I read the article, and here's is how the abstract reads: User-selected customization information for a network (e.g., HTML) document is stored at a server with reference to user identifying information that uniquely identifies the user. Whenever the user navigates back to the network address of the HTML document, the user is identified automatically and receives a customized HTML document formed in accordance with the customization information.
I'm not legal expert, but it sounds as if they just patented portals... you know, like http://my.yahoo.com... where you customize the information you want to see so whenever you use this page as your home site, your receive a "a customized HTML document formed in accordance with the customization informatio."
If so, what does this do to all the phpNuke, postNuke, phpWebsite and other mom-n-pop driven portals out there?
Yup... guess I'll have to do as them ads say... use only original AC/Delco parts
Same with my John Deer lawnmower... no more generic Home-Depot replacement parts for me.
Same goes for the little screws that hold the legs on my Webber Grill.
Oh, and I guess I can forget about using them 3rd party vacuum cleaner bags on my Hoover.
Hmmm... I can see it now. Whenever I want to burninate a DVD, I'll have to use original Dell media.
But let's get real here. Does this mean I can't use some indescript spool of thread repair the patented stitching on my ThinkGeek shirt?
Kidding aside. It almost sounds like this judgement essentially says I'm either 'leasing' or 'licensing' the daggone Lexmark printer. In which case, I'll just buy something else.
So I guess the first question that comes to my mind is, will a products such as ZoneAlarm stop this? And if so... will any penalties result from blocking?
Not being a legal beagle, will there be any legal recourse for those who might be aquitted?
Personally, I would think it tough for an individual to smack back the RIAA in such a case without the aid of a constituency of an equal or greater legal power.
What Fortune 500 company would spend the bucks now while the legal picture so ambivious?
I want to know who so I can sell short their stocks... seriously... any company this quick to jump is to me technically clueless and is bound to take a dive.
Maybe, but remember there was lousy pre-packaged music made back in the sixties too. Bubble-gum pop in the 60's, bad disco in the 70's and hair bands in the 80's.
I agree with you... but this isn't about being nostalgic for "WHAM"... but rather wanting to hear some music that takes risks. Sure Bowie was a bit glitzy, but musically and technically he stepped over to the edge. So did Pink Floyd in many respects.
Now to find such innovations, I have to sift through MP3.com.
And just to make up for my mistake, here is a parody that pretty sums up my last comment... that the quality of today's music seems a bit canned to the passion of some of the FUNK we had just 20 short years ago.
I realize the article cites organized crime as the real culprit... but couldn't one of the other causes be the low quality of music?
Meaning, as more and more merchandising of the performer comes into play, we get more and more "teenie-bopper" mediocrity such as Britney Spears and O-Town... neither of whom could hold a candle to some of the rich-n-thick textures and beats of groups past such as George Plimpton's Parliment, the Tower of Power, or even going back further to the Beatles, who made some serious musical and technical innovation with renderings such as Yellow Submarine?
As the original contractor/code-monkey on the INSPASS project, I'm amazed it only took 10 years to cut through enough of the beaurocratic B.S.
Aside from the very REAL issue of "who owns the data," were battles over smart cards, chips, which biometric was better, how to store the data. I remember one prototype was a smart card augmented with a 2d barcode, a regular barcode, an OCR-B readable (for hand geometry), and a magstripe... with a photo.
Of course, precision of card printing being what it is, the photo would often obscure or otherwise make the data in the other formats unreadable.
Now the question is how fast will they be able to look up the data at the ports of entry? Hopefully, the squabbling between INS and Customs is done and over. Back then, INS accessed a variety of "look-ups" via Customs. It wasn't pretty.
Let's see if this not only makes the system more reliable, but speeds things up.
Now the killer question, is this cool tool a good replacement for Windows based products such as CoolEdit or Cakewalk's Sonar? I've been a long time user of the later since the DOS days, but have become increasingly annoyed by latency issues as a result of the operating system.
I'm not only encouraged to make the switch by tools such as Ardour, but the increasing support for MIDI & Sound cards AND if need be, tweak my Linux Kernel for real-time music, MIDI & sound performance.
Now I just need to find an equivalent to Dave Phillips' "Sound & Midi Software for Linux" page for Video editing & DVD production.
I'm just kidding, still, considering the pounds of snow we had to shovel this past winter here in the Costal Mid Atlantic USA, I could have used a bit-o-warm sun.
The CNN article makes an intersting point good point In the 1990s, it seemed all one had to do to buy a ticket to Easy Street was learn a programming language or how to manage corporate computer networks.
Okay, so I've learned a dozen ways to shoot my foot clean off -- and now this article asserts that my skills are just as easily found abroad as here locally.
But is that really what is happening. When I read the above quote, I wonder, how many QUALITY programmers are losing their jobs to concerns overseas?
Similarly, if this is the case, okay, so now what? The computers didn't disappear, nor is the need for software going to go away.
Do we work for less? Do we (dare I say it) unionize? Pass laws? Comments, please.
This project has been in the works for almost 10 years, starting with the INS Accellerated Passenger Program (INSPASS) that used hand-geometry encoded as OCR-A text on a credit-card.
Some time after that project, fingerprints were coupled with photos to track illegal aliens as they came across the border. So someone who got caught in El Paso would come up on the system in San Deigo.
I believe that was back in 1995 when I worked on those contracts.
I always thought Sun made a mistake by not working with Microsoft when it came to Java -- especially with regards to Sun's . Some of the weaknesses I read in the article are exactly what Microsoft aimed at with their.NET architecture.
Perhaps I'm just showing my age, but perhaps a paragraph or two on the the MagnavoxOdyssey and it's betaMax-like demise may be just the history we need so later failures learn the lesson before trying and dying on the lonely shelves of stores and warehouses.
hasn't received much attention until recently?
on
XML and Perl
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The reviewer is correct, Perl is a good tool for slamming and jammin' text, including XML. What I'm not so sure of is the quote "It's therefore surprising that using Perl for XML processing hasn't received much attention until recently."
I mean one need only scroll down the extensive list of CPAN Modules to see well over 50, as well as many sites/authors devoting time, energy and resource.
Point is, though I personally love Perl, blatant plugs such as "... it's just that the world outside of the Perl community doesn't seem to have taken much notice of this work. This is all set to change with the publication of this book and O'Reilly's Perl and XML." " don't inspire confidence in the reviewer's objectivity.
Cheez-Wiz, this paper doesn't sound anywhere as glamorous as those 'Lincoln Tech" ads on late night television promising me millions of dollars and pretty women. Foo!
Actually, it is interesting to see he starts out with debugging -- how many of us have seen wanna-be programmers come and go when the project hits the dreaded maintenance cycle. Provided of course they can make it through the Yourdon-esque death-march.
I'm still not clear why the Southern Baptist Convention wants to involve itself with such a clearly satanic technology. Better go read the article....... oh, SBC Communications. Never mind.
I know the author of the article says he's sorta writing a satire of another article (yes, some of us do read the article) --- but one point he makes I think strikes home at some potential problems downline for Microsoft when he writes
9. Dev tools. Student versions of VB start at like $100. Try developing something on VMS without spending $60,000, and then try to make application without taking a class or reading book. VB has a WIZARD to create an app. And, if you want the enterprise level, you'll never have to spend more that $1000 for you PC to get all the dev tools.
The problem is that the development tools have indeed become too expensive. Long gone are the days where one could buy a simple 'Turbo' this or 'Visual' that compiler for $99.95. And along with that, goes much of the supportive development by independent programmers and small companies.
Similarly, have you seen what it takes in the way of system resources to write a simple COM component perhaps a XML-based web service on.NET Arguably, it is the inexpensive compiler that encouraged us to suffer through MS-DOS and early versions of Windows over other operating systems because you could at least roll something on your own. I don't see that happening with the new breed.NET.
Sure, J2EE is a behemoth as well, but at least you're not going to get licensed out the wazoo and knickle-n-dimed to death when you write your 150 lines to say "Hello World!"
Need proof? Turbo Pascal -- it changed the way we looked at the PC.
I understand what Robin Gross' group is trying to do. I'm not quite clear on how or what. Are they lobbyists, politicians. A consortium of business men and women?
And how well funded are the. Will they be able to compete with the schrill voice of the RIAA? Will they be able to do anything in D.C.?
I read bot the MBDC and Ford releases -- not much in the way of specs. Certainly nothing about maximum and minimum speeds. Maintenance requirements and/or torque/pulling power.
I mean, I like the idea of supercharged hydrogen (Hindenburg accidents excluded) -- but I would think these are issues Ford would want to publish as it markets this 118hp vehicle against one of its own 590hp monsters.
Amongst things touched upon are the open-source business model, how vendors will be tempted into locking in customers into their offerings, and other things.
Not until there is agreement and cooperation between the gnome & KDE contest -- and not until Star/OpenOffice begins a concerted campaign to replace MS Office (e.g. marketing, money, superbowl advertising) -- not until those things happen will Linux win fealty.
I know this is a bit xenaphobic, but what does this ruling mean to those of us in the U.S.? If it's overturned, or if the ruling stands, will it have any impact on those of us under the DMCA and the RIAA?
Slashdot Mirror
I read the article, and here's is how the abstract reads:
User-selected customization information for a network (e.g., HTML) document is stored at a server with reference to user identifying information that uniquely identifies the user. Whenever the user navigates back to the network address of the HTML document, the user is identified automatically and receives a customized HTML document formed in accordance with the customization information.
I'm not legal expert, but it sounds as if they just patented portals
If so, what does this do to all the phpNuke, postNuke, phpWebsite and other mom-n-pop driven portals out there?
I sure hope no one took the offensive and used tools such as wget, lynx and/or curl for evil instead of for good
As tempting as such technologies are
Which is why I'm so glad I can ignore such countermeasures and simply use Jay's excellent plug-in!
Yup
Same with my John Deer lawnmower
Same goes for the little screws that hold the legs on my Webber Grill.
Oh, and I guess I can forget about using them 3rd party vacuum cleaner bags on my Hoover.
Hmmm
But let's get real here. Does this mean I can't use some indescript spool of thread repair the patented stitching on my ThinkGeek shirt?
Kidding aside. It almost sounds like this judgement essentially says I'm either 'leasing' or 'licensing' the daggone Lexmark printer. In which case, I'll just buy something else.
So I guess the first question that comes to my mind is, will a products such as ZoneAlarm stop this? And if so
Wasn't this already accomplished back in 1992 by a Brit and his dog?
Sorry, couldn't resist. Still, 30 years later you'd think they might just skip the moon and hitch a rid with us to Mars.
Not being a legal beagle, will there be any legal recourse for those who might be aquitted?
Personally, I would think it tough for an individual to smack back the RIAA in such a case without the aid of a constituency of an equal or greater legal power.
Question is, do any such organizations exists?
What Fortune 500 company would spend the bucks now while the legal picture so ambivious?
... seriously ... any company this quick to jump is to me technically clueless and is bound to take a dive.
I want to know who so I can sell short their stocks
Maybe, but remember there was lousy pre-packaged music made back in the sixties too. Bubble-gum pop in the 60's, bad disco in the 70's and hair bands in the 80's.
... but this isn't about being nostalgic for "WHAM" ... but rather wanting to hear some music that takes risks. Sure Bowie was a bit glitzy, but musically and technically he stepped over to the edge. So did Pink Floyd in many respects.
I agree with you
Now to find such innovations, I have to sift through MP3.com.
And just to make up for my mistake, here is a parody that pretty sums up my last comment ... that the quality of today's music seems a bit canned to the passion of some of the FUNK we had just 20 short years ago.
... aside from crime syndicates popping Madonna CD's, I think the other crime affecting CD sales is pandering to the "American Idol" crowd.
The Onion Mothership Accidentally Descends On Hootie Concert
Point is
I realize the article cites organized crime as the real culprit ... but couldn't one of the other causes be the low quality of music?
... neither of whom could hold a candle to some of the rich-n-thick textures and beats of groups past such as George Plimpton's Parliment, the Tower of Power, or even going back further to the Beatles, who made some serious musical and technical innovation with renderings such as Yellow Submarine?
... it all sounds so contrived.
Meaning, as more and more merchandising of the performer comes into play, we get more and more "teenie-bopper" mediocrity such as Britney Spears and O-Town
I mean, now
Bah, perhaps its because I'm an old poop now.
As the original contractor/code-monkey on the INSPASS project, I'm amazed it only took 10 years to cut through enough of the beaurocratic B.S.
... with a photo.
Aside from the very REAL issue of "who owns the data," were battles over smart cards, chips, which biometric was better, how to store the data. I remember one prototype was a smart card augmented with a 2d barcode, a regular barcode, an OCR-B readable (for hand geometry), and a magstripe
Of course, precision of card printing being what it is, the photo would often obscure or otherwise make the data in the other formats unreadable.
Now the question is how fast will they be able to look up the data at the ports of entry? Hopefully, the squabbling between INS and Customs is done and over. Back then, INS accessed a variety of "look-ups" via Customs. It wasn't pretty.
Let's see if this not only makes the system more reliable, but speeds things up.
Now the killer question, is this cool tool a good replacement for Windows based products such as CoolEdit or Cakewalk's Sonar? I've been a long time user of the later since the DOS days, but have become increasingly annoyed by latency issues as a result of the operating system.
I'm not only encouraged to make the switch by tools such as Ardour, but the increasing support for MIDI & Sound cards AND if need be, tweak my Linux Kernel for real-time music, MIDI & sound performance.
Now I just need to find an equivalent to Dave Phillips' "Sound & Midi Software for Linux" page for Video editing & DVD production.
I'm just kidding, still, considering the pounds of snow we had to shovel this past winter here in the Costal Mid Atlantic USA, I could have used a bit-o-warm sun.
The CNN article makes an intersting point good point
In the 1990s, it seemed all one had to do to buy a ticket to Easy Street was learn a programming language or how to manage corporate computer networks.
Okay, so I've learned a dozen ways to shoot my foot clean off -- and now this article asserts that my skills are just as easily found abroad as here locally.
But is that really what is happening. When I read the above quote, I wonder, how many QUALITY programmers are losing their jobs to concerns overseas?
Similarly, if this is the case, okay, so now what? The computers didn't disappear, nor is the need for software going to go away.
Do we work for less? Do we (dare I say it) unionize? Pass laws? Comments, please.
This project has been in the works for almost 10 years, starting with the INS Accellerated Passenger Program (INSPASS) that used hand-geometry encoded as OCR-A text on a credit-card.
Some time after that project, fingerprints were coupled with photos to track illegal aliens as they came across the border. So someone who got caught in El Paso would come up on the system in San Deigo.
I believe that was back in 1995 when I worked on those contracts.
I always thought Sun made a mistake by not working with Microsoft when it came to Java -- especially with regards to Sun's . Some of the weaknesses I read in the article are exactly what Microsoft aimed at with their
On a lighter note, "Mean Dean's Semi-Definitive Guide to Selecting a Programming Language" describes the process of shooting yourself in the foot with Java as "The gun fires just fine, but your foot can't figure out what the bullets are and ignores them."
Perhaps I'm just showing my age, but perhaps a paragraph or two on the the Magnavox Odyssey and it's betaMax-like demise may be just the history we need so later failures learn the lesson before trying and dying on the lonely shelves of stores and warehouses.
The reviewer is correct, Perl is a good tool for slamming and jammin' text, including XML. What I'm not so sure of is the quote "It's therefore surprising that using Perl for XML processing hasn't received much attention until recently."
I mean one need only scroll down the extensive list of CPAN Modules to see well over 50, as well as many sites/authors devoting time, energy and resource.
Similarly, I would point out some press modules supporting web services via XML, such as SOAP::Lite as far back as 02/26/01 and XML-RPC also in '01 -- or O'Reilly's own XML.com with articles such as "Processing XML with Perl" written shortly after the turn of the millenium.
Point is, though I personally love Perl, blatant plugs such as "... it's just that the world outside of the Perl community doesn't seem to have taken much notice of this work. This is all set to change with the publication of this book and O'Reilly's Perl and XML." " don't inspire confidence in the reviewer's objectivity.
Cheez-Wiz, this paper doesn't sound anywhere as glamorous as those 'Lincoln Tech" ads on late night television promising me millions of dollars and pretty women. Foo!
Actually, it is interesting to see he starts out with debugging -- how many of us have seen wanna-be programmers come and go when the project hits the dreaded maintenance cycle. Provided of course they can make it through the Yourdon-esque death-march.
I'm still not clear why the Southern Baptist Convention wants to involve itself with such a clearly satanic technology. Better go read the article ... .... oh, SBC Communications. Never mind.
I know the author of the article says he's sorta writing a satire of another article (yes, some of us do read the article) --- but one point he makes I think strikes home at some potential problems downline for Microsoft when he writesThe problem is that the development tools have indeed become too expensive. Long gone are the days where one could buy a simple 'Turbo' this or 'Visual' that compiler for $99.95. And along with that, goes much of the supportive development by independent programmers and small companies.
Similarly, have you seen what it takes in the way of system resources to write a simple COM component perhaps a XML-based web service on
Sure, J2EE is a behemoth as well, but at least you're not going to get licensed out the wazoo and knickle-n-dimed to death when you write your 150 lines to say "Hello World!"
Need proof? Turbo Pascal -- it changed the way we looked at the PC.
I understand what Robin Gross' group is trying to do. I'm not quite clear on how or what. Are they lobbyists, politicians. A consortium of business men and women?
And how well funded are the. Will they be able to compete with the schrill voice of the RIAA? Will they be able to do anything in D.C.?
I read bot the MBDC and Ford releases -- not much in the way of specs. Certainly nothing about maximum and minimum speeds. Maintenance requirements and/or torque/pulling power.
I mean, I like the idea of supercharged hydrogen (Hindenburg accidents excluded) -- but I would think these are issues Ford would want to publish as it markets this 118hp vehicle against one of its own 590hp monsters.
Amongst things touched upon are the open-source business model, how vendors will be tempted into locking in customers into their offerings, and other things.
Not until there is agreement and cooperation between the gnome & KDE contest -- and not until Star/OpenOffice begins a concerted campaign to replace MS Office (e.g. marketing, money, superbowl advertising) -- not until those things happen will Linux win fealty.
I know this is a bit xenaphobic, but what does this ruling mean to those of us in the U.S.? If it's overturned, or if the ruling stands, will it have any impact on those of us under the DMCA and the RIAA?