Well considering the internet evolved from a government project I'd say there isn't going to be any heads exploding over this. Especially if it has military applications which it probably does. Reducing fuel expenditure is a tactical advantage and the vast majority of free market types still support the idea of the government fulfilling the role of national defense to some degree.
I doubt the military would use this, at least not overseas. Decreased fuel consumption isn't worth turning a bunch of small targets into one large target. An IED or RPG would go from hitting 1-2 Humvees to 3-6.
The national security benefit from reducing our domestic oil consumption by even 1% is pretty significant, though.
The US Army is already looking into something similar to this but not with the high-speed tailgating effect. They're using one lead driver to lead a group of radio-linked trucks so they can get several times the supplies moved with less exposure of personnel to hostile forces.
I only did a quick search so here's what I came up with: http://www.controleng.com/blog/AIMing_for_Automated_Vehicles/14540-Robot_Convoy_Truck.php
To be totally fair, people who don't pay for their software (pirates) aren't actually customers, and Microsoft has no responsibility towards people who aren't their customers.
That's not totally true. If all those pirates were to dump Windows for some other O/S, then Microsoft's market share would drop, weakening their near monopolistic hold on the market which allows them to sell other things and force wretched terms on vendors.
Yes, the term for it is "watermark". And watermarking, even synonym watermarking is nothing new. It's too bad they didn't use that word in their patent description. If they had known the right word to search for, they would most likely have found a number of prior art examples.
If you bought music with DRM then that was not officially a CD. As far as I know, Philips denies the use of the "Compact Disc" trademark to any product which is not to standard and the standard does not include the nasty stuff EMI etc., use to protect their music from (un)fair use.
Check the disc and see if if has the compact disc logo on it. It shouldn't.
Seemingly there is no reason for it to work at all, yet there are people who get results by taking it.
I had a cold. I stayed in bed and ate chocolate for a couple of days, and my cold went away. From this I learned that (a) chocolate is a cure for the common cold and (b) having a cold causes you to gain weight.
Bah. I never have modpoints when I need them so instead you'll have to accept my homeopathic strength chocolate as a reward.
No, it pretty much always makes sense to make software more efficient rather than less. Specially for companies like Google who have to run it on their own servers. If it becomes twice as slow then they need at least twice as many servers to provide the same service level. Yes, they do sell their service for others to run on appliances and while it may seem like a good idea to you to force customers to buy 4 appliances to search their website instead of a single efficient one, eventually the competition will begin to look more appealing and sales will be lost.
Yes, it makes sense to get a product out the door, but if Rev 2 comes out better AND faster, doesn't your company look better ? Letting code bloat to the point that it slows down 50% is not just lazy and bad for the customer, it's bad for the devs too (and thus the producer) because bad code is more bug-prone and harder to fix or update without producing more bugs.
Product releases are usually a balance between "We need to get product out and cash in" and good product.
You know, I work in a retail store as a break/fix monkey. I hardly ever see people downgrading.
Yeah, that's probably true in your position because you're dealing with the public and their personal computers. How many of them even know they can downgrade ? How many know the difference ?
If you were to check business break/fix IT monkeys, you'd find that they are ordering PCs with XP (if possible) or if not, ordering the downgrade discs for immediate use upon receiving the PCs before putting them on desks.
Yup - since they themselves submitted an estimate of the value of the copyright that should give him a strong case. I'd think that a lot of lawyers would take something like this on contingency - we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars.
> Eh, retaining access to a copy of the document after the original author revoked
> permission is certainly not a security issue -- at least, not unless you believe in DRM.
This is similar to changing the lock on your apartment when a friend to whom you have given a key tells you that she has lost it. Example: You give someone access to your confidential document on Google. He later informs you that his account has been compromised but that the miscreants may not have had time to use the credentials yet. You revoke his access in hopes of protecting your secrets but the miscreants get at them anyway using this bug.
Nono, it's more like giving the keys to your Toyota to a friend and then when you buy a Porsche, they can still drive the old Toyota but not the new Porsche.
Except it's not really like that at all because once they've had access to the document they can make a copy of that version and staple it to a powerpole for all the control you have of copies of your document. This is just common sense. Heck, maybe they have an eidetic memory. How are you expecting to expunge their memorised copy ?
Nobody needs to say it's due to a crew filming a TV show, just inform the town that there's a test going on at such and such a time, and there's a possibility of damage from the blast. I don't think that's at all unreasonable.
Riight... and I'm sure the insurance company for Mythbusters would love that. They'd have every loony and shyster in the area filing reports that their antique and irreplacable this or that was broken and their dog had a heart attack and they need 1 meelion dollars in compensation for pain and suffering.
This way, there's a boom, things break (or they don't) and if they do, they survey the area and deal with real breakages.
Unfortunately "legal" stuff doesn't always make sense. Often it's just code for ass covering.
YOu can sue...that doesn't mean you will win.
Seriously, who is going to let AIG win?
Someone that AIG owns like the way they got a senator to re-write the bailout so they got bonuses promised to them AFTER the bailout was announced and to make their bonuses tax-free as if any of the poor schmucks who lost jobs/houses because of these idiots is going to get a bonus/taxbreak.
If he's got a queue for every user, then I'm sure he can set businesses up with a business queue with different criteria. In the end though, being so badly oversubscribed, nobody's going to get 100% all of the time. If even a few subscribers get 100% guaranteed then there's no bandwidth for anyone else.
I think the general "you'd need 100 breeding couples to start a human colony" statement generally has an unspoken "unless you want 1 in 10 children to be born with serious congenital defects". It doesn't mean that the colony can't survive though.
Well, just think duelling banjos and you'll realise that a colony of one family can "survive".
...They SHOULD have used IDE drives twice to 10 times as large (and not all that much slower) AND at half the cost (if that expensive).
So in your obviously not humble opinion, they should store their important data on RAIDs built from consumer products of a size that once failed leave a several hour window for loss of data during rebuild ? (assuming they keep their SAN busy)
Or are you saying they need to build out multiple parallel copies (5+1n) of their SAN to cover that window ? In which case, they're pretty much back to expensive again.
Wow, what a mess. Download this package. Now download fourteen more packages... this is just a huge pain in the ass....
I know what you mean. I got that far only to find that the app won't run under java 1.6. It would load up but crash when I tried to actually play a sample. Sure, I want to help, but I'm not downgrading my java to last decade's 1.5 to do it.
You could use memory buffers:
"1 to "9 to store your blocks instead of temp files.
e.g. 'x"1y'y
To pull your block into buffer 1
and "1p to insert it.
Delete could be 'xd'y but these are just style things.
You can go direct to stuff from the command line too.
vi +777 file.foo to start editing at line 777
or
vi +/badcode file.c to start editing at the first occurance of "badcode" or whatever text you want.
I got something similar to these from some website that I have long forgotten:
alias AvadaKedavra kill -9
etc...
Yeah, That's a pretty old website right there that uses Harry Potter spells. Also with kill, you're better off knowing what the signals do than making a silly alias, for example kill -HUP will tell a lot of daemons to re-read their config files and sending QUIT or STOP or CONT are all useful at times.
Have WoW's 10+ million subscribers suddenly decided to abandon PC gaming?
One game does not an industry make.
That's right. That's why with only 1 major desktop O/S for PCs business and consumers alike have abandoned PCs entirely.
I don't know, 10M is a pretty nice chunk of market. While what you say is technically true, WOW is just one example. It may be an outlier but PC gaming is not dead. Netcraft confirms it.
Yeah, no joking. If you were to buy the original title plus all nine (9) SIMS 2 expansion packs at $30 each and all ten (10) stuff packs at $20 each (I just checked their website) you'd have ponied up $530 !
Now that's a pretty good revenue stream for EA.
I don't mind paying $50 for a game like Mass Effect and downloading their free expansion pack later, or $50 for the 5 full games in Valve's Orange box with countless free mods and expansions out there. In fact, deals like that make me feel good about a company but this EA scheme is ridiculous.
Mind you, I did buy a spore DVD, but when the clerk asked if I wanted insurance on the disc, I said, "Hell no. I already downloaded the bittorrent and I'm installing that as soon as I get the key out of the box. What do I need the DVD for ?" So granted, they got my money but I'm not paying another $20 to edit trees.
Well considering the internet evolved from a government project I'd say there isn't going to be any heads exploding over this. Especially if it has military applications which it probably does. Reducing fuel expenditure is a tactical advantage and the vast majority of free market types still support the idea of the government fulfilling the role of national defense to some degree.
I doubt the military would use this, at least not overseas. Decreased fuel consumption isn't worth turning a bunch of small targets into one large target. An IED or RPG would go from hitting 1-2 Humvees to 3-6.
The national security benefit from reducing our domestic oil consumption by even 1% is pretty significant, though.
The US Army is already looking into something similar to this but not with the high-speed tailgating effect. They're using one lead driver to lead a group of radio-linked trucks so they can get several times the supplies moved with less exposure of personnel to hostile forces. I only did a quick search so here's what I came up with: http://www.controleng.com/blog/AIMing_for_Automated_Vehicles/14540-Robot_Convoy_Truck.php
To be totally fair, people who don't pay for their software (pirates) aren't actually customers, and Microsoft has no responsibility towards people who aren't their customers.
That's not totally true. If all those pirates were to dump Windows for some other O/S, then Microsoft's market share would drop, weakening their near monopolistic hold on the market which allows them to sell other things and force wretched terms on vendors.
Yes, the term for it is "watermark". And watermarking, even synonym watermarking is nothing new. It's too bad they didn't use that word in their patent description. If they had known the right word to search for, they would most likely have found a number of prior art examples.
Nono, not Prior art ... original synonyms.
If you bought music with DRM then that was not officially a CD. As far as I know, Philips denies the use of the "Compact Disc" trademark to any product which is not to standard and the standard does not include the nasty stuff EMI etc., use to protect their music from (un)fair use. Check the disc and see if if has the compact disc logo on it. It shouldn't.
I had a cold. I stayed in bed and ate chocolate for a couple of days, and my cold went away. From this I learned that (a) chocolate is a cure for the common cold and (b) having a cold causes you to gain weight.
Bah. I never have modpoints when I need them so instead you'll have to accept my homeopathic strength chocolate as a reward.
No, it pretty much always makes sense to make software more efficient rather than less. Specially for companies like Google who have to run it on their own servers. If it becomes twice as slow then they need at least twice as many servers to provide the same service level. Yes, they do sell their service for others to run on appliances and while it may seem like a good idea to you to force customers to buy 4 appliances to search their website instead of a single efficient one, eventually the competition will begin to look more appealing and sales will be lost. Yes, it makes sense to get a product out the door, but if Rev 2 comes out better AND faster, doesn't your company look better ? Letting code bloat to the point that it slows down 50% is not just lazy and bad for the customer, it's bad for the devs too (and thus the producer) because bad code is more bug-prone and harder to fix or update without producing more bugs. Product releases are usually a balance between "We need to get product out and cash in" and good product.
You know, I work in a retail store as a break/fix monkey. I hardly ever see people downgrading.
Yeah, that's probably true in your position because you're dealing with the public and their personal computers. How many of them even know they can downgrade ? How many know the difference ? If you were to check business break/fix IT monkeys, you'd find that they are ordering PCs with XP (if possible) or if not, ordering the downgrade discs for immediate use upon receiving the PCs before putting them on desks.
Yup - since they themselves submitted an estimate of the value of the copyright that should give him a strong case. I'd think that a lot of lawyers would take something like this on contingency - we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars.
Yep, that's tens of minutes of work for a lawyer.
> Eh, retaining access to a copy of the document after the original author revoked > permission is certainly not a security issue -- at least, not unless you believe in DRM.
This is similar to changing the lock on your apartment when a friend to whom you have given a key tells you that she has lost it. Example: You give someone access to your confidential document on Google. He later informs you that his account has been compromised but that the miscreants may not have had time to use the credentials yet. You revoke his access in hopes of protecting your secrets but the miscreants get at them anyway using this bug.
Nono, it's more like giving the keys to your Toyota to a friend and then when you buy a Porsche, they can still drive the old Toyota but not the new Porsche. Except it's not really like that at all because once they've had access to the document they can make a copy of that version and staple it to a powerpole for all the control you have of copies of your document. This is just common sense. Heck, maybe they have an eidetic memory. How are you expecting to expunge their memorised copy ?
Nobody needs to say it's due to a crew filming a TV show, just inform the town that there's a test going on at such and such a time, and there's a possibility of damage from the blast. I don't think that's at all unreasonable.
Riight ... and I'm sure the insurance company for Mythbusters would love that. They'd have every loony and shyster in the area filing reports that their antique and irreplacable this or that was broken and their dog had a heart attack and they need 1 meelion dollars in compensation for pain and suffering.
This way, there's a boom, things break (or they don't) and if they do, they survey the area and deal with real breakages.
Unfortunately "legal" stuff doesn't always make sense. Often it's just code for ass covering.
YOu can sue...that doesn't mean you will win. Seriously, who is going to let AIG win?
Someone that AIG owns like the way they got a senator to re-write the bailout so they got bonuses promised to them AFTER the bailout was announced and to make their bonuses tax-free as if any of the poor schmucks who lost jobs/houses because of these idiots is going to get a bonus/taxbreak.
If he's got a queue for every user, then I'm sure he can set businesses up with a business queue with different criteria. In the end though, being so badly oversubscribed, nobody's going to get 100% all of the time. If even a few subscribers get 100% guaranteed then there's no bandwidth for anyone else.
I think the general "you'd need 100 breeding couples to start a human colony" statement generally has an unspoken "unless you want 1 in 10 children to be born with serious congenital defects". It doesn't mean that the colony can't survive though.
Well, just think duelling banjos and you'll realise that a colony of one family can "survive".
Rats. No modpoints for a "funny".
Unvaccinated, breastfed kids don't generally get sick. (very rarely)
Yes, and that's because the other 99.x% of the babies have been vaccinated (as well as the benefits of breastfeeding)
...They SHOULD have used IDE drives twice to 10 times as large (and not all that much slower) AND at half the cost (if that expensive).
So in your obviously not humble opinion, they should store their important data on RAIDs built from consumer products of a size that once failed leave a several hour window for loss of data during rebuild ? (assuming they keep their SAN busy)
Or are you saying they need to build out multiple parallel copies (5+1n) of their SAN to cover that window ? In which case, they're pretty much back to expensive again.
Wow, what a mess. Download this package. Now download fourteen more packages ... this is just a huge pain in the ass. ...
I know what you mean. I got that far only to find that the app won't run under java 1.6. It would load up but crash when I tried to actually play a sample. Sure, I want to help, but I'm not downgrading my java to last decade's 1.5 to do it.
Emacs has a text editor now?
See, this is why I hate mod points. They're never around when you need them.
You could use memory buffers:
"1 to "9 to store your blocks instead of temp files.
e.g. 'x"1y'y To pull your block into buffer 1
and "1p to insert it. Delete could be 'xd'y but these are just style things.
You can go direct to stuff from the command line too.
vi +777 file.foo to start editing at line 777
or
vi +/badcode file.c to start editing at the first occurance of "badcode" or whatever text you want.
Why learn to cook when you can eat at McDonald's for every meal? :P
Well, that's the problem isn't it. It's The American Way these days.
I got something similar to these from some website that I have long forgotten: alias AvadaKedavra kill -9 etc ...
Yeah, That's a pretty old website right there that uses Harry Potter spells. Also with kill, you're better off knowing what the signals do than making a silly alias, for example kill -HUP will tell a lot of daemons to re-read their config files and sending QUIT or STOP or CONT are all useful at times.
Have WoW's 10+ million subscribers suddenly decided to abandon PC gaming?
One game does not an industry make.
That's right. That's why with only 1 major desktop O/S for PCs business and consumers alike have abandoned PCs entirely. I don't know, 10M is a pretty nice chunk of market. While what you say is technically true, WOW is just one example. It may be an outlier but PC gaming is not dead. Netcraft confirms it.
Performing this number-crunching on idle CPUs/cores is responsible for 90% or more of the improvement from 50% to 80% Parallel Efficiency?
Nah, they just realised that by turning off all that heavy monitoring they could suddenly get more performance out of the original servers.
Yeah, no joking. If you were to buy the original title plus all nine (9) SIMS 2 expansion packs at $30 each and all ten (10) stuff packs at $20 each (I just checked their website) you'd have ponied up $530 !
Now that's a pretty good revenue stream for EA.
I don't mind paying $50 for a game like Mass Effect and downloading their free expansion pack later, or $50 for the 5 full games in Valve's Orange box with countless free mods and expansions out there. In fact, deals like that make me feel good about a company but this EA scheme is ridiculous.
Mind you, I did buy a spore DVD, but when the clerk asked if I wanted insurance on the disc, I said, "Hell no. I already downloaded the bittorrent and I'm installing that as soon as I get the key out of the box. What do I need the DVD for ?" So granted, they got my money but I'm not paying another $20 to edit trees.