) do you think that these merchants would be a little concerned, expecially before big retail times like Christmas. They would drop the spamming lead generators in a heart beat.
Here is one scheme, set us some honey pot email addresses. Harvest spam for a few weeks and then scan the spam for "Lengthen your R0D" posts and place them on a temporary server where all participants take one. In other words, the worse the spammers are, the worse they're hit. Since I collect thousands of spam posts a week, this is easy. The other thing is that for each of these emails we make sure we "opt out".
I'm sure we can do this. Almost everyone I know is motivated, they just don't know what to do.
Anyone in or around Cupertino, CA motivated enough to get this started ?
I think it would need a little cash, it may also work as a 501c3 (tax exempt donations). This would go to pay for servers and domain registrations. It would be nimble in that when the server is attacked, another would just pop up and the spammers would be wasting their time hitting a dead IP. Also since each cell has no knowledge of each other, if one cell is compromized (i.e. spammers start attacking the cell) then we know that the cell contains a spy and we retarget the members of the cell to go and create new cells.
As I mentioned before, the credit card companies are today unwittingly aiding and abetting. If they become aware that a particular merchant is using SPAM they then become full accomplices. The 501c3 money can be used to start civil class action lawsuits against them if they do not co-operate.
I can create a plan but we need to remain anonymous to the spammers.
Try running Unsolicited Commando from http://www.astrobastards.net/uc/
I gave some thought to these kinds of systems and I decided that they are far more dangerous than good. Soon you will find the spammers using them to damage the competition.
The best way is to get in touch with merchants. I'm even willing to risk a few dollars to place orders for Viagra to try to find who these people are and talk to someone. At this time, the credit card companies are unwittingly aiding and abetting. Guess what happens when you have people like me ordering products on-line and then calling customer the credit card customer support to cancel the payment and then asking them for the contact details of the merchants. It won't be long before the CC companies close these merchant accounts. There is still a danger using these techniques that they could be abused by spammers but I think that with people in the loop, the course corrections could happen more quickly.
The vigilante approach will also make it so that law enforcement gets their butt into gear. Do you know how frieghtening a community group like this would be to the politicians ? Guess how quickly the marketing associations will pull their head in. Unfortunatly, it does take some effort on our part, but we can choose how.
If we all to 30 minutes per day to fight spam, I think we would be far better off.
I don't know if there are communities of SPAMN fighters but it is obvious that if a small percentage of the population did this, the spam cost effectiveness would disappear.
Some companies out there are frightful with their attitude. For instance, yesterday I got a mortgage offer which forwarded me to a web site which I entered mostly truthful information except the name was different. The offer came with an "exclusive" security system. Double whammy...
I was called back within minutes by a company in Austin TX and when I asked them about their SPAM policy I got a really rude response. I suspect if they get a few more of these phone calls they'll stop doing this. I also found that a large US bank has web pages that refer to this company. Calling the bank and getting a cogent response about spam was engligtening. No one there can help. I suspect a few phone calls from customers could also help this situation.
Unfortunately, the spammers are pretty astute at making life hell on-line so I think this is only going to work through large numbers of small community groups.
So a question for the slashdot community. Are there any of you interested in organizing ?
I'm the customer of the distributor and they do listen.
Thanks for the insight
Please take this complaint. I will never buy a DVD (or copy damaged CD) with ``piracy'' protection". This is simply because most of these systems are used in a way that hurt me (the customer). Here are some things:
I have a DVD player that is now stuck on region 2. Thanks to Toshiba's change your region max 5 times firmware.
Time I've wasted working around this crap.
I have more issues but the the time one is enough. Before I realized just how much damage region coding restrictions did to me I spent thousands on DVD's. I now spend NOTHING.
Before I change back to buying DVD's I will require that all the encryption nonsense and region coding nonsense be dropped and a legally binding statement that if they ever pull this off again they will pay me damages enough to send them bankrupt.
JFFS addresses the flash write frequency concern.
It would be good if someone was to create a tiny JFFS auto loader that would load off the flash filesystem into windows automagically. That way you can make it seamless.
This is not an endorsement of JFFS, it's just an example of a flash friendly journalling filesystem. (I have not used it - it may be the best filesystem ever, I don't know).
Look idiot, think a little. Using a ATM, they record your biometric data (retinal, fingerprint, whatever) and allow your transaction to go through and record the info. Later, they replay the transaction electronically and rob you.
We're starting this relationship well with tad name calling and huge misconceptions. You have no idea.
Buddy, there is far more happening in the biometric space than you can shake a stick at. Do some research.
How do you think biometrics work? They scan you and convert the information into a long number or identifier. Then they compare that number with the number they have on file. If the two match (or are reasonably close) then the ATM thinks it is you. If you have an ATM (or can connect to the ATM system) you can enter the mag-stripe data, the pin, and the biometric info directly. And as others have pointed out, you can be issued a new card & pin, but biometric info is yours forever.
Electronically won't work. As soon as your fraudulent ATM is discovered, you and your cash are toast. It's too much work for so little money and so much risk.
If you check your hotmail account at a webcafe, your password is protected from sniffing by SSL, but how do you know the webcafe doesn't have a keylogger running? You don't. You can't trust the platform. Same thing with an ATM.
Unfortunately, if the machine at that cafe is compromised by someone leaving a tojan in there, you're toast because all your keystrokes are belong to us.
What difference will biometrics make if some criminal has installed a modified machine to intercept and record your biometric data?
To get money out of your account, they would need to be you for one. Secondly, when the crook shows up at an ATM, you can immediatly identify that they are a crook and who the crook is.
I'd like to thank the author on so many excellent points. He probably knows that this article will be met with flame.
Unfortunatly, I have a parallel set of horror stories.
I think there are a number of factors have brought this situation around but the predominant factor is the Peter principle on a mass scale for management at technology companies.
This has happened as a symptom of fighting between the technologically challenged and the technologically gifted continue because of failure to communicate. Software engineers (any engineers) live in the reality warp between social needs and scientific envelopes. Hence the difficulty for some managers to truly comprehend what engineers are saying. For a software enginner to be successful, they must bend their reality to meet artificial and often nonsensical goals. When a software engineer meets a near absolute issue, it is often impossible for them to communicate the level of risk. Hence the technically challenged management is unable to comprehend the gravity of the risk. Hence the ultimate breakdown of trust.
Example scenario:
IT administrator wants to "be more secure" and rules on creating a firewall. (often for selfish purposes - i.e. to attain experience) Engineer's job just got harder and asks IT guy for reasoning. IT guy responds with a "management told me" response. Engineer grunts in disapproval and moves on because the past experiences with discussing this with management have never been fruitful. As a cancer grows so does this process and finally, no-one does anything.
This has nothing to do with large companies, I've seen it happen in small companies as well.
I have managed many software development teams in large and small companies (as the director of SW dev) and I often have had to simply ask that my engineering team do all the administration. It's amazing how a bunch of smart developers can take the job of 5 administators and turn it into an hour a month kind of duty. Hence, I now look for developers that are skilled in all aspects of computers, from writing software to being able to administer an installation of machines.
If you look at high profile examples (like *both* Space Shuttle disasters) you can see that this problem is endemic in the a bureaucracy as one of the evolutionary stages. Unfortunatly, if the management at the very top of an organization can't understand this, the outcome is inevitable.
The patents must only cover the extensions that came in 1995 for long file names in the FAT file system. Linux was supporting long files names in FAT file systems before the patent using the UMSDOS filesystem and it worked like a charm.
I see 2 options, the first is that you can claim that the MS patents are invalid because of prior art (namely UMSDOS) and have the patents re-examined. The success depends on wether MS cited it as a prior art. Secondly, you can simply stop using long file names.
There are some technological things you could do as well but I have to agree with another poster that JFFS (or somthing like it) makes far more sense.
Gates on the other hand can ORDER everyone in his employ to jump around and shout "I'm a little idiot!"...
Well, not totally true. Many people have left Microsoft and those lucrative stock options because of just that - but it's not usually billg that is the issue, it's the cluless management that he has in place in some groups that as such silly things. (I know - I left them)
While you make a good point that battery technology has failed to make the leaps that other technologies (like disk drive technology, for example) have, the issue remains, increasing energy density may cause explosions (batteries blow - literally), other technologies in comparison don't have similar failure modes (few, if any, disk drives cause serious injuries).
Slashdot Mirror
The fastest Opterons now selling are 2.2Ghz.
64 bits does not actually change the CPU very much at all. In this case the AMD64 ISA does have a few more registers so that will speed it up a little and 64 bit memcpy's will push the memory subsystems a bit more so this is all good. The real issue is the extra memory requirements to load and store 64 bit pointers. This makes the memory footprint a little larger and hence causes some programs to run somewhat slower.
I would hang tight for a while on the purchase front and see what happens to the prices.
I thought the German courts told SCO to pull their head in. Isn't this going to get their head sliced off ?
Because we're shrinking ? Seriously, look at some of the string theory about "brane's". There are far more than the classic 4 dimensions (at least in that theory).
Does it ? There are anomolies that can be explained by imploding instead of exploding, for example, it appears that the universe is expanding at a *faster* rate now than it did after the "big suck/bang", while an explosion would theoretically expand at a slower rate after the "big suck/bang". Some astronomers discuss a mysterious force pushing things apart faster. So I think some the anomolies being observed may need to be viewed from a different perspective. I have not done an in depth analysis - it just seems to me that it's somthing that may fit the puzzle a little better.
Ah... If this theory is true, then there are more than 4 dimensions. If you look at some of the string theory stuff, you'll see that it's quite possible it's inside a new "brane" (a special case string than is a mem'brane'). This is but one answer.
It's also quite possible if you look at the universe, we are not "expanding" at all, in fact it is just as likely that we are imploding. (that faint sound you hear is the "BIG SUCK", not the big bang after-all !)
Some of the "dark matter" observations may be explained by this kind of theory.
This is somthing I wrote a while back: I call it the Imploding Universe. So, a sigularity is where all the formulas blow up ... right ? The IMPLODING hypothesis goes a bit like this; all matter in the black hole becomes a single point in which the space/time fabric is re-ignited in a whole new universe.
So what appears to be an expanding universe is really a remnant effect of the imploding nature. The reason the universe appears to be expanding is because matter is uniformly shrinking and space is expanding to take it's place. The quantum mechanics is explained as a rebirth of the matter.
The "dark energy" observation may well be effects of implosion. ...
Since then, string theory talks about 'Brane's. So it is quite concievable that "our" universe is within one of these "Branes" and that the "seeping of matter into the brane happens when a "tear" in the current brane is formed from the extreme acitivity of gravitons (since the hypothesis is that gravitons pass through branes while EM and Nuclear forces do not.
This is really spooky.
Yep, thats MY theory. You have to admit it's cute. Universe's popping up all over the place ...
If I was a software supplier, I would certainly agree to somthing like this - there simply is no downside. For one, I can usually put the "source" in escrow but no-one really know if it's enough for someone to move forward.
Also, if the company goes into bankruptcy, the bankruptcy judge may have some reasons to intervene in such agreements.
An escrow contract simply does not compete with true open source software.
That's been working for years on PostgreSQL. I just tried it again to be sure. PostgreSQL even outpaces MS's SQLServer.
drop table xfoo_a;
create table xfoo_a
(
a int
);
drop table xfoo_b;
create table xfoo_b
(
b int,
x text
);
insert into xfoo_a ( a ) values( 1 );
insert into xfoo_a ( a ) values( 2 );
insert into xfoo_a ( a ) values( 3 );
insert into xfoo_b ( b, x ) values( 1, 'One' );
insert into xfoo_b ( b, x ) values( 7, 'Seven' );
insert into xfoo_b ( b, x ) values( 3, 'Three' );
select x from xfoo_b where b in ( select a from xfoo_a );
I still don't know why MySQL has such a following when somthing like PostgreSQL is so much better in virtually all respects (IMHO that is).
IANAL. I don't think you can "copyright" and ABI because it can be expressed in many different ways, however some people think you can "Patent" and ABI (check some of MS's patents on WM.). Now, if SCO thinks they have a patent, they're SO out of luck because it's expired by now and they can't file for one now because it's been out for too long.... As for trade secrets, they're also SOL because, well, it's not secret. SCO can complain all they want about Linus & CO "copying" the ABI but there is no legal obligation to SCO for anything.
You would need to use a "CREDIT" card not a "DEBIT" card. I had one company in the past mess with me on a warranty issue. I simply called the bank I had the credit card with and the company finally resolved the issue, but not after having the money ripped out of their hands while they messed around trying to fix things.
When MC/VISA/AMEX start loosing money on spammers, you can bet that they will shut down their merchant accounts.
The thing I fear the most however is dangerous criminal activity from spammers to people who choose to do this. This can only be safe if lots and lots of people do this.
The other danger is bad guys deciding to do this to a legitimate buisness. Say I was an unscrupulous nasty SPAMINAL and I wanted to take out the competition, you could easily generate lots and lots of spam and then link to your competitions web site and watch them go down in a sea of bad transactions. This is what concerns me the most with this scheme.
I was told by a friend of mine (mortgage broker) that his company stopped using ileads.com because they were getting too many "bad quality" leads.
It seems that some people are starting to fill out these forms and having the brokers contact them and then after taking all the contact information from the broker, they inform them that if they don't a) divulge the information of where they got the lead and b) agree to stop using companies that use SPAM to generate leads that they will hand their contact details to the foaming at the mouth public.
Is this legal ? Souds like sweet justice to me.
You can use Google.
Usenet with PGP would be good.
Just say these spaminals (spamming criminal) decided to destroy my legitimate mortgage buisness by sending out millions of spam messages to all known honey pots ?
Yes, this is scary. Many spammers are outright criminals and will stop at nothing to snuff this out.
That's why I think we need small "cells" and we need to hit the merchants where it hurts. If you build a trust network where you put in place schemes to fight spammers and then you basically communicate in stealth mode when spammers don't know who is who.
The other thing is synchronization. If 100,000 people did what I did yesterday all at the same time, (somthing like Critical Mass in San Francisco) do you think that these merchants would be a little concerned, expecially before big retail times like Christmas. They would drop the spamming lead generators in a heart beat.
Here is one scheme, set us some honey pot email addresses. Harvest spam for a few weeks and then scan the spam for "Lengthen your R0D" posts and place them on a temporary server where all participants take one. In other words, the worse the spammers are, the worse they're hit. Since I collect thousands of spam posts a week, this is easy. The other thing is that for each of these emails we make sure we "opt out".
I'm sure we can do this. Almost everyone I know is motivated, they just don't know what to do.
Anyone in or around Cupertino, CA motivated enough to get this started ?
I think it would need a little cash, it may also work as a 501c3 (tax exempt donations). This would go to pay for servers and domain registrations. It would be nimble in that when the server is attacked, another would just pop up and the spammers would be wasting their time hitting a dead IP. Also since each cell has no knowledge of each other, if one cell is compromized (i.e. spammers start attacking the cell) then we know that the cell contains a spy and we retarget the members of the cell to go and create new cells.
As I mentioned before, the credit card companies are today unwittingly aiding and abetting. If they become aware that a particular merchant is using SPAM they then become full accomplices. The 501c3 money can be used to start civil class action lawsuits against them if they do not co-operate.
I can create a plan but we need to remain anonymous to the spammers.
Is anyone willing ?
I gave some thought to these kinds of systems and I decided that they are far more dangerous than good. Soon you will find the spammers using them to damage the competition.
The best way is to get in touch with merchants. I'm even willing to risk a few dollars to place orders for Viagra to try to find who these people are and talk to someone. At this time, the credit card companies are unwittingly aiding and abetting. Guess what happens when you have people like me ordering products on-line and then calling customer the credit card customer support to cancel the payment and then asking them for the contact details of the merchants. It won't be long before the CC companies close these merchant accounts. There is still a danger using these techniques that they could be abused by spammers but I think that with people in the loop, the course corrections could happen more quickly.
The vigilante approach will also make it so that law enforcement gets their butt into gear. Do you know how frieghtening a community group like this would be to the politicians ? Guess how quickly the marketing associations will pull their head in. Unfortunatly, it does take some effort on our part, but we can choose how.
If we all to 30 minutes per day to fight spam, I think we would be far better off.
I don't know if there are communities of SPAMN fighters but it is obvious that if a small percentage of the population did this, the spam cost effectiveness would disappear.
Some companies out there are frightful with their attitude. For instance, yesterday I got a mortgage offer which forwarded me to a web site which I entered mostly truthful information except the name was different. The offer came with an "exclusive" security system. Double whammy ...
I was called back within minutes by a company in Austin TX and when I asked them about their SPAM policy I got a really rude response. I suspect if they get a few more of these phone calls they'll stop doing this. I also found that a large US bank has web pages that refer to this company. Calling the bank and getting a cogent response about spam was engligtening. No one there can help. I suspect a few phone calls from customers could also help this situation.
Unfortunately, the spammers are pretty astute at making life hell on-line so I think this is only going to work through large numbers of small community groups.
So a question for the slashdot community. Are there any of you interested in organizing ?
Thanks for the insight
Please take this complaint. I will never buy a DVD (or copy damaged CD) with ``piracy'' protection". This is simply because most of these systems are used in a way that hurt me (the customer). Here are some things:
I have a DVD player that is now stuck on region 2. Thanks to Toshiba's change your region max 5 times firmware.
Time I've wasted working around this crap.
I have more issues but the the time one is enough. Before I realized just how much damage region coding restrictions did to me I spent thousands on DVD's. I now spend NOTHING.
Before I change back to buying DVD's I will require that all the encryption nonsense and region coding nonsense be dropped and a legally binding statement that if they ever pull this off again they will pay me damages enough to send them bankrupt.
This is not an endorsement of JFFS, it's just an example of a flash friendly journalling filesystem. (I have not used it - it may be the best filesystem ever, I don't know).
Care to cite the thing ? Or are you too afraid of a copyright violation ?
Look idiot, think a little. Using a ATM, they record your biometric data (retinal, fingerprint, whatever) and allow your transaction to go through and record the info. Later, they replay the transaction electronically and rob you.
We're starting this relationship well with tad name calling and huge misconceptions. You have no idea.
Buddy, there is far more happening in the biometric space than you can shake a stick at. Do some research.
How do you think biometrics work? They scan you and convert the information into a long number or identifier. Then they compare that number with the number they have on file. If the two match (or are reasonably close) then the ATM thinks it is you. If you have an ATM (or can connect to the ATM system) you can enter the mag-stripe data, the pin, and the biometric info directly. And as others have pointed out, you can be issued a new card & pin, but biometric info is yours forever.
Electronically won't work. As soon as your fraudulent ATM is discovered, you and your cash are toast. It's too much work for so little money and so much risk.
If you check your hotmail account at a webcafe, your password is protected from sniffing by SSL, but how do you know the webcafe doesn't have a keylogger running? You don't. You can't trust the platform. Same thing with an ATM.
Unfortunately, if the machine at that cafe is compromised by someone leaving a tojan in there, you're toast because all your keystrokes are belong to us.
To get money out of your account, they would need to be you for one. Secondly, when the crook shows up at an ATM, you can immediatly identify that they are a crook and who the crook is.
Sounds good to me.
I'd like to thank the author on so many excellent points. He probably knows that this article will be met with flame.
Unfortunatly, I have a parallel set of horror stories.
I think there are a number of factors have brought this situation around but the predominant factor is the Peter principle on a mass scale for management at technology companies.
This has happened as a symptom of fighting between the technologically challenged and the technologically gifted continue because of failure to communicate. Software engineers (any engineers) live in the reality warp between social needs and scientific envelopes. Hence the difficulty for some managers to truly comprehend what engineers are saying. For a software enginner to be successful, they must bend their reality to meet artificial and often nonsensical goals. When a software engineer meets a near absolute issue, it is often impossible for them to communicate the level of risk. Hence the technically challenged management is unable to comprehend the gravity of the risk. Hence the ultimate breakdown of trust.
Example scenario:
IT administrator wants to "be more secure" and rules on creating a firewall. (often for selfish purposes - i.e. to attain experience) Engineer's job just got harder and asks IT guy for reasoning. IT guy responds with a "management told me" response. Engineer grunts in disapproval and moves on because the past experiences with discussing this with management have never been fruitful. As a cancer grows so does this process and finally, no-one does anything.
This has nothing to do with large companies, I've seen it happen in small companies as well.
I have managed many software development teams in large and small companies (as the director of SW dev) and I often have had to simply ask that my engineering team do all the administration. It's amazing how a bunch of smart developers can take the job of 5 administators and turn it into an hour a month kind of duty. Hence, I now look for developers that are skilled in all aspects of computers, from writing software to being able to administer an installation of machines.
If you look at high profile examples (like *both* Space Shuttle disasters) you can see that this problem is endemic in the a bureaucracy as one of the evolutionary stages. Unfortunatly, if the management at the very top of an organization can't understand this, the outcome is inevitable.
Here are some URL's and you can see what is happening in the world where management and engineers fail to communicate:e sson.htm a manujam.errors.html
http://whyfiles.org/185accident/index.html
http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/ecology/l
http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/031120.R
The patents must only cover the extensions that came in 1995 for long file names in the FAT file system. Linux was supporting long files names in FAT file systems before the patent using the UMSDOS filesystem and it worked like a charm.
I see 2 options, the first is that you can claim that the MS patents are invalid because of prior art (namely UMSDOS) and have the patents re-examined. The success depends on wether MS cited it as a prior art. Secondly, you can simply stop using long file names.
There are some technological things you could do as well but I have to agree with another poster that JFFS (or somthing like it) makes far more sense.
Well, not totally true. Many people have left Microsoft and those lucrative stock options because of just that - but it's not usually billg that is the issue, it's the cluless management that he has in place in some groups that as such silly things. (I know - I left them)
I've seen reports lately of batteries blowing up.
Nokia: Other Batteries Explode
Google
While you make a good point that battery technology has failed to make the leaps that other technologies (like disk drive technology, for example) have, the issue remains, increasing energy density may cause explosions (batteries blow - literally), other technologies in comparison don't have similar failure modes (few, if any, disk drives cause serious injuries).