Stallman's right IMHO. In this case that's good.
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
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· Score: 4
As I read the law, Stallman is right:
Companies can keep their internal modifications secret as long as they don't distribute the code OUTSIDE their non-disclosure boundary - and once they distribute the object outside that boundary, they must also distribute the source.
Giving the code to people INSIDE the non-disclosure boundary is not "distribution" within the meaning of the GPL, so it does not confer on such people the right to disclose the modified code without the approval of the company's official decision-making process.
This is good. It means that a company can adopt GPLed open-source software without taking an increased risk that any company-secret changes they make for internal use only will be disclosed without their permission. That will make them more willing to adopt GPLed open-source software.
They'll still have to distribute the source to their changes if they distribute the changes themselves generally. And they're more likely to distribute anything useful but NON-company-secret than they would if they were working with closed-source code.
The only problem I see is if this speculation by legally-uninformed people, raising a spectre of employees disclosing their secrets, scares off management that otherwise would adopt GNU-licensed code.
Some years ago I was crossing the Detroit/Windsor border on the Ambassador bridge occasionally. There was a Macdonalds at the end of the bridge. It looked JUST like a US Macdonald's except for a little red maple leaf logo at the intersection of the two arches.
Turns out there was a story behind it...
It seems that when Macdonald's got their trademark, they only got it for the USA and somehow neglected Canada. Somebody in Canada checked - and then trademarked it. Then he cloned the ENTIRE Macdonald's Speedy Service System, including every last menu item (which were also not trademarked in Canada) and started opening franchises all over - including the one at the end of the Ambassador Bridge.
Well after some months a Macdonald's executive noticed, and a a company official was duly dispatched to order them to cease and desist. The owner laughed, pointed in the direction of the bridge, and asked the official if he had noticed the line across the bridge, right at the middle. Then he explained in small words that the line marked the boundary between the US and Canada, and he was in Canada now, and that Canada was a different country, and Macdonald's USA didn't own the trademark there, but HE did, and that they could go whistle.
So Macdonald's Speedy Service System sued (in Canadian court, of course). And lost. And the guy operated his restaurants for quite a while. Meanwhile Macdonald's began adding new food items and were careful to get the Canadian trademark on them. Macdonald's Canada couldn't clone them, of course, or at leaset not with the US names. But that didn't hurt them particularly.
Eventually Macdonald's US broke down and bought the guy out for some non-trivial number of megabux.
The encryption export controls were intended to increase national security, by enabling the NSA to continue to intercept and decode foreign traffic.
They have instead had the effect of decreasing national security, by preventing US citizens and corporations from hardening their information infrastructure.
Recently it has come to our government's attention that foreign governments, including many likely to become wartime enemies of the US, have set up cyber-warfare groups within their military, with the express purpose of waging offensive information warfare, including massive attacks on the US civilian information infrastructure.
Perhaps this proposal is a sign that our fearless leaders have finally sprayed themselves with clue musk and done a clue mating dance during clue mating season...
@Home has bigger fish to fry. Like what, you say?... people who host commercial sites on their cable modems
I can see the rest of your "bigger fish". But if they're claiming to be a high-bandwidth internet service provider, people will be buying the service with the expectation that they can use the internet services - which includes setting up home businesses.
If @home bans such things, and doesn't make that clear in their advertising (fine print in contracts don't count), they're defrauding their customers.
And if their workers weren't on a search-and-destroy mission for commercial sites and game servers, they'd have more time to deal with spammers. B-)
To be an illegal DOS attack they'd have to trick a server into canceling the articles against the wishes of the operator of the SERVER. Canceling messages against the wishes of the originator of the MESSAGE is fair game - because the operator of the SERVER is not required to carry the messages. The cancel requests themselves are advisory, not mandatory (though their processing is automatic, so the server operators must accept or reject them by policy rules rather than manually).
The cancel messages are formed in such a way that the operators of the servers can easily chose (by configuration options) to accept or ignore them.
Even better, the operators of the servers can selectively accpet or reject cancels from a particular instance of the UDP, certain classes of them, or UDPs in general (without regard to the policy on non-UDP cancel messages).
It'd be nice to see this extended to other services, I'm not sure how feasable it would be. I suppose a centralized procmail filter database would be feasible.
Take a look at the Realtime Black Hole List. This is a DNS-based hack that publishes the domain names of sites that allow spammers to send through their mailservers - in a form that lets mail transfer agents do a quick DNS inquiry and dump mail if it is coming from such a site.
Interestingly, it's an example of anarchism in action. Anybody can publish such a list. Anybody can hack their sendmail to use such a list - and pick any such list they chose. (As far as I know there's only one such list at the moment - probably a sign that it's doing a good job.)
The RBH client code is included in current Linux distributions. (I saw it as a {recommended} sendmail configuration option in Red Hat 6.1, for instance.) I've heard estimates that about 60% of the email inboxes in the world are now behind mail transfer agents that subscribe to RBH and thus bounce mail from any site on the list.
Prior art: In the early 1960s I did a science fair project: "A Relay Computer for Recognizing Handwritten Characters"
You drew a block capital letter on a printed circuit board with a test prod. There was a painted template to show you where to draw - essentially a 2x2 square grid plus the diagonals. There were several traces on the PC board, and touching a trace latched a relay, thus tracking the prod's motion.
I don't recall the exact year, but I graduated high-school in 1965 and this predates that. (Even then it wasn't totally original: I was "improving" a simpler device which predated it, that I'd seen in the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. That one recognized the digits zero through nine.)
So let's see: Writing stylized characters on a sensitive surface with a stylus. Real-time tracking of the motion and electonic extraction of significant features resulting in the recognition of all the letters of the alphabet...
Of course if I'd patented it then it would be expired by now...
3Com, which has sold more than 5 million of the Palm devices, has filed to sell a stake of the Palm Computing unit in an initial public offering.
Some time ago somebody got a patent on using a bitwise XOR of a cursor image with the image under it to keep the cursor form obscuring the image.
He (actually - a handfull of lawyers who bought the patent from him) then made a bunch of money off from it, as follows:
Every time a Silicon Valley company was going for IPO they'd wait until they were committed. Then they'd file a patent infringement suit. WHETHER THEIR PRODUCT HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH XOR CURSORS OR NOT! And he'd offer to settle and license the patent for a few grand.
Now the LAST thing you want when you're going for IPO is to have a lawsuit - no matter how bogus - working its way through the courts (at the usual glacial pace). This could cost you millions. So everybody would talk to their lawyers, and fume and fuss, and end up paying these jerks their few grand (and signing the agreement not to sue them after the IPO was done).
There were rumors that some people were so mad they were looking for a hit man.
But for YEARS they got away with it. And got several thousand dollars from essentially EVERY new silicon valley startup!
So now here's Xerox sitting on a patent for THEIR contrived character set-based handwriting recognizer - with claims that seem to cover doing handwriting recognition by watching a stylus move on a slate. And there's 3Com spinning off the Palm Computing operation in an IPO - an operation built on a different contrived character set-based handwriting recognizer. And the Xerox execs have decided that they want to make money off their patents...
So they file suit against 3Com just as their spinoff is going IPO. Even though (assuming another/. poster is correct) the 3Com system was announced in the press the year BEFORE they FILED for the patent.
``Clearly, we would like to either reach a settlement with 3Com out of court, or continue to pursue the remedies that are available through the court action,'' Simek said, adding that Xerox ``has always been open'' to a settlement.
SURE they're "open to a settlement". With a nice ironclad settlement contract that includes 3Com giving up the right to press charges of extortion.
Xerox also made mainframes for a while. Leased them out like IBM and the whole nine yards. Their suits decided that they were losing too much money on it, and pulled the plug. Then they sued IBM for unfair competition.
As a result of discovery, IBM was able to get their financial records. As a result of their extensive experience with leasing equipment (like ALL the mainframes on which they built their computer operation), their suits were able to understand the numbers. Like a lot better than Xerox suits were.
Turns out that Xerox had been making money hand-over-fist on their mainframes, too. But their executives didn't know enough about the leasing business to understand that. B-) The case got laughed out of court.
And of course pulling the plug on the loyal customers meant that Xerox couldn't restart their mainframe operation.
I recall a few decades back when an organization was putting together the CDP (Certified Data-processing Professional) exam. This was supposed to test programmers and let the suits know which were good enough to handle their jobs.
It was also a rather Co$tly little test. And the organization developing it planned to run itself on the money it charged for the tests and to joion their association.
Most programmers (myself included) considered it to be a crock, and thought the organization promoting it was trying to set up a protection racket, where their association members would be the only ones who would be employable. (And that even if it were in good faith, the field was so broad that any test would be ghettoized and would mainly measure which part of the field you were in, not how good you were.) So we boycotted it in droves, and it never took off.
Nowdays CDP is a dead issue.
Which is probably just as well, given that that these days Data Professionals don't do much with COBOL or RPG. B-)
They are making the same mistake as Casio did when they came out with their color projection TV based on a slide projector light source and lens, dichroic mirrors, and three monocrhome LCDs. It was tiny. It COULD have been high quality and inexpensive.
Instead they used crummy low-res LCDs apparently left over from their midget black-and-white Radio Shack grade pocket TV sets. Half of TV resolution in each dimension, for an overall pixel count of 1/4 that of a normal TV set. (Then the projection lens blew it up to wall-covering size.) Rectangular (not square) pixels - so computer graphcis is a pain. To make it even harder: pixels arranged in a brick pattern (each row offset 1/2 pixel from its neighbors). And with a black border (i.e. "the mortar") around the pixels. (Blown up to wall size it really showed.) And to top it off they wanted several thousand dollars a unit. B-b
This thing needs square pixels, 640x480 at dead minimum. And it should have a separate screen and interface for each eye - at least as an option.
I recognize those earphones - I used to use the earphone-only equivalent all the time. Good audio. But they're fragile. They (actually their cabling) need to be plug replacable, or the headset will fail in about 3 months of use.
The VR folk have a term for the generation of nausia when the visual image and the inner-ear sensations don't match.
It's "Barfogenisis"
(Example: The Star Trek ride at Disneyland has just enough mismatch that, at least for me, there was slight nausea which hit as I was leaving the ride.)
Apparently this is a survival mechanism: Under prehistoric, evolutionarily-significant conditions, the main thing that would cause significant mismatch between the motion perceived by the eyes and the inner ears was ingestion of a neurotoxin - typically from a poisonous mushroom or spoiled food. In such a situation, immediately emptying the stomach had a significant chance of allowing the victim to survive to reproduce when he would otherwise have died.
I think that even if you are not making any money from the implementation of a patented algorithm, you can be sued for damages related to the destruction of the POTENTIAL revenue stream that the company (or individual) might have made had they been able to use their patent.
Hmmm...
They must put sufficient description of the algorithm into the patent for anyone skilled in the field to be able to replicate the invention. The patent is published by the Patent Office. A piece of software that actually runs on a machine is just another description of the patented algorithm. It's only the use that infringes, not publishing a translation of the description (which happens to be clear enough that a computer can "understand" it, too).
Seems to me that if they can sue the open-source coder, they should also be able to sue the patent office - or anyone who publishes a textbook that describes the patented technique. B-)
Unfortunately, most (all) of the good video compression algorithms are patented and cannot be used.
I was under the impression that patents block the use of the patented item COMMERCIALLY - but that you can make one for your own personal, experimental use, provided you don't sell it or the product of its operation.
Assuming the above is true - it would imply that one could make open-souce codecs and use them to compress and view movies, and that these codecs could be distributed, provided it was for free.
There would be a violation if you showed, gave, or sold decoded movies to others (which is typically already a copyright violation), distributed video you'd encoded using the patented codec, or charged (even a media fee) for a distribution containing the codec source. So no servers and no including the codec in a commercial Linux distribution - the customer would have to download it from an open web/ftp site.
Do we have a patent lawyer in the house, to check whether my understanding is correct?
The list above only mentions the Compaq Presario 5600 series. I just bought a 5800 series machine (5888 - their current 700 Mhz Athlon box) and it also has firewire.
So it looks like Compaq is sticking with it for a longer haul.
In particular, there's a question I want to ask him, where his answer can be seen by many.
I am a small-l libertarian, i.e. I never joined the Party (due to a minor issue with the wording of the pledge). I characterize my political leanings as "law 'n order anarchist" (or sometimes "... minarchist").
By that, I mean that we should repeal all (or most) of the laws. But it is important that certain of them be repealed in the right ORDER. Most big-L Libertarians seem willing to repeal them in any order, taking every target of opportunity.
A case in point: The wealth-redistribution entitlements (welfare, child support, medical assistance, etc.) must go (or be significantly limited or modified) before the immigration restrictions can be releaxed.
I really hate imbeciles who bring the Nazis in to support *any* point of view.
I really hate imbeciles who dismiss out-of-hand any reference to the way the Nazis really were, and any comparison between their actions and those of a contemporary group. Such dismissal is extremely convenient for both neo-Nazis and those advocating feel-good political movements which lead to the empowerment of such totalitarian movements.
"Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it." If the ACTUAL history of the Nazis can be suppressed for about twenty years, we can expect to see them again - under another name, with a few details changed, but with the full "power and glory" intact.
And I'm not talking about twenty years from NOW. This has been going on for a while.
Read _The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich_ some time. And be very afraid.
They had to risk suffering to determine whether this stuff would maim little kids would be maimed by this stuff before it went on the market.
Animal rightists should pledge not to accept any medical treatment that was tested on animals - and wear a medic alert to that effect so the emergency room people will know to withhold such treatment if they're brought in unconscious.
My wife would have been dead long before I met her if not for animal research, and my best friend would have only one leg. Another close friend is a quadraplegic right now, and will probably remain so until he dies because of the government's ban on foetal tissue research.
One of the components of the Nazi mindset was animal rights - and it led in easy steps through replacement of lab animals with retarded humans and the definition of certain groups as "subhuman" to the "Medical Research" in the death camps.
I have no sympathy for people whose brains are so addled that they value the lives and health of rodents above the lives and health of human beings. That sort of thinking is only appropriate if the thinker is a rodent.
And imagine the thrill of releasing a little into the skimmer pot of a backyard pool! All of the sudden, glowing water starts shooting out of the return nozzles.
You'll probably have to turn off the clorination/ozoneation, or it might denature the proteins.
They need to be told that the internet, like most the rest of the world, is a place for ADULTS. It includes its equivalent of bars, bedrooms, and X-rated bookstores and theatres.
The solution to the perceived problem of kids viewing internet porn is not for government to censor the entire virtual world down to a level suitable for children. The solution is instead for childrens parents, guardians, and other supervisors to watch the kids and make sure they don't frequent the virtual bars, bedrooms, and X-rated theatres. They should not be running about unsupervised on the internet until they're competent to make their own decisions on such matters.
(Wiring the schools for internet is not a wonderful thing. It's actually the government making an excuse to censor internet content.)
there are NO barriers to entry (whatever you may believe about Microsoft) - when it comes down to it, if you think of an idea - you are free to implement it with no cost (other than time) to yourself whatsoever - this is very different from the traditional small inventor picture, where they have to approach others to build their product, or invest an absurd amount of money into making a factory or business themselves.
This is a the key point - though there are other issues related.
The purpose of the patent system is to encourage the advance of technology by trading a limited-time monopoly for a disclosure by the inventor of the guts of the invention. This gives the inventor time to get his invention into production, profit from it, and become established. Later it lets everybody else play - by which time the inventor is likely the established market leader.
Now that's appropriate for a hardware invention - both classic and modern electronic. Such devices require a fabrication facility and production design, which means a big up-front investment which must be amortized over a significant period, and exposure of the invention to many designers and laborers. Giving the inventor (or his partners or the patent-right purchaser) a limited-period monopoly lets him expose the design with the assurance that his work will be protected from competition for that period. This lets him employ enough people to begin high-volume production (with its economy of scale) and take out long-term loans (spreading the cost over many years production). Thus the unit costs are kept low and early volume production is encouraged - to the benefit of the consumer.
But production of proprietary software doesn't require such an investment. A new "killer ap" can be developed in secret by one person or a small number of people. When it's ready, the distribution media are utterly cheap and the unit costs are vanishingly small. A good app provides the user with significant value added. With vanishingly small unit cost and high unit value, profit margins are enormous. So investments can be made back very quickly, and a large pile of money accumulated before the software is cloned - after which the originator is established, a market leader, and a defacto standard, with no help from patents.
The software market was enormously profitable before software patents. (In fact it was enormously profitable even before copyright protection was extended to software.) There's plenty of incentive to volume-market a software product without patentability. And software life cycles are measured in single-digits of years, not decades.
On the other hand, a software patent locks up an invention (or a bogus claim of one) for a couple decades. If the idea is useful beyond the product (if any) that the patent holder choses to market, we all get to sit on our thumbs for a dozen life cycles before these other applications can be written. Bummer!
Thus, unlike hardware patents, software patents RETARD software innovation and REDUCE the availability of new products to the citizen consumer. This is exactly the reverse of what patents are supposed to do.
Software copyright, on the other hand, seems entirely appropriate. (Excluding distortions such as "look and feel", which seek to turn it into another form of patent by misinterpreting user interfaces as if they were movies or plays, or "copyright" of application interfaces and the like.)
Copyright protects the author of proprietary software against unscrupulous "pirates" who would just sell unauthorized copies of his work (at no development cost), without blocking others from designing a competing product using some of the same basic ideas and algorithms (but with development costs and lead time), and without blocking the use of the ideas and algorithms for other, innovative products.
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Companies can keep their internal modifications secret as long as they don't distribute the code OUTSIDE their non-disclosure boundary - and once they distribute the object outside that boundary, they must also distribute the source.
Giving the code to people INSIDE the non-disclosure boundary is not "distribution" within the meaning of the GPL, so it does not confer on such people the right to disclose the modified code without the approval of the company's official decision-making process.
This is good. It means that a company can adopt GPLed open-source software without taking an increased risk that any company-secret changes they make for internal use only will be disclosed without their permission. That will make them more willing to adopt GPLed open-source software.
They'll still have to distribute the source to their changes if they distribute the changes themselves generally. And they're more likely to distribute anything useful but NON-company-secret than they would if they were working with closed-source code.
The only problem I see is if this speculation by legally-uninformed people, raising a spectre of employees disclosing their secrets, scares off management that otherwise would adopt GNU-licensed code.
Some years ago I was crossing the Detroit/Windsor border on the Ambassador bridge occasionally. There was a Macdonalds at the end of the bridge. It looked JUST like a US Macdonald's except for a little red maple leaf logo at the intersection of the two arches.
Turns out there was a story behind it...
It seems that when Macdonald's got their trademark, they only got it for the USA and somehow neglected Canada. Somebody in Canada checked - and then trademarked it. Then he cloned the ENTIRE Macdonald's Speedy Service System, including every last menu item (which were also not trademarked in Canada) and started opening franchises all over - including the one at the end of the Ambassador Bridge.
Well after some months a Macdonald's executive noticed, and a a company official was duly dispatched to order them to cease and desist. The owner laughed, pointed in the direction of the bridge, and asked the official if he had noticed the line across the bridge, right at the middle. Then he explained in small words that the line marked the boundary between the US and Canada, and he was in Canada now, and that Canada was a different country, and Macdonald's USA didn't own the trademark there, but HE did, and that they could go whistle.
So Macdonald's Speedy Service System sued (in Canadian court, of course). And lost. And the guy operated his restaurants for quite a while. Meanwhile Macdonald's began adding new food items and were careful to get the Canadian trademark on them. Macdonald's Canada couldn't clone them, of course, or at leaset not with the US names. But that didn't hurt them particularly.
Eventually Macdonald's US broke down and bought the guy out for some non-trivial number of megabux.
The encryption export controls were intended to increase national security, by enabling the NSA to continue to intercept and decode foreign traffic.
They have instead had the effect of decreasing national security, by preventing US citizens and corporations from hardening their information infrastructure.
Recently it has come to our government's attention that foreign governments, including many likely to become wartime enemies of the US, have set up cyber-warfare groups within their military, with the express purpose of waging offensive information warfare, including massive attacks on the US civilian information infrastructure.
Perhaps this proposal is a sign that our fearless leaders have finally sprayed themselves with clue musk and done a clue mating dance during clue mating season...
@Home has bigger fish to fry. Like what, you say? ... people who host commercial sites on their cable modems
I can see the rest of your "bigger fish". But if they're claiming to be a high-bandwidth internet service provider, people will be buying the service with the expectation that they can use the internet services - which includes setting up home businesses.
If @home bans such things, and doesn't make that clear in their advertising (fine print in contracts don't count), they're defrauding their customers.
And if their workers weren't on a search-and-destroy mission for commercial sites and game servers, they'd have more time to deal with spammers. B-)
To be an illegal DOS attack they'd have to trick a server into canceling the articles against the wishes of the operator of the SERVER. Canceling messages against the wishes of the originator of the MESSAGE is fair game - because the operator of the SERVER is not required to carry the messages. The cancel requests themselves are advisory, not mandatory (though their processing is automatic, so the server operators must accept or reject them by policy rules rather than manually).
The cancel messages are formed in such a way that the operators of the servers can easily chose (by configuration options) to accept or ignore them.
Even better, the operators of the servers can selectively accpet or reject cancels from a particular instance of the UDP, certain classes of them, or UDPs in general (without regard to the policy on non-UDP cancel messages).
It'd be nice to see this extended to other services, I'm not sure how feasable it would be. I suppose a centralized procmail filter database would be feasible.
Take a look at the Realtime Black Hole List. This is a DNS-based hack that publishes the domain names of sites that allow spammers to send through their mailservers - in a form that lets mail transfer agents do a quick DNS inquiry and dump mail if it is coming from such a site.
Interestingly, it's an example of anarchism in action. Anybody can publish such a list. Anybody can hack their sendmail to use such a list - and pick any such list they chose. (As far as I know there's only one such list at the moment - probably a sign that it's doing a good job.)
The RBH client code is included in current Linux distributions. (I saw it as a {recommended} sendmail configuration option in Red Hat 6.1, for instance.) I've heard estimates that about 60% of the email inboxes in the world are now behind mail transfer agents that subscribe to RBH and thus bounce mail from any site on the list.
Prior art: In the early 1960s I did a science fair project: "A Relay Computer for Recognizing Handwritten Characters"
You drew a block capital letter on a printed circuit board with a test prod. There was a painted template to show you where to draw - essentially a 2x2 square grid plus the diagonals. There were several traces on the PC board, and touching a trace latched a relay, thus tracking the prod's motion.
I don't recall the exact year, but I graduated high-school in 1965 and this predates that. (Even then it wasn't totally original: I was "improving" a simpler device which predated it, that I'd seen in the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. That one recognized the digits zero through nine.)
So let's see: Writing stylized characters on a sensitive surface with a stylus. Real-time tracking of the motion and electonic extraction of significant features resulting in the recognition of all the letters of the alphabet...
Of course if I'd patented it then it would be expired by now...
3Com, which has sold more than 5 million of the Palm devices, has filed to sell a stake of the Palm Computing unit in an initial public offering.
/. poster is correct) the 3Com system was announced in the press the year BEFORE they FILED for the patent.
Some time ago somebody got a patent on using a bitwise XOR of a cursor image with the image under it to keep the cursor form obscuring the image.
He (actually - a handfull of lawyers who bought the patent from him) then made a bunch of money off from it, as follows:
Every time a Silicon Valley company was going for IPO they'd wait until they were committed. Then they'd file a patent infringement suit. WHETHER THEIR PRODUCT HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH XOR CURSORS OR NOT! And he'd offer to settle and license the patent for a few grand.
Now the LAST thing you want when you're going for IPO is to have a lawsuit - no matter how bogus - working its way through the courts (at the usual glacial pace). This could cost you millions. So everybody would talk to their lawyers, and fume and fuss, and end up paying these jerks their few grand (and signing the agreement not to sue them after the IPO was done).
There were rumors that some people were so mad they were looking for a hit man.
But for YEARS they got away with it. And got several thousand dollars from essentially EVERY new silicon valley startup!
So now here's Xerox sitting on a patent for THEIR contrived character set-based handwriting recognizer - with claims that seem to cover doing handwriting recognition by watching a stylus move on a slate. And there's 3Com spinning off the Palm Computing operation in an IPO - an operation built on a different contrived character set-based handwriting recognizer. And the Xerox execs have decided that they want to make money off their patents...
So they file suit against 3Com just as their spinoff is going IPO. Even though (assuming another
``Clearly, we would like to either reach a settlement with 3Com out of court, or continue to
pursue the remedies that are available through the court action,'' Simek said, adding that
Xerox ``has always been open'' to a settlement.
SURE they're "open to a settlement". With a nice ironclad settlement contract that includes 3Com giving up the right to press charges of extortion.
(This is second hand. You have been warned.)
Xerox also made mainframes for a while. Leased them out like IBM and the whole nine yards. Their suits decided that they were losing too much money on it, and pulled the plug. Then they sued IBM for unfair competition.
As a result of discovery, IBM was able to get their financial records. As a result of their extensive experience with leasing equipment (like ALL the mainframes on which they built their computer operation), their suits were able to understand the numbers. Like a lot better than Xerox suits were.
Turns out that Xerox had been making money hand-over-fist on their mainframes, too. But their executives didn't know enough about the leasing business to understand that. B-) The case got laughed out of court.
And of course pulling the plug on the loyal customers meant that Xerox couldn't restart their mainframe operation.
I recall a few decades back when an organization was putting together the CDP (Certified Data-processing Professional) exam. This was supposed to test programmers and let the suits know which were good enough to handle their jobs.
It was also a rather Co$tly little test. And the organization developing it planned to run itself on the money it charged for the tests and to joion their association.
Most programmers (myself included) considered it to be a crock, and thought the organization promoting it was trying to set up a protection racket, where their association members would be the only ones who would be employable. (And that even if it were in good faith, the field was so broad that any test would be ghettoized and would mainly measure which part of the field you were in, not how good you were.) So we boycotted it in droves, and it never took off.
Nowdays CDP is a dead issue.
Which is probably just as well, given that that these days Data Professionals don't do much with COBOL or RPG. B-)
As I read it this sends a single display image to both eyes. So if only one eye is working you're not missing anything.
Darn right.
They are making the same mistake as Casio did when they came out with their color projection TV based on a slide projector light source and lens, dichroic mirrors, and three monocrhome LCDs. It was tiny. It COULD have been high quality and inexpensive.
Instead they used crummy low-res LCDs apparently left over from their midget black-and-white Radio Shack grade pocket TV sets. Half of TV resolution in each dimension, for an overall pixel count of 1/4 that of a normal TV set. (Then the projection lens blew it up to wall-covering size.) Rectangular (not square) pixels - so computer graphcis is a pain. To make it even harder: pixels arranged in a brick pattern (each row offset 1/2 pixel from its neighbors). And with a black border (i.e. "the mortar") around the pixels. (Blown up to wall size it really showed.)
And to top it off they wanted several thousand dollars a unit. B-b
This thing needs square pixels, 640x480 at dead minimum. And it should have a separate screen and interface for each eye - at least as an option.
I recognize those earphones - I used to use the earphone-only equivalent all the time. Good audio. But they're fragile. They (actually their cabling) need to be plug replacable, or the headset will fail in about 3 months of use.
The VR folk have a term for the generation of nausia when the visual image and the inner-ear sensations don't match.
It's "Barfogenisis"
(Example: The Star Trek ride at Disneyland has just enough mismatch that, at least for me, there was slight nausea which hit as I was leaving the ride.)
Apparently this is a survival mechanism: Under prehistoric, evolutionarily-significant conditions, the main thing that would cause significant mismatch between the motion perceived by the eyes and the inner ears was ingestion of a neurotoxin - typically from a poisonous mushroom or spoiled food. In such a situation, immediately emptying the stomach had a significant chance of allowing the victim to survive to reproduce when he would otherwise have died.
I think that even if you are not making any money from the implementation of a patented algorithm, you can be sued for damages related to the destruction of the POTENTIAL revenue stream that the company (or individual) might have made had they been able to use their patent.
Hmmm...
They must put sufficient description of the algorithm into the patent for anyone skilled in the field to be able to replicate the invention. The patent is published by the Patent Office. A piece of software that actually runs on a machine is just another description of the patented algorithm. It's only the use that infringes, not publishing a translation of the description (which happens to be clear enough that a computer can "understand" it, too).
Seems to me that if they can sue the open-source coder, they should also be able to sue the patent office - or anyone who publishes a textbook that describes the patented technique. B-)
Unfortunately, most (all) of the good video compression algorithms are patented and cannot be used.
I was under the impression that patents block the use of the patented item COMMERCIALLY - but that you can make one for your own personal, experimental use, provided you don't sell it or the product of its operation.
Assuming the above is true - it would imply that one could make open-souce codecs and use them to compress and view movies, and that these codecs could be distributed, provided it was for free.
There would be a violation if you showed, gave, or sold decoded movies to others (which is typically already a copyright violation), distributed video you'd encoded using the patented codec, or charged (even a media fee) for a distribution containing the codec source. So no servers and no including the codec in a commercial Linux distribution - the customer would have to download it from an open web/ftp site.
Do we have a patent lawyer in the house, to check whether my understanding is correct?
The list above only mentions the Compaq Presario 5600 series. I just bought a 5800 series machine (5888 - their current 700 Mhz Athlon box) and it also has firewire.
So it looks like Compaq is sticking with it for a longer haul.
In particular, there's a question I want to ask him, where his answer can be seen by many.
I am a small-l libertarian, i.e. I never joined the Party (due to a minor issue with the wording of the pledge). I characterize my political leanings as "law 'n order anarchist" (or sometimes "... minarchist").
By that, I mean that we should repeal all (or most) of the laws. But it is important that certain of them be repealed in the right ORDER. Most big-L Libertarians seem willing to repeal them in any order, taking every target of opportunity.
A case in point: The wealth-redistribution entitlements (welfare, child support, medical assistance, etc.) must go (or be significantly limited or modified) before the immigration restrictions can be releaxed.
I really hate imbeciles who bring the Nazis in to support *any* point of view.
I really hate imbeciles who dismiss out-of-hand any reference to the way the Nazis really were, and any comparison between their actions and those of a contemporary group. Such dismissal is extremely convenient for both neo-Nazis and those advocating feel-good political movements which lead to the empowerment of such totalitarian movements.
"Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it." If the ACTUAL history of the Nazis can be suppressed for about twenty years, we can expect to see them again - under another name, with a few details changed, but with the full "power and glory" intact.
And I'm not talking about twenty years from NOW. This has been going on for a while.
Read _The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich_ some time. And be very afraid.
They had to risk suffering to determine whether this stuff would maim little kids would be maimed by this stuff before it went on the market.
Animal rightists should pledge not to accept any medical treatment that was tested on animals - and wear a medic alert to that effect so the emergency room people will know to withhold such treatment if they're brought in unconscious.
My wife would have been dead long before I met her if not for animal research, and my best friend would have only one leg. Another close friend is a quadraplegic right now, and will probably remain so until he dies because of the government's ban on foetal tissue research.
One of the components of the Nazi mindset was animal rights - and it led in easy steps through replacement of lab animals with retarded humans and the definition of certain groups as "subhuman" to the "Medical Research" in the death camps.
I have no sympathy for people whose brains are so addled that they value the lives and health of rodents above the lives and health of human beings. That sort of thinking is only appropriate if the thinker is a rodent.
Your digestive tract will take it apart and use it just like it does the protein from meat and veggies.
And imagine the thrill of releasing a little into the skimmer pot of a backyard pool! All of the sudden, glowing water starts shooting out of the return nozzles.
You'll probably have to turn off the clorination/ozoneation, or it might denature the proteins.
To do less would be hypocritical.
They need to be told that the internet, like most the rest of the world, is a place for ADULTS. It includes its equivalent of bars, bedrooms, and X-rated bookstores and theatres.
The solution to the perceived problem of kids viewing internet porn is not for government to censor the entire virtual world down to a level suitable for children. The solution is instead for childrens parents, guardians, and other supervisors to watch the kids and make sure they don't frequent the virtual bars, bedrooms, and X-rated theatres. They should not be running about unsupervised on the internet until they're competent to make their own decisions on such matters.
(Wiring the schools for internet is not a wonderful thing. It's actually the government making an excuse to censor internet content.)
This is a the key point - though there are other issues related.
The purpose of the patent system is to encourage the advance of technology by trading a limited-time monopoly for a disclosure by the inventor of the guts of the invention. This gives the inventor time to get his invention into production, profit from it, and become established. Later it lets everybody else play - by which time the inventor is likely the established market leader.
Now that's appropriate for a hardware invention - both classic and modern electronic. Such devices require a fabrication facility and production design, which means a big up-front investment which must be amortized over a significant period, and exposure of the invention to many designers and laborers. Giving the inventor (or his partners or the patent-right purchaser) a limited-period monopoly lets him expose the design with the assurance that his work will be protected from competition for that period. This lets him employ enough people to begin high-volume production (with its economy of scale) and take out long-term loans (spreading the cost over many years production). Thus the unit costs are kept low and early volume production is encouraged - to the benefit of the consumer.
But production of proprietary software doesn't require such an investment. A new "killer ap" can be developed in secret by one person or a small number of people. When it's ready, the distribution media are utterly cheap and the unit costs are vanishingly small. A good app provides the user with significant value added. With vanishingly small unit cost and high unit value, profit margins are enormous. So investments can be made back very quickly, and a large pile of money accumulated before the software is cloned - after which the originator is established, a market leader, and a defacto standard, with no help from patents.
The software market was enormously profitable before software patents. (In fact it was enormously profitable even before copyright protection was extended to software.) There's plenty of incentive to volume-market a software product without patentability. And software life cycles are measured in single-digits of years, not decades.
On the other hand, a software patent locks up an invention (or a bogus claim of one) for a couple decades. If the idea is useful beyond the product (if any) that the patent holder choses to market, we all get to sit on our thumbs for a dozen life cycles before these other applications can be written. Bummer!
Thus, unlike hardware patents, software patents RETARD software innovation and REDUCE the availability of new products to the citizen consumer. This is exactly the reverse of what patents are supposed to do.
Software copyright, on the other hand, seems entirely appropriate. (Excluding distortions such as "look and feel", which seek to turn it into another form of patent by misinterpreting user interfaces as if they were movies or plays, or "copyright" of application interfaces and the like.)
Copyright protects the author of proprietary software against unscrupulous "pirates" who would just sell unauthorized copies of his work (at no development cost), without blocking others from designing a competing product using some of the same basic ideas and algorithms (but with development costs and lead time), and without blocking the use of the ideas and algorithms for other, innovative products.
They're probably also worried that open-sourcing their protocols might lead to cyber attacks on their clearinghouses.
They're wrong, of course - mainly because Security through Obscurity doesn't work. But try to tell that to a suit.